He was completely right, I knew it. I just didn’t want to admit how I felt to myself. Now that Emil was calling me on it, I knew I’d have to deal with my emotions soon. I kept getting stuck on Emil’s certainty that I would know who to choose. I didn’t. Maybe that meant I wasn’t ready to choose yet, or maybe it meant neither one of them was right for me. If being without a soul mate would leave Alex or Emil unbalanced, what would happen to them? Would they become evil like other Daevos members? I sighed, thinking about the possibilities. I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be better to just not choose at all.
I met Jas at the movie theater on campus. Unless you wanted to drive thirty miles to Crested Butte, it’s the only movie theater in the Gunnison area—which made it super busy anytime a big movie was released. I was pretty sure people had already started standing in line for their tickets to the next movie involving Middle Earth. Luckily, we were going to the latest chick flick and it wouldn’t be an issue. It was probably also another reason Alex had agreed to watch me remotely, instead of stalking me in person. Lately, he preferred UFC to romance. Perhaps he was making a not-so-subtle comparison to our relationship status with his entertainment choices.
I opened the door to the College Center, nodding to a few people in the cafeteria area as I passed. During weekdays, the College Center was the most popular building on campus and constantly crowded, but on weekends, most people left campus for other activities like skiing or driving to Crested Butte.
I walked down the hall and saw Jasmine sitting cross-legged on the floor across from the theater. She was bent over a book, blue highlighter in hand, her head bobbing up and down slightly. Wires trailed from her ears to the bright blue iPod next to her on the floor. I could see her lips moving silently to the music. She turned a page and looked up. I waved at her. She waved back with a wide smile. She folded her book shut with a loud thud, like she was making some sort of announcement that she was done with words for the day. She stood slowly, stretched, and pulled the wires out of her ears, wrapping them around the iPod in her hand.
“Hey!” I said with marked enthusiasm. I was happy to be spending some time with my friend again, and even happier I didn’t have a bodyguard for a few hours.
“Hi!” She blew a bubble, popping it loudly. “I already got tickets.”
My lips turned down slightly. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t want it to sell out. Wouldn’t want to miss our chance to see Ryan Reynolds shirtless.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, looking around at the deserted hall and one freshman behind the concession / ticket purchasing stand. “It looks like there will be a long wait for everyone who didn’t plan ahead.”
Jasmine smiled and we both started to laugh. We’d fallen back into our old patterns, the jokes coming easily. It was like the past few months had never happened. I hoped it would stay that way when I talked to her about everything else going on in my life.
“I’ll get the treats since you bought the tickets.”
Jasmine nodded okay. We got a bag of popcorn with obscene amounts of butter, two boxes of candy, a lemonade for me, and a Coke for Jasmine. I gasped when she ordered. “If Zach knew you ordered a Coke, he’d consider you a traitor of epic proportions.”
Jasmine wrinkled her nose. “They don’t have Pepsi, and I like Coke more, anyway. Don’t tell him. It’s one of those things I can’t admit until we’re legally bound to each other.”
I laughed as we found some seats in the middle of a row toward the back of the theater. As we settled our things, I took in the space. Constantly taking stock of my surroundings and cataloging the details was something I did out of habit now. It wasn’t easy to learn, but almost being killed by a soul stealing supernatural being was a great motivator.
There were plenty of places for someone to hide…rows and rows of them in fact. There were a few other people in the theater with us, though. I imagined if someone was lurking about on the floor, the other patrons might have noticed. Still, I couldn’t count on other people to keep me safe, so I’d be vigilant about floor squatters. The thought made me instinctively raise my legs and rest them on the back of the chair in front of me.
Other than that, there was the door we’d come in, and the emergency exit at the front of the theater by the screen. The emergency exit was easy to watch, and I’d see light from the door behind me if someone opened it, so I felt okay about that too. Deciding we were safe for now, I slouched down in my seat as I grabbed a handful of popcorn, the butter making shiny little stains on my hands. I ate the pieces one by one and turned my head to Jas. “Legally bound, huh? So I guess things are still going well with you and Zach?”
Jas took a long sip of Coke, made an ahh sound, and leaned back in her chair. “Yeah. We’ve been busy with school, but we try to make time for each other.”
“You two are perfect together,” I said, nodding my head in admiration. I wondered if I’d ever have a relationship like that with Alex or Emil—or if I already had. One of them was my soul mate, and that’s pretty much the definition of perfect, but my short relationships with both of them in this life never had the ease I’d seen between Jasmine and Zach. Granted, Alex, Emil, and I had been dealing with some high-stress situations, but still.
Jasmine smiled at my assessment. “I like to think so.” She picked up a kernel of popcorn but instead of eating it, she pulled it apart bit-by-bit, almost as if she were pre-occupied. “What about you,” she asked finally. “How’s your love-life?”
I sighed. I knew Jasmine wasn’t Alex’s and Emil’s biggest fan, but she’d been supportive in the coffee shop. She might change her opinion about them if she knew the whole story—and didn’t think I’d gone nuts—but I wasn’t ready to tell that to her right this second. It could at least wait until after Ryan Reynolds showed us his abs. This movie might be the last “normal” time we’d have together. I wanted to enjoy it. “It’s been interesting…complicated.”
