Hidden
By M. Lathan
Copyright 2013 M. Lathan
More titles by M. Lathan
Lost - Hidden Series Book Two
Shattered - Hidden Series Book Three
Dedication
To Aaron, for everything imaginable.
Prologue
I understood why she wanted to kill me. I didn’t belong here in the first place. The world would be better off without me in it. I closed my eyes, torn between wanting to escape and wanting it to be over. I should have been more prepared. I’d known for years what face I’d see in my final moments, but no power of mine could have predicted what would lead me here.
Chapter One
Only once have I wanted to make a friend. I was seven, and he was a cat. This old, gangly thing the other orphans called Mr. Crusty. I would watch him hobble around, no feline grace left in his bones, wanting to play with and talk to the other pest at St. Catalina. Like I knew his pain and he knew mine.
Birds swarmed his carcass the day he died, before I ever worked up the courage to approach him. We found him out in the courtyard, getting pecked at, his pain and death meaningless to the hungry birds and everyone watching.
I still had a lot in common with Mr. Crusty. Especially now as Sienna and her flock circled me. They’d jumped at the chance to torture me as soon as Sister Margret left class for a bathroom break.
Sienna snatched last week’s Chemistry test from my desk. I hadn’t turned it over. I knew it was a D minus.
She cackled and passed it around.
“Leah, you would think someone who spends most of her time alone would have better grades,” she said. Her birds laughed on cue. “What do you do all day? Obviously not study.” She gasped slowly like she’d gotten a revelation in that blonde head of hers. “You fantasize about us, don’t you? You probably sleep in Whit’s old bed to feel close to her.”
Laughter spread around the room like an airborne disease. Disease. I shivered. That was an intriguing thought; I could almost hear the sound their bodies would make against the floor when it hit.
“Leah, come on. Say something. Scream at me, it’s been a while. At least cry,” Sienna said, laughing and leaning into my desk, closer to danger.
I didn’t cry. I never cry. And if I were going to, it wouldn’t be because of Sienna. I had bigger problems. I’d just broken a promise I’d made to God to not think about hurting His people, His children. And today was not the day to piss Him off.
My old roommate, Whitney Nguyen, graciously returned my test as she cackled with the rest of the birds. She liked the idea of me pining over her, but she knew I didn’t spend my free time thinking about her or sleeping in her old bed. After fourteen years of hard labor as my roommate, she’d given up on being friends or me being remotely normal. The current theory to explain my oddness was that I was in love with all of the girls and consumed by lust.
As long as they didn’t know it was magic.
I’d always known it was real. Everyone did. And I knew, along with the rest of the world, that it was evil, satanic, and had coursed through the veins of the creatures that tried and failed to take over the world.
I was afraid of them until four years ago, when I got disgusting magical powers and changed from a shy twelve-year-old into one of the monsters from everyone’s nightmares. That was shocking considering all of the creatures were executed after the botched apocalypse. I discovered that the government missed one on a Tuesday afternoon when I wished I could skip the walk to my dorm. When I opened my eyes, I was there, in my room, seconds after standing in an empty classroom.
I stuffed my test in my bag, bracing for the rest of their stunt. Even with my head down and eyes closed, I knew Sienna had taken a mask they’d spent hours decorating out of her bag. And I knew Whitney had covered her mouth while she giggled in anticipation.
She’d wanted to be Sienna’s friend since Sienna was the blonde toddler named Esther. Before the nuns learned our real names, we all answered to the one they’d given us from the bible. It took them a few years to identify the orphans who had been left to them after the world nearly ended. They thought Sienna was charming and our little leader, our queen. I struck them as weary. Whitney’s name used to be Abigail. I’d had to listen to the passage she used as evidence of being a king’s wife countless times, just like her idol and future best friend Esther.
Eventually, most of the girls put aside their bible names and went with what their records showed. I’d been Leah for eight years already, so I didn’t ask to be called Christine Grant. It didn’t matter to me then, but after the powers came, it felt like blasphemy to have a name with Christ in it.
