“It was you,” I said again. And I saw Phoenix stumble across Brandon’s path, I saw the blade go in. I saw it again and again.
Brandon stared at the black boulder and at the water rushing over rocks, splashing, churning, whirling on.
Talk to Brandon, Dean had said. Make your decision.
“You don’t deny it?” I asked. Guilt didn’t look the way I expected, shored up by excuses and anger.
Brandon shook his head. His voice seemed to be lost and swept away in the current.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He gave me a dull, weary look then shrugged.
“How does it feel? Talk to me.”
Walking away, crunching over the pebbles, walking back. “It feels like hell,” he said.
Make your decision.
Brandon waited a long time to speak again. “Hell. I never leave it behind. I stay home, I hang out in town—it’s with me every second. I ride into the mountains, and it’s there. I sleep and dream it. I want it to work out different. I wake up, and it’s the same.”
Make your decision.
I looked at Brandon and saw that he, not Phoenix, had joined those death-heads, spinning through a dark universe in eternal torment. I understood this and felt the first pang of pity.
“What about Sharon?” I asked. I compared her with Bob Jonson who had lost Jonas, with the Taylors grieving over Arizona, and with Jon and Heather Madison accepting that Summer was gone forever. “Doesn’t your mom deserve to know?”
“How would it help?” Brandon muttered. He’d considered it a million times, never reached an answer.
I thought again about Bob Jonson. “I hear you.”
A death wish sat heavy on Bob’s shoulders after Jonas died, and the truth didn’t lift it. It ended astride a Dyna in a soaring arc over the cliff edge, a plunge into white water and oblivion.
And how did it help Sharon to have Brandon stand in front of a jury? To know that if it had worked out a split second differently Phoenix might have lived?
Then again. “This is to do with justice.” I sighed. “The others—Jonas, Arizona, and Summer—they got it, whatever it cost.”
“Show me a way out,” Brandon pleaded. “I mean it, Darina. An exit out of this is all I’m asking.”
“I don’t know that you get to ask for anything,” I said more harshly. “That’s not how it works.” Because of Brandon we had all lived through twelve months of agony.
And suddenly, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, I was back for a delirious moment, here by Deer Creek with Phoenix, under the stars. It was our place, our precious time. I whispered his name. “Phoenix!”
Brandon heard me. He stood so still for so long I thought he’d stopped breathing.
I called Phoenix’s name, but it was Dean who came to me. “I can’t do this alone. You have to help me decide.”
Dean stood on the far bank surrounded by light. He was tall, unbending in the moonlight. “Explain your thinking, Darina. But hurry—we have very little time.”
“I feel sorry for Brandon. I didn’t expect to.”
“His is not a common suffering,” the overlord agreed.
We gazed at him standing a little way off, a lonely figure under the stars.
“What happens if the killer walks free?” I asked Dean. “Will Phoenix still get to move on?”
“I understand—you need justice for Phoenix to secure his journey’s end, but now you have to be prepared for things you didn’t expect, to open your eyes to the fact that justice takes more than one form.”
“I long for Phoenix to be free,” I whispered. “It’s all I ever wanted. I’m scared that if I don’t name Brandon, Phoenix will be trapped in limbo.”
“Does the world have to know the truth?” Dean asked. “Darina, I’m not sure. I don’t have the answer.” And he looked kindly at me, surrounded by his halo of light.
I walked up to Brandon with a big weight still on my shoulders, and I looked straight into his eyes.
He gazed back at me across a barrier of total, unending misery.
“You took a life, and you saved one,” I said softly, knowing clearly and precisely now why Brandon had shown no fear as he ran into the flames.
“Without you, Zak would have died.”
A brother’s life taken. A brother’s life saved.
Brandon heard me, walked a little way along the bank, turned, and when he came back, I saw that he was crying.
The weight lifted from my shoulders. A life taken, a life saved.
• • •
I’ve kept the secret of the Beautiful Dead for twelve whole months, so carrying to my grave the knowledge of what Brandon did shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.
“Tomorrow morning at dawn, ride out to Foxton to find me,” I told him. “I’ll need you then.”
He wiped his tears then walked up the bank and rode off on his Harley. I waited until the sound of the engine died.
“Come with me,” Dean said, inviting me into his silver glow.
We found Phoenix still in the barn, sitting on the hayloft steps with Iceman by his side.
“He has only a few minutes,” Iceman warned, touching Phoenix lightly on the shoulder as he and Dean left us alone together.
And as I sat beside Phoenix, I knew we’d reached the moment I dreaded. Every minute, every hour, every day of the last year had been leading to this. Now it was here.
