Hurricane Heart

Hurricane

The Soulless's hand was firm but I could see how his eyes churned with conflicting emotions. Although he was the one who wielded the gun, already he was realising that it could be a mistake.

‘Jeroen,’ Erik said, greeting his friend, who I had never seen before. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

‘Scarrus seems to have got things under control in the square. He’s fighting five Dreamers, but he managed to draft in ten of our lot.’

Shit. Was Carl down there? What about any of the others? We had to get over there.

We had to get out of this one first.

Bruno was dead, or dying, or unconscious at the very least. He was the one we would have problems with. I had never met Jeroen before, but he only seemed to be Erik and Elize’s assistant, doing their dirty work. The naivety and fear in his expression was undeniable. He was no killer. As for Elize, she hated me more than anything else in the world, but she was a cowardly bitch at heart. And Erik was the smooth talker. He loved the sound of his own voice more than anyone I knew.

So that was what I did. I talked.

‘You do realise,’ I began, putting the emotionless disguise back on once again. Strangely enough, it felt quite alien compared with what I had opened myself up to tonight. That would all be locked up again by morning. Things weren’t going to stay this way. Emotionless was easier.

‘You do realise that whatever you do to us is useless,’ I said. ‘I know what you want from Arjan, and who’s to stop me from having told this secret to every Dreamer I came across? Who’s to stop me from screaming it out of that window here and now so that the whole world can hear?’

‘You know?’ Arjan breathed, new-found hope and resilience in his voice. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ I muttered over Elize’s shoulder to where he still sat, bound to the chair.

‘Yeah, Hurricane, what is it?’ Erik jeered spitefully. ‘Or is that just another piece of information you’re going to keep from him?’

‘What else am I keeping from him then?’ I challenged. ‘Don’t talk about what you don’t know.’

Erik smirked. ‘Your name? You still haven’t even told him who you are! And I don’t suppose you’ve got round to the story about your father—‘

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I screamed unprecedentedly. ‘And for your information, he knows all about that!’

‘She told me earlier, actually,’ Arjan said. Under any other circumstance, I would have laughed at his sweet but insignificant attempts to back me up. But this time, he sounded so dangerous, so on my side, that I knew where the power truly lay.

Elize stepped closer, brushing her spiky hair out of her face.

‘And what about the act?’ she challenged with a hiss, her already narrow eyes becoming little slits in her bronze coloured face. ‘What about the fact that every bit of love you gave him was all a performance, put on as a request from one David Eisenberg?’

Oh God. I opened my mouth and bit my tongue in the hurry to reply with something. But there was nothing to say. They had worked it all out for themselves.

‘Don’t call David that!’ I snapped, taking a different approach, trying to hide any direct answers. ‘He’s the Master to you lot!’

But as I sidestepped slightly, Arjan’s face came into view.

His eyes were full of betrayal.

‘So it’s true then?’ he whispered. It seemed that I had let him down too many times already tonight. ‘Everything you said to me really was a lie.’

‘No!’ I cried, stumbling over my words. ‘No it wasn’t. It started off like that, but something changed somewhere down the line—‘

‘You said you loved me!’ he roared, bitterness and deception prevailing. ‘And it was all a lie!’

‘But it wasn’t!’ I begged, practically shoving Elize out the way as I ran to his side. ‘When I took you from that hotel, the Master wanted to know why you were so special. You know that! He wanted me to find out what I could from you, but he didn’t believe you would give away a dark secret on your own. He wanted me to get close to you so that I could find out the truth. But somewhere down the line, something changed, Arjan. Surely the fact that I returned tonight is proof that this is more than a lie!’

Why was I even saying it? I shouldn’t tell him things I couldn’t then undo. But maybe this was proof of the monster that called itself love working deep within my soul.

I began to untie his wrists, not caring that Jeroen, and probably the others by now, too, had guns. If they did, though, they didn’t fire them. Glancing round, I saw three masks of intrigue and excitement staring back at me, enthralled as though they were watching a gripping soap opera on TV.

‘How much was a lie, though?’ he challenged as he shook my hands off of his skin the instant he was free, standing up to face me. ‘What about tonight—the kiss, the words you said? Was that a lie?’

What could I say? Even I didn’t know for sure.

So I did all that I could. I wrapped my arms round him, I pulled him close, and I placed my small but powerful gun into his hand.

‘Take it,’ I whispered. ‘Save yourself.’

He pushed me away.

And then every fragment of glass in the window behind him shattered, millions of minuscule diamonds ricocheting off of one another and smashing to the floor and the pavement far below like pouring rain in an explosive symphony.

‘I told you not to shoot them!’ Erik roared. As I whipped round, instinctively pushing Arjan behind me to shield him, I saw Erik turn his rage on Jeroen, who was holding the gun out in front of him, stunned at what he had just done. Only now did I see how young he was; probably younger than me, less than twenty, still a boy. There was a naive vulnerability in his eyes.

‘You said that you wanted to bring them down,’ he replied, still in a state of shock. I remembered my first kill. Even on the times the bullet had missed, I still couldn’t comprehend that my own hands had created such destruction.

‘Not like this!’ Erik yelled, giving Jeroen a hard shove so that he fell into Elize. She shrieked and leapt out of the way like a cat.

