by Ryan Schow
“What if I don’t want to live forever?” he asks.
“Then you cannot share this life with me, because if you are always at risk of a real death, then I am always weak for having you in my life.”
“I’ll learn to fight,” he says, his eyes too heavy to keep open.
“How are you going to defend yourself against a bomb? Or something like The Operator if it comes back? Because almost everyone in my dojo is dead and my sensei—a man who could kill you inside of seconds even if you trained with him for years—was nearly beaten to death in minutes. He’d still be in casts if I hadn’t healed him.”
“So then you can heal me,” he says, slightly defiant. “You or the snake man.”
“No deal.”
He turns away from me, shutting me out. It’s time for me to go.
I jump into his mind for a moment, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. What I find doesn’t concern me, but it does shed some light on what he’s thinking. He’s toying with the idea of going back to Astor Academy registered as August, rather than Brayden.
That’s what kept him up last night. That and the explosion.
Logistically, he’s been thinking about how he can hack the school’s system and make the necessary adjustments. He’ll need to provide the school with hard copies of his records, and that this will involve him doing some illegal things, but these are things he doesn’t want to do on his father’s computer.
There is also that part of him that isn’t even sure he needs school because he’s a hacker and he can hack a bank as easy as he can hack Astor Academy.
He’s basically torn and trying to decide: live forever in my world, or spend eighty years in the real world not dealing with superpowers and assassins and time travel and bipedal lizards who show up to bring near dead kids back to life.
“Just kiss me before I go,” I say.
He rolls over, gives me a good one. Then surprisingly he smiles and says, “Whatever I decide, I want to thank you for getting that bomb out of my head. I know it wasn’t your decision for me to change, that it was mine, so I know this wasn’t your problem as much as it was mine.”
“I love you, dumbass,” I tell him, pulling him close. “That means all of your problems are also all of my problems.”
“And that’s why I love you,” he says, wrapping his arms around me.
“If you love me, then be with me forever.”
“I’ll think about it on the flight back,” he tells me. And then I take another slight bump off his thoughts, enough for me to realize he’s being honest, that he wants this.
He’s just scared. Terrified actually.
I close my eyes, start my meditation. Within seconds, I realize the frequency for travel I could not reach before has now been unlocked, courtesy of Draco. I open my eyes back up, look at August. He’s staring at me, waiting.
“I’m going to take a quick peek,” I say. “I think I can do that.”
“So are you going or not?”
“I’m not sure?” I say. He gives me a funny look because my answer is a question. “This is sort of new to me.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
Opening the portals on this side and at my destination’s side is easy. Envisioning myself traveling this wormhole sets everything in motion. Within moments, my conscience is rushing more than two-thousand years back in time to this little place called Jerusalem.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The moment I close my eyes I feel the pull inside me, like a gentle towing at my soul. It’s like time itself is beckoning me, tugging ever so lightly at me to come, to witness, to understand. Is this what it’s like to possess Draco’s gift? Is all of time known to me the moment I want to know it? Am I a part of everything simply by focusing my will toward it?
I feel myself searching throughout all of time for a certain energy, a specific soul, a person. Him. The moment I find him, the emotion crashes into me like a tidal wave, and I am there. Where my consciousness goes, there is delight, torment, an inordinate amount of pain and steep, steep suffering. And I haven’t even left August’s room yet.
How is this possible? I wonder. How can I feel all of this from so far away?
Instantly, I know what’s happening. This is the flagellation of Christ. I feel half of me in that time and half anchored to this time. It’s as if I’ve sheared myself in two to be in both places at once, each half reaching for the other, each wanting unity over separation.
But I am here and there.
Two parts of me.
Enough.
I feel my ethereal self in that room with Jesus and his aggressors, disembodied, seeing with spiritual eyes, knowing everything happening, feeling. Pontius Pilate is a prefect serving under Emperor Tiberius, and a cold, vengeful man. This is the man responsible for sentencing Jesus to death. A man I immediately detest with such enthusiasm I’m overcome with the need to rip him limb from gosh damn limb.
The cretin sits nearby—smiling as if he’s watching a play, or a lovely woman bathe—while two of his men vigorously flog Jesus.
Bare backed, dressed only in loincloth, the rampant abuse showing on his beaten body, Jesus takes the violence heaped upon him without mercy. The prefect’s men torment him with both weapon and tongue, speaking foul names upon him, cursing him with vicious, grunting effort.
It is as if they are trying to break his skin and his bones, but only after they first break his mind, body and soul.
Each and every strike against the man is a lashing, tearing pain that I feel here as well as there. It’s as though I’m connected to both him and my own body in this time.
As Jesus suffers the onslaught of flogging, his skin trenching open, he takes it with the will of a servant for the people he loves.
My soul suddenly knows so many things in this moment. One of which is feeling. Something I only know to be possible because when I was dead, even while trapped in another realm, I bore feeling and emotion, too.
