Jens started dancing to a hip-hop song he hummed in his giddy state, drawing curious stares from Jamie and Foss, and hoots from Tucker, who was more familiar with regular music. Jens taunted while he danced around me, making me laugh. “Don’t you want to know how I know about the pool sharking?”
I shook my head, grinning at his over the top dancing. “I assumed it was when you were watching us in that adorable stalker-like invisible state of yours.”
“You know it! I saw you two the whole time.” Then he switched his voice to imitate me in a higher pitch than my voice actually was. “Which ball do you try to hit in first? Now, the eight-ball is a solid, so why can’t I try to hit it in? My brother’s just teaching me today. This game is so confusing!” Then he switched back to his regular voice, laughing. “Linus was brilliant! How much was your biggest take in a night?”
I thought back to the thick wad we’d accumulated just before our birthday one year. We were saving up to buy a new gaming system, which occupied our time most of the month after that. I moved behind the partition to get dressed. “I dunno. Three hundred? Something like that. It was a long time ago. I don’t want to do seedy things when Linus comes back, though. I mean, first things first. When we get back to the Other Side, he’s going straight to the doctor to get his levels checked. I don’t want to get him back and be irresponsible. I’d never forgive myself if I let him die again.” I slid on my lavender Chucks and came out from behind the divider to find a sobered Jens.
“You didn’t ‘let him die’, Loos. I guess I didn’t even think about him coming back with leukemia.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his shoulders weighted with things I wished neither of us had to worry about. “But hey, if he still has it, we’ll figure it out. Best doctors, support during recovery time – whatever it takes.” He pulled me into a hug that he needed more than I did. “We won’t lose him this time.”
I pecked his cheek and slapped him on the butt, encouraging the smile to resurface in him again. “Let’s go, Jennifer.”
Jens grumbled, but I could tell by his furrowed eyebrows that he would be dwelling on Linus until he could see him with his own two eyes.
Twenty-Nine.
Lost at the Parade
I kept expecting an army to descend on us or some obstacle to keep us from reaching our goal, but the closer we got, the easier it was. It felt too easy, like there was a trap. Of course, that was probably the conditioned response to Undraland I was feeling. There seemed to be a war or a pitfall or sea monster around every “safe” corner. When Jens kifed a shovel from a home nearby as the sun fell, things started to get real.
We approached the unguarded Lugn River just as dusk was starting to settle on the lush greenery of Nøkken. We’d seen to the country not needing an army to keep watch over a river. There was nothing there to guard anymore, except a few fish, who wouldn’t tell anyone we were about to dig up an unmarked grave. Still, we held hands to ensure our invisibility, just in case.
“Where again did your mom say he was?” Jens asked, his voice quiet and respectful. Everyone was treating me with kid gloves. Half were excited to see this rare bit of magic brought to light; the other half were bracing themselves for my inevitable meltdown if we didn’t find him.
I sounded like I’d swallowed a frog, and it was doing the talking for me. “Fifty paces west of the Salmon Seesaw,” I croaked out.
Jens nodded, holding his shovel over his shoulder like a lumberjack (or something uber manly).
I touched Linus at my neck, breaking the quiet of the tense air. “Guys, whatever happens, I just want to say thanks for coming with me to see this through. I… This is…” It hit me anew that I’d gone from having one girlfriend to now having a team of warriors who would cross whole lands to bring me my own personal sanity. I had friends – friends that I loved. My heart warmed to the point where a lump rose in my throat. “Just, thanks.”
Jamie and Jens both felt my swell of nerves and gratitude on a different level than what my mouth was capable of expressing. Jamie hugged me in my mind, and Jens held tight to my hand in real life.
Jens’s palm was slick with trepidation and his breath was shallow. “Jamie, Tuck, stay with Lucy. Foss, you can take turns digging with me.”
Foss nodded, but I shook my head. “No. My brother, my shovel.”
