Endless

by Amanda Gray

  Where are you?

  I’m next door, she typed, trying to clear the haze in her brain. Where are you?

  At your house.

  “Damn,” she muttered.

  Nikolai sat up, his dark hair tousled, chest still bare over his jeans. “What is it?”

  She sighed. “A friend of mine is at my house. I told him to call first, but I guess he was in the neighborhood or something.”

  Nikolai raised one dark eyebrow. “He?”

  She nodded. “My friend, Ben.”

  Be right there, she typed into the keypad of her phone.

  “Do you have to go?" Nikolai asked.

  She didn’t want to, but there was no point pretending. “Unfortunately.”

  He stood up, crossing the room to get his shirt. “I’ll walk you.”

  She nodded, knowing he didn’t want to be apart any more than she did. She heard it in the catch in his voice, felt it in the way he gripped her hand as they left the house and headed for the pathway between their houses.

  They stopped at the end of forest. A couple feet more, and Jenny would be in the big, wide field leading to her house. She could see Ben sitting on her front porch. His truck was the only vehicle in the driveway, which meant that her dad wasn’t home yet.

  She looked up at Nikolai. “I miss you already.”

  He nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said. “It seems we never have enough time together.”

  “Will I see you tomorrow?”

  He pulled her into an embrace. “Tonight, tomorrow, as soon as you can get back here. Until then, I’m going to make some inquiries of my own about Morgan.”

  “Inquiries from who?”

  “I have contacts in the underground. If Morgan’s connected to the Order, someone should know about her.”

  “What about the book? The full moon is tomorrow.”

  “I’m betting that the more we find out about Morgan, the more we find out about your mother,” he said. “And we know she had the book at one time. It’s the best place to start. I’ll work fast, start reaching out tonight. We should know more by tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay.”

  She stood on tiptoe, kissing him one last time, not wanting to say goodbye.

  She forced herself to take a step away from him even though the idea of being separated for even a few hours made it hard to breathe. What if the Order came for him? What if she never saw him again?

  She tried to beat back the fear. They’d found each other against all odds, across time and space. They could beat the Order. They just had to find the book before tomorrow night.

  She stepped into the clearing, surprised to see Ben watching her. She felt a moment’s panic. Had he seen her kiss Nikolai?

  She continued across the lawn, forcing a smile and a wave as she got closer, stepping onto the gravel drive and crossing to the porch.

  “Hey!” She tried to sound cheerful, like that would somehow deter Ben from asking questions she hoped he wouldn’t ask. “I’m sorry. I thought you were going to call first.”

  But as soon as she looked into Ben’s eyes, she knew he had seen her with Nikolai. Ben’s face was too still. Like a mask set on top of his own face, the features the same but without the animation of expression.

  “Who was that?” He tipped his head in the direction of the woods between her house and Nikolai’s.

  “That?” She knew who he was talking about, but she turned anyway, looking back in the direction from which she’d come in an effort to buy some time. “Oh! That was … our new neighbor. I was just … you know, welcoming him. My dad told me to go, actually. Just to be polite.”

  She cringed inwardly at the lie, both on principle and because if Ben mentioned it to her dad, the whole story would start to unravel, both with Ben and her dad.

  Ben nodded, then analyzed her face like he was studying a cryptic map.

  Jenny nodded, stepping onto the porch. “Wanna come in?”

  “Sure.” He followed her hesitantly up the steps.

  Jenny breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe he’d let it go for now.

  She unlocked the door and stepped into the foyer. “Come in.”

  He stepped through the doorway, but not before looking back toward the forest in the moment before she shut the door behind him.

  “Did your dad build this house?” Ben asked as he followed her through the house and up the stairs.

  “He might as well have,” Jenny laughed. “He renovated it down to the studs. It’s his dream house. It took him over five years to finish it.”

  “He obviously knows what he’s doing,” Ben said from behind her.

  She led him down the upstairs hallway to her room. “He does. He’s an amazing architect. I just wish he could understand that it’s not my thing, you know?”

  She opened the door to her bedroom, and Ben followed her into the room, stopping just across the threshold. He let out a low whistle.

  “I take it your thing is painting?”

  She followed his eyes to the canvases lining the walls. “You could say that.”

  He crossed the room, studying her paintings. “Wow … These are good.”

  She felt exposed, vulnerable, despite his praise. “You think so?”

  “I do.” He straightened, his eyes falling on all the other canvases. “Who’s the guy? He’s in every one.”

  She was relieved the features of the man in the painting were so blurry. No way would Ben connect him with an across-the-field view of Nikolai. At the same time, she didn’t want to keep Ben from knowing about Nikolai. Not forever. She and Ben were supposed to be friends, and she was finally starting to understand that friends were friends all the time, even when you were being weird or crazy or telling stories about a guy from a past life.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I … see him sometimes.”

  “In your visions?” There was no teasing in his voice, no skepticism.

  She nodded.

