by Mason Sabre
It was the best option they had. The other was to leave Helena with Nick, and that wasn't an option. If that happened, and the Humans caught Helena, Stephen would find a way back into the real world, and that was something none of them would want.
Eden's expression was one of loss, worry, a grief that ran far more profound than she allowed to surface. "Hurry."
He nodded and then ran.
Xander might have been fae, but Eden was a witch. She could touch all the elements. Unlike the fae, she needed potions and brewed magic to bring about her true powers. The fae had it on a more fundamental level that was in tune with their beings, but witches only had a small simmering pot of it that would drain away to nothing if they didn’t feed it. She pressed a hand to the earth and opened her eyes wider as she pushed magic into the soil. The ground glowed beneath her outstretched fingers. She was feeling it too, backing up what Xander had told her about how long it would take before the Humans got to them. Another minute gone … another tick on the box that edged them all closer to death.
Xander had parked the car off the road, out of sight, just like they had arranged in their exchange of letters. God, it had been a long process, but they had done it. He had hidden the car as per Stephen’s instructions and then he and Eden had waited to catch Helena when she fell. That was where Xander ran to, with Stephen alongside him. He’d seen enough of Helena trying to bring him back to life.
A little way along the road was the body of the Human Stephen had used to smash the bus door open. Blood and brain marred the ground, and his skull was caved in at one side. Stephen wasn’t sorry. One less Human in the world made it a better place. They were the vermin of the earth, a plague of locusts who devoured everything. Then they pissed and moaned when the world where they lived began to die.
What a pathetic existence the Humans had. How awful it must be to do nothing more than serve their kind and worship the hate they bred inside for creatures they did not understand. This Human probably had no idea why he'd been transporting Helena and Stephen. He was just another useless drone.
Greed was the answer. The Humans weren’t content with just ruling Others. They wanted to take their gifts too—their abilities—and use them for their selfish gains.
There was no ball with this Human either, not that Stephen could see. If he had his solid hands, he might have been able to roll the body over. “Shit.” He crouched for a moment as Xander got the car. He rested his arms across his thighs. “Something isn’t right.” He couldn’t pinpoint it.
Tossing a look back over his shoulder to where Helena was. Did it matter? His children were safe. Helena was safe, and Lee would never get his hands on any of them again.
“I’m glad you’re dead,” he said to the Human. If he’d been able to kick him, he was sure he would have. “Wherever your soul is now, I hope you think your death was worthy of the cause.”
Xander pulled the car out from a covering of hedges and branches they had thrown on the top to hide it. He stopped when he got the car onto the road and straight. Stephen ran to it; his footsteps were soundless against the tarmac. No wind rushed through his hair. No scents …. When he reaped souls, the world around him stopped. That’s what was wrong. He had seen himself, and he had seen the others when he reaped, but they were always frozen in time and faded, as if through a lace veil, but this time … everything moved in real time.
Xander drove the car around the bus and got it to a lower part of the road where he could get it down as far as he dared. He edged it to the part where the earth got softer.
“Ready. I …” His voice trailed off. Eden stood back, arms folded across her chest and Helena leant on Stephen.
She lifted her arms, her hands clasped together, she brought them down against Stephen’s chest and slammed into its centre.
Behind Xander, Stephen fell to his knees. His heart slammed inside his chest and brought a cough out of him. It jumped like a gunshot and his eyes watered. He leant on his hands. “Again …” he called to her. “Do it again.” He crawled as fire seeped into his skin, his veins.
“What are you doing?” Xander asked Helena.
Helena’s eyes were wild. “He’s alive,” she said to him. “His heart is beating.”
Chapter 4
The machines beeped with steady, rhythmic sounds, energised with life … his life. He lay on a bed in the centre of a room in a house he neither recognised, nor knew the location. He had no real idea of how he had got there, but he had.
The sheet rested on him and stopped just at his chest, which was bare. A maze of wires ran out from various parts of his body which fed into the machines around him to monitor his stats.
