God of Destruction (7 page)

Alex’s boyfriend, James Bellman, sat beside
her. His empty hand sat palm-up on the armrest between them should
she decide to relax and take back her grip on it. He had a kind
face, marred only slightly by the grimace that had taken over his
full lips. Other than that, James was unnaturally beautiful, if not
slightly feminine, like an angel face sculpted from marble.

His brown eyes flickered from Alex to his
hand as he yearned for her to relax. He clenched his fist when she
didn’t so much as look at him, wondering what the hell was taking
Claire so long. Though he wouldn’t call himself an impatient man,
he was beginning to feel the sting of irritation crawl under his
skin. He glanced down at his hand, feeling it grow hot under the
weight of his burden. As he did, his eyes fell on the blue gemstone
of the ring on his finger. It glowed blue. Inconspicuously, he
tucked his hand under his leg, hoping no one would notice the
ethereal light he couldn’t suppress.

In a row across from them, wrapped up in each
other like the high school sweethearts they were, Alex’s cousin,
Hayden Clove, sat on her boyfriend, Scottie’s, lap. While she was
blonde-haired and brown-eyed, Scottie Caldwell was her opposite
with thick, black hair falling into electric blue eyes. It was
difficult to notice much else about him when he was seated and his
face was stuck so closely to Hayden’s; close enough that no
passersby could tell where one’s face began and the other’s ended.
Alex envied them that they didn’t seem to feel any of the
negativity surrounding their party in a vicious storm cloud.

Appearing very out of place, the last two
people traveling with the close friends were their recent
acquaintances, the twins Russell and Natalia Marks. The pair sat
awkwardly beside each other, facing apart while they played on
their cell phones, Russell nodding his head to the music coming
through his earphones and Natalia staring with a pinched face at a
Candy Crush screen that she was pretending to play. Russell was
rodent-like, with patches of fuzzy, brown hair occupying his scalp.
His beady eyes were concealed by thick glasses.

Natalia, on the other hand, was very
fortunate looking, if one overlooked the sarcastic gleam in her
eyes and ever-present sneer on her face. Her eyebrows were light,
too light in contrast to her gleaming, unnaturally straight, brown
hair. Her vicious eyes were practically see-through in the light
streaming through the window, their lightest blue blending into the
whites of her eyes. They flickered up and over the screen of the
phone, surveying the room for the first sight of Claire. She
desperately hoped that the girl would get in on time; otherwise,
her plans, and everything she’d been paid to do, were ruined.

Natalia and Russell had enrolled in their
school back in January and had graduated with the rest of them the
previous day. Alex wasn’t a huge fan of the twins, but when they’d
practically begged to go to Paris with them in celebration of their
graduation, the girls had been unable to turn them away. It had
only been
too
perfect for Natalia. She fully intended to use
this trip to her advantage, just as her employer had instructed
over the phone, when he’d
insisted
that she tag along on the
trip by any means necessary. She’d been all too happy to oblige,
anticipating meeting Vilmore there and finding irrefutable proof of
a higher power. Aside from the money she’d make from her employer,
she’d make millions selling her evidence to the public.

“Last call for nine a.m. to Paris,” the voice
over the intercom announced.

“What do we do, Lex?” Hayden whimpered,
pulling away from Scottie to glance at her cousin.

“We can’t go without Claire,” Natalia
interjected quickly.

Most of the party stared back at her without
speaking.

Picking up on where his new coworker had
screwed up, Russell scrambled to repair the damage. “How would you
all feel if she went on vacation and left
you
here?”

“I’d be completely understanding if it was
because
I was the one who was late
,” Alex hissed, standing
and pulling James with her. She took the handle of her carry-on and
sauntered toward the gate doors with James in tow. Looking for
reassurance in each other’s eyes, Scottie and Hayden followed
silently behind them, while the “twins” shared a look of
annoyance.

“Petrov—” Russell whined.

“Shut up, Russell,” she snapped under her
breath. “I’ll get her to the catacombs if I have to fly the plane
myself!”

“There’s no
way
you’ll be able to—” he
began.