  “Do you think he’s from the past?” Ben asked.

  She hesitated, wondering if this was the moment. If she should just spill it all.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said.

  “Fine. Whatever.” Something cold dropped over his features. “So are you going to show me the pictures or what?”

  “Ben, wait.” She touched his arm, trying to get rid of that look in his eyes. The one that seemed like anger and hurt all rolled into one. “Why are you mad?”

  “Why would I be mad?” He tried to laugh, but it sounded more like he was choking. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her like a little boy about to throw a tantrum. “Just because you’re hanging out with some guy I’ve never seen before, keeping secrets after I’ve told you everything … Why would I be mad?”

  Anger rippled through her. “Who I see is really none of your business.”

  “I thought we were friends.” His voice was wounded.

  “We are.” She wanted to take away his hurt, but somehow she knew that telling him about Nikolai wasn’t going to do that. “But that doesn’t mean you have the right to know everything I do, everyone I see.”

  He turned around. She couldn’t see his eyes from where she stood, but he seemed to be studying one of her canvases, the old train station with Nikolai at the edge of the platform. He faced her, his expression slightly less stormy. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just … ”

  “Just what?”

  He worried the ring at his lip between two graceful fingers. “I feel like you’re keeping something from me. Like we were in it together—the music box and your mom and even that weird monastery—and all of a sudden, you’re just … gone. Then I come over and I see you with that guy, and I can’t help feeling like something’s changed.” There was no bravado in his voice. The wall that had stood between them since they first met was gone completely, his face open and vulnerable in a very un-Ben-like way.

  The silence was heavy between them as she thought about what he said. When she got righ
t down to it, the question of telling Ben about Nikolai was simple.

  They’d become friends.

  The other stuff—the way Ben might feel about her and the way she couldn’t feel about him as long as Nikolai was in her life—didn’t matter.

  She sat on the edge of her bed. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I owe you an explanation. Everything just happened so fast.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She took a deep breath. “The guy next door isn’t just a new neighbor. It’s … stranger than that.”

  “Well, strange is kind of a hallmark of our friendship at this point, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled up at him. “You could say that.”

  He sat next to her, the bed dipping with his weight. “So tell me.”

  She took a deep breath, nodding. “Remember the dream we shared in the attic that first day? The one where we were both in a palace and I told you there was another guy there? One you hadn’t seen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “After thinking about it, I figured out that it was like my visions. A kind of … past-life memory. Only this one was yours and mine.”

  He didn’t flinch. “You think we were together in a past life?”

  “I think we were connected in some way. I just haven’t figured out exactly how.”

  “How can you be sure it wasn’t just a dream?” he asked.

  “I can’t. Not really. But it … I don’t know, it feels different, like a memory. And it ties in with a lot of other things that have been happening. I think the music box is some kind of doorway to the past. That’s probably what the mesmerization instructions were for—a way to bring about some kind of regression with the help of the music and the words put together.”

  He thought about it before speaking. “Assuming I buy that, what does it have to do with your neighbor?”

  “He was the other guy.” She said it in a rush, not giving herself time to change her mind. “I was with someone in the dream before I saw you playing piano. His name was Nikolai, and I was one of the Romanovs, the Russian family that was—”

  “I know who the Romanovs were,” Ben interrupted.

  “Right. Anyway, before I came across you playing the piano, Nikolai was warning me about the possible execution of my family.”

  “So you think this … Nikolai was also with you in a past life?”

  She nodded, wondering if it would really be that easy.

  “How is it possible that we were all reincarnated to end up in the same time and place?”

  She braced herself for what she had to say next. “We weren’t. Not all of us.”

  Questions clouded Ben’s eyes. “I don’t get it.”

  She chewed her lip, trying to find a way to make it seem less crazy. “Nikolai told me the story of the Romanov assassination, not as an event in history, but as it was. In that life, he tried to warn me. Tried to save me. But I wouldn’t listen, and I was killed.”

  “And he, what, remembers this?” Ben asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then, what?”

  She chewed her lower lip. This was going to be harder than she thought. “He was there when it happened, and when I … ” She shook her head, correcting herself. “When we were killed, he tried to stop it, but they shot him, too, and left him to die.”

  Ben looked at her without saying anything. She continued.

  “He didn’t die, Ben. Someone saved him. Some kind of … witch or mystic. She nursed him back to health, and then she sent him here.”

  “What do you mean? Sent him here how?”

  Jenny looked down, running one finger over the flowers on her comforter. “Have you ever heard of ley lines?”

  “Sure. Places on the planet with some kind of special energy.”

  She nodded. “Did you know some people believe ley lines allow access to wormholes? That people can use them to travel through time?”

  “Only in science fiction novels.”

  There was a question in his voice she didn’t know how to begin answering.

