Roman had twenty dollars burning a hole in his pocket and a teenage heart pounding a hole in his chest. The plan was Mari’s, and though his respect was nearly boundless for the only other member of the Tryhard Club that didn’t act like they were trying to be a fantasy hero from the stories, she admittedly didn’t have the best track record when it came to romance. As far as Roman knew, not only had her personal battle at earning Jay’s affections gone absolutely nowhere in more than eight years, she was famously responsible for single-handedly ending a classmate’s relationship via bad advice.
So, he was feeling a touch nervous. That being said, Mari seemed like she understood Adela better than any of the others and he needed all the help he could get. Every advance he made was curtly rebuffed, by cold glance or awkward silence. At times it felt to him like Emily was the only person she wanted to talk to, and even then the conversations had been limited to her involvement in the plan with the exchange students. Now that the plan had been executed successfully, Roman was afraid that Adela wouldn’t have any reason to hang out with them, and he’d spent so long making sure she would get invited to the fold. He didn’t want to miss this chance.
When she appeared, rounding the corner of the block at the edge of his vision, he did a quick check of his appearance and posture. Preening, Emily called it, usually with a reprimand about self-involvement and a lecture on the things that people really paid attention to, and blah blah blah. Just because no one wanted to comment on your appearance didn’t mean that they didn’t notice it, at least subconsciously. Roman checked his hair in the reflection of the cafe’s glass storefront. The carefully gelled spikes hadn’t been flattened or disheveled when he’d removed his hoodie. He was going for a half-formal, half-casual look: a long-sleeved button-up that was left unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up to show off the muscular definition he was building in his forearms without making it obvious that he was trying to show off, like was impossible to avoid when wearing something like a muscle tee. Beneath the outer shirt, a simple white t-shirt was tucked into pressed khaki slacks, all without a speck of mud on them. It had taken some doing, some intentional lengthening of his chosen route to avoid places where puddles and early snow had rendered the ground a virtual catastrophe to the well-dressed, but it would pay off.
He hoped.
Adela continued down the sidewalk toward him, and despite knowing how obvious his attention was, he couldn’t help but watch her. It was her unshakeable confidence, her cold indifference to what the world sought to bring to bear against her, that attracted him in the first place, and she hadn’t changed a bit. Even now, when all she was doing was walking down a crowded sidewalk in the waning daylight, it was as though she was daring the people in front of her to try to slow her down. The bustling pedestrians parted in front of her like she was royalty.
She had a tendency to dress all in black, and tonight was no exception. A close-fitting blouse worn with shorts that ended mid-thigh gave the impression of a daring outfit, but her arms, legs, and collarbone were concealed with sleek black thermal gear. Even with the full-body layer, it made Roman feel cold just looking at her, but she moved as if she barely felt the chill. Her long black hair was drawn into a ponytail which, even pulled over her shoulder as it was, reached almost to her waist.
He realized that he’d continued to stare at her silently even after she’d stopped in front of him. As was his signature move when it came to dealing with Adela, he immediately began to stammer.
“Where’s Emily?” Adela asked, cutting straight through his idiotic rambling.
Ah, right. The first of the evening’s many potential speedbumps.
“Emily...isn’t coming,” Roman said.
Adela immediately turned on her heel and began walking away.
“Wait!” Roman cried, starting after her. He saw heads turn towards them, and blushed. He wished he hadn’t chosen such a public meeting place. Adela seemed to agree with him. She turned, shot him a glare, and then seized him by the wrist. He was surprised by how strong her grip was, how easily she dragged him behind her to the alleyway behind the busy cafe. He was just beginning to feel self-conscious about the skin contact, the heat he could feel through her grip, when she released him. He was about to start explaining himself when she turned and shoved him into the wall, her hands gripping fistfuls of the front of his shirt.
“You don’t take hints well, do you?” she asked, and he withered momentarily at the fury on her face. He wasn’t sure how to answer that. They weren’t hints. Not really. Roman had had his share of off-hand dismissals, cold shoulders, and outright cruel rejections. Fewer than Tyler, but still, he wasn’t exactly inexperienced when it came to girls expressing their disinterest, and nothing that Adela had said or done so far had resonated with that experience. There wasn’t any of the disgust, the incredulity, or the glee that accompanied a person being approached by someone they thought wasn’t worth their time. The way Adela ran, the way she avoided subjects or ignored his invitations…
It felt like fear.
“Emily says…” Roman began, hoping to move to a more easily handled subject, “...she thinks you come from a...troubled place. Like one of the countries that’s in deep with the cartels, or maybe that you were in a gang, wherever you were before you came here.”
The anger bled out of her expression as he watched, and the face that was left seemed...empty for its absence. Cold and bitter, like the wind that whistled through the alley. She let him go, and stepped back.
“It figures she’d be that far, at least,” she muttered, crossing her arms. She shot him a glare, though it seemed half-hearted. Almost desperate. “So, what? That’s it? Adela’s from a bad place, she must be so scared to let people close? Is that all you think I am?”
