by Tara Brown
Of all the details in his story, that just seemed too ridiculous.
“Yeah. Shamans are very powerful, Aimee. A being nearly as powerful and equally as supernatural caused your mom’s death. Nothing in the world will ever be the same for you. You’ve seen the other side, which means you’re stuck with visions from the in-between. You will start to see things you can’t explain, and you can’t tell other people you see them. No one will believe you and you’ll sound crazy.”
“No. No, it hasn’t happened, except for seeing you.”
“What about Giselle before she woke up?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Shit.” How did he even know that? We hadn’t told a soul.
“Trust me, you have the sight now. You saw past my cloak, Aimee. That’s a bad sign.” He shuffled forward on his knees to me, getting sand all over his jeans. I stared at him, trying desperately to see something other than what I was there. The sexiest man I could possibly imagine, crawling on the sand toward me in jeans that hugged him nicely and no shirt. His stomach flexed under his silky skin. I wanted to touch each ab muscle. I wanted to run my hands down his stomach, possibly dragging my fingernails a little.
“You’re a hallucination brought on by the drugs and the stress of yesterday.”
“You saw me before you were drugged,” he muttered.
“Why can’t I be scared of you?”
“You can. You aren’t because deep down you know I won’t hurt you.” His smile reassured me. Even though my whole world filled with questions, I wasn’t sure I wanted the answers to them. “We need to get you home.” He rubbed along my arms, trying to warm me, while looking down on me as we knelt on the sand.
I frowned. “Can we walk?” The whole poofing thing wasn’t a fond memory for me.
“No.” He stepped forward and picked me up, and before I had a chance to argue, we were gone.
I panicked. “Just watch where you’re going!”
“We’re in your room, Aimee.”
The next thing I felt was the softness of my sheets. Wide eyed, I frowned at him. “I have sand on my butt. I don’t want it in my sheets.”
He sat on the chair across the room, watching me.
“Don’t leave.” I gave him a look and walked to the bathroom with new pajamas. “I’ll be right back.”
But I wasn’t right back. I stayed in the shower, trying to translate all the details he had told me into layman’s terms as if I were telling my sister a fairy tale.
“He is an immortal who was trying to help us cope with Mom’s accident. He was trying to make sure a negative outcome didn’t happen as a result of Mom’s death, which was not meant to be. A supernatural force or being killed Mom, and as a result, everything in our lives is upside down. I accidentally died on his watch, and although he managed to save me, I can see him and dead people as a result of being dead for a few seconds. All of this is unfounded at this point. He is clearly battling an obvious attraction to me and I him, even though he isn’t a human being.” I summed it up out loud to get a good grasp on how things were. I turned off the shower and knew what I had to do. “Dear God, if you can hear me, please make this just be a case where I’ve lost my mind. He isn’t real and the hallucinations have finally taken over.” That seemed more plausible.
I dressed and went downstairs, ignoring the pain in my head, to see my dad so he wouldn’t worry. “Hey, Dad. I’m going back to bed. I just showered.”
“Okay, dear.” He was reading a text of some sort and looked up with his glasses on, smiling. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “I think I just needed some sleep. I should be better by tomorrow, I think.”
“Okay, kiddo. Night.”
As I turned to climb the stairs, a knock at the door caught my attention.
My dad glanced at me.
“I’ll get it.” The trek across the room to the door was brutal. My hands quivered from the pain.
“Hey.” My stomach sank with guilt when I opened the door.
“Hey yourself.” Shane grinned at me and stepped inside. “Just wanted to check on you.” He bent his face down and pressed his lips against mine. He whispered against my lips, “You okay?”
I blushed and pulled back. “Yeah. Just sleepy.”
“I was looking for you after school but Blake said you were home sick.” He tucked my long hair behind my ear and played with the end.
“Yeah. I wasn’t feeling so hot.” I stood on my tiptoes and ran my fingers up into his thick hair, pulling his face back down on mine. He lifted me and pulled me out of the house. Away from the watchful eyes of my father.
He raised me up, pulling me into him. I moaned into the kiss, caressing him with my hands and mouth.
“Whoa!” He pulled back, chuckling. “Aimes, what’s gotten into you?”
“Sorry.” I wanted to tell him a tall blond hallucination, but I shook my head and wiped my swollen lips.
“So we’re good?” He grinned.
“Yeah. Call you tomorrow?” I took a step backward, resting my fleecy back against the door.
“Okay.” He stepped into me and devoured me once more. His body was crushing me into the dark door. He pushed himself away, turned, and waved backward. “I gotta go before your dad shoots me on the front porch.” He started the truck and drove off like a madman.
My fingers dug into the door, trying to grip the hard surface. He was the right fit for my heart. He always had been. I turned and went back inside, feeling confused about Aleksander and Shane and the whole mess.
My dad grimaced from behind his glasses and glass of wine, pretending to read the textbook he held.
I rolled my eyes. “Night.”
“Uh-huh.”
I climbed the stairs, trying to make it all the way to the top so my dad wouldn’t doubt my miraculous recovery. In truth, the stairs were death. My poor legs quivered as I reached the top. Being around Aleksander seemed to be the only thing that made me feel good. Besides mauling Shane.
