Just past an ancient sycamore with a U-shaped branch jutting from its trunk, Lance stepped off the road and made his way onto the grass, selecting a row of headstones and letting his fingers glide atop their surfaces as he passed, following the line until he reached the one that had been calling him.
He stopped, turned and looked down.
There was nothing special about the marker; gray stone, polished, but becoming rough with years of weather. Not unlike the others around it. Not worse, not better. Nothing to signify the type of person or type of life it represented. Lance read Quinten’s name etched into the rock. And something about the sight of the boy’s name caused a surge of emotion to land in Lance’s throat. The empathy was overwhelming. The sadness, now that Lance was as close to face-to-face as he’d ever be with the boy—so close, yet so far away—was almost too much to bear. Lance fell to the ground, tossing his backpack aside and sitting on his butt and cradling his face into his hands, flushed with grief that gripped him and demanded he take notice.
“I’m so sorry,” Lance said into his hands. “I tried. I tried to understand, I tried to help you. I … I failed. I hope you can forgive me.”
There was a beat of silence. A breeze blowing across the cemetery, grabbing Lance’s message and carrying it away.
“Hi, Lance.”
Lance’s head lifted from his hands at the sound of the voice. Found Quinten sitting on his headstone, his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles.
“I’ve been waiting.”
30
Just like that, the repeated message from the motel visions resounded in Lance’s head. He’ll be waiting. All this time, Lance had interpreted it as a warning, a threat that he’d forgotten since he’d left the motel’s parking lot. It hadn’t been a threat at all, but instead a wonderful promise.
The only thing that kept Lance from pushing himself off the ground and rushing toward Quinten, throwing the two of them together in an embrace, was the fact that Lance knew he was only seeing the boy’s spirit. With so much happiness and an overwhelming sense of comradery thick in the air between them, Lance had never wanted to hug a person more in his life. Yet he could not. So he sat where he was, on the grass before the boy’s tombstone, and stared in awe, searching for the right words, wondering where the two of them should even start their conversation.
Quinten started for him. “You can see me, right? Like, actually see me?”
Lance squinted in confusion. “Yes. I can see you.”
Quinten laughed. “Awesome. I never could. See them, I mean. Not completely.”
Lance stared back. Said nothing.
Quinten laughed again. “I could hear them—the spirits, the dead—I could hear their voices, their thoughts, I guess. And I could feel them, their presence in a room, around me, like an energy. Sometimes I could see things, like a blurred vision, like heatwaves in the summer coming off asphalt. Movement when there was nothing there. And they could hear me, too. We could communicate, easy as you and I are now. But”—he gave Lance a sly grin and a shrug of the shoulders—“I could never see them like they were just another person in the room. Almost tangible, you know? But you can. You can do it all, right?”
A part of Lance was almost dismayed to learn that after all the excitement of finding another person who was like him in the world, a person who shared his abilities and all the struggles that came along with them, there was already a dividing line between them. A difference that separated them.
“Yes,” Lance said. “But how do you … how do you know?”
Quinten shrugged again. “Same way people like us always end up knowing stuff, right?”
And only to Lance—people like us—would this answer make sense. And with that, Lance felt better. They might not be identical in their abilities, but for the first time in his life, Lance had just shared an understanding with somebody about a part of his life that had always lived alone. It was the most gratifying of feelings. The urge to hug Quinten rushed up at him again. He shoved it down and, understanding that the Universe would not have brought him here—to the motel, the town, the cemetery, to Quinten—without a purpose, asked, “Why am I here?”
Quinten’s face grew somber, the sly grin fading. “Because I have a message for you. It’s something you already know, I think. But if not, you need to. It’s something I’ve known for over twenty years. Ever since you were born. It’s why I’m like this”—he pointed to himself—“and you’re like that.”
Lance considered this, searched the boy’s face for deeper meaning. “You mean … dead and alive?”
Quinten nodded, and Lance felt a cold chill wash through him.
“But,” Quinten said, looking up to the sky and closing his eyes, as if gauging some unseen factor, “we still have some time, and I have so many questions. I’ve waited a long time to talk to somebody like you—like us. Tell me about yourself. Was your childhood as weird as mine?”
Quinten flashed a bright smile, and Lance burst out laughing. The moment was almost dreamlike, as if at any moment the feeling of happiness would fade and Quinten would vanish and Lance would awaken in a dark room with nobody to share his secrets with. The secrets he’d held for so long.
So Lance started talking.
It was euphoric, their talk. Two boys sitting together in a cemetery, swapping tales of their lives, moments of danger, humorous anecdotes, and tragic sadness. Both of them sharing things on a previously undiscussed level of intimacy reserved specifically for each other. They stripped away their reservations they’d spent so long building up, baring it all. Both of their stories culminated with their run-ins with the Reverend and the Surfer. The difference was Lance’s story had more to be added, while Quinten’s had come to an end.
The sun shifted across the sky as they talked, the hours passing. Finally, when the conversation eventually came to a stop, Lance offered what he’d initially come to say. After sharing this great moment together, the words that followed weighed even heavier on his heart.
