by Ryan Schow
Rebecca, Raven and I get into our bikinis and head out back. It’s cold outside, but the spa is nice and hot, clouds of steam lifting off it, the jets bringing the water to a near boil. We slip inside the water, smiling and relaxed, the contradiction between the weather and the heat of the spa simply euphoric.
“Glad I stayed?” Raven asks me.
“I am.”
“Me, too,” Rebecca says.
“I have to get up to Astor,” I say.
“I know.”
“You know because I know,” I say, understanding this. It’s not a telepathic connection as much as it’s a base of knowledge we all share.
“That goes without saying,” Raven says.
“I need the car,” I tell her.
“Of course you do.”
“We need another one, unless you want to live off Uber in the city.”
“Do you think I want to do Uber?”
Smirking, I shake my head.
“Liz needs one, too,” Raven says.
Rebecca knows about Elizabeth, and she’s trying to understand all of us together, but she’s not really making the connection with the fact that there’s a third version of me down south.
“Did she tell you this?” I ask.
“She’s been thinking about it,” Raven says.
“So what’s she getting?”
“She’ll call us tomorrow and ask if it’s okay to get the new Audi S4.”
“Another Audi?” Rebecca asks.
“Shocker, right?” Raven tells our new sister, then: “We might have a problem.”
I laugh. It’s hard not to.
“I know,” I admit, “we’re obsessed with Audis.”
Raven says, “If she gets that, and you take the RS5, what else should we get?”
“The RSTT.”
Raven nods her head and says, “Can we do tradesies?”
“It’s going to be a necessity,” I answer with a grin. “How would you feel about getting it later today and I’ll take the RS5 until you’re ready to switch?”
“That’ll work,” she says.
We savor another half an hour in the spa, but it’s mid-afternoon and I need to get back to Newcastle, to Astor where Georgia and the girls are.
Dressed and ready to go, my hair done, my makeup sufficient, I give Raven a hug and thank her, me. So weird.
“I saw the reptilian,” I finally tell her.
“Lizzy and I talked about it,” Raven says.
“So you know what I know, about the future, about what we have to do?”
“You know I do,” she says.
“Then you know then about the whole parallel universes business, right?”
“Still trying to figure that one out.”
“Whatever we think we know,” I say, slightly discouraged, slightly behind the eight ball on this one, “we don’t really know shit, right?”
“That’s the pervading thought.”
On the way out, I say good-bye to Rebecca, Orianna and Christian and then hop in the RS5 and hit the open road doing my best to keep it under one hundred, but failing miserably (naturally).
Chapter Fifteen
My Audi (in beast mode) and I hit the freeway like a rocket ship heading to deep space before I remind myself that the highway is not my personal playground. Being a good California driver, I dial it back to ninety and feel good about myself. Thirty minutes later, flashing lights draw my attention to my rear view mirror and dammit, I’m getting pulled over.
I signal right and move to the shoulder, put the car in park. I collect my license and registration and wait.
Even though the sun is going down and it’s still dusk, the California Highway Patrol sedan hits its spotlight, turning my side mirror into the freaking sun. I shade my eyes, click off the CHP cruiser’s spotlight using my mind.
A second later it comes back on and so I blow the bulb, which isn’t right, but whatever. Anyone who knows me will tell you I toe the line on these types of things and I won’t ever claim to be anyone’s moral compass. I’m just not that girl.
I’ll never be that girl.
So the CHP cruiser’s door opens and a man heads my way. Cars blow by him on the highway, noisy and gusting. A small gap in the traffic appears, but it’s short lived. The cop walks up in plain clothes, his held tucked low in the shadows of his face.
When I roll down the window, I find myself looking at him: Aloysius.
“What the hell is this?” I ask.
“When I realized who you were, who you are, I looked in on you, studied your history, first as Raven, then as Elizabeth and now as Savannah. Now I know you.”
“You don’t know shit, bloodsucker.”
“Yet I knew you got pulled over going ninety in a sixty-five on this day at this time on this stretch of road in this truly beautiful car.”
“So what do you want?” I ask. “Good conversation? A sordid ending to the increasingly interesting story that is my life?”
“I want you to stop what you’re going to do. Do your thing in this universe, or go to another one, I don’t care, just leave me and my father alone.”
“You know about that?” I ask. “Hopping universes?
“Of course, I do. But you can’t jump yet, so you can’t get away from me at this point.”
“If I want to leave, I can.”
“Not at this point in your life, and not this version of you, so that’s out. Oh, and you can gobble down a time device if you want, but not before I tear out your throat.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is we’re talking candidly because I could kill you if I wanted to—”
“Then do it.”
“There are three of you. I tried this once, in another timeline. You died, but not before another one of you hopped universes and put me in a rather nasty predicament.”
“Either way, we end your little planned reign of terror.”
A half dozen cars whoosh by, some close to Aloysius, others on the outside lane. Aloysius just looks down at me, grinning.