“I can’t find the words,” I whispered, a tight band of sorrow around my chest.
Phoenix put his finger to my lips. “What’s left to say? Except, we lived our whole lives for each other.”
“And you’ll be free?”
“Like Jonas and the others.”
“Will you see them again?”
“No one knows. All I’m sure of is that I leave the far side and go forward.”
Out of the darkness into light, free from doubt.
I took his trembling hand in mine, felt the dampness of my own tears on his cold fingertips. “Will I join you—in the end?”
Phoenix smiled, and the crooked curve of his lips caught at my heart. “Let’s risk a yes on that,” he murmured.
“And I know that we’ll never be apart. Remember—as long as you live, when you need me I’ll be there.”
“Any time, any place?” I moved my lips, but no sound came out.
“In a heartbeat,” he promised.
He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine—not a kiss exactly, only a brief, brushing contact before those searching, all-knowing eyes looked into mine one last time.
Then Dean and Iceman returned. They stood in the doorway, waiting for Phoenix to rise slowly from the step.
I held his hand, and I was the one who led the way out of the barn into the starlight before his time finally ran out, to the sound of the creek running through the valley and the sight of the crescent moon in a jeweled sky.
Phoenix walked slowly past the silver-gray ranch house, glancing at the shadowy porch and the securely bolted door. He smiled at me again.
In Hunter and Marie’s time, at a different place in history, this is where we would live.
“I know.”
Dean and Iceman hung back until the very last moment.
They let us reach the water’s edge together.
“You are everything to me,” I told Phoenix.
He kissed me on the lips, soft and cold. He spread his white wings and his hand slipped from mine.
And he walked away with his two companions, never turning back as they made their way out of the valley toward the ridge and the aspens, silver in the moonlight.
Three winged creatures walked into the shadows. The barn door swung closed. The Beautiful Dead departed.
Epilogue
Brandon came for me at dawn, and I drifted through
days.
Sharon Rohr visited our house before we left. She said that Zak’s burns had healed and he would soon be back in school.
“Thank you,” she told me, and our own deep wounds continued to heal.
Zoey heard through her dad that Michael Rohr was definitely sticking around for a while.
I didn’t care. I was drifting, sinking, letting go of the world.
“Brandon sold his Harley,” Hannah told me. “He bought a plane ticket to Europe.”
I nodded. Maybe it would help him, but really, no—he and I both knew that. I didn’t try to see him before he left.
Danny Kors found Oscar and Nathan Thorne holed up in the fisherman’s shack at Forest Lake. His “clean up Ellerton” campaign was making real progress. People started to relax.
Henry Jardine drove out to Foxton and nailed planks of wood across the barn door to keep out intruders. Kids camped out at Government Bridge undisturbed.
After Brandon brought me home from Foxton that Friday morning, I didn’t step outdoors until the day we moved.
Our new porch overlooked the lake. The water was smooth and sky blue.
Still I was sinking beneath its surface, and nothing would stop me.
I feel like I’m drowning. I go down in the clear, cold water without a struggle—this time no one holds me under, I am letting myself sink. Above me bubbles rise to the surface, and beyond that is a bright, quivering light that must be the sun.
It’s far away. My hair spreads like weeds, my legs and arms are weightless, water all around. My eyes are wide open, staring at the light. A current catches me and turns me facedown, staring into darkness. It plunges me deeper, twists me again until I glimpse the dappled, liquid light farther and farther above me.
And suddenly, without knowing why, I strike out. I forge upward, my arms cleaving the icy water, its whisper in my ears. I kick and fight back.
I choose life.
“I want you to take this.” Michael Rohr showed up at our new house with the picture he’d once shown me of Brandon and Phoenix. “It belongs with you.”
I took it and put it in my bedside drawer.
Who needs a picture on display when you have memories like mine to bear you up and carry you through life?
Any time, any place? I ask, gazing out across the glittering lake.
A breeze disturbs its silver surface. In a heartbeat, Phoenix promises.
About the Author
Eden Maguire lives part of the time in the United States where she enjoys the big skies and ice-capped mountains of Colorado. Eden Maguire’s lifelong admiration for Emily Brontë’s timeless classic, Wuthering Heights, ties in with her fascination for the dark side of life and informs her portrayal of the restless, romantic souls in Beautiful Dead. Aside from her interest in the supernatural and the solitary pursuit of writing fiction, Eden’s life is lived as much as possible in the outdoors, thanks to ranch-owning friends in Colorado. She says, “Put me on a horse and point me toward a mountain—that’s where I find my own personal paradise.”
Eden Maguire, Phoenix
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