The Survivor (Book 2)

Chapter 10

Zack and I spent a lot of the night in his room, emerging for dinner and small conversations with the rest of the house. We didn’t see Taylor and Eros until the next morning, but Av and Lionel were out with Apollo in the living room, playing some violent video game about zombies. Avalon annihilated the boys, becoming the reigning queen of zombie slaying, and Apollo said Eros would kick her ass when they left Taylor’s room. Eros wouldn’t like being kicked off his throne, even if he had been thrown out by Avalon.

We ended up back in his room where I fell asleep in his arms and he flipped the pages of an unread book. The house was abuzz the next morning. I could tell from the thoughts floating about. This wouldn’t be good.

I pulled Zack downstairs quickly, ending up in the living room to see I was the last one awake. On the television screen was a breaking news story of a facility in Georgia that had obtained proof of the existence of supernatural Beings.

My jaw hit the floor, as did Zack’s, and Taylor started pacing the floor like it was a runway and he was wearing this season’s latest trend. Zack swore under his breath, rubbing his chin as he watched the TV. “This is not good,” I said softly.

“Not at all,” Zack agreed.

“We should’ve killed those bastards while we had the chance!” Taylor threw up his arms. “I knew it was a stupid idea to let them live!”

“Then you should’ve said something before we left,” Zack said quietly. “You know that was your responsibility as a Being. If you don’t agree with something that’s been said or done, you state that disagreement.”

“He had hope,” I pointed out. “We all did. That’s not his fault.”

“So where do we go from this without another war?” Lionel asked. “We don’t need another war. Not so damned soon. We’ll run out of Beings if we get ourselves in another one so soon.”

“So make more Beings,” Avalon said quietly. “As bad as that sounds, it’s true. And there are alternative ways to making more. Faster ways. Cloning, for one. Takes me thirty seconds, and I can have ten more identical copies of myself.”

“We don’t need another war,” I agreed with the dragon-blood. “That’s stressful, and it’s time-consuming. We need something now. Training, gathering supplies, making armor, all of it. It takes too damned long.”

“The public will demand proof if they don’t immediately dismiss it,” Zack’s father said with a shrug. “Humans are skeptical.”

He was right. How much proof could they have gathered from us in the course of three days? Taylor’s quick healing could be dismissed as an unnatural phenomenon, but only a phenomenon. Nothing more. They might’ve gotten our confession on video, but words can be empty.

Humans cannot see directly the supernatural part of Beings. It’s wired into their genetic coding to be blind to it, and it has been since the dawn of time from what I’d read. How they could see Saint’s eyes, I didn’t know. Maybe the gene was breaking down, becoming unreliable. Maybe it was a part of Saint’s DNA. Either way, the humans would not be able to identify us simply by wings or eye color or lack thereof. Neither by scales, nor fangs. We were invisible.

The next story on the news was about an outbreak of some strand of the flu in a small town in Italy, near Rome. I frowned, “Is that because of us?”

“No,” Zack gulped. “I hope not.”

I dismissed the flu story, leaving the living room to ponder our situation. Zack followed me downstairs, in the room with one of the pools. “What do we do?” I asked, feeling more and more hopeless the longer he was quiet behind me. I watched the water, and he stood next to me, crossing his arms over his chest.