His knees trembled. He leaned against the brick wall of the bakery and cradled the phone in one hand while his other hand made a fist. Okay, chill out, no use getting scared. The kid might want to talk about anything. But his heart was pounding. Something Lucas couldn’t type. Only one thing that could be.
Zac tapped the screen to bring up Nate’s contact information. He hit the Call icon. The phone rang.
“Hello, this is Nate Giordano; if you want a call back, please leave a message.”
Zac cleared his throat before the beep ended. “Hey, Nate, it’s Zac Wilson. I got Lucas’s email just now, asking me to call. Please let me know if there’s anything new going on or just, you know, how he’s doing. Thanks.”
He ended the call, stood up, and thrust the phone back into his pocket. Legs numb. Dread overflowing him like a cup held too long under a faucet. Nothing to do. Nate might call back in an hour. A day. His legs went from numb to twitchy. He began to pace. He envisioned himself out on the dunes, nerves working out of him in the strong stride of his legs carrying him upward, in the pumping of his arms and the sweat that would break out on his back if he climbed far enough. Everything that had happened in the last few days felt heavier with this final brick laid atop the rest.
He was overreacting. The kid wasn’t prone to overstatements, but that didn’t rule out the possibility. Zac didn’t know anything yet, and he wouldn’t until he got word on his boy.
No, not his. Only sometimes Lucas reminded him. Not of his sons—he didn’t know the kid half well enough for that. But of the fact of his sons. The fact they had lived, grown old, and died, and on the day their hoary heads went to their graves, they remained his sons.
Nate Giordano should not face a grave like those. But all medical statistics promised he would.
Zac paced the parking lot and pumped his arms as he walked. He couldn’t talk this out with anyone. None of them knew about Lucas.
“I did.”
The smugness in that voice—Zac had heard it a thousand times in life. And he couldn’t contradict it now. Colm had thought Zac crazy to continue contact with the family after his Make-A-Wish obligation was fulfilled. He shut the memory down and lengthened his stride. Colm was irrelevant.
Maybe one day he’d believe that.
He tried Nate’s cell again, got voice mail again. He sank to the curb of the parking lot and cursed cancer, cursed mortal bodies that sickened and suffered and died. Once the outpour started, he kept going, folding his arms on his knees and spitting words no one heard. He cursed the cure that had taken Cady and Finn’s family, never mind their eternal destinations. And he cursed himself for not knowing how to make any of it right.
SIXTEEN
At the bakery the next morning, Connie beckoned him in with a smile and a quick arch of her eyebrows. He would lay money she hadn’t expected him to show up. He breezed through the paperwork, and then Connie gave him a quick tour of the baked goods and the idiosyncracies of the cash register. By then opening time had arrived, and she unlocked the doors.
Zac hadn’t forgotten that he enjoyed selling things. But he might have forgotten how deep his enjoyment ran.
Muffins, donuts, and fritters were the hot morning items, breakfast for workbound folks. Connie told him cookie and cupcake sales would rise after lunch, and suddenly Zac wanted to be there for that shift too, to compare the inventory demand. Okay, so he might be getting into this a little more than he planned to. But it was fun.
He’d been there less than two hours when a twentysomething woman walked in wearing jeans and tennis shoes and a pink hoodie that read I CLIMBED THE DUNES AT HARBOR VALE, MICHIGAN. She looked up from the donut case, saw him, and gasped.
“Whoa.”
“Hey, what can I get for you?”
“You look exactly like Zachary Wilson.”
“No way.”
“I swear, you do.” She gave a bounce on her feet that had to be involuntary. “You’re him. Aren’t you? I saw online somewhere, now that I think about it. You were touring the Great Lakes or something.”
“Hmm.” He pretended to ponder.
“Oh. My. Squee.”
He laughed.
“This is unbelievable. Would—would you mind a selfie? If you don’t mind. You can totally say no.”