“I want you to know I’m sorry,” Lance said. “Sorrier than you can ever know. I tried to save you that day, but I couldn’t.”
“I know,” Quinten said, his face falling a bit. “But see, that’s why you’re here, that’s what I have to tell you.”
Lance waited.
Quinten, who during their talk had moved to sitting in the grass with his back leaning against his headstone, said, “You weren’t supposed to save me. I was saving you.”
“I … I don’t understand,” Lance said.
So Quinten explained. About how he’d known his end was coming, that his purpose in life had shifted the moment Lance had been born. Lance was a force unlike any other, a power stronger than any seen before. The darkness recognized it at once, felt his emergence the same way Quinten had, and they wanted him. Would stop at nothing to get to him.
“So we had to protect you,” Quinten said. “Me and anybody else out there, I guess. Anyone else like us. Because if they were still out there, the others, they would have felt it just the way I had. We knew you were special. You were the one who would have to save the world from the darkness.”
Lance took this like a blow to the gut, a sucker punch of guilt. His thoughts whirled, dancing between disbelief and denial and fear. A tango of emotions.
Salvation, he thought. Shaking his head at the memory.
“In the room,” Lance said, “you said, ‘Salvation.’ You were talking about me?”
Quinten nodded. “It’s what I used to call you. As good a name as any, right?”
Lance thought about this. “I think I prefer Lance.”
Quinten asked, “How did you do it, anyway? How were you even there?”
Lance shook his head. “Honestly, I have no idea. Just add it to my list of superpowers, I guess. One minute it was 2015, the next, I was walking around in the past.” He’d meant this as a joke, but Quinten just looked at him in astonishment. So Lance filled him in on what had happened, e
verything at the motel. Though he left out the part about Meriam trying to kill him. Lance suspected that Quinten, having passed on, might actually know more details than he was letting on, but was preferring to hear Lance’s side of things.
When Lance was finished, Quinten shook his head and said, “Unreal. You really are the one.”
Lance said nothing. A rush of wind came through, bending the treetops.
“And now…,” Quinten said, his voice sounding suddenly nervous, “it’s my turn to apologize to you.”
Lance, again, was confused. “What? Why?”
Quinten looked Lance in the eyes, his face serious and stern. “I failed you. The day I died, I tried to fight it. I tried my best, but in the end, right before you arrived, they were able to get in. He was just so strong. He pulled down all my defenses, and he didn’t get much, but … I guess in the end he got enough.”
“What are you talking about?” Lance said, his heart racing in his chest.
“They pulled out a name,” Quinten said. “I didn’t know what it meant, and I don’t think they did either at the time, but eventually…”
“What name? I don’t understand?”
“Pamela,” Quinten said. “They got the name Pamela from my mind. Your mother.”
Lance was stunned.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Quinten said. “My best wasn’t enough.”
Lance was quiet for a long time, a flood of memories of his mother playing in his head. Including the night she’d died, when the Reverend and the Surfer had ended her life.
She’d saved him. She’d made the choice. A choice Lance might not ever fully understand, though Quinten’s testimonial was shedding more light on that understanding.
Finally, Lance said, “It’s not your fault. They would have found me eventually. And, hey, they’re so dumb it took twenty-three years, even with the clue.” Lance smiled.
Quinten looked back at Lance, first with apprehension, as if waiting for more, and then, when nothing came, with gratitude.
“Thank you,” he said.
The sound of a car’s engine and tires on crushed gravel jolted Lance to attention. He turned and looked over his shoulder and saw the beat-up Oldsmobile round the side of the church and start down the cemetery’s path. It drove just past the entrance and then stopped, engine idling.
“You need to go,” Quinten said. “It’s time.”
“What?” Lance asked, suddenly desperate for more time with the boy.
“What happened at the motel, that sort of thing requires a lot of energy, you know what I mean? Like the stars sending up a signal flare. It’ll leave a trace, too. Like a burnt-out campfire. The darkness will sense it, and they’ll come looking. They’ll be on your trail. Like they already have been.”
Lance had told Quinten about the showdown on Sugar Beach’s shore, about how the Reverend and the Surfer had met their end. And even though Lance had suspected as much, Quinten’s warning helped to reassure these suspicions. The war was not over. If not the Reverend and the Surfer, it would be somebody else, still hunting him.
Lance looked over his shoulder again, back toward the Oldsmobile that looked like a rusted hunk of garbage in the otherwise pristine grounds. “Who is it?” Lance asked.
“Somebody who you can trust. They’ll get you out of town. Wherever you want to go.”
Quinten had stood again, so Lance did the same, pushing off the ground and reaching for his backpack. Right then, his phone vibrated in his pocket, shooting a buzz of adrenaline though him. He reached a hand in to grab it, felt a folded piece of paper and then remembered. “Oh!” he said. “I have something for you. A letter.”
He moved to pull it out, but Quinten stopped him by saying, “I know what it says. She already told me. You keep it. Read it sometime. It might help.”
Lance opened his mouth to speak and then stopped. What could he say?
