Reaper

“So I’ll go,” I said simply.

Mason scoffed. “No, you won’t,” he said, covering his face with his hands.

I tensed my hands in my lap, and I simultaneously felt Jesse’s hand add pressure on my back. “I’m going,” I repeated, placing my hands calmly on the table and daring Mason to look me in the eyes. “Put together a team and I’ll draw them all to me – we’ll knock them out in one go. We have the power to do that, right?”

One of the men I didn’t know – a large, African American man with biceps bigger than my waist – looked hesitant. “If the numbers we’ve estimated on the colonies of Vampires and Werewolves are relatively accurate, then we should have the firepower-“

“That’s not a question, Charlie,” Noah snapped, standing up at his seat. “We can’t watch after you in the field like that, we’re in command. If you brought all of them to one place, you’d – it – “ He looked to Mason. “Help me out here.”

But Mason had a look on his face that said something else entirely.

“Do you know what you’re asking, Charlie?” he said quietly, his gaze intense. “You’re asking a lot of people to die. We may win, but we’re not going to come out unscathed, not by a long shot. Is that worth it to you?”

I swallowed hard, thinking about all of the people I had met in the compound. They were normal people, but they were devoted to this cause, I was sure of it.

“If it means we end this once and for all – yes.”

“But-“

“It’s me they want,” I pressed, “If they know they’re going to get me, they’ll be there, and then we have the upper hand. Home field advantage. It makes sense to me.”

Noah slammed his hand down on the table, and everyone jumped again. I was starting to see the resemblance, and my heart swelled for a moment.

“Charlotte fucking Scott, I am not sending you in there to be killed!” he roared, his face turning red. “We already thought we lost you once, and I am not about to go through that again!”

It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice on me. I felt a chill run down my spine – he was right. I had disappeared for months and they had thought I was dead. Sometimes it slipped my mind that they had gone through just as much pain and suffering as I’d been though, maybe worse.

But that didn’t make me want to back down. I’m not sure what was fueling this fire, but it was yet to be extinguished.

The room was silent. Mason stared at a spot on the table in front of him in silent agreement with Noah. My parents looked exhaustedly about the room. The others at the table were unsure who to look at in this exchange, but their nervous looks flew between Noah and me so fast I almost didn’t see it.

“I’m not asking your permission, Noah,” I said quietly, my voice shaky. “I’m telling you. I’m going to let them know where I am – with or without backup. One is a death sentence, the other will end this once and for all.” I stared at his dark eyes, like looking into a mirror. “Your move.”

Noah looked like he was in pain. He clearly knew what he was up against, but he had made the mistake of underestimating someone who had been under other people’s control for too long. I was tired of being the damsel in distress. That wasn’t me anymore – I was sick of being cared for by other people. Sick of being told what to do and how to act and what was safe. What good was it if I was stuck up in some gilded cage for the rest of my life?

To my surprise, Lilly was the first to break the silence. “They need a leader, Noah,” she said softly.

Noah flared his nostrils. “We have plenty of trained combat professionals-“

“That’s not what she means,” Mason snapped. He swallowed hard before looking his younger brother directly in the eyes. “And you know that.”

Noah looked lost, his eyes going dark. “Mason, you can’t – she –“ He was searching for words. His eyes flew around the room, wide with what looked a lot like fear. “Are all of you insane? She’ll die out there!”

“Then that’s my choice to make,” I said quietly. I could feel a chill run down my back and even I had to admit I didn’t really mean it, but I needed to get my point across.

Noah clenched his jaw.

“They’re never going to fight unless there’s something to fight for,” Mason murmured, almost like he was talking to himself rather than all of us. “They won’t go unless we’re out there with them, unless Charlie is out there with them – they want to know we’re all in. That we believe in this enough to risk our lives – all our lives for it.” He folded his hands in his lap as neatly as he could. “If anyone is capable of doing this, it’s her. She was born for this. It's literally in her blood to stop them.”

The room was so quiet that I could hear my own heart pounding in my chest. I was sure Jesse could hear it, too, and I wanted to think that he shared in my anxiety. It was tense, quiet – an eerie calm before the storm. We all looked at each other in sudden silence, debating on what to say, what to do. None of us knew, really.

