“I won’t let her live in isolation for another couple of centuries, and if I can, I’ll keep her from the cure in its current form.”
“Indeed, you’ll have to keep her from it,” David said quietly.
He’d been so still so long, his presence had all but melded into the wall behind him. He was a simple read most of the time, but now Zac had to work at it. Behind David’s veiled expression, desperation swelled. His voice held a deep hush.
“She’s seen us now. Knows who we are.” The brogue thickened with every sentence David spoke, r’s rolling and vowels morphing. “That knowledge will deepen her loneliness. She will end her life.”
The room was quiet a long moment until Cady whispered, “Then let her.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Let her.
No one spoke for a long moment, as Cady’s words settled around them like shed feathers drifting to the ground.
Finn stared at her as if he didn’t know her. “She’s a human soul.”
“And if Zac’s right, she’s innocent of malice,” Simon said.
Cady thrust her fingers into her hair as if to ease a headache. “So leave it up to her.”
Simon looked to Zac. “We might have to. You still have no way of contacting her.”
A low buzz of power was rising in the room, a decision coalescing between him and Simon, readiness to carry it out. The protector and servant in Simon was rising too. He might voice his certainty of failure, but he’d never refuse the mission. Zac thought through the impossibility of it. Rachel had wanted to be seen and heard the first time he met her. Even in the bakery, she had demonstrated that.
He pushed away from the wall. “I might be able to get her to contact me.”
Cady made a quiet choking sound.
“Look,” Simon said, “if she’s emotionally stable, it’ll be her choice. Permanent distance from us if that’s what she wants.”
Fine. The rest of them could let her go. Zac would stick by her regardless.
“No.”
The word was faint, hoarse, ragged to such a degree that Zac didn’t realize it was David’s voice until Tiana swiveled in her chair to look up at him. The man stood in his corner, tall frame seeming to have shrunk in the last few minutes, shoulders bowing as if they carried a world’s weight. When he met Zac’s eyes, the veil had dropped, and his expression had twisted into one of desperation.
“David,” Zac said.
He intended a ceding of the debate floor, but David seemed to take Zac’s speaking his name as a reproof. He looked from Zac to Simon, then to the others, his gaze coming to rest on Tiana. She nodded encouragement.
“She cannot distance herself from us,” David said. “She must not.”
“Why not?” Zac said.
“She must finish her work.” His brogue had grown so thick, Zac’s ears had to work to adapt. “The cure—she must finish it.”
“For us?”
“I know you don’t want it, Zac.” David looked around at them. “I venture to say none of ye want it, not today and perhaps not ever. But I—” His voice splintered into a rough inhale.
Tiana stood and went to him. She circled her arm around his waist and stood close to him, her eyes petitioning the rest of them. Maybe for compassion. Yes, her stakes were high in this room of ageless folk. She loved the man who now leaned against her.
“I need my years to begin counting again. I need my days to be numbered. Aye, Leon’s daughter has done great damage.” David looked to Cady and Finn with a nod of deference. “Indeed, it’s damage to all of us. But I ask that she not be punished with isolation.”
“All this is moot if we can’t find her,” Simon said.
David wrapped his arm around Tiana’s shoulders, and they seemed to face Simon’s words together.
“I’ll come with you,” David said.
A muscle twitched in Simon’s jaw. Any moment he’d go Action Hero on David. “Three people aren’t needed.”
“Zac can remain behind and recover.”
“No, I can’t.”
The tensions around him were pulling tighter: Cady’s hostility, David’s desperation, and Simon losing patience with both of them in his drive to stay on task. Zac drew a breath and forced his shoulders square, his posture straight.
“If I’m not there, she’s going to run again.”
“Then you and I will go.”
Simon crossed his arms, spread his feet, and glared.
Despite the vaulted ceiling, despite the sunlight spilling through the windows, the room began to close in.
“I have experience dissuading people from harming themselves.” Simon’s voice was a cool wall of stone against which David was welcome to bang his head. “And if she’s dead, I have experience making the scene clean and undetectable.”
David took a step away from Tiana to match Simon’s posture. “I need her research.”
“If we can’t bring her back, we’ll bring her work.”
“Neither of you will make that your priority.”
“No, David, I’m making the woman herself my priority, and if you—”
“Well, Finn?” Cady rose to her feet, wrapping her arms around herself as if she stood against a winter wind. “Why don’t you go too? The whole lot of you can go rescue her from herself, and I’ll go home and hold a one-person memorial for my manslaughtered family.”
The vise in Zac’s chest clamped down hard. He pushed to his feet, pushed past all of them toward the sliding door.
“Zac,” David said.
His fingers wrestled with the lock. He slid the door open and staggered onto the deck, into the bitter bleak afternoon that spit drizzle at him. He braced his right hand against the railing and the sting of the square wood edge against his palm reminded him of the torn scabs there. His left hand pressed tight against his side. He didn’t dare try for a deep breath, the kind that cleansed him of other people’s hurt.
