Vex (3 page)

“Don’t show them your weakness.” He spins the doorknob left and right several times as though it were a combination safe before the door gives, letting us inside.

We’re greeted with navy velvet walls. Pictures of ghastly looking people hang crooked in the entry.    

“Kitchen, living room.” Marshall darts a finger around, orienting me to the decrepit amenities. A prehistoric kitchen with an ornate white porcelain stove, a living room that consists of a dusty Victorian couch, and very little else. “Bedroom.” He guides me into a rather large area with an oversized four-poster bed, a lit candelabra in the corner. The strong scent of lilacs infiltrates the air. “I’ll be rooming with you.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I’m completely freaked out, so cuddling up with Marshall sounds like a godsend.

“Closet full of goodies,” he opens a wardrobe exposing a bevy of ballooned out dresses, and combat boots with heels. I pull out a yellowing bustle, feels like crinoline, the hoops lined with steel springs.

“Nice,” I bleat out disappointed. Really, I don’t care what I wear. I want to be home, not shacking up in a haunted hotel with Marshall.

“Let’s get to bed shall we?” He hops on the mattress, a bit overeager.

I dismiss his overzealous behavior and crawl up alongside him. Truth is, I’m exhausted on every level.

I close my eyes and lay my head on Marshall’s chest.

“Don’t even think about kissing me,” I say as the room disintegrates behind my eyelids. My head pounds as it tries to erase the new reality I’ve landed myself in. I try to think happy thoughts, thoughts of Gage—dust off the memories we’ve created, and bask in our love, but it only seems to highlight my newfound sadness.

I know what I have to do.

In my dreams I wait for him.

Logan.

He stalks the outer recesses of my mind for just the right moment. He thinks it will buy him time—time that will cost him nothing, avail him much, perhaps garner a kiss if he’s lucky.

I form the hill, the trees, shape the river that bisects this strange landscape he seems to will us to each time he comes to me.

I fashion a long sharp sword out of my imagination and watch as the scalloped blade shimmers under the artificial sun.

“Skyla,” he calls to me.

A smile plays on my lips as I spin on my heels.

I give a swift blow to the neck, greet him by way of decapitation—watch as his head rolls onto the grass and settles near the base of a willow tree.

Logan groans, gives several hard blinks before looking right at me. “So I guess this means you’re angry.”

***

“Rise my love!” A sharp voice bellows from above.

I stretch like a cat and struggle to open my eyes. Marshall floats in and out of focus, makes me wonder if I’m still dreaming.

A part of me expects to find myself nestled in my own bed beneath my canopy, safe on Paragon with a house full of Counts—my perennially pissed off stepfather milling around downstairs, but I don’t. Instead, I see Marshall in a t-shirt and jeans, not his usual teacher attire of chinos and a button-down. The heavenly scent of lilacs has been tainted with something far more commonplace—

“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bacon.” He stirs a frying pan in front of me as evidence.

I follow him over to the haunted looking dining room. Silverware is laid out, each heavy piece with a neatly carved face. Mine is a girl with long wavy hair, large blank eyes.

“Is this me?” I hold it up, accusingly.

“Pretty, aren’t you?” Marshall doesn’t pay it much attention. Instead, he doles out a large portion of food on the flat gold platter set before me. I unfurl a sapphire velveteen napkin and thread it through my fingers hypnotically. This is the color of the night sky, the last thing I saw as I lay on the stone. I pull it through my hands over and over like a habit. A tall silver goblet with the foot of a bird sits before me. I peer inside to find a bright red liquid that I’m pretty sure I’m staying the hell away from.

“What is this?” I pick it up and sniff.

“A common breakfast medium adored by citrus farmers the world over. Orange juice.” He settles across from me with his own plate loaded with the food he promised in his chime. “
Blood
orange juice. Squeezed it myself. Go on, you’ll love it.”

I take an uneasy sip.

“Excellent.” Tastes less blood, more orange.

“I thought so.” He examines me like a predator as I dig into my meal.

I’m starved and totally at the mercy of Marshall’s culinary skills, which apparently are well-honed because this is the best breakfast I think I’ve ever had.