  “What if it wasn’t only in science fiction novels?” she said, meeting his eyes. He didn’t answer and she crossed the room to her desk. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

  He stood beside her while she opened her laptop and inserted the flash drive she’d used to save the pictures from Photoshop. While everything loaded, she pulled the stool over from her easel. She gave Ben the desk chair. When the folder appeared on her desktop, she clicked it, opening all of the pictures and lining them up across the screen so Ben could see them in order.

  “You have to look at them in order to get what I’m thinking.” She pointed to the picture of the monks sitting in a circle. “This one’s the first one, I think.”

  She walked him through all the others in sequence, explaining as she went. When she got to the last panel, she recapped. “It’s like they’re doing something with the magic book and then … well, I think they’re traveling through time because the next thing you know, here they are. And this,” she pointed to the stone building in one of the panels, “is definitely the monastery.”

  Ben rubbed his chin, studying the pictures. Reaching toward her laptop, he zoomed in on the book. The cover was magnified, the familiar words “of Time” now visible on the cover.

  Jenny reached for the picture of her mom and Morgan, handing it to Ben. “Notice anything unusual?”

  He studied the picture, before shaking his head.

  She pointed to the book in her mother’s arms. “I think it’s the same book.”

  He peered more closely at the photograph. “It’s hard to be sure,” he finally said.

  She nodded. Then she told him about the trip to Marist, proof that Morgan had lied to her and that Jenny’s mother had had secrets of her own.

  “So what are you saying?” he asked. “Just … tell it to me straight.”

  “Nikolai came forward in time using one of the ley lines in the book. I think the retreat center is actually headquarters for the Order, an organization that’s supposed to keep people in the right time and everything. And I think my mom might have been one of them.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. The floppy front piece fell right back into his eyes. “A month ago, I might have blown this all off. But now … ”

  She caught something in his voice. An unspoken question.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Now what?”

  He stood, pacing her room and looking again at the paintings lining the floors of her room. “Well, I haven’t been visited by anyone from another time, but I’ve been having dreams—weird ones—ever since that whole music box thing.”

  She turned to face him. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you’re still having the dream we shared in the attic?”

  “Not that one. Not exactly. You’re not in these ones. Just me and some other people that I know in the dream but don’t know once I wake up.”

  “Tell me.” Jenny’s voice was barely above a whisper.

  He played with the ring on his lip for a minute before speaking. “Sometimes I’m in the same palace, but I’m in a uniform. Other times, I’m outside, in the woods. There are others like me, and we’re all guarding something, or … maybe it’s someone. I have a hard time remembering.”

  “Are you wearing the same jacket you were wearing in the vision we shared?” she asked softly, seeing him at the piano, his jacket open, a cigarette dangling from his full lips.

  He nodded. “Except things feel … tenser. My jacket’s buttoned and I’m taking orders.”

  “Taking orders from who?”

  “People I don’t know well who seem to be in charge. And there’s another man. I … I think he’s my father.”

  “Your father here or your father there?”

  “My father there,” Ben said. “He’s unhappy with me a lot. We’re always fighting. Even in the dream, I feel his disappointment. But that’s not what has me waking up in a cold sweat every night.”

>   She was surprised by the revelation. Ben seemed bulletproof, even now that she knew him better. “What does?”

  “The fear. In my dreams, I’m afraid.”

  The terror in his eyes made the bottom fall out of her stomach.

  “Of what?” she asked. “In the dream, I mean. What are you afraid of in the dream?”

  He turned his blue eyes on her. “Death. I’m afraid of death, because in the dreams, there’s no doubt in my mind that someone’s going to die.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jenny put the last of the dishes into the dishwasher. Her dad had invited Ben to stay for dinner, but he’d had to pick up his mom from Books, so it had just been Jenny and her father.

  She’d been tense as they ate the take-out Chinese her dad had picked up on the way home. When he asked what was wrong, she’d said that she was just tired.

  But that wasn’t it. She wanted to know about her mother. The questions loomed even larger in Jenny’s mind since her visit to Marist. She couldn’t help wondering if Morgan wasn’t the only one hiding something. Was her dad really as clueless about her mom’s past as he seemed? Did he really think being a complex, moody artist was reason enough for all her mother’s strange behavior?

  Jenny didn’t have the answers, but her resentment was building to a crescendo. She shouldn’t have to beg for answers about her own mother.

  Finished with the dishes, Jenny walked toward her dad’s office and paused at the door. He was leaning back in his desk chair, staring at the computer with single-minded concentration. He looked lost, his loneliness a dark cloak hanging off his shoulders. Jenny wondered if he was lonely. If maybe their quiet little life—a life with no questions but no answers, either— wasn’t enough for him.

  Go in, she urged herself. Ask him your questions. All eleven years of them.

  He looked up at her, sensing her presence. “Hey, you.” His eyes were tired behind his smile. “What’s up?”

  She couldn’t get the words out. Inwardly, she urged herself to get a grip. He was her dad. He’d tell her what he knew if she asked. She knew he would.

  But then she would have to know. She would have to know, for better or worse, who her mother really was—or how little her dad had really known about her.