“Did you see Gabriel? Jesse’s Gabriel?” Nikki demands. And it is a demand.
I arch my eyebrow at her.
Her tone softens. “It was Gabriel who erected the shield, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Because apparently Jeremiah can’t be trusted.”
“He won’t lay a hand on you,” she says.
My arched eyebrow only rises higher. “Not for lack of trying.”
“He won’t.”
“And what will you do to stop him, Ms. Tamsin, the ever faithful second-in-command?”
I know what Jesse would say. Break his hand. Blast his brains out his asshole. But she is much more vulgar than Nikki is. Nikki only says, “He won’t.”
“He doesn’t want to help her,” I say. Let’s see how open and honest we are really being with each other. “He wants to pin all of this on her.”
“No, he just doesn’t prioritize her protection like you do,” Nik says. “There are others worth saving, too.”
That stings a little.
“What did the agent want?” Nikki asks. “I saw you step out with him.”
“Garrison says the FBRD is in an uproar over Jesse. I suppose that can be blamed on her recklessness too?” I level her with a hard stare, daring her to echo Jeremiah’s cruel words.
But her anger is gone and she seems to have control of herself again. Her endless patience has returned. “No, they lost it when their agents started getting murdered by Caldwell. This latest development is only making matters worse.”
A diplomatic response.
“But you knew about the FBRD being under fire? And you didn’t tell me.”
She considers my face for a long moment, almost tenderly. Her jaw unclenches and her voice softens when she finally says, “That life is behind you now.”
The finality with which she says it feels like a punch to the gut.
That life is behind you now. Death replacing. A cozy home in Nashville. Dog walking and Friday night pizza and too many soy lattes to count. Appointment books and cocktails with friends.
She reaches up and tucks a strand of fallen hair behind my ear. “Gloria is out of surgery, and Maisie is asking for you. Want to go see them?”
“Yes.” Because Jeremiah may have refused to take me to Antarctica, but I’m not giving up so easily.
I’ll find another way.
Chapter 8
Jesse
My body burns. At first, I think I’m back in the barn, its rafters alight, its hay blackening in the crimson blaze. Somehow, time has reversed itself. I’m not twenty-six. I’m seventeen and dying.
No, Jesse, Gabriel whispers through my mind. Black feathers trail across my cheek. Do not give up your Time.
His voice is clear and bright in the encroaching darkness. Something inside me shifts, as if throwing itself out to break a fall—but feeling nothing.
Do not give up your Time, he says again as if this is supposed to mean something to me, but his voice is weaker. Farther away than ever before.
My feet find solid ground. I open my eyes, and I’m standing in a house, a small house that I’d know anywhere. The last time I saw it, it held my mother’s coffin in the cramped living room where a television should have been. Now, it was as I remembered it when I was much younger. Six or seven. My father sits on a battered brown sofa with his head in his hands. He still wears his mechanic outfit, the navy-blue overalls with gold zippers and a white embossed name patch on the front that read Eric.
“You don’t know that,” my mother says. “Why do you need to work me up over something you can’t possibly know?”
As soon as she speaks, she shimmers into view, bringing the rest of the liquid dream into sharp focus. Gabriel is somewhere behind me, begging me to come back. But I wouldn’t know how to oblige him even if I could.
“Keep your voice down.” My father tosses a look at the closed door just off the living room. That was my bedroom. Because of the position of the loveseat where my mother sits in her pajamas, a glass of water in one hand, they can’t see what I see—the shadows of two twin feet beneath that bedroom door.
I must be awake in there. I must be listening with my ear to the door.
“They say it runs in families. If my brother has it, then I could have it. Jesse could have it.”
My mother hisses. “Don’t you dare put that on my head. She’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
“I’m just saying we need to prepare for the possibility. If something were to happen, we don’t want to handle it badly. We need to be aware.”
My father knew about his NRD before he died? How could he? He woke up in a coffin underground. He liked to remind me he’d been an unlucky jack-in-the-box on more than one occasion.
I’m trying to place this conversation, but I can’t. It’s true that dying and resurrecting over one hundred times has made me forget a lot—and even more true that so few people remember everything from when they were six or seven—but this seems important. This seems like something I should have remembered.
“I don’t want what happened to Dyson to happen to us. Promise me,” my father says.
I look at my father’s dark circles and greasy hands. I note my mother’s red rimmed eyes. The swell of crickets pressing in on the windows from outside. The summer breeze wafting across my father’s tanned skin.
Jesse—you must come back.
Gabriel’s voice is stronger. And the world in which my parents sit in a dark house in the late evening while their little girl listens to secrets at the bedroom door wavers.
“Promise me,” my father says again, his face shimmering.
“Goddammit, Eric. I promise,” my mother echoes. “If either of you have NRD, I won’t call them. I wouldn’t even—”
Whatever she says to finish the promise is lost on the wind.
The scent of rain wafts up to greet me. A strong arm seizes me around the waist and pulls me back.
“You must not give up your Time.” Gabriel’s cheek is cold against mine. The vision breaks, and I’m on the sandy shore. I feel my body again.
