by A. L. Knorr
As I lay there feeling death's shadow cool my skin, my crippled organs pulsing weakly, I realized that I had no predictions for Akiko's future. Had I ever really known my friend? Hadn't I failed her, somehow, by not knowing her? And what about Liz? I had been so unforgiving, so rigid. I, who had prided myself on my compassion, had been so without compassion for my own mother. Jasher's face swam in my vision behind the clouds drifting across the sky. His eyes when he looked at Brendan were filled only with love, even after all the abuse he’d endured. If he could find it within himself to have compassion for his father, couldn’t I do the same for my mother? Shame burned within me.
Tears leaked from the outside corners of my eyes and tracked into my hairline. The tickles crawling over the fine hairs and pores drew me back to the present. My lungs finally relaxed enough for the vacuum to release and I sucked in a ragged breath and choked. My spine. My right kidney. Nothing was normal beneath the surface of my skin.
Move. Georjayna. Get up. They’re dying.
I coughed and panted. The pain was excruciating. But oxygen cleared my thinking like a heavy wind pushes clouds away from the moon. My head lolled and I saw the underside of the truck and the grasses on the other side. Plant life. If I could draw their energy to me... I threw an arm toward the green-filled ditch. My body rolled and my legs flopped out. I drew my legs up, bent my knees, and lay my naked soles flat against the earth.
Thick, ropy roots shot from my soles and down deep into the ground, ploughing through the soil, penetrating the topsoil and driving into the pedolith. The world exploded. Colored light lit every plant, every tree around me. My pain dissolved and broken-ness mended as knowledge poured through the soles of my feet, filled my entire being, and opened areas in my brain I never even knew were lying dormant.
A new sensation filled me, so powerful that I was sure that my hair was standing on end. My body unfolded toward the sky like a sapling, drawing nourishment from the organic matter beneath me. I grew and didn't stop. The truck and the dead land and the house shrank below as I became like a thick oak, huge and strong, with roots penetrating layers of subsoil and clay and humus, every strata offering unique rich and nourishing properties. I kept growing in both directions. My roots felt as though they had no end and the sun filtered life in through my skin.
Looking down, the wraith was a black smudge of smoke, and the ashen earth around it a sandy hole of putrefaction. Two men foundered in the gray ash, feeble creatures in peril below the giant sequoia that I had become. Odd, I thought. Neither the wraith who had been Mailís, nor the father or the son looked up at this massive redwood looking down at them.
Energy and nutrient-rich water pulsed through my roots and up through my limbs, into my organs and brain. Everything around me for miles was alive with life-force light. Every plant, tree, and shrub. The world had become a rainbow of shifting, pulsing light.
Beneath my roots and running straight to the left and the right of me was a bright white line of light. I had a sensation like swinging a big heavy head full of branches to look first left, then right. The white light shot straight as an arrow off to either horizon and was so bright that the light of it blotted out anything living in its path or erected on top of it. I squinted at its cool blue and yet bright-white light.
Way back in my consciousness, I heard a voice, so faint, like a bell sounding far away. It was Faith's voice.
...matrix of energy lines criss-crossing the earth...
My roots were deeply embedded in the white line of light. I pulled my attention back to the scene below me, feeling an urgency in the small people down there, people that I knew.
The hole of rot below had become nothing more to me than a tiny blight on the skin of an apple. The sort of dent you wouldn't even bother to cut out with a knife.
"Jasher," I said. A sound like thunder rumbled and rolled across the land. Was that me? I was too big, too powerful. Just the desire to be closer made my vision sharper and I narrowed in on the two dying men. Eight leafy vines shot from the soil and stretched toward Jasher and Brendan. Three of them penetrated the wraith and a distant scream filtered into my hearing. The green vines wrapped around the men, cradling them and lifting them from the mold-riddled sand. My vines. Like umbilical cords, they pulsed with the juices of the earth, feeding the men with healing nutrients from plants I sensed and selected from miles around. The men’s bodies fattened and fleshed out, their skin grew plump and rosy. I couldn't register expressions on their faces, they were blurred and seemed to communicate in a language I might have understood once. My vines settled them into the grass and the two men landed on spring-loaded, energy-filled legs.
