by Kimbra Swain
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked.
“I just arrived. Raif said you were up here with her. He said that she moved,” he replied.
“No, the rat is seeing things,” I replied.
I got up and stretched. “I took a walk out to the coast today. Bamburgh looks like it’s finished.”
“Yes, the Armstrong family moved into it a few years back. Although William sadly never got to see it completed,” he said. William Armstrong bought the castle to make it a family home. He rebuilt it from ruins, but died before the work was completed.
“How is she?”
“The same. Always the same,” I said.
“Lincoln, go for a few days. I will watch over her. You need to move about the world. You are a nomadic being. If you continue to stay here without a break, you will go mad. She would not have you stay,” he said.
“I know! She would probably make me leave. But, I promised to stay with her, and so I will. I gave my word,” I said. “I’ve waited this long. I know that the moment I leave she will wake up just to spite me.”
He laughed. “Sounds like something Abby would do. Come, let’s open some of her liquor and have a few drinks.”
I stood and nodded. I looked back to her. She looked the same. Always the same.
SAMARA STAYED FOR A WEEK. I did take a trip to the other side of the county, but I didn’t get far before I felt like I should return to Abigail. When I returned, I said goodbye to my friend, and he left. Evening arrived quickly, and I stood at the window in her room. I could barely see the ocean. The moon reflected down and glittered off the water. I remembered the eclipse the night she died. The night the sun died. I’ve lived to see many omens, but none so pronounced as that one.
My thoughts wandered back to the night I pulled her out of the church where they attempted an exorcism on her. Of course, she wasn’t possessed. She survived it, but only barely. I hastily used a sleep spell on everyone in the room including the priests who had just branded her and the Archbishop who performed the exorcism prayer. She pulled in so much undisciplined power that she could have levelled the whole room with everyone in it. She always thought that they performed the ritual, because a nun saw her use magic.
However, I knew through my contacts that they believed her to be a changeling. A few even referred to her as Nephilim. Of course, neither of those things described her accurately. Gabriel’s involvement in her life did not involve a genetic component. A Fae noblewoman birthed her to a master wizard, her father, at the behest of her great grandfather, Gregory Theodoard. I didn’t know the logistics of Gabriel’s involvement, but I knew that she belonged to him as if he were her surrogate father. Samara explained as much of it to me as he could. Besides, both of her parents had abandoned her. Theodoard wanted her created for his own purposes. After they created her, they dropped her off at a children’s home in Bristol without telling Gregory where to find her.
I only found her just before the exorcism. That very night I became acquainted with her sharp tongue. I chuckled at the memory of that first meeting. There was a special humor to her quick wit. I rarely caught on to it until I’d already made some hateful remark to her, and we would start fighting again.
I caught movement out of my right eye and slowly turned toward the bed. I stood stunned. Her hands tensed and her fingers spread open wide. They trembled. I rushed to the side of the bed. She still did not breathe. I grabbed her right hand and tried to get it to relax. Perhaps her muscles had spasmed. Her back arched upward, and she sucked in a huge breath. I paused still holding her hand. She did not let it out. She shook in a prone position on the bed. I reached up to her face, and placed my palm on her cheek.
“Breathe, Abigail!” I said forcefully. “Let it out!”
She exhaled. I turned to look at the door. Raif stood there fidgeting.
Her breaths came quickly and frantically after the first one. Her hand clamped down hard on mine. Her body continued to spasm and lurch around in the bed. Her eyes shot open, and those velvet green eyes stared back at me desperately. Her mouth moved.
“Don’t try to speak. Just breathe. Abigail, just breathe. Come on, you need to control it,” I tried to calm her. Her heart which laid dormant for so long, now pounded. I feared that if she continued at this rate she might seize. I laid my free hand on her forehead. I hated to do it, but I feared for her safety. “Hodéezyéél,” I said softly, and her body relaxed. She sank back down into the bed. I paused for a moment. She continued to breathe, and her heart continued to beat.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Her hand still was clamped onto mine. The only part of her body that didn’t release the tension was attached to me. I tried to free my hand, but she held on even harder. Eventually I pried her fingers off one by one.
