“Oh, now . . . don’t pressure me, doll. I don’t think I can—”
In my head, I heard Cat scream M-A-A-A-A-C! And I covered my ears.
It was a gross understatement, but I said, “Wow! She really is loud. How long were the two of you married?”
“It shows, huh? Fifty-three years. Seven less than Creesie and Joe.” With a wink, he added, “By the way, Cat never did wear the pants in the family. I just let her think she did.”
“Okay, nosey . . . whatever you say.” My laugh ended in a sigh as I thought back on something terrible. And wonderful. And unforgiveable.
“Don’t worry. He’ll forgive you.” And for the second time today, I was glad he had eavesdropped. “You know, Ethan has a very big heart.”
“So everyone keeps telling me—the big heart part, anyway.”
“It’s true. We’ve known him . . .” Mac’s voice broke off. He slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
“You knew Ethan from before, too!” I shouted, surprised that I hadn’t thought of this. I was definitely slipping. “And me! Is that why you’re so busy trying to protect me?” I considered the options. “Were you and I friends? Relatives?” Horror-struck, I shrieked, “Oh, no! Were we boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Now, doll, don’t go letting your imagination run away with you.” Mac snorted a laugh. “But that’s a good one.”
Cat screamed again, this time urging us both to return. We ignored her.
“Tell me,” I pleaded. “I won’t tell a living soul. Are you helping me because we shared another lifetime together? Is that what you guys do?”
“It’s a dead thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Mac looked torn, as if he wished he could tell me but couldn’t. Then he glanced around nervously. “Let me put it this way, I could tell you—”
I gasped. “But then you’d have to kill me?”
“Heavens no.” Mac grinned. “Then Cat would kill us both.”
We laughed together, leaned back against the rough shingles, and watched puffy clouds move across the blue sky. The clouds kept forming shapes as I watched them. I thought Mac was doing it—a dog, a cat—and then I knew for sure when the cat snarled and began to chase the short, kind-faced dog. After a while, my thoughts, like the clouds, began to drift.
“Why do you think Daniel landed at that Station?” I asked him. Of all my questions, this was the one that terrified me the most. It caused me to obsess over whether he deserved to be there, or not. I held my breath as I waited, trying to appear unconcerned.
Mac stared off at a cloud. I saw the shape before he thought it—a black panther in a low crouch, grey-blue eyes, its tail flicking in a rhythmic motion. “Creesie already told you. He was lost.” He looked back at me, head tilted. “Even the best of us get lost sometimes.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to admit that Mac was talking about me as well. “But in that other lifetime was Daniel evil?” My voice shook at the end. Just then, the panther leaped into a cloud.
“He seems to be good and bad, likeable and then not. Somehow, Daniel is capable of being both at the same time. That part, I admit, is scary. Still, if I look at what he did for you at that Station, it leads me to think that he’s more than capable of bringing out his good side when he wants to.”
“Did something happen in that other lifetime?” I begged. “The one where you knew him? What could be so terrible that you can’t tell me about it now?”
Mac’s face went pale as if I’d hit a nerve. He paused. “I’m more concerned about the connections Daniel might have made by accident. It’s the reason we kept our distance from him when he first got on the elevator.” As he said this, I could see them again—pressing their bodies nearer to the icky black walls, away from Daniel. At least there’d been a logical reason for it.
“You mean, if Daniel connected with something, then connected with any of you?”
“Then all of us would be tied to it.” Mac emphasized the last word in such a way that it conjured up every scary image I could think of.
“And”—I hesitated—“what do you think it is?”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
“Tell me!” I was doing my best to tune in to his thoughts, but Mac kept shifting the frequency on me. Several times I nearly had it, but then they’d slip away. It was like trying to hold sand in your hand.
Mac shook his head harder.
“But I came in contact with something, didn’t I?” And I’d kissed Daniel. “Aren’t I in danger, too? Aren’t we all connected? Me, Daniel, It . . . You?”
