Bad Bloods (32 page)

Freedom wouldn’t come.

“I understand.”

“Then make Daniel understand,” he said it so
suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly.

“What do you mean?”

“He…” Cal’s voice cracked. “You know what
he’s been through.”

One ambush was enough. He’d been in two, and
I hadn’t even been in one. While my family was dying, I had been
crying in a bathroom like my feelings mattered. I still couldn’t
admit that to anyone.

I simply nodded.

Cal nodded too, like that would explain
enough. “I’m afraid for him.” He stumbled over the word “afraid,”
as if he’d never used the word before. “I fear—” he stopped. “Right
before you arrived, Catelyn spoke with him.”

“About Steven,” I prompted him. “He told
me.”

“Did he tell you what happened after?”

I shook my head.

“He tried to kill himself, Serena.”

My bad blood veins ran cold, as frigid as the
snow outside, and I squeezed the chair’s armrests to keep myself
seated. “What?” was all I managed.

Cal repeated it, as if he knew I couldn’t
believe it. “The only reason he didn’t…” he faded, reaching up to
scratch his temple. “Catelyn was attached to Melody the entire
time. When Catelyn left, Melody was still in the room. She became
visible right before he pulled the trigger.”

I searched my memory, trying to recall if a
bullet hole had been in Daniel’s bedroom ceiling, but I hadn’t
looked. I hadn’t even considered it.

“She saved his life, even if she is too young
to realize it,” Cal said, his cheeks paler than when he started. “I
thought I lost him.”

I leaned over to grab his hand. He stared at
my touch, and his lips shook like he wanted to smile. “He’s been
through so much, and to watch that boy suffer makes me wish this
world wasn’t so cruel.” He took his eyes off our hands to look at
me. “But he has to stay in this cruel world. He can’t leave it. It
would only make things worse. It would destroy everything. And—and
I can’t bring myself to ask him to stay.” Cal swallowed his tears
back.

I couldn’t handle any more tears. I nodded,
stood up, and walked to the door. Our conversation was over.
Leaving Cal was all I could do to remain sane. The information was
enough to drive me mad. But I kept myself numb. I had to. I didn’t
have a choice either. I didn’t feel a thing until I opened the
door.

Melody grinned up at me, clutching a
struggling cat in her arms, the orange cat. Catelyn’s cat. “I found
the kitten!”

A laugh escaped me. A real laugh. A laugh I
couldn’t stop. And I fell to the floor, pulling Melody into my
arms, and freeing the orange cat from her hold. I hugged her tight
to me and buried my nose in her hair. I pushed all the tears
back.

Her little nails clawed at my arms, and she
squirmed against my chest. “Kitten cat—”

“Kitten cat is fine,” I said, smelling
medicine on her. She must have helped one of the older kids treat
someone. “Stay with me for a minute.”

“But I want to play with the cat,” she
whined, still struggling, and I greedily hugged her harder. My
four-year-old girl was in my arms, and all she wanted to do was
leave them.

“Okay,” I whispered, finally letting her go,
and she zoomed down the hallway, her brown braid trailing behind
her.

I watched her until I couldn’t anymore,
knowing she didn’t understand—or couldn’t fathom—what had happened,
and I wished the others hadn’t understood either, even though they
had to. Someone had to. If we didn’t suffer, Vendona couldn’t pity
us, Vendona couldn’t see themselves in us, Vendona wouldn’t fight
for us. We had to be martyrs, and that was what Calhoun needed me
to understand.

If we won, Daniel and I would retell our
stories, stand in the spotlight, advocate for our kind, give up any
chance at normal lives, and we would suffer because of it, over and
over again. We could never move on, never forget, never let go like
regular people. It was probably the reason Daniel had almost ended
it all. Our suffering would never end, but our suffering might let
others, like Melody, live. And I had to make us both believe in
that, even though we hadn’t won the election yet, even though we
might not win at all.

