Burden of the Soul

24.

It was as if I was drifting from a warm sleep into being awake as my eyes opened softly, blinking away the image of Clara’s face in front of me, full of terror as I tore the key from my wrist and threw it to her. The image of her cowering there on the third floor of the brownstone and her fear, my fear reflected, was burned into my mind and remained there with me as I hibernated in warmth and darkness.

I felt ashamed. I had failed. My most important responsibility as a Gaurdian was to protect Clara, and I had failed.

Hovering just over that shame was my grief. As a Guardian, I was bound to duty. But I loved her completely and my heart was crushed under the weight of her expression in that last moment. I had failed her as a Guardian, yes, but I had also failed her as an aunt.

I floated in the comfort of limbo while my mind burrowed through the levels of shame and grief. I rolled and twisted in an infinite state of physical relaxation, undisturbed by my surroundings, yet tortured by the frozen image in my mind.

But then I was disrupted as the warmth fell away and was replaced by a chilling cold and darkness.

I went to draw in a breath, but my mouth filled with sour water and I realized then that I was submerged. The darkness was not only darkness—it was the gray murk under a watery surface.

I started kicking my legs frantically, completely taken off guard. If this was a dream, it sucked.

I raised my head and saw the glimmer of silver light above me and a swirling of white water just below the surface. I kicked with my legs and used my arms to pull at the water, launching my body forward, the light becoming bigger and more vibrant.

Then finally I hit the surface and launched out of the water, gasping for air. I heard thrashing a few yards away. Something was struggling to stay afloat. Instinctually, I took off swimming to the bobbing figure hearing gasps and cries each time it surfaced, right before it sank back again.

I reached it and wrapped my hands under its small arms, pulling its back flat against my chest and holding it there. I used one arm to pull at the water, directing us to what appeared to be a darkened shoreline. I heard her cough repeatedly, feeling the vibration inside my own chest.

Swimming on my back, I faced up to the night sky and saw the moon directly over us, lighting the water’s surface and casting silver, glimmering strands across each ripple my arm created.

We reached the water’s edge as my arm, swinging back, knocked into a large rock, so I turned and gently pushed on the small body trying to get her to climb up, but she turned and grasped at me, shaking.

So with her tucked under my arm I pulled myself up onto the rock and let her settle in my lap shivering in the cold.

I looked around and let my eyes adjust to the darkness and saw tips of buildings rising above the tree line just beyond the lake. I turned my head around and saw an iron fence surrounding the lake and a dirt path at its perimeter.

Completely disoriented, I wondered how I got here and remembered the last thing I had seen… Clara’s terrified face as she pressed herself back against the wall of the third floor and how she came into view a bit at a time as I ran frantically up the stairs, away from the light chasing me.

I looked at my watch (Thankful I had opted to splurge for the waterproof feature) and saw that it was 9:54 pm.

The little girl coiled in my arms, still shivering, and cried.

I wrapped my arms around her tighter, though there was little warmth my soaked body was going to offer, but I needed a minute, to piece together how I got here. My mind fought back as I tried to connect the dots, but it was hopeless. It was a blank slate.

“Oh… wow.”

We hadn’t been there long before being found. That’s the beauty of Guardians, they always seem to show up before the police do. It was two newbies. I didn’t know them, but they knew me. Everyone seemed to know me. Or fear me… it was a toss up.

Even though I had disconnected from the Guardian I had once been years ago, the reputation had stuck. No one seemed to know the details of why I transitioned out of the hunt and into the guard or why I had turned down the opportunity to lead. But I preferred it that way.

All anyone seemed to remember was I had once been lethal, and probably carried that potential with me. That I had once snapped a man’s neck and taken the lives of many all for a cause I had grown up being told to believe in. And I did, believe in it. Doubt’s a funny thing, though. There’s always room for it.