A lull had fallen over the bakery a minute before she walked in. He wasn’t shirking other customers. He stepped out from behind the counter, they posed in front of the donuts, and he held the phone at her request when she denigrated her “stubby little arms,” which appeared no shorter than average.
She was grinning as she took the phone back. “Best souvenir ever. Thank you so much.”
“No problem.” He might be grinning too.
“Oh, and can I get a custard donut?”
“Sure thing.”
As he wrapped it, her smile fell away. “Does this mean you’re retiring?”
He laughed at the word, so meaningless to him. But concern gathered lines in her face. She cared about his answer. He handed her the brown bakery bag. “On hiatus, that’s all.”
“And selling pastries?” Red pushed into her face. “Sorry. Way too personal.”
“When it’s time for me to retire, I’ll be public about it. Fair enough?”
“More than fair. Thanks. Wow. Um, thank you.”
He nodded. With a last smile she left, nearly bumping into the next customer, whose artificially silver hair was the only identifier he needed.
“Well, hi,” he said.
Rachel from the diner stood staring at him. “Hi yourself.”
She stopped a few steps past the doorway. Zac smiled, but she didn’t return it. The pause became awkward while he tried to figure out how to dispel it—treat her like a fan? Like a customer? She seemed like neither at the moment, ignoring the baked goods and somehow looking equally displeased with him.
“How can I help you?” he finally said.
“You work here?”
He gestured at himself behind the counter.
“I don’t understand. Are you secretly broke or something?”
Nothing remained of the Rachel from a few days ago. No melancholy, no vulnerability. Today she was studying him like an entomologist recording the habits of a newly discovered insect species. Time to erect some boundaries.
Which was just as well. Today he lacked the emotional energy to offer a listening ear. Even his smile felt plastic.
“Thanks for your concern, Rachel, but—”
“I mean, if you’ve got a job here, you must be planning to stay. For a while, at least?”
Information she didn’t have the right to, but the matter was self-explanatory. Zac shrugged.
She approached the counter, but now her focus was on the case of muffins. As she scrutinized them, she said, “You must be crazy overqualified to sell baked goods.”
She stepped the length of the case and he wondered, as he had last time, if someone abused her. But maybe she was the abuser. Maybe a tar pit of hatred boiled at the core of Rachel; maybe nothing did, no feeling at all. But no, that last wasn’t it. Even now she fizzed, a shaken soda bottle of uneasiness.
“Can I get one banana nut and one cranberry orange?”
“Sure.” He grabbed a pair of tongs and placed each carefully into its own small box. “Would you like a bag?”
“That would be perfect.”
He nestled them inside a brown paper bag and handed it to her, hit keys on the cash register, and told her the total before the machine had finished ringing.
“Good math skills,” she said.
“Old-school education.” One-room schoolhouse, to be precise.
She paid him cash, exact change. “I guess I’ll see you here again. I like this place.”
“Welcome anytime.”
“I’m a photographer. Sort of itinerant. There’s so much beauty in this area, I might stay too for a while.”
He nodded. She seemed to be making more than small talk, offering him a piece of
personal information to make up for her earlier forwardness.
“Have a favorite subject in the area?” he said.
Her eyes brightened. “There’s this gorgeous abandoned barn off the highway a few miles from here. Getting dilapidated but still majestic somehow. Maybe majestic because of the disrepair. But I wish someone would restore it.”
“Do you mean the one off French Road, about halfway to the national park?”
“Yes! You’ve seen it.”
“I’ve driven by a few times.” His time exploring the old structure felt suddenly private.
“I think I’ve captured every angle by now, every nail and wood grain. It’s such a neat old place.”
She looked over her shoulder as several people stepped up behind her, forming a line. The unsettled carbonation in her spurted everywhere. Zac tried not to wince.
Without one giveaway, she lifted her bag and moved aside for the others. “Hey, I’m all set. Go ahead.”
