by Jordan Dane
He stared into the fire as if he still puzzled things out and remembered.
“What are you talking about?” I grimaced. “Wouldn’t she have seen you like I did…because she died?”
“She called your name and you heard it, even after you grabbed my hand. Remarkable.” Distracted, he ignored my question as if he hadn’t heard me.
“A-Abbey?” My mother’s voice.
Death conjured the memory of my mother’s voice as easily as he controlled the ravens. I heard her again in my mind as if she was with me now. She spoke my name like she’d done on the day she died.
I shut my eyes to make the memory stay.
“Yes, I…remember,” I whispered.
After I’d taken Death’s hand at the accident, my mother had called my name and broken his connection with my soul. Until now, that’s all I remembered, but Death’s version of what really happened would not be rushed. He had his reasons for telling me everything.
“Dying. The word is…almost beautiful, isn’t it? It sounds very much like it is—that one final breath,” he said.
He had drawn out the word on his lips to show me what he meant.
“There are those who believe that I will be the last to die,” he said.
I tried to grasp the magnitude of what he’d shared with me, but I couldn’t come close to imagining it. An eternity of collecting and caring for human souls until the end of time—alone—was beyond my comprehension.
“You’ve seen my burden now, with your own eyes. My spirit harvests countless souls that I look after and hold in my embrace for all of eternity, until it will no longer be my responsibility. And before you ask—yes, I remember each one. It is my duty…and my privilege to remember. Every human soul leaves a mark on me.”
The fire shed light on his face that warmed his expression, making the deathlike pallor of his skin disappear. Or maybe—because he talked about my mother—I needed him to look human again.
“Your mother was special,” he told me. “The good ones, like your mother, are light. Their souls weigh no more than a feather. I thought you should know that you’re still alive because she made a bargain…with me.”
“A bargain? What bargain?”
“I had come to take one soul and she gave me hers. She took your place, Abbey.”
“No, that can’t be.” I shook my head. “How is that even possible? If I was the one who should have died, how can you make a deal like that? It should have been me.”
“Perhaps, but that’s not what happened.”
“You took my mother from me. How could you do that?” I felt the heat rush to my face and heard the anger in my voice. I didn’t even know what I’d said.
“If you had died that day, she still would have been separated from you.” He presented his logic without emotion, but whenever he talked about my mother, I saw a change in him.
“When she gave her life so you could live, I harvested her soul and she became a part of me, a part I’ve never forgotten,” he said. “Feeling the love she had for you, and seeing her sacrifice, that spawned something in me that I have never felt before. Sometimes when someone dies, the love stays…in me, Abbey. I had to know what it felt like.”
“To be human?”
“To be loved.” His eyes welled with tears that glistened in the firelight until one trickled down his cheek.
“Your mother gave her life for you. That was her wish and I believe her sacrifice had purpose. Celebrate her life and the way she loved you…still loves you.”
I took a deep breath and let what he’d said settle into my brain. I did want to celebrate Mom’s life, but I couldn’t do it at the expense of Nate. My mother had died. She wasn’t coming back. Accepting what she’d done for me would take time. But no matter how Death justified what he’d done to be with me—and experience what it felt like to become human—nothing would excuse the way he’d highjacked an innocent life.
That wasn’t…human. Not even a little.
“What about Nate?”
“The human capacity for love was the very reason I chose him.” He raised his chin like he’d bestowed an honor. “You already had feelings for the boy. I knew you’d let me near you if I looked like him.”
“But that was wrong. How could you ruin his life, because of me?” I shook my head. “Did you have something to do with what happened to him?”
When he didn’t answer, I crossed my arms and forced myself to look him in the eye. I had to be strong, for Nate.
“You told me once, when we were talking about suicide, that to squander a life was…a waste. Was that just bullshit?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Because the way I see it, you messed with Nate’s life. You took his body like you had a right to it. If you’re the keeper of souls, and every one of them is precious to you, why is it easy for you to take his life like it doesn’t matter? He’s not a pawn for you to play with. This isn’t a game.”
“I didn’t know any of this would happen. I thought I could control everything. But can’t you see? I had to do it, even if it was only for a blink of an eye in time. Love is the most powerful emotion humans possess. Until your mother planted a seed of it in me, I could only glimpse it from the outside.”
He reached for my arm and wouldn’t let me go.
“I came here to see you again, Abbey. Having your mother’s soul within me, I knew if I came to you, that you would trigger her love for you, inside me. And you did.”
For the first time, Death grinned, but I couldn’t be happy for him. All I felt was profound sadness for Nate.
“In this body…” He opened his arms and looked down. “I had hopes that you might feel the same love…for me. I had to know both sides of love. Don’t you see? I thought I could control everything.”
This time when he raised his hand to stroke my hair, I flinched. I couldn’t forget I was in the company of Death, even if he did look like Nate Holden. When he saw my reaction, he took a step back and clenched his jaw.
“But you didn’t control it. Nate’s in trouble, isn’t he?” I urged, not waiting for his answer. “You have to do something. You can’t let him die.”