And I was struck with the realization that maybe these people didn’t know as much as I gave them credit for.

I had always looked up to my parents, my brothers – they were people greater than I was, older and wiser than I was, and so I had to listen to them. I stayed quiet, I didn’t talk, I stayed in my place. Always in the place they had put me. I had lived for so long in the corner they’d shoved me into, too scared to walk into the world like a normal human being. I was sheltered for so long that when I finally opened my eyes to the real world, I was catapulted into a whole different one, one beyond my wildest imaginations. But when it came down to it, the biggest thing I could have learned from all these interactions with monsters is that my family was human the whole time. And they were just as scared, small, and alone as I was.

The realization hit me full force as I locked eyes with each member of my family. Two pairs of blue and two pairs of brown eyes were scanning the room, looking anywhere but me, but I knew what lay behind them. They were scared. Scared like me. And knowing that gave me the final push I needed.

“I’m going,” I said again.

In a flurry of activity, Noah threw a file full of papers at the table and stormed out. He slammed the door behind him with a loud bang that made me and everyone else jump.

“Do you have anything to add, parents?” Mason seethed, clenching his fist around one of the papers that had landed on the table in front of him. When they wouldn’t meet his eyes, He launched the paper ball at the wall behind them before he stood up. “I’ll go get him before he does anything stupid.”

I snapped out of the trance I’d gone into. “No, Mason, I’ll go,” I said softly, rising slowly from my seat. Everyone’s accusatory eyes were on me. “This is my mess.”

He clenched his jaw and thought about it for a second, weighing the pros and cons, I’m sure. Then he sighed, ran a hand though his hair, and slowly nodded.

I followed Noah out of the room, listening intently for his footsteps even though I was almost sure I knew where he was going. Noah had a theme, at least since he had hit puberty. Whenever he was upset, there was only one place – well, okay, two places, if you count the kitchen – that made him feel any sort of better. The problem was that this as a facility I hadn’t located in the compound yet because I rarely do that sort of thing, but I found a few signs along the way that pointed me in the right direction.

While I was walking – slowly, as my abdomen was still tender and I didn’t like moving a lot – I started to retreat into my head. Everything we had just talked about was knocking around inside of my brain making some hell of a racket. But more than that, I was starting to think about something I had been careful not to think about much for the last few weeks.

Sawyer.

I wanted nothing more than to forget about him after he left me. I could feel the wound reopen every time his name came across my subconscious, but I couldn’t help it. There was something about him that would forever be with me, no matter how hard I tried to push it to the back of my mind. And it hurt. A lot.

I could feel the chill snaking back into the base of my spine. Without Sawyer, my life had much less meaning. I surprised myself with the thought and trued to suppress it, but it wove itself into my subconscious like a parasite. What good am I anymore? I clenched my fist to try to fight it off. He doesn’t want you. He left you to die and didn’t even explain himself.

This was all very overwhelming. I leaned against the wall next to me as my head started to spin. I was worried for a moment, but the spinning passed. I did a once-over on myself and declared myself fit to continue walking, at least physically. Mentally, I was still a little shaken up.

I knew I’d found Noah by the smell first.

I wrinkled my nose as the stench of sweat assaulted it. I didn’t like gyms – they smelled like old socks and all I ever got from them was self-consciousness and sore knees. I was in shape enough so I kept my distance, but Noah – ever since he was young, he had an affinity for lifting heavy things. He practically lived at the gym when he was in high school. He played football like every other red-blooded white boy, but he really enjoyed the off season more than he did playing. I think that was part of his decision to join the Marines. It gave him a reason to stay in peak condition, all the time.

Plus it got him out of the country. Looking back, I can’t say I blame him.

I found him in the back of the room, under the bench pressed. I think he sensed me coming, because as I walked up to him, he finished his set and placed the barbell back on the rack with a loud clang. He sat up, facing away from me, and was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling, his face screwed up in pain.

I caught sight of the source of that pain.

