She was waiting, but for what, she wasn’t sure. She reached for the door handle, but no matter how far she stretched, it was just out of reach. She felt lightheaded. Her body seemed disconnected from her brain and all her urgency dissipated.
“Oh well,” she said to no one. “That’s not why I’m here anyway.”
Ambling down the worn sidewalk as the sun beat down on her, she noticed her feet didn’t hurt at all. It was a fleeting, unimportant thought that she quickly brushed away. A bead of sweat rolled down her nose and as she reached up to wipe it off, she heard something. Someone.
“Cali? It’s the rain.” It was Lexi’s voice.
Cali looked back up to the sky, and rain splashed her face. The sun was gone, replaced with menacing clouds that stretched to every edge of the horizon.
“Is this what I’m waiting for?” Cali asked the sky.
As if in answer, an engine revved nearby. The world in front of Cali vibrated, like water rings from a single drop breaking the surface. Only it wasn’t water, but the air in front of her. A small blue car sped toward her. It slowed in front of her and everything moved in slow motion. Lexi, dressed in her work clothes, sat in the driver’s seat staring out the windshield.
Cali went to knock on the window when a dark shadow moved in the passenger seat. She hadn’t noticed it before, and now that she had, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. There was no definite shape to the shadow. It was wispy and cloud-like.
Feeling the urge to turn and run, Cali faced away from the car. She stiffened. “If you keep running away, you’ll never understand what’s going on,” she said to herself.
Turning back to the car, Cali tilted her head to study the shadow, but it was too late. The car sped away. As if to make up for its earlier extreme slowness, it moved as a blur. Light exploded to the side of the blue car, leaving Cali momentarily blinded. Once her eyes finally adjusted to the dim light of a streetlamp, she saw Lexi.
She came into focus the same way the world did when Cali turned her camera lens.
“Is this blood?” Lexi asked after running her hand across a bleeding gash that covered the top of her head. She held out her bloody hands as if waiting for Cali to examine them. Cali was too dumbfounded to answer. “Is this real?” Lexi’s voice cracked as tears cleared a path down her stained cheek.
Flames danced behind Lexi.
Crying out her name, Cali ran to her best friend. She wrapped Lexi in a tight hug, but she was cold as ice.
“Oh no, I ruined your pretty dress!” Lexi said when they pulled away. Her voice was thick like she’d just woken, and her frigid hands gave Cali goosebumps.
Cali held her and looked down at herself. Blood ran from the shoulder in streaks across the front of her dress. The square neckline was splashed in warm, sticky gore that smeared across her chest. The short sleeves dripped, and the crimson trailed down her arms. It looked like someone had tossed a bucket of red paint at her.
Cali let out a startled pant. Shaking, she looked back up. Lexi’s eyes rolled back, and she collapsed to the ground.
“No!” Cali cried out.
Lexi vanished and a small puff of yellow smoke appeared where she’d been. The smoke grew and thickened and covered her like tar, pushing her to the ground under the streetlamp. The sallow light temporarily blinded her.
Footsteps startled her and the light faded, she was on the floor of her closet. She held the gray dress in her hands, and it glistened with dark, still wet, blood. She gasped and dropped the charcoal fabric. A copper smell wafted through the air and stung her nose.
“No.” Cali trembled. “No!”
She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She opened them and the blood was gone. Her clean dress was on the floor. Shaking, she picked it up and buried it behind her other clothes before dropping back to the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Dustin opened the closet door and stared down at Cali. “Are you okay?”
Cali blinked back tears and gaped at him.
“Did you fall?” He sat on the floor next to her.
Cali nodded and cleared her throat. “I was grabbing clothes and...” she let the sentence hang.
Dustin looked at her a minute and bent to help her up. “You...I thought...you sounded scared. You were yelling.”
“It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
Dustin nodded, grabbed her bag, and helped support her as they left the house. Cali cleared her throat, choked back tears, and thought about donating the charcoal dress to charity. Or burning it.
***
Alexia wasn’t sure where she was, but inches in front of her sat a coffin. Covered in mud, it dripped onto the floor. It looked like someone had ripped it from the ground and dropped it at her feet. The top had a giant hole. Bits of wood splintered toward the ceiling like the hole had been broken from inside. Alexia crept closer to look in. The coffin was empty except for a thick layer of dirt. Hair trapped on the splintered wood tickled her arm and Alexia pulled on it to examine it. It was a tuft of hair that had been pulled out by the root. Short, blonde, and not hers. There was blood around the hole too.
Alexia turned away from the coffin. Beautiful stained-glass windows. Uncomfortable looking pews. She was in a church. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d been to a church in her life. Always for funerals. This was no exception, it seemed.
There were people. Soggy-eyed and sniffling. She recognized many. Her parents sat in the front row.
“Mom, Dad?”
As she approached them, the door slammed open. A puff of yellow clouded the doorway. It morphed into the shape of a man with his back to her and long, blonde hair. He turned to face her, and a wicked smile crept across his lips. She recognized him but before she had a chance to place him, his face contorted as if he were in pain and then he was the yellow mist again. It cleared, and Cali staggered in.