“Stop saying that. I don’t know what that means.”
Whatever I’m about to say falls away. Gabriel is bleeding. His blood is on my hands. “What happened?”
“You must come back,” he says through labored breaths. “I can’t hold this for long.”
I can’t remember Gabriel getting hurt. I can’t really remember where I was before I was in my childhood home, looking at my parents as they must’ve been…how many years ago?
Years ago…
There is somewhere I need to be…not the beach. But…where? I can’t remember.
Gabriel’s grip on my hips loosens. Go back to your Time. Go back to the convergence.
My mother’s house shifts into focus again, hardening around me once more. But it isn’t the early hours of a summer night. I’m standing there, eight or nine years old, looking between my mother and father with parted lips and a rabbity panic. My father is covered in dirt, still wearing the suit we buried him in, graveyard soil in his hair and flecks crusted in the sweat under his eyes.
My mother is holding the receiver to a cordless phone. She’s crying.
“You promised,” he says to her.
For a long time, nothing happens. No one moves.
Then she manages a nod and puts the receiver down.
My child double runs to him and throws her arms around his neck.
The world kicks forward again. My father remains alive. At seventeen, my double doesn’t die in the barn trying to escape her abusive stepfather, because there is no stepfather. She dies in car crash leaving a party with a boy who’d had too much to drink and also kept trying to stick his hand up her skirt. The dark-haired boy wearing a flannel shirt swerves to miss a deer and sails off the road into a tree.
She—I—shove open the door and fall into the ditch beside the car. I bleed to death on the side of the road.
Jesse, you’re going too far…
> I wake up in a funeral home to the faces of my parents. I’m wearing a black dress. They aren’t frightened that their corpse daughter has just opened her eyes. They know what I am, and they are okay with it. My father pulls me off the mortuary slab, worried, but relieved. My mother is crying and hugs me so hard the vertebrae in my back crack.
That fall I go to college. On graduation day, I stand with them for a photo while a classmate, a red-headed girl I don’t have a name for, takes a photo.
Jesse. I can’t hold open the door.
I look at the smiling faces. I note the roaring cheer of all the people in the stadium, the swish of gowns, the blare of music. Confetti. I realize I’m looking for someone.
Someone is missing, some part of me insists. Someone isn’t here. And her absence gives the whole vision a tainted glare that forms into pinpricks of pain in my mind.
The world shimmers again, crumpling like paper in a fist.
Then I see her face. A woman, blond and beautiful with warm brown eyes and a tiny diamond stud in her nose. I see her in her red coat. I hear her speak my name.
Only then does her name come to me in return.
Ally.
The last ounce of resistance leaves me. This world falls away, and when I open my eyes, I’m on an ice shelf shaking furiously. My eyes sweep the deep blue waters, the endless plateau of shimmering ice, the baby blue sky with puffy white clouds. In the distance something burns, weak black smoke of a cooling wreckage wafting up to the sky.
“What the hell was that?” Now I remember Michael’s shooting star of pain. “What the hell did he do to me?”
“Michael used a disruptor. It severs your connection to your own time,” he says.
And while I’m happy to know that shooting star of pain has a name, a disruptor, I can barely appreciate this information because Gabriel is not okay. He looks sick as hell and appears to be fading fast.
“Why do you keep saying Time like that—like with a capital T,” I ask. “And what the hell did I just see? That’s not how my life went. Was it an illusion? Like one of Caldwell’s mind tricks?”
Gabriel waits until he’s sure I’m done firing questions at him. “You saw a possibility.”
“So if my mother hadn’t had my father hauled away to a camp, that’s how it would’ve gone?”
“It isn’t that he disrupted your hold on this Time that concerns me,” Gabriel says. “It is that he pushed you toward this possibility, of all the infinite possibilities.”
He forces an image of Ally into my mind. I see her bright shining face again and know it was this image that he used earlier to help me see through Michael’s trick.
“He showed me a world where I never met Ally? Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.”
I blink twice. Wait, what? Back up. Did this angel really just say he didn’t know? I was just starting to believe that they were angels. Wouldn’t they be omniscient if that were true? They’d know everything.
Rachel’s theory was that they were ancient aliens, come to shepherd us into a new era so that we could be a better, more awesome civilization. But then again, what aliens in their right mind would waste their time on us? Of course, people have pet rocks and sea monkeys, don’t they? I guess it’s possible some weirdo creature thought humans were entertaining enough.
What if we are the Tamagotchi craze of some angelic civilization?
Focus, Jesse. I remind myself. I’ve got bigger problems right now.
“Is the disruptor going to keep doing that?” I ask. “Knocking me out of my Time?”
“Yes. It will get stronger.”
“And if it doesn’t, what’s he going to do? Go after my dog?” I hate it when the bad guys go after my dog. Or worse. My heart flops. “Ally? Maisie? Gloria? Hell, even Gideon is growing on me.”
“He cannot attack directly. He no longer has a corporeal host.”
“So…indirectly?” I hiss. I’m already plotting the invisible distance between me and Al. I’m summoning up my strength, ready to jump to her and kick Michael’s angel butt.