When the traffic breaks and the noise dies down, he says, “There are a trillion possible outcomes to this situation, Savannah. One where I end you, one where you end me, one crazy one where I seduce you the way I know how—”
“With your vampiric gaze? Give me a break.”
“—and we become lovers.”
“Can you hear my vag getting extra dry? Yeah, you don’t do it for me.”
“The point is, I will fight this fight for as long as necessary.”
“Why? Why is there a fight? Why must you fight so hard to end the lives of so many innocent people?” I ask. “What is your end game?”
“This is the least settled of universes,” he says. “There are control measures in other universes that make what we’re trying to accomplish here in this one impossible.”
“Such as?”
“Monsters. Things worse than you and me. Things far worse than your little reptilian friend.”
“Why can’t you just stay here and forget about those other universes. They’re not converging. Besides, I kind of like it here. It works.”
“It works for you now, but you are a monster, like me. Forced to hide. Unable to be who you really are.”
“Which is what, exactly?” I ask.
“A hunter,” he says, a glint in his eye. “A stone cold killer.”
Any girl in my position would take this as a compliment, but for some reason, this turns my stomach.
“You are not meant to be here,” he says. “And I’m not meant to be here. But this is how it starts, the corruption of our DNA, the experimentation. People like Holland, in this universe, he is genetically predisposed to chaos, same as my father, same as me. We are anomalies, immortals, and these are the games we play.”
“I don’t crave power, like you, you freaking psycho. I don’t look to end others to make my life better.”
A few eighteen wheelers cruise by, the heavy gusts lightly rocking Aloy
sius, but not enough to unbalance him. A little louder, he says, “You are a proponent of justice and freewill.”
“Yes, if you’re going to water it down like that.”
“But there is a darkness in you I can feel, a part of you that did not start out that way, but is that way never-the-less.”
“Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Dr. Phil.”
He grins, unblinking, not trying to seduce me, but thinking of me as a woman instead of a warrior.
“Oh young Savannah,” he muses, “the babies we could make. We could be greater than Holland could ever be. We could combine our DNA into a child, children—this is where the true, unstoppable vampire race begins. My blood, your supernatural talent…we could literally rule this universe and others as well. This is the benefit of our meeting.”
I make the mistake of holding his gaze. There is an unencumbered beauty there, a magnetic draw with a gravitational pull like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It is mesmerizing, intoxicating, bursting with the promise of a nearly overwhelming desire the likes of which this heart and mind of mine have never known.
If I rode Chloe’s emotions to get high off her lust, then that was but a drop of what life with this man could provide. Then it all stops. This multiverse of emotion simply falls away, leaving me breathless, disappointed, scared.
“I could give you that feeling always, my dear. But you would not like me to feed it to you without your permission. This is how we did not work before. When we were together in another life, in another timeline, under different circumstances, you loved almost everything about me. Just not that.”
“I would never be with you,” I say, my voice faltering, the affect of the trance I was just under sitting low in me like sexual need.
“Ah, but you were, and we were a lovely, almost charming duo.”
He knelt down before the door so we were face to face, and he said, “I have never met a woman so enthralling, so utterly amazing and so powerful as you, Savannah Swann. You are everyone else’s nightmare, but to me, you are perfection personified. I want you, I need you, I have to have you.”
In that moment of such deep confession, I hit him with a psychic punch so hard it kicks him off his feet and into traffic where a Toyota Avalon going just over eighty smashes into him, launching his body a ways down the highway and leaving him rumpled, broken and distorted on the asphalt.
The Toyota skids to a stop, slides sideways, two wheels lifting off the ground in what will become a massive barrel roll. With my mind, however, I keep this from happening because this is my fault, not theirs. Correcting the car, I make sure it doesn’t roll or skid into the ditch and kill the passengers.
Another vehicle behind the Avalon, an older Chevy Tahoe, runs over Aloysius’s crumpled body leaving behind a smashed lump in the street.
I start the car, check to make sure traffic is stopped, then I ease forward and drive slowly up to him for a better look.
Everything is crushed and leaking. His arms are splayed out, his legs bent at wrong angles, half his head caved in. His eyes see everything and nothing. Seeing him like this reminds me of future Alice in the desert after being hit by the big rig the new future Alice arrived in.
I sit there long enough to make sure he’s not coming to, and he’s not. There are people piling out of their cars, crying and shrieking, telling someone, anyone, to call 911. Window still rolled down, only a few feet from the corpse, I say, “Try and wake from that potato pancake,” then navigate around the stopped cars and take advantage of the break in traffic.
One hundred miles an hour comes quick. One ten isn’t unreasonable. I settle in at one-twenty until I hit the next city.
Chapter Sixteen
I get in through Astor Academy’s gates the way I get in to anything. The free will of Savannah Swann. I mean no harm, so I guess trespassing is okay. After parking, I head to my old room. It’s empty. There are lots of empty rooms after the incident with The Operator. After the death of Cameron O’Dell. Everyone saw that day as the Astor Massacre, even though it was one dead girl and two dead clones. It was the brutality of The Operator’s deaths that shocked everyone.