That worried me. Almost as much as walking into my room and having to look into his eyes after the whole Shane thing.
How could I possibly be into two guys?
I had to pick and this, in this room, wasn’t the healthy choice.
I leaned on my bedroom door and watched him lying on my bed reading a book on how to decipher Arabic. He was in his jeans, still half naked on my bed.
It might have been a hot moment for me, half-naked guy in my bed and all, but I frowned at his jeans. I assumed they were still coated in the salt and sand which would be covering my sheets.
“Your jeans—”
“I know.” He smiled as I closed my door and locked it. “I took the sheets and my pants outside and shook them. There isn’t any sand.”
“Thanks.” I wondered if he could read my mind, or because he was a figment of my mind, he knew what I was thinking.
His crooked smile seemed to be stuck on his face. “I haven’t seen these kind of pajamas on a girl your age in a long time.”
“Fleece?” I asked as I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Don’t girls your age wear sexy things?”
I couldn’t help but laugh back. “Well, I had underwear and a tank top on, but you wrecked them. Honestly, I just can’t seem to shake being cold and itchy. These make me feel nice.”
He agreed, “I love fleece.” He reached over and rubbed his hands up and down my arm, slowly. As weird as it was, I could have fallen asleep.
The sexy vibe I’d had downstairs started to fade away as his massage deepened, moving to my shoulders. It relaxed me and made me sleepy. My head didn’t hurt while he was touching me. I had to follow my plan though if I was ever to get beyond the schizophrenia fears I was harboring.
“Go to the chair. We need to talk.”
He groaned. “We can talk here.”
“No. Move.” I shoved him off the bed.
He landed on his feet with amazing reflexes and grabbed the chair from
the other side of the room. He pulled it over beside my bed and sat on it backward, waiting.
“Okay, I’m ready, brainiac. Fire away.” He kept a smug grin on his face, probably already knowing the questions I had to ask.
I lay on my back. “Okay, so we are going to do the Q&A portion of this evening, quickly. I have about ten minutes of effort left in me and then I need some sleep. Ready?”
“Do your worst.”
“Did the drugs ruin my brain?”
“What?”
“Do I have drug-induced schizophrenia? Are you a figment of my imagination?”
“You have sand on your floor from the beach and I healed your pain. The answer is obviously not scientific. Next.”
“How old are you?”
“Six hundred and forty-three.” He responded quickly and efficiently. I liked that.
“How many families like mine have you worked with?”
“Not many. It doesn’t happen often. I’ve never kept track, but I would say a couple hundred at the most?”
“Where do you live in your off time?”
“I don’t know. I just roam until I’m called. Sometimes I chill with friends.”
“Is there a Heaven where you go when you’re not looking after a family?”
“I don’t know anything about Heaven, personally. I’ve been cursed to be what I am since my death. Like you, I have heard there is a Heaven. I have met people who have been there. I myself have never been.”
“Were you ever human?” I turned to face him.
He flinched ever so slightly at the question. “Yes.” He didn’t go into details, but rigidity washed over him.
“When?”
His expression told me to drop it. “Six hundred and twenty years ago.”
“You’re twenty-three?”
He nodded.
My eyes got heavy as my head started to hurt again. “Did you see my mom die?”
“No, I came afterward.”
“What killed her?”
“A shape shifter.” His voice never cracked or wavered as he said it.
My head instantly translated as I sensed myself drift off into a painful sleep: my mom was killed by a werewolf or something that belonged in an HBO series.
Chapter 18
Is there Philly Cream Cheese in Heaven?
I dreamed things that made no sense to me. I was lost and confused. My mom was falling and then she turned into an angel and flew back up into the sky. She never came back down from the sky. She also didn’t seem too concerned that I was standing on the road watching her fly away. She didn’t wave to me.
I woke to find Aleksander sleeping beside me on my bed, his warm body nearly burning me as I touched him. I was still frozen but touching him seemed to take it away.
A million questions were stuck in my mind. They had nowhere to go. My head was swelling with them.
Aleksander stirred, turned on his side, and wrapped his leg around me. He pulled me into him. I let his lips drag up my throat until he whispered a word, “Nora.”
I froze, not sure what to think. I stayed very still until he started to wake up and opened his eyes to me. I assumed Nora was a woman he had loved before he met me.
He looked at me and smiled. “You have more questions now?”
“Who’s Nora?” I blurted out.
“How did you—”
“You talked in your sleep.”
“Oh.” Finally, after a moment of thought he whispered, “My wife.”
A shiver trembled through my whole body. “Wife,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“Yes. We were married when I was eighteen. She was the only woman I ever loved in my whole life.”
“What happened to her?” I had to ask.
He looked down at the sheets, breaking the eye contact as if ashamed. “She remarried and moved on after I died.”
“Did you watch her?” I asked.
“Every day I could. I watched her fall out of love with me and in love with him. The sweet soft girl I had married became a hardened woman. It was a tough time and she had a hard go.”
“That’s terrible.” I blinked away a tear. “You still love her.” It was a statement not a question.
