Cordell looked like he expected some shocked gasps followed by some murmurs at the mere mention of his name, that hearing it should somehow make us act like we were in the presence of undisputed royalty or godhood. Rolling his eyes, he stamped his foot down like a kid throwing a tantrum. “You know? Part of the White-Cloaked Sentinels? I know you guys have heard of me.”
“The Sentinels? Yes. You? Not so much.” Lori wasn’t feeding into his ego. Despite the tough and indifferent look she had, a small bead of sweat ran down the side of her face. Something about this guy made her nervous too, and with her power, that didn’t make me feel any better.
“Ah, you must be Loriana, right?” Cordell repeatedly clapped his hands together like he just met his favorite celebrity and was fighting every urge to gush. “Apologies, you prefer Lori. I know the rest of you as well. Ethan, Alex, Lizzy, Rosie, Braden, Julio, Val, Abigail, and Michelle. And of course, we can’t forget the best among you, Rebecca.”
The way he said her name made me feel like something cold had wrapped itself around my neck and squeezed. I knew for a fact that he didn’t send a cable to choke me, but that didn’t make the breaths come any easier. In a battle to maintain my composure and protect my girlfriend at the same time, I placed myself between Cordell and Rebecca, upping the strength on my barrier as best I could. If McLeod was like a lion, whose might and presence could be felt just at a glance, Cordell was like a snake. Every word, motion, and action was calculated. Everything he did was to get him one step closer to taking down his prey. Even looking at me, it felt like he was coiled and ready to strike.
“How do you know about all of us?” Lizzy asked. At least on the outside, she seemed completely composed. It was baffling to me that she was barely any older than I was. It always felt like she had a handle on the situation.
“Oh, please, don’t act like you guys are any kind of secret. You all pulled off the biggest heist any of us have seen in at least a century.” He pointed to everyone in my time, his finger resting in my direction for longer than I cared for, which was any time at all, really. “The rest of you don’t have the same accolades on your resume, not that I consider that a bad thing. I know great talent when I see it. Some of you have tapped into better than your peers, but all of you have amazing power. After all, not many could have escaped that man unscathed. Well, relatively unscathed, I should say. Having the turncoat did wonders, didn’t it?”
“What do you want with us?” Lori asked, her outward composure matching Lizzy’s. She stuck her chin up and puffed out her chest to look bigger.
“What a ridiculous question.” Cordell frowned at us like it was a genuine disappointment he had to hear it. “You all decided to seek us out. Not the other way around.”
“Then why are you here now? Why not let us find you?” Rebecca asked, speaking up for the first time since Cordell appeared to us. She looped her arm in with mine, unsure if it was more comforting for her or for me.
Cordell seemed to ponder that question for a moment, thoughtfully tapping a finger to his chin while looking toward the moon. “Well, while your friends are great—and I really mean you’re all tremendous—your gift is something else entirely. Not to sound brash, but I have a global presence. I knew about McLeod before he was born. Nothing surprises me, except for you. I don’t know how you managed to stay hidden from me all this time, but now that you’re here, I knew I had to make a special appearance.”
“Well, she’s staying with us. You can’t have her.” A tiny wave hit the yacht. There wasn’t any wind or anything strong enough that should have caused a wave I could feel to hit the boat. A couple of partygoers saw us, turning away from us as soon as they glanced over.
“I believe that we got off on the wrong foot. No doubt in part to my little test with Ethan, yeah?” When everyone nodded, he sighed. “I understand that you’re in the market for allies. Powerful ones. We’re just that. The White-Cloaked Sentinels are some of the most powerful allies anyone could have on this planet. While we prefer to keep to ourselves, I admit that McLeod...frightens even me. His Anomaly isn’t as incredible as Rebecca’s. When it comes to Anomalies, seldom are that remarkable. It’s his control and strength that are unparalleled forces in this world. I’m quite proud of my own combat prowess, and I still wouldn’t give myself the edge, to be frank.”
Cordell sat down on the ground, crossing his legs like a child. Under his cloak, he wore black boots and black pants, completely regular clothes that I would expect to see a hiker wear. They weren't what I expected some secretive enigma of a guy to wear to his yacht party. Like an excited kid, he could barely contain himself. He would tap on his knees and rock in place on the deck like he was waiting for us to leap with joy that he happened to find us.
“We do need allies, you’re right about that much.” Lori wasn’t happy about admitting it, and I wasn’t either. I took a deep breath and bit my tongue so she could do her thing. “McLeod destroyed our home and has killed thousands of innocents. He wiped out a city with a sword. He’s a threat to regular humans as well as us. Those who don’t comply are crushed underfoot.”