She was covered in blood. She looked around the room before turning to the front. For a moment, Alexia thought she was looking at her, but no. Turning, to see what Cali stared at, she saw her own face smiling back at her. She recognized the picture. Cali had taken it. It was huge. The photo was framed and surrounded by flowers.
Alexia froze. It was her funeral. The coffin was hers.
But the blonde hair wasn’t.
Cali limped to the front of the church. She was covered in small cuts and her feet were bandaged up to her knees. She glanced at the coffin but shuddered away from it. She looked at the picture again before turning back to the people.
Alexia noticed a scab on Cali’s scalp, as if a chunk of hair had been ripped from it.
When she reached for Cali, the world shifted, and Alexia was sitting in her bed.
Chapter Fourteen
“Leland?” The door to her room slammed behind Alexia as she made her way to the kitchen.
“Yes?” He followed her down the stairs.
“I think I just remembered my funeral.” Her voice was high-pitched, and she had to work to calm herself.
“You mean your death?”
“It wasn’t my death. It was my funeral.” She paused in the kitchen trying to decide if she wanted to sit, or eat, or make coffee, or cry.
She decided to brew coffee.
“But you weren’t alive for your funeral. How could you remember it?” His tone was strained. “It is normal to remember your life and your death, but after that, you should remember things like your Ether, the Cetteri…”
“It felt like all the other past lives. I saw Cali. She was covered in scratches and her dress was bloody.” She opened the fridge.
“Cali wasn’t bloody at your funeral.”
Alexia felt her back straighten and she took a deep breath before slowly closing the fridge.
“You…you went to my funeral?”
He nodded. “I saw your accident, too. Or the aftermath, at least. I’d expected to see you right away after but—”
“Stop. How fucking weird.”
“What happened?”
She explained the church and the framed picture of her. “Cali walked up to it and she was covered in blood but no one in the church noticed her.”
“Oh,” he said.
He poured them each a cup of coffee and sat at the table.
Alexia pulled out her notebook and flipped to the back. Flopping in the seat, she tossed the notebook open on the table and started writing about the funeral. When she got to the part about the yellow cloud, she froze.
Something in her mind clicked into place. Her stomach knotted and she flipped to the front to skim her past lives. She ripped out a blank page and started putting the lives in order.
Some older lives were short, but not all of them. In one of her more ancient lives, her past-self had lived well into her fifties. One even reached ninety. However, all her newer lives were short. They all ended abruptly. Also, the group died together. Leland, Cali, Dustin, and Alexia started dying—with only two exceptions—at the same time, in the same event. The first exception had been because they had been in different states during war, but even then, they’d died the same day. The second had been the life Alexia had just lived. Leland hadn’t even been alive, and Dustin and Cali still lived.
The deaths had started with the trials in Suffolk. They’d burned.
In Torgau: they’d drowned.
Then a fire along the Oregon Trail.
It went on like that.
The SS Princess Alice: they’d all drowned.
The Boxer Rebellion in China: fire.
Older lives hadn’t left her feeling so uncertain. She’d died as young as ten, but not as part of a group.
It unsettled her that most of the deaths had been fires or drowning. The only life that had been different was her most recent life in Jaydee, Colorado. She died alone and in a car accident. It didn’t make sense.
The car did start on fire. It hadn’t killed her but would have if the accident had failed.
What bothered her the most was that new lives were all tinted in yellow. The scenes, the memories, the people, everything had all been literally tinted a dark yellow. Her blood cooled. Something was missing.
“Why did we all start dying so young?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“We all died together, and the deaths were all—” She paused and looked up. “Yellow or whatever.”
Leland looked at her. “Yellow? What are you talking about?” he asked.
“We all die young. Usually in a fire or a flood. On the same day. In all our newest lives.”
“I’m not sure you’re remembering things correctly. There—”
“No!” She cut him off. “It started after the trials in Ipswich.” She listed each death in order. “Fire or drowning. That’s it. I mean, shit, during World War II, you and Dustin died in a fire at Pearl Harbor the same day as Cali, and I died in a flood. I mean, my life as Alexia doesn’t fit. Still, you have to see what I’m getting at.”
Leland took a long drink of coffee. Alexia ran her finger across the rim of her mug and waited for him to explain that she was wrong and just not remembering correctly. Everything would be fine. She was remembering wrong. There was no reason for her anxiety.
“You’re right.” Leland sat his coffee down hard. “You’re right,” he repeated. “How’d we miss that?”
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. And the yellow? What’s that?” Leland rubbed his earlobe as he spoke. He locked eyes with her. “None of us noticed all these deaths, and it should’ve been obvious. And troubling. Whatever is happening, it’s happening to all of us.”
“You didn’t find this weird?” Alexia asked.
He cleared his throat, then swallowed. Neither spoke for an awkward moment.
“I can’t remember certain things about those lives either. There are pieces that just…” Leland trailed off.
