I nodded, grinning up at him, happiness bubbling up inside me. “I don’t know why we fought it.”
“Neither do I,” he replied, pressing his lips against mine.
I lost myself in his kiss.
Everything was perfect.
After we left the hospital, Jason and I realized there was no threat to Hunter anymore. No one was trying to kill him. In fact, everyone was very grateful to him and Paige, just as I was. My son had healed me, taken away all the things that hurt me, made me whole.
We moved back into the mansion that my grandmother had left to me. It had been unoccupied for years, so it took a bit of sprucing up, but very soon, it was home again.
Jason and I settled into our lives easily, and we were both glad of it. For too long, we’d been antsy. We’d needed some kind of danger to keep us occupied. Now, for the first time, we were really free to enjoy things. We no longer had any violent urges of any kind. I didn’t want to kill. Jason didn’t want to either.
He told me how much it meant to him. He’d carried around his dark side for so many years, always fighting it and never quite managing not to give in. But now, it was wiped clean, completely gone from his mind. He said he felt like a new man.
We had never been more happy together. Never.
Hunter and Paige didn’t see the point in finishing high school. Besides, they barely had time. They were rock stars now, and they traveled all over. Everyone wanted to meet them. To thank them. To pay them homage.
To… well, why not admit it? Worship them.
That was what they deserved, after all. They’d fixed each and every one of us.
We were reunited with Marlena shortly after moving back into the mansion. We hadn’t spoken in a very long time, but there was no lingering bitterness between us. She was happy to see us, and we were happy to see her. It was good to have old friends back, especially when we’d lost so many.
Sometimes, I would think about all the people who’d died. My parents. My brothers. My best friend Lilith. Hallam. Palomino. Grace and Boone.
Before, when I used to think about them, I felt an aching sense of loss. It was painful.
Now, I accepted that they were gone, and I didn’t feel anything other than a vague twinge of regret.
It was so much easier than they way things used to be, back when everything hurt.
Within a year or two, Chance and Kenya were married in the backyard behind the mansion. Their ceremony was beautiful. Kenya was a radiant bride.
Marlena and I commented on the way things might have been before. We remembered that people used to cry at weddings.
She laughed. “Tears of joy? Who were we kidding? There’s no such thing.”
“I haven’t cried since Hunter and Paige took over,” I said. “And let me tell you, I don’t miss it.”
“Why would you?” she said.
Before long, Chance and Kenya had two beautiful little girls—Belle and Gina. They were a delight to us, simply the sweetest little beings I thought I’d ever met.
Even though I’d loved both my boys, when they were small, there had been so much heartache in our lives that I’d never truly been able to enjoy them. Now, everything was pure bliss all the time.
We didn’t see Hunter and Paige as often as we saw Chance, Kenya, and the girls, but that made sense. They were busy. They had important things to think about. After all, the entire world depended on them.
When I did see them, though, sometimes I saw something in my son’s eyes. He looked… troubled.
But, well, I could hardly remember what feeling troubled was even like.
I was sure it was nothing to worry about. And besides, I didn’t remember how to worry.
So, I let it go.
The way I let everything go.
And the world was wonderful.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
~hunter~
It had been five years since Paige and I had made love in that gazebo, and the world was a completely different place. People were content. They were peaceful. There was no crime. There was no hate. There was nothing but perfect bliss all the time.
It was a very satisfying thing to see. A lot of people want to change the world, but Paige and I had actually done it. We’d made a paradise on earth, and there was nothing but shiny happy people wherever we looked.
Paige and I had insisted on a policy of strict noninterference right after everything changed. She and I discussed it, and we thought that one of the mistakes that her parents had made was to literally rule the world. Kieran and Eve had been global benevolent dictators, and we didn’t want that for ourselves.
In the end, it made very little difference, because there wasn’t much need for a government anyway. Everyone got along. No one hurt anyone else. And everyone was perfectly happy doing whatever they needed to do in order to contribute to society. There was no conflict, and without conflict, all of the governments and law enforcements sort of, well, dissolved.
The world functioned perfectly around us, and we didn’t need to rule.
I was surrounded by shiny, happy people. Constantly. Day in, day out.
I thought that would make me happy.
It was good to see my family doing so well, for instance. I loved that I’d been able to solve all their problems.
But…
I don’t know. Sometimes, I felt empty.
I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it.
Interacting with anyone except Paige wasn’t much of an interaction at all. Happy people were incredibly boring. There was no reason to have conversations about how someone’s day went. Everyone’s day went the same. Really fucking great, thanks for asking. There was no reason to get anyone’s opinion on anything, because no one had any negative feelings about anything. They had no preferences. If it rained, they were happy. If it was sunny, they were happy. If there was an earthquake that knocked down a bunch of buildings and killed twenty people, no one cared. They were still happy.