Natalia rolled her eyes, “Christ, Russell,
you are as whiny as your boss.”

“Not boss,
teammate
,” the mousy man
corrected. “He’s my teammate!”

“Either way, you and Kierlan are getting on
my last nerve, little man,” she hissed.

Their worries were unnecessary. At that
moment, a scream over the rabble of the crowd turned everyone’s
attention to the girl running headlong through the throng of people
in the room. Her blonde hair was falling from its ponytail and she
was hanging hunchbacked under the weight of her father’s sea-bag on
her back, filled to bursting with her necessities. She dreaded the
thought of having to fit it into the compartment over her seat, but
there was no way she would have had time to check it in. “I’m
here
!”

Alex smiled and hid her laugh behind the back
of her hand, disguising it as a cough.

Natalia forced a smile on her face and
grabbed the back of Russell’s shirt in her claw-like fingers,
hauling him to his feet as she stood.

Without hesitation, everyone convened at the
gate to Paris gave in their tickets and made their way toward the
entrance to the plane. Alex hung back as the rest of them stepped
on, waiting for her best friend to come into sight in the long
hallway. James gave her a look but shrugged as he continued on his
way. With her hand still balled into a fist around the back of
Russell’s shirt, Natalia led him to the back of the plane, where
they could talk without the worry of listening ears.

Claire approached Alex with an apologetic
smile. “I’m sorry I w…was late,” she said as she passed Alex. The
two girls stepped onto the plane, the last two, and got to work at
shoving Claire’s enormous bag into the overhead compartment.

“Push harder!” Alex whined, her short stature
keeping her from getting a better grip on the heavy luggage.

“I can’t,” Claire grunted, her frail arms
shoving uselessly against the green canvas while the other patrons
looked on.

“Excuse me.”

Claire froze when she felt someone touch her
shoulder. Giving up on her bag, stuck halfway in the overhead
compartment, she spun, a bit too zealously, to face whoever had
addressed her. Her swift movement stopped short when her forehead
connected harshly with someone’s hard body.

“Ow!” she protested. A goose egg was already
forming on her face.

The man before her chuckled; the hand on her
shoulder moved up to her face, tracing circles where her forehead
ached with a bruise. “Sorry ‘bout that. Guess I don’t know my own
strength,” he said.

“Ya, why don’t you watch it, buddy!” Alex
growled, tugging Claire away from his grasp.

“Relax, Alex, it w…was just an accident,” the
blonde murmured as she opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw when she did was a
blindingly bright smile shining down on her, the man’s face
unaffected by Alex’s comment. Her eyes traveled up, finding his own
stormy grey ones and she was immediately transfixed, seeing a face
more gorgeous than she’d anticipated surrounding them. His head was
shaved, but, in Claire’s opinion, it only added to his appeal. Her
heart hammered in her chest, her shyness turning her face a bright
red.

“Sorry I h…hit you,” she squeaked, forcing
air back into her lungs.

The other passenger laughed, but rubbed the
shoulder she’d hit with mock protest. “You should be! It’ll take
months to regain full use of this arm!”

She couldn’t help but give a slight, shy
smile.

He awkwardly trailed off in his laughing,
realizing that she wasn’t going to join him in it. He rubbed the
back of his neck, clearing his throat. “Anyway,” he continued
seriously, “I was just coming over to see if you needed any
help?”

Claire nodded, her eyes flickering away from
his face.

“What’s the magic word?” he joked, trying to
make eye contact with her again.

She gulped.

Alex stepped in, as she usually did, when
Claire’s shyness stole her voice. It wasn’t the first time Claire
had gone silent in the presence of a boy who was, obviously,
flirting with her. “Yes, we need help. Please.”

Kierlan’s face fell the slightest bit, but,
before Claire could find his smile any less than perfect, he turned
to the overhead compartment. He easily shoved the bag into its
place, pulling the door back into place. “There ya go,” he
murmured, looking back at the beautiful blonde for praise. He liked
praise, especially if it was from someone as hot as her.

“Thanks,” Alex said.