Jens swallowed. “Babe, I don’t want a fight on this. If Linus really is buried here, there’s no telling what state his body’s in. I don’t want you seeing anything you can’t unsee. Jamie, no matter what, you and Loos stay put. I won’t have her seeing things through your eyes, either.”
Jamie moved to hold my hand, and then made a show of sitting on the grass underneath a tall, drooping tree, pulling Tuck and I down with him. “You got it, brother. Good luck.”
Jens nodded once, and then turned invisible as soon as Foss’s hand gripped his shoulder.
Anxiety engulfed me. My mouth went dry and my stomach churned like a washing machine with a brick in it. Jamie was privy to my every thought, since I couldn’t spare any energy into putting up my mental wall. The fingers of my free hand worried the hem of my t-shirt as I raised the hand Jamie was clutching to bite my nails.
When I was a little girl, my parents took us to a Fourth of July parade. There were baton-twirlers, people in costumes, clowns on stilts and a whole drum section that beat the anthem of freedom into the air.
I’d been fascinated. No matter how close we got to the action, it was never close enough. I had to see how many drums there were, and the serious expression on each drummer’s face as they pounded out the rhythm of my very young heart. It was exhilarating. It was exciting. I was flying.
It was the only thing I saw or heard, which is how I got lost. Thousands of people, but not one of them knew my parents or my brother. No one knew us anywhere we went; we left each location not long after arriving.
An hour may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but to not be able to find your daughter for that long a time brought my mother to a state of out and out panic before they finally found me.
It’s a funny thing when you’re a kid and have no concept of time. I wasn’t all that worried when I looked up and didn’t see my parents; I knew Linus would find me.
When my mom was sobbing and my dad was ashen with his worst fear realized, Linus and I shared a shrug at what we deemed an overreaction. We knew we would never be lost if we had each other. No matter the distance that separated us, we could always find the other one. In fact, that day at the parade, Linus had been the one to lead them to me.
It had been more than two long years Linus had been lost in this parade – a sea of faces and noises that tried to drown out my brother, but never succeeded in silencing him from my heart altogether. As Jamie squeezed my hand through the first thrust of the shovel, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had found my brother.
Thirty.
Not Paying Off
The tension was so high that when Jens’s eyebrows raised when he finally met resistance in the widest hole ever, my heart leapt into my throat, and I almost vomited.
“Whoa! Calm down, syster.” Then to Jens, Jamie called, “Everything alright, brother?”
“There’s a box!” Foss jumped down into the hole with Jens and made quick work of brushing off the top. “Lucy, there’s a box!”
Jamie’s hand in mine quickly turned into a restraint. “Let me see! Is it a coffin? Tell me it’s the right size!”
Jens popped his head up out of the hole in the ground like a gopher, his expression alight with all the hope in his heart. “It is! Hold on, baby! We’ll get him out! Foss, help me dig around the sides.” He shouted in our direction, “Tuck! I’ve got some rope in my red pack. Toss it here.”
Tucker fumbled in the red moonlight through the bag too slow for my liking. “Hurry!” burst out of me, but I didn’t have to wherewithal to apologize for being rude.
Tuck ran the rope to Jens and sacrificed getting dirt on his last clean shirt to hel
p the guys hoist out the box. When the rectangular wooden crate hit the grass with a creaking thud, I went into full-blown raving lunatic as I threw my body toward the box. “Linus!” was all I got out before Jamie’s hand cupped my mouth.
Jamie yanked me back and shushed me in my ear. “You don’t want to wake anyone, do you?” He wrapped both arms around me in something that was too restrictive to feel like a hug. With his hand still over my mouth, he said, “Whatever’s in that box, I’m here.”
It’s Linus. It’s my brother. Jamie, I know it’s him. I can feel it.
And I could. Something stirred in me – in the necklace even. I can’t explain it other than that. Jamie and I had the equivalent of a cell phone connection between us, but Linus and I had a sonic boom. We couldn’t always hear thoughts, but we could feel the other when it was most urgent. I blamed how I didn’t feel him before on the fact that Nik was en route to dying, and Jens was assumed dead. That would distract me from even the biggest blast of dynamite. Plus, I hadn’t actually been this close to the river last time.
