by Sara Preucil
Briana took another deep breath, reigning in the energy, suppressing it. The ground underneath her gave one last, small sigh. The pebbles surrounding her ceased their rattling and lay still.
Briana crumpled, and began to sob.
Chapter 44
With a gasp, Briana sat up. As with most nights after Eagan left, she had dreamt of their last moments together. Trying to remain quiet for Liam’s sake, she pulled her knees up to her chest, intending to stifle her rapid breathing. Her hands reached around her legs, and then paused. Her fingers brushed against a different fabric than her usual nightgown. She patted at the cloth on her legs, and quickly discovered that she was wearing some sort of pants.
She made to swing her legs over the left side of her bed, but they collided painfully—and noisily—into something solid. Quickly, she pulled them back, rubbing her feet, which had taken the brunt of the hit. She could hear one of her parent’s footsteps approaching, but they sounded strange, muted somehow. The sound of a door opening came from the wrong side of the room, and then a bright unnatural light flooded the space.
Briana blinked, taking in the suddenly lit room. The walls and ceiling were a crème color, the floor was just as light but was covered wall to wall in something she vaguely remembered was called carpet.
This was not her room. And that was not one of her family members who stood at the door.
The boy—or more accurately, man—was standing in the doorway, dressed only in plaid cotton pants. Briana tore her eyes away from him, feeling her face burning.
“Are you okay?” He spoke. “I heard a loud bang.”
Why wasn’t he surprised to find her there?
“Where am I?” She demanded, looking at the young man again. The voice that asked the question wasn’t hers. Her hands flew to her throat. “What’s going on?”
His dark brows furrowed; he appeared perplexed by her question. “Tara, what—?”
“Who is Tara? You haven’t answered my questions.” Out of the corner of her eye, Briana caught a glimpse of something dark. She reached for it.
“I don’t…” She ran her fingers through strands of golden-brown hair. “What?” Taking a closer look at her hands, she realized that her skin was no longer ivory, but held a distinct olive hue. Her breaths starting coming faster. Feeling the panic rising in her chest, she glanced back to the stranger, her eyes begging him for answers.
For some reason, a look of understanding dawned across his face. He approached her quickly, knelt down by her bed, and took her hands in his. She tried to yank free, but he held on tighter.
“Breathe, just breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
Briana tried to obey, tried to relax, but suddenly, images came rushing to the forefront of her mind, battling one another for her attention. She flinched away from the rapid onslaught, trying to block them out.
“Don’t fight it, let the memories in. Try to remember.”
“There are too many,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “I—can’t—”
The images were coming too quickly, and her brain fought fruitlessly to make sense of them.
She was sitting in a classroom, staring down at words on a textbook.
The scene changed and her small hands were unskillfully drawing a symbol of two overlapping triangles while a woman with green eyes talked to her about balance.
The symbol swirled and evaporated into a mist, and the next thing she knew, she was in a hand-me-down wedding dress, walking down an aisle as a woman with gray-streaked strawberry-blonde hair and a young man with dark hair smiled at her from the front pew.
And then she found herself kneeling over a man as he bled to death in the mud.
“Make it stop,” she pleaded.
“It will. Just breathe.” The stranger’s voice sounded far away as image after fractured image surfaced.
Her withered hand reached out to pat the head of a small, red-headed child.
She was peering out from beneath a black hood, watching a girl writhing in pain on the floor, her mouth open, but no sound came out.
Her face felt damp. She could hear the young man talking, but couldn’t make out the words. She squeezed her eyes tight against the onslaught. Finally, after an immeasurable amount of time had passed, the images slowed and then stopped.
She blinked her eyes open. Somehow, during that mental attack, she had laid back down on the bed and had curled herself up in a fetal position. She unraveled, her stiff muscles protesting, and sat up.
She looked at the young man. Slowly, her brain pieced together a face and a name.
“Aidan,” she breathed out. His shadowed face, which so easily could be described as brooding, lit up with her recognition.
“Can you tell me your name?” He asked.
What a stupid question, she thought, of course I know my name.
She wiped at her damp face, shooting him an annoyed look and said, “Yeah, it’s Tri—.” She snapped her jaw closed. That was weird. She had thought Briana, but her mouth had tried to say, what? Something that started with a T. Teresa? Tamara? No…
Tara.
Her world split. The fragmented images sorted themselves into two categories… no… timelines… no… lifetimes. Two lifetimes, one completed, one just getting started.
“Oh.” Tara breathed. “Oh.” She buried her face in her hands. “Hooolllly shit.”
Aidan’s hand rested gently on her shoulder.
“Tara, are you okay?”
She just nodded.
“What do you remember?”
“Everything,” she whispered. “I got married, I had a family, I grew old.” She raised her head and held out her hands in front of her. “I remember what they looked like, how they felt to be wrinkled and fragile. This is too weird.”
“I know,” Aidan reassured her. “Weird would be an understatement.”
“I—I lived in Ireland; I had a brother.” Liam. Her heart twisted at the thought of him. He wasn’t like her, their mother hadn’t passed the gift on to him. “He’s gone,” Tara whispered. Her whole family was gone. She had had a husband, and children, and grandchildren. She could make out their faces, but they were somewhat distorted. Like she was seeing them through a semitransparent sheet of glass.
