by Mason Sabre
Eden was standing on a ladder in the corner of the room. She was painting across the higher parts of the wall and using a lighter shade of blue. Where it met the parts Helena had already covered, she’d blended them, so the shade got darker the lower it went.
Helena stood up. “Umph …" She let out a sound that made both Eden and Aiden pause, and unseen to them, Stephen too. Then she arched her back and rubbed at it, before running her hand across her belly.
“Everything okay?” Eden had her roller poised, her foot ready to take a step down if Helena needed her.
"I think we're fighting in here." She lifted her top to show the smooth elastic of her maternity pants. Even through that, the babies could be seen rippling underneath everything. "Come and feel."
Eden put her roller in the tray at the top of the ladder and climbed down the steps. She wiped her hands down her pants first, then she put them both, palms out, against Helena’s belly.
“You want to feel too?” Helena asked Aiden.
He shot her a grin that lit his entire face, freckles and all. “Can I?”
“Clean your hands first,” Eden said, about to stop him.
Helena shook her head. “It’s okay. Bit of paint never hurt anyone.”
They stood for a while with their hands on Helena. Eden gave a jump and laughed when one of the babies gave a visible kick to her hand. “Sibling rivalry, already. I wonder what’s going on in there.” She laughed again. “God help you if they both take after their dad. I—” She paused when she caught Helena’s eyes. And Stephen felt it too, the slam that Helena’s heart gave, pain and hope. “I’m sorry.”
“I know. I just wish he was here. It’s so unfair. He should be part of this, you know?”
Eden smiled at Helena, sympathetically meeting her gaze. "I'm sure he is. He's a stubborn shit. If there is a way to be part of this, I am sure he'll find it. Besides, he'd only complain if he were here."
Helena raised a brow and then she moved to get back onto the stool.
“Complain?” Stephen said from where he was sitting. Of course, neither of them heard that.
“Get out of my way, witch. This is man’s work. Go do your hocus pocus stuff outside,” Eden spoke in a deep, mimicking tone.
“He doesn’t talk like that,” Helena said, laughing, and it was a good laugh, a real laugh, but it held the edge of sadness to it, too, like she needed to cling onto that. He wished she’d let it go. For her sake.
“Oh, he does.” She made herself try to stand tall and puffed out her cheeks as she put her arms into a muscle flex pose and stuck out her chest. “Damn witches.”
“At least you got the damn witches part right … damn witch. Oh, I’m gonna give you some shit when I get back.”
They were laughing when Xander came up the stairs. His footsteps were heavy on the floorboards just outside the door … at least, Stephen hoped it was Xander. He doubted very much that his body had got itself out of bed.
Xander entered the room through Stephen before he could move out of the way. Stephen grasped at his chest and the sudden, fleeting feeling inside as he almost toppled over again. He'd never get used to that shit. "Geez, thanks for that." Stephen got back to his feet. At least he was feeling a little better than he had been before. Maybe as his body recovered from the blood loss, so did he.
“Look, Xander. I’m painting.” Aiden dashed to the other side of the room to where he had made his marks. He grabbed another paintbrush. “You want to help?” He was already anticipating Xander would say yes as he held the brush for him.
“Maybe later,” Xander replied, though.
Aiden just smiled and nodded and used the new clean brush for himself. It was that simple. Aiden was safe, he was warm, and he was with people he loved. He didn’t need anything more than that. He was happy to stay and make a mess on the wall.
“I need to go out and get some things for the car,” Xander said to Helena and Eden. He’d obviously decided he was going already because he had his boots on, and a jacket. "I figured if you were all okay here, I could just take a walk into the next town and get some things. There's a junkyard just outside it."
“Something wrong with the car?” Helena asked.
“Not really. Brakes are squealing and could do with a change, and I need to grab some oil. Just basic things to keep it running.”
Helena nodded. “Must be so great to wander around. I think I have forgotten what freedom feels like.”
“You want to go out?” It was Eden. Stephen guessed no one had really thought about it. Two years in captivity and then being stuck in the house. Before all that, she had been a doctor, an established member of a community, strong, outgoing. Lee had taken more than her physical freedom from her.
