by Cege Smith
“Jeffrey, I’d like you to escort David back to his room. I think given his current attitude that it’s best that he doesn’t have an opportunity to interact with Ellie without my own personal supervision. I’m sure you can make the appropriate excuses to her about his absence. I have some other things to take care of in the meantime.”
“Of course,” Jeffrey said.
From what David remembered, the old butler had never cared for him. At the time he thought it was either he didn’t like children or the fact that Lillian was constantly showering him with attention. Now he considered the possibility that Jeffrey considered him weak and unworthy of his consideration given Mikel’s control over him. Jeffrey had been yet another of Mikel’s spies that Lillian never knew was there. Right now it meant that Jeffrey was a roadblock; a roadblock he would have to get through to get to Ellie.
David felt Jeffrey’s hands clasp his shoulders from behind and he was roughly pulled to his feet. David expected to be dragged up the stairs, and he was planning to make enough noise during the journey to his room to hopefully attract Ellie’s attention. Her room was up on the third floor, but the stairwell was open all the way to the top.
Mikel grinned at him and then made a small wave. “See you later, alligator.”
The scene faded and when David’s eyes readjusted, he saw that he was standing in the middle of the room Mikel had been given in the mansion when he reappeared as David. Another piece appeared in the mental jigsaw puzzle of his memories. All that physics stuff flew right out the window when you were dealing with a waypoint. Entities tied to it that weren’t bound by a mortal body could transport themselves anywhere they wanted. The transfer was not as pleasant for someone like David. His skin crawled and it felt for a few moments like he had an extreme sunburn.
He pulled away from Jeffrey’s grasp and walked over to the chair where he remembered Ellie sitting earlier. He flopped into it and stared at Jeffrey. “So let me guess. I’m grounded and supposed to stay in my room until Mikel says I can come out?”
The expression on Jeffrey’s face was priceless. David watched as the butler’s face got red and the man’s mouth twitched as if he wanted to say something but reconsidered each statement. “You will not leave this room because you won’t be able to.” He pointed and David saw that the door to the hallway was gone. And the air was becoming uncomfortably warm.
“I thought, and Mikel agreed, that you may have missed your previous room. So he’s agreed to let me recreate as much of that environment here as I see fit. Now if Ellie or any one of the others were to come looking for you, all they’d find would be an empty room. I think that it won’t take long before you’ll reconsider your position on joining Mikel. It is pointless to try to fight him. He will win. He always does, and it would be unfortunate for you to lose Ellie’s affections in some desperate, misguided need to assert your independence.”
“He needs me. He said so himself,” David said, sounding more confident than he felt. He had a sinking suspicion that Mikel had an ace up his sleeve that David couldn’t see.
Jeffrey’s next words confirmed it. “If Mikel so chooses, David, you will be nothing more than a temporary fix to a problem that he can resolve through other means.”
“Ellie loves me. And I love her. You can’t just chuck that aside without risking weakening the waypoint, which I know he won’t do. Even if she is a Ripher, he can’t be sure that her psychic ability would be able to sustain it on her own without killing her.” David wasn’t sure where the words had come from, but as soon as he said them he knew they were true. He needed to remember more quickly.
“She loves you now,” Jeffrey said with a sly smile. “If she were to perhaps change her affections to a more suitable partner, one who had abilities superior to even her own, well now, that would change things considerably, don’t you think?”
The thought was sickening and David realized what Jeffrey was saying. “She could never care about a thing as revolting as him. She’s a good person, and she cares deeply about other people. Mikel kills people. There’s no way he could pull that off.”
“I think you’d be surprised at the caliber of women Mikel has wooed over the course of his existence,” Jeffrey said coolly. “In any case, I’ll leave you with that thought to mull over. You can be a problem or you can be part of the solution. If you do truly care for Ellie, I think you need to do some very deep thinking of what your next move will be.” With those words, Jeffrey faded away.
As soon as the man vanished, the temperature in the room climbed quickly. David was beside himself with worry and he started to pace the room, despite the fact that it took less than a minute for the familiar sweat to start gathering on his forehead. He knew that he was going to be very miserable soon, but that paled in comparison to what Jeffrey had just told him.
He should have considered that Mikel would eventually make a play for Ellie’s heart to ensure a back-up plan. He had been stupid not to anticipate that. If Ellie did begin to care for Mikel, then Mikel could bypass his need for David altogether. In Mikel’s game, that would be a win-win situation, and an attractive one. For David, that was the worst possible scenario; not only would Ellie be forever trapped in the waypoint, but she would also be tied to a man who would rip her heart to shreds for sport.
David slammed his fist into the wall where the door should be. A hole appeared, and as soon as he pulled his fist away, the hole disappeared. So it was remarkably like his previous prison cell. He wondered if it had truly been his fate to be damned. Turning his back against the wall, David slid to the ground.
Damned. That’s what he was. Over the course of a century, his body had been used to watch and manipulate his adoptive parents as well as the poor souls that had the misfortune to be drawn to this waypoint for their transition. He had never known what it was like to be normal until he was sent into the real world. Even then, although he didn’t know it, he had been prodded and guided to Ellie’s doorstep.