“Eat up. You’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

“Doing what? You have an arena where you pit unwitting humans against Fems? Where a crowd of long deceased Counts hunger for our demise?” Hopefully he’ll send me packing, even if it is a very long hike back to Paragon from this suspended reality—

“You didn’t think you were going to receive room and board and wonderful meals whipped up by yours truly without an exchange, did you? It’s called work, Skyla.”

“You want me to scoop horse crap out of your barn?” I have a feeling that would be the best-case scenario.

“Don’t be silly, you won’t be working for me,” he picks up his fork and holds out the carved figure of a woman, her wild frazzled hair looks all too familiar.  

 Ezrina.  

Chapter Four

Overtime

Working shoulder to shoulder with Ezrina in the chop shop isn’t exactly my idea of a reprieve from real life, sort of a nightmare if you ask me.

“So, you’re never going to believe this,” I start. “Your great, great…great? Anyway one of your relatives is my cheer coach, Ms. Richards.”

Ezrina pulls down a metal tray and slams it against the stainless counter, creating a horrific cacophony of sounds that reminds me of the jazz music my dad used to play in the car.

“She doesn’t visit.” Her voice reverberates through the metal chair I’ve perched myself on—rings through me like the shrill cry of a bell.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think she knows about you.”

Ezrina’s burgundy eyes flare into perfect kaleidoscopes of fire.

“I mean she
knows
about you, but I think she’s unaware of the fact you still exist.” As in—blissfully unaware.

“There’s always a way, Skyla.” Her ghastly pale flesh doesn’t peak or break out in a sweat as she continues to move at a breakneck pace. She pulls something a little larger than a butcher knife out of a drawer, causing me to leap off the stool—clear across the room for safety.

“Come,” she calls. Pulling back a plastic sheet, she reveals an array of bloodied human limbs.

Instinctually I want to scream but my hand flexes over my lips and I give a few unproductive dry heaves instead.

“Vomit—you’ll eat it to clean it.” Her pallid features pinch in a quiet rage. 

I straighten, and go over, trying not to pass out at the sight.

“What is it?” Who is it, or was it, might be a better question. Hopefully Chloe.

“Noster lost a man competing.”

I don’t know what he was competing in, but if you lose your feet and hands in the process, I’m pretty sure it’s not any kind of competition I’d be interested in.

“Grab a tray,” she instructs.

I’m a little shocked at how quickly I’ve succumbed to the role of Ezrina’s assistant—accomplice, and find myself beside her sporting a metal platter in my hands.

She hacks at the base of an ankle with the squared off blade in her hands while prying away the upper portion of the leg.

“Sort of reminds me of the time you chopped off my arm,” I say without any real emotion behind it. Secretly, I’m hoping to bond with Ezrina, lend her great pause before she attempts to hack off another limb that happens to be attached to my body.

Ezrina rolls her head over her neck, and a thin dried blood of a smile starts to form. She gives a powerhouse swing at the ankle once again, loud as a gunshot as the knife connects, cutting the foot right off the joint. 

Blood splatters over my dress, my face. I wipe off my lips with the back of my hand, spit the bitter taste out of my mouth.

Worse job ever.

Next time I see Marshall I’m grabbing him by the collar and demanding he send me back to Paragon—back to Gage.

***

Days drift by, a week—then another. Marshall doesn’t come. He’s left me in this haunted version of reality to rot like the corpses Ezrina spends her days attending to. I pick up fruits and vegetables from the farmers market of horror and bolt back to the haunted mansion Marshall has me holed up in. I’ve worn each of the bloated dresses at least three times. So tired of strange fitting underwear, bra’s too big or too small, all of the above rotted and yellow with time.

“I want to see Marshall,” I say to her while bagging the fingers of a Levatio. Just handling the flesh of something even remotely related to Gage makes me ache for him—hunger for him so intensely until I feel I’m about to break.

Ezrina ignores me per usual.

“What happened to you, Ezrina? I heard you wandered into the forest, and never came out.”

She expels a breath with a faraway look in her eyes as though she were reliving a painful memory. “Love,” she says, stripping the flesh off a forearm and scrapping bone samples onto a Petri dish.

“Love?” As in she’s calling me love, or she actually had the opportunity to experience it? “Love is a great thing,” I say. Ezrina is locked in a morbid gaze, staring off into nothing as though she finally reached the end of her existence. “So, are you a scientist?” I ask, changing the subject. “A mortician?” Just the mention of a mortician reminds me of Dr. Oliver, and I want to go home, to the mortuary—hell at this point I’d take the underbelly of the cemetery. “Do you think Gage can visit me here?”