Sienna cleared her throat, getting on with the prank, and I kept my head down. I’d seen this moment as I stepped out of the shower last night during one of my annoying and useless visions of the future. I couldn’t avoid much of what I predicted. I’d promised God I wouldn’t use magic.
“So, Friz,” Whitney said, referring to my hair—which was curly, not frizzy, by the way. Hers was a slick black, almost blue, that she’d chopped to her chin after moving out. Her reasons: she couldn’t stand the silence anymore, she wanted real friends, and a dozen other complaints I’d tuned out during her rant. Then she stormed out—a few times to get all of her things—and climbed to the top of the social ladder overnight, propelled by what the rumor mill turned into an epic fight that ended in me groveling on my knees for her to stay.
I didn’t even get out of bed, didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at her while she packed.
Whitney tapped her purple nails against my desk. I still didn’t look up.
“I know you never go to dances, or anything really, but we figured out a way to help you so you won’t miss out tonight. Just put this on and we won’t know that it’s you feeling us up in the dark. Plus, you can hide your creepy trance face when you numb out. We put glitter on it and everything.”
They cackled as the mask swiped the side of my face and landed on my desk. I exhaled slowly, silently, and brushed the mask to the floor. I developed a sudden interest in my textbook, and they finally flapped away from my desk.
This was their idea of fun, but my heart was black and I didn’t have a soul, so my idea of revenge wasn’t as funny. It would involve the creepy trance face she hated so much.
“Back to your seats. Settle down,” Sister Margret said, slamming the door behind her. “Act like civilized humans.” They didn’t settle down. Sienna and her flock were still in hysterics about their prank. The others were sitting on desks, tinkering with cell phones. I was seated quietly, pretending to be a civilized human. “Settle down, or you’ll lose mingling privileges for a week,” Sister Margret said. They rushed to their seats then.
God forbid their precious, unsupervised time with the boys from St. Mathew, the male orphanage next door, be revoked. The nuns used that threat for everything. It worked on them every time because they were human and had nothing else to worry about.
“It’s time for lab,” she said in the now quiet room. “Get in your groups. Stay on task in there.” I didn’t have a group, but I packed my bag and prepared to tuck myself in an empty corner of the lab. “Uh … Leah.” Her voice was low and flat like she suspected something had happened to me in her absence. I went to her desk as the other girls pushed through the door. She continued in a whisper. “I think you should retake your test while they’re in the lab. Your C minus won’t survive that grade.”
“Thanks,” I said, even though I didn’t feel grateful for her pity. Pleasant emotions required a soul, and things like me weren’t made with them.
She gave me a blank test, and I went back to my desk. I
’d do much better now that there was a wall and a closed glass door between twenty-two other minds my magic allowed me to hear.
If I wanted to, I could spy on them, know their secret desires and shames, but I’d also promised God that I would ignore their thoughts. The indistinct jumble of words distracted me all day, especially during class. Homework and projects kept my GPA afloat at a 2.4. If I had a soul and could feel humor, I would have laughed when Sister Margret told me I had test-taking issues.
She had no idea how accurate that was.
My life would be much easier if my kind had stayed in hiding like they had been for ages. But no. That idiot wizard Fredrick Dreco had to go and ruin everything when he decided to take over the world. Now we were extinct … kind of.
I finished the test in ten minutes. I knew how to balance equations when I wasn’t ignoring the clatter. I slid the test on her desk, and she checked over it while I stood there.
“B,” she said. “Do this the first time next Friday. I can’t let you retake anything else this term. Understood?”
I nodded and headed to my desk. My clogs squeaked against the floor twice on the way there, the soles still damp from the rain.
I slid into my desk and pulled out my notebook to scribble. Sister Margaret didn’t mention the lab, so neither did I. I’d take an F if it meant staying out of Sienna’s way. Or really, letting her stay out of mine.