“Maybe,” Roman said, mostly because he wasn’t at all sure where to go from this point. It felt safer just to let her talk, now that she was on the verge of opening up. “Is there more to it?”
“You don’t know the first thing about me, Roman.”
“That’s hardly my fault!” he shot back.
The silence held, the two of them glaring at each other. Adela broke away first, though she did with a scoff. She shook her head, and the scoff turned into a throaty laugh.
“You want to know more about me?” she asked, and there was something in the softness of her voice that had the hairs on the back of Roman’s neck standing on end.
He nodded, certain his voice would crack if he answered verbally. Because of puberty. It had nothing to do with the sudden intensity on Adela’s face, the way her dark brown eyes seemed to darken in the shadow of the alley, drawing in the light until all that he could see was her.
“I was eight years old when I took my first life,” she said. “It’s something of a tradition. The children are left in buildings, in pockets of survivors in the wake of the attack. Tasked with killing the healers, halting the rescue efforts, drawing attention away from the main force. The ones who survive are given a rank, and they join the attack next time.”
Roman had figured as much. Or, Emily had figured as much and she’d warned him. About the worst-case scenarios, about how dark a past Adela could have, if she came from one of the places Emily believed she did. Some of the more war-torn, cartel-run countries were living nightmares. They would start recruiting children as soon as they were old enough to hold a gun. Induct them young, so they grew up without knowing there were other paths. So that violence and death and fear were as much a part of them as their beating hearts.
He was glad that Adela’s father had gotten her out of that environment, one way or another. She was in a place where she could grow the way a child needed to, even if she was a little behind. All she needed was for someone to reach out to her, to not flinch away when she lashed out, not recoil in fear when she presented her darkness.
“One of my fellow initiates was the one who claimed the kill. It was a medic, alone, who pulled aside the rubble and found us. Ixta and I had been left with a group of women, mothers cradling children.”
Adela held up one of her hands, staring at the palm before turning it over to examine the back. “My hands were trembling, then. I remember I could barely keep hold of my knife. Ixta, though...Ixta was a proud daughter of one of the priests. She’d been eagerly anticipating that day since she was old enough to walk on her own, while all I ever did was fear it. When the rescue worker shook her to see if she was awake, Ixta split her open from her belly button all the way to her neck. The woman screamed for so long, longer than I thought anyone should be able to scream.”
Her hand was shaking now, too. She watched it curiously for a moment, then tightened the hand into a fist. Rock steady.
“I was even more scared, after it was over. They always sent two of us on these initiations, you see. One to pass and the other…to fail. To separate the weak from the strong, and to illustrate the cost of failure to those who would go on. It wasn’t too bad, if you were a boy. You lose some status, respect in the eyes of the others, but you’d eventually be sent back to the battlefield. Girls didn’t get that luxury. Breeders were a resource that our people sorely needed. If you couldn’t prove yourself worthy of wielding the blade in battle, you were given to one of the warriors, to serve and bear children until your last day.”
It made Roman’s stomach turn. He heard about these places on the news, but to actually speak to someone from the heart of a war-torn country, someone who had been so close to murder and death and sheer hopelessness at an age when Roman was still wearing pajamas to bed.
Uncertainly, he reached out a hand and put it on Adela’s shoulder. He’d seen Emily perform a similar gesture in the past, and it was almost always received positively. It was something about the small connection, like a symbolic bridge between two people, spanning the gap between their existences to bring them closer.
She reacted to his touch, and not like he’d feared she would. Adela pulled away at first, but surged forward all at once, practically falling into his arms. His breath caught in his throat as her body pressed against his, and she wrapped her arms around him as she buried her face in his neck. Roman’s own face grew hot, and he was once again wildly aware of how quickly and loudly his heart was beating.
“Can you guess what happened next, Roman?” Adela whispered into his ear. “Can you guess what the warriors found, when they returned for us?”
Roman was afraid that the thumping of his heart would echo throughout the alleyway if he opened his mouth, so he just shook his head.
“They found me, alone, clutching my bloody knife like it was the last thing in the world. I killed Ixta, because I refused to accept the fate my failure had in store for me. I killed the mothers and the children, because I couldn’t be sure they’d stay quiet about what they saw. I prepared my lie and I rehearsed it a thousand times, alone in the darkness.” She paused, and the sibilant whisper turned into a furious hiss. “And the warriors who retrieved me never even asked. Ixta’s father forgot her name and had another child, because that’s all we are. Expendable shots at greatness through legacy. And my father was so proud. He took the bloody knife from my hands, turned it into a keepsake.”
“Wait a second,” Roman said, pulling away from her. Adela stepped back as well, an amused look on her face. “Your father was a part of this? You said...you said you lived with your father here…”
“My father wasn’t a part of it, Roman. My father is el Dio de Sangre, the Blood God, the King of the Fallen, the Shepherd of Exile. He stands at the head of the greatest empire of wizards that exists, the sworn enemy of Avalon’s parade of brightly colored fools.”
There was a lot to parse in that statement, but one fact slowly filtered in through the remains of the fugue brought on by Adela’s proximity.
