he took my arm to lift me out of the seat. “No good can come of this.”
“Stay,” Jared said, his voice calm, threatening. I stood to leave the room and he stepped closer to the camera. “Stay or they all die.”
I hesitated, then sank back down into the seat. Grandma kneeled next to me. “If he gets out of there, hon, we’re all dead anyway. He’s just taunting you, baiting you.” I suddenly understood why everyone was so afraid of Jared when they had found out what he was. I could now empathize on a level I didn’t want to.
“No,” Cameron said, bending to the monitor. “He probably does want her to stay, so he’s making empty threats.”
“And the hybrid speaks,” Jared said.
“How is he hearing us?” Glitch asked, checking wire after wire. “That room is encased in steel ten inches thick. And there is no audio in. I guarantee it.”
Cameron reproached him with a baleful look. “He’s an archangel, Glitch-head. He can do things like that.”
Glitch flipped him off, but Cameron paid no attention.
“Why would he want her to stay?” Grandma asked, and Cameron offered her a much softer version of his reproach.
“Because he really is in love with her.”
My grandparents bristled, but I didn’t believe him. This wasn’t love. This was hatred. Contempt. Blind rage.
“Then, then I don’t understand,” she said.
“He’s an archangel, a messenger. He doesn’t kill for the sake of killing. He kills because he’s been ordered to. But there’s a balance.” Cameron sat beside me. “You remember what I told you? About how he is made of light and darkness, right?”
I nodded, trying to understand, but sinking deeper and deeper into a state of despair.
“Something has shifted, has caused the darkness to overtake the light.”
“What?” I asked in helplessness. “What could do that?”
Before Cameron could answer, Jared took another run at the door. He was still strong, still ridiculously fast, but he apparently couldn’t dematerialize. Granddad was right.
When he failed again, Jared gazed into the camera. His expression was filled with so much hatred, so much apathy, I took a mental step back. Then he turned away, and the strangest thing happened. When he spun back around, he became a blur. He did dematerialize, became a mass of smoke and fog that spun and swirled like a whirlwind.
As though proving he still could.
As though he’d heard my thoughts.
The camera shook, vibrating until the room went completely black and only sound was left. And the sound we heard was like the fluttering of a thousand birds. It grew louder and louder, feathers brushing against the speakers, wings rustling against one another in a chaotic frenzy until, in an instant, it stopped. Silence, abrupt and surreal, settled in the room like a blanket.
I gazed into the monitor, searching the blackness. “Jared?” I whispered. When I received no answer, I asked, “Is he still in there?”
Granddad looked worried too, but Cameron nodded and said, “Parlor tricks. He can’t get past those walls. I guarantee it.”
After another minute of waiting and watching, Granddad took me by the shoulders and lifted me out of the chair. He set guards on the vault and one at the monitor while the rest of us went back to the house to regroup. I just wanted an explanation. Something to help me understand what was happening. Before Jared escaped and killed us all.
My grandparents had been right all along.
* * *
“How did this happen?” I asked as we sat around our kitchen table. Betty Jo was making coffee and Glitch was setting out sandwich meat and bread at the behest of my grandmother. She sat in the chair beside me, so tired and so scared, she seemed to have aged right before my eyes. A sadness had consumed me as well, along with a genuine desire to die. I’d never been particularly suicidal, but would death be so bad? On the plus side, the pressure to save the world would end.
“I don’t know how they did it,” Cameron said, “but somehow, when the descendants got a hold of Jared, they branded him with some kind of symbol.”
“They branded him?” I asked, appalled. “Do you mean they burned him?”
“Yes. I saw the scar on his back when we were restraining him.”
I closed my eyes. Starving for answers, I asked, “What kind of symbol? What does it do?”
“I don’t know. I’m not into that voodoo-hoodoo stuff. But, for lack of a better phrase, it seems to be blocking the light. All I see when I look