Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (26 page)

“Well will you look at
this
! It’s the love birds! United at
last!” She stepped into the center of the room, which housed, unusually, a
large black leather couch. She sat down and clasped her hands together.

“Who the hell
are you?” I asked. “What is all this?”

Before Hannah could answer, I watched in
awe as Liesel pulled at her chains, and screamed, a large white light erupting
from the top of her head. The cage and her chains started shaking, like the
entire room would suffer a violent earthquake.

Hannah stood up, sauntered up to the
cage, and shook her head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” She grabbed a long stick from the
ground and started swatting it at Liesel’s side. As Liesel screamed even
louder, with the shaking coming to an immediate end, I realized Hannah was
hitting her with a hot poker stick.

“Leave her
alone!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

“She has to learn,” Hannah said. “Magic’s
not gonna save her this time. She’s up against something far greater than
herself.”

“Cameron…” Liesel said, her head turned
to her left. I could see the painfully apparent red marks over her stripped
body, her face stained with dirty tears. “Cameron… I’m so sorry…”

“You
bitch
!”
I screamed at Hannah, who had a grin on her face even bigger than before. I
tried to pull on my chains, but there was no way my vulnerable seven-year-old
body was going to have enough strength to pull myself out of this mess.

“
Cameron
,”
she said, “such filthy language for a soon-to-be newborn. You want some of the
poker stick, too?”

She ran up to me and started swinging the
stick at me, just barely missing my face and body. She pretended like she was a
swordsman, dancing around on her feet, swatting at me with the scary, deadly
weapon. She started flinging the stick right toward my face, and I closed my
eyes, scared she would poke one or both of them out.
 

She laughed and threw the stick on the
ground. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I don’t hurt
children
.”

“What
do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?”

Hannah sat back down on the couch. “You
see, here’s the thing: I was having a really tough time in my life, Cameron.
The worst. After four years of slaving after my sick mother, she died, a
painful, excruciating death that only the few select people like us can
experience.”

People like us?

“And just around this time, while I’m
surfing the web, disappointed about my mom, feeling utterly alone, I see this…
video
.”

“Video?” I
asked.

“Mmm hmm. It was short, out of focus. But
I knew, in those first few seconds, the girl in the video, flying up around her
high school auditorium like she’s goddamn Peter Pan… was my little
sister.”
 

“What?
Sister
?”

“Hannah!” Liesel
shouted from her cage. “Hannah! Stop this! Right now!”

“Liesel,” I
said, “I’m going to get us out of here.” Even though I had no idea how.

Hannah continued. “Cameron, at the very
least, if you’re going to marry my sister, can you call her by her
real
name?”

I squinted my
eyes. “What?”

“What are the
first four letters in her name?”

“I don’t know
what—”

“Tell me the first four letters of her
goddamn name!” Hannah jumped up and rushed over to me, again. She started
rocking my crib back and forth.

“L…”
I said.

“That’s right.”

“I…
E…”

“And?”

“S.”

“What
does that spell?”

“Lies.”

“
Lies
!
Exactly
! All lies. Her name… her
history. Haven’t you ever wondered, Cameron, where she really comes from? Do
you really think her mission in life was to be a waitress at a pizza joint in
po dunk Reno, Nevada?”

“Liesel, what is
she talking about?”

She just kept her head down and didn’t
respond. I could see, once again, that she was crying.

“Cameron,” Hannah said, “I’d like to
introduce you to your fiancée. Alicia May Foxwell.”

“
Alicia
?” I asked. Again, Liesel didn’t
look at me.

“You should be over-joyed,” Hannah said.
“Isn’t that a better name than the dopey Liesel Maupin? I mean, come on. She
had a chance to start afresh and change her name. She could’ve at least picked
something that didn’t make her sound like a complete
dweeb
!”

“What did she
ever do to you?” I asked, trying to control my rage.

“I’ll tell you what she did. She left me.
Your little fiancée left me when I needed her most. Four years ago, our mother
got cancer. And with our combined powers, as elementary as they were, we were
still unable to make her better. So instead of sticking with me to help Mom,
she just fled, she just bolted out of L.A. and never looked back. For four
years I had no idea where she was. I didn’t know if she was in the United
States, or even alive. And then in February, I saw that video. Thank... the
Lord… for Youtube.”

I looked past Hannah to see Liesel
finally turned my way, her hair covering most of her face.

“So with Mom gone,” Hannah continued, “I
decided to take a little trip up to Reno, just to see what my little sister was
up to. Then I find out she’s nothing but a second rate waitress, and already
getting married to a pathetic weasel of a guy who can’t seem to keep the powers
of his fiancée in check.
 

“After first meeting you in Almanor, I
decided to stay in Reno for a while, see if I could ruffle some feathers. It
didn’t surprise me one bit when I managed to seduce you into kissing me, making
you call off the wedding, but it sure threw me a big surprise when Alicia
tossed a spell your way to make you start aging backward a year with every day.
I’ve gotten a chance to talk with my sister, and she told me something like
this happened before. Boy, my sister must be a hell of a catch. Every time you
screw up, she curses you with a life-threatening disease! Now that, my friend,
is
love
!”

I sat in the crib, completely stupefied.
For the first time I realized the similarities between Hannah and Liesel (or
Alicia, if I were to believe this quack). Secondly, I also knew that it was
going to take a miracle to escape this lunatic. Cool and calm, with her moments
of bizarre eccentricities, she unfortunately seemed to know what she was doing.

“You don’t know anything about love!”
Liesel shouted from her cage. “You never have, never will, Hannah!”

