“What do you mean they aren’t real?” I demand.
“They’re not real. They’re fake.”
How is that even possible? Inquests are not an optional event. Everyone has their Inquest on their sixteenth birthday willingly, or they’re hunted down and forced into it. I knew a boy dying of cancer who was bombarded by Inquisitor Moore in his hospital bed.
“How did you get out of having an Inquest,” I ask feeling slightly dazed. Could I have done the same thing?
“I didn’t.”
“But…”
“I thought for sure I was going to be named a member of the Guardian class. I wanted it more than anything,” Milo says, “so I went to my Inquest eagerly.”
“What happened?”
Milo doesn’t answer right away. He lifts the hand I’m holding and stares at the marks on his wrist. The most jagged of the lines deforms even more as he clenches his hand into a fist. “When the Inquisitor started, it was obvious something was wrong. He said my full name…and then nothing. No talents, no name, no class. There was simply nothing for him to tell me. I was nothing.”
“I…I’ve never heard of that happening before,” I say.
“Neither had I.”
I knew what was coming when I stepped into Inquisitor Moore’s house. I knew there was going to be rejection and possibly death. It was horrible, but at least I’d had time to prepare myself for it. Milo was blindsided. His dreams were ripped away in an instant. Memories of the day I finally put the pieces together and realized my own horrible fate crowd painfully into my mind. I know how that feels very well.
“What happened?” I ask.
“The Inquisitor tried again and again. He spent hours trying to make something happen, but my wrist never changed. When he finally gave up he started panicking, raving about the Guardians coming. It was only luck that the resident Guardian was sick that day. I had no idea what he was talking about, but my parents were pretty freaked out too.”
“Why were they so scared?” I ask.
He doesn’t seem to hear me. His eyes harden as his grip on my hand tightens. “They just kept screaming at each other. Celia started crying, but I was the only one who noticed. I didn’t know what to do. She was always just the little snot who bugged me before. Mom and Dad took care of her. I was too busy. Suddenly the roles were reversed,” Milo says. Rolling onto his side lets him bury his face in my hair without disturbing my leg. “She was so scared. I stumbled over to her and held her. We listened together as my parents argued with the Inquisitor about what they should do. The Inquisitor kept shaking his head and saying he had to turn me over. I was upset before, but I started shaking as I listened to them. Turned over to the Guardians. Horrible images of what they were going to do to me blocked everything else out.”
Forget my leg. I roll, gently, onto my side and press against Milo’s chest. The pain of moving stings my eyes, but Milo’s whole body curling around me helps to soften the hurt. I don’t ask him to go on. I just hope that when he’s ready he will. I know better than anyone how difficult it is to hold a secret inside for so long, and how torturous it is to finally let it out. The room dims in the faded pink light of sunset before he speaks again.
“The next thing I knew, I was being pulled away from Celia. She grabbed for me but my mom held her back while my dad and the Inquisitor pinned me to the ground. I fought back but my dad clocking me in the head ended that pretty fast. I was too out of it to see the knife, but I felt it.”
My shoulders convulse under the pressure of a horrified shudder. “They cut you? How could they do that? You could have died.”
“I almost did,” he says quietly. “My dad knew what he was doing but everything was so chaotic. He started cutting and my mom panicked when my blood started pooling on the rug, and bumped my dad. It was a weird feeling, dying. Once I lost enough blood, I just felt tired. I couldn’t even feel the cuts anymore. If it weren’t for Celia crying hysterically next to me, I don’t know that I would have even tried to fight.”
“Please don’t say that,” I say.
Milo kisses my forehead and leaves his mouth hovering over my skin. “Until that night, I thought not becoming a Guardian was the worst thing that could ever happen to me.” The bitter tinge to his voice is buried deep, but not hidden. Shallow dreams cut when they shatter just as much as the more profound ones.
“I won’t make that same mistake again, Libby,” Milo says. “I may not have any dreams of becoming anything now, but I have other things to live for. I won’t let go of you, and I won’t let my parents do the same things they’ve done to me to Celia.”
“Milo,” I say with more than a little hesitation, “I would have been pissed about the way your parents handled things too, but they were trying to protect you weren’t they?”
I don’t know how I expected him to react, but laughing wasn’t on the list at all. Until the anger in his voice turns it into a growl. “Their idea of protecting me was to bribe the Inquisitor and nearly kill me, then throw me back to the wolves. I went back to school two days later with bandages all over my wrist. I was the only one wearing a sweatshirt in May. The Guardians were tipped off somehow, and they came after me in the middle of the night. The idiots started in the wrong room, though. Celia woke up screaming. I was right across the hall from her, but by the time I got to her room one of them had a knife to her throat.”
My throat tightens at a similar memory.
“I didn’t even think, I just barreled into the room and tackled him like I was back on the field. Strength and Speed couldn’t match me with how caught-off-guard he was. The second one, he was on me before I hit the ground. Celia ran for my dad, but I knew he’d never get there in time,” Milo says, his voice growing darker with every word. “Somehow I managed to get one of their knives, and the first chance I got I put it into the first Guardian’s throat.”