I crawl into the bed, almost unable to sleep because of the onslaught of memories I have of this place. They pour through me, almost at will, certainly at random. Seldom are they kind. Most of what I remember is being obsessed by Damien while my future husband became my best friend as I sat there oblivious to all of it.
I won’t lie: sometimes I’m pretty dumb. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit too self-destructive. But then I fall asleep and it’s like the sleep of the dead. When I wake, it’s to the rising sun. I lay here for awhile until it’s time to get up.
At seven-thirty I call Georgia, who is obviously still asleep.
“When’s breakfast?” I ask.
“Where are you? This is the girl, right? From Monarch?”
“Savannah.”
“Yeah, that’s it. It’s you, I mean,” she says, yawning so hard I find myself yawning with her. Then: “Where are you again?”
“My old room. Downstairs.”
I give her the number and she says when she’s ready, she’ll come get me.
She’s down by eight and I’m answering the door with a smile on my face and hope in my heart. Unfortunately I open the door and she’s standing there with her arms crossed and a frown on her face.
“You need to tell me everything,” she says.
“Over breakfast or in here?”
“Considering this place is barren, breakfast will do. Unless what you’re going to tell me is going to be upsetting.”
“It will be.”
Her hands fall to her side and she says, “Seriously?”
“I know you burned your parents favorite plant,” I say. “I know you killed that boy, not at Holland’s underground lab, but in Canada.”
She quickly steps inside, closes the door and says, “You can’t just blurt things like that out. What if someone hears you?”
“I erased your mind. Wiped it clean for your safety.”
“You what?” she says, aghast. Slowly it all starts to make sense. “All those blank spots? Are you saying…that was you?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“And Cicely and Tempest, too?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Why?”
“Do you want me to show you?” I ask.
“Why would you do this to us? I mean…hell, I don’t know what I mean. Just, you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Do you remember the girl who ripped that kid in half last semester? The kid you set on fire when everyone wasn’t looking?”
She takes a deep breath, lifting her chin and setting her jaw.
“I was the girl whose eyes got roasted. The girl who found Cameron. The same girl who died in the lab when you smoked that bald kid.”
“Most of that is foggy.”
“I can clear it all up for you,” I say. “But only if you want that.”
“I do,” she says, slightly apprehensive, a touch breathless. “I mean, I think I do.”
“It’s going to hurt.”
“Just do it,” she tells me.
I walk to her, put my hands on her head, open a connection between our minds and let my memories flood into her brain. She closes her eyes against the rush. I also release all the stored memories of me that were hers so that she has everything.
When at last she opens her eyes, there are tears in them. She pulls me close and says, “Savannah?”
“Yes,” I say, holding her.
“I think maybe we do this too many times.”
“I won’t be changing bodies anymore, and hopefully I won’t have to tinker with your thoughts either. I hate that part, but mostly I hate looking at you when I love you so much and seeing you looking back at me like I’m a total stranger.”
“You were a second ago.”
“If you knew what was in my head, you’d do the same thing, too.”
&n
bsp; “Let’s get breakfast before I digest my empty stomach,” she says. And then: “Don’t erase me again, Savannah. Seriously.”
School hasn’t officially started yet, so there are no classes. Later that morning, Georgia calls Cicely and Tempest and asks them to come to her room. When they get there, Georgia introduces me to them and we all meet like we’re strangers. Georgia sees that look in their eyes and telepathically I say, “See?”
She nods unconsciously and then catches herself and stops.
Cicely is looking at her weird.
“So you’re new here?” Tempest asks me.
“Yes and no,” I tell her.
Any minute Georgia is going to do to me what she did before, and that’s make me tell them who I am. Instead of making a big thing of it, I slink into both their minds and unlock everything.
They stop and stare at me.
“Abby?” Tempest asks, like she just blinked back into existence from a trance. Her memories aren’t as clean as if I made the same connection and had the same time with them as I did with Georgia, but that would come.
“I’ve missed you guys,” I say, smiling. Now, surprisingly, my eyes flood with tears and I feel overwhelmed by my emotions.
“We do this too much,” Cicely says, echoing Georgia’s earlier sentiment.
“She said she won’t do that again,” Georgia replies.
“Why would you do this to us?” Tempest asks, half excited, have bothered. “I mean, I know it’s because you’re protecting us, but what from?”
“The future.”
“Explain,” Georgia says.
“The boy I killed here on campus, he was a soul using bodies from a set of clones created for him eight hundred years into the future. He made the mistake of inhabiting the last body. When I killed him, I took his soul.”
“Took it where?” Tempest asks.
I tap my head, then say, “He’s buried here. Caged actually.”
“You have that creep inside you?”
“I do.”
“Why can’t you let him go?” Cicely asks.