Chapter 26: Dead Weight

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Dead Weight

Getting Jared into the car took 10 minutes.

He wasn’t fighting her. That was the strange part. He just wouldn’t move. He sat in the melting slush, staring at nothing, and when Zoey pulled on his arm, his whole body came up like a sack of wet laundry. She got an arm around his ribs, hauled him across the clearing, and poured him into the passenger seat. He didn’t help. He didn’t resist. He just let his head fall against the window.

She buckled him in, shut the door, and stood outside for a second with her hands on her knees, breathing hard.

’He weighs a ton.’

She climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and pulled back onto the dirt road.

Zoey glanced at him.

He hadn’t moved. His hands lay open in his lap, palms up, like something he’d forgotten to put away. His eyes were red. His coat was soaked through. There was a thin line of dried blood at the corner of his mouth where he’d bitten his lip.

She too was still sore. That was the truth. Yesterday she’d stood in the yard and watched her brother blast her beast against a wall. She had said things she couldn’t take back. A hot, stubborn knot of anger was still sitting in her chest, and part of her wanted to pull it out and wave it in his face.

’You hurt my lizard. You made me cry. You owe me an apology.’

But she looked at his hands again, and the knot loosened.

’No. It wouldn’t be fair.’

He was going through something serious. Something she didn’t understand. He’d driven into the wilds in the middle of the night, alone, with her mother’s car, and come out of it looking like this. Whatever she was angry about could wait.

She turned onto the main road and drove them home in silence.

* * *

The house felt empty when they got in. Immediately she spoke.

"You need to eat," she said.

He didn’t answer.

"I’ll make something warm. Eggs, maybe. Toast. Do you want juice?"

He stared at the table.

She cracked 4 eggs into a pan and let them sizzle. She buttered a stack of toast, poured a glass of orange juice, and carried it all to the table on a plate. She set it down in front of him.

"Here."

He didn’t look at it.

"Jared. Eat."

"I’m not hungry."

"You haven’t eaten since yesterday."

"I’m not hungry."

She sat down across from him, folded her hands, and watched him. The steam curled from the eggs. The toast went soft. The juice sweated in its glass. He didn’t touch any of it.

’Should I say something?’

An idea had been circling her head since they left. It was small and obvious and, she thought, kind of useful. He still had the gorilla. A big, strong, SwampGorilla that nobody had stolen. It wasn’t nothing.

She opened her mouth.

’No.’

She shut it again. It would sound ridiculous. It would sound like she was telling him not to be sad, like his loss was a small thing, a lost mitten. She could picture his face. He would look at her like she’d slapped him.

’It would be insensitive. Don’t.’

So she held her tongue, and she kept watching.

Across the table, Jared’s eyes had gone distant. He wasn’t looking at the food. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at something a long way away, something she couldn’t see.

’I wasted it.’

The thought circled slowly, like a vulture.

’I wasted the last two days. I trained with her. I tried so hard. And some beast just made away with her.’

He had spent hours in the yard, shouting orders, building up her trust, learning her moods. And yet he hadn’t even seen it coming.

’It wasn’t just a beast. It had a master. He was up in the tree the whole time. I didn’t put it together.’

He should have known. The owl had landed too cleanly. It had negated his attacks too easily. A wild beast doesn’t snatch a gem out of mid air and fly it to a waiting partner. Every sign had been there.

His hands curled slowly into fists.

Zoey couldn’t bring herself to leave. She sat there with her elbows on the table, watching the clock tick, afraid of what might happen if she stood up. He had that look. She’d seen it in movies, in the last 10 minutes before something terrible happens. A flat, hollow stare.

At last, Jared pushed back his chair.

It scraped against the floor. Zoey jumped. He stood up slowly, one hand on the table, and she stood up too, quick as a reflex.

"Where are you going?"

He didn’t answer.

He walked out of the kitchen. She followed. He climbed the stairs, one slow step at a time, and she climbed behind him, so close she could have touched his back.

At his door, he stopped, just for a second. He didn’t look at her. He pushed it open and went in.

He didn’t care anymore whether she followed or not. It didn’t matter. It was only noise at the edge of his thoughts.

He crossed to the desk, picked up the pouch from where he’d dropped it, and tipped out a handful of gems. He didn’t look at them. He just took the first one his fingers closed around, a cool, damp, mossy stone, and stuffed the rest back.

Zoey hovered in the doorway, watching. She didn’t notice the pouch contained other gems though.

He walked past her, down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door into the pale morning light.

* * *

Jared stepped into the yard, took a breath, and dropped the gem.

It cracked against the dirt. Green light flared.

The SwampGorilla rose out of the glow, huge and calm, vines dripping from its shoulders. It looked around the yard slowly, then down at Jared, and let out a low, questioning grunt.

"Okay," Jared said hoarsely. "Let’s train."

The back door banged open.

"Jared!"

Zoey came running across the grass, her boots slapping the mud, her braid half undone. She skidded to a stop a few feet away, breathing hard.

"What are you doing?"

He didn’t answer.

"You can’t be serious." She stared at the gorilla, then at him. "You’re weak. You’re hurt. You were crying in a forest 2 hours ago. You haven’t eaten. You haven’t slept."

