by Chloe Garner
Jason threw his bag over his shoulder. She was amazed at how he could act like nothing had happened. Maybe to him, nothing had happened.
“Load ‘em up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sam was carrying her backpack and her duffel bag out to the car. Samantha remembered that she fallen asleep in her clothes. Disoriented to the point of just going along, she scooted to the end of the bed and put her shoes on.
<><><>
Abby was at Carter’s apartment when they go there. She stood from a cup of tea at the table and put on a light jacket. It wasn’t hot out yet, but the jacket was more for style than warmth. Samantha had always liked it, the way it drifted along behind Abby.
“You boys are coming with me,” she said.
“Hi, guys. Good to see you,” Jason said. Sam was itching to talk to her and in no mood to argue. Samantha had expected it.
“I’ll see you later,” she said. Abby tugged Samantha’s sleeve on the way by.
“Watch him close,” Samantha said.
“Which one?” Abby asked.
“Yes.”
Abby smiled and tugged her shirt again.
“Come see me soon,” she said.
“Yeah.”
And then Samantha and Carter were alone.
“Abby tells me you leveled up,” he said. The solid black suit, the tie, the hair. Everything was strict and in place. Cold. The same as it always was. She didn’t know why she ever expected it to change.
“Yeah.”
“And Nuri told me she declared you a mage.”
“Yeah.”
He pursed his lips, spreading his arms behind him on the counter.
“Does this mean you’re willing to admit that maybe I’m not wasting my time?” she asked.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. He nodded. He didn’t talk about Abby, either; the fight to get her back.
“Fury?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Figures.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve underestimated you,” he said. The words were stunning; mentally, she found herself sitting on the floor, but she didn’t let it show on her face. The corner of his mouth twitched. “You want to sit?”
“Yeah.”
She followed him over to the couch, where he sat with his back in the corner, leaning against the arm. She pulled her feet up in front of her to hug her knees.
“Any after-effects?”
She shook her head.
“Me, neither,” he said. It was a salute. A rare one. They sat and looked at each other, knowing.
Knowing stuff that no one else alive knew.
He had rained death on high-level demons like they were ash before he hit them. Samantha had stood in the doorway with a handgun and a shield, both hanging at her sides. Diana, mythic sword of the man named Carter, had been so dark she had radiated it. Carter had visually throbbed with the darkness, even in the dim light of the ancient subway maintenance room. The street term for it was glowing black. Samantha had read about it, a little before and a lot more after that, as unholy rage.
He had never spoken to her about it. She had never asked. Even if she hadn’t died in the minutes following his collapse, she would have known better. On the entire planet, there was maybe a fifty-fifty chance that someone who had Carter’s power would be alive at any point in the history of the world. To have two of them sitting on a single couch. Unprecedented. In all of time. The heat, the bubble of power in her chest, forming herself around it like clay in her hands. Knowing that power and then opening her hands and letting it go. Sam and Jason had thought it was just another party trick.
“Righteous fury,” she whispered. He nodded.
“Abby said the thunderclap shook the building,” he said. She had felt it, the roll of power she summoned from the other side. The demon couldn’t stand before it. A feeling her guts remembered with satisfaction and her shoulders with power. It made her hands shake to think too hard about it.
It was a secret. That feeling. A secret only the two of them knew.
She kept waiting for him to make a smug comment that recentered the focus on him, one that claimed a stake in the source of her success. She was ready to scratch his eyes out, to fight him. He just waited.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she said. The corner of his mouth twitched, humor or irony, she couldn’t tell.
“And yet.”
The muscles in his jaw moved and he looked down at his knees.
“I suppose you’ve had me re-ranked,” she said. He shook his head, picking at random debris on the cloth.
“I thought you’d want to be there for it.”
“No you didn’t.”
His mouth curled.
“No I didn’t. But I want you to, anyway.”
“You just want me to cross again,” she said. His Carter smile came back, the one that wasn’t charming at all, but would have been if he had ever meant it.
“Would bump you up the rankings a little further, wouldn’t it? Capstone it?” His eyes raised, running the line between playful and carnivorous. “When was the last time you were across?”
“You were there.”
“You send your boy across, but you won’t go yourself. Why is that?”
She leaned her head against the couch, feeling the dull grayness of her core again, poignantly.
“I got out,” she said. He laughed.
“Clearly.”
“I’m not one of us,” she said. “Not any more.”
“You never were,” he said, shifting. “And you always will be.”
She missed Justin. Justin had mocked Carter’s riddles and quasi-truths. Even without ever understanding them, Justin had intuitively grasped that the paradoxical truths were part of what she hated about what she did. She would go to dinner with him, and there would be none of the identity crisis. No unspoken power struggle. No complex system of contract and social favor. Just two people, laughing at how awful Justin was with chopsticks. Eating food. No universe of absolute truth peering in at them.