I turned my attention to the wraith and the rest of the world blurred away. What had seemed so huge and terrible now seemed small, petty, infirm, and frail.
Chapter 33
I stretched out my right hand, fingers spread. My huge sequoia limb swept forward, branches opening toward the wraith. My left arm - another massive branch, reached out to the other side. Time had slowed down and my movements had taken on the heavy, power-filled motions of a giant.
A cracking noise snapped across the landscape and echoed off the hills in the distance, and a slow groan vibrated like some giant rusty nail was being pried from a wooden board. I could feel the ground quaking through my roots. Two huge cracks formed in the earth as I raised two cliffs up out of the neighboring land on either side of the property. The dark house full of sucking death collapsed and slid toward the crevice. Black bats trailing smoke exploded from the windows and the cracks in the walls, swirling and flapping like they were drunk and panicked.
The wraith screamed, its dry place sifting and dissolving beneath the specter. The wraith shrank into itself, and the horror of its missing face melted into human-like features. Limbs formed from the dust and the shape of a woman was wrung from the shadow. I could almost make out the dress she'd been wearing when she'd trapped herself in this land for good.
"Mailís," I said, and her face cleared as she recognized her name. My voice rolled like an echo after a crack of thunder. Black bruises ringed her face and eyes, and what had once been a beautiful set of teeth were black pegs of rot. Her black eyes lightened, almost but not quite reaching a human shade of brown. "He loved you. Cormac loved who you used to be."
My mountains of earth towered on either side of her, hanging at impossible angles in the air and making her look so small. At my words the wraith paused, understanding the meaning. Regret poured off the being in waves, like heat wavering over desert sand. She threw her head back and cried an agonized scream to the sky. She turned black-ringed grief-filled eyes upward and opened ghostly arms and hands out to yield to her fate. As the two walls of earth and soil crashed over the house, there was an exhale of surrender soon drowned out by the heaving and groaning of the land. The earth churned and swallowed the wraith, the bats, the house, and the gritty, putrid ash. I rolled and tossed and mixed the soil, keeping my eyes locked there with intention.
"Georjie." A voice said a name from far away and off to the side. I heard it, and registered the name as mine.
The towering sequoia withdrew into me, my heavy limbs becoming light and fleshy once again. Only then did I become conscious that the roots shooting from the soles of my feet and reaching into the earth were not actual physical appendages, as I unconsciously lifted a foot from the earth.
The energy feeding into me from the strata below instantly halved in intensity and I wobbled, off balance. I set my foot down and stabilized myself. I stood there breathing, for I don't know how long. A hand unconsciously went to my head as I processed everything that had just happened. I looked down at myself... my limbs, my hands. I spread my fingers before me, open, long and beautiful. This was still my body. I was not a tree.
I looked down at my bare feet, dirty to the knees with soil. I smiled, and a hysterical laugh burbled up. I wriggled my toes and looked around myself for my flip flops. Nowhere to be found.
"Georjie."
I turned and looked up, my eyes falling on Jasher for the first time since I returned to myself. Was it just my imagination or had he gotten bigger?
"You look...healthy," I said. My voice cracked. "Have you seen my shoes?"
He mutely held out my flip flops and I walked over and took them. I dropped them onto the earth and slipped my dirty feet into them.
"I need a wash," I said, looking down at myself. But what would have driven me insane before, was now pleasurable.
I noticed my phone in his other hand, his tanned fingers curling around the pink case.
"Oh, thank you." I reached for it, and he lifted his hand and let me take it. Movement in my periphery drew my attention to the man standing just behind the truck box. "Hello," I said. "We've met before. You remember?"
