Edge of Seventeen (5 page)

The blond werewolf’s crazy sudden tsunami of
emotions wasn’t technically a dime-a-dozen kind of inner turmoil,
but her curiosity wasn’t getting the best of her. If it was hard
enough to diagnose mundane adults, it was probably impossible to
read
and comprehend
a werewolf. What she knew was this: This
was a man who needed a reason to hate her because, whatever it was
that he was feeling, he didn’t want even a bit of it. The thing
was, he also needed a reason to stop from tearing her to pieces.
She was a job, and he couldn’t turn up with an Incarnate carcass in
his hands and shrug it off like he’d only squashed a fly. It might
have made her woozy with the way everything he felt rolled off his
skin, but she needed to walk away from it.

Quite frankly, it wasn’t her responsibility.
She figured that, whatever he needed, Fate would find a way to give
it to him. She fully intended on ignoring him. Sunday didn’t know
what would happen
exactly
. She didn’t know why she was so
important,
precisely
. But she knew that things happened and
that, in some way, she was supposedly some big deal in the
preternatural community. Her life was mapped out, at least for the
time being. To Sunday,
this
happened. Furthermore, to
Sunday,
so much more
would happen. She figured that she’d
just as well let whatever was going to happen
happen
.

This afternoon, Sunday wasn’t going to say
anything to the werewolf drawing hard breaths and standing in her
way. There’d be no consolation and there’d be no prize. Rather than
incite any more fury from another person who could rip her to
shreds, she rubbed her eyes, turned back to the open car door, and
reached in to collect her purse. With the straps fisted and her arm
lax, her bag dragged by her feet as she walked past the new wolf
and Angel, still stomping and glowering at her from where he stood
at the back of the truck.

For a heartbeat, Sunday halted. She craned
her neck to look behind at the big bearded werewolf and at least
give him the benefit of a sideways glance, but she found his eyes
turned away. With eyebrows furrowed heavily and an expression so
sharp it could cut through steel, he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

Sunday rolled her eyes and shook her head,
the wisps of her long brown bangs catching in the momentary breeze.
This man wasn’t going to show her the slightest modicum of respect.
He wouldn’t even talk to her like the others did. When she realized
that any acknowledgement sought would be in vain, she sighed deeply
and drew her eyes away from him. It still wasn’t her problem.
Regardless, if it was, she was too damn tired. The drugs might be
out of her system, but they had taken their toll and she was
wrecked.

One of the motel room doors behind him was
ajar. It had to be theirs. She slung her knapsack strap over her
shoulder and her body slumped beneath the weight of it. When she
eventually reached the room, she walked in as casually as if she
were entering her own room.

Stephen looked up at her with a Cheshire
grin. Thick rippled arms crossed behind his shaved head, the
shortest of the three werewolves had his legs outstretched on the
bed. Though she looked at the empty space beside him for a second’s
consideration, she knew she wasn’t so tired that she would jump
into bed next to a werewolf. Her eyes flicked to the empty bed with
the sheets still tucked under the mattress at the other end of the
room.

“Glad to see you’ve made it, kiddo,” Stephen
said. He wasn’t trying to hide the entertainment he found at her
ultimate submission to getting out of the car.

“Whatever,” she retorted. If she could have
peppered it with a little spite, she might have come across the way
she really felt. Rather, her
whatever
came out like a
yawn.

Sunday crossed by Stephen’s bed to reach the
one beside it, sticking her tongue out at him as she momentarily
blocked the TV. He snickered. Big bad werewolves weren’t so scary.
Not to her anyway. They were just annoying.
These
, in
particular, had done little more than get in the way of her bodily
functions, her hunger, and her desire to hunker down under a warm
comforter and snooze.

As soon as she was within a foot of the empty
bed, Sunday pivoted in a perfect 180-degree turn and flopped
listlessly onto the bed. She grunted as soon as her body hit the
mattress. She proceeded to remove her battered Chucks and pull down
the sandpaper-like comforter until she found the sheets beneath
them.

