by J. R. Ward
Jim frowned in the darkness that surrounded him. The English voice came from over on the right, and the immediate temptation was to open his eyes, lift his head, and see what was doing.
Training overrode the impulse. Thanks to being in the military, he’d learned that when you came to and didn’t know where you were, it was better to possum it until you had some intel.
Moving imperceptibly, he flattened his hands out and felt around. He was on something soft, but it was springy, like a deep-napped rug or…grass?
Inhaling deep, his nose confirmed his palms’ observation. Shit, fresh grass?
In a rush, his accident at the job site came back to him—except, what the hell? Last thing he knew he’d had one hundred and twenty volts of electricity sizzling through his body—so it seemed logical to assume that if he could still string two thoughts together he must be alive and therefore in a hospital. Except as far as he knew, hospital beds were not covered in…sod.
And in the States most nurses and doctors didn’t sound like British lords or call each other lawns.
Jim opened his eyes. The sky overhead was dappled with cotton-puff clouds, and though there was no sun to see, the glow was all summer Sunday—not just bright and stormless, but relaxing, as if there were nothing urgent to do, nothing to worry about.
He looked over to the voices…and decided he was dead.
In the shade of a castle’s great stone walls, four guys with croquet mallets were standing around a bunch of wickets and colored balls. The quartet was dressed in whites, and one had a pipe and another a pair of round, rose-tinted glasses. The third had his hand on the head of an Irish wolfhound. Number four had his arms crossed over his chest and an expression like he was bored.
Jim sat up. “Where the hell am I?”
The blond who was lining up his shot glared over and talked around his pipe. Which made his accent even more high brow. “One moment, if you please.”
“I say you keep talking,” his cross-armed, dark-haired buddy muttered—in the same dry voice that had woken Jim up. “He’s cheating anyway.”
“I knew you would come around,” Round Glasses chirped in Jim’s direction. “I knew it! Welcome!”
“Ah, you’re awake,” the one next to the wolfhound chimed in. “How lovely to meet you.”
Goddamn, they were all good-looking, with the no-care-in-the-world vibe that resulted from not just being rich, but coming from generations of wealth.
“Are we done with the chatter, lads?” Pipe Guy, who was evidently named Nigel, looked around. “I should like some silence.”
“Then why don’t you stop telling us what to do?” the dark-haired one said.
“Pop off, Colin.”
With that, the pipe was shifted around to the other side of the mouth, the shot was taken with a crack, and a red-striped ball rolled through a pair of wickets and struck a blue one.
The blond smiled like the prince he no doubt was. “Now it’s time for tea.” He glanced over and met Jim’s eyes. “Well, come on, then.”
Dead. He was definitely dead and in Hell. Had to be it. Either that or this was some weird-ass dream because he’d passed out in front of the TV and there’d been a Four Weddings and a Funeral marathon on.
Jim got to his feet as the lads and the wolfhound headed for a table set with silver and china, and without a lot of options, he followed them over to “tea.”
“Won’t you have a seat?” Nigel said, indicating the vacant chair.
“I’ll stand, thanks. What am I doing here?”
“Tea?”
“No. Who are—”
“I am Nigel. This rather acerbic fool”—the blond nodded at the dark-haired guy—“is Colin. Byron is our resident optimist and Albert is the dog lover.”
“I go by Bertie to friends,” Mr. Canine said as he stroked the wolfhound’s ruff. “So, please, by all means. And this is the darling Tarquin.”
Byron pushed his rose-colored roundies higher on his straight nose and clapped. “I just know this tea is going to be fabulous.”
Sure it was. Absolutely.
It’s finally happened, Jim thought. I’ve finally lost my damn mind.
Nigel picked up a silver pot and started pouring into porcelain cups. “I can imagine you are a bit surprised to be here, Jim.”
Ya think? “How do you know my name, and what is this place?”
“You’ve been chosen for an important mission.” Nigel put down the pot and hit the sugar cubes.
“A mission?”
“Yes.” Nigel lifted his tea with his pinkie extended, and as he looked over the rim, it was hard to pin down his eye color. It was neither blue nor gray nor green…but it wasn’t brown or hazel either.
Good God, it was a color Jim had never seen before. And all of them had it.
“Jim Heron, you are going to save the world.”
There was a long pause. During which the four lads looked at him with straight faces.
When no one else started laughing, Jim picked up the slack, throwing back his head and belly-rolling it so hard, tears spiked into his eyes.
“This is not a joke,” Nigel snapped.
When Jim caught his breath, he said, “It sure the hell is. Man, what a fucked-up dream this is.”
Nigel put his cup down, got to his feet, and walked over the bright green grass. Up close, he smelled like fresh air, and those weird eyes of his were positively hypnotic.
“This. Is. Not. A. Dream.”
The bastard punched Jim in the arm. Just balled up his smooth hand into a fist and fired the thing hard.
“Fuck!” Jim rubbed the sting—which was considerable. Pipe Guy might have been built lean and long, but he packed a punch all right.
“Permit me to repeat myself. You are not dreaming and this is not a joke.”
“Can I hit him next?” Colin said with a lazy grin.
