Dying Day

by Kory M. Shrum

  Power. Raw, relentless power blasts through me like an atomic bomb. It knocks the waves back with its force. Michael is thrown off his feet. His blade of light is cast into the water and disappears under a rolling, black wave. The angels evaporate into ash, nothing more than tumbling soot on the sand until the next crashing wave overtakes it.

  I’m alone on the beach at last, my legs and arms shaking.

  Then there’s Gabriel.

  He appears on the shore, looking windswept and beaten. He’s bloody. His clothes shredded and skin slashed. That’s what kept the angels busy, I realize. A hundred against one.

  But here he is—victorious—standing in the same thigh-deep waves as me, his wing tips trailing the surf. His eyes bright and the color of midnight waters.

  “You cast them out,” he says. It sounds like praise.

  “Jesse!” Ally screams. “For god’s sake answer me!”

  I turn toward the swirling light vortex, sparkling like infinity. The waves are so high now. They’re lapping at the bottom of the house steps. And I think if I wait any longer, they will overtake the house completely.

  “Seal the gate,” Gabriel calls over the roar. He gestures to that beckoning star. He makes me follow him to its edge until most of his face is lost in its brilliance. I think he’s going to pass through it and leave me here. But he pauses halfway through and offers me his hand. He waits for me to take it.

  “It’s not over?” I ask, and as soon as I say it, I realize what a stupid question it is.

  Of course, it’s not over.

  I place my wet, shaking hand in his.

  I take a deep breath, and he pulls me through.

  Chapter 25

  Ally

  She’s dead. I’m too late, and now she’s dead. Her body is limp in my arms.

  “Jesse!” I scream for what seems like the thousandth time. “Damn it, Jesse, answer me!”

  Her eyes flutter.

  Without considering what I’m doing, I want to take her into my arms and shake her until all this manic energy leaves me. I go to plant a thousand kisses on her cheeks and lips and hair.

  But I can’t. I can’t get close enough to really touch her.

  The shield keeps a minimal barrier between us, which I realize is for my benefit not hers, because that endless, flaming power hasn’t stopped pouring from her. We are in the eye of the storm, but the world still burns.

  She seems immune, the flames standing about three inches off her own body. But if this shield should fail suddenly, I imagine I’ll burn away like grease in a pan. That’s what happened to the mask I tore off my face. The winter gear that I shrugged off once I reached her had melted the instant I threw them away. All that’s left of them is a bubbling smudge on the ice.

  She pulls herself up to a sitting position, her hands traveling over her body as if she can’t quite be sure she is really here.

  She looks at me as if she’s never seen me before. My stomach drops.

  “It’s me,” I say, my throat tight.

  “I know who you are.”

  “I came to get you.” I feel so stupid saying this, but I’m immensely relieved. More relieved than I should be, trapped in a ring of fire. “Obviously.”

  “You shouldn’t be here!”

  “I had to come anyway.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “You’re one to talk.” I gesture at the chaos enveloping us. “Can you turn this off?”

  She looks around, her eyes reflecting all the dancing firelight.

  “I know what this is…” she says. Her jaw sets.

  “Great, then turn it off.

  “I can’t. I have to die to do that. This is a swirling vortex between the planes. This…” She gestures around herself. “This is like the giant death drain I see during a replacement.”

  I wish you could see it, she’s said to me countless times.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “There’s only one way to close it. I have to die. This is one big replacement, and I have to die.”

  “Then die,” I say. “Die, and I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  There will be no returning from this, Gabriel says. He stands as a watery figure among the flames. In the firelight, he looks more like a demon than an angel. But considering where we’ve arrived, maybe he’s been a demon all along.

  I stare at him, trying to process what I am hearing—my worst fear.

  “Take her away! Take her far away, and then I’ll close it,” Jesse screams. She’s looking at Gabriel’s vaporous form.

  In order to seal the gate, all of you must pass through, Gabriel says. And there is some tenderness in his voice that causes me to search Jesse’s face. Something passes between them.

