Seth closed his eyes and shook his head. I screamed as Seth slid down a few inches.
Archer and Ian both instantly started to climb up to get to him, as did a few members of Varick’s security detail, but there wasn’t much footing, and they were too far away. In the end, Archer got up to the roof the fastest, and leapt over to a lower roof, beneath where Seth was.
“Seth,” he called. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen, buddy.”
Payne came through the window and slid down to Seth. He grabbed the boy’s arms and pulled him up. I watched as Seth grabbed a hold of Payne. Payne held on to him tightly. He then helped Seth climb back up to the window, carefully. Uncle Mark appeared in the window and helped pull Seth through.
By the time I ran inside and up to their floor, Seth was trying to pull away from Aunt Breanne, who was looking him over for injuries.
“No!” Seth struggled to get away. “I’ve got to go.”
“Seth,” Aunt Breanne said. “Stop it. You’re not going anywhere.”
Seth just kept fighting. Everyone was telling him to calm down, assuring him that he was all right, but he wouldn’t listen.
“Stop it!” Seth yelled. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to be here!”
Aunt Breanne was having none of it.
“Seth, you’ve been happy here. We’re all here for you.”
He looked Aunt Breanne straight in the eye. “I’m not Jared!”
The shock and hurt on Aunt Breanne’s face was instant, and horrifying to watch. It was also the moment that Seth needed to bolt.
As he ran past me, I could have grabbed him, but I didn’t. A gut feeling told me not to.
As Seth reached the door and opened it, he stopped short. I saw the reason why.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jared asked. He was blocking the doorway.
Aunt Breanne was on her way to Seth, but I put a hand on her arm to hold her back, and whispered Jared’s name. I heard her breath hitch as she looked to the empty doorway. She couldn’t see her son, but she believed he was there.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” Jared said to Seth, taking a step closer. “Where are you going?”
“Away,” Seth yelled.
Jared just shook his head and smiled.
“That’s not about to happen,” He said. “And what do you mean that you’re not me? I think my mom knows the difference.”
Seth just stared at Jared, unable to move or say anything.
“Look,” Jared stepped closer. “You’re right. You’ll never be me, but you’re not replacing me. My mom would have loved you just as much even if I were still alive. You’re nobody’s replacement. And for the record, you couldn’t replace me if you tried.”
Seth backed up a step, looking shocked.
“Second,” Jared continued, “did you think if you ran away, they wouldn’t look for you? They never stopped looking for me.”
“I can’t stay,” Seth screamed, falling to the floor. “I’m not their family. I can’t be their family. I won’t be their family!”
He began to weep.
Jared motioned for me to approach. I slowly walked over, and Breanne did the same. We knelt down on either side of Seth from behind, while Jared stepped closer and mimicked our movement.
“It’s too late,” Jared told him softly. “You already are.”
Seth hid his face as he cried. Jared’s assertion obviously terrified him. He was shaking as I pulled him into my arms.
“Seth,” Jared continued. “You can’t stop my mother from loving you. Just like you can’t stop the others from coming here and trying to take you back. What you can do is help Bristol prepare for their arrival. You’re a part of their family now. Help protect your family.”
Seth nodded as he wept. Jared faded away.
Turning around, Seth fell into Aunt Breanne’s waiting arms. She stroked his hair and told him it was all right, while Seth kept telling her how sorry he was.
“My God,” Patton’s face had gone white. He had lowered himself into a nearby chair, and had a few tears in his eyes. “He was really here.” It was like he was speaking to himself more than anyone else. “Jared was here.”
I nodded. “He sees Seth as family.”
Patton covered his eyes with his hands. Archer placed a hand on his father’s shoulder, and after a moment, Patton reached over and gripped his son’s hand. It was the first tender moment that I’d ever witnessed between them.
“So,” Patton said, clearing his throat. “What’s next? How do we get Seth to tell us about these people?”