A sudden storm had descended over New Haven while I ate outside alone, so I hadn’t gotten to the best part of my lunch. I pulled my orange out of my bag and stabbed it with my nail. This was the only thing my soulless body could feel outside of pain and anger—momentary peace for the time the scent would linger in the air. I didn’t know why, but for a few moments, it would soothe me. I’d be calm, unafraid, like no other second of the day.
It was one of the most pathetic things about me—the unpopular weirdo, fruit sniffer, and witch.
“Leah,” Sister Margret said, like she’d called me more than once. I hadn’t heard her.
“Yes, Sister?”
“I asked if you thought it was stuffy in here.” I nodded. It wasn’t stuffy, but I didn’t want to disagree. It took more words to disagree, I’d found, and I tried to speak as little as possible.
Her dress swept the floor on her way to the window. I braced for the February chill, begging my magic not to rear its hideous head. My most frightening power, commanding fire to do whatever awful thing I wanted, could flare unexpectedly, especially when I was cold.
How ironic. Fire was the most effective method used during the vanquishing of my kind, according to my history books. I guessed I was the only one with that particularly devilish power … or else they’d be alive, too.
“I’m always afraid when the sky looks like this,” she said. She cracked the window and reached her wrinkled hand out into the storm. “It reminds me of the war when the days were as dark as the nights. It still haunts me, the way they tormented us, even though they’re all burning in Hell right now.”
She slammed the window, and I shook in my seat. She didn’t notice, too busy mumbling at her desk about the brother she lost during the war—a story she’d told enough times I could recite it from memory.
I was sorry about her brother. I was sorry things like me were vicious and had terrorized humans for years. I was even more sorry that she wasn’t safe in her own classroom right now. I wasn’t in hell like the rest of my people, and there were so many ways I could kill her. I could move anything without touching it—her body out of that window, her bones under her skin. Or I could just speak it. I’d never been bold enough to try a spell, but I knew it would work. She needed to pray more than she knew. But I didn’t want to be a monster, so I prayed, too, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to.
According to my file, my parents were bankers with a normal life. I must’ve gotten lumped in with the wrong type of babies when I survived the fire that killed them. I didn’t belong here, praying to their God, living at one of their schools. But for now, I just had to be quiet and keep the magic hidden. As long as I was invisible, I would continue to escape a death that should have happened sixteen years ago.
But my odds of living were bleaker today. It was the last Friday of the month, and I’d pushed it by thinking of killing four times already, on the very day I had to go sit in God’s house with my unclean blood for mandatory Mass. One of these days, I may burst into flames when I take communion. Then Lydia Shaw, who was credited for ridding the world of magic, would find out she’d missed one. Then … that would be the end of Leah and/or Christine.
It didn’t make sense to me how humans were able to defeat my kind. I felt strong enough to take out everyone in this school. But they did, so they’d do it once more if I blew my cover.
The bell startled me, like most harmless sounds did, and I rushed out of class before they could come out of the lab.
The last two hours before Mass would be easier. It was also Club Day. Girls like Sienna and Whitney would be headed to Ballet and Art. I went to the basement for Robotics. It had the fewest names on the sign-up sheet, so I went for it.
The five girls who made up the St. Catalina Robotics Team, who called themselves the Robo-Girls, were considered nerds, but even they didn’t talk to me.
They worked on their huge robot for a national competition while I tried to get the wheels to work on my two-foot thing that didn’t deserve to be called one. These girls were actually smart. I was just here to disappear for a while, so I stayed out of the way. That worked for everyone here. Sister Sheila got to read her Bible while everyone worked in harmony, the Robo-Girls didn’t have to include me and risk falling even lower on the social ladder, and I got to struggle in the back … alone.
Two hours of almost silence was what I needed before Mass. The Robo-Girls didn’t drag the evil out of me like the others.
I kept my eyes on my feet as I walked through the church doors. I thought it was better to look away, less disrespectful.