She supposed that her grandchildren would be alive, and building their own families now. But they were in another country, and they wouldn’t know her like this. Tara’s eyes filled with tears.
“They’re all gone.”
Aidan lightly squeezed her shoulder.
Briana’s life continued to unfold in Tara’s memory. “It’s so odd,” she said after a few minutes, kneading her forehead with the heel of her palm, “to have gone by more than one name. What do I even go by now, Tara or Briana?”
Aidan pulled his hand away from her shoulder. “Where exactly in Ireland did you live?”
“Umm…” Tara closed her eyes, trying to sort through the deluge of information. “Kerry. Why?” She looked up at Aidan and was shocked by his expression. He was staring at her, his brows furrowed, his dark eyes wide and searching.
“Is everything okay?” Keegan walked into the room, wearing only an overly large t-shirt, her curly mane escaping its bun.
Tara tore her eyes from Aidan, and looked down at her hands. Simultaneously, Aidan cleared his throat and stood up.
“Tara has finally awakened,” he explained. “I was just coaching her through it.”
Keegan wrapped her arms around Aidan’s waist. “That was nice of you, babe. Ready to come back to bed?”
Aidan turned back to Tara, but wouldn’t meet her eyes when he spoke. “Will you be all right?”
The memories were still coming in a chaotic flurry, and she felt a fresh wave of emotion every time a new one surfaced. But now that she understood what was happening, however bizarre, she felt that she wanted to sort it out in private.
“Yeah, I think I just need to rest for a bit. Thank you, though, for checking on me.” she added, not wanting to see
m ungrateful.
“Okay.” Aidan switched the light off and allowed Keegan to lead him out of the room, closing the door behind them.
Tara laid back down against the pillow, staring up into the dark. There had been one particular fleeting image that she now grasped for. Someone in an olive green uniform. Slowly a face surfaced.
“Eagan,” she whispered, feeling a tear slip out of the corner of her eye. She reached for Briana’s memories of him, but they were slow to come. It was as though Briana had locked them away into some deep recess of her mind. Tara tried for a while longer, but soon exhaustion overtook her, and she slipped out of consciousness.
Chapter 45
In a daze, Aidan followed Keegan back down the hallway toward the living room and the inhumanly uncomfortable hide-a-bed.
Briana. When that name slipped out from between Tara’s lips, Aidan’s heart had stopped. And when he asked her the next question, he knew beyond reason what her answer would be. Kerry.
He took a shaky breath as he laid down on the lumpy couch bed. Keegan snuggled up against him, and he put an arm around her, feeling an unexpected rush of guilt.
Could it just merely be coincidence that Tara’s previous life happened to be in that very part of Ireland that he knew all too well? Aidan frowned, staring up at the dark ceiling. But no, he knew it the same way he knew what county she had lived in. This was the same girl.
Never once had he imagined the possibility that the sweet, strong girl he had met all those years ago was also an elemental. He racked his brain, searching through their few shared moments, looking for a clue that he might have missed. But there were none. Briana had hid away her gift just as he had.
Her face came to the forefront of his thoughts: her pale skin dotted with freckles, her curly strawberry-blonde hair, her forest-green eyes. Those eyes that had challenged him as he had reached for his pistol when her sudden appearance in that small shed had startled him awake. He recalled, for the millionth time, those painful seconds in which his eyes last held hers. Sadness, fear, the loss of something inexplicable. They had shared these brief unspoken feelings in those last seconds before he had fled, never to see her again.
Aidan had lived an entire life between then and now. Once or twice in his previous life, he had imagined travelling back to Ireland, but he always talked himself out of it. She would have been older then, probably with a family of her own. And besides, he was then wearing a face she wouldn't have known. He would only have scared her. And so, he had resolved to find acceptance in the reality that he would have to let her go.
So, he had lived out that quiet life to the ripe age of seventy-six near Edmonton in the Canadian province of Alberta, missing a girl he had known for a matter of days in a previous life.
And now, two deaths, two births, two lives later, that girl was a mere fifteen feet away, separated from him by a measly barrier of drywall and paint.
Now that he knew who Tara was, his actions and unaccountable feelings all started to make sense. For absolutely no reason, he had been compelled to move out of Seattle, to go north. It was the same gut feeling that had led him to travel with that particular company to Kerry, Ireland. And when he was searching for Aria in Bellingham, he had watched a number of employees leave the Order’s office building, but something kept him from following any of them until she had appeared. Then after she had helped him escape, he had acted against his better judgement and brought her with him. He had told himself that she might be useful, and that alone was worth risking the exposure of their safe house and the safety of the others. But in reality, he had wanted to keep her safe.
Over the past twenty-four hours, he had struggled with the meaning behind his actions and the inexplicable possessiveness he had felt for her. Whenever Dylan touched the wound on her thigh, it took everything Aidan had to not shove him away.
Keegan murmured something in her sleep and snuggled closer. Aidan caught a whiff of her apple-scented shampoo and felt another wave of guilt. How could he be thinking about another girl after everything he and Keegan had been through together?