“I’m not sure you’re its type,” Mac blurted. “Well, you are and you aren’t.”
My eyebrows flew up. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or rejected. “What do you mean by that? I’m not its type?”
“It . . . um, he prefers females. But not to steal souls. It . . . um, he wants to connect through your memories. Since he has none of his own, none other than ones he acquires, it makes the bond more concrete.” Refusing to meet my gaze, he said, “I think the one that had you in its grasp got carried away, though. He became so lost in his desire to retrieve every last one of your memories that he came very close to killing your physical body.”
This confirmed my suspicions. The strangling. The dying. It was real.
Mac shook his head. “I just don’t know what he was doing there. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“What are you saying? Isn’t that where it—he—hangs out?”
“No,” Mac said, his face pale again. “He and his kind usually wander the borders of life and death.”
There was an actual border? Big swallow.
“Anyway,” I rambled on, “they don’t have that great of an imagination so there’s nothing to really worry about. Right?”
“Not from the depraved, no.” Now Mac visibly swallowed. He wasn’t telling me the whole story, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.
“But if that evil being isn’t part of the depraved, what else is out there that I don’t know about?”
“Too much.” Mac changed the subject. “But like Creesie said, you’re probably more trouble than you’re worth. I’m quite sure you broke his cold, black heart.” He gave a weak laugh. I faked a laugh with him. As we sat up, he ruffled the hair on my head.
“This place keeps getting weirder and weirder,” I said. But there was something else troubling me.
“Once you’re here on a permanent basis, it all seems part of the natural order.” Mac suppressed a smile on this next part. “And we don’t usually ‘hang out’ here on a daily basis. We tend to favor the more peaceful places . . .”
But I wasn’t listening. I was catching up with his last few comments . . . I was and wasn’t its type . . . I was more trouble than I was worth now . . . I’d probably broke its cold, black heart . . . I was reading between the lines, recalling the unsettling emotions that had came over me at the other Station when my stomach dropped suddenly.
“My—my soul wasn’t being stolen, was it? I asked numbly. There was a slow-firing in my brain as I began to connect the dots. “It—he—he was seducing me!”
I found Mac’s eyes. He nodded grimly. “It’s the reason you felt so out of your head. Sethos has quite the reputation in our world. His talents, though warped, are limitless. That’s who I think Daniel picked up his new talent from.” Under his breath, he muttered, “And apparently, he’s a pretty fast learner.”
I tried to block that from my mind and buried my face in my hands. Mac patted my knee. A couple moments of awkward silence followed.
“Now that Sethos knows what Charlotte can do, you don’t have anything to be afraid of, doll. Besides, like I said, he prefers to meld with males not females. Then, through his gift of seduction, he makes the females fall in love with him.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re right,” I mumbled through my hands. “That’s comforting.”
Mac reflected for a moment. Something was troubling him. “No worri
es for you,” he said, a little too lightly. “I just hope Sethos didn’t show up to make contact with the only other living being there.”
I dropped my hands and stared at him. “Daniel?” My voice sounded tinny.
“But Charlotte protected him too,” Mac reminded me in a rush. “So Daniel is nearly as much trouble as you are. Oh, and he’s not about to lie down and take it . . . Look how he became a wild animal to keep himself safe from the depraved. Even I have to admit that’s darned clever. The boy could outwit a fox in a henhouse.” For a flash of a second, I thought Mac admired Daniel. Or was I reading too much into it?
Cat’s insistent screams sounded again in our heads. He reached for my hand. “We really should be going. An angry Cat is never a good thing.”
We leapt from the rooftop and in one fluid movement found ourselves standing on the steps outside of Creesie’s front door. I noticed I wasn’t even slightly out of breath. Then I thought of something funny. “I wish I moved this fast in the living realm. I could really kick Brody’s butt on the crags.” I laughed. “Oh, that’s right, I already do.”
Mac didn’t return my smile. He looked at me as if he were about to breathe his last breath. My body went rigid. Dead people’s moods weren’t the easiest to predict.