Before the other two werewolves made it back
to the room, she turned her back on the Alpha laying on the other
bed and nestled under the covers. Her feet were cold and the air in
the room was dry. It was well-suited to the hot-blooded wolves, but
not to her. As usual, Sunday found herself either too hot or too
cold for comfort. She shuddered inside her cardigan wishing she had
the energy to ask the werewolf to turn on the heater.

Just as she was falling asleep, the door
slammed, and she startled into awareness. The other two had
returned to the room. With them all finally gathered into the same
room, Sunday rolled over not so much to look at them, but so that
they could hear the little bit that she wanted to say.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said in a
half-mumble. She rubbed her eyes as the men watched her—men or
monsters, or both. “I knew you were coming and I know that you’ll
leave me soon.”

She turned back and snuggled into the pillow.
Within a minute, she was asleep.

Sunday was
blindfolded and tied up. She was also lying naked, stripped
entirely of her privacy along with her clothes. She was an awkward
fourteen year-old with a long body and long limbs. She was gawky
and nervous even when boys looked at her and she sensed that they
liked what they saw. Sure, Sunday had all sorts of powers and was
all kinds of rebel, but she was also fighting tooth and nail to
stay strong in the face of what was the proverbial ‘big bad witch’
in all the fairy tales, and to keep from bursting into tears of
embarrassment and shame at her own nudity.

After too many minutes to count, the door
creaked on its hinges and the stagnant humidity in the room was
sucked out like a vacuum. The sudden chill of an AC vent from just
outside the room blew in, and Sunday shivered.
Click. Click.
Click. Click
. Steps on the bare cement floor made their way
toward her. When the clicks stopped, the door was shut behind
them.

Even robbed of her vision, Sunday sensed the
strength of the witch’s aura as she entered the room. She knew that
if she wasn’t careful that magic would flood her psyche. There was
no way that she would condescend to this witch’s power. She was too
young, though, and too immature in her gifts. Without Maggie’s
intercession, she’d blacked out more than once when she’d practiced
letting the world seep in. Opening up, even just to get a clearer
picture of her captor, would inevitably lead to her own loss of
control.

“Have you no fear? Do you not know why it is
that you have been brought to us?”

The woman’s voice was tight and clipped, but
she wasn’t angry. It was more a lecture of rhetorical questions
than an interrogation. This was the same voice that had greeted her
in Seattle when the werewolves handed her off. This was Bernadette;
and, of Bernadette, Sunday knew nothing.

Sunday didn’t answer. Maybe it was the rebel
in her that didn’t want to do what she was asking merely because
she asked it. Maybe it was the blind optimist in her that knew she
could get away with not answering. Either way, Sunday didn’t have
anything to say to the woman.

“You did not run from the men who sought you
and brought you to me. Why is that? Are you so naïve? Have you been
so ill-prepared for your fate?”

She seemed to expect that Sunday wouldn’t
respond. Bernadette projected authority. Her pedantic tone implied
she was the boss. Child or no, Sunday didn’t want to be spoken to
as an unruly, precocious girl who’d been caught being naughty with
her hand in a cookie jar. She also didn’t want to be treated like a
fool but, then, her choices weren’t many when she was struggling so
hard to keep up her psychic defenses.

“Do you not know what you are, Incarnate?”
Bernadette continued.

Sunday had never heard herself referred to by
that name. It was a term that she learned of while in the care of
the sisters, but no one had ever told her she was it. Her eyebrows
pinched and she jerked her head slightly to face Bernadette’s
voice.

“I see you flinch with recognition.” The
witch laughed with cruelty, pleased with the fact that Sunday had,
in some small way, responded.

“The Incarnate child,” she continued. “We
have doubted you for so long and yet here you sit in complete
ignorance of what you truly are. Can it be true that the Incarnate
is so entirely unaware of what she is? Do you not want to know the
extent to which you are coveted or why it is so?”