✽✽✽
Four years ago, at the age of sixteen, Aidan had experienced his own awakening. After numerous consecutive nights filled with strange, impossibly detailed dreams, he did the only thing he could think of and took to the internet. Somehow, amidst the quagmire of trolls and pervs that make up about ninety-five percent of internet users, he had found Keegan. Or, more accurately, she had found him. It didn’t take long for them to suss each other out and for her to convince him to meet. So, the next day he packed up what little he owned, left the foster center he had been staying at in Olympia, and caught a bus to Seattle.
It turned out that Keegan’s parents, both elementals, were a part of an organization that was working against the Order. Their main priorities were to connect with and locate elementals before the Order got to them first.
Aidan was given a spare bedroom in the Rhodes’ home, another family that was part of this resistance. Their thirteen-year-old daughter quickly bonded with Aidan, and in no time, Aria became the little sister that he never had. A short eighteen months later, Aria’s parents died in a car accident.
Keegan’s family generously took in both Aria and Aidan. Keegan and Aidan worked as partners to find other lost elementals, and their relationship quickly moved beyond friendship.
A few months ago, deciding he needed a place of his own, Aidan rented this apartment. Aria had begged to come with him; he had relented on the condition that she continued going to school. So while Aidan worked days at a nearby café, Aria was finishing her senior year online, sometimes coming into the café to bug Aidan and bum off the Wi-Fi.
About a month ago, when Dylan came to Washington, the resistance in Seattle had hooked him up with Aidan, and he had come to stay with him and Aria. Aria had taken a liking to the thin, tattooed boy instantly, so it was no wonder she had been the most worried about his disappearance. Two weeks after Dylan’s arrival, he didn’t return to the apartment one night, but it hadn’t elicited any sort of concern on Aidan’s part.
A couple of days later, Dylan still hadn’t shown up, and Aria was seriously starting to worry. At this point, Aidan knew he probably should have paid more attention to Aria’s concerns, but he had been planning on visiting Keegan on his days off. Selfishly, he went down to Seattle anyway, but promised Aria that he would ask around if anyone had seen or heard from Dylan. No one had. And then when he returned to Mount Vernon a few days later, Aria was gone.
✽✽✽
Self-directed anger swelled inside Aidan’s chest. Aria was his responsibility, and he had failed her. He had been stupid, allowing himself to get caught by the Order, and then getting sidetracked by Tara.
Keegan stirred again next to Aidan, no doubt sensing his restlessness.
What was he supposed to say to her? That he was experiencing residual feelings for someone he met briefly almost one hundred years ago? It was unreasonable for him to have felt so attached to someone he barely knew. And what about Tara? How freaked out would she be to know that he was so affected after such a brief encounter? He had heard what she said about her past life; she had gotten married. Clearly she—Briana—had moved on. If there was anything for her to have moved on from.
In that moment, Aidan was resolved. Aria needed him; she was all that mattered. He needed to remove Tara from his mind. She had her own stuff to sort out, and until she did so, she was a potential threat to those that he cared about.
Reaching over to the arm of the couch, Aidan picked up his phone. For a split second he felt that same hopefulness that he felt every time he checked the device. But there were no new calls, no new texts. He felt his hope break, felt it sink back into a dark pit in his stomach as he wondered for the millionth time where Aria was.
Aidan fell asleep holding his phone tightly in his hand like it was a lifeline to his little sister.
Chapter 46
A couple of months later, Briana stood at th
e small table in their cozy kitchen, setting the places for dinner. From the hutch, she had pulled out three sets of dishes; only recently she had broken herself of the habit of setting four places. The space in front of her father’s chair remained empty. His chair sat unmoved since he last used it, gathering dust.
Briana forced herself to pull her gaze from the untouched chair, continuing her task.
All of a sudden, the force—the strange force that she felt since meeting Eagan, like the potential energy of an unwound spring aching to recoil—snapped.
She felt it break, leaving her untethered.
The sudden impression of utter aloneness, the physical pain of it, made her gasp aloud. The last plate wobbled in her shaking fingers and fell to the floor. It burst apart, sending ceramic shards everywhere.
And somehow, Briana knew, with absolute and terrible certainty, that Eagan was dead.
Chapter 47
Tara woke suddenly. Her face was damp with tears, and she had to stifle a sob as she sat up in the bed.
The heartache that Briana had felt, that Tara now felt, came crashing into her with jarring force. She hugged her knees to her chest, as waves of another lifetime’s grief washed over her. She rode them as she rocked back and forth, breathing through the pain.
Slowly, the room began to lighten with the rising sun. When she felt like she could breathe again, she shakily got out of bed. She was still wearing the pajama bottoms that Aidan had given her, and she pulled on her own gray Sehome sweatshirt over the white tank top she had been sleeping in.
A gaping ache was growing inside of her, and all she knew was that she needed to see Aidan. There was no thought beyond that, no formulated words. Tara just needed to see him.
Quietly, she opened the door and crept down the hall in her bare feet. Hushed voices at the end of it told her that the others were already awake.