“No, you have horrid aim and you might strike him somewhere delicate.” Nigel returned to his seat and took a small sandwich off a wheel of perfect little snackie-poos. “Jim Heron, you are the tiebreaker in the game, a man agreed upon by both sides to be on the field and settle the score.”
“Both sides? Tiebreaker? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You are going to have seven chances. Seven opportunities to influence your fellow man. If you perform as we believe you will, the outcomes shall save the souls in question and we shall prevail over the other side. As long as that win occurs, humanity will continue to thrive and all shall be well.”
Jim opened his mouth to shoot off some shit, but the expressions of the lads stopped him. Even the smart-ass in the group was looking serious.
“This has to be a dream.”
No one got up to punch him again, but as they stared at him with such gravity, he began to get the creeping suspicion this might be something other than his subconscious talking while he was out cold.
“This is very real,” Nigel said. “I realize it is not where you saw yourself going, but you have been chosen and that is the way of it.”
“Assuming you’re not full of shit, what if I say no?”
“You won’t.”
“But what if I do.”
Nigel looked out over the distance. “Then everything ends as it stands now. Neither good nor bad wins and we are all, including yourself, over. No Heaven, no Hell, all that has gone before wiped clean. The mystery and the miracle of creation over and done and dusted.”
Jim thought back on his life…the choices he’d made, the things he’d done. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“It isn’t.” Colin drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. “Think about it, Jim. If nothing exists anymore, than all that went before was meaningless. So therefore your mother doesn’t matter. Are you prepared to say that she is nothing? That her love for you, her darling son, is not valuable?”
Jim exhaled as if he’d been hit again, the pain of his past ricocheting through his chest. He hadn’t thought of his mother for yea
rs. Maybe decades. She was always with him, of course, the only warm spot in his cold heart, but he did not allow himself to think of her. Ever.
And yet suddenly, and from out of nowhere, he had an image of her…one so familiar, so vivid, so achingly real, it was as if a piece of the past had been implanted into his brain: She was cooking him eggs over the old stove in their ancient kitchen. Her grip on the iron pan handle was strong, her back straight, her dark hair cut short. She’d started out as the wife of a farmer and ended up as the farmer herself, her body as wiry and tough as her smile had been soft and kind.
He’d loved his mother. And although she had given him eggs every morning, he remembered that particular breakfast. It was the last she’d ever made—not just for him, but for anybody.
She’d been murdered come nightfall.
“How do you know…about her,” Jim asked with a voice that cracked.
“We have a vast knowledge of your life.” Colin cocked an eyebrow. “But that begs the question. What say you, Jim? Are you prepared to relegate everything she did and everything she was to—as you would put it so bluntly—shit?”
Jim didn’t like Colin very much.
“That’s all right,” Nigel murmured. “We don’t care for him ourselves.”
“Untrue,” Bertie piped up. “I adore Colin. He hides behind his gruffness, but he is a wonderful—”
Colin’s voice sliced through the compliment. “You are such a fairy.”
“I’m an angel, not a fairy, and so are you.” Bertie glanced over at Jim and resumed playing with Tarquin’s ear. “I know you’re going to do the right thing, because you loved your mother too much not to. Do you recall how she used to wake you up when you were small?”
Jim closed his eyes hard. “Yeah.”
His bed growing up had been a small twin in one of the farmhouse’s drafty upstairs rooms. He’d slept in his clothes most nights, either because he was too exhausted from working out in the cornfields to change or because it was too cold to lie down without multiple layers.
On school days, his mother had come in singing to him….
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…. You make me happy when skies are gray…. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”
Except he wasn’t the one who had left her, and when she had gone away, it hadn’t been voluntarily. She had fought like a wildcat to stay with him, and he’d never forget the look in her eyes right before she’d passed. She’d stared out of her beaten face and spoken to him with her blue eyes and her bloody lips, because she’d had no more air left in her lungs to carry her voice.
I love you forever, she had mouthed. But run. Get out of the house. Run. They’re upstairs.
He had left her where she lay, half-naked, bloody, and violated. Ducking out the back door, he’d raced to the truck he wasn’t old enough to drive, and his feet had barely touched the pedals as he’d started the thing.
They had come after him, and to this day, he had no idea how he’d managed to get that old truck to go that fast down that dusty dirt road.
Bertie spoke up quietly. “You must accept this as both reality and your destiny. For her sake if for no one else’s.”
Jim opened his eyes and looked at Nigel. “Is there a Heaven?”
“We are on the edge of it right now.” Nigel nodded over his shoulder at the castle wall, which ran off into the distance. “On the far side of our gracious manse, the souls of the good tally in fields of flowers and trees, their hours spent in sunshine and warmth, their cares and worries no more, their pain forgotten.”
Jim stared at the footbridge over the moat and the double doors that were each the size of an RV. “Is she there?”
“Yes. And if you do not prevail, she will be ever gone as if she never was.”
“I want to see her.” He took a step forward. “I have to see her first.”
“You may not enter. The quick are not welcome therein, only the dead.”
