*****
Benji felt warm. He couldn’t remember why, but he knew he shouldn’t feel warm. He shouldn’t feel anything. There was a reason, a good reason, for staying in the foggy gray nothing. But what was it? He tried to let it go. He tried to retreat back into his cozy nest of unfeeling, but he couldn’t. The warmth wouldn’t go away. It felt tight, like an unwanted hug. It kept getting stronger and stronger until a white hot flash burst behind Benji’s eyes and he sat up gasping for breath.
He was immediately aware something heavy fell on top of him. It was slumped over, having been pushed to the side when he sat up. Before Benji could wrap his mind around what was happening he was embraced awkwardly by two pairs of arms. Grandpa and Tyler were connected to the arms and they both looked distraught and weepy.
Intelligently, Benji said, “Huh?”
“Thank God you’re alright,” Grandpa was saying over and over.
Likewise, Tyler was repeating, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” in rain man fashion.
Benji was still dazed. If Grandpa and Tyler were here, that meant the figure slumped beside him was . . . .
“Sarah!?” Grandpa exclaimed. He roughly pushed Tyler aside and turned the limp form over. It was Sarah, but she looked pale and sickly and seemed to be breathing heavily even though she wasn’t awake. Grandpa began hastily checking her over. He was holding back tears.
“What’s going on?” Benji asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
But no one was listening to him. Both Tyler and Grandpa were trying to wake Sarah up and a tall, skinny bedraggled guy rushed up as well. The rough looking guy had one hand bound in a makeshift splint, but he tried to reach for Sarah with the other. Grandpa shoved him away.
“This is you’re doing, beast,” he declared angrily. “If she’s . . .,” Grandpa faltered, “hurt, then I hold you responsible.”
“She’s alive.” Tyler interrupted the argument. “She’s just unconscious.” He looked at Benji sadly. “I don’t know what that means, but her heartbeat’s steady.” The scruffy guy tried to approach again and Grandpa cut him off.
“You stay away from her,” he growled. “You’ve done your part and have been released from the boundary. Get the hell out of here.”
“I think you’d better leave,” Tyler put in, more calmly than Grandpa.
The man gazed concernedly at Sarah, but eventually he nodded to Tyler and disappeared into the shadows. Grandpa’s shoulders sagged in relief.
“Who was that guy?” Benji demanded. Grandpa turned his attention to Benji.
“No one,” he said, settling heavily on the ground next to Benji and Sarah.
Tyler answered him more directly. “That was Left Paw,” he said, “he’s a . . . friend.” Grandpa snorted derisively. “I’ll tell you about it later,” Tyler promised.
“What’s going on here?” Benji insisted. The last thing he remembered was . . . Thana. He looked down at his chest, the spot where the needle pierced him was bandaged and he ripped the dressing away, but there was nothing beneath it. “I’m alright,” he said incredulously. Although he was shirtless, there didn’t seem to be scratch on him.
“Looks that way,” Grandpa reiterated.
Benji examined his hands and arms. There wasn’t a mark on him, from anything. He felt the back of his head. His hair was still singed, but the sore burned spot was gone. He was fine, as if it never happened.
“You remember what happened?” Grandpa asked him.
“I guess so,” Benji replied. “Unless it was all a dream.” Looking around him, he didn’t think that was likely, though. They were somewhere in the wilderness, in a small rocky clearing ringed with sparse trees and shrubs. Two tents were set up and a campfire was dying off to Benji’s right. Tyler leaned over him, examining Benji with a flashlight.
“Amazing,” his brother breathed. “Could Mom do stuff like that?” he asked Grandpa.
Before the old man could answer, Benji interrupted. “Mom!? Where is she?!” He scrambled to his feet peering desperately around the campsite. Grandpa stood, too, and put his hands on Benji’s shoulders in restraint.
“She’s not here, Benjamin,” he said gruffly.
“She’s dead,” Tyler said brutally, still sitting on the ground next to Sarah.