I felt sadness for what happened to me, and I wanted to live.
Jesus is no different.
In his heart, he does not hate those abusing him. Even shackled and bound to a whipping post, he asks his father for their forgiveness.
How is this possible?
As his skin opens and weeps red, as his pale body becomes the landscape of monumental abuse, my sheared soul moves beside him, my brain in this time thinking two things: I can stop this; I can kill them all.
And just then, Jesus turns to the place my soul resides and he looks right into what would be my eyes, taking three or four vehement gashes before hanging his blood soaked head down into his cuffed hands. As I stand there invisible, spiritual eyes on the blood and sweat trickling down his face, into his beard where it collects, I watch it drip, drip, drip onto heavy iron shackles and think, this has to stop.
I feel everything.
I feel his knees pounded raw and pressed into the ground, the weariness of his bones, the quiet cries in his mind for God to let them see the light where their souls are not damaged and vengeful but clean and pure.
A woman comes into the room and gives Pontius Pilate a drink, sneaking a glance at the flogging underway.
Blanching, she leaves quickly and without word.
My soul roars upon the man as he sips his wine and watches the show. My invisible, divided soul goes face to face with this abominable creature and it screams with such force the coward withers quite suddenly and immediately, his drink nearly spilling, his hand clutching his chest.
And then a voice in my head booms: “No!”
With that thunderous roar, my soul flees that time and slams reckless into my body in this time. My eyes shoot open and August is sitting up and staring at me, not sure what’s happening. All the emotion of that moment hits me with tsunami force, a force so great not even this body can contain it.
I am instantly in tears. Instantly sobbing.
August is pulling me into him, cradling me as I lay sideways in a fetal position
, not knowing how I can feel so much love and so much hate at the same time.
The door to August’s room opens and Lenore is there. I feel her, my eyes seeing her, seeing everything.
“Bray—I mean, August, is she okay?” she asks.
The beautiful woman’s face is genuine concern. She is not a sympathetic woman by nature, but she is not beyond empathy either. This much is now clear.
“Yes,” he says.
“Why is she crying like that?” she asks. Looking me, she says, “Savannah?”
I put into her head that I am okay, just overwhelmed with emotion. I tell her I’m an empath and feeling too much right now.
She stops, wondering why she has an answer in her head, wondering how she just suddenly knows this while not having heard a word from my mouth.
“Are…I mean…are you an empath?” she says, almost like she’s embarrassed to ask, but unwilling to keep quiet, too. She needs to know if she’s imagining this or if this is real.
“Yes,” I say, my eyes so big with tears, and so red.
She comes to my side, starts to rub my back, but then she pulls her hand back, almost like she’s been bitten. Her hand is splotched with red. She stares at it, then looks over my side to the spots where blood has seeped through my shirt.
I didn’t know I was bleeding.
“What is this?” she asks, holding her hand out as if it does not belong to her.
“Do you know what the stigmata is?” I ask her.
“People mysteriously bleeding from their hands and feet where Jesus was supposedly nailed to keep him on the cross,” she answers.
“He was flogged with metal tipped whips,” I hear myself say. She is aghast. “Sometimes, when I feel too much, when I’m in a situation I don’t understand, I feel too much and it translates to my physical body.”
“We need to get you looked at,” Lenore says.
“She heals,” August says.
Lenore looks at him with a thousand burning questions in her eyes. August simply looks back at her, his eyes saying so many things, the loudest of which is this: do not ask.
“So…?”
“I’m okay, Lenore,” I say, sitting up and wiping my eyes. “I just needed all of that emotion out of me.”
“What…what are you…feeling?” she asks.
“Something far worse than I expected. I know what this is about though. I’m okay. I just need a few minutes to collect myself, if that’s okay.”
She nods hesitantly, then stands and says, “So no Band-Aids?”
I shake my head, smile and thank her. When she is gone, August says, “What the hell, Savannah?”
“I was there, August,” I hear myself say.
“Where?”
“At Jesus’s flogging. I wanted to kill the prefect who put him there. I lost control and went after him, but someone bigger than all of us kicked my soul back here. I…I think it was…oh fuck, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think it was God.”
“You got evicted by God?” he asks in utter disbelief.
“Is that so incredulous? I mean, if someone like me is possible, then isn’t someone like Him possible, too?”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks after a moment.
There is such a tenderness in his eyes, so much love and concern for me it makes me not want to do this. But now I have to. If God wants me out, then it’s that important that I maintain control. If I go back once more, it will be to watch and feel, but not to intervene.
Looking up at August, I say, “It’s time. I’ll be okay. You need to trust me and let go.”
Reluctantly, he does.
I lean in and give him the best, hardest kiss of my life. I kiss him like I’ll never see him again, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be back together in no time.
He doesn’t know that.
I don’t either.
This time I’m about to jump to is not lost on me. This is why I chose it. This event. Never has there been such a moment in history that I believe will touch me more than this: a man willing to lose everything for people who love him and hate him, for people who want him dead, for billions of people who will never know him.