"I can't leave Nick. I don't know." She shrugged. "I can't sort my thoughts out. One minute I know what we're going to do, the next, it just comes into some jumbled mess in my head. Like, why are we painting this room if we’re going to leave when Nick wakes up?”
“Because we don’t know how long we’ll be here,” said Eden.
“And why not?” added Xander. “The paint was here. Might as well use it. Looking to the future of those babies gives hope, and we need that now.”
"I guess," Helena said, and she was back to painting, although she moved along a little to do another part of the wall.
“Before you go,” Eden dug into her pocket and pulled out a small piece of folded paper. “Can you get me these things. I think I might have a way to get the silver out of Nick, and not just his blood.”
Helena paused. "You can get it out? Like out of his body?"
The expression on Eden’s face was perhaps not the confirmation Helena was after, more a silent conversation between their body language.
“I hope so. I was reading something … I can’t make any promises.”
“Maybe he will wake up?”
Both Xander and Eden met each other's gazes at the bright hope in Helena's words. They had already decided he was a goner, it would seem, and Stephen almost thanked them for their vote of confidence in him. He would get back. He would. No matter what it took. It was just damn hard to realise his friends had given up … they had. They'd fallen by the wayside somehow and lay down. He'd show them.
“It’s fine,” Helena said after a second. “I get it, you don’t think he will, but you don't know Nick as I do. I know him." She rubbed her belly. "He'll come back to us for these two. I promise you. You just have to believe it."
“Helena …” Eden put her hand on Helena’s arm.
“You’ll see. He’ll not let Lee win. Not like this.”
“He’ll wake up,” Aiden said, and he went to Helena’s side and hugged into her hip. “He has to wake up.”
Helena smiled down at him, and her eyes had glossed over a little. Maybe the words of her friends had cut a little deeper than she cared to admit. The scratches of slight betrayal were almost evident in her expression. But she smiled for Aiden. At least he had hope … he believed.
“I have some things I need to ask him,” Aiden carried on. “So, he has to wake up.”
Helena ran a hand over his hair. “You can ask me.”
Pursing his lips, he stared back up at her. Somewhere in his little mind, he became serious, and he needed to make her understand correctly, the enormity of his problem. "It's boy's stuff," he said, stating it firmly.
Helena raised her brow and nodded in firm understanding. "Oh, boy's stuff. Well, how about I make us some lunch, and you talk to him? Remember I said he could hear you? And that sometimes people have a very long sleep and they need you to talk to wake them up because he’s …”
“Uncon—”
“Unconscious,” she finished for him. “Yes. But he can hear you. He can hear all of us, and he needs us to talk to him and to be strong.” She tossed a quick glance at Eden, because the words weren't just for Aiden, no. They had a double meaning to them.
“We didn’t mean anything,” Eden said. “I just …”
>
Helena slipped her hand down into Aiden’s and then stepped around him to go toward the door, but before she left, she patted Eden’s shoulder. “I know. I’m going to go and make some lunch." She looked at Xander. "If you can get hold of some milk and vegetables while you're out?"
“I’ll do my best.”
So much as Stephen wanted to go down with Helena and Aiden to the kitchen, he knew they were safe. No one had come into the house. No one was outside the house but in this room … Xander and Eden, there was something … something between them that was a look and a concern. They were standing, both silent as Helena and Aiden went down the stairs. It was easy to follow them with sound because Aiden was chattering away already. His little mouth never seemed to stop going.
When they were at the farthest part of the house, and Aiden’s voice was muffled, Xander spoke. “Do you really think you can clean his blood? Will it work?” He had the list in his hand still. He glanced down it. From what Stephen could tell, there were only three things marked on it.
“I don’t know.” She folded her arms across her chest and then went to the large window. “I have to try, though. Even if all it does is clean his blood, at least that gives us something for the children.
“Why am I getting these if you’re not sure?”
She shook her head and then turned her back on him. Then she put her head down and buried her face in one hand. She whispered something, but it was hard to catch.
Xander crossed the small gap between them. He put his arms around her and half turned her, so she was side on in his arms. Then he pressed his mouth to the top of her hair.