She walked out without another word, and customers began giving Zac their orders. He tried and failed not to analyze her as he boxed up a dozen cherry white chocolate chip cookies. People mattered; life mattered because of people. He couldn’t trust the human race, and he couldn’t renounce them either. Where did that leave him?
For the rest of the day, he served customers when they came in and paced behind the counter when they didn’t, hands latched behind his neck. He punched out at 1:15 and got his keys and phone from a corner nook on the kitchen counter. He’d missed a call.
Nate Giordano.
SEVENTEEN
No voice mail. Zac’s heart pounded as he let himself out of the kitchen, waved to Connie, and headed to the lot behind the bakery for his car. He got inside before hitting Redial.
No answer.
He clenched his eyes shut and saw three gravestones. His sons.
Months ago, Lucas had given himself a stress fracture while working his leg weights. He had freaked out on his parents, pleading with them not to let Zac know about his weak bones. Thinking Zac, stuntman extraordinaire, would be disappointed in him.
Curse that stupid TV show. Curse the serum in his veins. Curse a world that brought pain to kids. He’d done a lot of cursing lately. He tried the call again. No answer.
Even when Lucas’s leg had fractured, Nate had answered Zac’s call. Twenty-four hours had now passed. He could tell himself to wait for news. He could tell himself this might be no worse than a fractured bone. But he knew.
He dropped the phone into the center console and started the car. His eyes blurred. He blinked away the tears before they could fall. Lucas. The cancer in his body was on an assault mission, and Zac could do nothing for him.
Or maybe he could.
The thought flashed in his brain like the original camera flashbulbs that blinded and popped, dazzled and smoked. He could do something. He could save his boy.
He started to drive. One block over, he parked in the lot of Galloway’s Books.
Through the door he charged. Behind the counter, Tiana was ringing up a group of customers, but she glanced out of habit at his entrance. She went still for a moment as he barreled past her.
“David?” he said. Maybe snapped.
“In the stockroom.”
“Thanks.”
He rushed at right angles down aisles of bookshelves, toward the room in the far right corner of the store. Past rare hardbacks and well-read picture books and supermarket romances. Past the aisle of David’s adored Westerns, in which men knew what they had to do and did it. In which men preserved the lives of people who mattered to them, regardless of the cost.
He pushed open the stockroom door. David knelt before a few boxes, carefully turning the pages of a nineteenth-century hardback, no doubt inspecting it for damage or foxing or whatever else he looked for. He lifted his head, and his eyebrows arched.
“Zac.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Of course.” David set the book aside and stood. He looked around the room with a frown that said he hadn’t evaluated its appearance in a while. “No chairs.”
Zac gestured a dismissal. “I won’t be here long. Just want you to know I’ll be gone for a day or so.”
“Where this time?”
“About a year ago, I did a thing. You know what the Make-A-Wish Foundation is?”
David nodded then tilted his head. “You were someone’s wish?”
“His name’s Lucas.” The words seemed to turn a valve inside him, release the torrent of the rest. “He’s twelve, has osteosarcoma, they found it in the long bones of his legs but he’s been well for months now, they said cancer free but if it ever comes back or shows up in his lungs …”
The torrent dried up. He couldn’t speak the words.
“And now it has?” David said.
“He asked me to call. I have. Four times. I can’t get any—” He pressed his thumbs into his burning eyes. “I can’t get any news, which means there’s something wrong with him. Something really wrong.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s not why I’m— I’m going to fix it, David. I’m going to fix him.”
Caution smoothed the furrow of David’s brow. “How?”
Zac’s jaw tightened at the man’s willful obtuseness. “I’m going to give him blood. My blood.”
David folded his arms and studied him as if Zac had just proposed to fall off another tightrope. “I thought our blood was no good to the mortals.”