The right side of the church was reserved for the boys from St. Matthew. I’d never spoken to any of them. They wouldn’t know me as Leah or Christine. They’d probably identify me as the quiet creep or possibly the lesbian who was in love with Sienna and Whitney.
I sat in my usual seat on the last row on the girls’ side. I bowed my head to pray. I pleaded with God, his entire holy family, and everyone else in heaven for the evil inside of me to not repel communion, turn crosses upside down, or whatever else was supposed to happen.
“Hi there, friend,” Sienna said and giggled, like Mass wasn’t hard enough without her bothering me. I toyed with the edges of my skirt so I’d look too busy to hear whatever she had to say. I knew better than to wish I were somewhere else. I’d be there in a second. “You wanna come sit by us?” she asked.
I picked at my overgrown cuticles as she and Whitney fell into a bigger laugh. I knew what was so funny— – the time that had actually worked.
Whitney had only been gone a week. I was eating in the cafeteria at my newly empty table. Then she walked over, Sienna Martin: the Queen of the Universe, and said, “I hate how things ended with you and Whit. Come sit with us.” She smiled, and I picked up my tray and followed her like an idiot. When we made it to the famed table, she spun around with a different face than she had before and said, “Leah, stop following me. You are so obsessed with us. Let it go. She doesn’t want to be your friend anymore.”
Thoroughly horrified and embarrassed, I ran out of there, lunch tray in hand, and caused an even bigger scene. They periodically bring up that hilarious moment and others where I’d lost it, screamed, or bolted out of the room. There were several where they’d startled me on purpose and I had spilled something all over my clothes before I banished myself from the cafeteria.
“Oh, Leah,” she said, not quite done, apparently. “I heard something disturbing about you. Candice told Whitney that Hannah told her that you … came on to her in the locker room today.”
&
nbsp; I sighed. These accusations were getting more ridiculous as the years wore on. I didn’t even take gym this year. I’d opted for an extra science. Physics offered more homework and less free time.
“Spaz, I’m shocked,” Whitney said. “I thought you were in love with us. This is no way to show it.”
I stared at the crucifix until they lost interest in my reaction. They strutted down the aisle like it was a runway, and Sienna blew a kiss to her boyfriend. I rolled my eyes. My witch powers, or the devil himself, made me sure that he was sleeping with Tiffany—one of Sienna’s loudest birds.
There was nothing worse than knowing something that could hurt her and not using it. But I’d kept it to myself, hoping it would show God that I didn’t want to be evil.
Maybe it was working. I didn’t vomit when I took communion, nor did I spontaneously combust.
“The Mass has ended, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God,” we all said together, and I raced through the church doors.
My dorm was the biggest of the four. The current junior class, my class, made up most of the population at St. Catalina—the kids orphaned in the darkest year of the war. We took up the entire building and had since we were infants. The common room had grown up with us. It used to be the open space where we were coached to walk and talk. Then it turned into a playroom. I pulled on the double doors and entered its current incarnation. Pink and purple lanterns hung from the ceiling over plush sofas and beanbag chairs, facing different flat screens around the room.
Sienna had been in charge of this remodel. Even if she hadn’t claimed this room as the court where her subjects come to worship her, I still would’ve banished myself from it. Sitting around with humans outside of class was the last thing I wanted to do.
I planned my weekends according to one goal: be invisible. I’d incurred a sacrificial tardy in first period so I could set my laundry to dry while the girls were gone and my delicates were safe from pranks. I knew I’d get here first after Mass, it was mingling time, and had left my laundry basket waiting by the dryer. I passed through the kitchen that permanently smelled of chocolate chip cookies and grabbed the plastic bag I’d packed and left in the front of the fridge to make for a quick exit.
Groceries for the weekend, check. I dropped the bag in my basket and piled the clothes on top. Laundry, check. A television blared in the common room just as the staircase door slammed behind me. Leah out of sight until Monday morning, check.