I looked over to where Aunt Breanne was talking with Seth. We needed details, and even if Seth couldn’t remember them, we couldn’t afford not to know them.
“We need to call Aunt Sapphire,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
The Last of the Connors
“Seth,” Sapphire said. She sat down in a chair opposite both Seth and myself, her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap. “I want to explain exactly what will happen once we begin. Please feel free to ask questions. What I do can be difficult, but Bristol also experienced it not long ago. It won’t hurt, although it can be frightening.”
Sapphire had rushed over the moment Varick had called her. She wore no makeup, and was wearing a simple brown shirt and pants that she had probably thrown on at the last moment, yet she still managed to exude authority.
We were sitting in Varick’s study, an enormous room that had more books lining the wall than we had in my entire school. In one corner sat a huge mahogany desk, and a deep leather chair that I could easily see Varick sitting in while he looked at contracts.
The three of us were sitting on the other side of the room, in similar leather chairs next to the fireplace. We’d decided we should conduct this session without a large audience, so it was just Seth, Sapphire and me.
Seth had insisted that I be with him, all the while trying to not appear like he was nervous. He was trying so hard to be brave.
“I’m done being scared,” he insisted.
Sapphire smiled warmly and caressed Seth’s face.
“My sweet boy,” she said. “There’s no shame in being afraid. True bravery comes from what you’re doing right now—facing your fears. And sometimes facing your past memories can be the scariest act of all.”
He nodded. She kept talking.
“I have a feeling that your past will not be pleasant, but I need you to understand that nothing we see together will affect the way anyone feels about you. We love you. Do you understand?”
Seth nodded again, but he didn’t make eye contact.
Sapphire explained everything to Seth in detail, just like she had done with me. Seth listened intently and even asked a few questions.
“If I start to see a memory that I don’t want to see, can I make it stop?”
“That’s a good question,” Sapphire answered. It was a question I should have asked the first time around, come to think of it. “It’s difficult. When you start to follow a thread, it’s difficult to stop the memory from coming back. I can help you with that, but it’s not easy, especially when that memory is something you both do and do not want to remember.”
Seth looked confused.
“How could I want both?”
“Sometimes there are memories you don’t want to see because they’re very sad. You don’t want to remember them, and they might be difficult to watch, but at the same time you need to see them. This does not always mean that impulse is bad.”
Seth nodded again.
“I’m going to stay here with you,” I told Seth. “The entire time. If it gets to be too much, or you need a break, just say so.”
“I need to remember these things to help,” Seth told me. “So we can be ready for them.”
“We have time,” I said. “Seth—”
“No,” Seth insisted, turning to Sapphire. “I’m ready.”
Sapphire nodded and touched his hand, then reached for min
e. We all stared into the fire as Sapphire led us into Seth’s past.
“Where are we?” I asked Seth.
We were in a field on a sunny day. A cool breeze took the sting out of the warm day, and in the field, the grass was tall. There were wildflowers blooming all around us.
I glanced around for Seth, but his eyes were locked on someone else: a small boy who was laughing and running around the field, picking the prettiest of the flowers.
I took Seth’s hand, and we walked closer.
At one point, the boy turned, and I could finally see his smiling, young face. It was Seth. He was five or six years old. I didn’t see any of the worry or fear that I normally saw on Seth’s face.
He was totally and completely happy. The way an innocent little boy should be. I saw him run over to a woman. She was too old to be his mother, and looked closer to Sapphire’s age. She wore her grey hair in a bun, and was dressed in white pants paired with a blue sweater. Seth ran up to her and presented his flowers proudly.
“Oh how sweet,” the woman said. “Are those for your mother?” Seth nodded. “She’ll love them. Wildflowers are her favorite.”
Young Seth giggled.
“I bet she’s making an apple pie,” the woman told him. “Served warm with vanilla ice cream. My favorite since I was your age.”