My breath catches in my throat and my stomach twists painfully. He killed the Guardian? A subtle shiver runs down my spine at the violence in his eyes as he says it. I have no love for the Guardians, but I have no desire to kill them if I can help it, either. I shudder at the lack of regret in Milo’s eyes. I understand the need for deadly force when you’re protecting people, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the effects of it. I don’t know whether I killed the Guardians that came after me at the mall, but I have nightmares about what I did. Milo’s expression makes it clear his sleep wasn’t disturbed because of his actions. When he speaks again, I feel myself flinch involuntarily.
“The second Guardian laid me out with a blow to the back of my head and started dragging his friend out the window,” Milo said. “I told my parents we should have left as soon as I woke up after my botched Inquest. I still don’t understand why the Guardians want me, but I knew staying where people knew us and knew our names was a mistake. But they swore the Inquisitor’s bogus report about my Inquest would hold up. They didn’t want to upset our lives.”
“And Celia almost died,” I say quietly, trying to put aside my discomfort with Milo’s story and focus on what he needs now.
“If I hadn’t gotten there in time they would have murdered her to get to me. My parents let that happen by staying there. I won’t forgive them for that. For everything else, maybe, but not for that.”
“So it was your idea to move?”
“Out in an empty little border state we could fade into the background and hide from the Guardians. Celia could be safe out here where the closest major Guardian training compound is five hundred miles away.” Milo pauses and strokes my hair. “I hoped that Celia would be safe here, and that if her Inquest went as badly as mine did, I could get her away from my parents and disappear into the desert before anyone could stop us.”
I sigh and curl against him even more tightly. He responds in kind.
“Meeting me has to be the worst thing that could have happened to you,” I say.
“Not hardly.”
Shaking my head in frustrati
on, I say, “But you constantly have to dodge camera crews around me. If one of the national reporters gets you on tape the Guardians will know where you are. And I’ve already nearly gotten Celia killed once. I am horrible for you, Milo.”
“No,” he says firmly. “Libby, you’re the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I wouldn’t change meeting you for anything. I love you.”
Every time I hear those words on his lips my heart dances to the sound of his voice. My joy is dulled under the weight of what he’s saying this time. He loves me and says he doesn’t regret getting close to me, but life is never that simple. He’s too blinded to see the very real possibilities of how this story we’re writing might play out. I was too selfish to see it earlier. I wanted so much to be loved by someone again that I let Milo put himself at risk. Never did I imagine the depth of what he was putting on the line for me. A terrible realization sinks into my heart. I can’t let him do it anymore. A little over four months of happiness, it will have to be enough to carry me through to the end. Whatever that end might be.
Tears start forming in my eyes before I even begin to speak. I press myself against Milo as hard as I can, drink in his scent and memorize the contours of his body. Four months, it’s probably more than I deserve anyway.
“What if Celia ends up getting hurt, or worse, because of me?” I say. “You can make sure that doesn’t happen if you leave me alone. Milo, you can’t be with me anymore. I won’t have yours or Celia’s blood on my hands. I have too much on them already. Please don’t ask me to do that, Milo. Please leave.”
“No. I won’t leave. I’m not going to be one more person that abandons you.”
I turn away from him, wincing at the wrenching pain that runs through my leg. My voice is strained and weak when I speak. “I refuse to be the reason you die, Milo. Go, please.”
“No.”
“Get out of here!” I scream at him.
His hands grab my shoulders and jerk me up to his face. The shock of his brute force overrides the screaming my leg is doing. Defiance so intense it presses me down with its force rolls off Milo in waves. “Stop it,” he demands, shaking me again. “Stop it, Libby! I’m not going anywhere. Nothing you say will change my mind. Just stop it!”
“It’s a choice between me and Celia,” I finally say. It stops him cold. I’m asking him to choose between me and his little sister, a choice he should never have to make. But he has to understand. I have to make him see the truth.
“Why does it have to be one or the other?” he asks quietly.
“In what ending could you ever have us both?”
His eyes blaze with fire. “We stand a better chance of protecting her together.”
“No! I’ll get her killed, Milo. If I’m in your life she’ll never be safe. You know it’s true!” I argue, punching against his chest to drive home my point.
Milo shoves me into the bed and straddles my hips. His face glowers a mere inch away from my own. “You want to know what ending will let me have both you and Celia?” He presses down on me, his intensity bordering on frightening. “I get the woman I love and the sister I would die to protect by helping you do what you were born to do. Destroy the people hunting us, and I get my wish.”
My mind stutters in shock. “You…you want me to go against the Guardians? Are you serious?”