“Do you see the yellow too?”
He shook his head.
An icy fear crept through her veins. When it was just her memories that were broken, that was one thing.
This was something else.
“If something were only happening to you, my memories would be intact,” he said. “I mean, thinking about it, we were being reborn pretty quickly after each life there at the end. Were we running from something?” He ran his fingers through his hair.
“When did that start?” Alexia asked.
“Umm.” Leland looked down. “After France. Things were normal, then there is a hole and then you were rushing us to be reborn right away.”
“I was?”
He nodded. “Yeah it was…wait!” He rubbed his face. “I think I remember something. It was before you were reborn in Jaydee.”
“What?”
“It’s so fuzzy. Gregory comes to mind for some reason. I remember something Gregory told me.” He let out a nervous laugh. “I saw it too.”
“Who’s Gregory?” Alexia asked.
He finally looked into Alexia’s eyes. “He’s an Essence almost as old as you. A friend. An extremely powerful tracker. Puts me to shame. He told me he saw an Essence disappear and he couldn’t really explain it.”
“What?”
“It…I feel like I am just now remembering it. I feel like I forgot it almost as soon as I heard it.”
“The same way we’ve forgotten everything else?” Alexia asked.
“Maybe.”
“You said you saw something.”
“Right. So, umm, her name was Dawn in her last life. I really didn’t know her, but we were friendly. She told me she wanted to be reborn. I saw her heading towards the portal.” He paused, scowling. “What happened? Something. I was confused, but I don’t know why. I went to check on her, and her Essence had been dispersed.”
“What does that mean?” Alexia asked.
“Instead of being reborn as a human, you break your Essence up into new Essences.”
“Break it up? So, a bunch of pieces of Essences are cobbled together to make new ones?” Alexia turned up her nose. “Very Frankenstein’s monster.”
Leland laughed. “No. Not like that. Essences are Energy. The longer you exist, the more energy you have. If you’re dispersed, that energy is broken up becomes several new, unique Essences.”
“So, you die?”
“In a sense. The new Essences are unique. None will be you. But the energy goes on forever, no matter the form.”
“Could that Dawn have done it on accident? Like, flipped the wrong switch or gone through the wrong portal or something?”
“The portal knows what you want.”
“So, someone killed her?”
“That’s not possible.”
“If it wasn’t an accident, what other choice is there?”
“It’s not possible,” he repeated.
“Why?”
“It has to be a choice.”
“Okay. How far apart did these two things happen?”
“I don’t know when Gregory saw it. But he told me, and I saw whatever I saw with Dawn within probably a hundred years of each other.”
“So, what did these two have in common?”
“Nothing that I know of. They weren’t close. They were both powerful, but in—”
“Powerful how?” Alexia interrupted him.
“Both of them were pretty young for Essences, but both had really strong powers. Marius could levitate. By his fifth life, he could lift other people. For many of his lives, he was a performer in a circus or a traveling magic act. I checked in on him often because I had never seen powers grow like his and be so present in human form. Most people wrote off his skills as an illusion, which was fine with him.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Alexia interrupted. “Some guy could fly, and no one cared?”
“He levitated,” he told her.
“Yeah, but—” she trailed off.
“You’ve heard of witches, shapeshifters, and magic?”
Alexia took a deep breath before answering. “Cali was accused
of being a witch.”
“But she wasn’t one.”
She looked into his eyes, but it was clear there was no joke. “You’re saying those things are real?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“So what were Dawn and Marius?”
“Human. Just very powerful. And something with Marius let it show through when he was human.”
“Who was Dawn?” Alexia asked.
“She had an extreme green thumb and loved plants. She could make them grow. She’d sit with a dying tree, talk to it, stroke its sagging limbs, and the next week, the tree would be standing tall with new shoots and healthy green leaves. I remember thinking I hadn’t seen her for a long time, so I used my tracking ability to find her and she was working as a forest ranger. I found her just after a devastating wildfire. Once it was out, Dawn wandered into the blackened woods and cried. She picked up a charred handful of dirt.
“She went into something of a trance, and when she came out, Tiny seedlings had sprouted all around her. It was so beautiful to watch. One moment she’d been holding nothing more than blackened earth, the next she was surrounded by tiny green sprouts blanketing the burned ground. It was amazing. Even for her.”
“But that was as a human, so how was she dispersed?” she interrupted.
“I was so enthralled, I watched her for a few more days. Within a week of her growing the saplings, the river flooded and overtook the banks. The ground under her feet gave way and Dawn dropped into the water. Vines and tree branches reached out to drag her from under the churning water, but each plant that grabbed hold soon lost its purchase and was pulled into the river to join Dawn.”
Alexia felt her face go white. “She drowned.”
Leland nodded. “As soon as she was in the Cetteri, I found her. Thinking about it now, she didn’t even seem to remember her death. Next thing I knew, Dawn was gone.” His voice was hollow. “I talked to her. She had no intention of dispersing.”
“What did—” Alexia’s words cut off in mid-sentence.
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