by A. R. Asher
“Yes.”
I smile. “I know several. Maybe when we figure out what we have to do, you can meet them.”
He wipes the tears from his face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why… I just… I don’t remember the last time I’ve cried. I guess it just… kinda… came out.”
I laugh, “You’re fine. Let’s get the rest of the scoop from Grace. I know I can get you guys to get along.”
“I… Are you sure?”
I shrug, “May as well try. Come on.”
We go back into the room. Grace’s eyes are closed, but she grumbles to signal her consciousness.
“Grace? Cal’s not gonna hurt you. I promise. He’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met. And I need him to hear what you have to say, just in case. We have to save the world or something and if you say anything important, he’ll be able to interpret it. Is it okay if he sits in and listens?”
“I’m sorry for being scared,” Grace whispers. “I heard you cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just… I… I’m sorry,” she says through a veil of tears.
Cal smiles, and I can’t believe it, but it’s absolutely genuine. A real smile. “It’s okay. Thank you. I understand that it must be hard. But I promise, I will never hurt you.”
“Aren’t you that crow boy?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“I thought you were supposed to be evil or something,” Grace says sleepily, curling the blankets around her thin frame.
“Yeah, I am supposed to be. But I don’t think I am.”
“I don’t think you are either,” she says with a tiny smile.
I feel the flood of Cal’s peaceful joy surge through the room. His emotions, his being, is explosive, electric, alive; he is contagious. I feel my heart swell as though it’s being carried by feathers.
This is good.
“So you want me to keep talking?” Grace says.
“Oh! Um, er, yeah. If it’s okay with you. If you ever feel uncomfortable, you can stop.”
She shakes her head, “No, I can’t. I have to say everything. I… Where did we leave off? Oh, okay, okay. I knew I had to leave, but I didn’t know where to go. But then I had this dream. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Everything felt so… real. But I saw you in my dream, walking through this forest, all beat up. And you had this look on your face like you owned the world, and then you cut your hair off. And I saw the path of the forest, where it was-- I saw everything. So, I just started running. I don’t know if I actually ever stopped running.”
“That’s impossible,” I breathe.
“I don’t remember much, though. I don’t even know if you two are real. The dream seemed real, and I think I’m awake now, and now everything seems like I’m in a dream again.”
I bite my lip and look at Cal, feeling as lost as ever. He just shakes his head, clearly as confused as I am.
“I’m not crazy, am I?” Grace whispers, covering her mouth with her hand.
I shake my head, “No. I’m just trying to figure out how you got here by running the entire time in your state… Wait. Those claw marks on your legs. Do you remember anything about those?”
“Claw marks? I have claw marks on my legs?” She pulls up her skirt just enough to see her wounds and she shudders at the sight of the red gashes. “Oh God. I… Where did these come from?”
“Do you remember anything about any animals, by chance? They look very birdlike,” Cal suggests.
“Animals… I… Oh my god, I remember. I rode a horse here. But then some wolves killed the horse. They were black-- they had these piercing red eyes that glowed in the dark. And then those crow people tried to get me and bring me back to the castle, but then this… this flock of doves carried me on their back and brought me here.”
I shake my head. All of this is insane. I believe that she’s not lying, but how am I supposed to believe a story like that?
But then Cal gasps. “How many doves? How big? What did their eyes look like?”
Grace seems to mentally reel back. “I… I think… They had gold eyes? They were maybe this big--”
“I’ll be back.” Cal gets to his feet from his spot on a chair in the corner as he sprints out of the room and down the hallway.
“Is… Is that a good sign?” Grace asks quietly.
“I have no idea,” I whisper back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Grace falls asleep waiting for Cal, so I take a book out of the corner of the room and absently flip through the pages. My head is too clouded to make sense of arrangements of the alphabet, but I love touching the pages. It makes me feel like I’m back at home, if only a little.
I miss Mom. I hope that she’s okay. I wonder what she’s doing… I wonder if she’s been thinking of me, or trying to forget. And since Evan died… Who’s been protecting her? The idea that she might be alone and scared somewhere terrifies me. Mom could never live like that. She needed other people to talk to. She needed ears to listen to her stories, or she’d go crazy.
I’m going crazy, sitting here and waiting for a boy to tell us something riveting about doves with gold eyes.
I miss Leo. I want his warmth, his arms around me, his heartbeat in my ear. Even if he is just a puppet… I love him. I can’t stop loving him. I don’t know how. I never knew I could even fall in love, let alone fall back out. My body, my feelings, my blood doesn’t know what to do or how to react to the concept that I fell in love with someone who might not even be real. What if everything about him, his story, his personality, even Jacob, were made up?
But I know that Jacob was real, and Leo was real at some point too. I was there when he met his child for the first time. I was there when he tried to save Julian from Elliot, even if he knew who Elliot really was at the time. There was a point in Leo’s life when he was real. And maybe it was possible that those pieces of him, those real pieces of him from before when he was ‘possessed’ and consumed with his obsession with Elliot… Maybe those pieces came out, and those were the pieces that I loved. There’s no way that I could love a shell of somebody… If that’s the only person I could love, then there was no hope for me anymore.