"I do," he said in a rich, resonant bass voice. He looked younger, more vital than the man I had met on the street at the beginning of the summer. His eyes were no longer shuttered and clouded, but a clear and vibrant brown. He seemed frozen to the spot for a moment, but then shook himself and moved around the truck, reaching out a hand. "I'm sorry, I..." We grasped hands and shook, awkwardly, like we were at a house party instead of two people who had just survived a traumatic supernatural experience. “Nice to see you again,” he said.
As the minutes passed, the revelation of what I had become and how much power had been at my disposal began to register. My body trembled. A fear-filled awe overcame me and spots flashed in front of my eyes. I reached out a blind hand. "Jasher?" My voice quavered and vertigo made the world spin.
"I'm here." A solid arm went around me just as my legs buckled, and he took the bulk of my weight. "I'm here, Georjie. I've got you."
"I can't see," I whispered, my fingers clutching at his shirt. His collarbones winged out under my hands and warm shoulder muscles jumped under my palms.
"Take a breath," he said, so close to my ear that I could feel the breath from his own lips.
I inhaled deeply through my nose, once, twice, and three times. The black cleared away from my vision and Jasher's face came into focus.
"You're alright," Jasher said, brushing my hair away from my face. His arm tightened around me as my legs found strength again and I stood. His brown eyes were soft, filled with compassion. But from the concern drawing his eyebrows together, I could tell that he didn’t really believe I was alright.
"Take me home," I said.
Chapter 34
I'm not quite sure how, but I know it was all thanks to Jasher that I ended up properly in bed and properly asleep, until the silent faraway sound of a creak woke me. I was so dazed when I went to bed that night that I wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't.
When I woke, the room was still mostly dark. My mind was clear and my thoughts were no longer jumbled. My thoughts turned to Mailís, and I began to piece together the path that had led her to where she'd ended up. She'd never learned the full truth about why Cormac had left her, why he had broken her heart so brutally. She'd been convinced it was for another woman. I remembered the moment the horseman came flying into the residual to whisk Cormac away. I couldn't hear the words that were said, but it was clear that Cormac and Mailís had been interrupted. Had he intended to tell her the full reason and hadn't had the chance? I recalled the moment her body had bounced off some invisible barrier, after she’d killed Cormac. Had the fae locked her there? Had they seen how destructive she’d been with the powers they had given her and, unable to take them away, they simply put her in jail? Or had she done it to herself by sucking all the life out of the earth and making a void she couldn’t leave? She’d still been there, still alive in a way. Did that mean I was immortal now too? How many others were there like me, and could I find someone with the answers to all of my questions?
There was another creak and I lifted my head to listen.
"Georjie?" It was Jasher, whispering at my door.
"Hey," I whispered back.
He padded into my room silently and approached my bed.
"Did I wake you?"
"No. Are you okay?" I went to sit up.
"Yes, yeah. It's alright. Stay down." The bed depressed as he crawled over to the space beside me and lay on his side facing me. I relaxed against my pillow, pushing the fabric under my cheek so I could see him.
He took my hand and squeezed it. His fingers were freezing.
"Why are you so cold?" I put my palm against his cheek, it was also frigid to the touch.
"I was outside." He caught my hand against his cheek and pressed it there.
"How come?"
"I had a lot of thinking to do," he said.
"Yeah." I could relate.
We lay facing each other in silence, but he was not restful. I could feel the energy pulsing through him. He kept squeezing and caressing my fingers, but in an agitated fashion.
"Can I tell you something?" he finally said, like he couldn't hold it in anymore.
"I wish you would," I answered.
"I can't see ghosts anymore."
A few heartbeats passed.
"What?" This time I did sit up.
He gave up the pretense of relaxing and sat up, too. "I'm not joking."
"How do you know? What if there aren't any ghosts around? I mean, what makes you think that you can't see them anymore?"
