Liberation

Chapter 12

(Switching point of views)
Henley's Point of View:

The angry sound of the loud alarm going off jolts me awake, my blood already starting to boil at what could be happening.

I rip the sheets of the bed out of my face and get up, my black hair falling in my aging face. I pull it back into a bun, dress in warm clothes, and head outside.

"What on Earth is going on?" I demand as I walk into my brother's room. The smell of alcohol makes me wrinkle my face in disgust, the repulsive scent making my skin crawl.

One of the many guards in the room turns to me and answers, "Someone broke in and attacked him. They grabbed one of the empty bottles and hit him across the head with it."

I let out a quiet laugh, for that's exactly what I've been wishing to do to him for the past week. His obsession with those powers is deterring him from the main problem: I know Julia is here in the city.

I walk up to my unconscious brother, his black hair in his face and the rising and falling of his chest suggesting that he's peacefully sleeping. That is, of course, if he didn't have a nasty bump forming on the top of his head.

A sly smile beginning to form on my face, I snap my fingers and Will jolts awake, looking around furiously like a madman.

It's good to have the power of control back.

He begins mumbling incoherently, fumbling for the drawer that holds the box of powers so he can make sure that they're still there. He pulls out the box and puts in the correct code, and I brace myself for what comes next.

The blinding colors stream from the box, suggesting that the powers have been untouched. "What happened?" I demand as I close the box and put it back in the drawer.

Will raises his head, the distraught look leaving his eyes telling me that he's finally sober. "Someone...a girl I'm sure it was...somehow broke in. I heard a sound but when I looked around, I didn't see anyone. It was only the split second before she hit me in the head did I see her," he explains, rubbing the sore spot on his head.

I grab the collar on his shirt and pull him to my eye level. "Tell me Will, what did she look like?" I ask frantically.

He jerks away from my grasp. "Well how the hell should I know? She had on a mask that covered half of her face anyway," he says.

"Could you tell what color hair she had?" I ask. He furrows his eyebrows as he tries to remember. "Yes, I think I recall small bits now. Her hair was dark brown, almost black with caramel colored highlights," he says.

"Skin tone?" I ask next. "From what I could tell, she was really tan, almost like she's lived in the sun her entire life," he answers truthfully.

And then, I ask the final question. "Her eyes?" His face changes at the question, unnerving him. "They were green, but not some ordinary green. It was like a color that was specially made, a bright green that you might see in the reflection of a rainbow in a glass prism," he says before adding, "I've never seen anything like it before."

I feel a determination rise up in me, a feeling I was all too familiar with years ago when I had the chance to kill her. I have that chance again, and I'm not wasting it this time.

"Follow me," I say to the guards as I leave Will's room. We all walk down the stairs to the front entrance of the compound, standing in the mouth of the doorway that overlooks the yard.

"Search everywhere around the perimeter, but leave the homes untouched. We can't let the citizens suspect that something's going on. Will and I will go door to door tomorrow and figure something out. For now, search the area; she couldn't have gotten far by now," I order them.

The guards disperse themselves and hungrily search like hounds on the fresh scent of the hunted.

I myself begin to look as well, for I have an eye for details that most would ignore. An overturned stone, a broken twig, stirred up dust settling after someone has run across it.

I walk over to a barbed-wire fence, high and sharp enough to keep anything out.

That is, of course, unless you're transparent.

Something small suddenly catches my eye. I peer down at one of the spikes of the wire, delighted to find that an inky black piece of fabric has been snagged. The tip of the spike has a few small beads of blood running down the sides, almost as if someone was in such a hurry to leave that they weren't paying attention.

I carefully pick up the piece of fabric when a distant memory hits me like a brick wall:

A boy, beaten bloody with his hands tied to a post. A girl whose identity remained concealed by this very piece of fabric, only the green in her eyes giving her away.

This was the hood that Julia covered her face with when she came to save that dreaded boy, Peter. I hate him almost as much as I hate the girl.

Any friend of Julia's is an enemy of mine.

I stuff the piece of fabric in my pocket and walk away, trying to formulate some kind of plan to get this mess sorted through.

Julia wants to find me? I'll gladly show myself. She wants these powers? I'll put them in her reach. She wants to save these people? She has the chance. But there's always one thing Julia forgets, a fatal flaw more deadly than she thinks:

Freedom has a cost.