Cal walks into the room after maybe a thirty-minute-long absence, tons of papers barely kept aloft in his arms, edges and corners peeking out of the mass.
“I know what we have to do,” he breathes, and I start to move my arm towards Grace to wake her up, but Cal grabs my hand and shakes his head ‘no.’
I can’t help but flinch under his fingers.
“Are you okay?” He asks quietly.
“I feel really weird when you touch me sometimes. That’s all.”
“Like how?”
“Warm. Electric. Very… red? It startles me, that’s all. It’s fine. I think I just get nervous around you.”
Cal laughs quietly, setting down the papers and reaching for my hand. “Come with me.”
I take it, and he leads me up way too many flights of stairs. I’m panting as I collapse on my knees at the top.
We are in a little room, exposed to the elements. I can hear the crows caw outside, hear their wings flap as they participate in their endless ritualistic flight in a circle around the spire of the mansion.
Cal helps me to my feet. “Jay. Do you know what it means when you feel that way, when somebody touches you?”
I laugh, “No. I don’t know jack shit about anything anymore.”
“Hey. Tell me how this feels, okay?”
He leans in close so that our noses are touching, if only slightly. I shiver and close my eyes so I don’t have to look into his, which are brown and full and warm.
“Open your eyes,” he whispers.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“It feels weird. I’m scared.”
He unbuttons his shirt just enough to expose his perfect chest, with curves and angles straight out of a book on sculpture.
“No, stop, what are you--”
He takes my hand and I feel f
ire, and he puts my hand on his chest, right over his heartbeat. It’s… rapid. Winged brushstrokes against the prison of his body.
“I’m scared too. You feel how fast that is? I’m scared too. Do you see what you do to me?”
“Cal, I don’t understand--”
He brings his face close to mine again, our noses touching. “Is this okay?”
It feels intense and black and red and purple, but also yellow, the brightest yellow of the morning sun, it feels white, the white of the full moon on a summer’s night.
I nod. “Yes.”
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then his breathing is shallow as he looks into my eyes, panting and yearning.
Fire floods my stomach as his lips meet my cheek. They’re soft and perfect, hills and valleys, rivers and oceans, everything that is, was, and will ever be.
“Is that okay?” He whispers.
“No.”
“Why.”
I finally manage to meet his eyes. “That’s not where they’re supposed to go.”
He sucks me in to him, our lips meeting like a collision of burning trains from the wrong tracks, and we feed in and out, madly, passionately, and I don’t understand anything that is happening to me or my body but I know that it is right.
I touch his chest and he shivers, but he pulls me closer, and I feel him, the warm definition of his body, tracing the lines of muscle and flesh.
He holds my hair in his hand, and what were once bodies made of black holes are entire galaxies colliding together.
He cups me in his hands like I am something precious, and I hold tight to him like I never want to let go. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to let go.
He backs me against a wall and unbuttons the rest of his shirt, and I feel his shoulders, feel his shoulder blades, run my hands down every inch of bare skin he lets me see and touch.
He puts one hand on the wall and the other on my shoulder, and I am his air as he breathes in the life of me, kissing up and down my neck as I shudder in pleasure, clutching the wall, desperate to not let myself melt in his arms, because I don’t want to fall in love again, and I certainly don’t want to lose somebody I’ve fallen in love with again.
He backs away. “Jay… Why are you shaking like that?”
I feel a few tears slide from my eyes. “I can’t love. And I can’t lose anybody ever again. And you feel so different… this is just what you do to me,” I whisper. “You feel so right.”
Cal slowly takes my face into his hands, “Jay… The secret is us.”
“What do you mean?”
“What dispels darkness? What is the only thing on this earth stronger than darkness?”
“Light… But I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Your name from Reya-- Rose. Roses represent love. You were always meant to fall in love. Elliot manipulated that part of you because he figured it out first. I think you were meant to fall in love with me. If I am the darkness, and you are the light… If we love each other… Then what’s left?”
“Nothing.”
He smiles, “Yes. And then everything will go back to the way it’s supposed to be. No imbalance of light or dark. Just… life. The way it is.
“But what if I don’t fall in love with you? What if you don’t fall in love with me?”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Cal whispers, feeling my heartbeat as he pulls my hand onto his chest.
His heartbeat is a hungry wolf in the forest. Chasing. Chasing forever.
Mine is strong enough that I can feel it in my wrists, my ears, and there is music in us.
We are in perfect synchronization.
“Please kiss me again,” I whisper, and he obliges.
I have never tasted anything as sweet as his lips, anything as fulfilling, anything that shines as bright.
“Where do we go from here?” I breathe as he kisses my neck, ravenously tasting the salt of my body.
He pauses. “I wish we had more time,” he whispers. “We need to take care of the birds-- remove their darkness. If we do that, then Elliot loses his power.”
“Do we have to kill him?”
“I think he deserves death after everything he’s done, but that’s up to you.”
“Then he will die,” I whisper.
“We’re going to need a lot of people. I’ll find my brothers.”