“Yes, of course. She was my first true love and I never got closure.”
“Where were you from?” I asked, moving over on the bed, away from him. I could tell he was putting up a wall, like I did. I backed off a little.
“I’m from Norway. Aurland. It’s on the Nærøyfjord. My family had a farm. My surname was Jonson because my dad’s name was Jon—that’s how it was done. So my sisters were Jonsdoter. Our mom was captured from somewhere near the Greek islands in a raid. So she named me Aleksander. It was a Greek name but it sounded Norwegian. Well, it did to her. I was made fun of a lot for my name. Everyone thought it was a girl’s name. Education wasn’t as important back then. Not like it is now, where everyone knows about Aleksander the Great.” He beamed at me.
I held back a snort. “So can you still speak Norwegian?” I asked, not thinking about it.
“Ja jeg kan.” He smiled, laughing. “So, shall we get to the rest of your questions? I know you have a million.”
“I’m sorry about your wife, that’s really sad. What did she look like?”
His eyes slanted. “Not letting this one go, huh? Fine. She was tall, very tall. Almost as tall as I am. She had long blonde hair to her waist. It was thick and almost white. Like yours, but thicker. Her skin tanned, even though she was fair. Her eyes were blue like mine—intensely blue. She had a pretty face with beautiful features. She was thick, not fat but strong. She could pull a cart and carry kids around all day. She was an amazing woman. Are you happy you know that now? Shall we talk about your past boyfriends?”
I bit my lip. “I don’t have any past ones. I had never been kissed in my life before these last few weeks.”
His face reddened and grew angry. “The guy who was here last night, making out with you on the front porch? He doesn’t count?”
“He counts.” I frowned at him. “I just don’t know what he and I are.”
“What are you and I?”
“That is even less certain. You’re still seen as a criminal to society, and before, when you were always vanishing on me, I thought you were a ghost. Kissing Shane still seems like a better idea than kissing you.”
He growled, “I’m not going to comment.”
“Whatever.” I blushed, sensing his annoyance on the subject.
“I don’t want you to be with anyone but me, but I don’t really know how to be with you. I can’t stay here forever.” He tilted his head.
“Where will you go next?”
“Wherever I’m called.” He looked sad at the thought of that.
“And I have to go to college. I don’t know that I want a boyfriend when I’m at college.”
“You know, I haven’t felt this protective and possessive in a long time. It will take me a while to cope with you saying things like boyfriend.”
“Let’s not think about it.” I stared at the ceiling as I considered how to ask the question I’d wondered about since he started the conversation. “How did you die and become an immortal?”
“There it is—the right question.” He ran his right hand through his short hair and looked down at the bed. His eyelids lifted and without moving his head he watched me through his lashes again. “Same as your mom. A shape shifter killed me. I was attacked and left in the woods to die. Next question—”
I interrupted. “But you didn’t turn into a werewolf from the bite?”
He laughed. “Hollywood made that up in the early forties with The Wolf Man. No, a man must be cursed by a special and rare person to become a lycanthrope, unless of course they’re born to the family. The bite does nothing but infect the person if the wound is not taken care of. Rarely is a person bitten though. Most of them hunt animals in the forests, not people. We don’t taste very good. True shifters are fae.” His smile was haunted.
“A discussion for another time.”
“But how did you become this? How did you learn all your magical powers?” I could see him backing away emotionally from the conversation.
“Let’s focus on right now. We have a problem. I don’t know how to stop my curse from pulling me to the next place, and I don’t want to be apart from you.”
“That is a problem.” I tried to think of questions that didn’t involve things he wouldn’t want to talk about—his wife, his family, his homeland, his turning into whatever he was, and definitely no discussing his death. “How did you know to come here when my mom died? How do you know where to go next?” I hoped he would at least answer these, and I could possibly hypothesize on my own from the breadcrumbs he left me.
“I just know. I get a feeling. Like when you have a dream, I see what happens in flashes or pieces, I guess. I simply know I need to go right or left.”
Disappointment and asking him questions made my head want to explode.
“I kind of pictured it more as if you fly up to the pearly gates and someone gives you a clipboard with a name on it. You then ask questions around the Philly Cream Cheese snack bar and figure out how you’re going to crack this tough case.”
“Wow.” He burst into laughter. “I wish it was that easy. I’m not a real angel. I’m cursed.” He moved a strand of hair from my face and smiled. “I think you should go and eat.”
“Yeah, probably.” I was a little dizzy, but by then I knew to wait it out. The stars always cleared after a moment or so.
I pushed myself up, but my legs wanted to buckle. I could tell from his worried expression he was thinking about taking me back to the hospital. All I needed was more sleep so I stood my ground and walked out of my room. My dad wasn’t downstairs.
“Do you get hungry?” I asked as I slowly descended the stairs.
“Yes and no. I am an immortal now. I’m not like an angel in that I can make myself vanish and become air. I have a sort of magic. I can cloak myself around people who haven’t been to the in-between obviously. Even cloaked you’ve seen me, so you’re not a normal person anymore. I need food and drink to live, but I won’t die without it. I will get tired and weak after a long time.”