“Mine too, Grandma,” young Seth said, and started babbling to her about his school friends and cousins. His birthday was just around the corner. It wasn’t every day a boy turned five. He spoke so quickly it was hard to understand everything he was saying.
I watched as young Seth skipped along beside his grandmother as they walked. As they got to the end of the field, Young Seth stopped. My Seth went to stand beside his younger self and look at his grandmother.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Seth.” His grandmother beamed at him with affection as she spoke. “Go give those flowers to your mother and give her a kiss from me.”
Young Seth waved goodbye to his grandmother who blew him a kiss before fading away. As we watched young Seth run to the house, we followed.
“I forgot about her,” Seth said as we followed.
Seth ran ahead to catch up with his younger self. As he did, I turned to Sapphire.
“I’m glad to know that he had a family that loved him once,” I said. “But why are we seeing this?”
Sapphire shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she answered. We were walking toward the farmhouse where Seth had been kept. I recognized it in the distance. “We’ll let it play out. Even if we don’t find the answers we need, we’re learning about Seth.”
I nodded as we climbed the porch steps, watching as the door was closed in front of us. I turned to Sapphire, unsure what to do. She simply walked right through the solid door, just like I’d seen many ghosts so many times. I had always thought how cool it looked to just vanish through a wall or door. Now was my chance and I hesitated. What if I got stuck? That would be just my luck. I’d end up with a door wedged up my butt.
I sighed, gritted my teeth, and went for it, squeezing my eyes closed. When I opened my eyes, I found myself on the other side. That wasn’t so bad.
We were in a kitchen. My Seth was watching his younger self interact with a woman who must be his mother. She placed the flowers Seth had picked into a vase and filled it with water.
Seth’s mother was young, with soft, wavy blonde hair that was just long enough to reach her shoulders. She had pretty blue eyes, and a few freckles on her cheeks that reminded me of Seth. She was just a bit taller than me. She had a thin frame, but when I looked more closely, I noticed her pink and white dress showed off the beginning of a baby bump.
Did Seth have a little brother or sister out there somewhere? All this time, we had believed Seth was part of one of our families. If he wasn’t, it might mean that he had family out there looking for him.
The thought of not having Seth with me was devastating, but if he had other family who cared about him, surely they wanted him. We needed to reunite them.
Seth’s mother placed the vase down onto a table, and gave her son a hug and kiss. She smiled at him in a way that radiated joy.
“How was your visit with grandma?”
Young Seth smiled, but his eyes were fixed on the apple pie that was cooling off on the countertop. Seth’s memory was so strong that my mouth actually watered from the aroma.
“Gramma said to say hi,” Young Seth said. Each syllable was over-pronounced, the way little kids often talked. “When is Daddy getting home?”
“Soon.” His mother used her finger to tap Young Seth’s little nose. “I hope, anyway. But we’re still not eating that pie yet. Uncle Drew and your cousin Matthew may come to dinner. So we’ll need a few extra places set for dinner. I’m going to get started. If you like, we can—”
There was a bang from the front of the house. It sounded like someone had slammed through the front door in a hurry. Seth’s mother looked toward the door with concern. Something was wrong.
The boy who entered was around sixteen years old, with messy black hair and dark eyes. His clothes – jeans and a t-shirt – were filthy, ripped, and burnt. He had blood stains on his face.
“Matthew.” I could see the panic in Seth’s mother’s eyes when she realized that Matthew was alone. “Where’s your uncle?”
Matthew was near tears. “Aunt Jean, we need to go. We need to leave right now.”
Young Seth watched his mother start to cry. He was confused, and started asking his mom where his father was.
Jean ignored her son, and kept talking to Matthew. “What happened? We’re not going anywhere. Not until you tell me what happened.”
Matthew was trying to pull her to the door, telling young Seth to hurry.
