She gave directions to her place.
As they were driving, he said, “Where have you been?”
“Here. There. Around.”
“I wish we’d had a chance to meet. Before.”
She closed her eyes and wanted to sleep. A nice dreamless sleep.
“Sorry.”
They got to her apartment and, without thinking, she said, “You can come up if you want to.”
She instantly regretted it, not knowing why she’d invited him.
Maybe because he was her only tie to Alannah.
He nodded and she led him up.
“It’s nothing special. Just a place.”
When they got to the apartment, she told him to help himself in the kitchen while she cleaned up.
He got himself a glass of water and was sitting on her ratty old couch when she returned.
“It’s uncanny how much you look alike.”
Savannah smiled.
“I don’t believe she’s dead,” he said.
She sat on a chair across from him.
“I don’t think you realize how close we were. See the diaries over there?”
He looked where she pointed at a dozen books sitting on a shelf and nodded.
“We shared them. We were so close, we wrote in the same journal, as if we were two halves of the same person. We knew what the other person was feeling, what they had planned, and we were never far apart. We loved each other in a way you would never understand.”
“I loved her, too.”
She didn’t answer.
He continued, “I still do. I will never believe she’s dead. I will find her.”
“I wish you could.”
“What happened that night? Tell me what you know.”
“I didn’t know it was going to happen. She always told me everything, but not that time. All I knew was that she was terribly afraid of you.”
Jeremiah’s face turned sad, and he tried to smile to hide it but Savannah knew how he felt.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t say that to hurt you.”
She went to the kitchen and took a beer from the fridge. She held it up. “Want one?”
He shook his head. He joined her in the kitchen. “She knew I’d had a terrible temper in the past. And I knew how fragile a person she was. I hate myself for letting her think I could ever hurt her. I think I just felt so betrayed . . . .”
That’s when he started to cry.
Savannah refused to comfort him, because she blamed him as much as he blamed himself. All she could manage was to push a box of tissue closer to him.
“Sorry,” he mumbled between sobs.
She shrugged.
“She’s still dead,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, Jeremiah left the apartment and drove back to his hotel room. He felt more lost than ever.
But he still believed Alannah was alive.
Nothing would ever shake that feeling.
Chapter 24
2020
The little boy stood behind a tree and stared at his target.
The boy had died twenty-eight years earlier, and although he didn’t know it’d been almost three decades, he remembered his death. The cold water carrying him away from his father, the quick glances of the canoe before it disappeared from sight, his dad calling to him before the voice evaporated completely and the rushing water carried him away.
He didn’t remember the actual moment he died, not exactly, but he remembered swallowing a lot of water, choking and fighting, not being able to do anything to help himself.
He remembered that he eventually lost the fight and closed his eyes for the last time.
At least, that’s what everyone had told him to expect when he died.
The old guy at the front of the church talked about going to heaven. That didn’t happen, either.
Instead he found himself buried deep in the subconscious of another person. He’d lived there ever since, mostly sleeping.
He didn’t like being dead.
At first he thought he might be in heaven after all. There was nothing to see or sense in any way, and he felt like he was sleeping most of the time.
Every once in a while, though, he could concentrate hard enough to catch a glimmer of where he was. The cold water that killed him was still weighing on him. He felt that cold water all the time, even though in some weird way he knew that was long behind him.
“I’m only ten years old . . . .”
It was that thought that sometimes came to him when he could find a bit of brain tissue that allowed him to think.
Only ten years old. Luke Harrison didn’t miss his mom or his dad or his little brother, Dylan, although he sometimes found memories of them buried deep in his new brain. He remembered his Vavo, too, his mother’s mom. She always made nice Portuguese meals and taught him how to speak the language. He didn’t miss her, either. He wasn’t sure why, but the only feelings he seemed capable of truly experiencing were hate and self-protection. More than anything else, Luke wanted to control the body he was carried around in.
That body belonged to a girl named Savannah Clarke. He knew little about her, because whenever she was in charge of the body, he was pushed down to the core stem, and he floated in a world of gray silence.
Sometimes, the other interloper took over the body. That was a girl named Alannah, but Luke hadn’t shown up for the past four years. He had hoped she was dead so there was only one person he had to defeat to own the body, but he sensed that Alannah was starting to come back.
It was the older man’s fault.
Alannah loved him.
Something had happened four years earlier to make her want to hide, but the man had come to find her, and her soul was rumbling in the rotten basement of the brain. She was awakening, and Luke couldn’t allow that.
The imminent rising of Alannah had pushed Luke to take matters into his own hands, and this morning, he pushed hard enough.
For the first time, he controlled the body.
* * *
He snapped awake and took a long, deep gulp of air. It felt so good to swallow something that wasn’t cold and liquid.
“I did it,” he whispered.