  “This is what he meant by sacrificing my heart?” She spits the words out.

  Tears stream down her face.

  “Gabriel, I can’t kill her! You can’t ask me to kill her.”

  She is part of you.

  “No! I mean, yes, she is, but no! She’s not going to die here!”

  I see her rising panic, watch the flames whip around her, the vortex spiraling wildly.

  She’s going to lose control, I realize. She’s going to destroy the world out of fear.

  “Fuck you, Gabriel! Fuck you! You knew all along! You knew this would kill her! Every time you told me that I could protect her, you were lying to me!”

  The power begins pulsing, throbbing like a heartbeat. The crack in the earth deepens. I have to calm her before she loses any more control.

  “Jesse, look at me.” I try to turn her head to look at me, but the shield won’t let me. “Jesse, please!”

  “Why aren’t you pissed?” she screams over the pulsing flames. Fire dances in her eyes. “He led you here to die!”

  “I came because I wanted to be here.”

  “Bullshit!”

  I flinch, and for some reason this makes her crumple more than anything.

  “I came because there is nowhere else I want to be. Do you think I can bear to lose you again?”

  She clasps her hands at the back of her neck and screams.

  I try to ignore this even as the ice under my feet shifts again—or is that the earth trembling? “What kind of life do you think I’ll have without you?”

  “A long one!”

  “No,” I say with certainty. “I’ve been in a world without you. I don’t want that. Asking me to live without you is far crueler than ending my life and saving billions of people. And if we have to go through some vortex, death drain, whatever, in order to save our world, then I’m coming with you. I’m coming with you to the other side.”

  She screams. “There is no other side! When I die, there’s nothing!”

  “Then there’s death,” I tell her. “Then we die. Together. Because you’re not leaving me here.”

  Tears spill over my cheeks.

  “You’re not leaving me here again.”

  Her face crumples. She covers her face with her hands.

  Gideon’s words come back to me. I’d tell her…

  The words start pouring out of me. “I’ve been in love with you since I was fifteen, Jesse Sullivan. I love every smile, every smirk, every sarcastic eye roll that’s ever graced your beautiful face. I love looking across the kitchen table and seeing you there. I love your laugh. I love the way my stomach twists up every time I hear it. I love the way I feel when you kiss me. When you wrap your arms around my neck, and look into my eyes…”

  “Stop it,” she begs, jaw working.

  I take a ragged breath, my throat so tight I can barely breathe.

  “The whole world stops. I love every kiss, every time you’ve put your hand in mine.”

  “That’s enough!”

  She looks ready to attack me, but I don’t stop. “Every time you stood up for me and defended me… Waking up beside you. I love the way you feel in my arms when I curl into your back, when I kiss your neck…”

  Tears stream down her face.
“Please. Just—please.”

  I don’t let her pull away from me. “I love listening to your breath as we lay together in the dark.”

  “Shut up, or I’ll make you shut up!”

  “Even when you’re an asshole, I love you!” I scream at her. “So if you think you’re going to leave this planet without me, you’re out of your damn mind!”

  “If you’re going to die,” she says, looking over the rim of her hands. “They’ll all die.”

  Her eyes burn with her hate.

  “There’s nothing worth saving. You’re the only good thing in this world,” she says and the dark and hungry power in her eyes terrifies me. “If you’re going to die, then let them burn.”

  “No. There are good people here. They deserve their chance.”

  “Why? Because you got yours? Because here we are with our happily ever after? There is no happily ever after for us.”

  I think of that silly book that Jesse loved when we were kids. The one resting on Maisie’s bed a million miles away. I want her to live. I want her to read that book and go to school and live with Gloria.

  “Do you remember The Way Home?” I ask.

  She blinks back angry tears that shimmer in the firelight.

  “Picture the beach house.”