“One last thing before we go,” he said quietly.
My nerves were on edge. I hoped it wasn’t something else I needed to hear.
“You really are the cat’s meow, doll . . . so much like your mother that it makes my heart beat faster just to see you smile. I see her everywhere in you.”
“Aha!” I pointed a finger in his face. “You also knew Vivienne!”
He plunged ahead, ignoring my comment. “When the time comes, promise me you’ll trust your heart. If you can do that, there’s no such thing as a wrong choice.”
“I—um . . .”
He placed his hands on my shoulders. “It’s true that you may feel love for both of them and, popular opinion aside, I believe anyone’s capable of loving two people at the same time—”
I pretended not to know what he was talking about, but I knew I’d fallen short. It wasn’t easy to fake something when the other person could hear your every thought.
“Trouble is, three really is a crowd,” he said sagely. “Promise me, when the time comes, you’ll take a moment and listen to your heart.”
Creesie had obviously looked ahead in time and shared it with the group. I wasn’t so much angry as envious. With his hands still resting on my shoulders, I closed my eyes in defeat. Did this mean more choices? That was the last thing I needed, especially one as difficult as choosing between Daniel and Ethan. My new love and my first love? Each one so different and yet so much alike and I loved them both because of that. The pressure was too much to bear. My shoulders weren’t nearly wide enough.
When I opened my eyes, Mac was watching my reaction, his blue eyes peering at me from under his cap. “I—I promise—I guess.” I got all choked up as he gave me a hug.
“Ready?” he asked, releasing me. I nodded, dabbing my leaky eyes. To my relief, Mac didn’t say anything further, nor did I ask anything else of him.
When he opened the door, we returned not to Creesie’s living room, but entered the bright little corridor located just outside the elevator’s entrance.
My stomach dropped. Ethan’s voice was the first thing I heard. From the sound of it, something terrible had happened. He wasn’t speaking so much as quietly moaning my name. What had happened? Hadn’t I only just left him?
Mac pulled a travelling coin from his pocket without saying a word. Just before I ran through the wall separating us from the Station, I looked back once. Charlotte was nibbling on a fingernail as she looked back.
17 Soulnapped
My third step down the aisle of the flat-nosed bus sent me into that familiar space where I was traveling in the direction of my thoughts. But midway, something altered. It was like I was being pulled in a second direction—taffy in the hands of some obnoxious child—and it was a most unpleasant sensation.
Travelling took longer than it ever had before. When I finally saw light, a grayish-green haze hung over the sky. Though shrouded in mist, I saw that I was standing at the top of an enormous range of cliffs, with an ocean spanning the entire horizon. Scattered amongst the barren patches of grass, yellow dandelions flowered at my feet. I’d seen a picture of this place, once, in a frame in Ethan’s room. He’d visited here. Though the thought was pleasant and view was breathtaking, for some unknown reason my insides jittered.
Before I heard his voice, I felt an instantaneous rush of emotion, as though I were a can of shaken soda and someone else had hastily yanked the top.
“Cliffs of Moher,” he said smoothly. “Word has it you’ve become quite enamored with the Emerald Isle. Lucky me that you showed up at the same time.”
He came from behind me, his voice sounding as lazy as his stroll, as if it were a total fluke that we were both here. I twisted sharply and railed on him, “How did you get me off course, Daniel? You know this wasn’t where I was going!”
He sent an innocent look my way. “I intercepted you, Hope. Besides, from what I remember, you used to love my surprises.”
“This is not a pleasant surprise! You—you soulnapped me!” I physically restrained myself from reaching out and strangling him.
“Go ahead.” He smiled wickedly. “The pleasure would be all mine.”
“Stop listening!” And then it dawned on me. “You can hear my thoughts?”
“Don’t act like it’s such a big deal, love. You could hear mine too if you’d just let yourself. In fact, if you’d stop acting for one solitary minute like you still had a body, you could do all kinds of things.”