“Bingo!” Cordell yelled with a snap of his fingers. “And that’s why you need me. Need us, in truth. Why don’t you come by my place and we can talk this over, huh? Before you say anything, I’ll give you a card to contact me, and I’ll leave you be for the rest of the evening. All you have to do is dial the number, and we can make arrangements.”
Without waiting for a reply, he pulled out a bunch of business cards with a single phone number printed along the surface. The striking blank ink on pearlescent white stationary reminded me of how his boots and pants clashed against his cloak. He dropped the cards on the ground in front of us. Since there were enough for each of us, that told me the invitation wasn’t just exclusive for the entire group, even though we were expected to think about it together. I didn’t like that he thought he could get one of us to slip out without the others knowing. For all his good-natured talk, there wasn’t a lot about my interaction with Cordell that I enjoyed and even less that I trusted.
There was genuinely nothing I could compare it to. It was his mere presence that gave me the chills and the feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t get along with everyone in my life, and even when I interacted with those people who didn’t like me that much, I never felt as cold and sick as I had with Cordell. How could a single person appear so upbeat and unsettling at the same time? I had no idea.
After we cleared off the yacht, our partying spirit thoroughly diminished, and the debate on what to do went on for hours that night. Hours spent in a cramped hotel room still in our stupid costumes because no one wanted to waste any time. I was firmly in the camp of ignoring Cordell altogether and finding another solution. Lori, Shelly, Val, and Rosie were all with me. They wanted nothing to do with him or anything he had to offer us. Lori could barely get a read on the guy, something she admitted was a first since she discovered her power. Val was unsettled by him as well, comparing Cordell to the raw strength and brutality that McLeod had at his disposal. According to her, he masked it well, and I trusted her assessments on things like someone’s strength and brutality.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
On the other side, Abigail, Lizzy, Alex, Braden, and Julio all thought we should at least talk to him. None of them liked Cordell, they made sure that was known, yet they all insisted we needed all the help we could get. I was absolutely livid that they were willing to risk trying to partner with that snake. They kept trying to justify it as a necessary evil and risk. I wasn’t buying that at all.
“He tried to jab his metal cable into my head!” I reminded them, raising my voice. It wasn’t until I saw Megan shift nervously under her blankets that I made it a point to calm myself down. “You heard how he talked to Rebecca. He knows about all of us. Why would he know about all of us and not help us before if he wanted to? He doesn’t care about doing anything good, he just wants Rebecca and to throw his little parties on his yacht. Who knows how many others he makes that same ‘offer’ to?”
“Ethan, I think that we have to work with him,” Rebecca said softly, looking down at the marks on her hands. “I don’t know what choice we have anymore.”
“You can’t be serious. He clearly wants to just use your power for...whatever he wants with it. He could be the only person on the planet with an Anomaly that way.” I wasn’t mad at her, and I tried to make that clear in my voice, as hard as that was. I was mad at the entire situation. We shouldn’t have even been there talking about it. There was something off about the guy.
“All I want is a safe world to live in,” she said, her hands squeezing her knees. “I know it won’t ever be truly safe, but if we can just get out of this mess, it should be better. I’m so tired of feeling like my only value to the world is because I can take people’s powers away. I want this to end.”
“I know you’re upset, that you just want to protect your girlfriend, but what good is that if we can’t stop the greatest threat that any of us have faced in our lifetime.” Abigail’s voice was sad and quiet, though mixed with some hope. It sounded like she felt truly close to the end of this madness for the first time in forever. The end of the madness that robbed her of her own family.
“I don’t want to just protect my girlfriend,” I said, the beginnings of a blush making its way up to my face. “I want to protect everyone in here and everyone out there. I don’t even care about using bad people to get good results. I just do not think everything is on the up and up with Cordell. People are already scared of us because of McLeod. It’s not just surviving this fight; we have to think about our future.”
“These are just kids.” Shelly stood up, her diminutive stature not taking anything away from her confidence and presence in the room. She was one of the only people not wearing a ridiculous outfit. That couldn’t have hurt her confidence any. “You can’t use these kids to be your pawns in this scheme if they don’t want to. They went along with what you said before and we’re lucky they came back to us from that, and do you know how traumatizing that ordeal was?”
“You’re a child yourself,” Abigail snorted, her patience finally up. “You’re barely more than an underqualified little girl with a position of tremendous power handed to her on a silver platter.”
