Young Writers Society

Chapter Sixteen

“Wait a minute. What are you saying?” Max asked, his strange eyes frozen as he turned over Ness’s words in his head.

“I’m saying that Jordan is one of them,” Ness told him, arms wildly pointing to the computer. “Look. She lives on Westchester Drive…also known as the house run by Satan, if we’ve forgotten already.”

“You can’t be serious,” Landon muttered, shifting behind the unmoving nurse and peering at the computer screen. His eyes quickly raked over every word, and they slowly widened with each line.

“That whole thing was a trap!” Ness exclaimed, backing away from the computer. “Her and Greg, in the hall…they were together on it the whole time!”

“I feel stupid,” Jonas mumbled, looking at his hands and shaking his head. “But how long did they think we’d go along with it?”

“Who knows?” Landon replied, still scrolling through the computer.

“Must have been pretty long, considering that we fell for it,” Ness said.

“I wonder if anyone else in school lives on Westchester Drive…” Landon’s voice trailed off as he clicked on a few more icons and began typing quickly.

“I can’t believe it. She is one hell of an actress,” Ness was saying, talking to herself more than anyone else. Max had retreated to the wall and was staring straight ahead, not saying anything. His eyes were steadily locked on a picture frame across the room, his thoughts in tatters.

“There’s no way to search for students by their houses or anything on here,” Landon was telling Jonas, both of them staring intently at the flickering computer screen. “Who knows how many people live in that house.”

“How many of them go here, even if they don’t live in that house?” Jonas asked, raking a hand through his dark black hair.

“You should have seen the way she looked at me. She seemed so scared. That bitch! And then they way he slapped her across the face…” Ness was pacing, her hands moving as she spoke. “Oooh, please let me kill her.”

Landon stepped away from the computer, making sure it looked the same way as when they entered the nurse’s office. “We’re going to have to go back there some time,” he said. “Before Friday.”

“If we go after then, it’s too late…that means that we would have decided what we’re going to do,” Ness announced quietly, still more to herself than to anyone else.

“And with the way things are going right now…I think we know what we’re doing, don’t we?” Jonas said. The other three nodded.

“We can’t go back, though. They’ve all seen us. They probably put some sort of protection around the house to keep us out, or look for us…they had to have done it by now,” Ness told them. “Think about it. There’s no way that they’re going to let a break-in like that happen again.”

“They have to know what we’re after. What else would it be?” Landon shook his head. “This is going to be hard.”

“We can’t go back,” Ness said again. “Unless we can change how we look…I don’t know how I know, but we won’t be able to get in there the same way we did before.”

“They think that all four of us got in because Max turned us invisible, I bet. They didn’t see Ness and me come in as the wind,” Landon said. “They might have just put up defenses against his invisibility…maybe. Who knows?”

“This is too hard. How are we supposed to know what to expect?” Jonas raised his hands quickly in a “what now?” gesture. “We haven’t done this before.”

“We need Camael. He could tell us. He’s the only reason we know half of what we do now.”

“Which is why we can’t go back,” Ness told them for a third time, and Max nodded his head in agreement. “God can go find other Mortal Angels to do this for Him. I mean, if we’re going to quit by the end of the week, then what’s the point of us getting the stupid Candle, anyway?”

All four of them were silent for a minute, thinking quietly to themselves. Landon’s steely, mysterious eyes were tense and thoughtful; Jonas sat on the floor against the wall, his expression unreadable. Ness’s eyes were closed and her hands were over her face lightly; Max still stared straight ahead, barely moving.

“Wait a minute. Maybe going back to the house isn’t such a bad idea,” Landon said.

“How could it not be a bad idea?” Max asked.

“Maybe they don’t expect us to come back. Maybe they expect us to stay away because we think they put up protection against us.”

“Yeah, but what if that’s not what they expect?”

“Just suppose it is. They won’t expect us to come back, and when we do, they won’t be ready for us.”

“Alright…so how would we do it?” Jonas asked, gold eyes narrowed as they looked at Landon.

“Well…Jordan isn’t in school for the rest of the day, so most likely she’ll be missing assignments. One of us could knock on the door and tell them that they have the assignments while the rest of us sneak in somehow,” Landon suggested.

“One problem, genius. They’ve already seen all of our faces,” Jonas told him.

“No. They saw you and Ness, that’s it,” Landon pointed out. “Max and I were on the ground, and both of you were in front of us. We just got rammed into the wall…thanks to me letting go of Ness and falling out of the air. Remember?”

“How could I forget?” Max and Ness said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed, despite the situation.

“Alright, but what if they recognize you anyway? They should know by now that all four of us look pretty funny,” Jonas brought up, motioning to his hair, eyes, and skin tone. Ness ran a hand through her own strange red hair, realizing that Jonas was right.

“Not necessarily…” Landon’s voice trailed off again, and his eyes went back to their thoughtful appearance.

“What if Jordan told them all what we look like and who we are?” Ness asked.

“We have to take our chances,” Landon told her.

“I bet she doesn’t even know who we are, besides Ness, of course. She fainted, remember?” Jonas brought up.

“It was a fake faint, though,” Ness reminded him. “But I bet she didn’t see, since her eyes were closed and all…and I know that she doesn’t recognize our voices. She doesn’t have any classes with most of us.”