The evil sister
turned around. “What was that?”

“You heard me. You can’t feel love for
anyone. You have to take all your anger out on me, someone who actually had a
shot at being happy.”

Hannah stuck her hand out in the air and
closed her eyes. A bright red light shot out violently from Hannah’s palm, only
to strike Liesel’s cage and send her into a seizure. Hannah was electrocuting
her! Just by using her
hand
!

“What are you
doing?” I shouted. “For God’s sake, stop!”

She stopped. And then turned to me. “In
here,
I
am God.” She turned back to
Liesel, who had a white foamy substance erupting from her mouth. “You don’t
think I’m capable of loving? How about those four years I spent with our
mother? How about those four years taking care of her day after day, making her
meals, doing her laundry, wiping her ass and her
shit
? Do you think I did that for my health?”

“You have no one to blame but yourself,”
Liesel said, in the tone of a whisper. “You can’t blame me for throwing these
last four years of your life away.”

“I did it because she was our mother, and
I
loved
her, with everything in my
being. You, Alicia… you just abandoned me. You just left me with her, so I
could watch her suffer, so I could watch her die—”

“I saw an
opportunity,” Liesel said. “An opportunity to get out. And I took it.”

“And so you went to Reno? To be a
waitress? To marry a boy you barely know, who had no trouble making out with
another girl just
weeks
before the
big day?”

“You coerced
him, Hannah. Don’t try to convince you didn’t.”

“I simply laid out the temptation. And he
took it, head on. Do you think I made him tell you on your birthday that he
didn’t want to go through with the wedding? That was all him, baby. Because he
was contemplating whether he still loved you or not—”

“That’s not true!” I shouted, wishing I had
some magical powers of my own about now so I could slice this chick in two.
“You want to talk about lies? Everything she’s saying is a lie! Leese, please
don’t listen to her!”

“Don’t worry,
I’m not,” Liesel said. “No matter what happens, I love you, Cam.”

I nodded and
couldn’t help but smile. “I love you.”

Hannah rolled her eyes and walked back
over to the couch. She lay down in the center of it and kicked her feet up in
the air. “You two make me sick.”

“So what’s your
plan?” I asked. I had to know.

“My plan?”

“Wait! First of all, where are we?”
And then the big question:
“And what is
that horrible smell?”

“Don’t, Cam,”
Liesel said, worrying me even more.

“Oh, what is
it?” Hannah asked. “You don’t enjoy the smell of rotting flesh?”

“Rotting…
rotting
what
?”

Hannah giggled and jumped back up to her
feet. She ran toward the crib and pulled out a stretcher behind a curtain on
the side of me. “Forgive me for being so rude, Cameron. I’d like you to meet…”

She pulled a
blanket off of a dead, rotting corpse, and I upchucked all over my little crib.

“…my mother…
Veronica.”

The woman on the stretcher looked like
she’d been dead for weeks. Most of her face was melted off, with little worms
crawling all over her body.

“What… why…”

“Let her be a reminder of what you gave
up, Alicia,” Hannah said, facing the other side of the room. “Of who you gave
up to be with
him
!”

I tried to throw up again, but I didn’t
have any more half digested food to let out. So instead I just gagged a few
times.

Liesel started crying again, and I turned
to her sister, someone who up until this point I assumed was crazy. Now I knew
she was a real psycho bitch.
 

“You’re not gonna get away with this,” I
said, trying to sound confident, even though I sounded like a little girl.

“Oh… what… a
little child like you’s gonna stop me?”

“Whatever you’re planning on doing… it’s
not gonna work. Liesel has
powers
.
Did you forget that?”

“She has powers? Don’t you say!
”
Hannah slapped me in the face before I could react, and
then she slugged me in the nose with her elbow. A thin trail of blood started
running from my nostrils down to my chin.

“Stop!” Liesel
shouted.

“I’ve got three times the amount of power
your little
girlfriend
has,” Hannah
said. “While she’s been keeping her powers—well, mostly—on the down
low these last four years, I’ve had nothing but time to keep myself occupied
with my training. There’s only a few other known people in the world who have
the capabilities we have. And one was our mother. And as hard as she tried, and
I tried, she still couldn’t cure herself of that cancer. That, my friend, was
the greatest mystery of all. I can cast spells, make objects disappear, raise
fifty-story buildings right up off the ground. But I couldn’t cure my mom. I
couldn’t do a damn thing.”

“Why can’t
Liesel get out of the cage?” I asked, fast.

“What? Oh, you mean, why can’t she just
say a few magic words and fly up into the sky?”

“Yes.”

“Because the cage is lathered in our one
and only kryptonite. You know what that is, don’t you?”

I just shook my head.

“Wet. Silver.
Paint.”

Liesel looked beyond sick. She looked as
if she was dying. I wanted to rush over to her and give her a big hug and kiss
and tell her everything was going to be all right. But honestly, at this point,
I had no idea if I was going to live through the day. I noticed the silver
paint dripping from her cage, and I could see her whole body weak and
trembling, like the strong smell from the paint was suffocating her on the
inside. I couldn’t really smell the paint all the way over here, given that the
odor of the dead mom was still the forefront calamity in my nostrils. But I
knew it was hurting her.

“So you
kidnapped her?” I asked. “What? To make me suffer?”

“To make
her
suffer, dipshit. This might be a surprise, but none of this has
anything to do with you. I just want to keep her in that cage long enough to
see you de-age all the way into
nothing
.
And then I’ll let her go.”