When I reached for his arm to beg for Nate’s life, he turned toward the fire and shut me down cold. Any connection we had, when he’d talked with respect for my mother, was gone now—and from the look on his sickly face, he felt it, too.
“If you’re Death and you’re supposed to live until there’s no one else, what’s wrong with you? You look…sick and weak. How can that be?” I had a bad feeling about the way he looked and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. “You’re dying too, aren’t you? What happens to you if Nate dies? Tell me.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“No, that’s not possible,” I argued. “What about your duty? You’re the guardian of souls, an angel. What would happen to all the souls you have inside? What would happen to my mother’s soul if you…died?”
“What I did—taking control of a living body—that’s never happened before. I fully expect to be punished for what I did. It may not be up to me anymore.” He shook his head. “I never intended to hurt Nate, but I fear that I have. It may be too late to do anything about it.”
“Why are you saying that? I know Nate is trapped on Denali. What’s happening to him?”
“He’s dying.”
“No, you can’t let that happen. You can fix it. You’re an angel.”
“I wish it was that simple.” He gazed into the darkness beyond the fire, as if he saw past the clearing and the growing darkness. “Right now, rescuers are digging him out of a crevasse. If they find his body without its soul, he’ll be dead. After they discover him like that, I won’t be able to bring him back. He’s dead, because to them, that’s what they see.”
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��Then switch back.” Even though I heard the anger in my voice again, I didn’t stop. “Let him have his life back. It’s his life, not yours.”
Death looked at me as if I betrayed him. I asked him to give back Nate’s body as if that was as simple as swapping jackets. That’s when his own words came back to me, when he’d said that he envied humans and that his greatest fear would be enduring an existence of feeling nothing. That’s what I’d asked him to do, to go back to that reality and give up being human, something he wanted with all his heart—something he’d learned from my mother.
Now that he’d tasted what it meant to be human, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been more merciful if he’d never known those feelings at all? For him to experience being flesh and blood, only to have that taken away now, felt beyond cruel.
But so was getting robbed of your life—and that’s what had happened to Nate. How could Death expect me not to—
“You said before that you were afraid of me choosing sides,” I said. “I didn’t understand what you meant, but I think I do now. I choose Nate, the real Nate.”
“Abbey, don’t do this.”
“I have to. No one is speaking for him.”
“But I’ve told you. It might already be too late. Everything is out of my control.”
“No, I can’t accept that. I won’t.”
I realized how stupid I sounded. I was a kid, arguing with Death like I had something real to say. But by the look on his face, nothing had gotten through. I had to get his attention and I had to mean every word.
Nate’s life depended on it.
“You’re the one who bargained with my mother. You took her life instead, because you can do that.”
Wringing my cold trembling fingers, I took a shaky breath before I said the only thing left to say to Death.
“If you need a soul to collect, take my soul instead.”
On Denali
After he heard a loud crack and the rumble of heavy snow crashing down into a breach, Bob looked up the slope and squinted into the dying light as the mountain rescue crew raced for a dark opening in the snow. On instinct, he followed the men with barely a glance over his shoulder, calling out orders to Mike Childers.
“Mike, stay put. I’m going up,” he yelled.
Even over the noise of the wind, Bob heard the zing of ropes that had snapped to a stop. Cool under fire and well trained, each member of the mountain rescue team carried out their assignments without saying much.
“I got tension,” one man called out as he dug in and gripped his rope.
With his gear working as it should, the man who had fallen through was held in place, swinging by his climbing harness and belay loop. By the time Bob got to the dark chasm, he saw the fallen ranger waving his hand, giving his thumbs-up signal to Lewis.
“I’m okay.”
Layers of snow formed a solid wall of ice where the ranger had fallen through, but beneath those layers was a dark expanse that the waning sunlight couldn’t reach. Bob peered through the shadows, hoping for a glimpse of Nate and Josh, but it was too dark to see anything except the suspended ranger in his red parka, swaying by his lifeline.
After the ranger in charge saw his man was safe, he stared into the deep fissure, smiling at his guy. The worried look on Lewis’s face, that had been there only seconds earlier, had vanished.
“You always were an overachiever, Nelson,” Lewis said.
“You know it, sir.” The guy, who looked to be in his twenties, grinned as he swung from his harness like a child on a swing. His voice magnified and reverberated within the cavern below. “If I’m good to go, you can lower me. No sense wasting this great vantage point. I can do a little recon.”
“That was my plan. Nice of you to fall on the sword.”
“Anytime, sir.”
With the angle of the sun, only shadows stretched into the hole. There wasn’t enough light for Bob to see beyond the young ranger as he dangled and swung across the tight opening.
“We’re gonna lower Nelson down to check things out.” Lewis grabbed Bob’s shoulder and fixed his gaze on him. “Your boy’s beacon is stronger now. Can you hear that?”