Noah’s right shoulder looked like it had been torn apart and put back together again. I knew he’d been injured, but I had never actually seen the damage it had done – he usually kept his shirt on so we wouldn’t see it. It couldn’t be completely healed, I imagined, even thought it had been a few months since he’d returned home from the war. I would see it in the way he moved it, tenderly, as though he was still getting used to it. I was suddenly hit with a wave of concern for him.

I was about to say something to break the tense silence when he beat me to it.

“Do you remember when you learned how to ride a bike?” he asked quietly, glancing at me over his mangled shoulder.

I was confused, caught off-guard by his question. I blinked a few times, and shook my head. No, I didn't remember, not completely. Bits and pieces.

“You must have been about four,” he continued, placing his palms flat on the leather bench. “Five, maybe, I dunno. And I remember – Mom and Dad didn’t want you to take off the training wheels. Not yet. You’d only had them for a month.” He smiled then, a sad smile that didn’t quite reach his face. “They were pink and sparkly, and they were the only thing you wanted for Christmas that year. I had my bike, too, but I was taller, and I could already ride with two wheels.”

I had to say I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. When I was four, he would have been eight or nine – not very old himself.

He looked back at me to make sure I was still paying attention. “I decided it wasn’t fair of Mom and Dad to keep you from doing it, if that’s what you wanted. So I decided I’d teach you myself.” He sighed and leaned back, smiling a little, a bittersweet memory. “I put you on my bike with no training wheels and just – ‘Go, Charlie, go!’” He pushed his arms away from him, like he was acting it out.

I could feel the smile pulling on my lips.

“But you got to the end of the block,” he said softly, lowering his arms. “You didn’t know how to stop and you crashed, you crashed hard, into the wall in the Robertson’s yard, you remember that?” He swallowed hard. “I ran down there as fast as I could. You were knocked out. Your helmet had fallen off. I didn’t know what you’d done because you weren’t going very fast but – there was blood everywhere, and you weren’t waking up…” He shook his head. “I carried you all the way back home, bridal-style, blood everywhere, sobbing like a baby because I thought for a second that I’d killed you.”

I offered him a sad smile. The story jogged my memory a bit, but anything before I was seven was hazy for me. Plus, my parents weren’t ones to dwell on things like that – they’d much rather sweep it under the rug. But I imagined a nine-year-old Noah in that situation and I felt my heart break a little.

He looked at me for real for the first time since I’d gotten there. I could see the pain and the sweat on his face and it almost made me want to step down, but I had come too far to do that now. “Everything I’ve done from then on has been to make up for that, in some twisted way. I know you’re an adult, Charlie, and I know you’re stronger that I think you are. But sometimes I flash back to that tiny girl in my arms, and I just…” He shook his head again, unable to finish the sentence.

Slowly, so he knew what I was doing, I went over and sat down on the bench next to him. I wasn’t sure exactly what to say, but my mouth opened before I could stop it. “Noah, you… you’ve done more for me than anyone in our family,” I told him honestly, folding my hands in my lap because I wasn’t sure what to say. “You practically raised me. The voice I hear in my head that tells me right from wrong – it’s yours.” I paused. “Well, you and Jimminy Cricket.”

He snorted. “That’s fair, I guess.”

I bit my lip. “I’m sorry for what all this has put you though. I know it hasn’t been easy for anyone, everything that’s happened. This isn’t just some family issue you can tell your therapist and forget about until the holidays, I’ll tell you that.” Noah laughed again. “But you have to know that no matter what happens, it has to be my decision. You just have to trust that you’ve taught me to make the right one.”

He sighed, squeezing his eyes shut. “This doesn’t mean I’m okay with this. I’m still scared of losing you, Charlie.”

I reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing it for reassurance. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Mmm.”

“So am I,” I admitted.

We sat there in silence for I don’t know how long. I rested my head on his good shoulder, content to just sit there with him and enjoy the sibling moment.

“Where did you get so smart?” he asked out of the blue, more to himself than to me.

“From you, obviously.”

“Oh please, your nose is giving you away.”

“It doesn’t do that anymore!”

“There it is again.”