When I woke up, it was still dark. I didn’t realize an entire day
had passed until I found myself in the living room, staring at the
hurt kids healing the kids who were hurt worse. But Vi’s appearance
had me running to the couch.

She was lying against the pillows, half
propped up, her eyebrow sliced. Her eye was swollen black, as inky
as her hair. Still, she managed a cocky smirk when she saw me.
“Told yah I could handle myself.” As the last word left her lips,
she pushed the remaining air out of her lungs and groaned.

Adam pushed some ice into her hand and lifted
it to her head. “Come on, kid,” he forced a teasing voice. “Don’t
sass us now.”

Vi half-laughed and it turned into a fit of
raging coughs. Blood even sputtered onto the ice pack. Adam held it
instead. “No laughing, okay?” This time, his voice was soft.

I reached out, ready to heal her, but Adam
stopped me. “You’re still too tired.” He knew better than anyone
why I was sleeping so much. My abilities had limits. Healing her
now would only hurt me more. It’d probably hurt us both. “She’ll be
fine.”

I tried to meet her shadow-filled gaze, but
her good eye was shut, and her breathing became shallow. She’d
passed out.

“Give her this,” Catelyn cut in between the
Shadow Alley celebrity and me, handing Adam a Diet Coke before
facing me. “You, too.” She shoved a cold can in my hands, opening
it for me when I didn’t budge. She repeated exactly what Adam said.
Violet would live. Her injuries were nowhere near Huey’s or
Peyton’s. On top of that, she had saved Ron. He was cleaning
himself in the upstairs sink, and I heard the water turn off just
as they explained it to me.

The small staircase squeaked as he made his
way down, and he nodded at me as he stepped over Tessa’s long legs
to sit next to Ryne. Justan was the one who held my gaze the
longest.

“What are we going to do, Daniel?”

He sounded too old for a preteen. He looked
too old too. In him, I saw lifelessness in a boy who was still
alive. He wasn’t asking me what we were going to do to survive; he
was calculating his next move. He was willing to kill again. But
his question affected the young ones in a different way.

“Why do they hate us?” Tessa asked, her big
brown eyes on Vi. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

I saw something I could never forget. I saw
lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and
understanding in a child’s eye. It was the worst thing I would ever
witness. It flooded my brain with an overwhelming amount of
tragedy. I thought of all the hardships and people I had lost in
the past few days alone, but most of all, I thought of how I didn’t
regret any of it.

I didn’t regret meeting them and living, but
I didn’t regret what I had tried either.

“They hate us because we’re different,” I
said, kneeling down to meet Tessa’s gaze, but she was lost on Vi.
Ryne was the one watching me. “Until they feel what we feel, they
will never fully understand the hell they caused.”

“So, we make them feel it,” Justan
concluded.

I stared at the boy again, trying not to
predict his tainted future. “No,” was all I could say.

His lips shut in a thin line, and I placed my
hand on top of his head as I stood up. He almost ducked away from
me, but for a moment, he hesitated. “We aren’t born evil; they
teach us to be,” I said, trying to reach whatever dark pit he’d
fallen into. “Don’t fall for it.”

“But we have to be that way to survive—”

“No,” I said. “You don’t have to be anything,
okay?”

Justan didn’t nod.

When I opened my mouth to speak again, Adam
laid a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you leave everything to me?”
he asked, speaking quietly, as if we could have a private
conversation among the suffering. “You should get more rest.”

“I’ve been resting all day.”

“I can handle it.”

I shrugged my friend off me, ready to
confront him about why he was treating me like one of the injured
children, but Serena was there, and all my ability to stand up for
myself disappeared. She weakened my anger with a simple smile, even
if it was a forced smile.

“Aspirin,” she said, handing it to me. I
popped it in my mouth, and she grabbed my hand with the Diet Coke,
lifting it to my lips. “Now drink.”