Jamie shifted behind me, securing me to his chest and resting his chin atop my shoulder. For a guy who was hesitant to comfort me when I’d needed him a few days ago, it seemed he was determined to make up for it now. No matter what happens, I will always be your brother.
I stopped my manic gleam and blinked, sucking in air too heavy for me to take enough of it in. I know. I love you, Jamie.
I love you too, syster.
For the longest minutes of my life, I watched Foss and Jens pry the nailed-down lid open. With bated breath, my eyes remained fixed on Jens for signs that Linus was there, and everything was roses.
Jens said nothing, but turned away so I wouldn’t see his tears fall. I struggled against Jamie to get to him, but Jamie held me fast. Not until Jens says we can go see Linus. Patience, syster. Tucker stepped in and hugged Jens. His arms wrapped tight around my boyfriend like a vice, squeezing his ribs together so Jens didn’t shatter when he fell apart for those few seconds he permitted himself to feel overwhelmed. Hearing the man you love break down is an indescribable smash of awful that crushes you until he breathes easy again.
When Jens finally turned to me, his face red, he nodded and waved us forward.
I’d never sprinted so fast in all my life, including when I’d been running from the Werebear in Ohio when I’d first met Jens.
Jens caught me around the waist just before I reached the box. “Hold up, Loos. You can’t see him yet. Cover up what you can, Foss.” He waited for Foss to place his own shirt and Jens’s over Linus’s body, and then drape Tucker’s donated dress shirt over the top of Linus’s face, leaving only Linus’s mouth uncovered. Jens held me tight, his voice dripping with emotion. “Your mom said you had to pour the ashes into his mouth, right?”
I nodded, my hands trembling so badly, I was worried I might come this far only to trip and drop the ashes all over the place.
Jamie knew my thoughts, so without a word, he slipped the rope from around my neck and began peeling off the wax seal with his knife.
“I want to be the one to do it,” I demanded, my eyes wide and face gaunt.
Jamie nodded, placing my hand around his, so we were both clutching my cremated family in a grip firm enough to ensure they didn’t drop. He brought me over to the homemade casket where I saw my twin’s jaw hanging open an inch. His lips had a sickly gray pallor to them. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but not being greeted by a skeletal form with no skin or sinew holding his bones together was a relief. There hadn’t even been much damage from the earth to the inside of the box. It was Linus on chemo. Too thin for my liking, but still a person, as opposed to a Halloween prop. I wondered if my parents had done something to preserve his body. I knew this kind of non-decay wasn’t natural. He didn’t even smell.
The trickle of soul into body was slow and purposeful, each granule finding its way back to its home like earthworms digging and disappearing underground, leaving nothing of themselves behind.
Mixed in with Linus’s soul were the remnants of my mother, my father and Charles Mace, as well. It was the last trace of my family, and I was gambling it all on Linus.
I would gamble anything on my brother.
Jamie closed Linus’s lips to seal the mixture inside, and motioned for Tucker to start performing the bonding charm my mother had instructed us to do.
When Tucker placed his hands on my brother’s chin and the top of his head, I was overcome with the urge to push him away. Linus was my brother, not his. When Jamie’s hand on my shoulder brought reason to me, I backed my territorial claim on Linus down to a reasonable level.
Tucker closed his eyes and began murmuring in a language I didn’t know, looking, well, stranger than usual. “Hålla tätningen. Binda bitar. Återställa hela.”
When he took his hands off Linus and nodded once to the group, I balked, “Is that it?”
Tucker bristled. “Yes. About half a year of schooling went into learning how to make it look that easy. I’ll take your ‘is that it’ to mean you’re eternally grateful for my help.”
I ducked my head, chagrinned. “Sorry. Thanks for being awesome at all things elfish.”
Tucker was slightly mollified. “That’s more like it.”
A minute passed by before I dared to blink, watching my brother’s mouth with bated breath.
