Pittacus Lore - The Power of Six

“I can’t stop thinking about what you went through,” I finally say, but what I would rather tell her is that I can’t stop thinking about her. “Being held prisoner for half a year, having to witness Katarina being-well, you know what I mean.”

“Sometimes I forget it happened. And other times it’s all I can think about for days,” she replies.

“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “I don’t know; I guess it goes without saying that I miss Henri, and it kills me that he’s gone. But after hearing your story I realize how lucky I really am. I mean, I got to say good-bye to him and everything. Plus, he was there while I went through my first Legacies. I can’t imagine going through that alone like you did.”

“It was really, really hard, that’s for sure. I could have used her the day I started to gain my invisibility Legacy. I could have used her even more for girl talks when I was growing up. They were pretty much our parents on Earth, right?”

“Right,” I say. “What I find funny is that now that Henri’s gone, the things I remember most about him are the things I usually hated. Like when we would leave some place behind and we’d drive for hours and hours and hours down the highway headed someplace I’d never even heard of when all I wanted to do was just get out of the car. Now, the conversations we had on those trips are the ones I remember most. Or when we started training in Ohio, and he made me do the same thing over and over and over again . . . I hated it so much, you know? But now I can’t look back on any of it without smiling.

“Like one time after my telekinesis finally came, we were training in the snow and he was throwing all these objects so I could learn to deflect them. I had to redirect them back at the source, and he heaved a meat tenderizer really hard at me, and I used its own velocity to whip it back at him; and at the very last second he had to jump headfirst into the snow to keep from being hit,” I say, smiling to myself. “The pile of snow was actually a snow-covered rosebush with all these thorns. You would not believe the noise he made. Stuff like that I won’t ever forget.”

A car approaches on the side of the road and we scoot off into the ditch until it passes. It whips into a stone driveway of a nearby house, and a man in a black leather jacket jumps out. He pounds on the front door, yelling for whoever is inside to open up.

“Jesus. What time is it?” I ask Six.

Six moves towards the man and the house, my hand still in hers. “Does it matter?”

As we creep within ten feet of him, the smell of alcohol hits me. He stops pounding his fist against the door to yell, “You better goddamn open this door, Charlene, or you don’t wanna know what I’m gonna do!”

Six sees the revolver in his waistband the same time I do and she squeezes my hand. “Screw this guy,” Six whispers.

He pounds again and again until the lights in the front window turn on. Then, through the door, a woman shouts, “Get out of here! Just get out of here, Tim!”

“Open the door right now!” he yells back. “Or else, Charlene! Or else, you hear me?”

We’re within touching distance of him. I can see the faded tattoo below his left ear is a bald eagle holding a snake in its talons.

She yells back, her voice shakier than before: “Just leave me alone, Tim! Why are you here? Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

He pounds and yells even harder. I’m about to put him in a choke hold, squeeze that bald eagle and snake right off his neck, when I see the gun slowly crawl up his lower back until it floats away from him in Six’s invisible hand. She puts the barrel of the gun up against the back of the man’s head and buries it in his brown hair. She cocks the hammer with a loud click.

The man stops pounding on the door. He stops breathing, too. Six pushes the gun even harder into his skull and then she pushes it stiffly to the right, spinning the man around. The sight of the floating gun in front of his face makes him go white. He blinks and shakes his head violently, expecting to wake up in his bed or in the back alley of whatever bar he came from. Six moves the gun side to side and I wait for her to say something, to really spook the hell out of him, but instead she suddenly turns the gun towards his car. She shoots, and a radius of broken glass appears on the windshield. He screams, shrilly, and burst into tears.

Six aims the gun at his face again and he quiets down, letting a stream of snot hit his upper lip. “Please, please, please,” he says. “I’m sorry, God. I, I, I’m gonna leave right now. I swear. I’m leaving.” Six cocks the hammer again. I see the curtain of the front window move to the right, and expose the face of a large blond woman. I squeeze Six’s hand and she squeezes back. “I’m leaving right now. I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” the man sputters to the gun. Six aims at his car again and empties the chamber with a loud bang; the rear driver’s side window explodes into a thousand pieces.

“No! Okay, okay!” the man shouts. There’s suddenly a wet spot on the inner thigh of his jeans. Six motions the gun at the front window, and he makes eye contact with the blond woman inside. “And I’ll never come back. I’ll never, ever, ever come back.” The gun bobs to the left twice, indicating he can leave. The man rips his car door open and dives in. Stones spit out from under his tires as he reverses out of the driveway and then barrels down the road. The woman in the window continues to stare at the handgun that’s floating next to her front door, and that’s when Six flings it over the house with such force that it’s sure to land in the next county.

We run back to the road and then we continue to run until there isn’t a house in sight. I wish I could see Six’s face.

“I could do that kind of stuff all day,” she finally says. “It’s like being a superhero.”

“Humans do love their superheroes,” I say. “Do you think she’ll call the police?”

“Nah. She’s probably going to think it was all a bad dream.”

“Or the best dream she’s ever had,” I say. Our talk turns to all the good things we could do for Earth with our Legacies if we weren’t busy being hunted or hated.

“How did you train yourself, anyway?” I ask. “I can’t imagine learning the things I did if it hadn’t been for Henri pushing me so much.”

“What other choice did I have? Either we adapt or we perish. So I adapted. Katarina and I trained for years before we were captured, but obviously never once after my Legacies developed. When I finally got out of that cave I promised myself that her death wasn’t going to be in vain, and the only way to do that was to seek revenge. So I picked up where we had left off. It was hard at first, especially on my own, but little by little I began to learn and grow stronger. Besides, I’ve had more time than you. My Legacies came sooner than yours, and I’m older than you.”

“You know,” I say, “my sixteenth birthday-or at least the day I celebrated as my birthday with Henri-was two days ago.”

“John! Why didn’t you tell us?” she asks, then lets go of my hand and playfully shoves me away, making me instantly visible. “We could have celebrated.”

I smile and reach for her, feeling blindly in the dark. She takes my hand and interlocks her fingers in mine, allowing my thumb to rest over hers. The thought of Sarah comes into my head, and I find myself instantly pushing it out.

“So what was she like?” I ask. “Katarina?”

A moment of silence passes. “Compassionate. She was always helping others. And she was funny. We used to joke and laugh a lot, which probably seems hard to believe, seeing how serious I usually am.”

I chuckle. “I didn’t say it, you did.”