The cold glint that was in his eyes when he talked about killing the Guardian in Celia’s room returns. I’ve seen Milo get angry, several times. I can handle his anger. This goes way beyond that. There isn’t a wild fury in him driven by being in the moment, just a stone cold hatred and desire to return the pain they caused him. It frightens me more than the idea of attacking the Guardians.
“I’ve wanted to kill them all since the night they tried to murder Celia. They aren’t protectors, they’re mercenaries. I dream of finding that second Guardian and ramming his own blade into his heart,” Milo says. I can’t stop myself from pulling away from Milo a little. He’s so focused on his dreams of vengeance he doesn’t notice. A shiver ripples through my spine. Then a second, but for a completely different reason.
“Is that why you didn’t ignore me?” I ask. My bottom lip quivers like a frightened child, but in this moment I feel like I am seven years old again, teetering on the brink of having my world pulled out from under me. “You saw me as a way to get revenge?”
Milo’s eyes widen, and his grip softens and slips off my shoulders to the pillow behind me. Any hint of the darkness that consumed him a moment ago disappears completely. “No,” he says, “no, of course not.”
“Then why?”
“Because the sullen pout on your lips was so adorable I couldn’t resist.” His slow smile spreads and threatens to make me forget why I questioned him in the first place.
His irresistible charm won’t work this time. The memory of his cold eyes haunts me. “Milo, I’m serious. You knew who I was when you talked to me. Why?”
“Because I knew who you were before Lance stood up in class,” he says. I start to argue with the impossibility of that, but he doesn’t let me. “I don’t mean you being the Destroyer. I mean you, Libby Sparks. Lance was the only thing in your head before, but you were in mine. I never understood before your Inquest why such a smart and beautiful girl like you was so quiet and reserved. I guess I should have known you had a secret, given my own experience with them, but I wasn’t about to let a little thing like you being the Destroyer stop me when I finally had a chance to get to know you.”
My heart begs me to believe him. Is it really too much to ask for one relationship not tainted by lies and betrayal? I just don’t know if I can trust what he’s saying. He wants so badly to crush every last Guardian into the ground. And he wants me to help him. My Perception is hammering away, telling me he believes what he’s saying, but does that make it true?
“Libby,” Milo says, his voice alluringly soft, “I promise you that I had no other thought in my mind other than kissing your pouting lips that day. I hated that Lance hurt you, but I wanted to take his place. I wanted you, not a weapon.”
He leans in closer. The heat of his body is stealing my breath. Tingling dizziness spreads from my chest to my fingertips and toes.
“I still want you, Libby. More than anything, I want you.”
“But you want me to go after the Guardians,” I manage to say in a breathy whisper.
“I’ll go after them regardless. I think it would be a step toward solving both of our problems. Having you with me will help, yes, but the choice is yours.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I won’t ask again,” he says, “but I won’t leave you either. So stop asking.”
His unguarded emotions cover me in his love and his honest desire to share my life no matter the risk. I don’t want to doubt him. Someone else with the same ambition might see me as a tool to be used before a woman who needed a soft touch, but I tell myself that Milo isn’t that person. Passion and anger burns in him as fierce as any other warrior wannabe, but it is tempered with concern for me.
The deep-rooted desire to protect and care for others has to be stronger than his darker desires. They have to be. He’s shown me so many times how much he wants to do good. That stuff earlier, it was only there for a few minutes. That isn’t the real Milo. The real Milo is the one stroking my skin, radiating love. Although he is a teenage boy kissing a pretty girl. That can cloud a guy’s mind pretty quickly and make them forget just about anything else.
“You can’t stay with me and go after the Guardians at the same time,” I say.
His old casual shrug makes a return. “I’ll figure something out.”
“You know I won’t let you go alone. You know I’ll come with you whether I want to or not.” It’s an accusation, but not one filled with malice. It’s just the truth. I couldn’t let him face that alone.
“It’s a possibility,” he admits, “but I have a feeling that if you really want to stop me, y
ou’ll have a pretty easy time of it.”
“You think so?” I ask.
He nods before touching my lips, lightly at first then more hungrily. My lips part as his tongue glides over my bottom lip. Need so desperate it can never be sated races through my veins. Milo lowers his body gently to mine as his mouth wanders down my neck. My mind begs him silently to keep going, to explore every inch of my skin. I reach up to tangle my fingers in shaggy hair that is no longer there, and find myself simply pulling him closer. He groans and pulls back.
“No,” I whisper. I don’t want him to stop. I want him to erase the past few days, erase my doubt. I want his body to be the only thing in my mind.
Milo offers me one last kiss and rolls onto his back.
“Milo…”
His fingers wrap around mine but he doesn’t come back. “Libby, you’re doped up on some serious drugs. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”
“But…”
“Libby, when you’re thinking more clearly, if you still want to, I’ll be more than willing. But not now, not when you might regret it later.”
That taste of his passion is intoxicating. I can’t imagine ever not wanting to bask in it, but as my thoughts grow more and more fuzzy I start to realize that later might be a good idea.
Chapter 25
Boiling Mercury