Stephen leant against the wall in the corner of the room and glared at his own body. "Get up," he said. He pushed his head back against the wall he couldn't feel and propped his arms on his raised knees. "Just get the fuck up." He clenched his fists into tight balls and ground his jaw at the same time. The sound of each beep created such energy inside him to fight off the building burn under his skin … another second when he couldn't figure the shit out. Another second when he lay useless and separated from himself.
Helena, who had gathered more mental strength on the journey to the house, stood by his side with her hand on his chest above his heart. It was like she didn’t believe the readout the machines gave. “I don’t understand,” she said to Eden, who was behind her and setting items on a small table; plasters, antiseptic wipes and other things needed to clean up the gash across her forehead. “All his readouts show he should be conscious, but he isn’t. I don’t understand it.” She ran her hand along the side of his face and cupped his cheek as she leant over him. “Where are you?”
“Behind you. I’m right behind you.” He stood, again, like he’d done so many times since they arrived at the house. He’d paced, cussed, sat, even stomped his feet and beat his chest at one point … anything to relieve the tension in his muscles, and none of which made him feel any better. “I’m right here.”
He went to the bed and waved his hand over his face. "Get up," he said again. "Just get the fuck up."
He clenched a fist over his chest. If he could somehow jolt himself back to life and make himself wake up … The moment he got close to any physical part of himself, his skin vibrated, and he snatched his hand back.
“For God’s sake.”
Once, when he was a child, he'd been plugging in the Christmas tree lights. They had a weird connector that had to go inside another. His mother had told him, if not a dozen times, when reconnecting them, make sure the live end is not plugged into the wall. He hadn't listened and then Gemma had done something, and he'd lost concentration. Instead of sticking one connector into the other, he'd missed and jammed his thumb into the live end. Fuck, it had hurt like a bitch, like the electricity gripped the end of his thumb and bit down. That was what it was like when his hand got close to his body—an intense electrical pain that sped up his heart rate and sent his brain into violent numbness.
He stepped back and growled out another curse.
“Please wake up.” Helena’s words were whispered sobs, crawling their way out of her throat as she gripped his useless hand. Then she pressed her face to his tattooed shoulder and kissed his skin. “I need you.” She wasn’t crying, but her dark lashes glistened with the tears she kept inside.
Stephen put himself on the other side of his body, so he could face her. “I’m sorry.” Not being able to get into his own body was one thing, but not being able to touch Helena was something else entirely. When he tried to touch her, his fingers slipped through and grabbed nothing. He bit down and blinked hard and shook his head as he pulled his hand back to himself. “I’ll fix this. I swear to God.”
“We need to get that cut cleaned up,” Eden said. She carried the tray to where Helena stood by Stephen, but she didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything about him. Instead, she placed the tray on the counter in the corner and pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves. “Helena.�
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A pause and Helena squared her shoulders before turning to face Eden. “I can clean myself up.”
“I know you can. But let me do it. Sit down.” She pulled a stool out for Helena and patted the cushion. “I want to clean it before you get an infection or something. I also think we should listen to the babies, make sure everything is okay.”
Helena’s hand went to her swollen belly, but her eyes were on Stephen. “I feel them both.”
"Good, but it'd set my mind at ease if we check. Make sure they're both doing great. Did you get scans and things at …" Her words trailed off, and Stephen wasn't sure if it was because she was afraid of upsetting Helena, or she just didn't want to say it.
Whichever it was, Helena didn’t notice. She used the counter top to help get onto the stool. “I forget who the doctor is here.”
Eden smiled. “Well, don’t they say doctors are the worst patients?”
Helena was a doctor. When she and Stephen had met, she'd had her clinic within an Other community. She'd also worked alongside Lee Norton, not so much by choice. The stool was from Helena's old place. Eden and Xander must have gone back and got her things out. He wasn't so sure if that was brave or just plain stupid. Without seeing the place, Stephen knew the town … the Humans and their fears had probably flattened the safe gated community.