Sometimes, I thought back to what my father had said when he’d been practically dying with that bullet in his body. About how not having pain turned people into robots.
I saw now that he was right.
But…
Well, they were so happy. It seemed wrong to take that away from them just because I was feeling bored and empty.
Truthfully, I didn’t feel any pain either. Paige and I weren’t blissfully happy like the rest of the population, but we had very nice lives without any stresses or problems.
But I didn’t feel like a robot. I felt like a shell. Like a hollowed-out husk.
Paige and I talked about it a few times. She said she felt it too, sometimes.
But we both agreed that we’d be selfish to destroy paradise for ourselves.
No, lately, Paige had become obsessed with the idea of getting pregnant.
Which wasn’t happening.
I tried to tell her it wouldn’t. We had all the memories of the world spirit, and I knew that Kieran and Eve hadn’t been able to have children, and that my own parents had woken up from their coma specifically to have them as well. And even without the powers, they’d never managed to have a child together.
She didn’t want to hear that.
Eventually, we stopped talking about it.
But I knew she still thought about it. There was a desperation to the way she attempted to seduce me sometimes.
We moved forward.
Other things bothered me too. For one thing, Paige and I didn’t seem to be aging at all. Everyone else around us was, including all the people who’d had immortal blood, like my father. When Paige and I had taken over, we’d stripped that power away, and there were no more Nephilims or vampires in the world.
We were impervious to harm, as well, and I was beginning to think that this might mean we’d be stuck doing this forever.
We might stay alive, stay the same age, and watch generations of happy people grow up and die.
I was already bored of it after five years
.
I didn’t think I could handle an eternity of it.
When Paige and I talked about this, she tried to convince me that we’d have children, and it would make all the difference.
But I didn’t think we would.
And so, we stopped talking about that too.
In fact, it began to seem as if interacting with Paige was a minefield, and that there were so many different issues and topics that we had to avoid that it hardly seemed worth trying to talk at all.
The thing was, Paige was pretty much the only person left to talk to.
* * *
One bright summer afternoon, Paige and I went to the mansion for a family cook-out. Everyone was there, and they were all happy to see us.
But I knew they would have been just as happy if we hadn’t come.
And it made their feelings mean absolutely nothing to me.
I lounged on the patio with my father, who was manning the grill. Steaks (and a portobella mushroom for Kenya, who was still vegan, although very, very happy about it) sizzled under the flames. Paige was inside, playing with Chance’s and Kenya’s daughters. Paige liked to spend time with the kids whenever she could. I didn’t see the point in any of it.
The children were even less interesting than the adults, mainly because they’d been born after we’d taken over the world, and they’d never experienced anything besides pure bliss.
“I guess you two are keeping busy?” said my father, grinning at me.
“Oh, always,” I said. Even though there was nothing to be busy at doing. Paige and I had all our needs seen to. And no one actually had problems or anything.
“Well, that’s good.”
“Everything’s good,” I said wearily.
“It sure is.” My father turned one of the steaks on the grill.
I took a drink of the lemonade that my mother had poured for me and watched him. When I was young, he was never this happy. He was always worried about something. Often, he was tense, as if he was always fighting some internal battle. I set the glass back down. “Can I ask you a question, Dad?”
“Sure.” He closed the grill.
“Way back when all this started, you and Mom wanted to do something with the leaves. You remember that?”
He chuckled. “Well, that was clearly insane on our parts. We’d spent so much time afraid, Hunter. We weren’t good with relaxing and letting things happen. We wanted to fight fate. We didn’t realize that we were killing ourselves for no reason.”
I ran my finger around the lip of my lemonade glass. “You think it would have worked?”
“What? Dosing all those people with leaves?” He shook his head. “I doubt it. There’s no way we would have been able to get everyone in the world at one time. We were both really banged up and really desperate. We weren’t thinking clearly.”
I took another drink of lemonade. “Did you ever take the leaves when you had these powers? The ones I have, I mean?”
He thought about it. “I… I don’t think so. We only found out about them right before our powers were stolen from us by Kieran and Eve, and we took them the first time right after the power transfer. So, no… never did.”
“What do you think would happen if I took them?”
He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it would block your powers entirely.”
“Really.” I stared down into the lemonade.
“You thinking about doing that?”
I scratched the back of my head. “What would you think if I said yes?”
“Don’t know that I’d think anything. I want you to be happy, Hunter. I’m so happy, and I want you to be happy too.”
“But if I got rid of my power, you wouldn’t be happy.”
He knitted his brow together, as if he was concentrating very hard. “I wouldn’t?”
Damn it. This was why it was stupid to talk to any of them. My father couldn’t even conceive of being unhappy. He couldn’t be frightened of it. He had no negative emotions.