This was an opportunity too good to miss.

I tilted my head behind me.

‘Give me the gun.’

Whatever Arjan thought of me, he still trusted that I was the best bet to keep him alive, and I felt the now warm death-dealing machine touch my palm. I closed my fingers around it, whipping it out in front of me, and fired as Erik and Jeroen still blazed at each other.

Jeroen collapsed. He staggered backwards, yelling out and clutching at his side. He had been moving, so the shot was not overly accurate, but I still saw a river of blood beginning to emanate and surge down his side as he clutched at it in agony.

He dropped his gun and Elize made a dive for it, but I was too fast. The bullet missed her falling body by millimetres, but hit Erik’s hand as it flailed out instead. He doubled up in pain too, clutching at it with his good hand, wrapping it tightly in his shirt as he bit at his lip and cried out and began to practically hyperventilate with the agony.

Elize jumped lithely to her feet as an unexpected gust of wind was channelled through the now glassless window from behind me, whipping my hair up into a dark tornado. She took one look at me, my gun pointed in her face before she even had a chance to lift hers up, and turned and ran. She sprinted for the door, her normally graceful moves clumsy with fear and desperation. She practically dived for the doorframe, grabbing it and using it to propel herself through, where I then heard every one of her frantic footsteps on the highly polished stairs.

Erik began to head for the door too, staggering in his pain. I fired at him again, but missed in my haste, and because of the fact that he was a stealthily moving target. He fell through the opening, and his footsteps on the stairs outside were echoic and unevenly spaced. He yelled out after Elize, staggering to the first landing, but she didn’t seem to come back.

She was such a hypocrite! And she had the nerve to say that I didn’t care about the man I loved. Well, had she taken a look at the relationship between her and Erik anytime recently?

So I was left with Jeroen, lying on the floor, drenched in his own blood, clutching at his side. I would have shot him again, but something about the youthful innocence in his eyes—innocent for a Soulless, anyway, made me hesitate just long enough for Arjan to grab my arm from behind and pull it down to my side.

‘Not another one,’ he whispered into my ear, not angry, more desperate. ‘There’s already been too much blood spilt tonight.’

I reeled round to face him, my eyes wide and my heart thudding, but not through anger, but adrenaline.

‘Do you trust me?’ I asked. ‘Oh God, please say you do.’

He contemplated for a moment.

‘I guess I have no choice, do I?’ he said. After all, I had just rescued him and saved his life. ‘You’ve got one more chance.’

He hadn’t even finished talking before I grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him at a run towards the door out to the stairs. On the way out, he picked up his—my—stun gun from the computer desk next to where a dead Bruno still lay.

Arjan

By the time we got downstairs to the foyer, completely out of breath but high on hope, Erik and Elize had disappeared. Of course they were still alive, though Erik was injured and would hopefully remain out of things for the rest of the night. Bruno was either dead or dying, and that was a sadistic consolation for my mind, and Jeroen didn’t seem about to pose any more trouble for us.

We charged out onto the empty street, me following Hurricane, and she charged to the left, back down the road, clinging to the edge of the park, retracing the same steps that we’d both taken too many times tonight.

We headed round a corner at the far end of the road before having to stop momentarily for breath.

‘Where are we going now?’ I panted.

‘The centre, I guess,’ she replied. She turned to leave, but I hadn’t fully recovered yet, and I wanted to make the most of this stop. I grabbed her by the shoulder and she whipped back round, eyes wide and dangerous with the insanity of the moment—of the entire night.

‘You didn’t come back for over an hour,’ I said, desperate to know some answers. ‘Where were you?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I said,’ she replied.

‘Go on.’

‘I was sort of kidnapped.’

‘You what?’ I asked. I couldn’t fit the two together: Hurricane, kidnapped. She was the kidnapper; not the kidnapped. She just never seemed to be in that sort of vulnerable position.

But they’d said things back upstairs that had made me wonder—things like ‘Olaf brought you here;’ whoever this Olaf was. Now it made sense.

‘What happened?’ I persisted.

‘It was kind of quick,’ she said. ‘I was running from Scarrus; I had to get back to you, but I ended up taking refuge in a car park, charging up to the top floor. Two men jumped out from behind a van and dragged me off. They phoned someone—I assumed Scarrus, although maybe it was Erik, as Scarrus never reappeared, then shoved me in the back of their van. I managed to get myself untied—it wasn’t easy though—and took one of their guns and shot them.’

I laughed.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure whether you’re incredible or insane,’ I told her.

She shrugged, that mystical look back in her eyes. ‘Maybe I’m both. There’s such a fine line between the two.’

‘Maybe,’ I mused, my mind already somewhere else.

‘What?’ she asked, perceptive towards my sudden change of emotion.

‘Back up in the office block, you said something about knowing why the Soulless needed me,’ I said. ‘Was that true?’

She was evidently planning out her answer, and I couldn’t help but wonder what lies she was already preparing to feed me. I felt guilty though, and when she did reply it was a surprising outcome.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Well, partly. I don’t know for certain, but the theory makes sense. However, I haven’t told anyone else yet, not even the Dreamers I saw, so I’m seriously thankful that Jeroen didn’t kill me in the end.’

‘What is it though?’ I asked.

‘You see, Arjan,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘other people don’t dream.’