“Max, you can go and knock on the door, ask for Jordan…you know, that stuff. Tell them you have her homework. The rest of us will sneak in, and then they go to get Jordan, you can turn invisible and all four of us can go look for the Candle,” Landon said.

“No—” Max began, but he was cut off.

“Or even if we could just figure out what they’re doing in there. Try to listen in on some of their plans…maybe we’ll overhear where the Candle is,” Ness suggested.

“But—”

“And Max, since you like her…you can just…I don’t know, talk to her, try to hit on her, something…I don’t know…keep her occupied so that we at least have time to look around a little,” Jonas said, gold eyes flashing.

“This isn’t going to work—”

“It’s a great idea. It has to work. Max can distract her and we’ll get the Candle…it’s perfect. And I mean…you’re the one that looks the least like one of the Mortal Angels. You match more than the rest of us do,” Ness pointed out.

“No.” Max’s voice was tense and loud. Landon, Ness, and Jonas stopped talking abruptly, surprised by Max’s sudden outburst.

“Why not?” Ness asked. “It’s a good plan.”

“No, it’s not a good plan and you know it. It’s not going to work. I’m horrible where girls are concerned, and I’m not going to be able to stand there and have a conversation with her about homework for ten minutes. It’s not like I even do my own.”

“No, but—”

Max interrupted Jonas and continued. “After they tell her who it is, she’s probably not even going to come to the door.” His face dropped slightly and his eyes became distant. “I’d screw it all up for us.”

“How do you know? You wouldn’t—”

“They’d probably end up taking us all hostage, or something. I’m telling you, it’s not going to work. And then when they kill us all, it’s going to be my fault.”

“What are you talking about, ‘kill us all?’ We’re not going to die, Max,” Landon told him. “What makes you think…” His voice trailed off, and Landon’s gray eyes were focused on the area behind Max. The blonde boy didn’t notice; he kept talking. He ignored the looks Landon, Ness, and Jonas were exchanging; he didn’t even realize that the other three were deeply engaged in a telepathic conversation.

“Listen to me. You guys know as well as I do that I have a tendency to mess things up,” Max said quietly.

“You’re right, Max,” Ness told him, her voice hard. “You do mess everything up.”

“See, I told you—”

Jonas narrowed his gold eyes at Max, looking scarier than ever. “Look at what you did when Bloody Guy attacked us the first time. You almost let Ness die because you’re too scared to help out.”

Max’s face dropped completely and his eyebrows contorted with confusion. They had never agreed with his low self-esteem before…maybe they were finally realizing what a screw-up he was, after all…

“Face it, Max…you suck. Out of everyone in the world, God had to pick you to help us get rid of evil,” Landon told him, his tone deadly serious.

“I mean, the whole reason we’re not going to choose to stay His mortal angels is because of you,” Ness revealed to him.

“Now, wait a minute—” Max began, but he was cut off. What was happening here? He never dreamed that these three people would ever do this to him! They were his best friends.

“Yeah, who wants to work with you until the Apocalypse comes?” Jonas folded his arms over his chest.

“And God only knows when that’s going to be,” Landon added. His eyes were as gray and steely as they had ever been.

Max backed up a step, not daring to believe what his friends—were they even friends?—were telling him. They stood there shoulder-to-shoulder, three against one. Deep down, he wanted to hurt them for being like that, but he knew he could never do that. His concentration was going all over the place; he felt himself begin to slide out of focus.

He looked at his hands; both were already translucent. He tried to bring them back into focus but his thoughts were barely coherent—he could never even try to use a power when he couldn’t think straight.

Landon had to be picking up on these thoughts: they had to be louder than anything he’d ever heard before. If he was hearing Max’s distress, why wasn’t he doing anything to stop it?

“You’re pathetic, Max. Deal with it,” Ness said.

“I don’t know how we even considered letting Max do something important in this,” Jonas told Ness and Landon. “He’s right; he’d get us all killed.”

“Why are you doing this, guys? What is wrong with you?” Max yelled.

“We’ve always thought this. See, we were just being nice before. Now is the perfect time to tell you how horrible and low we really think you are.” Landon spoke with his hands, his eyes menacing. The infinite gray bore into the blue of Max’s eyes, and he felt more uncomfortable and disturbed than he ever did before.

In fact, he had three pairs of unsettling eyes looking at him: gray, gold, and violet. Nothing on his friends matched; it was strange to have to take in the full impact of them at once like this. Is that what everyone saw when they looked at the four of them? What did outsiders think when they laid eyes on their macabre coloring?

Jonas frightened him the most. His golden eyes stood out in stark contrast to his brown skin and blue-black hair. They were fiery and hawklike, almost evil in their own way…

Max’s whole body was transparent by this point, and his mind was anything but intact. His friends stood there and ripped him apart with their words, bringing everything to his ears that he thought about himself.

A small corner of his mind—buried far in the recesses of normal, every day thought—began to speak to him.

What kind of person are you, letting other people put you down like that? It told him. You know that you are anything but worthless. You are much more than what they are saying.

Yeah, Max said to himself, straightening up.

Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do.

Slowly, his thoughts began to come back into order. His molecules were pulling themselves together, becoming whole again, making him visible.

“You know, Max, I should have never become friends with you in the first place,” Jonas was saying.

“You’re helpless…so insignificant—”

Max cut Ness off, standing straight up and becoming solid, fully visible.

He screamed, “I am not worthless!”