The guys’ animosity was stifling enough, but Cady, what had flowed out in her words just now … Zac bowed over the rail and shut his eyes against her anguish. It wasn’t a word he used lightly, but it was Cady right now.
He forgot to regulate his breaths, gulped the cold air recklessly, and his tight lungs reacted with a cough. Zac sagged against the deck rail. Wretched, undying body that still cracked and snapped and tore and bruised.
“Zac.”
He couldn’t straighten. “Yeah.”
David stepped outside. “Are you with Simon in this? You want to prevent me from—”
“Stop.”
“I must be—”
“Stop talking.”
David approached, studying Zac now, a crease forming between his eyes. “What is it you need?”
“I need you to shut up.”
David stood at his side as Zac sucked breaths through clenched teeth. He kept his eyes shut until the pressure in the room behind them released its grip. When he could, he raised his head.
“That thing Moira calls extra empathy.”
“Aye.”
“It doesn’t hit this hard most of the time, but I … I haven’t been sleeping, and I’m …”
David nodded. “Worn down.”
“Would you pray for me?” The words he’d hoped to say to Tiana left him now without forethought.
“I do so often.”
Zac tried to smirk and failed. “I need a lot of it.”
“Everyone does.”
“I spoke to Him last night.”
David grasped the deck rail in a gesture that didn’t try to hide his investment in the topic.
“But I don’t know where I go from here,” Zac said. “There. Wherever.”
“He’ll show you.”
This my son.
“He might be trying to. I can be a little willful.” Zac’s mouth tugged on one side, but again the mask refused to fit. “I don’t know, man. I’m … I’m uneasy, I guess.”
“About what?”
Uneasy was hardly the word for the qu
aking in the core of him when he imagined himself standing before Jehovah Elohim without excuse. One more example of Zac’s cowardice, especially compared to David’s confused expression at the idea of a man’s uneasiness before the Almighty. Well, David Galloway had probably never feared anything in his life. Zac forced his posture straighter and ignored the stabbing of his ribs. Couldn’t have this conversation bowed over like a weakling.
“I broke a hundred-year silence, you know?”
“Aye, and He heard. ’Tis a good thing.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“How can it be other than good?”
So much faith in this guy. Zac wouldn’t mind borrowing a tenth of it. “I had the gall to knock on His front door last night after a freaking century. He should cast me out of His house forever.”
“But He won’t.”
Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him.
Zac propped his forehead in one hand, all out of words. His head buzzed and ached, his back and hip throbbed, and none of it hurt half as much as his ribs. He tried to gather himself, but his legs turned to rubber and let him slide down toward the waiting floor of the deck.
“Zac.”
David gripped his forearm. Zac drooped forward, and David caught his other shoulder.
“Sit, friend.”
“Okay.”
David frowned at the reply. He propped Zac against the deck’s half wall and crouched beside him. “Your strength is sapped.”
“Fair summary.”
“You didn’t eat.”
“Oh, right. Guess not.” Two bites didn’t count in a metabolic sense.
“Wait here.”
Zac looked down at his limp hands, his legs stretched out in front of him, and chuckled. Groaned. No more laughing for the next six weeks.
David strode into the lit house, disappearing around the corner into the living room. He returned in minutes with Zac’s food, a bottle of water, and Tiana. She held a pill bottle.
Tiana knelt beside him and offered him the dish of spaghetti. “I can microwave it, if you want.”
“No, this is fine.” He forked a bite, chewed slowly. “How’s Cady?”
“She went out. Said she needed some space.”
“Oh.” Zac leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“Zac,” Tiana said. “How many hours since you had pain meds?”
“Haven’t yet.”
She huffed and popped the top open on the ibuprofen. “Get these into your system while you finish eating.”
He accepted two pills from her hand, then the water bottle. Tiana watched him swallow the pills.
“I’m all right,” he said, and when she rolled her eyes, “I have to find Rachel. I can’t worry about trivial stuff right now.”
She gave a slow nod. “I guess it’s trivial from your perspective. From the mortal perspective, it feels like you almost died again.”
He smiled.
“What?”
“Was picturing Simon’s reaction to that.”
“Because he cares.”
“More like he relishes my humiliation.”
But the words he had overheard warmed him. It was stupid to cup those words in his hand and keep them. He’d known the man would call him brother just as Zac would say of Simon. Still, though.
Maybe he was just too tired.
“Well, allow me to say as your friend and former fangirl, I’d love it if you would stop ending up hurt.”
“Former?” He grinned, and this felt real too.
She shrugged. “They’re mutually exclusive terms. Obviously friend wins out.”
His eyes burned. Yep, definitely too tired.
“Feeling steady yet?”
“I think so.”
He’d eaten the meatballs, the buttery breadstick, and most of the pasta while they sat there. He set the plastic dish aside and planted his palms on the floor to push himself up, but David had already moved to his uninjured side and offered his arm. Zac gripped it and let David take most of his weight. On his feet, he breathed as deeply as he dared then took a step on his own. His legs held him up, and the headache was fading, though the pain in his ribs hadn’t eased yet.