“But I do still have a body!” I argued. “And strictly speaking, so do you!”
I couldn’t believe how angry I was. Funny, I often felt that way when I got around Daniel. On the other hand, I knew Ethan was in pain somewhere, and I needed to comfort him. That would make anyone incensed. I listened, but could no longer hear his voice.
“Trivial detail,” Daniel mused. I hoped he was acknowledging the fact that he still had a body, and wasn’t responding to my thoughts on Ethan’s absent voice. Like an insistent child, he pleaded, “Can we have some fun now, please?”
“No! Show me how to do a shortcut, and I’ll be on my way.” I noticed as he came closer that a fog crept into my head, but I disregarded it and growled, “I’m sure you know how to do it.”
“I do,” he teased, his voice still so casual, his wavy hair rumpled by the wind. “I’ll make you a deal. You do what I want to do, and then I’ll send you back to the whiner.”
“Don’t call him that!” I thought about arguing my point further, but sensing it was a losing battle—I’d never won an argument with Daniel; he enjoyed it too much—and, in an attempt to stop wasting precious time, I thrust out my hand instead. “Shake on it. Take your five minutes of thrills,” I said, my voice full of contempt, “then let me go.”
Daniel shot instantly beside me. Though he moved like golden vapor—a drastic change from the panther at the Station—thanks to my bodiless vision, his physical shape remained visible. I tried not to notice, but he’d made it look so graceful.
Instead of shaking my hand, he lifted it to his lips. That’s when my head became enshrouded in that too-familiar fog. “Stop doing that!” I insisted as it encroached on me again. Daniel looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about, but I’d seen that innocent look before. He was faking it. “Let’s get this over with!” I grumbled. “I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.”
In a single whisper of vapor, we travelled to the edge of the cliff. My shoes gripped at the crumbly edge, but I had no reason to be frightened. Daniel stood behind me with his arms locked securely around my waist. From here, I could see that the cliffs rose like ancient black monoliths hundreds of feet above the sea. I even spotted the occasional tip of a colorful beak belonging to one of the pengu
in-like birds that lived here. I sensed we weren’t in the living realm, but the details were exquisite. I wondered if Daniel had done some research prior to my arrival. The idea of this made my blood boil.
Had he planned this?
“These cliffs rise nearly seven hundred feet above the sea in some places.” Daniel pointed a slender finger toward a group of orange-beaked birds. “Those are Atlantic Puffins. I guess you could say they’re famous—think of them as the Brad Pitts of the bird world—and they like to call this place home.” The longer he spoke, the more he came off sounding like a tour guide (less like a soulnapper.) My anger was abating, replaced by a drowsy wooziness that made it difficult to concentrate. “Out there,”—he pointed toward a barely visible series of green mounds—“are the Aran Islands in Galway. And those”—he twisted sharply—“are the hills of Connemara.”
“It’s spectacular,” I said breathlessly. Then as the sun peeked through the clouds, the fog in my head lifted. I felt more like myself. “Okay, can I go now?”
A roar of laughter sounded behind me. “Hope, we’re just getting started. Whatever happened to the girl who couldn’t get enough excitement in one day? Where’s that girl? I want to spend the day with her.”
I didn’t mean to say it; it flew out of my mouth by accident. Like a tiny boat on a stormy sea, I was at the mercy of my emotions. “That girl got abandoned by her boyfriend at fifteen. That girl worried herself sick about what might have happened to him. That girl is dead.”
He pulled me closer. I wished he hadn’t. He was squeezing me tightly. His arms, the same ones that used to hold me for hours on end, were urging me to soften. I tried to remain stiff and unyielding, but that woozy sensation dragged me under again.
“I’m sorry I put you through all that. I wasn’t myself back then.” He sounded like he meant it, but I couldn’t make myself look to see if was genuinely sorry. “Biggest mistake of my life.” His voice cracked.
Another wave of emotion was suffocating me; I lifted my head above it.
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