Behind the blindfold and the single-minded
intent she had against her captor’s will, Sunday’s curiosity
stirred. The Incarnate stuff tested her reasoning. This being, this
natural wonder of humanity, was a myth the nuns passed along
generations of their sisterhood. From the stories she’d been told,
Sunday learned little to substantiate the existence of such a
person. Sure, some people believed in saints and prophets,
messengers of God, but saints and prophets were a whole different
story than gods and goddesses walking in the flesh. There was only
so much Sunday could believe as fact, or even possibility.

The Incarnate, according to the sisters, was
an avatar for something ancient. It was real, more real than the
earth and the people walking on it. Incarnate magic was something
that, unlike witches’ magic, was born with them and would die with
them. It didn’t come from spells or potions. It wasn’t singularly
‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It was just, natural and neutral in that way. An
Incarnate was a vessel for all of the mundane and all of the
mystical, an avatar for all the things that had spiritual or
natural energy simultaneously. It was the walking, talking soul of
everything.

Some people thought the Incarnate could be a
god. Other people thought the Incarnate was something of a demon.
However many different ways people chose to define it, everyone
could agree on one thing: the Incarnate was a rare gift to the
world. The thing is, gifts aren’t universally good or bad. Gifts
could be awesome, or gifts could suck.

Sunday wasn’t sure all the Incarnate stuff
didn’t sound totally crazy. She’d told Maggie only a
million
times how she thought that, quite possibly, Maggie and her sisters
had drunk the Kool-Aid. Still, Maggie answered, “Consider that this
kind of being could walk amongst us. Consider that this person
could transcend the mundane, physical shell of her body. Don’t you
do that, Sunday?
Don’t you
experience this?”

Sunday shrugged then. To be compared to a
mythical being seemed silly. She would sooner believe in vampires
and angels than in an Incarnate.

“Whatever,” she’d answered to Maggie. “An
Incarnate can’t be everything all at once. It’s just not
possible.”

Perhaps Maggie and the other nuns were
witches in their own way. She assumed, perhaps wrongfully, that
growing up among them, she was one of them. That she was merely
someone with a gift, an innate ability that had grown into a
practiced skill. Sunday had never assumed that she’d been anything
but what they all were, just a little stronger.

The air in her dungeon had once again grown
stale. Bernadette came into this room alone, but she wasn’t alone.
There were others outside. Sunday could feel them eager to enter
her dungeon. They were hungry for her. Rabid, even.

“You are going to experience pain, child,”
Bernadette continued sternly. Sunday could imagine the woman’s
furrowed eyebrows and narrowed eyes set on her looking down her
nose.

“Your body will be assaulted as will your
spirit. You will be reshaped and molded, inside and out. You will
be cleansed of your ill, and you will be born again, pure and
supple. Here, our coven gathers to fashion your rebirth from human
child into something wholly new. You are the Incarnate, dear child,
and that wondrous gift comes at a cost.”

Maggie had explained rape to her once. You
know, because that’s what parents do. They warn their sons and
daughters about the wrong kinds of touching and the shame that
arises even if it wasn’t one’s fault. Sister Margaret did what she
could after Sunday’s mom couldn’t any longer. This wasn’t exactly
rape yet, but that’s what Sunday feared most: the ‘yet’ part. In
her limited experience, Sunday could think of no other reason why
she was in the position she was in if not for that horrible
end.

Pulsing just a hair beyond the walls of it
were those desperate auras. They were excited that Sunday was here.
Theirs were the bated breaths of wanting.

Right now, Sunday wished she follow Sister
Margaret instructions: poke him in the eyes, scream your head off,
and
run
. So much for good advice when you’re naked and bound
to a cement block. For a second, Sunday wished she’d followed that
advice the second Angel had approached her. She’d known what was in
store then, except perhaps not the details of what was to come.

Sister Margaret had been less forthcoming in
what she envisioned of Sunday’s destiny. The nuns who cared for her
after her mother’s passing were kind and generous. But they had
their secrets too. What little they told her clicked together in
Sunday’s mind as Bernadette lay out what she planned for her.

“You’ll be hunted, you know. You’ll be feared
by some and envied by others,” Maggie had told her.