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FORSAKEN

By GINA

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Chapter One
"Chained to You"

Grace

I swear I hear him singing.
I stick my paddle in the water and heave it back as Ms. Bertelli told me to do, clanging against Ollie’s paddle behind me, because he and I just can’t seem to get in sync. Ollie is a freshman, and The Most Annoying Kid I Have Ever Met. How we got stuck in the same kayak is a testament to my prodigious lack of luck. And consider-ing my last name is Fortune, that’s saying something.
The Freshman-Senior Kayak Adventure is one of those time-honored annual forms of torture that private schools like to inflict on their students in the name of “breaking the ice.” In Buffalo in October, that could be literally true. Thankfully, it’s nearly fifty degrees now, with only a light drizzle instead of the usual freezing rain.
Which makes my hearing that singing all the more weird.
“Quit hitting my paddle, Ollie,” I say for the fif-teenth time.
“Sorry, Grace,” he says for the sixteenth time. Ollie is a tuba player for the school orchestra. He’s kind of shaped like a tuba, rounded and flaring in all the wrong places, with a mop of shaggy hair that sticks up every which way, like he’s been recently electrocuted. He’s one of those kids I feel sorry for and want to be nice to, but at the same time I want to hurt him very badly.
“Have you heard of Super Boa?” he asked me when I first met him, at the First Day of School Picnic. He stood way too close, and every time I backed up he took a step forward, until I was up against a tent pole with nowhere to go.
“Is that some kind of snake?” I asked.
“No! It’s a K-Pop band. They’re awesome.” Awe-some is Ollie’s favorite word, and he always says it with a really long aaaaaa, just to make his point. He then pro-ceeded to play me a clip of the aaaaaawesome Super Boa on his iPhone, while at the same time imitating the band’s cool moves, which he did surprisingly well, though it made the video hard to watch without getting motion sickness.
I tried to avoid Ollie after that. But around every corner, in the hallway, in the Atrium (which is what we called the cafeteria) and even in the library—everywhere I turned, there he was. So naturally, I got stuck with him as my kayaking partner.
Ollie is talking about Korean boy bands again. I tell him to shush, not very politely. I’m listening. There is only the faintest echo. But I know it’s him.
I look up at the collection of giant silos that line the Buffalo Canal. According to our very informative and over-caffeinated gym teacher, Ms. Bertelli, the silos were built at the turn of the previous century, when Buffalo was the Queen City, and all the grain that came from the Midwest had to pass through here to get to New York City on the Erie Canal. Or something. Honestly, it’s hard to pay attention when grownups start talking about histo-ry.
Some people think the silos are an eyesore. They’ve been abandoned for decades. Yet they are so much a part of the Buffalo landscape…without them, Buffalo wouldn’t be Buffalo anymore. They have a kind of de-cayed beauty, like Roman ruins—there’s something magisterial and tragic in their presence. They’re stopped in time, frozen, unchanging. They will be here long after we’re gone.
I stop paddling and stare up at the wavy concrete structures, fringed by the twisted, blackened metal of the marine towers. The singing has stopped. I search for a face, for any sign of human life.
“Did you hear that?” I ask Ollie.
“Hear what?”
“Singing, some kind of music.”
“Nope. I bet the tuba would sound good in there though.”
I’m probably hearing things again. I hear his voice all the time, in my head, in my dreams. Sometimes I stop in the middle of the hallway or street and turn around, sure I hear him calling my name.
Grace…
Maybe it’s only Ariel, my Guardian Angel. Yes, I have one of those, and yes, I hear him talk to me, and no, I am not crazy, at least not as far as I know.
Besides, Jared is dead. Completely, utterly, totally, in-finitely dead. I saw him die, saw him fall into a pit of fire, along with his demon father, Azazel.
Yes, he had a demon father. And yes, he killed him. Well, we killed him. I helped a little with that. But Jared died too, fell into the Cauldron—the pit of fire—with Azazel, lost forever.
I shake it away, trying to concentrate on Ollie’s war-bled Korean-accented rapping. “Baby you got me on fire…”
But that only makes me think of fire, and then I’m thinking of Jared again. Jared Lorn, the most beautiful boy on earth, half angel, half human, completely dead.
“Grace! Ollie! What’s the matter?”
Ms. Bertelli has paddled all the way back to scold us for falling behind. “Keep going! Steady paddles, dip, pull, lift, dip, pull, lift! You can do it!”
I dip my paddle and “accidentally” splash her in the face. “Oops! Sorry!” I say with a lopsided smile. “I’m not very good at this.”
“This is simple, Grace!” She swipes at her face with her sleeve. “Ollie, you need to buckle your lifejacket.”
“It won’t buckle,” says the boy who wishes he was Korean. “It’s too small.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
Then it happens. An explosion. Only it isn’t a bomb or anything like that.
It’s music—a burst of it, from the silo in front of us.
Guitars, strings, trumpets, drums, cymbals…they echo, reverberate, bounce off the veil of sky. My arm shoots out, whacking Ollie in the arm with my paddle.
“Ouch!” he yells. I pay no attention to him.
The Song, the Song, the Angel Song, the song that is only in my head, only now it isn’t. It ripples through the water, through the kayak, into my bones. It’s every-where. I spring upright, standing in the kayak, somehow balancing, my heart racing, my ears almost popping.
“Grace! What on earth are you doing?” Ms. Bertelli screams.
Then I lose my balance and fall into the murky black water of the Buffalo River. And Ollie goes with me, his life jacket only half fastened.