They knew my training. They knew my potential. They knew my past… most of it, at least. They knew I was deadly and once acted on it with control and strategic discernment. I had been the best of the young recruits being conditioned to one day lead, equaled only by one other. They knew together he and I made the perfect team… until one day we didn’t.

My heart had been broken, and doubt edged its way into the cracks. That’s about the time I went completely insane.

You know what they say about a woman scorned… she shouldn’t go around snapping people’s necks.

Over the years I had heard the rumblings, the restored hope that we could one day win the battle since Clara had been born into our family and may have some of my fight in her. All the while I felt the conflict of wishing, as an aunt, to see myself in her but also wishing I never would.

That’s one thing they never addressed in training—how to deal with the guilt, the shame… the regret.

It was all just part of that human emotion package they attempted to breed out of Guardians. Around the time my older sister, Claire, had been born a second school of thought for Guardians came about. They thought it would be better to detach us from emotional connections at the beginning and children born into Guardianship were separated from their parents. Guardians became their family in addition to their training grounds. But there were those, like our parents, that still believed in the importance of… well, love. Purists, they called them.

Then there was the New Order, giving birth to the next generation and handing them over to a life of training and, later, battle.

With our family in tact and leading the charge, skeptics of the New Order used us as their primary argument—the family chosen for the oldest soul’s re-entry. The family equipped with warriors and protectors. We were the Guardian golden family.

Until one day we weren’t.

When Charles died, our family nearly fell apart, the strands of which barely held together by the eldest of three children, Claire. She had always been the strongest, no matter what others thought. They assumed it was me, but they were wrong. My weakness is what took his life.

It was an assignment gone wrong and he was trying to protect me, his little sister.

The loss was more than our family could bear. We fell apart, each in our own way, but no one more so than our parents. Xavier, the leader of the Gaurdians at that time used our misery as an argument in support of the New Order, saying the cause was put at risk by its champions being shackled to emotion.

The debate on top of their own grief was more than our parents could take. It destroyed them and Claire and I both were alone, unable to leave. Clara had already come back into the world.

I was thinking about Clara while holding the little girl, remembering what it felt like holding her when she was that young. How each warm breath from her sleeping body made joy resurface and crawl through every limb until completely taking over and blocking out everything else that seemed to matter a moment ago. The breath of a child in your arms—if only there were a way to bottle it.

Her name was Hannah, I had learned that much. When the two newbie Guardians showed up and helped me get her over the fence (which took some serious coaching on my part) she screamed relentlessly until I was over the fence and took her back in my arms. While making our way through the park and then in the car on our way to a safe house, I calmed her with small talk and making silly faces. It was a trick I had learned with Clara at that age. And the distraction was welcomed. I couldn’t immediately make sense of what I had just gone through, so I preferred not to try.

We never told Clara about the uncle who had risked his life and lost it. In the end, we wanted to protect her from the pain we carried. She had been too young to remember anyways. We erased any evidence of him from our lives… for Clara’s sake. She never knew about the family she could have had, had things gone differently. After awhile it became habit for Claire and I to avoid any topic that would somehow include our brother, parents or family. And they melted into memories fading with time, like scenes from a movie seen too long ago to fully remember.

For Clara’s sake.

As the car got closer to the safe house, my attention went to Clara. When I had first questioned the newbies about her, they assured me she was safe and well, but couldn’t give me any information beyond that. We drove past the brownstone where she would be, in the care of Brik and those I trusted. It was comforting to know she was in his care, but still I wanted to see for myself. The lights were on and I saw the shadows of bodies grouped together near windows.

“What’s going on?” I was careful not to speak loudly enough to wake Hannah.

“We’re not sure,” said the guy in the passenger’s seat. “It’s off limits for us.”

Protocol.

“We were able to get a hold of Demetrius,” the driver said. “He was our contact in the park, and he told us to take you to the safe house.”

“Well I want to go here,” I said, motioning to the brownstone alive with light and shadows. “Just a quick stop.”