Five minutes died before Tucker broke the silence. “Were there more instructions from your mother, Lucy?”
I shook my head as I knelt between Jens and Jamie, peering over the side of the box as I prayed with everything inside me that Linus would open his eyes. I removed Tucker’s shirt from my brother’s face and gasped at the sight that made me ache. He was gaunt and had a gray pallor to his sunken-in skin, but he was him. Even in death, he was just enough him to run me over with an onslaught of memories from childhood on up to the last time I saw him.
Half an hour passed in the dark of night before Jens stood and moved to the other side of the coffin, silently apologizing to me before sliding Linus’s eyelids open. Tucker clicked his fingers to make a small flame, but Linus’s pupils did not react. “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t he be waking up?”
I couldn’t answer. All the hope inside me was pitched at such a high note of tension, I feared my cells breaking down if I admitted this was not going how I’d envisioned. “Mom said to dig him up, pour his soul inside, have an elf do the bonding charm, and he would come back. He’ll come back.”
Another half an hour passed, engulfing us in the full swing of night when the lantern lights in the houses in the distance went out one by one. The stars blinked overhead, peeking over my shoulder like children to see if Linus Kincaid was yet again breaking rules so he could come back to life.
Foss and Tucker were sitting in the grass a few feet away, their heads bowed in respect for the somber moment and the still dead body in the box.
Jamie’s doubt began to seep onto my side of the hallway that divided our minds. He’d made sure to keep the door open, so he could check on me every millisecond. I was angry at Jamie for letting his hope waver, even for a breath of an errant thought. I mentally shoved him and went back to focusing on my twin.
I had no idea how much later it was that my desperation began to peak. I broke the unspoken agreement of silence among the ranks to whisper as I leaned over the edge of the casket, my face only a foot from my brother’s. “Linus,” I choked out. “Linus, wake up.”
Jens closed his eyes, pained at the sight of all our hard work not paying off.
Not paying off immediately. Big difference. I could be patient.
I pushed forward, not caring that I had an audience who could hear my every exhale. “Quit fooling around, Line. I came all this way. The least you could do is get out of bed.”
I looked up when I heard a sniff. Jens was red-faced across from me, and his voice was choked with the tears he was too stubborn to shed in public twice in one day. His elbows rested on the lip of the bo
x, his hands clasped in prayer as he whispered to my brother. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you died. I wasn’t there when you needed me most. You didn’t deserve this.” His words were strangled. “I did what you asked. I looked after Lucy for you. I couldn’t keep your parents alive, but Lucy made it.” Any hold that Jens had on his emotions broke, the dam giving birth to a flood of regret and sorrow that could not be stopped. His shoulders started shaking, and I knew that as rare as a shooting star on Valentine’s Day, my rock of a boyfriend was crying. “I’m sorry!”
Jamie relinquished his hold on my sweaty hand to move around the casket and wrap Jens in that brotherly hug I adored. Jens’s few escapee tears fell silently, but I had none. I’d cried enough for Linus. Now should have been the time for me to be smiling. Linus should have been back already.
I was irate. “Get up, Linus! Come on! You’re pissing me off, laying around like this. I put your soul back in, so get up already!” My voice rose in pitch as I willed my twin to open his eyes and look at me.
Linus remained in his coffin, stubborn as ever, keeping me on the edge while I waited for my other half to wake up.
Thirty-One.
No Limits
I hadn’t noticed Foss, Tucker or even Jamie fall asleep, but when the morning sun rose, they all roused with expectant faces that quickly fell when they realized Linus was still jerking my chain by, you know, staying dead. His box was in the shade under an overhang of tall trees that kept the sun from shedding light on my largest source of frustration and anticipation.
Jens had given up hope that Linus would come back, and waited out what he assumed was my denial that would quickly be followed by a crushing fist of grief.
Jens was wrong. They were all wrong. When they mulled around, passing around rolls and readying their gear for the trek onward, I paid them no mind.
Lucy at Last Page 16