  “How did you—”

  “Picture the quiet, perfect beach. An island in the middle of a sea. The two of us on the back deck drinking iced tea with lemon. Picture Maisie and Winston and Gloria, happy and alive. Better than alive. Thriving. Picture Maisie in school. Picture Maisie with her friends. Picture Gideon in some posh palace, stuffing jewels in his pockets and charming the pants off some heiress.”

  Nikki… I picture her smiling face. Her laugh. I can’t bring myself to ask Jesse to picture good things for her, but I’ll do it for her. I’ll imagine the perfect woman. One that will love her as fiercely as I love Jesse.

  “I can’t hold on any longer!” Jesse cries, her back bowing.

  “Do you see them?” I ask her, trying to keep the calm in my voice despite my galloping heart, despite the fear strangling me. I inch closer to her. “Do you see the house and the ocean? Do you see the people we love? Picture them happy. Picture them safe…”

  She’s screaming, head thrown back, mouth open. Her body begins to lift off the ground. I wrap my arms around her. I still can’t touch her because of the shield, but I clasp my hands behind her back.

  “They’re happy, Jesse,” I say, feeling my lip tremble. “They’ll have long and happy lives because of you. Do you see it?”

  Firelight glimmers on her tear-stained cheeks.

  Now! Gabriel commands, and without thinking, I tighten my hold on her.

  The shield is gone. The purple light vanishes.

  I expect fire, immense and terrible pain.

  Instead, I feel cold black water rush up to greet us. We hit the surface hard, and all the air leaves me.

  We are sinking through an inky black. I clutch Jesse, limp in my arms. She starts to slip away from me. I hold on harder.

  I don’t care if this black, salty ocean, these eternal, nighttime waters, swallow me whole.

  I give myself completely to the waiting darkness, but I refuse to let her go.

  Epilogue

  Nashville, Six Months After

  Gloria sits back in her metal folding chair and pinches the bridge of her nose. Given only darkness, her eyes begin to search every time, every place. What emerges from the darkness first: sand, very close and textured. Only hues of black and white and gray until the color shifts forward. The view widens. Sand becomes a beach. A beach becomes a shoreline. A shore gives to rolling, gentle waves, pink with the approaching dawn. And the dawn itself, blinking awake over the horizon.

  At last, the sound, felt first in her chest as a vibration, then as pressure in her mind, until she realizes what she is hearing.

  A laugh.

  Brinkley’s laugh, the sight of his leather jacket turning toward her. It’s been too long since she’s heard that rich vibrato. Tears spring to the corners of her eyes unbidden.

  She expects the vision to falter then, fade to black.

  Why shouldn’t her gift diminish now that the war against Caldwell and the angels is over? What other purpose could she possibly have now that the danger has passed?

  Why should you be the last one standing? Her bitter heart asks.

  But six months have passed since Jesse cast her shield around the earth, giving them a new lease on life, and Gloria’s gift hasn’t diminished at all. In fact, some mornings she wakes with visions so clear in her mind that she can’t be sure she’s ever had such clarity.

  Maybe this is what her gift is really like, now that there aren’t angels around turning her head this way or that. Now that she doesn’t have a target that narrows her vision and blinds her to possibility, perhaps she will finally experience it, her power in all of its intended glory.

  Gloria lifts her hand, feeling the pencil roll between her tender knuckles. These tiny, wooden ridges are enough to make her finger bones ache. Yet she presses the lead to a page she can’t see, perhaps only imagining the first brush of graphite dust falling onto the cream-colored page.

  She doesn’t need to see her hand, the paper, or the pencil. She need only concentrate on Brinkley’s laugh, on the sound of his boots shifting in the sand, and follow its beckoning into the dark.

  She never knows how long she is gone when she views. And this time is no different.

  As with all previous attempts to see around the corners of time and space, she must first enter the darkness. She lets it wash over her like a cold, black wave until everything freezes around her and she finds herself suspended. A water droplet hanging in mid-air between faucet and basin.