Eden pulled a clip out from her own hair and used it to pin some of Helena’s long brown hair back to get to the gash. She used balls of cotton wool soaked in warm water to clean away dirt and blood. “It’s not too bad. I think we’ll get away with just sticking a strip on it rather than a stitch. I’ve got a cream too I want to put on it. Help it heal faster.”
Helena angled herself, so Stephen was in her sights. “Do you think he can hear us? Wherever he is in there? I always used to tell people, families, that when someone was in a coma, they could hear and to talk to them to bring them out.”
Eden hesitated, bloodied wool ball in her fingers. “Maybe. If he can hear anyone, it’s you.”
Helena, beautiful Helena whose world was teetering on edge, glanced around the room, and for a single moment, her eyes locked with his as if she could see him. It brought a gasp to his throat, and a yearning so fundamentally deep inside it touched his soul with cold fingers.
Maybe he had to force himself into his body, force himself back somehow. When he was reaping souls, it was so different. He could never explain how he got back into his body in those times, or even if he left it. No cord went from his body, no ethereal link between his physical form and this, but when he reaped souls and held them in his hand, he simply just went back, like waking up. The souls were missing this time, though. So were the balls and maybe that was the problem.
The second he put his hand close to his physical body, the biting hum started again, but instead of snatching it back as he had done before, he kept it there, pushed, closed his eyes and fought to get through the sensations crawling along his skin. The hum was in his head, not from the outside, but like it started in his hand and echoed through his veins. He opened his eyes. Nothing bad was happening. He wasn't fading, dying, or anything else that would lead to an irreversible catastrophe. "Come on …" he ground out, his words pushed by sheer frustration.
He pushed harder, pushed down until his hand was covered entirely by his living flesh. Then he waited.
A ball of fire warmed in his gut. It got hotter with each second, and he gritted his teeth. This was like an orgasm just on the cusp of going over, but not reaching the spot enough … not yet. He had to fight to keep his hand there, waiting for that pop … the snap when the two parts of himself rejoined.
There was only silence, thick, lonely silence wrapping ugly arms around his body and suffocating him. Maybe he needed to climb back into his body. Perhaps it was just that simple. The more he considered it, the more it sounded like the logical answer; why hadn't he thought of it before?
Moving, he put his back to the bed and leant against the edge. Then, he tried to grasp the bar, or at least he made the motion, but his hands went through the metal, and if he hadn’t been keeping himself steady, he would have fallen completely.
With a steadying breath, Stephen focused his mind and jumped up and back, intending to land atop his own body so he could lie on it and somehow become one.
Instead, he fell through himself, fell through the bed and landed like an idiot on the floor beneath. The metal feet of the bed stuck out from inside him. One wheel was lodged in his chest, not that he could feel it … not that he could feel anything. He stayed on the floor, arms out to his sides, legs spread as he stared up at the underside of the bed. "Well, that worked."
A light knock on the door made Helena jump, and she kicked her leg out. If Stephen had been in a solid form, she would have kicked his left arm. He wished she had. At least then he would have felt something … felt something more than the nothingness.
The door opened, and Xander popped his head in. "I've a visitor for you. Are you busy?"
Stephen pushed himself out from under the bed and still bound by the physical limitations, at least in his head, he even ducked before he stood. “I’m busy being dead, if that’s what you mean by busy,” he said, huffing to himself. “Come in.”
“We’re just cleaning up here. Not busy,” Eden said.
Helena frowned at first, but then a little face peeped out from behind Xander.
Aiden … God, it was Aiden. Stephen's heart spiked in his chest at the sight of him, and, at the same time, the bleep on the machine jolted, and everyone glanced at it. Even Stephen placed his hand on his chest to feel for his heartbeat as if he was expecting it to flatline.