She took another drink. “You use that word a lot when you talk about them.” She paused. I waited. “I still can’t believe the two crazy alpha males who wanted to kill each other a few months ago when you were dating them are now saying everything’s fine and you should take your time to decide between them.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think they’re particularly happy about it, but yeah.”
“Who came up with that idiotic plan? You know it’s only a matter of time before they kill each other. Then you won’t have either of them!”
Fortunately for me, they weren’t easy to kill.
“They did,” I answered. “They didn’t want me to regret my choice, and wanted to make sure I completely understood what they both have to offer. They indicated the sooner I decide, the better, but so far, no blood has been shed…at least not that I know of.”
Jas blew out a long breath. “It’s only a matter of time. I have to tell Zach this. He’ll think it’s insane.”
“Yeah. I feel that way about my life a lot, too.”
Jas looked at me like I’d said something weird, which I had. I was about to ask if we could talk after the movie because there were some things she needed to know regarding the last few months, when I suddenly felt a sturdy hand hit my shoulder from behind. I looked down at the dry, cracked fingers with chipped fingernails, and knew instantly they didn’t belong to Alex or Emil. I must have been caught up in the conversation and missed the light when the door opened behind me. Alex might have been right to worry about me being here alone. Hopefully, he really was watching me through his ring.
I glanced at Jasmine, who was already staring behind me. I turned slowly, looking up into the face of a guy I’d never met before. He had wavy black hair that curled slightly over his ears. His round face indicated a boy still on his way to becoming a man—or one stuck in time at that age. He was wearing black jeans with a red and black striped sweater that went to his wrists. It was a measure of my paranoia that I immediately looked to his arm for the Daevos vowmark. Too ba
d it was covered with his clothes. I spared a glance at his hand, rough with patches of darker spots, like he spent a lot of time outdoors. When I looked back at him, he was smiling. “Heyyy,” he said.
“Hi,” I answered warily. I tried to move forward and turn, using the excuse that I wanted to see him better. The movement made his grip tighten.
I shot a glance at Jasmine. She noticed I was uncomfortable, but didn’t seem concerned. “Hi! I’m Jasmine,” she said in her usual, perky tone.
The guy forced his gaze away from mine to Jasmine. He staggered a bit as he did so and I wondered if instead of evil, he might just be drunk. “I’m George.”
“Like the monkey!” Jasmine said, referring to one of our favorite children’s books, Curious George.
George laughed, and Jasmine laughed with him, diffusing the situation. Smitten with Jasmine, he lifted his hand from me and turned his attention to her. To Jasmine, this was just some creepy guy who wouldn’t leave us alone. To me, it was a potential Daevos member, and I couldn’t even check for his vowmark because he had a sweater on. Who’d come up with such a stupid means of identification anyway? Geez! Did people not wear clothes when the Goddesses made that up? Or did they think the Daevos would only stick to tropical climates? Either way, it was a bad-guy identification fail.
Couple the annoying guy who might-be-evil-might-be-drunk with my already heightened paranoia, and we were quickly moving from tropical storm territory straight into hurricane levels. And that hurricane’s name was Alex. He’d undoubtedly be thrashing through sometime soon. Jasmine would not be happy and would start her stalker speech again.
Light from the hall flashed as the door opened again. Rowdy laughs mixed with flat-out guffaws hit my ears before I got a visual. When I did, three guys were pushing each other and stumbling down the aisle. One of them saw George talking to us and yelled, “Snuffy!”
Snuffy? That had to be a nickname. And not a very flattering one.
The guy pointed at us and brought his stumbling in our direction. His friends teetered along behind him. “Snuffy” George seemed just as pleased to see him. “Dude! You found me!” I glanced at Jas with a look that asked, were they playing hide-and-seek?
“We got the wrong time!” The guy who’d yelled said. “This is a girl movie!”
Snuffy seemed to think that was hysterical and couldn’t stop laughing.
The guy pushed Snuffy forward. “Come on! Jake’s got more beer at his house!”
Yeah, because that was exactly what they needed. At least my suspicions had been correct about him being drunk, not Daevos. Still, my observation skills could use some work. It was a good thing I wasn’t studying to be Detective Columbo. I’d watched the show with my mom growing up. She would be disappointed at my lack of sleuthing talent.
“We’ll hang out there until our movie starts!”
On the way out, they kept laughing and stumbling, pausing long enough to say, “See ya, girls! Have fun watching your girl movie!”
I kind of resented that. I knew plenty of guys who watched romantic comedies and liked them—even if they wouldn’t admit it.
Jas and I watched them leave. “That was weird,” she finally said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“People are stupid on a whole new level when they’re that drunk.”
“You’re not kidding,” I agreed again, but in my head I was thinking her level of weird and mine were on two completely different planets. I’d watched a soul be destroyed after holding its body in place with my mind. That was weird. Jasmine hadn’t seen anything close.
She laughed a little and before long, previews were starting. I lost myself in romance and sexy men for the next two hours.
When the movie was over, we left the theater and drove to the town ice cream shop a few blocks away. I was feeling good about catching up with Jasmine.