“Matthew James Connor,” Jean yelled, and planted her feet. “You were supposed to meet with the Shaws and then come over for dinner. There wasn’t supposed to be any more fighting. Victoria Shaw promised this was going to be the end of it—”
“She lied!” Matthew yelled back. “He’s dead. The Shaws moved against us. It was all a trap. Uncle Jason’s dead, and so’s my Dad, and Ken and Tim and—they’re coming after us. We need to go right now!”
Young Seth was crying, holding onto his mother the same way my Seth often held onto me when he was scared. She picked him up and held him tightly, both to comfort him and to seek refuge in his touch.
Matthew grabbed her keys from a hook by the door, and they stumbled toward the back door.
My Seth was white as a sheet. Tears welled in his eyes. I wanted to comfort him, but we didn’t have time if we were going to follow his memory.
Outside, Jean Connor got young Seth buckled into the back of her minivan. She gave him one last kiss and turned to get into the driver’s seat, but she barely had the driver’s door open before the ground beneath her exploded and she was blown into the dirt. Both Seths cried out as their mother struggled to get up off the ground.
Matthew came running around the other side of the car.
“I thought we got you already.”
He turned, and saw Jake and Jack walk into the yard.
“I guess you missed,” one of the twins said. “Let me.”
Jake was speaking—Jake was the twin Uncle Mark had killed.
He flicked his hand out. A stream of flame sprayed from his palm and engulfed Matthew, who began to scream.
Sapphire gasped in shock, but the twins just laughed as poor Matthew burned alive right before their eyes.
The young man stumbled backwards and into what looked like a pool. After that, we didn’t see any more, because young Seth’s view had been cut off. He was still strapped into the car.
Jake and Jack walked over to the open minivan. We saw them look young Seth up and down as he was crying and screaming.
“Little putz pissed all over himself,” Jack said to his twin. “Do we really have to bring him back with us? I bet I could shoot right down his throat and make him go boom from the inside out.”
Jake laughed, but shook his head. “You heard Vicky. We can’t kill them all—and this one’s on her list. We know his ability. He sees ghosts, big deal. He can’t hurt us.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. By this time, young Seth had started calling for his mother.
Jack reached out and slapped his face. “Shut up or I’ll—”
“Get away from my son!”
Jean rushed Jake from behind, holding a small knife to his throat. She used her free hand to grab Jake’s hair and yanked his head back, forcing him to expose his neck even more.
“Keep your hands up,” she ordered. “You and your good for nothing brother are going to let us go. We’ll take our chances outside of Angel Falls, but you just—”
An electric spark zapped her on the hand, forcing the knife to drop and her to scream. Once she was distracted, Jake spun around and punched her straight in the face. She fell backwards into a rosebush.
“You two are morons,” someone else said. A man came into view with his hand held up and electric energy pulsing around it. It was one of the men I’d seen in my earlier vision—one of the guys stuffing his face on pizza and wings while Seth had been locked up downstairs, hungry. “I knew you’d screw this up.”
“Shut up, Bill,” Jake looked annoyed. “You might have hit me. You gotta watch those bolts of yours.”
I wanted to jump into Seth’s memory and kill them all for their cruelty. Glancing over, I could see Sapphire felt the same way. Her hands were clenched into fists and she glared at the Shaws, but we both stayed silent and watched. We needed to know what happened next.
“You know,” Bill said as he looked at Seth’s mother with a disgusted sneer. “I can’t believe I used to like you back in school.” He pulled her up by her hair. “Jason didn’t go down without a fight. He took three of us out before we killed him. And he didn’t die slowly. He was in a lot of pain.”
Jean’s fist flashed out, striking Bill’s face, splitting his lip. She tried to run, but was stopped when Bill grabbed her throat in his hand.
With a bloody grin, Bill began to squeeze, first with one hand then with both. Jean clawed at him, scratching his face, scraping the skin of his hands, but he refused to let go. Her eyes went wide as her lungs burned. Her face began to turn purple as the fight started to go out of her.
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