Death, and the Girl He Loves

  I lay down on the bed. My bed. The one I’d slept in for a decade.

  How could I not visit more often? How could I not be here, in the most sacred place I knew?

  My lids felt like lead. I fought to keep them open. I needed to get home and explain to my parents why I’d left school at lunch. They’d be getting a call soon when I was reported absent in sixth hour. I didn’t want them to worry. I’d wanted them for so long, what if I fell asleep and they disappeared again? What if this were all a dream?

  DUST AND BOXES

  Even the horrid likelihood that I would wake up to find out I’d dreamed everything, that my parents weren’t really back, that the war hadn’t really been diverted, that Glitch and Brooklyn and Cameron and Jared were really still alive, didn’t stop my lids from closing and staying closed. They opened only when I heard voices downstairs. They catapulted me out of my slumber and I bolted upright. But I was still here. I was still in this reality, surrounded by dust and boxes. I blinked into the diminishing light. It was late, but I didn’t have a phone to check the time.

  My parents would be worried.

  I scrambled out of the bed and headed for the bathroom to splash water on my face before remembering there wasn’t a bathroom. My grandparents had put in a bathroom when I was in the fifth grade. I’d been living with them since I was six, and I’d complained for years about having to go downstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. One weekend my grandmother took me on a shopping trip for school clothes in Albuquerque. We’d even stayed the night in a hotel room. It had a pool and a hot tub and I found the true meaning of happiness that weekend. But when we got back, Granddad and some of his friends had spent the entire weekend putting in a bathroom for me. My very own bathroom. It meant giving up most of my closet, but it was so very worth it.

  Now it was back to being a huge closet, almost a room unto itself. Darkness crept in fast, but I didn’t want to leave. I sat back down on my bed. Rested my elbows on my knees and my face in the palms of my hands. And the double-exposed picture of my life came back to me. I remembered playing hide-and-seek in this room. It was full of boxes, but at the time, in the other reality, I’d been living in it. Two images formed in my mind, overlapped, melded. Two realities blurring into one.

  “The older you got, the more you pulled away.”

  I jumped at the voice and turned to the doorway. It was my grandfather. My wonderful grandfather with his gray hair and gray eyes and patient smile. He stepped inside, followed by my grandma. Her bright blue irises shone at me. I wanted to run into their arms, but I didn’t want to make a fuss. This was a different reality. Somehow, I wasn’t just in heaven; I was in more of a parallel universe with overlapping realities that made my head spin.

  “From everything you knew,” Granddad continued. “Everyone you knew.”

  My parents were right behind them. They followed them into the small room, and Mom came over to sit beside me, but I had a hard time tearing my gaze away from my grandparents.

  “It started when you were very young,” Mom said. “You told Casey you hated him.”

  Casey. I would never get used to calling Glitch Casey.

  “And when we asked why, you told us he was going to die anyway. You figured you’d save yourself the pain of losing him later by letting him go then.” Mom lowered her head in sadness. “And you hardly spoke to your grandparents, even though they lived right by you. You just pulled away.”

  Guilt assaulted me as the very grandparents I’d apparently been shunning looked on, their eyes full of more understanding than I deserved.

  “You started forming friendships based on how badly the person treated you,” Dad said as Mom took my hand in hers.

  I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “That would explain my friendship with Tabitha.”

  “Yes, it would,” Grandma said.

  Dad kneeled before me. “We just didn’t know what to do to help you, Pix. You were so worried about today. Worried you’d failed. Worried you would fail.”

  “Until you hardly ate,” Mom said. “Hardly slept. That’s why we’ve been waiting with bated breath for this day to arrive. We knew … No, we hoped that things would change. That you would … come back to us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, tears spilling out over my cheeks.

  “No, sweetheart, no,” she said, fat tears rushing down her face as well. “You saw so much in those early years. You had so many bad dreams. Saw so many people die. Don’t ever be sorry.”

  “I don’t understand what happened. The clouds opened up and thousands of evil spirits escaped onto this plane. I didn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.”

  Granddad grinned. “You’re going to have a hell of a time convincing your grandpa Mac of that.”

  “Mac?” I said. “He’s here?”

  “Sure is,” Mac said from the doorway. “And I thought the party was in the church dining hall. What’s everyone doing here?”

  “Mac.” I brightened. Like always, his presence was a welcoming salve. “You’re here.”

  “Didn’t we already cover that?” he asked, his expression shimmering with mirth. “And I brought something for you. Something we agreed on years ago.”

  He shook out a T-shirt and held it up to me. I read it aloud. “My parents stormed the gates of hell and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

  My voice grew softer and softer as I read. I glanced at my parents, hesitant to talk about what had happened to them. Hesitant to tell them what I’d done. How I’d led them to their deaths. Or, well, their first deaths.

  “Then it was real?” I asked. “I didn’t dream up an entirely different life? I don’t have a split personality?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that exactly, eh, Bill?” He ribbed Granddad, who laughed right along with him.

  He handed me the shirt, and I wadded it into a ball, wishing I could burn the evidence of what I’d done.