Bob hadn’t noticed, but Lewis was right. Hearing that the rapid-fire beeping had grown more intense, he couldn’t help but react. His heart raced way too fast and his breathing at this high altitude made his lungs burn. When one of the rangers readied first-aid gear and two rescue gurneys, nothing could keep Bob from hoping that his son and Josh were together and alive.
Using a series of Prusik rope knots and Munter hitches tied to a system of karabiners and pulleys, Lewis’s team worked fast to secure and anchor Nelson’s tie line before they set up a transfer-load escape system. To handle the ranger’s suspended body weight and keep the ropes from cutting into the ice, the men wedged a knapsack between the tie line and the edge of the crevasse to act as a buffer.
Now with Nelson cinched tight and the other rangers lowering him, Bob watched as a flashlight beam moved in the growing darkness. The young ranger looked for any sign of the boys.
“Give me slack,” he called up with his voice echoing from the hole, “until I yell stop.”
The incessant beeping of the tracking beacon would have gotten on Bob’s frayed nerves, but that noise meant they’d found the boys. To Bob, he couldn’t remembering hearing a sweeter sound.
“Stop! I see something.”
When Nelson yelled from the icy chasm, Bob held his next breath and waited.
“Yeah, I see a glove…and a boot under some snow,” he called out. “I think I got him.”
Him? Bob’s throat wedged tight. He prayed they’d found both boys.
“You see two of ’em?” Lewis must have read his mind.
“Can’t tell, sir. Lower me down. There’s a ledge. I can swing over.”
With a stern face, Lewis gave a nod to his team and they strained to lower his man a few more yards. As the rope hissed over the canvas knapsack, Bob shut his eyes and prayed, listening to every sound coming from the cavern. When the rope went slack and the tension loosened on the metal pulleys, he heard that clacking sound and opened his eyes.
Ranger Lewis called down to his man, “Is the boy alive? Are they both there?”
After a long silence, Nelson’s deflated voice came back up the hole.
“I found both of them, sir. One’s got a compound leg fracture. He’s in bad shape.” As Nelson moved, every sound he made magnified and welled up through the breach. “I’m not finding a pulse on the other one.”
“Let’s get those boys out of there,” Ranger Lewis said, ordering his team into action with a wave of his arm.
Lewis told Bob that both boys would get medical attention at Fairbanks Memorial, the nearest acute-care facility, but his reassurance got lost. With Bob being in shock and numb, not much of what Ranger Lewis had said sunk in.
Not after Bob heard that one of the boys didn’t have a pulse.
Abbey
Standing before Death with my offer to him still ringing in my head—“take my soul instead”—I wanted to look sure and brave, but all I had inside me was tapioca pudding. I didn’t want to die and I’d never had a death wish, not even after Mom died. (Well, maybe that’s a lie, but I got through that.) Now my future would be in Death’s hands. I suddenly knew how my mother felt. The decision she made had been an impossible one, but I understood it because Death hadn’t left me a choice, either.
I already knew what it felt like to live with the guilt of causing someone to die and I was tired of carrying that burden. Death helped me see that, so the irony wasn’t missed on me that Death had watched me paint myself in that corner again. Only this time, Nate’s life hung in the balance and I was the only one who could bargain for him.
I would gamble on Death’s brand-new humanity and the love I felt certain he had for me—my mother’s love—that he wouldn’t take me up on my offer. But if he did, I wouldn’t back down. My mother showed her love for me with a sacrifice only she could make. How could I let Nate die and do nothing?
If that happened, my life and her death would mean nothing. I waited for him to offer his hand to me. When he did, I would take it.
“Whatever happens…after tonight, we will not see each other,” he said. After he glimpsed my face, he turned toward the fire. “I know your tears aren’t for me, but maybe one day I won’t be beyond your forgiveness.”
He repeated the words about forgiveness that he’d said to me before, when I didn’t understand what he’d meant. Now I did. The hurt in his voice gripped my heart in a way that I knew would never let go. When I met his gaze, I didn’t see Nate anymore.
I saw someone different—a boy I would miss.
“I want you to know. The time I’ve spent with you has meant everything to me. Whether I face an eternity of nothing or it all ends tonight…” He looked up from the fire and fixed his beautiful blue eyes on me. “You were worth the risk, Abbey.”
Without saying anything more, he vanished in the split second it took me to blink. Like the embers off the fire, he splintered into pieces that spiraled through the smoke. After he disappeared into the darkening sky, he left me alone with an aching emptiness.
I had no idea what Death had decided.
All I knew was that he didn’t offer me his hand. He and his raven were gone, but if one human boy’s life was truly beyond his control, that terrified me. In the deepening shadows of dusk, I started down the mountain with my mind a total fog, except for one thing.
I had to know what happened to Nate.
Chapter 14
Near Healy, Alaska
I raced down the steep trail through the switchbacks and when I got closer to our cabin, I was breathless and had a stitch in my side. The crisp mountain air that smelled of pine, my halfway boulder landmarks and every glimpse I usually took of the lake between the snow-covered evergreens—my entire trip down the mountain had gone by in a blur.