“Raif, send word to Samara. Let him know she’s awake. Tell him to contact Theodoard,” I instructed.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Should I fix her some tea? She likes tea.”
“I don’t think we are ready for tea yet, Raif,” I said.
He looked disappointed, and rushed off down the hallway.
I looked back to her and watched her eyes twitch beneath the lids. She dreamt. I just hoped they were good dreams, however I sincerely doubted it.
WE REPEATED the cycle multiple times over the next twelve hours. She would wake up and convulse until I put her back to sleep. The nightmares continued. I watched her body twitch, and the movement of her eyes. Her face wrenched in pain and horror. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to break the cycle. Raif said that he couldn’t reach Samara or Theodoard, but that he would keep trying. I cursed Hyperion. He dictated that she be brought into this world. He made me get her back from the Catholics. He forced me to work with her. Now, I was stuck here with her in a vicious cycle watching her suffer over and over. For someone who loved her so much, he had bloody abandoned her! I growled, and Raif ducked out of the room.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for the next round. Her body slowly stopped the dreamy movements. Her eyes stopped moving. I leaned over her. One arm on each side of her, and readied myself. I just hoped she didn’t pull power and blast me across the room. She sucked in the deep breath again and her body lurched up. I slipped my right arm under her and lifted her off the bed. I took my left hand, and placed it behind her head. I applied force to make her look me right in the eye.
“Breathe!”
I drowned in an abyss of darkness, and despair crept into my heart. Above me, I could feel the faint touch of light. This tiny source of hope remained just out of my reach. I struggled to reach out to it, only to be left empty-handed. Pushing with my arms, I forced myself toward the light with all the power I had left to spare. My legs lumbered below me like dead weights. Once I reached the spark, I pushed my body upward and gasped. I pulled in air, and my lungs held on to it as if they hadn’t experienced the swelling of oxygen in ages. Suddenly, I realized that someone plucked me out of the darkness. Strong arms hauled me forward, and I heard him bellow.
“Breathe!”
I opened my eyes to see that Lincoln held me in his arms. His deep chestnut colored skin glistened with perspiration, and his dark haunting eyes pierced into my heart. My lungs expelled the air at Lincoln’s command, and my body trembled.
“Listen to my voice, Abigail. We must break the cycle,” he begged desperately. My eyes drifted around the room to determine where I was. After surveying the room, I realized I laid in my bedroom at the house in Northumberland. At the door of the room, I saw my Rodentia friend, Raif, who minded the house for me. He peeked around the corner, and his eyes grew wide as I looked at him. He ducked quickly back around the corner.
“No, look at me,” Lincoln’s voice demanded my attention back to him. His hand behind my head applied pressure forcing me to turn my eyes back to his. Despite his stubbornness, he displayed a gentleness I couldn’t fathom, because Lincoln hated me. I didn’t understand why he was the one here when I woke up.
Without a doubt in my mind, I knew I had died. The dark wizard had cut my throat, and I remembered laying helpless as every drop of blood sprayed out of my body. After my death, somebody had performed miracles beyond my imagination, because I should be neither breathing nor depending on the arms of the man who hated me more than anyone on this earth.
“I will struggle with this no longer, Abigail. You must have control,” he said.
My body continued to convulse. I tried to swallow, but my throat burned. Lincoln continued to talk, although his voice faded in and out.
Lincoln only saw me as a petulant child. Sometimes, I had acted that way purposefully, because I knew it simply drove him mad. He never gave me the chance to be anything else. To him, I was the poor girl he saved from an exorcism in the Catholic Church. When I first met him, his steady voice and manner comforted me after that traumatic experience. However, my distaste for him grew as I got to know him. Even after I had trained to use my magic, he had no faith in me or my abilities. I only worked with him when my Grandfather forced us to do so.