He had been manipulated to find her and bring her to the waypoint. His love had trapped her here as surely as her decision to save their lives when it was offered up by Mikel. The thought had crossed his mind, as it did now, if his feelings for Ellie were real or manufactured, but then he remembered that the waypoint wouldn’t have accepted them as its own personal “battery” unless the feelings were real. That gave him a small amount of comfort. That also meant that even though she had been manipulated as well, Ellie’s feelings were as real as his own. It wasn’t much to cling to, but it made all the difference.
David knew that if he had any chance of really helping Ellie, his options were to find a way to play nice with Mikel, or find a way to win at Mikel’s game. If he did what Mikel wanted, then there was less need for Mikel to use him as his body puppet. As long as he had an opening where he was the one in control around Ellie, there was a shot he could send her a message somehow and let her know that she was in danger and that he was trying to figure out a way to help. That as much as he wanted her to be able to, she couldn’t trust him unless he gave her some kind of signal. He was going to have to be very subtle about it. Mikel could smell deceit from a mile away. He had to think. All he had for the time being was time. He would hold out hope that Ellie wasn’t going to be distracted by Mikel and his charm.
David leaned his head back against the wall and let the heat soak into his skin. If there was a way to beat Mikel, he was going to find it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Feeling a small amount of trepidation, Ellie made her way up to her room. On the third floor she stopped just short of the door to the right. A gaily drawn-up sign still hung from a tiny piece of tape that said “Ellie’s room.” She had barely used the room in the short time that she had watched the mansion at Lillian’s request; it seemed like a lifetime ago. From what David had told her, some awful things happened inside her room that last night. But with the trio from the car accident occupying the remaining three bedrooms on the second floor, she didn’t have much ch
oice. Her glance wandered across the hall to the set of double doors that marked the master suite. She had bad memories of that room as well.
Taking a deep breath, Ellie turned the doorknob and the door swung open. She didn’t know what she had expected, but the room looked exactly the same as she remembered it. It was a large room but it was still dominated by an elaborate four-poster bed, and there was a small make-up table against the right wall and a reading nook complete with comfy chair and a small reading lamp on a stand on the left. Across the wall that faced what she still thought of as the front of the house, there was a large sitting bench under the windows. Ellie knew that in her reality, on the Other Side, those windows framed a magnificent view of Lake of the Isles. But this wasn’t Minnesota anymore. The large windows gave way to nothing but blackness, which made Ellie uneasy. She wondered if there were invisible eyes out there staring at her and she shivered.
There was nothing in the room that indicated a woman had given birth there, or that people had died there. Ellie was starting to wonder if that whole part of her life had ever really existed at all. With no remnants to remind her, it was nothing but an empty room. Ellie decided that she needed to forget that piece of the past for the time being. It wouldn’t help her here to dwell on things she couldn’t change. Determined now, she crossed the room and went into the bathroom.
It was only at seeing her face in the mirror that Ellie discovered that her situation was taking a much larger toll on her than just a mental one. Ellie was thirty-three, but the pale, haunted woman in the mirror looked older. Her long brown hair fell almost to her waist now; it had been just midway down her back in her last memory. She touched her face. Just like with David’s, she saw lines there that hadn’t been there before, and her cheekbones protruded as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Her whole frame was bordering on skeletal. She looked ill.
Approaching the sink cautiously, Ellie’s mind whirled. How long had she been in the waypoint? She poked at her memories, but the moment she and David re-entered the house on that last night to her waking up in front of the fireplace downstairs in the library today seemed like it was almost instantaneous. But clearly that wasn’t the case. There was a hollow echo of something in between, but that time that she spent with the Voice seemed like mere moments. She was badly frightened by this latest development, because if she could indeed find a way back to her own reality, would she find her life gone? Had too much time passed? The thought paralyzed her.
Ellie turned the faucet on and set her hands on the edge of the sink bowl. Nausea ripped through her and for a minute she thought that she was going to pass out. She forced herself to focus on the water gushing from the faucet and watching it swirl down the drain. It had been years since she had dealt with an anxiety attack, and this one felt like a doozy. She took deep breaths and watched the water, pushing away the thoughts of hysteria that were running rampant through her mind. She had to be calm, collected, and thoroughly in control. She couldn’t allow unconfirmed thoughts and notions to cause her to do anything stupid. She had to deal with facts.
Eventually her heart rate returned to normal, and she looked up into the mirror and stared deeply into her own eyes. “You will not freak out,” she told her reflection. “You only know that time works differently here. You will remain in control. You will not let myths and half-truths beat you.” Roni had been the one that coached her on positive affirmations. Thinking of her old best friend gave Ellie pause. She remembered talking about Roni with the Voice, but she couldn’t remember why. Before that, she hadn’t thought of Roni in years. She knew that there was something important there, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Just like other thoughts of the Voice, the memory faded away almost as quickly as it came.