It had been a long time since she had missed him this desperately. Sam felt it, making himself present but staying silent. She wasn’t alone. She hugged her knees against her chest harder.
“You weren’t born for this,” Carter said, leaning toward her. “Neither was I. But this is where we are, anyway. You and I. Here on this couch. Light and dark. I don’t care if it means something or not. We use what we are, every day.”
“What do you want from me, Aspen?”
He looked at his hands, long eyelashes hiding his eyes.
“Do your job.” For a moment, she thought that was all he was going to say, but he looked back up at her. “Wherever that is. Whatever it is.”
“Are you conceding it might involve the twins?” she asked.
“You unfurled your wings at a demon who was going to kill them.” He laughed. “Even I can’t argue with that.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“I know. But I trained you better than that. You’re stronger than that.”
“I never asked for this.”
“No. You asked for the truth.”
She turned her face away.
“Did Abby tell you to talk to me?”
“She told me what happened yesterday,” he said. “And what happened in Alabama. If you think I don’t know you better than that, I’m disappointed.”
He stood and walked to the kitchen.
“You are the most powerful Shaman who has ever lived,” he said. “Shamen don’t do what you do. It doesn’t make you the greatest Shaman unless you use what you know as well as you use your power.”
“What does that mean?” Samantha asked. “What are you telling me to do?”
He opened a beer and took a long swallow, setting the bottle on the counter.
“Hell if I know.”
<><><>
Abby had stolen all of Carter’s
gun maintenance equipment and banished Jason to the spare bedroom to work in bliss. She had served Sam a cup of tea and sat on the couch watching him.
“So,” Sam said. “How are things?”
She laughed, her smile coming easily.
“You Rangers bounce back easier than anyone I’ve ever watched,” she said. She sipped her tea and settled back onto the couch. “And it isn’t even a show, is it? You’ve just been raised to take that pain as what life is.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. And he felt silly trying to drink out of the tiny teacup. He was distracted. She smiled again.
“Tell me about it,” she said. He raised his eyebrows. “What did you see?”
He set the tea cup on the table.
“It was kind of personal,” he said. Her eyes sparkled as she crossed her legs on the couch and tipped her head back.
“Okay. Tell me…” she took a breath and closed her eyes, “tell me about it.”
“I saw three different things,” he said. “All of the same event, but really different.”
“Okay,” she said. “When was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I assume if it was personal, you or people you knew were in it. When was it? How old were they?”
He closed his eyes, looking at Jason’s face as he cooed down at the tiny pink bundle in his arms.
“Now,” he said. “More or less.” Could he tell a year on Jason’s face? Could he see that much time in his own?
“I remember that one,” Abby said.
“What?”
“It was early. I had almost forgotten. What you saw… Did it worry you?”
He wouldn’t have put it that way, but…
“I guess.”
“Two bad choices? Or three?”
“Three.”
He felt like he should have taken it back the moment he said it, but all three of them had bothered him. He didn’t want any of them. She smiled, leaning forward over the table to take his hands.
“May I listen to your heart for a minute?” she asked. Somewhere, Samantha felt a stab of nostalgic grief of a quality that could have only been Justin. He nodded absently at Abby and closed his eyes, sending Samantha warmth. It was the same feeling he had when he thought about his mom. It wasn’t bad, it just hurt to be alone. He didn’t want her to be alone. Abby’s hands squeezed his and she let him go.
“Most of your visions will be you reading the other side. When you remodeled your brain, though, you had a different kind. The darkness read you. It showed you three futures… An important moment, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And… If you were to try to imagine what the future would look like in that moment… Do you have a different idea for how that might look?”
“I never thought about it,” he said.
“Do,” she told him. He didn’t want to. He knew what he was going to find.
If Samantha started a life like that with someone else… The bitterness and the exclusion he felt at just the thought of it mirrored the feeling he had had in the vision. Even if he had once asked Jason to try to start a romantic relationship with Samantha in the hopes of making an alternative for a second life for the three of them, he had always known it would tear him apart if it had worked.
If someone was going to run away with her, he wanted it to be him. Impossible or not, it was what he wanted. His mind’s eye looked at Jason again, face lit up looking at a little baby girl, and he knew that Jason was going to be a huge part of his life. He couldn’t see a way forward, didn’t want to see a way forward that had him and Jason doing different things, having different lives. And Samantha loved Jason. Uncomplicated, protective, willing Jason. Neither of them would ever do that to him, but… He realized he thought it was inevitable. They would end up together. Worse. He believed he had opened the box, asking them to try in the first place.
He looked at Abby and shook his head.
“No.”
“It scares you?”
“Yes.”
“You knew what was going on in everyone’s heads, in the vision?” she asked. “How they felt?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not about the future,” she said. “It’s about you. It’s about the fears that you have and the darkness on the other side preying on them. You have to take it as a warning from your own mind. Make it a positive, not something that you spend your life avoiding. The fact that you don’t see an alternative doesn’t mean there isn’t one. You’re just afraid of it. Or afraid it doesn’t exist.”