“Fuck that and fuck you.” Jim walked and then ran for the bridge, his boots thundering across the grass, then echoing on the wooden planks over the quicksilver river. When he got to the doors, he grabbed onto the great iron pulls, yanking so hard his back muscles screamed.
Fisting up one of his hands, he pounded at the oak, then pulled again. “Let me through! Let me through, you son of a bitch!”
He needed to know for himself that she wasn’t hurt anymore and that she didn’t suffer and that she was okay. Needed that reassurance so badly, he felt like he was shattering as he fought to get past the barrier, his battering fists driven by the memory of his beloved mother on the linoleum in the kitchen, the stab wounds in her chest and her neck bleeding out onto the floor, her legs spread, her mouth gaping open, her eyes terrified and imploring him to save himself, save himself, save himself….
The demon in him came out.
Everything went white as rage took over. He knew he was hitting something hard, that his body was going wild, that when someone put a hand on his shoulder he took them down to the ground and pummeled them.
But he heard nothing and saw nothing.
The past always unwrapped him, which was why he made a point of never, ever thinking about it.
When Jim regained consciousness for the second time, he was in the same position he’d been in for the first coming-around: flat on his back, grass beneath his palms, eyes closed.
Except this time there was something wet on his face.
Popping his lids, he found Colin’s face right above his own, and as the guy’s blood dripped onto Jim’s cheeks, the “rain” was explained.
“Ah, you’re awake, well-done.” Colin pulled back a fist and cracked Jim right in the puss.
As pain exploded, Bertie let out a cry, Tarquin whimpered, and Byron rushed over.
“Right, now we’re even.” Colin hopped off and shook out his hand. “You know, taking human form has its benefits, indeed. That felt rather nice.”
Nigel shook his head. “This is not going well.”
Jim had to agree as he sat up and accepted the handkerchief Byron held out. While he stemmed the bleeding from his nose, he couldn’t believe he’d exploded like that at those castle doors, but then he was always shocked afterward.
Nigel eased down on his haunches. “You want to know why you were chosen, and I believe you have a right to know.”
Jim spat out the blood in his mouth. “Now there’s an idea.”
Nigel reached over and took the bloody handkerchief. The instant the cloth made contact with his hands, the stain disappeared, the white fibers as pristine as they had been before they’d been used to stop a red geyser.
He gave it back for further use. “You are the two halves together, Jim. The good and the bad in equal measure, capable of great reserves of kindness and profound depths of depravity. Thusly, both sides found you acceptable. We and…the other…both believe that when you are presented with the seven opportunities, you will influence the course of events according to our values. We for the good, they for the evil—with the outcome determining the fate of humanity.”
Jim stopped mopping up his face and focused on the Englishman. He could dispute nothing of what had been said about his character, and yet his brain remained scrambled. Or maybe he had a concussion, thanks to Colin, the knuckle-cracking motherfucker.
“So do you accept your destiny?” Nigel said. “Or does all end here?”
Jim cleared his throat. Begging wasn’t something he was used to. “Please…just let me see my mother. I…I need to know she’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry, but as I said, only the dead may pass to the other side.” Nigel’s hand came to rest on Jim’s shoulder. “What say you, man?”
Byron came in close. “You can do it. You’re a carpenter. You build things and you rebuild things. Lives are constructions just the same.”
Jim looked at the castle and felt his heartbeat in his busted nose.
If he took everyt
hing at face value, if everything were true, if he were some kind of savior, then…if he walked away, the only peace his mother knew was gone. And as attractive as he might find the emptiness and timelessness of nonexistence, that was a cold exchange for where she was now.
“How does it work?” he asked. “What do I do?”
Nigel smiled. “Seven deadly sins. Seven souls swayed by these sins. Seven people at a crossroads with a choice that must be made. You enter their lives and affect their path. If they choose righteousness over sin, we prevail.”
“And if they don’t…”
“The other side wins.”
“What is the other side?”
“The opposite of what we are.”
Jim glanced over at the table with its white linens and sparkling silver. “So…we’re talking about a bunch of ass-scratchers sitting on Barcaloungers watching Girls Gone Wild and drinking beer.”
Colin laughed. “Not hardly, mate. Although that is an image, indeed.”
Nigel glared at his buddy and then looked back at Jim. “The other side is evil. I shall let your mind summon the appropriate reference, but if you should want a place to start, you have but to think of what was done to your mother and know that those who hurt her enjoyed it.”
Jim’s gut clenched so hard, he leaned to the side and dry-heaved. When a hand smoothed over his back, he had a feeling it was Bertie. And he was right.
Eventually, Jim’s gag reflex cut the crap and he got his breath back. “What if I can’t do this?”
Colin spoke up. “I shall not lie—it is not going to be easy. The other side is capable of everything. But you shall not be without resources.”
Jim frowned. “Wait, the other side thinks I’m going to be a bad influence? During the crossroads of these people?”
Nigel nodded. “They have the same faith in you that we have. But we had the advantage of reaching out to you.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“Coin toss.”
Jim blinked. Right, because…that’s how they did it at the Super Bowl.
Focusing on the gates, he tried to see his mom not as how he’d left her on that kitchen floor, but as these princes said she was. Happy. Relieved of burden. Whole.