He went back to the grill, opening the lid. “Look, if you want to try it, I think there’s still a plant growing out back.”
“There is?”
“Oh, yeah.” He poked at the grill with his tongs. “We never got rid of it. Should be there.”
* * *
I touched Paige on her shoulder. She was crouched down, playing dolls with the little girls.
She turned. “Hunter.”
I gestured with my head for her to come with me.
“What is it?” she said.
I backed away.
She got to her feet and followed me.
I led us into the foyer of the mansion, away from everyone else. I held out my hand to show her that I had a bunch of the leaves. I’d picked them off the plant outside.
“What are those?” she said.
“These are the leaves that my parents were talking about the first day it happened,” I said. “They block magic if they’re ingested or if they get into a person’s blood stream. I was thinking maybe we’d… chew them.”
She dragged her teeth over her bottom lip. “To get rid of our powers?”
“Well, they wear off in a day,” I said. “If it worked, we’d have to keep taking them.”
She twisted her hands together.
“Paige, if I’m right, and the powers are what’s keeping us from having children, then maybe if we took these—”
“But everyone else would lose the happiness we gave them.”
“I know,” I said.
She turned away from me, looked back into the living room at the little girls. “It would be selfish, Hunter. We already decided that, didn’t we?”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t know if I care anymore.”
She drew back.
“Paige, every day, they seem less and less real to me. I don’t care about them. How long will it be before I can’t stand it anymore? How long until I lose it? Until I start torturing people for fun? It happened to your parents. It happened to mine.”
“We’re different than they are,” she said.
That was what we always told ourselves, anyway. That our parents hadn’t been able to handle the power, and that was why it had gone badly for them.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we were just slightly less fucked up than they were, and it’s going to take longer for us to crack. But… I don’t know if I can live like this anymore.”
She shook her head. “Hunter, what if the powers are the only thing that makes us love each other? They brought us together in the first place. What if we get rid of them, and then there’s nothing between us at all.”
I touched her face. “Baby… there’s less and less between us every single day. We’re falling apart already.”
“That’s not true.”
“What will we be like in ten years? When we still haven’t had a child, and when everyone else is showing their age, while we’re still young?”
She took a step away from me. “Stop it. Stop it, no. You’re wrong.” Her eyes filled with tears. She turned away from me and scurried back into the living room.
My shoulders slumped and I stared down at the leaves in my hand.
I shouldn’t have tried.
Things were fine. Things were right. Things were meant to be.
Everyone else was happy.
That should be enough.
But then Paige reappeared in the doorway, a fierce look on her face. She darted over to me, she snatched a leaf out of my hand. She shoved it into her mouth and began to chew.
I was startled.
She swallowed. “Maybe I am selfish. But the truth is, I want to have a conversation with someone who’s not you. And I want that person to actually have something interesting to say.”
I grinned. I put the remaining leaves in my own mouth. I chewed.
We stood there, waiting.
At first, it seemed like nothing was happening.
But then… slowly, like a wave is pulled back into the ocean, I cou
ld feel my awareness of the world start to recede. I couldn’t feel every person on earth. I couldn’t feel anything except myself.
There was a shriek from inside the living room.
We ran there.
The two little girls were both sitting on the floor, yelling their heads off.
Shit.
Was this going to be bad?
“Hunter!”
I turned.
My mother was streaking across the foyer. She threw her arms around me. “You stopped it.”
I held her away from me. There were tears glistening in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It’s not… it’s not bad?”
She laughed. “I feel like I just woke up.”
“But, Mom, I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do.”
She put her hand against my cheek. “Sweetie, sometimes there isn’t a right thing. And I’m sure that all the people on earth would prefer to be able to make their own decisions. You set us free.”
I took a deep breath and looked at Paige.
She reached out and took my hand.
EPILOGUE
~azazel~
Jason was watching the television, but he was standing in front of the screen, his brow furrowed, his posture tense.
I touched him on the shoulder. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you look that hard.”
He turned to look at me. “Sorry. It’s just… I mean, look at this, it’s a mess.” The television kept showing various horrific scenes—mobs, thefts, raids, and shootings. The world had been happy one second and plunged back to normal the next. There was a little bit of fallout, especially since governments and law enforcement were still getting back on their feet.
“It’s a good mess,” I said. “It’s better than the way things were, everybody fake happy, under Hunter’s and Paige’s spell. I’d much rather have people making their own messes than not in control of themselves.” Back when I’d first found out about Hunter, the oracle had said his power would be the absence of magic. That he would render all power impotent. And by taking those leaves, that was just what he’d done. Paige and Hunter had controlled all the magic on earth. Now they were blocking it. The world was now free of all of that crazy supernatural jazz. It was only us—the people—doing things the best that we could.
Gasp Page 28