He turned his head away.

"Don’t be stupid," she said. Her voice cracked. "You can’t be stupid right now. You just lost your dragon, and now you want to do this? You seriously want to train right now?"

Jared looked at her.

He didn’t speak. He just stared, with empty eyes, with his face as blank and still as stone. It was the same look he’d given the empty branch in the wilds. It wasn’t angry or cruel. It was worse. It was nothing at all.

Zoey’s stomach turned.

’Don’t you dare stare at me like that,’ she thought. ’Don’t you dare. Say something. Yell at me. Anything.’

He turned back to the gorilla.

He reached out and laid a hand on its massive forearm. The gorilla looked down, and something passed between them, a flicker of understanding. It lowered itself slightly. With a slow, wet crack, a thick, vine wrapped limb began to detach from its shoulder, trailing moss and swamp water. Jared caught it in both hands.

He fitted it over his own arm.

The plant arm slid on like a gauntlet. It was enormous, easily twice the size of his own, thick and green and knotted with roots. It curled around his fist and wrapped up to his shoulder, tightening as if it had always belonged there. He flexed it once, experimentally.

Then he threw a punch.

The arm whipped through the air with a heavy crack. A gust of wind rolled outward, bending the grass. The air shuddered. A small branch snapped off the dead tree.

[Rex.]

He threw another.

[Rex, listen to me.]

He threw a third.

[You need rest. Your mana’s may not be low, but your stamina has taken a hit. Mentally you’ve taken a hit. You’re injured. You haven’t eaten. This is a bad idea. This is a very bad idea.]

He didn’t answer. His breath came in short, harsh pants. He threw a fourth punch, a fifth, a sixth, each one harder than the last.

[Rex. Rex. Rex.]

The system repeated itself, over and over. It tried everything. It tried sarcasm. It tried logic. It tried begging. Each time he flinched a little, like a man shrugging off rain, and kept going.

[Fine. Fine. Here’s something.]

[You won a few beast points yesterday. From the wilds. 136 in total.]

He kept punching.

[136. It’s not nothing. It’s the first time you’ve earned any. You could spend them. You could...]

He didn’t stop.

The system fell silent.

He reached out again to the gorilla, who stood patiently with its remaining arm hanging at its side. He took hold of it, and the gorilla let him, slowly sloughing it off in a spray of green droplets. Jared fit the second arm over his other hand.

Now he had two.

Two huge, green, vine wrapped arms, wrapped around him from shoulder to fist. They felt thick and hard and heavy, like armor, like tree trunks.

He stood there for a moment, breathing, and spoke, low and flat, to no one.

"I was wrong and stupid to take only one beast with me. There’s a reason I alone get to start with 10 SSS rank Beasts."

His voice shook on the last word.

"Come on," Zoey said. "Stop being unreasonable."

He looked at her.

She stared back at him, her eyes bright and wet, her hands curled into fists at her sides. He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he turned away and drew back one huge, green fist.

The next thing he knew, he was on the ground.

It happened so fast he didn’t understand it. One second he was standing in the ring, arm cocked back, and the next the sky was spinning and the dirt was slamming into his spine.

She was on top of him, both hands pressed flat against his shoulders. Her braids hung down around his face. Her knees were on either side of his ribs. She had thrown herself at him with her whole body, like a linebacker, and now she wasn’t going to let go.

"Jared, please stop," she said.

He blinked up at her.

"Don’t make me cry."

Her voice was small. It cracked at the edges.

"Jared, please."

A tear dropped from her chin and landed on his cheek. It was warm.

He lay there, breathing hard, with two enormous swamp arms flopped uselessly in the dirt on either side of him.

Something in him gave way.

He couldn’t have said what. The heavy limbs slid off his shoulders and melted back into the shape of the gorilla, which stepped back, folded in on itself, and collapsed into a small, mossy gem.

It rolled to a stop beside his hand.

Zoey sat back, wiping her face with her wrist. She didn’t get up. She stayed there, kneeling, ready to pounce again if she had to.

Jared sat up slowly and picked up the gem.

He held it in his palm. While looking it, he thought of his ground dragon and then...

"It’s only one beast," he said. "I can still..."

His voice wavered.

He was trying to say something encouraging. A lie. He’d meant it to sound strong, a reminder that he still had something. That he wasn’t empty handed. That there was still a way forward. But the words wouldn’t hold. They broke apart halfway through.

"It’s only one," he stammered. "It’s only..."

He bent forward and sobbed.

He didn’t realize it yet but this was an effect of the beast bond on him. The system didn’t mention it, it didn’t seem like the time. Jared and the ground dragon bond had briefly reached level 3 before capture.

Zoey sat in the dirt and watched him, her hand pressed against her mouth.

’Is he going to be alright?’

She didn’t know. She didn’t have any way of knowing. She only knew that she couldn’t leave him alone. So she crawled forward, slid an arm around his shoulders, and held him until the worst of it passed.

After a long time, she helped him to his feet. She walked him back across the yard, through the kitchen, and into the living room, where she sat him down on the couch and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV, scrolling past news and cartoons until she found something quiet and dull.

It was already late afternoon.

And somehow, after everything, they were only just about to eat breakfast.