“What was your vision about?” he asked. “Can I ask?”
“I destroyed the world at the end of every one of them,” she said. She looked down and away, remembering. “It lasted for days.” She looked up and smiled at him again. “Sam sat with me the entire time and talked to me. I don’t remember anything she said, but I like to believe I could hear her, anyway.”
“Why did she leave?” Sam asked. “What did Carter finally do that made her leave you?”
She shook her head.
“Even I don’t know,” she said. She closed her eyes. “When she first came back, she was so happy. Joyous. She laughed and she smiled and she… She was so light.” She looked at him. “I like to imagine that that was what she was like as a child. I know it probably isn’t completely true, but she had that childlike happiness that you remember, even if you never felt it.” Her face was dreamy. “We laughed like girls. She jumped in puddles for the splash. And then… She started feeling life again. I know she’s terrified now that she’s going to do something wrong and never get back there. It’s made her so hard. Harder than she was before she died, even. But for a few months… I draw a lot of hope from who she was in those months. Even Carter couldn’t dim her shine. No. I don’t know what sent her away, but she’d been gone for a while.”
“She’s getting worse,” he said. She stood and took his cup.
“Some of that is the stuff that you know about, some of it’s just what she is. You want cookies?”
“You have cookies?”
“Never know when Sam is going to send a little boy here who might need a cookie,” she said.
“Yes you do,” Sam said. She grinned, putting a box of cookies on the table in front of him as she sat back down.
“Yes I do. She won’t let you protect her. I would recommend not trying.” Sam took a handful of cookies and sat back in his chair. She took the box and picked one, as if there was a right answer and a wrong answer, then sat back to nibble at it.
“Are there good cookies and bad cookies?”
“There are always better cookies and worse cookies. If you know, wouldn’t you pick the better ones?”
“They’re just cookies.”
“Sam always picks the best cookies,” Abby said.
“And she never enjoys them as much, either,” Sam said.
“We aren’t talking about cookies, are we?” Jason asked. Abby stood and offered him the box.
“Would you like one?”
“I want real food. Come on, Sam. Grab your girl. Let’s go indulge in the culinary melting pot that is New York.”
“And by that you mean, go get burgers,” Sam said.
“Obviously.”
“I can take you to Sam’s favorite,” Abby said.
“Oh, you’re welcome to come, but I meant her, not you,” Jason said.
“I know. But she’s fifteen minutes away by subway. We can be there in five.”
“She does pick the best cookies. You got her, Sam?”
Sam tugged on the bond, drawing her attention as politely as he could. She was alert immediately. Not in the middle of something. He emphasized hunger, realizing as he did it that he actually was hungry, and there was an affirmative response. She pushed him. She would find them. He looked at Jason.
“She’s on her way.”
“Can you tell her to leave Carter?”
Abby laughed.
“Can or not, he can’t keep Carter from coming, nor can she. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to change for dinner.”
Jason collapsed onto the couch.
“Is that what meal this is?” he asked. Sam shrugged. He wasn’t even sure what time it was. The last time they had eaten was…
Yesterday at lunchtime. With Caroline. He steeled himself against the stomach-churning grief, waiting for it to pass. Samantha waited with him, echoing it. Abby reappeared, breezing through the room in a long, flowing black dress. Her hair was piled on top of her head, falling down in wild curls around her ears. Sam could feel Jason staring just as hard as he was.
“It makes her smile,” Abby said. “I like making her smile.”
“You look like a hack psychic,” Jason said.
“You look like a witch,” Sam said.
“You got a crystal ball around here, too?” Jason asked.
“It’s over there,” Abby said, indicating the corner. There really was a glass globe sitting on a book case.
“Seriously?” Jason asked.
“It’s symbolic, isn’t it?” Sam asked. Abby opened the door and grinned at him.
“I really shouldn’t be surprised, should I?”
She led the way out through her building and down crowded sidewalks. She walked like the world would move out of her way, and it did. Sam was aware of every person who got to close, trying to keep from bumping into anyone. He was carrying a hunting knife and a hand gun, and he didn’t want them causing a problem - or walking away. Jason looked like he had his forearm resting on his gun. Sam restrained himself from doing the same.
The river of people was foreign to him. They spent enough time in cities for it to be reasonable for Samantha to make fun of them for being city boys, sure, but they tended to be on the outside of it all. Wading through people almost elbow-to-elbow as they lived what appeared to be perfectly normal lives… he was struck by it. And maybe jealous. Samantha felt his claustrophobia and introspection and agreed with him. It was strange to be this surrounded by people who had no idea. She seemed to like it. Not the crowdedness of it. She was below ground, on the subway, feeling the same sense of need for distance from people, but the presence of it. Like it was a promise.
Abby had visions of ending the world.
It gave him a sense of perspective.