  That momentary pause of deafening eternity is the extent of her experience.

  Then she returns. The droplet hits the basin, and she swims to the surface of consciousness.

  Feeling finds her limbs first. Gathered heat begins to leave her, and she trembles. Falling adrenaline, chattering teeth, sweeping cold, and tight muscles. All of this serves as confirmation that she has returned to her time, her place, and to the body that holds her.

  The weight of her settles into the chair. I’m depressurizing, she thinks. Too fast now and I’ll get the bends.

  She sits in her metal chair and listens. A lawnmower runs outside. A car horn blats further down the block. Children are laughing, screaming, but not in the way they sometimes scream in her dreams.

  Basement pipes gurgle overhead, babbling their watery speech over metal teeth.

  When she feels she can bear it, she opens her eyes.

  The long work table in front of her shifts into view, the blurred double vision recombining, settling into a single shape. The overhead bulb gives the three sheets of paper a buttery hue. The lead shines like silver dust in its beams.

  She’s completed three sketches, she realizes, with the corrugated remains of a jagged edge along each side.

  She leans forward to better inspect her handiwork. Her whole body responds to the movement. Her tight muscles groan. Sharp pains radiate through her chest and pelvis. The muscles along her spine clench and loosen, only to clench again. She hisses through her teeth.

  It took fourteen surgeries to make her whole again. Over a hundred screws and pins hold her shattered bones in place. She has five months of physical therapy behind her, and perhaps five years ahead.

  She drops the pencil, and it rattles onto the tabletop. It rolls off the edge and clatters to the floor. A high, musical sound.

  She decides to pull the sketches to her, instead.

  One is of Jeremiah Tate—or what is left of him. He’s face up in the drawing, eyes staring at empty space somewhere over the viewer’s right shoulder. His teeth showing between parted lips.

  A single bullet hole sits in the middle of his forehead, a pool of blood runs from the back of his head, spreading on what looks like black and white checkered tiles.

&n
bsp; His glasses sit askew on the bridge of his nose. Gloria taps a finger against the collar of his white dress shirt and it smudges. If she closes her eyes, she can see the blood soaking into those white fibers.

  Upon seeing the drawing more closely comes the last piece of Gloria’s gift.

  The knowing.

  Seeing him rendered in her own hand gives her that. She knows that it’s Gideon who makes the final killing blow, using a Barrett M82 from a Chicago high rise blocks away. But she also knows Gideon is only granted this revenge because Tamsin couldn’t follow through.

  Gloria didn’t draw it. So she can’t be sure.

  But she sees Tamsin there, standing like an Amazonian, laying her accusations of betrayal against her former boss. Sees…Tamsin press the barrel of her own gun to his forehead, maybe even to the same spot where Gideon’s bullet found home. But she didn’t pull the trigger.

  She punched him in the nose instead. It broke. But there is no sign of that here. No swelling of the nose or bruising beneath the eyes. So Gideon’s assassination will come at least two or three weeks after Tamsin’s assault.

  So many little clues, she thinks, her eyes flitting along the page.

  The second drawing is Maisie—not Maisie, Maya, she reminds herself. Maya Jackson. A foster kid from Chicago, adopted this summer by retired Captain Gloria Jackson. Hair and eyebrows dyed black, making those baby blues stand out like a frozen pond in winter. Maya kneeling at a grave marker in Mt. Olivet’s cemetery. Placing flowers on two headstones, while Gloria herself places flowers on a third.

  Jesse Sullivan. Alice Gallagher.

  The single slab of stone bears their names. But it’s a symbolic marker, meant to comfort the living rather than enshrine the dead. There was nothing to bury. They found the destroyed helicopters and bodies—but no trace of either woman.

  Nearly every agency of authority searched the frozen continent for evidence. They found remains of the soldiers that Jesse left in her wake. But no trace of either woman was recovered. No remnants of their clothing. No DNA on a scrap of cloth or blood or hair. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.