Jude
Seventeen years old
The island exhaled, blowing smoky tendrils of breath along the cobblestone streets in the market district. It was a beast, and we, its occupants, were the prey.
The mist swirled and eddied as my boots cut silently across the street.
Tucked within the shadows, I waited. A minute or two passed, and then my phone vibrated. Peering into the growing night, I fished it from my jacket pocket.
Marnie: Tell me again why you can’t come over?
I was about to put my phone away when another text came through.
Marnie: I’ll do that thing you like with my tongue while you do that thing I like with yours.
A series of suggestive emojis was tacked on the end.
I was hard in a flash, the dull throb taking its time to dissipate after I shoved my phone away and gazed back out at the street.
Marnie and I had been dating since what felt like the dawn of time. Though really, it had been since we’d both left middle school behind and had journeyed into our bodies and high school together. We’d had a lot of fun in figuring them out. So much so, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked at anyone else.
Her father, an expert in criminal law, was kept on a tight retainer by Nightingale and had been an acquaintance ever since we’d moved here when I was a kid. That is, until they’d sent Ivan to London. I wasn’t sure if he and my dad still stayed in touch, and I didn’t much care.
We could have our own playdates now, and we made sure we had many.
Marnie’s mother remained, sipping martinis at The Ribbon and maxing out Ivan’s credit card in the high-end stores of the market district and sleeping with boys who weren’t much older than her daughter. I doubted Ivan cared, for he hardly returned to the island, and he was not the type of man to go without a female companion for long.
Some years ago, my father had been ready and waiting to rule the London chapter, and from what I remembered, he took great pleasure in knowing his future. But we’d been summoned here when I was eight, and ever since, he’d only grown more distant.
As if he’d never wanted to be placed on Peridot Island at all, let alone rule it.
There was no election, no way to see us or my father coming. Hildebrandt had died in a boating accident with his only heir, leaving behind a mayor-less island and an empty throne.
My younger brother and my mother had struggled with the transition, and my mother never quite smiled the way I remembered her smiling before.
Though I wasn’t sure if it was the transition so much as it was all the ways in which my father had changed since stepping foot upon the ancient, haunted large expanse of land surrounded by pristine sea.
I’d been too young, too absorbed in video games and my books to give a flying shit what we or my father did.
That was then.
Footsteps sounded, sure and swift, upon the damp street.
A puddle of dull light illuminated the dark but not enough to be certain of who it was approaching.
It was the dead of night, though, and the market quarter was vacant. As it should have been.
The only sound to be heard came from the whispering roar of the sea.
I steeled my shoulders, felt my spine lock and stiffen, and hardened my stampeding heart.
Reaching behind me, I pulled the mask from the back of my jeans. Its scales were cool beneath the iron grip of my fingers.
I refused to look at it. I already knew what it looked like, had memorized the glimpse I’d caught of my father’s mask some years ago.
All initiates wore them during their tasks and on some rare occasions, even afterward.
We all did this.
I could do this.
I had to.
Everyone had to, and I was sure as fuck not going to ask for special treatment. I wouldn’t be given it, no matter who my father was.
I was no different.
Stop thinking and go, I inwardly screamed at myself.
Removing the knife from my jacket pocket, I pulled on the provided mask and leaped out from the shadowed alcove.
A scream sliced through the damp air, through the racing organ in my chest, but it didn’t slow my hands as I shoved the woman’s companion to the ground and stabbed him in the side of the arm.
I jumped over him, his thrashing limbs stilling as the blade remained embedded in his forearm. With my teeth gritting so hard I swore I chipped a molar, I removed it, felt the sickening slide of metal through flesh, and plunged it where I’d been instructed.
Right through the center of his palm.
The word was growled, my head bent low to his ear to whisper as he cried out beneath me, “Becuman.” My hand clenched to twist the knife through his tendons, but he screamed like a stuck pig.
The woman joined in. She screamed and screamed beside me, rousing the sleepy crows and gulls from rooftops, their wings pounding above our heads into the star-painted sky.
“Jude,” the woman said, and then I was the one to go still. So still that when I pulled back, I saw the man’s eyes, wet with pain and horror, rattle with recognition.
The woman shoved me, and I shrugged her off. I knocked her away even as every instinct, as my fucking heart howled in protest to do the opposite. “Jude? Oh my fucking god, Jude.”
She sang my name repeatedly, a pain-soaked whine that slithered inside my ears, softened and burned my heart, and reduced it to black ash.
How she’d known it was me, unless she’d known more about Nightingale than she’d ever let on, wasn’t something I had the time to figure out.
Pulling the knife from Park’s hand, I stood on trembling legs and wobbled back a few steps toward the ever-awaiting shadows.
She was leaning over him now, covered in blood, choking on her tears, her hands pressing at his wounds.
I felt my head twitch, felt ice encrust every cell in my body, as the darkness enveloped me like a fresh layer of suffocating skin.
Turning away to dial the number I needed to, I slid the bloodied knife into the sleeve of my jacket. I’d reached the end of the alleyway when Park yelled, “Help! Jude, please.” I froze at the urgency in his voice. “I’m begging you, come—oh, fuck.”
Something skittered up my neck, something that made me race back to find the woman almost convulsing on the cobblestones beside Park, who was struggling to sit up and reach for her.
“Jude,” he wheezed. “If it’s you, please,” he said, coughing, “help.”
I stepped back out onto the street. Muted light battled the dark and failed while I fumbled with my phone and stumbled through my empty brain for the emergency number.
Not entirely sure I was breathing, I stabbed it in and rambled off the address as soon as the receiver’s voice came through.
“Sir, can you tell us what condition the woman is in…” She kept on fucking pressing.
Moving closer, I stared at said woman’s shaking form, my heart collapsing, my hand slackening. Rage colored my vision, dotting it with red. “Just fucking come already.”
Then I hung up and dialed my dad.
He inhaled, loud, and held it. “The paramedics aren’t coming. Get to the warehouse.”
The woman gazed up at me with wide eyes, her hands slick with blood, saliva trailing from her mouth.
No… I shouldn’t have called them. I wasn’t thinking. But we couldn’t just leave her.