We went to the old school theater and saw a show that was—I have to admit—quite funny. We had picnics on the weekends in the butterfly garden. Most days we would just hang out and talk. Mick loved that.
One day when we went for a walk, or a float, in the garden I lay in the grass and stared at the blue sky above us with its many rainbows. Mick lay down next to me. He was smiling.
“This is really nice,” he said.
Butterflies in all colors circled over our heads, even green and pink ones. They made the sky look like a living painting.
“I know. I love this place,” I said and pointed into the air. ”Look there is a turquoise butterfly.”
But Mick wasn’t looking at the butterflies any longer. He had turned his head and was staring at me.
“What?” I said when I felt his glare. I turned my head and looked into his blue sparkling eyes.
“Nothing. I just wish it would always be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like this. You and I spending time together.”
“It is kind of nice,” I said and smiled. It had been really great to just relax and live my own life for once, to really fully enjoy where I was right now and not worry so much about what was going on back on earth.
“Only kind of?” He asked.
“No, it has been great. I think I needed this little break,” I said.
Mick sighed and turned his head away.
“What?”
He looked at me again. “Sometimes I would just wish that you would open your eyes and see what I am seeing.”
“And what are you seeing that I am not?”
“That you are just torturing yourself by going to see Jason all the time. That you are preventing yourself from living the life that you were supposed to have. It is almost as if you are punishing yourself.”
I sighed.
“No matter what you do, he will get older and older. Have you even thought about that? You will continue to be sixteen while he will grow older. As long as he is still on earth in a human body he will grow older while you remain the same. Even if he manages to escape his addiction, even if he begins to see you again and you can be together, he will still continue to grow older. You live in two different worlds. How could you ever create a life together? It is not a life for him, and it is certainly not a life for you. You can’t protect him forever. At some point something will separate you from him. It might be his age, the drugs, or a human being who is all you are not. Someone could give him what we both know he really needs.”
He paused before he continued. “Think of it,” he said and rolled over on his side while leaning his head on his hand. “It could be like these last few weeks all the time. Your life could be that easy—only going to school and hanging out with me.”
I smiled. “That does sound nice. And you would like that, huh?” I said and gave him a friendly push.
He looked at me seriously. “I would indeed enjoy that very much.”
I smiled awkwardly. My heart pounded in my chest. Mick had a serious look in his eyes as he leaned over and pressed his lips against mine. I closed my eyes. He hadn’t kissed me like that since the night he caught me in the cellar on my way back to Jason. It had been more than six months ago. I had missed his lips and that feeling of kissing another spirit when the lips kind of melt together. It’s hard to explain—so soft, so gentle. Every part of me wanted him to grab me and hold me tight. And I never wanted the kiss to end. It had been such a long time since I last felt this kind of love. So when Mick released my lips and drew his head back, I grabbed his neck and pulled him back toward me until our lips met again. He was surprised, I could tell, but he didn’t mind me kissing him.
When I let him go he smiled that handsome white smile.
“I want you so badly,” he whispered.
I smiled and enjoyed the closeness. It was like I wouldn’t let him go. I kept hugging and kissing him and pulling him close.
Then I stopped and looked into his eyes.
“If we are to see each other—really be together—then you will have to accept that I will visit Jason from time to time. Once I get the permission to leave the castle again, that is. Could you accept that? I promise it will not be every night like before.”
He pulled away from me with a sigh. He stared at the grass for awhile and picked a couple of blades. Then he made his decision. He turned his head.
“If that is the only way I can have you, then yes, I will accept it.”
Most of the fall passed and still no one knew who had burned the message into Yofi’s coat. As the months went by, I eventually gave up hoping. Once a week I went to Rahmiel’s chamber to ask her if I could get permission to leave the school area again, and every week she looked at me and shook her head.
“It is not safe for you to enter the human world when you have a threat over your head. In the world of the humans there is no protection from the evil,” she said.
So I went back to spending another week without seeing Jason. I still missed him a lot, but now that I had started seeing Mick, I felt like I didn’t need Jason that much anymore. I began to think Mick had been right. Maybe I had just been torturing myself by going there. Jason was lost and belonged to a different world now. I would never be able to be with him, no matter how often I visited him. So maybe it was all for the best.
Mick gave me all I needed. He made me feel better and that hole in my heart just wasn’t there when I was with him. It was actually nice for once to be with a guy who really saw me, heard what I said, and responded to me. Right now Mick gave me all that I had been longing for in Jason. There was only one problem. He wasn’t Jason.
One day the snow came and we couldn’t ride the Pegasuses anymore.
“We have to wait until spring comes,” Adahy said.
The butterflies left the garden, waiting to come back in the spring. Still Mick and I liked to be outside in the afternoons while holding hands and stealing kisses behind the trees.
No one in the school knew about us and we preferred to keep it that way. During the long winter months I grew increasingly fonder of Mick. I began to think that maybe we could create a nice eternity together. Maybe it was real love.