“Thanks,” he said to both of them.
Tiana squeezed his arm then looked from him to David. “I’ll be inside.”
Right. They hadn’t yet begun to argue.
“Okay,” Zac said. “Bring it.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No matter what Simon or I have to say.”
David’s jaw hardened as he turned his head away. “I’m not a liability.”
“Not typically, no. Right now you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s a means to an end for you.”
“That’s not true.” The brogue was back in force.
“What did you imagine when you theorized her suicide? Was it loss of the woman or loss of what the woman might be able to produce?”
Shock smoothed the fury from David’s face. He backed a step away from Zac, bumped into the patio table, and sank into one of the plastic chairs.
“She might have stopped at some hotel along the highway last night and injected herself. Have you even wondered about her soul?”
David bowed his head.
“So no, David, you don’t come with us. Because she’ll see the way you’re viewing her.” Zac made no attempt to steady his voice. David had to hear the urgency, had to understand. “And that might be enough for her to go through with it.”
“Lord God forgive me.”
The man had gone from bullish to penitent in three-point-two seconds. He covered his face with one hand and sat a long moment. When he looked up, his eyes were glossy.
“A day or two ago, Tiana joked about how much she reads, that she’ll be blind at forty.”
Zac nodded. “And it reminded you.”
“I didn’t need reminding.”
“No, I guess not.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No.” Zac sighed and pressed a hand to support his ribs. “I don’t.”
His wife had died so young, before he’d known he couldn’t. And then there had been Moira, only Moira. When she wasn’t in his bed, he slept alone, despite every recent rumor to the contrary. Not because of moral fortitude, he knew to his shame. Because he couldn’t share his body with a woman and not share his soul. He wasn’t capable of detachment.
And he couldn’t endure the kind of grief David would endure.
“It’s nearer every day.” The words broke. David turned his face away. “She is sweet beauty to me, warmth and kindness. She is home, and when she leaves me I’ll be …”
“Hey.” Zac came near and set a hand on the man’s quaking shoulder. “Is something wrong? Is Tiana sick?”
“Aye, she’s sick with mortality, man. She’s dying daily, and I cannot stop it, and I cannot join her journey.”
His friend’s burden settled onto Zac, dragged at him like sodden clothes on a man overboard. He tried to shed it, to keep hold of the necessary focus.
“I hear you, David. I do. But Rachel is at risk right now, this minute.”
“I know it.” David swiped a hand under his eyes. “I’ll not lose sight of it again, God help me.”
“We have to do something.”
“What is there to do?”
“I have an idea.” An idea that galled him, but to save her life he would do it.
TWENTY-SIX
The last thing he wanted to do was go online, but it was the only way he might find Rachel. Cursed media generation. Then again, twenty years ago he’d have had no chance of finding her at all. First things first: get rid of the desperate post reaching out to a dead man. But as Zac’s cursor hovered over DELETE, he froze.
Simon joined him, David, and Tiana, taking the last empty chair at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?”
“She saw this.” Zac turned the laptop to face the others, though the stupidity of t
he post now brought heat into his cheeks. “She knew I’d tried to contact Doc.”
They were nodding but slowly, failing to follow his line of thought.
“Suppose she’s one of my followers.”
“One of the million?” Tiana propped her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.
She looked young but not ageless. Zac swallowed. If she lived to be ninety, her time on earth was a third over.
He cleared his throat and hoped they would think he was simply still hoarse. “Slight exaggeration.”
She gestured to the screen, and he turned it back around. Shoot, she was right, which meant he’d garnered another fifty thousand in the last two days. Since the snapshot in the bookstore.
“Okay, but maybe she liked the post to Doc. There’s only a few thousand of those.”
“You want our help trying to find a profile that fits?” Tiana’s eyebrow was cocked with a tinge of skepticism, but she was pulling out her phone.
“Yeah, or …” Zac kneaded his forehead. Had he bruised his head too? Felt like it. “Maybe I have to post something to her.”
“And hope she replies,” Simon said.
“Yeah.”
“Does that sound like something she would do?”
“I don’t know her, man. I just know we might be against a clock, and if she already …” He couldn’t say it.
Simon was already nodding. “If she’s cured, we have about thirty hours from that point.”
Bless the man, Simon understood. Thirty hours to find her and ensure she didn’t die alone. The tide of it rose inside Zac. He would do this for her, if he could do nothing else.
“Okay,” he said. “Anyone who wants to help, let’s look at the post likes first. Just in case.”
“On it.” Tiana’s thumbs blurred over her phone.
David tilted back in his chair and crossed his arms.
Zac rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’ll be useless to me, you troglodyte.”
“My apologies.” He seemed to mean it.
For a silent twenty minutes, Zac and Tiana searched, she starting from the most recent and he loading the whole list to start from the bottom up. Simon and David wandered out of the room.
The number of unread notifications ticked upward while Zac scrolled. He huffed, blinked to keep his eyes from glazing, and it had increased by five. He huffed again.
From Sky to Sky Page 20