They looked at each other and I understood their confliction—listen to the boss or listen to the potentially lethal, crazy woman in the backseat.

“I’m sorry, but we’re on orders here,” the driver said.

The safe house was just next door. The Guardians are thorough and were sure to block out these locations, both on this street and the few brownstones backing up to it, as headquarters years ago. After Claire was taken by the light and we had to move Clara and Chris, they were emptied out and used both for their housing and their protective cushion. Only Guardians with a certain level of clearance were allowed in.

I had that clearance—the newbies did not, so they waited outside.

“You guys can come inside,” I said from the stoop, still cradling Hannah in my arms.

They looked at each other again, trying to decide.

“Nah, we’ll just stay out here,” the driver said. “If that’s okay.”

His tone took that of a question, unsure of his choice.

“Whatever,” I said, suddenly annoyed by him.

Adjusting Hannah in my arms, I was able to free one hand to punch in the security code, but not before purposefully making a show of blocking the key pad from the newbies’ view just to piss them off. Like I could care less if they knew the code. They were just puppets for the master, and I was my own master.

Inside the brownstone I didn’t dare switch on any lights. I knew my way around and didn’t want to risk waking up Hannah. We were both still damp with the sour smell of the Reservoir’s murk. I set her down on a couch in the living room, then made my way to a linen closet on the second floor where we had stored spare clothes months before.

None of my clothes were there. In their place was an empty space—someone had removed them.

“So much for hope,” I said quietly out loud to no one other than myself.

I grabbed two T-shirts from Brik’s pile and then a pair of pajama pants from Mr. “Always Relaxing” Oliver’s stash. I didn’t bother looking through Liv’s clothes. There was no need to come back from the dead and feel bad about the size of my thighs all in one night.

I changed on the landing, leaving my damp clothes right there on the floor, then headed downstairs with the spare T-shirt in hand.

As I turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs I saw the shadow of a large figure speed down the sidewalk. Even without any features, blurred by the window panes, I could recognize that profile anywhere. Demetrius. A partner that had become a dear friend during difficult times simply by never asking. He just always let me be, and I grew to love him for that.

He passed without coming to the door. They would be here in just a few moments, and I suddenly got nervous. The hair on my arms stood up straight and I became aware of every motion my body took stepping toward Hannah’s sleeping figure on the couch.

I was back from the dead. I was nervous about his reaction. I was scared that he wouldn’t react at all.

Any moment Brik would walk through that door and I would know which it would be. And I wasn’t ready for either.

Carefully, I undressed Hannah and then dressed her in Brik’s spare T-shirt. It hung like a christening gown down past her feet. She wiggled a little, giving a warning that she might wake up and I made sure to move as slowly and gently as possible—gestures I had learned while Clara was little. Funny how the muscles just seem to remember.

I was placing an afghan over her just as the beeping from the keypad outside came to life and the door clicked open. I stood up and put my finger to my lips.

He rounded the corner of the hallway at full speed and then stopped abruptly when he saw me, frozen. A gauze bandage on his forehead obscured part of his face and I suddenly felt sick. He had been injured. I took a deep breath in and looked for any other signs of injuries but found none outside of the look in his eyes.

His pained expression was the one a part of me had hoped for, and yet feared. He still loved me.

My finger against my lips took on the feeling of a memory. His finger against my lips, my back pressed against a tree as members of the Fallen passed by unknowingly in the woods years ago. If we had met under normal circumstances, it would have been our first kiss right then. But we hadn’t met under normal circumstances and didn’t.

Protocol.

Demetrius was right behind him, beaming with an ear-to-ear smile that warmed my heart. Then Liv rounded the corner with far more grace. She came up behind Brik with her eyes locked on me and tears beginning to form.

Brik took a step closer to me, his body taking on the shape that had, at one time, been familiar. Shoulders arched down, each step rhythmic to an awkward beat and his hands reaching out —vulnerable.

“Grace…” It was a whisper from his lips, and brought me back to that moment in the woods.