“No!” Benji cried. “I made a deal,” he said angrily. “She has to be here. Thana gave me her word.” He tore his shoulders from Grandpa’s grasp. “You,” he pointed meanly at his grandfather, “You ruined it! You all did. I was going to get her back,” Benji wailed, sitting abruptly. “I almost had her back,” his voice trailed off, swallowed up by the trees.
“No,” Tyler said roughly, turning to Benji from where he sat. “What you almost did was get yourself killed.”
Benji shook his head. “I wasn’t going to die,” he insisted. “I just had to give up something and Mom would be home. Just one little thing, but you couldn’t let me do it could you?”
“No we couldn’t,” Grandpa answered solemnly, stepping between the brothers. “Benji, if Thana had succeeded in extracting even a small part of your soul, she would be free,” he tried to explain. Benji focused his gaze on the dirt. “She might have broken your bargain and not done anything for your mother or worse. She could have brought Annie back and enslaved her.” Benji shook his head in denial, but Grandpa kept going. “Necromancy is the darkest of arts. Even a sane Necromancer would have twisted your request or betrayed you completely. And I think we can all agree that sanity wasn’t something Thana possessed in great abundance,” he added.
“What’s the point?” Benji asked suddenly. “Why did you tell us about any of this if nothing can ever be done to change things? Why do good people have to die?” He punched the ground fiercely to illustrate his frustration.
“Oh, yeah,” Tyler muttered, “hitting the ground is going to solve everything.”
Grandpa growled a warning at him and Tyler subsided. “I don’t know why,” the old man answered Benji. “Not many do, even the wisest among us have questions.”
“It’s not fair,” Benji said.
“Sure isn’t,” Grandpa agreed, “but that’s the way it is.”
“I don’t accept that!”
“Then you’ll spend the rest of your life wrapped in anger, hate and disappointment,” Grandpa said. “And those that care for you the most will be the ones to get hurt.” Grandpa left it at that and went over to rummage in a group of packs lined up against a boulder. Benji didn’t see his backpack anywhere, but he couldn’t really come up with a lot regret for having lost it.
His grandfather returned with a sleeping bag and a light blanket. Together, Tyler and Grandpa carefully laid Sarah on the sleeping bag and covered her with the blanket. They spent a few minutes in murmured conversation and Benji became annoyed at being left out.
“What happened to her?” he asked.
Tyler turned. “She saved you,” he said simply.
Benji wandered over to them and looked down at his pale sister. She was cringing and shivering as if in the throes of a bad dream. “How?” he asked dispassionately.
“Sarah is special,” Grandpa said. Benji snorted and Tyler glared at him. “She inherited a gift from your mother,” he explained. “Sarah used it, at unknown cost, to heal you.”
Grandpa abruptly changed the subject, telling the brothers to get some sleep. “We’ve a long way to go tomorrow. We need to get home and get to a doctor,” he said. “I’ll stay up with Sarah,” he assured Tyler.
Tyler looked worriedly at Sarah’s shadowed figure. “We could really use a good cell phone signal right about now,” he lamented.
Grandpa smiled at him reassuringly and Tyler nodded in return. He grabbed a few things from his pack and crawled into a tent. Grandpa directed Benji to an extra t-shirt and he shucked it on and slid into the adjacent tent. He heard Grandpa shuffling around, stoking the campfire, and settling next to Sarah.
Benji writhed around, trying to get comfortable. He wasn’t very tired. I
n fact, he felt weirdly rested. He supposed he had Sarah to thank for that. Resentment slithered through him. Why would she go and do something like that? What did she have to gain? She shouldn’t even have been there. None of them should have come. Benji was fine, it would have worked out just fine. But his resentment couldn’t mask the doubt. Had he been so wrong? A voice mingling with cricket sounds and night breezes floated across his mind. Yes, he had, it whispered. Wrong, it said. You were so very wrong.
*****
Chapter 32: Eulogy