  “Do you know what happened?” I asked my parents, suddenly unable to meet their eyes.

  “We know everything,” Mom said. “Well, everything your grandpa Mac would tell us.”

  Dad frowned at his father before turning back to me. “He’s not the most forthcoming sort,” he said. “But we got the basic gist of things.”

  “You were gone for so long,” I said, my voice catching on something in my chest.

  Mom squeezed my hand. “And we’re terribly sorry for that, Pix. We would never have left you on purpose.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, becoming frantic. “There was a wind and this lightning bolt and these clouds and then you were ripped away from me.”

  Mom flung her arms around me, trying to console us both. “It didn’t happen, Pix. It didn’t happen, because of what you did.”

  I leaned back so I could look at her. “I didn’t do anything but watch my friends and family die!” My sorrow and terror welled up inside me and threatened to burst out of my chest. “I did nothing.”

  The bed dipped again as Mac sat next to me. He took my face into his hands, wiped away my tears with the padding of his thumbs. “I beg to differ,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “You saved the world from total annihilation.”

  I let a frustrated breath slip through my lips.

  Instead of arguing with me, he asked, “Do you remember what we did when I was in prison?”

  “You were in prison?” Grandma asked, appalled.

  “Apparently,” he replied with a grin, teasing her. When I nodded, he said, “Okay, let’s try that again. This will be rather new for me, but we’ve done it before, if memory serves. You told me so.”

  By this point, I was so confused, I would’ve agreed to anything if it meant I’d get some answers. “Okay.”

  He put up a hand, fingers slightly splayed. We had done this when I’d visited him in prison. Only we’d done it through glass and he allowed me to see how he ended up in prison. He’d gone after the men who’d tortured his wife, my gran
dmother, for information and killed her. The men, descendants of nephilim, had wanted to know about me. My name. My mother’s name. Where I was born. They knew the last prophet had been born and wanted to kill me before I had a chance at life. She’d died protecting me. She’d died on the day I was born. Mac went after the men who took her. He killed them all in a shoot-out, received several gunshot wounds in return for his efforts, and almost died himself before he found my paternal grandmother. She was dead, of course. Had been dead for hours. But he held her, rocked her, promised to do the right thing.

  The right thing had ended up being prison and making my parents promise never to tell me about him. He thought it would be best. He didn’t want his only granddaughter to know the horrors of what he’d done. But I’d found out about him anyway, rather accidentally, actually, when I first found out I could go into pictures. I’d hunted him down, looking for answers, and visited him in prison. And we’d done this very thing. We’d touched hands through the glass. And he showed me everything.

  It was a memory I didn’t want to relive. When I hesitated, he said, “Pix, history is different. You changed everything.”

  I swallowed hard and with great effort put my hand on his.

  It didn’t take long. Images flashed in my mind instantly until he led me to the place he wanted me to see. We were in a field. A wheat field. And a teenaged boy was working on a tractor. I recognized the red hair and kind eyes as being those of my grandfather Mac. It was him as a kid. I looked on in fascination as a girl walked up to him. Me. I walked up to him.

  I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn yesterday, during the war. I was filthy. My hair hung in tangles about my face. Dirt smudged my cheeks and forehead, and my clothes were ripped in several places.

  Mac looked up from his work, wrench in hand, and stared.

  “Mac,” I said, praying he’d listen.

  Yes, I’d prayed. I remembered my overwhelming sense of fear that he would run or refuse to listen after I’d struggled so hard to get there. To get to him.

  Realization of what happened catapulted me back to the present. I gasped and reeled as my surroundings blurred and shifted into my old room. Lowering my hand, I took a moment to absorb the new memories bombarding me; then I gazed at Mac, stunned to my toes.

  “I did it,” I whispered. “I went into the picture Glitch had in his hand. It was of you.”

  Mac smiled and nodded, and Mom wrapped an arm around me.

  “Your mother took that picture when you weren’t looking,” I continued. “She’d been given a new camera for her birthday, and you were her first subject. Her very first picture.”

  Mac’s brows shot up. “You saw all that?” he asked.

  “Yes, but—” I blinked and thought back. “—but I didn’t get a good look at her. She was behind the camera. I couldn’t get past it. Wait a minute.” I beamed at him as a new realization emerged. “You saw me. Most people can’t see me when I go into pictures.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  A soft, bewildered laugh escaped me. “You certainly aren’t. You saw me. Just like Jared does when I go into that other picture.”

  “I did see you. And let me tell you, you scared the shit out of me at first.”

  I laughed again, only this time in nervousness. Granddad would clobber me if I used that word in his presence. Apparently he wouldn’t do the same to Grandpa Mac. Thank goodness. I was fairly certain Mac could take him. “You’re like a prophet, too. You have abilities, but you’re male.”

  He nodded. “It’s true. Most of the males in the line have some small amount of extrasensory perception, but we are nothing compared to the women in our family. Our feminine counterparts are gifted beyond measure.”

  Grandma sat on a box in front of me. “You changed everything,” she said reassuringly. “You changed the future. You stopped the war.”