“You never told me how you died,” I asked one day.
He froze for a second before he continued. “That is because there is not much to tell.” He turned his head and smiled at me.
“But you do know it, right?”
“Sure, I saw my file when I graduated. Just like everyone else. But it is many years ago.”
“Do you ever visit your loved ones?”
“I do not have any.”
“Oh. Are they dead?”
“All my family is dead, yes. I have been here a hundred years, remember?”
“Oh yes. Of course.”
We floated side by side in silence for awhile.
“But you visit them in Heaven then?” I asked.
Mick sighed. “No, I don’t.”
“You never visit your parents?”
“I cannot. They are not there.”
“What do you mean?”
“They are not there. I guess they went to … you know, the other place. The world of the damned.”
“Hell?”
“I guess.”
“But why?”
He sighed deeply.
“It is a long story.”
I found a bench and brushed the snow off. Then I sat down and smiled up at him.
“I have plenty of time,” I said.
Reluctantly he agreed to sit down next to me. I really wanted to know his story since it was a big part of him. We all had our baggage from earth that we carried with us. I hadn’t been told mine yet, but I would one day, and I would definitely share it with Mick no matter how cruel it might be.
“Just tell me the story,” I said.
“Well, there is not much to it, really. It is not that sensational,” he said, probably hoping that I would let it rest.
But he knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t.
“I just want to get to know you, really,” I said.
“Do you not know me by now?”
“Just tell me, please?”
He sighed deeply again. “All right, then.”
Chapter 7
I looked at him with anticipation. He didn’t look at me but stared into the air with an empty look in his eyes.
“As you might have guessed, Mick is short for something else. My real name is Mikjáll Haraldsson. I was born and raised in Iceland, a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean where it is cold and the weather is rough. My family was very rich and powerful. Times were tough back then and everybody, both men and women, had to work hard to put food on the table. Most people had to start working when they were still teenagers. They would work on a farm or go out on big fishing boats. Some of them never came back. Everybody was poor except for two families on the island. My father, Harald Grimsson, and his best friend, Leif Eiriksson, had enough money so their children and wives didn’t have to work. Their friendship went back for several generations and my parents wanted it to stay that way. Therefore they had promised their firstborn in marriage to one another. They had sworn it in blood.”
“So you were supposed to marry some girl you didn’t know?”
“Solrún was her name. And that was expected of me, yes. I would have done it for my family.”
“How old were you when you died?”
“Just turned eighteen.”
“And that was when you were supposed to marry this girl?”
“Yes. My father and mother stood very strongly on this. The whole family honor was at stake. You don’t run from a promise made by blood.”
“Did you marry her?”
He shook his head. “No. It never happened.”
“So what did happen?”
He sighed again. His eyes gazed at me.
“Sólrun came to me two nights before the wedding. She told me that she couldn’t follow through with it. She was crying and had tears running down her cheeks. It was horrible. She was afraid of her father. She had fallen in love with a young fisherman named Jón and she knew her father would never approve of it. But she loved him and didn’t want to marry me.”
“That’s perfectly understandable. I mean if she was in love with someone else,” I said.
“But back then it was a very serious matter. You could not break a promise made in blood by two lifelong friends. It would bring shame to the family and, back then if someone brought shame upon their families, it had to be vindicated.”
I gave him a concerned look. “What do you mean?”
Mick sighed deeply. “If a woman abandoned an arranged marriage, she would have to be killed.”
“Killed?”
Mick nodded.
“Wow. Why?” I asked.
“To restore the honor of the family. It was the noble thing to do. It showed that a strong family was not going to just accept this kind of mistake. It was seen as the father’s duty.”
I looked at him, almost not believing what he was telling me. How could people think like that? Who would kill their own daughter because she fell in love with the wrong man?
“Mistakes? How could love be a mistake?” I said.
“I grew up under very different circumstances than you. The honor of the family was the most important. That was just the way it was.”
I shook my head.
“That sounds so tough.”
“Life on earth can be very tough.”
I nodded and stared at Mick’s fair skin. He was so beautiful. “So what did you do?”
“I told her to run away and try to hide. But there are only so many places you can hide on an island and with only eighty-five thousand people, someone would eventually tell her father where she was. So I told her to try to get on a boat and get away from Iceland as soon as possible. But I knew she probably would never make it in time. The big boats did not leave Iceland more than a few times each year and it was extremely expensive to get on one. So I gave her a bag of money and I told her to leave our hometown immediately.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was. And it got worse. I knew my family would not take this well. They would want some kind of compensation for this breach of promise. They suffered humiliation in public and thereby lost a lot of honor, so they demanded something in return. And one day our two fathers sat down in a chamber at our house for hours discussing how they both could get their honor restored. I remember I crawled into a small closet next to the chamber, where I knew there was a hole in the planks and I could peek in. My heart raced so badly I almost could not hear what they were saying. My father was terribly angry at his friend for not raising his daughter well, for not controlling her.”