“Thanks,” Claire repeated without looking at
him.

Kierlan frowned, stepping toward his seat in
the row behind them. “Welcome.”

Averting their gaze from the man behind them,
Alex and Claire took a seat beside James and waited for the plane
to take off. Alex nonchalantly flipped through Sky Mall while the
ground disappeared beneath them out the window.

“What happened?” she asked without looking
up.

Claire put one earphone into the ear furthest
from Alex as it popped. “I s…slept through my alarm clock,
again.”

The other girl closed the magazine in her
hand quickly as she turned to face Claire. “Did you have the dream
again?” she demanded urgently, pulling her friend’s hand into both
of hers. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she assured her. “Same d…dream,
as usual.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” she repeated. “I must be getting
used to it, ‘cuz I didn’t even n…need my inhaler this time.”

Alex nodded as she studied the dark circles
under Claire’s eyes. It had been five years since the blonde had
started having the recurrent dream that brought on her infamous
panic attacks and made her continuously late to school. As she
studied her, though, Alex couldn’t help but dwell on her friend’s
choice of attire. With a chuckle, she asked, “
What
are you
wearing?”

Claire, startled, looked down at herself and
burst out laughing. An older woman a few rows up gave a loud
shush
and Claire grimaced apologetically. “I f…fell asleep
before I could change and I left in s…such a hurry this morning
that…”

“You didn’t realize that you were still in
your school uniform?”

“I’m t…telling you, Lex, when I have that
dream, it…” she struggled for words. “It…takes over. It’s like I’m
n…not asleep, at all. It’s like I’m living there, as the girl. When
that knife comes d…down into her heart…I can feel it. I can f…feel
it and that’s what wakes me up! That pain in m…my chest. I know it
sounds crazy, but it’s l…like a past life or something.”

“That doesn’t sound crazy to—” Alex
began.

James broke in when he began to feel
uncomfortable. “I think you might want to get that checked out,
Claire,” he gave a tight chuckle, folding his hands in his lap with
a force that turned his skin bone white. “Night terrors aren’t
good, and when they start to impact your life, you should probably
get it checked out, right? Right.”

Alex raised her eyebrow in question. James
wasn’t good at concealing secrets, and he definitely wasn’t good at
diverting attention from one. They had been dating long enough for
her to know that something wasn’t right. “James—” she began.

“Right?” he asked, his question directed only
at Claire.

“You’re probably r…right,” she relented,
pushing the other earphone into her ear as she tried to fall back
to sleep. She felt like she hadn’t slept in days.

When she was sure Claire was asleep, Alex
turned to her boyfriend with crossed arms and a pout on her face.
“Alright. Spill.”

The
clack
of James’s teeth snapping
together was audible despite the noise coming through the vents
around them and the voices rising up over the rows of seats.
Ignoring her question, he looked away, choosing instead to stare
silently out the window, into the white mist surrounding the plane.
Letting a string of profanity slip through her lips, Alex leaned
over him to pull the cover down over the glass.

“Damn it, James, tell me!
Please
!”

“There’s nothing to say,” he insisted. “B…but
recurring dreams aren’t normal. She should see someone about
that.”

She scrutinized his face with narrowed eyes.
“I don’t believe you.”

Chapter Seven

Location Unknown; June 27
^th
, 2012

Don’t put me back in the tub. Don’t put me
back in the tub. Don’t put me back in the tub.

The words replayed themselves in her head,
over and over again, but she could only rock herself quietly while
she shook the water from her hair. It hadn’t been the first time
she’d been returned to her lonely cell after another session in
that terrible room. The evil woman who’d dragged her underwater the
first time, and every time thereafter, had been gone for the last
few sessions, but Janie hadn’t been reprieved when there were so
many ready volunteers to take her place.

She never cried. She’d been in this cold
prison long enough to realize that tears did no good and she
couldn’t afford to waste the limited water she was given. After
enough time, Janie eventually lost the need for the pathetic
process. Now, when she suffered through nightmares of drowning, she
only screamed when she woke, and tried to ignore the pain.