Shaking her head at her silliness, Ellie scooped a handful of the cool water from the faucet and leaning over the basin, splashed it on her face. The sensation gave her the jolt that she was hoping for; her thoughts crystallized and felt sharper. Another quick splash erased the nauseous feeling entirely. Ellie grabbed a hand towel off the rack and dried her face, feeling a million times better.
Looking at the reflection in the mirror, she could see that she even looked better. Her cheeks had a rosy glow from the crisp water and her eyes were bright, and not dull like before. She thought a short nap might be exactly what she needed to feel fully like herself again. She wasn’t sure that her body required sleep here, but it felt comforting. Her mother used to tell her there was nothing a nap couldn’t cure. Smiling, she set the towel down and made her way back into the bedroom.
She stopped just inside the room. Lounging on the window bench across the room was Mikel. For one second she appreciated how handsome he looked in his elegant suit, but she crushed that thought with one of revulsion.
“So much for knocking,” she said, crossing her arms. Mikel was the last person that she wanted to see. If she never saw him again, it would still be too soon. She hated how much control he had over her life.
“Ellie,” Mikel said, clapping his hands together. “Jeffrey said you are taking your transition well. I wanted to check on you myself considering I have a special interest.”
Although Ellie was wary of Mikel, she was certain that he needed her. That made her feel more confident in how she dealt with him. If she showed him the slightest ounce of fear, she was sure he’d pounce on that like a cat. Better to keep him off guard. She gestured at herself with her palms up and her hands wide. “As you can see, I’m fine. I could use a little rest though, so if you’d excuse me...”
Mikel stood up. “Of course, I understand that this is a taxing time for you, regardless of how well you are acclimating. I hope you know that I have been thinking a lot about you, Ellie, and my promises to you. I want you to know that I am a man of my word first and foremost. I know we are just starting to get to know one another, but I am hopeful you will find that my companionship isn’t entirely onerous.”
Ellie had no idea what to think about Mikel’s little speech. Did he think that at some point she would like him? The idea was preposterous. She said nothing but just walked over to the door and opened it. She couldn’t make her message more clear.
She gave a small cry of surprise to find a woman standing on the other side grinning at her. “Hi, Ellie,” the woman said. “I’m Lucy.”
“Lucy, I’m so glad you are here. I was just bringing Ellie to meet you,” Mikel said with his arms outstretched toward her. As he passed Ellie he gestured for her to follow him out into the hall.
Once she stepped outside, Ellie was surprised to find a small table had been set up along the window seat at the top of the stairs. The third floor landing was larger than Ellie’s studio apartment, and there was still plenty of space to move around. On the table were two glasses of red wine and a bottle.
Mikel put his arm around Lucy and looked at Ellie. Although the woman looked slightly uncomfortable, she didn’t move away from him. “Ellie, I know that you and Lucy are going to be fast friends. I asked her to come specifically to help you. I am sure that she can relieve some of that leftover guilt that I know lingers from your mortal coil.”
“How are you supposed to help me?” Ellie asked. She squinted at Lucy, trying to figure out if she had ever seen her before. There was something about the woman that felt familiar. Lucy was younger than she was, probably closer to David’s age. Her chocolate skin was smooth and lovely, and she had a short cap of black curls that framed her eyes perfectly. Her brown eyes twinkled at her. Lucy was just a tad shorter than Ellie, and she wore a trendy cream off-shoulder sweater and a pair of fitted khaki slacks. She looked ready to go out for a day of casual shopping and brunch, not someone who was caught up in life and death, and waypoints and hell.
Lucy looked up at Mikel with a look of disapproval. “You didn’t tell her?”
Mikel shrugged, “You didn’t give me time before you came barging in, dearest.” He looked at Ellie and winked. “Lucy is a witch.”
Even after everything th
at had happened to her, Mikel’s declaration caused a spasm of laughter to escape Ellie’s lips. “I’m sorry, what? I don’t believe in magic.”
Lucy nodded. She wore a small smile but her eyes were serious. “Yeah, I get that a lot. Look, why don’t we sit down and have a chat. I’m sure Mikel has far more important things to do than listen to a bunch of girl gossip.”
Mikel looked at his watch. Ellie thought the gesture absurd in a place where time seemed to matter little, but she said nothing. “You are probably right, Lucy. As much as I’d love to stay and help you get acquainted with the Afterlife’s newest Ripher, I do have another appointment.” Then he moved to Ellie so quickly that she didn’t have time to react. He touched her cheek and said, “I look forward to spending some quality time with you later.” Before she could jerk away he was gone.
Ellie’s breath was coming in short gasps and she felt like her skin was burned where he had touched her. She looked over at Lucy, who was rolling her eyes.
“I don’t understand why he always has to be so dramatic. He can use a door just like everybody else, but no. Always the ‘poof’ act to impress the girls,” Lucy said.
Ellie sat down on the bench beside Lucy because she needed a minute to collect her jumbled thoughts. Mikel’s touch completely unnerved her. A few seconds later, Lucy’s last words finally sunk in. “Impress who?”
“Well, you, of course,” Lucy said as if she was explaining something to a five-year-old. She picked up the wine glass and took a long sip. Then she set it down and licked her lips. “You are all he’s been able to talk about lately.”