I knew my door would be unlocked today. Sister Phyllis, the guardian of our dorm, had inspected rooms while we were in class. I still reached for my key; the inspection hadn’t been announced.
Even with my bedroom door closed and locked behind me, my act had to continue. I dropped the laundry basket and took two steps to my desk to deposit my bag. Then three to the closet to drop off my shoes. Then six more to my bed. I’d memorized my careful dance, a performance I suspected hadn’t gone unnoticed over the years. Even now, it felt like I was being watched. I shrugged my blazer off and confirmed my suspicion. It usually happened late at night, but the hairs on my forearm were standing at attention. They’d been that way for the past few days, almost constantly, making me completely sure that eyes were on me. It felt like they wanted to see me be normal, human, and I wanted to show them just that.
I reached for the remote slowly so it wouldn’t fly into my hand. I had a movie all cued up for my performance. I’d taken it from the movie library this morning. I figured no one would come knocking on my door for the dusty VHS copy of The Little Rascals.
I crashed on my bed, exhausted, and faced the little TV once used for princess movies with Whitney. I could have upgraded using money from my student account—money my parents left behind. But I rarely watched TV, and I had bigger problems than the size of my screen, like having my head mounted on Lydia Shaw’s wall.
I ate my typical meal—a turkey sandwich—for dinner. I made my orange last the entire movie to savor the scent.
After Uh-Huh learned a new word, I went into the bathroom for my shower. The hairs on my arms relaxed as I stepped through the door; it was the only place I didn’t feel watched.
The shower sprang to life just before I touched the knob. “I’m sorry,” I said to God. “I didn’t mean to do that.” I waited as the hot water beat down on me to see if that slip would make this night my last.
I checked the hairs on my arm. Still down. Still alive for now.
A far second to oranges, the song I sang in the shower every night had a way of soothing me. More than anything, it made me tired enough to fall asleep. With Whitney gone, I didn’t have to whisper it.
The stars are out,
It’s time for bed.
Now close your eyes,
And rest your head.
May angels shield you with their wings,
As you dream your little angel dreams.
I didn’t recall composing that song, but apparently, I used to think I was good and perfect like the angels. I knew better now.
I stepped out of the shower and tugged a brush through my unruly brown tangles. I stared into the mirror over the sink as I started the song again. My skin screamed winter. I should be a warmer tan; I looked less creepy in the summer. Maybe that was why the girls had been digging into me so hard. I looked rather witchy. The unease that made them mock me was probably their souls warning them, urging them to notice I was different and dangerous.
At my worst, it feels like the fire that could easily shoot from my palm is raging inside of me. My heart picks up, more than when I’m scared. It pounds, I can’t hear. My blood dances, taunting me, begging me to hurt whoever’s hurt me. And I know that I can. I feel that I can.
But I don’t. I breathe and pray and let the magic cool. I didn’t want to be this way—consumed by rage and thoughts of death. I’d much rather be normal and not feel so distant from everyone around me. It would be nice to join the art club and not have to worry about what I’d do to the catty girls there. Before the powers, I’d thought that was where my life was headed—being the quiet girl with the natural artistic abilities. The nuns had thought drawing and painting would bring me out of my shell, make me finally want to talk to someone, connect with someone, change how I’d been since I was an infant.
I was, in their words, impossible to soothe until one day I stopped crying and making any noise all together. Like I’d tired myself out, and I never recovered. I guessed I couldn’t because of what I was—the only soulless creature alive.
Art couldn’t help that, so now, I didn’t draw for the fun of it. It was how I filled the hours before sleep when the hairs were excited on my arm. I drew for whoever was watching. I flipped through the pages of my notebook, past the gray depictions of my more ethical obsessions—oranges, the view of the forest from my window, and the birds that live there.
I filled an entire page with them, some flying, some pecking at the blue lines and the spirals of the notebook, waiting for the hairs to fall. Sleep overtook me before they did.