For a moment, I felt like a child as I
listened to her every word. I even listened to her as she directed
me upstairs, away from my bedroom, away from the kids, away from
everything I had to lead. I didn’t even know how she knew about the
rest of the upstairs, but we were in the single bedroom—the one Vi
sometimes used—and we were alone.

She closed the door behind us to seal the
deal. I wasn’t leaving. I wasn’t going to be around the flock at
all.

“What’s going on?” I asked, half expecting
her to turn on a light, but she didn’t. Maybe she really did want
me to go back to sleep.

“What do you mean?”

I turned to face her, and I searched her gray
eyes—so empty I could lose myself for hours searching for a soul.
Holding her gaze was like holding my own gaze in the mirror, in the
reflection of a lake, searching for myself in another person but
seeing nothing—and I saw nothing because I was nothing.

I sat on the twin bed and put my head in my
hands. “Cal told you then.”

She was quiet as she sat next to me. Her
silence told me everything. He had told her about my attempt.

“You know you can’t.”
Die.
She didn’t
have to say the word.

I cursed. “I know that, Serena,” I snapped at
her, even though it wasn’t her fault. It was mine. It was always my
fault.

As if she sensed my thoughts, she spoke, “It
isn’t your fault,” she said. “You know that, right?”

I gripped my hair, unable to hold anything
else, and stared at the floor. The logical part of me knew it, but
the emotional part of me didn’t. I was driving myself mad. Of
course it wasn’t my fault, but I was torn in two, and I was the
only one in all of Vendona that had been through this twice. It
felt as if destruction followed me, as if the boy who could heal
only brought death. A sick, cruel joke placed on me by a universe I
never asked to be in.

“It was a one-time thing,” I managed to get
out.

“But—”

“Serena, please,” I said. “I need you to
trust me.”

“I don’t.”

My eyes cut across the darkness to find her.
Despite her words, she held a small, patient smile.

“I don’t trust you,” she repeated. “I don’t
trust that you’re being honest with yourself. I don’t trust that
you aren’t blaming yourself, and”—she sucked in a breath—“I need to
know what happened.”

“What?” My word was tight. “You know what
happened.”

“In the Western Flock ambush.”

I leaned back, studying her, but her eyes
bore into me. My fists curled up, thinking this was about Robert,
but my insides tore open with the desire to talk about it, to
explain it to someone, to anyone, and I knew why she suddenly
didn’t trust me. I wanted to tell someone before I died. I still
believed I was going to die, and she didn’t want me to think
that.

Even then, my heart stopped—only aching in my
chest—and my lungs burned. All of my insides pressed against one
another, as if trying to live when they’d died long ago. “I don’t
know…”
about this.
I couldn’t even say that. I couldn’t even
admit that I’d never told all the details to anyone.

“I need you to tell me,” she said, “so I can
tell you why this isn’t your fault.”

“Why it isn’t my fault?” Her words didn’t
compute.

She grabbed my hand. “Please.”

It was the desperation in her voice that
reached me, and the desire in her eyes that I saw.

I nodded, but we sat in silence as I searched
for the words, as I fought past years of forcing myself to forget,
as I found the ability to speak about my secrets for the first
time.

I had never felt so alive.

“Our mom was dying of something—I can’t
remember what. I was just a kid.” Six years old, to be exact. “I
thought my abilities were a secret, but my father must have known
because he started screaming at me. Told me to heal her. Told me to
fix everything. And…and I panicked.” I had to start at the
beginning, before we found the streets. “I couldn’t heal the sick,
and I tried to tell him, but he started to beat me, and Robert
intervened.” I recalled the exact moment that I realized I wasn’t
the only bad blood in the house. “Then Dad struck him.” My hands
started to shake, and I tried to hide them, but Serena held them.
She held them so tight it hurt. “The next thing I knew, he was in
pieces. Both of our parents.” Robert had blown them up. He could
blow anyone up. “We stayed under the bridge that night.”