“I’ll get my sisters-- and Brom and Ren, and…” Nick. If he’s alive.
“We should go now, probably,” Calico whispers. “We don’t have much time.” He points up to the sky, and I frown when I see the blanket of soot gray mottled by a splatter of red stars.
“What’s happening?”
“The darkness is consuming everything. Before long, everything will be black and we’ll all be dead.”
“How much time do we have?”
“I would say three days, by the looks of it.”
“Okay. We should pack up and leave. But how are we going to transform the birds?”
Cal bites his lip, squinting uncomfortably at the ground. “You… You need to kill me.”
“WHAT?” I scream, wrapping my arms around my body to keep the pieces of myself together. “I’m not going to kill you!”
He shakes his head, “Jay, that’s all there is to it. There’s no other way. Otherwise everybody dies.”
“Cal, I can’t kill you, I don’t--”
He takes my hands. “The light needs to defeat the dark. And it’ll be okay. You’re the only one who might miss me.”
I feel tears sting my cheeks like hot slaps to the face. “I won’t. I won’t do it. I don’t care what happens. I can’t. I can’t--”
“We have a few more days. I can’t force you to do anything. But we do have to defeat Elliot. Let’s start there, okay?”
I nod, even though my body, the marrow of my bones, every pore of my skin is screaming a hellish, indignant ‘no.’
“Jay… I know it’s stupid. And wrong. And all of this is so messed up, and I’ve only known you personally for a few days, but… I love you.”
I close my eyes as the sobbing takes me. “I love you too.” I throw myself into his arms and he pets my hair, kisses the top of my head, cradles me like the child that I am. I want to stay here forever. I want him to become a doctor and I want to become a farmer, and we might be apart but we’ll sleep in the same bed together every night, and we’ll wake up beside one another, the person that we were literally made for. I’ll hide poetry around the house for him, and we’ll have kids together, and we’ll have the most perfect, beautiful family in the world. Everything will be perfect.
But I suddenly feel sick. I was once the game master of the world. I made my own rules and ignored everybody else’s. I was free, bound to no obligations, no relationships. And now, I have naturally reverted back to pawndom. Fate has choked me, bound me, whipped me into submission time and time again. It is everywhere and there is no escaping its all-encompassing grip. I am not strong enough. I will never be strong enough to defeat the challenges that face me. I am an abandoned ship set afloat in the middle of a nameless ocean.
I have to do something. I can’t be this person anymore… this person who takes things as they come. I have to be able to change something. There has to be some sort of a loophole. At the very least… I will die fighting against destiny, if that is the only way I can fight it.
I will not let it win.
And then, I will finally be free.
CHAPTER THIRTY
If I slept, I would have to choose between sleeping next to the person I love or sleeping next to my best friend, so I choose not to sleep. I stay awake in the library, Bear climbing into the chair opposite mine as I leaf through some poetry. The problem with poetry is that it’s supposed to soothe your soul, give you some sort of resolution or closure… but the poetry Cal has gathered in the library is all horribly emotional. I find it hard to leaf through the pages without thrusting the book into the fireplace.
I can’t
kill anybody.
I can’t kill the boy I love.
I’m tired of the lot in life that I’ve drawn. I don’t know what else there is out there, but I know there has to be something better than this. A world where people can be whoever they want to be, where people can make their own choices. Where people are people: more than cogs and screws in a robot that serves only to walk onwards forever, directionless, lost, and alone.
There’s a knock on the door, and Grace comes in without waiting for a reply, rubbing her eyes. “Mind if I join you?”
“Go ahead. Bear can move.”
She smiles, “Nah, you can stay, fella.” She ruffles Bear’s ears and sits on the floor next to him as his tail goes wild with the sight of her, and the feel of her attention.
“What’s up? Can’t sleep?”
She shakes her head, “Nah. You?”
“Everything’s wrong with me,” I say, laughing. “I don’t think I could sleep if I was drugged.”
“Something happened between you and Calico?”
“I, um… We’re in love. And it was always destiny for us to find each other and love each other. And it was always destiny for me to do everything I’ve ever done throughout the entirety of my life. And Cal says that the only way for us to save the world before the darkness consumes everything is for me to kill him.”
“Oh my god.” We sit in silence as Grace registers the gravity of the deed I have to do. I hope she can figure it out. I certainly can’t.
“How are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m supposed to use this opal dagger that I have. But I can’t do it, Grace. So many people have already died, because of… Because of me. I’m sick of it. I… I can’t do this anymore.”
“And there’s no other way?”
I shake my head, “He says no. But maybe, just maybe… I can figure something out. That’s the only hope I have left. But if he has to die, I can’t spend these last few days with my nose in a book, trying to figure things out… I want to make every day count. I can’t imagine myself ever loving anyone else. Not even Leo. He… He’s gone, I guess. Elliot took him, somehow. And even then, the way I feel about Cal over the course of just a few days is stronger than any love I’ve ever felt with Leo. But I don’t know if that’s because I feel that way, or because of destiny. I keep losing the desire to live. There’s nothing I can do with this life if everything that happens isn’t even my own doing.”