“Be well, friend,” Quinten said. “I’m glad to have met you. Now go be what the world needs you to be. Go kick some ass.” He smiled that sly grin of his again, and then he faded away.
Lance stared at Quinten’s headstone for another full minute, having to will himself to look away, to turn around and leave this place. Though the time had been short, Lance would be forever grateful for it. It had, in fact, reinvigorated him, sparked to life an enthusiasm and energy that had begun to grow dormant after his months of tragedy and travel.
Go be what the world needs you to be.
Lance reached out and rested his hand atop the boy’s headstone. “Thank you,” he whispered. Then he turned and followed the path to the waiting Oldsmobile.
As he approached the car, the driver’s side window was cranked down, revealing for the first time the driver. Lance stepped around the front of the car and stood by the opened window.
He was hit with a slap of recognition, though he couldn’t quite place the woman’s face. Pretty, but tired. Kind, but wary. Maybe late thirties. Through the window opening, she was appraising Lance the same way he was appraising her. All the while, he couldn’t shake the fact that he knew her somehow.
And then, like flipping over a playing card, the reveal was instant. The last time he’d seen this face, it had been much, much younger. But it was the same face, he was certain.
“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Alexa.”
It was the young girl from room five.
31
“Sorry if I scared you,” Alexa said after Lance had climbed into the passenger seat. Inside, the car smelled like sweat and grease. A vanilla-scented air freshener was fastened to one of the air vents, working hard but failing to fight off the odor. Lance’s feet crushed down a pile of fast-food bags on the floorboard. He set his backpack in his lap, turned and looked at the woman.
“Before, on the road,” she said. “And again, at the diner. You probably thought I was crazy. Hell,” she laughed, “maybe I am.”
Lance said nothing. Alexa did a three-point-turn in the cemetery, the Oldsmobile’s suspension sounding like rusted hinges, and then she drove back to the street. “I saw him in a dream,” Alexa said. “You know, him, from the motel. I think you know him too, right? You must, if you’re here. Quinten.”
Lance nodded silently, waiting.
“It was the first time I’ve seen him since he helped me. After all these years. It’s hard to believe, really, that I’d never dreamed of him. That some part of my subconscious hadn’t dragged him up from my memory by now, considering how much of an impact he’d had on my life. He set me free, you see? When I was a little girl, he saved me. He…”
She stopped. Looked at Lance with a sudden fascination, as if the joke had been on her the whole time. “Do I need to tell you all this?”
Quinten’s words again: Somebody you can trust.
“Not really,” Lance said. “I think I understand.” Then, “You’ve been alone ever since? Ever since that day at the motel?”
Alexa was quiet then, as if her past had suddenly rushed up behind her like a stranger in a dark alley. Then she said, “Yes. But that’s okay. I’m a survivor. Maybe I got that from my dad, which I hate to admit, but hey, it is what it is. I’ve been all over, you see? I’ve been to every state, seen every national park. I’ve lived my life free and clear. Hell, I’ve been thirteen different people since I was twelve years old, at least on paper. And, yeah, it’s had its ups and downs, but I wouldn’t change it. I think he saw that. Quinten, I mean. That day when it all happened…” She’d been talking fast, rapid-fire, but paused here, looked over at Lance like maybe she was about to second-guess her trust in him.
“It’s okay,” Lance said. “Go on.”
Alexa considered this for just another brief moment, then shrugged. “I think he saw my future—my other future. I think he knew that if they’d reported my dad’s death, if I’d gone back home, I would have just ended up in the system, you know? State care, foster homes, who knows what kind of hell that would have been? Passed around like a damn commodity, never knowing
if the next person who pretended to be my new dad was going to beat me or touch me or starve me. Hell, you’ve seen the stories on the news. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” She flicked on the left turn signal and headed out of town. “Anyway, I think Quinten saw all that for me, and he knew he had to save me. So he did.”
Lance remembered the look on Quinten’s face when he’d made contact with the girl in room five, the way it had suddenly flashed with sadness. The girl was probably right, about everything. But Lance didn’t need to tell her that. She knew well enough herself.
“And the dream?” Lance asked.
“Oh, right. I saw you and him talking, right back there in the cemetery.”
For a second, Lance’s mind went crazy with the thought that Alexa had actually been able to see Quinten in the cemetery with him, but then he understood. “We were together in the dream?” he asked.
She nodded, brushed a few strands of graying hair from her face. “You two were talking, over by his grave—I knew it was his grave for some reason, even though I’ve never been back here since that morning—and I couldn’t hear anything you were saying. But then he was next to me, too. Quinten, I mean. He was still over by the tombstone, talking with you, but then he was next to me at the same time. And he told me then, he told me to come here and to trust you and take you wherever you wanted to go.”
Lance looked at her, studied her face while she drove, the sun coming through the windshield lighting her features in a golden warmth. “So you just did it?” Lance asked.
Alexa shrugged. “It was just a feeling, you know? Like you know something to be absolutely true? Instinct, I guess you could call it. It was the same feeling I had that day at the motel. When he first walked into the room, I knew I could trust him. I still can’t explain it. But, hey, it is what it is. You know?”
The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4 Page 40