Self preservation took over the moment my heart lurched at the sound of him saying my name. I straightened my spine and squared my shoulders.

“Clara,” I said, and it stopped him mid stride. “How’s Clara?”

He was frozen for a moment in the posture I had known so clearly and so intimately years ago. The boy on the precipice of becoming a man, and owning up to everything that entailed in his position. Then he took stock of my expression and the child sleeping on the couch. He straightened his spine, squared his shoulders and assumed the posture I had witnessed from a safe distance once he had accepted the position of leader.

“She’s safe,” he said. “A little banged up, but safe.”

I looked to Dem for confirmation and he nodded slightly.

“I need to see her,” I said. Desperation slipped through in my tone.

“Not right now,” Brik said. “Let her have tonight and give yourself some time to adjust.”

He shifted his weight and morphed his posture from stoic leader back to awkward and unsure, then back again.

The silence was gnawing at my insides.

“I couldn’t find my clothes,” I said, tugging at his old T-shirt hanging loose at my waist. “I’m sorry, I just grabbed…”

“It’s good,” he said quickly. “I mean, it’s fine.”

“I’m sorry, I moved your clothes.” Liv took a step forward when she chimed in and looked at Brik from the corner of her eyes. “I thought it would be better for…”

“It’s fine,” Brik cut her off, then turned back and looked me in the eye.

It had been years since I had worn a spare shirt of his or had given any display of intimacy between he and I beyond that of colleagues. By their looks it was clear that significance wasn’t lost on anyone in the room, least of all Brik.

“I can change,” I stumbled.

“I don’t want you to,” he said.

“So who’s this little one?” That’s why I loved Dem. He could tell I had reached my limit for navigating subtext. “Pick up a stray while you were gone, Grace?”

He gave me a wink.

“Her name’s Hannah, but I don’t know anything else. She was just flopping in the Reservoir when I sorta popped back up.”

“The Reservoir?” Brik’s eyes tightened with confusion, which pulled on the bandage.

I took a seat and one by one they each positioned themselves around me, but never too close. I told them what I could remember, which wasn’t much. It only took a few minutes, and by the looks on their faces and exchanged glances I could tell they weren’t going to be able to give me any insight into it either.

“So… what did I miss?”

They each took turns filling me in, trying to gloss over the parts in which Clara was left exposed or put in danger. When Liv got to the part about Clara sneaking out, I shot a look at Brik.

“Right, it’s my fault the teenage girl snuck out at night and got caught in the woods with her boyfriend,” he said.

“Boyfriend? How long have I been gone?”

“A few days,” said Liv.

“You work fast,” I said to Brik and no one else.

“Love doesn’t follow a timeline, Grace. You of all people know that.”

The tension level shot up in the room and I noticed both Dem and Liv look away as if protecting their eyes from the emotional shrapnel flying around.

I hated other people knowing my business.

Brik eased up and walked me through the rest leading up to tonight’s birthday party. That’s what I had seen through the windows when driving to the safehouse. After finishing, he held out his arm and unlocked his phone.

“Looks like the coast is clear, if you want to head over. Rose and Oliver are anxious to see you,” he said.

“What about Clara?”

“She’s asleep,” he answered. “Let’s wait until morning on that. Rose contacted the Doctor and he recommended she get some sleep before any more big surprises.”

I could tell by his tone he was genuinely concerned about her well being, which was a nice change. He was a product of the New Order. Genuine connections weren’t easy for him.

“Nice to see you onboard,” I said, standing up and moving to lift Hannah off the couch. Brik was behind me then and spoke softly only for me to hear.

“She’s my niece too, Grace.”

I stood up straight and turned my head over my shoulder to look him in the eye. I could see his chest raise and lower with each breath. One. Two. Three.

“I know.”

Liv crossed the room and gently tucked her arms under Hannah and carefully lifted her while she continued to sleep.