"There are always ghosts around, Georjie." He started talking with his hands. "I was downtown. At first I didn't notice, I was too...freaked out by what had happened. As we drove through Ana, my focus was just getting you home. But after you went to sleep, I got to thinking. There is this one ghost that always hangs out on the corner of Fleet, in front of O'Shea's Pub. He's never not there. For my whole life I've been avoiding that corner because of that ghost. I avoid all kinds of places in town because of the dead that haunt them. But, as we were driving home, I didn't see him there." His accent was getting thicker and he was talking faster. "It really began to weigh on me, so I took my bike out and went to Ana tonight, to check that corner, and all the other usual places, including Eithne."
"No ghosts?"
He shook his head, almost violently. "Not one."
Even in his whisper I could hear the excitement in his voice, feel it vibrating through him.
"It's not some kind of fluke?" I said, hope rustling in my chest like a bird about to take flight.
He took my hand again. "I think that whatever you did to me, when you saved me and my da's lives, you healed whatever had scarred me since my birth. I feel like a totally different person."
I was thunderstruck. I hoped it wasn't some sort of strange coincidence. That all the ghosts hadn't just decided to take a holiday last night. "That's incredible, Jasher."
"It's more than incredible, Georjie. It's life-changing. Do you know what this means?"
He was no longer bothering to whisper. Yes, I knew what it meant. It meant everything. To him, it literally meant the world. I could hear it in his voice.
"It means you can go to University, visit Rome, and Angkor Wat."
He nodded. He held my hand and stroked my cheekbone with his other. "It means I can live, Georjie. It means you've given me back my life.”
"It wasn't me, Jasher. It was the fae that did it."
He shook his head. "Maybe they gave you the power you have, made you what you are."
I'm a Wise, now. Whatever that means.
"But this gift came through you." His palm caressed my cheek. "Thank you."
I didn't know what to say. I couldn't take credit for whatever I had been able to do. I hadn't even been conscious that it was happening, I just didn't want Jasher to be desiccated to death the way Cormac had been. I wished I could go back in time and save Cormac, too.
"I need to kiss you," he said, suddenly. "Can I kiss you?"
Part of me had always thought men were being wimps when they asked that, but I detected a hidden meaning in his question. "You already have kissed me, Jasher. Twice. Have you forgotten?"
"No I haven't," he sai
d. "Not at all." And with that, he closed the space between us and took my lips with his. A strong arm wrapped around my lower back and pulled me to him, right onto his lap.
He splayed his hand on my upper chest, over my heart, the fingertips pressing into my skin like he wanted to feel what it was made of. His hand slid up my chest, over my collarbones, along my neck and curved around the base of my skull. He wound his fingers through my hair and turned my head, deepening the kiss. His stubble scraped against my face.
Now I knew what a lit match felt like. The kiss ignited and consumed us. I wrapped my arms around his neck and upper back, the muscles jumping under my hands. It was the pure vulnerability and generosity in the kiss that melted my bones into a warm liquid. Never had I been kissed in such a soul-baring, defenseless manner. As his mouth moved against mine, I was beginning to wonder if I had ever been kissed at all. Some kisses take, some kisses give. This kiss entrusted and endowed. I felt like a rich woman.
I knew Jasher couldn't be mine, at least not then. He had been given an escape. All of the closed doors surrounding him had just swung wide, and the fresh, clean air of opportunity had wafted in. This man, this talented, compassionate soul, would make an impact on the world.
Jasher and I had been through a lot. But even through all the wonderful moments we'd shared, there had always been a wall around him. His self-preservation box. During this kiss, and only then, did he give himself all to me. That's what I mean about generosity. He laid bare his soul and I basked in its beauty. Everyone deserves to be kissed the way Jasher kissed me that night. If you haven't been yet, you will, and then you'll know what I mean.
We broke the kiss and became still, our faces so close together my skin tingled. Our breathing was the only sound for a long time.