Gabriel’s hand clamps down on my arm. Hard. “He has barbed you.”
I scoff. “Excuse me. No one barbs me without at least feeding me dinner and telling me how pretty I am.”
Gabriel’s eyes darken to that dangerous hue. No jokes then. “You’re poisoned. You will be without a shield and will continue to grow more unstable as long as it is in your system. You must be more careful.”
This coming from the guy who is bleeding all over himself.
“And what about you?” I ask, hissing at the sight of his fingers probing the wound. “What does the disruptor barb do to you?”
His jaw clenches and he withdraws his hand with a ragged breath.
He flickers. He flickers the way he used to flicker when the other partis were around me. But in every direction, there is only this ice desert. Not a single soul. I’m not even sure there’s anyone left in the weakening black smoke fuming from the smoldering helicopters.
“Is he trying to take you away from me?” I ask. A stiff panic starts to take hold of my spine. “Because I don’t know how to do what you’re asking me.”
“When the charge is complete, the gate will open.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“You cannot get lost in Possibility again. You must be here. Now. And you must know what you want. If I am not with you—”
He says Possibility like it’s capitalized, too. Like it’s a place where everything lives between the immaterial and reality.
“If you’re not with me!” I interrupt. I’m shouting, and the sound of it echoes vast over the frozen tundra. “What about all the partis and angel merging at the moment of ascension crap?”
“He will take my place if he can,” Gabriel warns, and his words send a shiver up the back of my neck. I curl deeper into my puffy, stolen, coat. “We survived this attack, but there will be others.”
He flickers again.
“Hey—” I grab his hands and squeeze hard. “Don’t disappear on me. You know I can’t fight Michael alone.”
You are stronger than you think.
He squeezes my hand in return. Then he is gone.
Chapter 9
Ally
I stagger out of the elevator, my hand gropes blindly for anything to steady me. My right fingertips brush textured plaster. My left hand goes over my heart as if to keep it in. Cold chills run from head to toe, cramping then releasing the muscles along my spine. By the time my shoulder connects with the wall, I’m trembling.
“What’s wrong?” Nikki asks. Her hand is steady on my back.
“I don’t know,” I say, my heart galloping in my chest. “I feel…strange.”
And I can’t seem to articulate it any better than that. The sensation creeping along my skin is strange. Unsettling.
It’s two layers, I realize. There’s what’s happening in my mind: like I forgot something important. An appointment. Or that I need to be somewhere. A certain panicky shock blanketing my mind. And then there is the physical experience—the hint of a flu, or an illness that is threatening to put me under for days.
“Can I—?” Nikki begins.
“Just give me a minute.” I force the words out. A minute to lean against the wall and breathe.
Breathe, I tell myself. And I’m reminded of the therapist I saw so many years ago who taught me how to deal with my anxiety, and stress, and mounting anger in the wake of losing Jesse. I feel like all we did for the first month were breathing exercises.
Breathe.
My shoulder presses into the cold, hard plaster until the bone aches. But eventually the feeling does recede. The weight in my arms lightens. The hallway comes into focus. The sounds of sneakers squeaking on tiles. The soft whoosh of a door sliding open or shut.
But even as my body seems to weather the passing storm that nagging fear darkening my mind doesn’t leave me.
“Do you,” Nikki begins, but lowers h
er voice. She licks her lip as she casts a furtive look up and down the hallway. She leans in to whisper. Her breath is hot on my ear. “Do you see anything? Gabriel? Jesse?”
I look up at the ceiling’s white tile with gray specks. The hallway is wide and empty except for the two of us.
“No. I just feel…” like I’m dying. No, don’t say that! She’ll have a conniption. “…off. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”
The intercom in Nikki’s ear lights blue. “Tamsin,” she says, by way of introduction. But her eyes are fixed on mine, searching my face.
I feel guilty under that assessing stare so I push myself off the wall and step around her. On unsteady legs, I walk toward the red and white sign saying Patients Only. She reaches out and seizes my arm, stopping me from entering the hospital wing.
“Repeat that,” Tamsin says, her face coloring red. Her eyes widen.
“Are you sure?” she asks the person in the earpiece but she’s pressing her fingers to the side of my throat, searching for the artery. She checks my pulse. Her shoulders relax.
Her gaze slides away from my face. “No, just monitor the situation and notify me immediately if it happens again.”
The intercom goes dark and her crushing hold on my arm loosens.
“What’s happened?”
“Two of Jesse’s replacements just collapsed,” she says, scowling. “Parish says they went into some kind of convulsive fit. One crumpled outside the office building where he works. The other went into cardiac arrest while riding her bicycle along the St. Louis riverbank.”
She tries to meet my gaze, but I turn away.
“Come on, I want someone to look at you.”
“Nick—”
“Two people she replaced. You’re someone she’s replaced.”
You are so much more than that, Gabriel whispers. I hear the crackle of lightning and smell the rain on wet pavement—but the entrance to the hospital remains unchanged. Gleaming white doors beckon me.
Dying Day Page 10