“Here, I’ll take her over and set her up in a spare bedroom,” she said. “Lord knows Rose is going to love having a little one around.”

Dem led her out of the living room to the front door and they were gone.

Neither Brik or I moved right away. I counted his breaths and allowed mine to sync up with his. We had continued to work together through the years, but this proximity, this intimacy, had been absent. It had come back so naturally and I could feel just how easy it would be to take the plunge and allow it to take over. It was terrifying.

He reached out and turned my shoulder so I was facing him. The skin along my nose, cheeks and lips remembered him and suddenly ached.

“So,” he said. “Fresh start in the morning?”

I took a step back.

“How about just back to normal in the morning,” I said.

Disappointment sank into his eyes for just a second before resolve took over. He leaned in closer than before, so close I was able to feel his breath across my upper lip.

“How about no,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. He pulled away slowly and took a few steps back.

I couldn’t will myself to move or say anything, the weight of my body’s reaction to his presence forcing me to be completely still.

He smiled before taking off to the front door.

“Fresh start it is,” he said proudly from the hallway.

Everyone was over the shock of my reappearance and, just like Liv had predicted, Rose had lit up at a little one to dote on. Within an hour I was old news and ready for some sleep.

I went up to the second floor and approached Clara’s bedroom door.

“Grace?” It was Brik at the bottom of the stairs. “Just let her sleep.”

“I am, I just need to see her,” I whispered.

He gave up, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the wall behind him. There was a smug look to his expression. For a second I tried to decipher it, but then gave up, frustrated, as his eyes seemed to beam with some thought. As if he knew I was about to walk into a booby trap and come out covered in maple syrup and feathers. Or worse.

I turned the knob slowly and barely opened the door to limit the amount of light spilling into her bedroom.

She was there, asleep, and well. I watched as her shoulder raised and lowered with a few breaths, each giving me more relief than the last. One. Two. Three.

I took in a breath and was about to close the door when I noticed a hand draped over her waist. I looked up and saw her two hands at her pillow.

“What is that?” It was still a whisper but loud and serious enough to let the owner of that mystery hand know they were about to lose it.

A head popped up, disoriented with eyes squinting. hair flattened and sticking up with the pillow’s indent.

“Huh?”

I opened the door and clenched my fists.

“Get out of that bed… now.”

“Grace?” Dave was blinking and half asleep.

“…now.” I drew the single word out, which must have been threatening enough because he pulled back the covers and slid out of bed, trying not to wake Clara. He approached the door and tried to maneuver past me quickly enough to limit a clear shot.

“Nothing happened,” he said, ducking out onto the landing.

“Oh I’m sure that was the last thing that went through your teenage mind before you climbed into bed with my niece. ‘Gee, I hope nothing happens.’” I motioned to the empty spare bedroom down the hall with my arm and closed Clara’s bedroom door with the other. “Move your ass, son.”

He looked downstairs at the group of Guardians that had formed at the bottom waiting to see if he was going to make it out alive, then took off to the spare bedroom realizing no one was going to speak up for him.

I headed down the stairs and ignored the laughs Dem, Oliver and Liv were fighting back. I looked at Brik as I passed him.

“That makes you his pimp, you realize,” I said.

“Oh sure, it’s my fault the two teenagers…”

“Just shut up, ” I said.

I rounded the corner and passed Rose, shooting her a look.

“I expected more from you.”

Dem, Oliver and Liv lost it then.

“Where are you going?” Brik leaned over the railing, extending his neck to watch me march down the hall.

“To get a sleeping bag,” I said.

“What, are you going to sleep outside her door?” Brik was having trouble holding back his own laughter at that point, which just fueled my fire.

“No,” I said, opening the door to the basement. “Outside Dave’s.”

They all laughed then. I think I even heard a snort come from Oliver as I made my way into the basement. Hearing them all again, being back with what I had taken for granted… well, I couldn’t help but smile a little.

But I was still going to find a sleeping bag.