  “But how?” I asked, still not quite understanding.

  “You told me everything that day,” Mac said. Then he held up his hand again. “Want to see?”

  I filled my lungs, put my hand on his again, and dived back into the past. It took me a while to convince Mac of who I was, but he’d grown up knowing about the prophecies and the texts. He knew about the possibility of a female being born in his lifetime. Of the impending war. So what I told him wasn’t so foreign he couldn’t comprehend. Couldn’t believe. But it did take a while.

  I told him everything. I didn’t know how much time I had, but we walked through the wheat field as the sun set and I told him all about his wife, how he would meet her, how he would fall in love. Then I told him everything after that. I told him the bad stuff. Everything I could think of before I ran out of time and was killed in the war.

  After our long talk, we looked back. Mac’s mother was still aiming the camera. The sun was still hanging in the same position, even though it seemed like hours later. Time had not passed.

  He looked at me like one would something they loved. “These are the end times,” he said. “And we have the power to change the world.”

  I nodded. “Please, Mac, please save your wife. My parents. If you do nothing else, please save them. Tell my dad not to go to the ruins that day.”

  This time my surroundings melted more slowly. I didn’t want to leave. My grandfather as a teen boy was so handsome and strong and I trusted him implicitly. I’d placed the fate of the world in his hands.

  After I reemerged back into the present, I questioned him with a quirk of my brow. “How did you stop it all?” I asked him in awe. I’d told him what was going to happen, but he would still have to stop it all. How?

  “I followed your directions,” he said, grinning. “I ran home and wrote everything down as fast as I could. Dates. Names. Events. Then, when the time came, I warned people what was about to happen. I stopped your friend Cameron’s mother from going on a bike ride that you said would end in tragedy.”

  Cameron’s mother? He’d saved her life?

  “I went on a camping trip with Casey’s Boy Scout troop when he was in second grade, kept a constant vigil on him, and stopped, I’m assuming, whatever happened to him.”

  And I’d never found out what that was. When Glitch was in the second grade, his troop went on a camping trip during spring break. Something happened. I never found out what, but it had changed Glitch. He withdrew, became depressed, and hated—no, more like feared—Cameron from that day on. That would explain why they were now friends when in the other reality they could hardly stand each other. But I was still dying to know what happened on that trip.

  “And most important,” Mac continued, “I stopped the men who took my wife.”

  “She’s alive?” I asked, hope blossoming in my chest.

  Mac lowered his gaze. “No, ma’am, she is not.”

  “But—”

  Grandma put a hand on my knee to shush me. “She died of cancer a few years ago, but you knew her.”

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “If you’ll think back to your memories of this time, you knew her.”

  I tried to remember. It would come to me, I was sure of it. My new past was revealing itself bits at a time.

  “But she’s here with us in spirit,” Mac said, so sure of it, there was no sadness in his voice. “And I stopped Dyson.”

  “Dyson?” I asked with a gasp.

  “Pix,” he said, lowering his gaze again. “Before it got to that, enough things came to pass for me to know that everything you said was the God’s honest truth.” He chewed on his lower lip before admitting, “I did what I had to do.”

  “You … you killed him?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, between you, me, and the fence post, I did. Mr. Jake Dyson, aka Norman Sydow, died in a home invasion about fifteen years ago. I saw no reason to let someone like that live. He’d already been cooking up a plan. He had a book called a grimoire. He knew how to open the gates. Knew how to summon a demon and was researching exactly which one he wanted to summon.”

  “Malak-T
uke,” I said.

  “He hadn’t settled on any one at the time of his death, but yes, that name was on his list.”

  “Then you stopped him from opening the gates in the first place.” I looked at my parents in turn. “You saved them.”

  “No, Pix,” Mac said. “You did. Just like our ancestors prophesied, you stopped the war before it ever happened.”

  “No,” I said, disagreeing completely, “not just me. All of us.” Every single one of my friends had been involved in saving the world. Brooke with her insistence that I practice, that I learn to go into pictures and hone my skills. Jared fighting the demons off before they could come after me, before they could stop the prophecy from coming to fruition. Cameron protecting me as long as he possibly could, long enough for the picture to end up in my hands. Kenya going back for said picture, that handful of photographs of no importance whatsoever. Then Glitch giving his life to retrieve just one, the one that would change the world.

  We did the impossible. All of us together.

  I shook out the T-shirt and pulled it over my V-neck before looking at my parents. “You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed of this. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate everything, but what the heck is this party about?”

  “Didn’t you see that part?” Mac asked me.

  “I don’t think so.” I scanned my brain. “Nope. No idea.”

  “You told me the date.”

  “The date?”

  “The date of the war. You told me when it would happen and you said if we were still alive the next day, aka today, then we’d done it. We’d stopped the war. Then you insisted,” he added, seeming to hold back a chuckle, “with your torn clothes and dirty face, that we were to throw a huge party to celebrate. You didn’t have much faith when you appeared to me. You were so lost, so desperate. But you said if this day came, if we made it this far, we had to celebrate and that you wanted this very T-shirt.” He pointed to my new T-shirt.