It wasn’t. Zac knew. Simon had tried to heal a mortal once. A long time ago. The woman had died anyway. But Zac’s blood had never been tried, and each of them was different. Simon’s blood could speed up the rejuvenation process for others; Zac healed faster from mortal injury than the other longevites did.
“They live in Ohio. I’ll start driving now, and by tomorrow he’ll be a healthy kid again.” If only Lucas would hold on until Zac got to him.
“He’s in a hospital?”
Stupid question. Zac huffed.
“So you’ll go in and offer them a blood sample. And they’ll run the usual tests and wonder about the altered nuclei.”
As if he hadn’t thought of that. “I have to risk it.”
“What will you tell his parents? His doctors?”
“I’ll tell them my blood can make him well and they’ll give it to him.”
“And you’ll tell them his body will stop aging from that day on? That he’ll be trapped with an adolescent physiology for the next hundred years?”
“We don’t know that. Maybe he’ll mature to adulthood and stop aging then.”
“Would you experiment on him without their consent, or the child’s?”
“It’s not an experiment.” His pulse began to pound in his ears. “I’m going to save him.”
David took a step closer, and his arms lowered to his sides. “You can’t do it, Zac.”
Zac was breathing as if he’d been out for a jog. He stepped up too, and David didn’t flinch as Zac closed the gap, invaded the man’s precious space bubble.
“You’re not going to stop me.”
“Revealing your blood chemistry holds risk for all of us. And not telling the mortals the whole truth would be an immoral use of—”
“Immoral?” He pushed closer to David. “Lucas will live. There’s nothing immoral in that.”
“You’re wrong.”
Not about this, he wasn’t. About a thousand other things, but not about this.
“I don’t care what you think of it,” he said. “I’m going to do it. I’ll be back here in a few days.”
David pushed him against the wall and held him there by the shoulders. “You’ll not do this thing to a child. You will not.”
The shock of the physical aggression broke something open in Zac. Something that had been waiting to break. He swung a fist, and David blocked him, and Zac swung again and despite his shorter height connected with David’s jaw. David staggered back into a stack of boxes, and the top one ti
pped and spilled books to the concrete floor.
David came at him again. Tried to pin him again. Zac dodged, and David raised his voice as if he knew the pulse in Zac’s ears might otherwise drown him out.
“It’s not your problem to fix.”
“Yeah?” Zac swung his fist again but pulled the punch in time to spare the drywall. “I don’t see anyone else fixing it.”
They stood in silence, breathing hard.
“The mortals don’t need to be fixed, my friend. Their role has been set.”
“Some role. Dying of cancer, getting murdered—”
A quiet choked sound.
David turned away and knelt before the spilled books. One had landed facedown, splayed open, spine cracked and pages falling loose. David set his hand on it, the gesture mournful. He lifted it gently though it was ruined. An old, old edition of MacDonald’s Dealings with the Fairies. As he set it aside on top of a tape-sealed box, his shoulders hunched.
“Supposing we found some way …” David cleared his throat. “I’d never do it to her, Zac. I’d never ask her to carry this.”
Tiana. “Even if the alternative was death—I mean, imminent, premature death?”
“Even then.”
“Maybe she’d want it.” Maybe Lucas would. Maybe his parents would.
“We’ve talked about it at length. She wouldn’t.”
“She’d rather die?”
“You speak of death as though it’s the last page of the story.”
Zac shook his head against the image of Ruth Wister’s tearful jubilant face. “I can’t go there right now.”
“It’s—”
“David, please.” He turned to go. He had to move, take action. “I can’t.”
He yanked the door open and left the room, began navigating the narrow aisles, working his way toward the front, walking under bare light-bulbs and ducking their trailing string pulls. His path ran into the returns cart, and he turned around and headed for the next aisle. A man and his young son were browsing the picture books. The man offered the kid a bottle of water, which David would object to had he seen it. As Zac neared them, the boy tipped the bottle to his lips and gargled water in the back of his throat.
From Sky to Sky Page 13