Page 13 of The Quiet
Suddenly, Von was among them, Nate jolting as Von poked his head over his shoulder.
“What are you talking bout’?” he whispered with a knowing grin.
“He also has a sixth sense for when he’s being discussed. That ego at work again,” Khalid replied, removing a cigarette casually as if she hadn’t just been caught discussing him.
“Kiddo,” Von said, nodding his chin to her as he wrestled Nate into his chest with a strong arm, before using the other to pullhis own shirt down over his collarbone. He exposed two small arrows, broken down the middle, tattooed on his skin. “Fangs of the lamb, and I’ll get my third one tonight for today’s kill.”
Khalid’s description and Von’s enthusiasm married into a distorted but sobering picture. Von was keeping score of the Strike he’d killed like a trophy. She could already sense that he hated them, hated them enough to dehumanize them. He was a god and they were his victims to slay with lightning. Just as Khalid had described it, Von was the slightest bit scary, perhaps to people too.
As she watched his smile and the banter between the ROSE continued on, her eyes drifted to Khalid and she saw someone much more like herself, someone who watched the undercurrents of how the world operated. In less than a minute, Khalid shared a profound truth, and Baker wondered at the importance of it, that Khalid had seen the need to share it with her now. It seemed as if the mission of the ROSE was so much more complex in Khalid’s heart than Von’s.
The afternoon drew to night, and Baker’s mind lingered on the theatrical tale Von had shared as well as the small mentions of romance. She kept Khalid’s words close but they slowly became a footnote to the grandeur her fantastical mind spun from Von’s stories.
As they settled in for bed, Baker hoped that the conversation might somehow steer to more stories or talks of love like Valentine sometimes had when he’d been drinking. He often told her stories before bed, granted it had been hard to make sense of them sometimes, fantasy blurring with real life events, and he often lost track of the plots. She’d have to poke or prodhim to get him to keep going and sometimes he’d start off on a completely different story.
Regardless, she wanted to live an epic story like those and she wanted it to be full of love at every turn. She wanted to rescue and be rescued, to fight dragons and to save a prince and meet lots of princesses and marry a king and be adopted by a queen and have lots of children who have children, and be an old woman who could sit and watch the golden wheat fields go on and on, but still fight a dragon when they visited on occasion. She’d left Fort Kit if only to preserve such dreams in herself. Von seemed to live out those dreams for real.
“You’re a ROSE through and through,” Khalid said as she covered Baker in a blanket for the night. Khalid slipped under another blanket next to her as they settled in their quaint stone room. Bird was already settled in on Baker’s other side and was reading a tattered book by candlelight.
Baker wondered what had prompted Khalid’s comment, surprised that anyone might think of comparing her to such a force when she often felt so feeble. Clutching Nate’s mask to her chest, she stared at the dark ceiling as she waited for the others to fall asleep. When they’d both dozed off, she lifted the mask plate up and over her face. She stared at the ceiling through the grooves, her heart racing until she could hardly stand the excitement anymore. She pulled it back down over her chest.
The day had lit a tiny flame in the middle of her chest, a small candle that pushed back a vast fog within. The little light, faint as it was, made her recognize that the loneliness that existed inside her, was not her.
She realized that there was a world where she could exist apart from it, and that she had not actually swallowed her own voice, but simply lost it in that fog.
One day, she realized at last, she would find it, along with everything else.
The possibility thrilled her, and despite being so exhausted, it still took time to fall asleep.
Her dreams were feverish that night.
She was a ROSE made of pure fire and fought Death in a furious battle. She soared over the mountains with nine wings on her back and the power to summon the sun
For the first time, Death ran.
CHAPTER 5
NOON AT MIDNIGHT
TUNEDYL WAS SEVERAL days away. On day four they reached Carver’s cliff’s outside of the seaside town. Ella basked in the familiarity of the cliffs. It had famous beauty with the roaring spray of the ocean to the right and misty green plains to their left. The forest was barely in sight, nestled in a valley between two mountains and coated in fog. They’d traveled to Tunedyl before when Kay had aided their team and so the journey had a strange air of familiarity.
The conversation had been familiar too, Ella frequently steering Kay from spontaneous class-like lectures that burst out of him almost on impulse. They’d been punishing when the team had traveled together on long trips. Alex had started smoking again just to have an excuse to walk off for an extended period of time in silence. Meanwhile, Jade clung on every word of each lecture as if information itself was new, fingers combing dreamily through her long black hair as Ella and Crow rolled their eyes nearby.
Ella caught the first waft of fish in the air as the wind rolled toward them over the Tunedyl docks. Her return to the present stung her with sadness, as if she’d forgotten her team was gone.
Kay hopped off his horse as they entered town, both of them quieting as the buildings huddled in around them.
They tied their horses up at the town bullpen before walking in. A small fire burned in a fireplace in the corner, keeping the brisk air at bay.
“Well, look at that. If it’s not Stitches,” a man said from the bar, cleaning out a glass with a washrag before squinting through the haze of late afternoon lighting.
Ella smiled back at the less than illustrious nickname, earned during her training years as a medic.
“Enjoying retirement?” she said, scanning the enclosure. She saw several bookcases in the corner and tables with a few guests.
He shrugged. “Things have been alright. What happened to you?”
“Just a rough end to the last mission,” she said, pulling her sleeves down over her bruised forearms.