Then he laughed. He stopped as soon as he started, because the laugh was nothing like any that had ever come from his own body. Then he laughed at that, since it shouldn’t have surprised him.
He wasn’t wobbly or weak when he stood. The autonomic nervous system took care of ensuring he could breathe, kept his heart beating, and maybe had something to do with remembering how the new body walked.
He felt hunger and thirst, feelings he hadn’t experienced since he died.
Before sating himself, though, he was curious, so he walked to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.
The girl who looked back had long blonde hair, and he knew that anyone would think she was very pretty . . . maybe even beautiful. Her face had no lines and when he smiled, she looked even more attractive.
He took off the T-shirt and shorts he’d been sleeping in and stared at the body. He’d never seen a girl naked before, and for a moment, he felt fear. He didn’t know what to do.
Then, just as quickly, he remembered why he’d pushed so hard to take control of the body.
“I’m going to get rid of you, old man.”
He took a drink of water and found an apple in the kitchen. He didn’t know how to make much else to eat.
“Don’t care.”
He spent the next hour in the apartment. The biggest surprise was when he had to pee and found things different than he remembered.
Twice, he felt Savannah trying to take control, but he concentrated and pushed her back. He somehow knew that if he pushed hard enough, she would be forced into the same gray sleep he’d endured for so long.
But, it was very tiring. Both times, he needed to sit down and spend a few minutes recuperating.
“How do you keep me buried, Savannah?” he asked. Of course he received no
answer.
The apartment was smaller than the house he remembered, and everything looked different. He couldn’t figure out how to turn the television on for a long time, but then he finally found a small plastic device that let him turn it on and off.
“Where are you, you jerk?”
He knew the old man was in the same town. He was searching for Alannah, and that meeting must never happen. Alannah needed to stay dead and buried.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know what the man looked like.
He searched the place but he couldn’t find any photos. He did find the man’s name—Jeremiah Moore—written in some diary entries, but there was no description other than to say he was eighteen years older than the twins.
Twins, my ass.
If anything, they were triplets.
His two sisters remembered nothing. They just knew the two of them had always shared the same body. Luke remembered, though. He remembered dying the same day that Savannah was born and, whether by fluke or design, found himself slicing through her consciousness, splitting it into two. Sometimes he imagined he was actually the father of Alannah, since his arrival created her. The three shared the body, but he was always the one with the least amount of control.
It wasn’t fair.
He planned for all that to change. Starting right now.
He kept looking around the house, never finding a photo of his enemy. He did find something equally important, though.
“Oh, hello,” he said as he pulled the revolver from its hiding place in a shoe box at the back of the bedroom closet.
The gun must have been placed there by Savannah. Goodie-Two-Shoes Alannah would never have had anything to do with it.
He laughed loudly, now more used to the girly sound of his voice.
Luke sat in a ratty old armchair, fondling the gun. Even at ten, he’d seen enough television to know how to use it, and his hands certainly had the strength to pull the trigger. It was perfect.
Then he realized how to find out what Jeremiah Moore looked like.
He closed his eyes and thought of Alannah. He chose her because she was weak, so deeply buried that he wouldn’t accidentally give her control, which might happen if he started messing with Savannah.
The girl was deep. He searched his mind to find her, and for minutes, he couldn’t feel her at all. He did run into a section of the core stem where Savannah was trapped, and he eased his way around her, searching for the other sister.
He was almost ready to give up ever finding her when he felt a tiny flash of a soul in the furthest recesses of the brain stem. He reached to her in his imagination and nuzzled up to her.
Alannah barely noticed he was there, and he took advantage of that. His mind sent out tendrils to her, massaging the sleeping girl, touching her, reading her feelings and thoughts.
He knew she was still buried in grief from the accident four years earlier. He thought she was being an idiot but kept that opinion to himself. He felt the gray depression draping her lost soul. Luke didn’t allow himself to think about that. He didn’t want to lose the strength he had through pity.
There was only one mission ahead.
He poked through Alannah’s memories, searching for the one that would lead him to Jeremiah.
Finally, he found what he was looking for: a frozen image of Jeremiah as Alannah wanted to remember him. He was smiling and his eyes were full of life, full of love as he stared at his soul mate.
He knew that was how Alannah felt, and he barely suppressed a laugh.
Savannah, Alannah, and he were the real soul mates here.
* * *
Now he had the old man in his sights.
The gun was heavy but that was okay. His hand knew exactly how to hold it. Clearly, Savannah had done a lot of practicing with the revolver. He wondered briefly what plans she had had for it, but he figured she wasn’t exactly a long-term-planning kind of girl, so she probably didn’t have anything specific in mind. Just a feeling it would come in handy.
“You’re right, sister.”
Jeremiah was standing by a food truck. There were a half dozen of them in a row, and it took him a while to decide to go for the Thai food. As it was being prepared, he was looking at a cell phone.