“You’re...a wizard?”
Adela laughed, and it wasn’t a friendly sound. It was harsh and bitter, more like she was mocking him than the laughter he had come to know over the years with the Tryhard Club.
“Sure, that’s the takeaway,” Adela said, rolling her eyes. “Mundanes. Yes, I’m a wizard. Specifically a blood mage, more specifically a blood priest. That’s not really a functional distinction, though, more of just a societal one. I’m here to-”
“It doesn’t matter,” Roman said quietly.
Adela’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? I’ve killed people, Roman. More people than you’ve met in your life. Innocents, soldiers, wizards, Mundanes. I’m a monster.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” he answered. She flinched, the cold, stoic mask she wore fracturing for a moment before it settled back into place. Even then, the carefully blanked expression she normally wore looked less stable. Her eyes were narrowed, the muscles in her jaw slightly clenched.
She looked like she was about to start arguing, but Roman couldn’t let her. He finally felt like he was building momentum, and he needed to use it.
“You don’t learn about cults, where you’re from, do you?” Roman asked, though he immediately felt silly for asking such an obvious question. “No, of course you don’t. What good would it do you? Well, we learn about them here. Normally you’d just hear about them on T.V. and in the movies, but Emily and Jay did a stint on abnormal group psychology, and they made us all sit through it too.”
“It’s not a cult.”
Roman laughed, though it was half-hearted at best. It was too sad a subject for him to really muster the humor. “That’s literally what any cult member would say. Everything I’ve heard so far lines up perfectly. You have a leader that every member of the cult worships. I bet he’s charismatic. I bet he has the type of image that everyone in the cult can look up to, and he makes you want to do better for his sake, because he so consistently avows that the needs of the group come before the needs of the individual. How could you not want to follow someone so selfless?”
“You’re wrong,” Adela said, but Roman could see it in her eyes that he was hitting close to home. Even her voice had lost its hardened edge.
“More power is given to the members of the cult that prove themselves, because it’s harder to use fear and brain-washing to control competent people. So anyone with the potential for independence is moved to the inner circle, and given more power, more freedom, more of an idea of the big picture...and more responsibility to bear. More darkness. Blood priests, I think you said.”
“No…” Adela whispered, and Roman saw fear on her face for the first time. That fear gave him hope. It was stupid to think that just hearing about how cults work might convince Adela that she was in the wrong, that her loyalty and her commitment were misplaced. The only way words like these could actually affect her in any powerful way was if she’d already been thinking things like this on her own. If he could add the weight of justification to her own misgivings, and then give her a way out…
“You could stay, Adela,” Roman said softly. His next words came from Emily, and as a quotation they rang with a confidence that he could never have mustered for an original thought. “None of us care where you came from, or what you’ve done. The only thing that matters to us is where you go next, and what you choose to do now.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “There would be consequences, for both of us.”
“We’re strong enough to deal with that,” Roman responded. “All of us, together. That’s how we’re strongest. They want you to feel alone, like you have nowhere else to go. Because if you-”
Adela stepped forward and kissed him, her lips pressed fiercely against his.
Cherries, Roman thought, as his brain shut down all but the most automatic thoughts. Her lips taste like cherries. Lip balm, maybe?
There was moisture on his face too, catching the chill of the autumn wind. It wasn’t until she pulled away that he saw the tears on her cheeks.
“You’re a good guy, Roman,” Adela said, sniffing once before she swiped her hand across her eyes. “And you’re right, for the most part. Watching you guys laugh and joke, going to school these last two weeks...being a part of the club, even just for a little while. It’s been more fun than I thought I’d ever get to have.”
It was starting to sound like a goodbye. He was not about to give up on her, not after he’d seen the girl that lay underneath it all.
“Adela, let’s go talk to Emily,” he said, trying to calm the note of urgency that sprang up in his voice. He didn’t want to spook her. “She’ll know what to do.”
“She always does, doesn’t she?” Adela said, though it sounded like it was more to herself than him.
Roman reached out and took her hand. “Come on. We’ll go together.”
“Go home, Roman,” Adela said. “Go home, and don’t come back out until morning.”
“What are you…” Roman began, then blinked. His head felt like it was full of fog, and it didn’t clear until he shook it vigorously. When he looked up, he was standing alone in an alleyway. Between Reynold’s Cafe and the thrift shop, judging from what he could see of the street.
But what had he been doing? It was like a dream, retreating further the harder he tried to cling to it. There had been a plan, and...he had been trying to…
Roman let out a frustrated groan. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. Why was he always so spacey? He jammed his hands into his pockets and walked back out onto the sidewalk. The sun was going down, and he was dressed a little light to be staying out for too long. The city fair was just getting started, but he didn’t really feel like going alone.
A flicker of recognition sparked at that thought, but it slipped away into the bitter wind as quickly as it came. Roman headed off down the sidewalk after slipping his hoodie on, still wondering why he’d come so far out just to stand in an alley, and why he had the taste of cherry on his lips.