Now he used the same comforting voice as in that first meeting, but in my delirium his words confused me. He continued to speak.
“Put a sock in it, Lincoln,” I croaked out. He stopped his banter and looked stunned. Then he did something I didn’t expect and rarely saw him do, he laughed at me. Suddenly, the memories of my death swept over me. The moment of clarity I had to tell him to shut up evaporated in a rush of fear, blood, and death. He realized that I no longer watched him. He sobered.
“Abigail, no. Don’t let your mind drift away,” he said still holding on. I turned my weary eyes back to him. Peering into the depths of his eyes, I realized he knew what happened in my desperation to survive the attack. I had used my magic to pull the life force from a man, then used the resulting power to slam another into the wall, breaking his neck.
The dark wizard responsible for my death had bound my power so completely that pulling the life force from another had become my only salvation to escape the situation. He wanted me to corrupt myself, then he executed me for it. Just before my death, he allowed two thugs who worked for the New York mob to viciously rape me. Tears rolled down my face, as I remembered those events and hated myself for the fruitless measures I had taken. Again, the memory flashed through my mind with haunting clarity.
I forced myself to look at Lincoln to get the images out of my mind. Then, I saw emotions in Lincoln that I didn’t know existed, especially towards me. He drew me closer to him and his arms felt warm. His voice softened, and he said, “Abigail, I know what happened to you, what they did to you. Presently none of it matters, because you are alive. Remind your body you are in control, and be at rest.”
He knew, and he said it didn’t matter. I took longer breaths and focused on the strength of his arms. Even as I trembled in shock, I could feel the taut sinew of muscles under his shirt. I realized that my hands clasped at his shirt and I released my hold on him. I steadied myself flat-handed on his chest. Through his shirt, I felt his heartbeat, steady and strong.
“Good,” he said and sighed. He realized then that I struggled to swallow. “Raif, go get a glass of water, please.”
I heard Raif scamper down the hallway to the stairs. In only a moment, Raif returned with a small glass of water. Lincoln moved his right arm up around my shoulders and grabbed the glass with his left. He shook his head as I reached up to hold it. He tilted it carefully to my lips. I took a small sip, and the water rolled down my throat like the first rain of the season ran down a dry riverbed. He sat the glass down on the nightstand next to the bed.
“How long?” I asked, wondering how long I had laid in bed after my death, and how they had brought me back. My memories were filled with utter darkness except for the repeating flashes of my death, the continuous nightmare that played over and over in my head.
He winced, “Almost three months.”
“Brian?”
“No.”
“Jay?”
“Jay is alive, but he found your body. The impact of your death has been very hard on him. Seeing you again once you are feeling better will alleviate his pain. However, we should avoid any stressful situations for now,” he said.
Jay found my body. He had kissed me the night I died. Even though I never considered a relationship with Jay, we were friends. He distracted me that night by proclaiming his affection, but ultimately, it didn't matter. The wizard inside the room bathed in power, and I had only dipped my foot in it.
“Why are you here?” I asked, knowing Grandfather must have ordered him.
“I promised I would watch over you until you were better,” he responded kindly.
“I release you from your oath,” I spoke with authority, and a small breeze wafted around us.
“No, don’t use magic. Thank you for that, but I am staying for now. You will just have to tolerate me,” he said with a smile.
The last time I saw him, we were hunting Vampires in Romania. The Great War raged, and we abandoned our efforts due to the constant danger of being shot or captured by Lenin’s forces. I returned to the Agency’s headquarters in Lisbon, and Grandfather assigned me to the Tammany problem. I didn’t know where Lincoln went after Romania. We parted company with barely a word. He despised me, or at least, I thought he did.
“Who are you? And what did you do with the hard-nosed Diné I once knew?” I asked.
He laughed, “Samara said you wouldn’t change. I’m glad of that.”