Luke knew what the phone was by now. He’d learned a lot by studying the diaries that the girls had put together.
He was alone behind the tree, about thirty feet from Jeremiah.
No witnesses except the people in the food trucks, but they weren’t looking. It was a cool day and there were no other people in the park that Luke could see.
He lifted the revolver and steadied his right wrist with his left.
Thanks for the training, Sav.
Slowly, very slowly, he pulled the trigger.
Even though his body knew most of the routine, he was still shocked by the recoil.
The gun shot was loud and scared Luke almost as much as the revolver pushing his arm backward.
He cried out in shock. The gun was on the ground, and he scrambled to pick it up.
He took one look back and was relieved to see Jeremiah lying on the ground, not moving, his chest covered in blood.
Chapter 25
2020
Alannah woke for the first time in four years.
To her, it felt like no time had passed, but subconsciously, she knew exactly what the situation was. Somehow, recently, she’d found a reason to want to come back.
Jeremiah was here.
Alannah was used to sharing the body with Savannah; they’d done that for their entire lives, and nothing particularly surprised to her. She never knew exactly what was going on when she wasn’t in control, but she sometimes had a sense, like a long-lost memory that wasn’t quite formed.
Jeremiah was back, and he had never meant her harm.
She knew that, although she wouldn’t have been able to explain how she knew.
As was their longstanding tradition when they switched consciousness, Alannah first took stock of her whereabouts and then hunted for the diary.
The apartment was foreign to her, but reading the diary would bring her up to speed.
Back in Aynsville. That’s a surprise.
It took her an hour to skim the diary. Four years of notes, four years of catching up. Once she was done, she went to the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised to see that her face hadn’t changed. She didn’t find any wrinkles or anything, just a slight lightening of her skin color.
She touched her cheek and it felt the same. Part of her wanted to laugh. Four years wasn’t that long, but when you’re only twenty-eight, four years was a seventh of your entire life.
If she looked closely, she could see the remains of a scrape on her cheek, but it was mostly healed. She never questioned minor things like that. Savannah’s lifestyle was different from hers. “Jeremiah,” she said to her reflection. “I need to find you.”
Saying his name out loud brought back the overwhelming love she felt for him and a burning desire to find him. She needed to be sure he knew she wanted to be with him.
Always and forever.
She has no doubt he felt the same way. They were meant for each other, unlike any other couple she’d ever heard of.
Where are you?
That was the question she couldn’t answer. Savannah’s diary mentioned that he was in town, but that was several days ago, and she didn’t know where he was staying.
She could wander the streets, but how successful could that be? Aynsville was small compared to Las Vegas, but it still had 20,000 people. Chances were slim to none that he’d be walking on the same street as she was.
Although it seems that’s exactly what had happened a couple of days ago when he ran into Savannah.
She felt hunger pangs and wondered when the body had last eaten.
She closed her eyes and hunted through the images scattered among her short-term memories.
There was nothing about food, but she was shocked to find a shred of a memory of th
e body shooting a gun.
At Jeremiah.
That’s what she thought it was, at least. She wasn’t sure.
The image shocked her. She could tell it wasn’t just imagination. The body was shooting at Jeremiah.
“Savannah? What?”
But, no, it wasn’t her sister. She might have her quirks, and she was reckless, and Alannah sometimes thought she was out of control . . . but she’d never try to kill him.
Then she knew: it was the boy.
“Oh my God . . .”
Somehow he’d managed to take control of the body and had hunted Jeremiah.
She felt weak and leaned against the kitchen counter. The smell of rotting bananas was in the air.
Neither Alannah nor Savannah liked bananas.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. In the brain stem, she found Savannah, buried in a deep coma. She wasn’t in a hurry to come back.
But the boy was. She felt the anger and urgency in his soul as he pushed to take the body back.
“No!”
Alannah had shouted aloud unnecessarily. The boy feel the force of her pushing him back.
She knew almost nothing about him, other than that he didn’t belong. He had almost surfaced a handful of times over the years, but had never been strong enough to actually take control.
The anger floated up even more dangerously, and Alannah knew she had to be careful. Savannah and she needed to be sure never to let him be in charge again, ever.
She no longer felt hungry, but she did take a drink of water. It helped calm her.
The boy attacked Jeremiah, maybe killed him.
Alannah went to their computer and opened her browser, heading to the Aynsville News web site. It took her no time to find the story from four days ago.
Yesterday at 4:10 p.m. Jeremiah Anthony Moore was shot in Alamo Park, near the Sunday food trucks. The assailant escaped and there are few clues. Moore was taken to Liberty Hospital with serious injuries. He is expected to live.
Freddie Barnard, who operates Freddie’s Pizza, was nearby and told police the assailant was a woman. Another witness, Molly St. Clair, disputes that, saying the attacker was clearly a man, although thin with long hair.
Soul Mates Page 15