“Silence!” Her voice goes off like a gong. She picks up a stainless ax and barrels in my direction. “It takes all of my will not to dismember you hourly. Save the questions for someone who cares.”

“I need to go home,” the words speed out of me. “Marshall!”

Her eyes bolt around the lab, at the endless trays of diced up cadavers, the blood stains on my dress, my hands, and shakes her head in frustration.

“Come,” she takes off down the hall.

The white slick floor gives way to a dull brown carpet. The cool air is exchanged for humidity as a familiar cobalt glow envelops us.

We step through the area housing a plethora of watery glass caskets and into a conjoined room the size of an airplane hangar. It’s congested from floor to ceiling with the tubular structures. They go on forever in seemingly endless rows. Most all of the tubes contain bodies sporting bright blue wetsuits with floating hair and hands as the cobalt water stirs into a whirlpool.

Normally I would freak out and try to run or scream my head off. But on this day, at this strange hour, I can’t help feel like I’ve just got the world’s biggest promotion.

“What do you do with them?” I’m fascinated.

“Feed them to you for dinner,” her shag of wild hair flexes when she says it as though it has a life of its own.

I seize at the thought.

Her lips pull into a line, and for the first time, not only did Ezrina speak to me without yelling, I think she just took a stab at humor. I pray she took a stab at humor.

“Funny.” My voice sounds thick. I hadn’t heard my voice in anything but the chop shop for what feels like a small eternity. I was getting used to the echo produced by my own vocal cords as though Ezrina and I were becoming a single species. “What’s my job?” I ask dutifully.

She steps toward the back of the room, lined with three rows of steel drawers, sliding out the one in the middle. It’s a girl about my age. I blink back surprise. She’s whole as far as I can tell. She wears a t-shirt and jeans. Her long, straight hair is encrusted with blood, a clot the size of a silver dollar lies along the temple. She has a pretty face and looks decidedly serene despite the fact she’s very much dead.

“Bathe her.” Ezrina continues to pull the drawer out until long metal legs hit the floor like a gurney. The next thing I know we’re wheeling her down the hall into yet another room. She hooks her up to the sink. “Undress her. Fill the tub with keeping liquid. She needs to soak before we store her.”

“Keeping liquid?” The blue water, it
keeps
them. I get it, but gross.

“Synthetic plasma used for preservation,” she sighs it out as though I had worn her down before leaving the room.

We’re going to store her. Dear God. What the hell is going on?

I place my palm over her forehead—barely feels cold. Fresh blood sits curdling on the side of her face. Then I do the unthinkable. I pinch her nose, lean in, place my lips over hers, and breathe. I push in twelve solid breaths before giving up and panting over her lifeless body. As a Celestra, daughter of Caelestis, I should have been able to save her. I’m useless—nothing more than a tool in Ezrina’s cadaver cafe.

It takes forever to wrestle her clothes off. I feel bad manhandling this poor dead girl who looks like a giant sleeping doll—a naked sleeping doll, but that’s beside the point. I fill the bathtub up to her face. I can’t stand the thought of submerging her, killing her again by way of drowning if only in my imagination.

Ezrina returns with a wet suit, and we struggle to get it in place. Afterwards, we wheel the girl over to a table with a glass tube lying on its side. She slips her into the opening at the top with little to no effort. Ezrina erects the tube upright, and hooks a hose over the top that expels a gush of blue solution.

“Is the keeping liquid the same as the blue fog?” Not only were the Counts surrounded in it, but it’s come from Mom and Tad’s room before.

“Yes. It rejuvenates cellular structure.”

“So they need it.” Knew it. I bet Tad and Mom sniff it up every morning before breakfast. I bet they’d drink it by the gallon if they could.

“Regenerating plasma. A small amount inhaled is enough to rebuild the connective tissues and restore cell reproduction.”

“Who thought of this?” I wash over her as though she were a genius. “You?”

“I.” She softens into me with a hint of pride. It’s in that moment I see something inside her, beneath the ugly façade, the cantankerous brawling anger she resorts to so quickly. For the first time Ezrina actually feels human to me.