We ordered our ice cream and sat down to eat and talk. Jasmine started sculpting her bubble gum flavored treat into a mountain in her bowl. She loved the flavor because it came with gum, so she always said it was two treats in one. Because she always saved the gum for last, she was very particular about how she ate it. First she made a mountain of ice cream. As she came to pieces of gum, she’d pick them out and line them around the edge of the bowl. Her precision was impressive. It was like watching an archeologist dig for artifacts.
I got cake batter and chocolate ice cream mixed with brownies. It was pretty awesome. I don’t have any special ice cream sculpting skills though, so I just ate mine like all the other boring people in the world.
“How are your classes going?” I asked between bites.
She picked out a blue piece of gum, carefully scraping some ice cream from the mountain onto her spoon. “Ugh,” she said, holding her stomach like she’d been stabbed. “Chemistry might kill me.” She paused to take a bite. “I don’t know if nursing was such a great idea for my major.”
“I’m surprised you’ve stuck with it this long,” I said. “Last year you changed your major at least five times. Your parents were concerned.”
She laughed. “They talked to you about it?”
I nodded. “They asked if I knew what you’d decided on. At that point, I think you were considering leaving school to become a Victoria’s Secret model. I didn’t tell them that.”
“Those angels make bank!” Jas frowned, pushing her brows together—like she was sad at her lost opportunity.
“Still, I think if you’d flip-flopped on your major so much this year, they would have staged an intervention.”
She sighed, dropping another piece of gum at the base of the mountain. “I’m still not sure this was the right choice, but we’ll see.”
I nodded. Picking a major is scary. You’re basically deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life, or at least until you can find something you’re passionate about that pays enough so your degree doesn’t matter. Some majors aren’t as exclusive. Like, business. You could get a job doing almost anything with that focus. But a major like nursing? There aren’t many directions to go with that…and they all involve needles.
We both took a bite of our ice cream. “What about you? Still happy with psych?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I think the subject is really interesting. I’d like to get my Masters degree and open a private practice.”
“Would you do general therapy, or focus on something?”
I sat up straighter in my chair while I pushed my ice cream around a bit with my spoon. I wasn’t sure how Jas would react to my answer, but she’d be hearing more soon enough, so this would be a good way to test the waters. “I’d probably do general therapy, but I’d really like to work with people who have had paranormal experiences.”
Jas didn’t seem fazed. “Like ghosts and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I answered slowly, thinking “and stuff” could cover a lot.
“So you’d be trying to help them deal with what they think they saw?”
“I’d like to.”
“That would be hard,” Jas said. “It’s not easy to convince someone what they thought they saw wasn’t actually real. Have you seen some of those ghost hunting reality shows? Those people are hard-core.”
And it had been going so well.
Apparently all the years we’d tried to conjure ghosts in the graveyard, or make Bloody Mary appear in the bathroom mirror, Jas had been doing it for fun and didn’t believe anything would really happen. I now knew better. “I’d help them whatever way I could. But I wouldn’t try to convince them they hadn’t seen something.”
“Why not? Therapists are supposed to cure delusions, not make them worse.”
I took offense to that. “Because there are too many unanswered questions out there,” I said, my tone firm.
Jas looked at me suspiciously. “Do you actually believe in ghosts and weird paranormal stuff?”
I held back a sigh. If she only knew. “Yeah, I do. I’d like to focus my Masters research on it, eventually.”
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Jas’s spoon clattered to the table. “How is this possible?”
I took a deep breath. Her reaction didn’t bode well for future paranormal discussions. “Jas, I’ve always been interested in the paranormal. You know that. We used to watch those scary reality shows together! Remember when you were sure the Black’s house was actually the Amityville house and we conducted an investigation?”
“I was just goofing off.”
“What about in high school when we drove around the cemetery three times with our lights off and saw the big headstone at the top of the cemetery turn red? We were convinced it was a portal to hell.”
She rolled her eyes. “We lived in a small Montana town. Everything was a portal to hell. The light was just a reflection from passing cars.”
I shrugged. “Rationalize it any way you want, it still happened. You can’t deny there are things out there that can’t be explained.” As I said it, I realized my words sounded a lot like the ones Caleb had said to me in the cave last year when I’d pretended to not believe him about the Amaranthine and Daevos. People like to explain things they don’t understand by calling them odd occurrences or impossibilities; really the rationalizations are coping mechanisms people use when they can’t deal with the truth.
“You’re right,” Jasmine agreed, “but that doesn’t mean they’re paranormal. It means we haven’t found the explanation yet.”
“Or that we have, and don’t want to believe it.”
She grabbed a napkin off the table, waving it in an “I give up” gesture. It was probably smart not to get in an argument right now. Our relationship was too fragile. Still, I was concerned about how she’d eventually take the news that I was a reincarnated Tracker who could sense soul mate bonds, and in a weird twist, seemed to have two soul mates myself. I had a feeling her immediate response would include a lot of giggling.
“So,” she said, leaning forward like we were about to exchange juicy gossip. “What’s it like dating two guys?”
Eternal Echoes, Emblem of Eternity Trilogy Book 2 Page 11