If ever there was a bright and shining example to follow and to influence, history says it would be Jesus Christ.
I’ve never been religious, but I’m not opposed to taking a peek at this part of history. Besides, Jesus and I just might have a few things in common.
Although I have never been a martyr, I certainly understand sacrifice for those who don’t know you and who eventually hate you and want you dead.
That was my life as Raven. The life I killed myself for so I wouldn’t end up back here eight hundred years later beaten and in pieces.
Now that I think of it, though, maybe Jesus and I don’t have much more than that in common. Still, for whatever reason, I feel that I need to be there, to be near Jesus in his last hours, to understand.
I know Jesus was never portrayed as being perfect, for he was a disrupter of man’s obsession with false idols and power, but I do believe he was pure, that he was love. I am not perfect by any stretch of any imagination. I am not purely love or easily capable of forgiveness. And though I am passionate, I do not understand moderation and I have no balance.
These are the things I don’t tell August. The things Draco knows about me. But Draco trusts me, right? Enough to give me this power? So somewhere along the way, I believe he knows that I will find my answers, that I will bring light and love to this world and not just violent reprisal.
Still, I feel vengeful and muddled. My heart is half love and life while there is a darkness I am compelled to yield to, if only to destroy those who look to harm others.
Yes, I am an addict. A justice junkie through and through. Yet somehow this doesn’t feel like enough for me to live this life fully.
I hope to find my answers here. The truth is, I feel inspired.
Closing my eyes, I feel my soul open a portal to a time after the flogging but before his crucifixion. I do not connect with Jesus this time. Instead I seek out a bright light, an overwhelming sadness, a broken hearted, wildly desperate soul: Jesus’s mother, Mary.
When I connect with her, I sense the pull as an instantaneous force that draws me swiftly out of this world and into the palace of Caiaphas. The moment I appear in that time, it is before a servant woman who all but faints the moment I appear. I am wearing jeans, one of August’s t-shirts and his black and white converse shoes. Not exactly the paragon of this time’s fashion.
Meaning I need to change clothes…
The woman passed out before me, the one laying on the floor surrounded by a dropped basket of garments, is not much taller than me. She’ll work. As I’m undressing her, as I’m undressing myself, I realize I’m woefully unprepared for this both physically and emotionally.
It will be okay though, right?
Chapter Twenty-Three
One minute August was sitting beside her, watching her, hurting for what he knew she was about to do, and the next minute Lenore was opening his bedroom door. August had a moment of panic.
He looked at Savannah, then at his step-mother.
Uh oh…
The instant Savannah disappeared, Lenore walked in, seeing her there one moment then gone the next. Her eyes shot open, her jaw loosening.
He could see it right then, all the blood draining from her face.
“August, what the hell was that?” she asked, her voice sitting too high in her throat, like she was about to have a mental breakdown.
He was so torn in that moment. This must have been what it was like for Savannah to come out to her parents. Savannah was not a girl. He knew that now. She was a God of this earth—not evil, or good, just…lost, trying to find her way. How do you crystalize that for someone who barely knew changing DNA and bodies was possible?
You don’t.
“She left,” is all he could say.
“Where…where did she go?”
Lenore asked, her voice still too high, her hands now trembling at her sides.
“Um…”
They just sat there looking at each other until Lenore’s eyes started to flood and she turned and walked away.
Damn.
A moment later, his father came in with a troubled look on his face. The great Lloyd James was officially rattled. He was a man who knew that he was so far out of his depth he didn’t know which step was solid ground or which one would drop out beneath him.
On one hand, he had a wife who he was sure was telling him a tall tale; on the other hand his son had changed his DNA and told him his girlfriend was both telepathic and telekinetic. But this wasn’t the big enchilada. All this sat second chair to the fact that he’d seen both of them damn near eviscerated with a bomb, a bomb that had them nearly dead in one second, then healed perfectly in the next. If he hadn’t seen these things with his own eyes, Lloyd James wouldn’t have believed it. But he did. He does. And now shit was getting weirder by the second.
“Where is Savannah?” he all but belted out.
“Gone.”
“Where did she go?” he barked. “And don’t lie to me.”
“It’s better that I do,” August calmly replied.
“Honestly, son, I’ve been patient with all this horse crap and now I’ve got Lenore as upset as I’ve ever seen her. She’s talking about stigmata and…and…and some bullshit about a…disappearing act? Like right before her eyes?”
“Yeah…”
“So? Where is she?”
“Like I said,” August said, his tone tempered, “it’s better that I lie.”
“Why?” he asked, some of his anger burning off, but some of it still sitting hot inside him. He was clearly at odds with himself and reality, and though he sounded irate, August knew he was just trying to be rational, if not understanding.
“Because the truth will haunt you.”
“I can deal with it.”
“She left the same way she got here,” he said, measuring his words very carefully. “By teleportation.”