I had to stop Mick. This was so far from anything I knew and believed in. “How could that ever be his fault?” I asked. “She just fell in love with someone else! I don’t get that.”
Mick stared at me. Now I felt that he didn’t understand me.
“I know times were different, but still—” I continued.
“It was his responsibility to control his daughter. That is just the way it was in a patriarchal society.”
“Poor girl.”
“That was exactly what I thought. But I was the only one. Imagine how I felt when they came to the conclusion that the only way the honor both families could be restored was if she was killed by the man she had left at the altar.”
I looked at Mick with wide open eyes. Was he actually saying what I thought he was?
“So you had to kill her?”
“That was what they wanted, yes.”
I exhaled. Mick sighed again.
“What did you say to them?” I asked.
“I was lost. I begged my father not to ask this of me, but he had made up his mind. There was no turning back. This was how it was going to be. It was the right thing to do, he said. My mother supported him. So did all of my siblings. Everyone wanted me to do this. Except me. I could never kill anyone. I tried to explain to them that I didn’t have the same anger toward her that they had. I did not feel like I had lost any honor. I did not tell them that I had looked her in the eyes and seen the fear nor did I tell them that I had given her money. How could I? They would have killed me as well for dishonoring the family.”
“What did you do?”
“The only thing I could do. I accepted and then I went out to look for her. I searched all the small towns on the island for months, hoping and praying that she would not be there when I arrived. If I found her, I had to follow through with it. And I just knew I could never do such a thing.”
“Couldn’t you just not do it? Couldn’t you let her go and then tell them that you never found her?”
“If only it were that easy. No, everybody on the island knew why I came to their town and everybody wanted to help my family. This was something the whole island talked about and my parents would definitely know it if I saw her and did not kill her. Someone would tell them.”
“Wow. That didn’t leave you with much choice, did it?”
Mick shook his head with a serious look. “I had to search and go where people told me they might have seen her and just hope that she was not still there when I arrived. And for months I was doing fine. A lot of people took me in and fed me. A few of them thought they knew where she was, but fortunately they were wrong. So eventually I began to think she might have been lucky enough to get away in time.”
“Something tells me you weren’t that lucky,” I said and felt a pang in my heart when I saw the sadness in his eyes.
He shook his head slowly.
“No. I was not that fortunate. When I reached the capital, Reykjavik, I was taken in by a family who had seen her. And worst of all, they knew where she and Jón were hiding. They had heard of the tragedy that had struck my family and were willing to help me. They would even have their two sons, Magnús and Snorre, help me.”
&nbs
p; “So now there were witnesses?”
“Yes. I was devastated. Now there was no way I could let Solrún and Jón run and then go back to tell my parents they had escaped. I lay awake the whole night speculating on how I could get out of that mess, and there was only one way.”
I held my breath while I stared at Mick’s beautiful blue eyes. He was such a contrast to Jason’s dark nature. Mick had skin as light as ice. He was picture perfect. He had such a proud charisma. I could picture him riding an Icelandic horse across the country searching for that girl, worrying that he would actually find her.
“You had to do it?”
Mick nodded and stared at me. I felt a chill like ice-cold water running down my back.
“I decided to follow through with my promise to my father. After all, it was the right thing to do. It was the honorable thing. So when I left the house with the two sons and my knife, I was determined. I was going to do it and then I had to live with myself the rest of my life.”
“So what happened?”
“We went to this small house close to the harbor where I had been told they were hiding. It was an old abandoned wooden house, or more of a shack to be exact. I kicked in the door and found them sitting on the floor holding each other tightly. Solrún looked up and stared directly into my eyes. I remember my heart stopped for several seconds. I just looked into her eyes and saw how she was begging for my mercy. Begging me to let them go. Then Jón got up and approached us. He told us to take him but spare her. It was his entire fault, he said. He had taken her against her will. She had nothing to do with it. Magnús and Snorre said it would never be enough to restore my family’s honor. I needed to kill the girl as well before I could return to my hometown. So I lifted the knife and went toward her. Jón was crying and screaming at me, while Magnús and Snorre held him down. I approached the girl with the knife and saw how she went down on her knees and started praying. She closed her eyes and asked God to receive her. She was ready to come home, she said. That was when I stopped. I stood for a long time and stared at her. I heard Jón moan and Magnús and Snorre growl as they fought to keep him down. But I was frozen. I couldn’t do it. So I dropped the knife on the floor, turned around and left. I ran for hours in the freezing rain, until I had no more strength. Then I tumbled onto the ground and lay there lifeless for a long time until someone came by and picked me up. I had a high fever and was unconscious for two days. When I woke up I was in a stranger’s house. They had taken me in and taken care of me. When I got back on me feet I continued to flee, well knowing it was only a matter of time before my family would find me. And so they did. Six months later they found me hiding in a small shack in the country. I had been helping out on a nearby farm in exchange for food and shelter. Now they kicked my door down.”