The school guidance counselor, Ms. Robeson, looks at me over her granny glasses. She isn’t old, but she wears those old-fashioned half-moon glasses with the chain around her neck. Her face is thin, pinched, as if she doesn’t get enough protein in her diet.
I’ve showered and changed into some “extra” clothes the gym teacher keeps in her office “just in case.” I’m still shivering, hair wet. I sit in the chair across from the counselor, arms crossed over my body, knees locked together in defense. Here it comes. The grilling.
I’ve been through this before. Ever since the Trage-dy, ever since Jared’s death, people have poked me and prodded me, looking for the crack, the place of implo-sion. I’ve been pretty good at concealing that—mostly because I can never, ever, tell anyone what happened the night Jared died. I haven’t even fully told my best friends Ethan and Bree. Ralph knows most of it, but he would never tell either. Ralph is Jared’s dad, but not real-ly. He’s actually Jared’s grandnephew, if you want to be totally literal. It’s a long story.
“What happened in that boat, Grace?” Ms. Robeson uses her soft, I’m-a-counselor-and-I-care voice.
“It was a kayak. Not a boat.”
She purses her lips at my sarcasm. Like I said, we’ve been through this before. “Why on earth would you stand up in a kayak? Ms. Bertelli said you heard some-thing. What did you hear?”
“Music. The Star-Spangled Banner. I stood up. It’s a conditioned reflex.” I’ve gotten to be quite the smart aleck in the past year.
“Grace.” Now she’s using her disappointed voice. “You need to tell me the truth.”
I shrug. “I didn’t mean to stand up. I was just—shifting around. My legs really hurt, being in that posi-tion for so long. I needed to straighten them out. Plus, Ollie was singing Korean hip hop songs, and I’d just had enough. Hasn’t that ever happened to you? Haven’t you ever just had enough?”
The counselor nods sympathetically. She’s buying this! Wow, I am getting good. My leg issues always make a good excuse anyway—they were crushed in a car acci-dent when I was little and still don’t work quite right.
The thing is, they don’t hurt that much anymore. Only I don’t tell Ms. Robeson that.
“It’s been a tough year for you, I know,” the counse-lor said. “A lot of trauma. It’s understandable. Do your aunt and uncle—?”
“Just leave them out of it.” I haven’t told her I don’t even live with my aunt and uncle anymore. Apparently, Aunt Ruth hasn’t told the school either. I live with Ralph and his housekeeper Emilia in the Mansion. Ralph is like a dad to me, the father I never had. And anyway, it’s none of Ms. Robeson’s business.
Too many people already know way too much about me. Like how I managed to stop a maniac student on a shooting rampage of the school, only I really didn’t. Like how my birth mother was Shannon Snow, the fa-mous movie star vampire killer, who tried to take over my life by making me into a drug-addicted slut. Well, I think that was her plan anyway. Like how I used to be in a band called Forlorn, which even had a hit single, but then Jared died and I was so badly hurt from the Ordeal that I couldn’t sing anymore. I still don’t sing. I just play the piano now. I play for the musicals, for the concerts, for the would-be opera singers at the Buffalo Arts Acad-emy. But that’s it.
Everyone tries to get me to sing again. My best friend Bree, my other best friend Ethan, even Penny, who also lives with Ralph and is like a sister to me now. Penny was a drug-addicted slut, and she’s the first to admit it, but she was saved by Jesus and now she’s the most prayer-filled person I know. She prayed me through that thing in the Abyss with the demons, which—aside from having Ariel—may be the only rea-son I got out.
And Jared sacrificing himself for me.
That was nine months ago. He’s been dead nine months. I am trying to move on, but it seems to get harder rather than easier. Five stages of grief, one coun-selor told me. To me it was just one long, endless stage of unforgetting, of abysmal if-onlys.
“Time to move on, Grace.” Ms. Robeson stares at me over her glasses. Everyone says that. Time to move on. But move where? Where should I go, exactly?
“Do you have plans for college?”
“Not really.” Ralph offered to get me into Buffalo State, where he teaches, but I’m not too interested in col-lege. I’m not too interested in anything.
“What would you like to do with your life?”
Oh man, what a stupid question. “I think I’d like to be a vampire killer.” I say with a totally straight face. I practically am one after all, demons and vampires being more or less the same.
“Grace.” That disappointed tone again. She’s shaking her head now. “Okay, fine. We’ll talk later, when you feel better. But I have to send your aunt a letter about this incident.”
Won’t be the first time.
“Okay.” And then, to make her believe I’m really sorry: “Is Ollie okay?”
She smiles, encouraged by my concern. “He’s got a nasty bruise, and he might have swallowed a bit too much of the Buffalo River, but otherwise he’s okay. You were lucky, Grace. If Ms. Bertelli hadn’t been so close, I shudder to think of what might have happened.”
I shudder too. If Ollie swallowed much of the Buffa-lo River, he might still be a goner. But I have a feeling I’m not going to get rid of Ollie so easily.
I leave the counselor’s office and walk down the hall to the front door, avoiding the kids who stop to stare at me. I’m tired of being under a microscope. I had almost gotten to the point where people were starting to ignore me again, like the Good Old Days. But one stupid move and it all comes roaring back.
Crazy Grace, Little Mis-Fortune.

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