I felt a wave of exhaustion cascade over my body. Sensing it, he gently laid me back down on the bed, and pulled the blankets up to my arms. “You are different,” I said.
“I gained perspective,” he replied. His answer shocked me. Lincoln was the Navajo Monster Slayer, predating most of the ancient beings I knew. Grandfather and he debated who walked the earth first, never coming to a concrete solution. I suspected Lincoln came into being long before Hyperion, but their origin stories took place in such different worlds, it was impossible to tell. I didn’t know what kind of perspective a man of that age could gain. He smiled again as I reasoned through his response. He rarely smiled, but I decided that he had a nice smile and should do it more often. Perhaps when I died, I awoke in a bizarre alternate world hell, and this man wasn’t Lincoln at all. I reached up and pinched him on the arm knowing that the famed Monster Slayer was immune to injury, and an extremely hard pinch wouldn’t do anything to him.
“Why did you do that?”
“I wasn’t sure you were real,” I responded. “The Lincoln I know is a mean bastard who plagues my life, distrusts my judgment, and doubts my abilities.”
His eyes turned dark, and he looked away from me. “Abigail, I assure you I am the same Lincoln you know. The rest we can discuss later. Samara will return as soon as we can contact him.”
“Oh, you are just watching me until he returns,” I said.
“No, I’ve been here since the night you died,” he said. “I promised to watch over you.”
“You can go,” I said repeating my release of his obligations.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. “Abigail, we have had our differences, but you will have to endure my presence. We can continue our hostility to one another, or you can allow me to care for you until you can do it for yourself.”
Clearly, he still managed to be frustrated with me, even though I tried to make light of it. My eyes fluttered and sleep rapidly approached.
“Rest, and I promise to be here if you need anything,” he said trying to comfort me. I had never considered his face to be compassionate, but in that moment, I’d never seen such compassion.
She drifted off to sleep. I felt proud of her for controlling her body so quickly and responding to my instructions. Perhaps she had changed as well. I moved to the chair across the room as Raif peeked in the door.
“Samara will be here tomorrow,” he said. “Can I bring you some food or drink, sir? Does she need to eat?”
“We will w
ait for Samara’s advice on when she should eat, unless she asks for something first. I am well, and I do not need food or drink for now. Thank you, Raif,” I said.
“I’m so happy that she is awake now,” he gushed.
“I suppose I’m not good company,” I said. He looked puzzled.
“You are excellent company, sir. You do not wreck your room or track mud into the house. You take a bath. You are civilized, sir,” he replied.
I laughed at his statements. I supposed he had seen quite a few beings who were not civilized, and I believed he genuinely wanted to compliment me. “Thank you, Raif.” He walked out of the room.
I asked myself the same question Abigail asked. “What happened to the hard-nosed Diné?”
In a stubborn moment to acknowledge her humanity, I frivolously spoke harsh words, on the night of an omen, and a gift from God died. I regretted those words, and would regret them forever. Watching her breath normally, I drifted off to sleep hoping that she would make it through this trial.
Her nightmares returned. She successfully screamed now since her throat and voice responded to the commands of her brain. I shook her to wake her, but she did not respond. She settled after a few moments. I cringed knowing that she re-dreamed her death. Something had to be done, and soon, or it would drive her mad.
THE NEXT MORNING, I slipped out of my room and took a quick bath. As I put on clean clothes, I heard Raif welcoming someone in the front door. I rushed down the steps in the main lobby of the house and stood face to face with Thomas, my twin brother.
“Shitsilí! It is good to see you!” I rushed down and hugged him.
“Hello Lincoln, I heard you were in Northumberland, and I thought I’d drop by and say hello,” he smiled and patted me on the back.
“I have been confined here for a while, but hopefully I’ll be back on the move soon. Please come in and have a seat. Allow me to check on Abigail, and I’ll return shortly. Samara should be here soon,” I said.
“May I go with you? Let me see this sleeping beauty,” he said.