Shelly, for her part, stayed calm and collected. She wasn’t going to take the bait and prove Abigail right with an outburst. “I’ll remind you that you’re the one who asked me to be your successor. I didn’t come chasing after it. When I could just barely buy a pack of cigarettes, I traded my foreseeable future to ensure that what was left of my family could stay together and that my brother could have some stability in his life, and I would do it all again without thinking twice. I’m young, yes, and I don’t have incredible powers like you. I have no issues accepting both of those things. But let me make it very clear: I’ve had nothing handed to me in six years. I’ve earned everything I’ve had since I became an adult, which isn’t much, but I will not have my pride stepped on because you want to be childish yourself.”
That silenced the room for a few seconds, giving me a chance to take everything in. I already decided I was going to help, no matter which “side” won. Everyone there was too important to me to just abandon them if they wanted to try and work with Cordell. There’s strength in numbers, and just because I didn’t agree with their decision, didn’t mean that I was prepared to leave them alone with that freak for an instant.
“There’s no need to vote, Rebecca broke the tie. Listen, no one needs to do anything they don’t want to,” Lori said with a sigh. “Let me repeat that and make it clear because I’m tired of us rehashing the same things for hours on end. If there is anyone here who doesn’t want to go meet with Cordell, you don’t have to. This is completely voluntary, okay? With that out of the way, who’s all going?”
As I expected, everyone raised their hands without hesitation. Not everyone was happy, myself included. That was just part of deep friendships and family. You had to roll along with things that didn’t make you happy. Everyone was in it together, which helped lift my sour mood. There was a real sense of unity between all of us, despite the relatively short time we’d spent together. No one looked smug for being on the majority’s side and no one looked sullen for being on the minority side. Once the decision was made, it was just that. A decision that had been made. After that, it was clear it was time for us to plan what we were going to do together.
“You talked to these guys before, yeah?” Lori asked, looking up toward Abigail. “The time for secrets is out, we need to know what you know, and we need to know it now.”
“I can’t even be sure of who I talked to,” Abigail admitted, not too proudly. “They wore a mask, appearing to be just around six feet tall, give or take a couple inches. They had a voice manipulator of some kind. It was constantly changing, so I couldn’t tell much from who I was speaking with. That’s the complete truth. Your interaction with Cordell was more than I’ve had with the Sentinels.”
“Shelly, can you stay behind and watch Megan for us?” Rebecca asked. She looked miserable, like she was selling her soul away, knew it, and couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was disgusted and ashamed at my own powerlessness as her boyfriend. I should have been able to protect her from things like this. “I don’t trust how this guy will react around a normal human, and Megan knows you, so I’d feel better leaving her in your hands.”
“Sure, I’d love to.” Shelly definitely didn’t want to, and certainly wouldn’t love it, but she put up no fight. The relief on Rebecca’s face was obvious, her shoulders relaxing as some of the tension left her body. It did feel a little strange to talk about Megan like she wasn’t right there in the room with us, but unfortunately for her, this was very much grown-up talk.
“Great, thank you so much,” Rebecca said, her voice shaky. She pulled out the card she picked up and stuck it out in the middle of our group. “Can someone make the call? I’m still not too good with phones.”
Before we made the call, we all decided to take a few minutes to decompress. To me, it felt like some kind of death march we were all taking together. No one in the room was happy. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were making the wrong call. If everyone was this upset about it, surely there had to be some other way, some other method to get the whole mess figured out. I wasn’t going to say we were doing great against McLeod. We’d barely managed to survive.
Maybe we really did need someone like Cordell to help us.
“Are you okay?” Megan’s little voice brought me back to the real world. She’d crawled out from under her covers, holding my costume’s sleeve with her little hand.
“I am now that you’re here.” I wrapped her up in my arms and put her on my lap. “You just make everything better.”
Her brown eyes went wide as she smiled. I tried to use her for some motivation. Yeah, working with Cordell left an uneasy feeling in me. Keeping Megan safe? That was something I’d do at all costs, including striking a deal with a guy who felt like the world’s coldest snake. The kid deserved a safe world to grow up in. My reservations would be left at the door every single time when it came to giving her that safe world. I wanted to protect her from everything bad in the world.
“I don’t like this,” Shelly muttered, joining me on the bed with the little girl. We both looked out at the somber group, everyone lost in their own little worlds.
“Don’t like what?” Megan asked, tilting her head to the side.
My sister smiled and gently pinched the girl’s cheek. “Nothing you need to worry that cute little head about. I’m just grumpy tonight.”
I wished it was just some simple grumpiness any of us had been feeling. It would have been a hell of a lot better than what felt like the weight of the entire world.