"He knows," Helena said, pushing away from Eden so she could go over to Stephen. "He heard. Nick? Nick, can you hear me?" She ran her hand through his dark hair and leant down, so her face was just an inch from his. "It's me, Helena. Aiden is here."
Nothing. There wasn’t a way to make his heart jump like that, or he would have tried, even if it was just to let Helena know he was in there.
“I made him a picture,” Aiden said, coming to stand beside her and not realising the shock she had just had. “I drawed you and Nick and the babies. Xander said they’re inside your tummy, but they will come out soon.” He held the paper out to her. It was a picture of a family shaded in three colours, but it was enough … enough it made Helena smile and her eyes gloss.
“It’s wonderful.” She gulped back her tears. “We can stick it on the wall, so Nick sees it when he wakes up.” She stooped down to him and slid her hand around his neck to cup just under his hair. “We missed you so much.”
He gave a nod, and the skin under the smattering of freckles across his nose blossomed red and flushed his eyes. Helena wrapped her arms around him before any of that sadness could come out. She held him tightly, embraced him in a way Stephen could only yearn for.
“I missed you,” he said.
In their heads, their dreams, the moments they could talk and lie together, Stephen and Helena had talked about Aiden. They’d imagined what he was doing, joked about Eden suddenly looking after a child. It was a need in Stephen that had both shocked him and scared him. He’d never imagined he could be a father. He’d never realised just how frightening it was to have someone like that depending on you.
They'd written to Aiden during their time in Norton's place. Secret letters passed back and forth, filled with hopes, dreams, plans of escape. They'd never kept the letters or the drawings. It was too risky, but they'd enjoyed them, sealed them into their minds and pinned every wish on them.
“You came back for me?”
Helena released Aiden enough, so she could hold his face in her hands and look right into his perfect little eyes. “We promised we would.” She ran a thumb across his cheek and then pulled him in to place a kiss on his head. He hugged her then, only for a moment, because he jumped back, eyes wide.
Helena laughed and put Aiden’s hand on her belly. “They’re excited to see you too.”
“They were saying hello.”
Her bump moved again, rippling with the lives inside. “They keep doing it.”
Such innocence in those eyes … such hope. Stephen wondered if he'd ever had that look about him. It seemed to him, when he cast his mind back, that his entire life was spent at war, either to protect or defend. It was part of who he was. Although Gemma was a few years younger than him, he couldn't remember a time without her when they were growing up. Then, of course, Evie had come along, and he'd had two sisters to look after. Just like he knew Aiden would do with the babies.
Aiden used the stool Helena had been sitting on and pushed it next to Stephen. “Xander says he’s sick.” He leant on Stephen, hand on his chest, to peer at his face.
Helena shuffled herself around and into a position where she could stand beside Aiden and not cause him too much trouble, then she put her arm around his back. “He got a little poorly from the crash. But I am trying to make him get better.”
Consideration stole Aiden’s expression for a second as his young mind took that in and decided what it meant. “Will he die?” He raised his eyes to her. “My mum died. Eden said she is in heaven watching me.”
The simple and direct question choked a whimper in Helena's throat. "No," she said. "He needs to rest. She moved, so Aiden couldn't see her properly, and then she pressed her face against his back and blinked away the tears.
“It won’t end this way,” Stephen promised, moving as close to them as he dared. Close enough, he could pretend he could feel them. “I’ll not let it.”
Chapter 5
The moon was a small slit in the dull sky. Just a blink above, masked by shadows and clouds. Stephen had witnessed many shapes of the moon during his life. Even more of them since the witch took him from his father's cage and shredded his soul—the scars across his arm were a constant reminder of what had occurred. He stared out of the window, mentally alert. Somewhere, his father, his sisters, his mother maybe saw the same moon, the same sky. He thought about them often, especially Gemma. She was the closest to him in age and the one person in the family who accepted him, understood him even. He let out a sigh and let his shoulders loosen. "I'll see you all again."