“I miss you,” she said to him. She kept her arms huddled around herself, but she let Xander hold her. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
He stared out across the top of her head. “None of it was meant to be like this. Nick … he was supposed to help us. I …” A long pause. “He was supposed to fix everything. That’s what the book says. He is meant to come and be that bridge between the worlds. I’ve gone over it so many times, tried to piece together what is missing from the torn page. Maybe we’re missing something.”
Eden wiped her eyes. “I know. I …”
“Do you think it could be wrong? The book I mean. Or maybe we are wrong, and he isn’t the one? I don't know. I keep thinking about it all, and it goes around in my head. Time is just ticking by."
“It’s him. I’m sure of it.” She moved out of Xander’s embrace and put herself, so her back was at the window. "I saw him. When all of this started, when Freya got him. He was down by a river, and I had followed him. He left his body like the book says the one can do. I don’t even think he knew he did it, but he just jumped out of it, and I could feel it too. I could feel him. I still can." She bit her lip. "Maybe Norton fucked it up? Nick's never had the chance to learn what he can do. How can he fix us when he thinks of himself still as the mortal man he was?"
“What if it is like Helena says. We need to wait? Trust him?"
There was a long pause. "I think he's dying," she said, her words low, and pained. "His blood is dying. Every time I take some from him, it's harder to clean, and the silver is stopping his body repairing itself.”
"But if you get the silver out …"
“If I can get the silver out, then maybe he can produce more blood. I don’t know if it’ll bring him back.” She blew out a breath, and it was almost like she couldn’t look at Xander as she turned her gaze away from him. “Even if he never wakes up again, I just need him to live long enough to save his children. If they die, we’ve lost the war.”
Chapter 25
It wasn’t Stephen’s intention to follow Xander. He was a big boy and surely capable of going about the errands himself without the need for a ghostly chaperone. He was equally sure that Xander could buy car parts and collect a list of things for the witch without much supervision, yet, he followed him anyway.
Keeping a little distance, Stephen stayed behind Xander. He wasn’t sure why he was doing that either, but it just seemed like the right thing to do. Joey was walking with his father. He was a little copy of him, and those parts that were different, Joey put them into place himself. The way Xander walked with one hand in his pocket, Joey did that. The way he swung the other arm, using it to balance him out with each stride, Joey did that too. The only difference between them was their size and that Xander wore a patch across where his eye had been. Perhaps that was why he was walking with one arm swinging.
Only once, Stephen had lost the use of an eye, and that had been enough for him. It wasn't even that long either, a week perhaps, although if he'd been asked back then, he would have answered with a childish whine that it was too long, way too long. There had been a smirk on Emily's face when his mother had patched up his almost gouged out eye … a lesson she had probably thought. Just because he'd been in agony and blood rolled down his face, it hadn't stopped her giving him a lecture about fighting … especially when that fighting was with tigers who were much bigger than him. He almost smiled just remembering it. But his balance had been off. His father had confined him to the house grounds and then to add layers to the punishment, he’d made him play ball with his sister. He couldn’t catch it for shit. Every time she threw the ball at him, he reached to snatch it from the air and missed. Who knew that both eyes made it better to target something?
The path from the old town where the house was branched off at one part. Stephen hadn’t seen this, or if he did, he really didn't remember it well. For some reason, he thought Xander would go left, but instead, he walked right and then went off the road and onto an almost unseen path that ran into the overgrowth. The grass was long, wild. It grew in so many directions as it reached up, and the wind ruffled across some of the wayward pieces tangled like lovers holding hands, grasping and releasing again. Then he stopped.
There was a pile of rocks that had probably once formed a wall. Down one side of them, the land dropped, and there was a small lake. Xander sat on the part of it that still held some shape to what it used to be. He sat and stared out, turning so he could gaze over his shoulder at the vast landscape, but that wasn't what bothered Stephen. He wondered what it was that was on Xander’s mind. Something was troubling him … something was causing him pain. He had given the impression to everyone that he had it together, but his falling apart was there, just at the seams, if anyone cared to look. Today, he looked like a man who'd found himself, but then as Stephen stayed near him, he realised that neither of those was true. No. There was a weight on Xander's shoulders, a weight bigger than anything he had spoken about in all the letters that had passed between them during his and Helena’s captivity.
He was faltering … losing hope. He clasped his hands together in front of himself. He had his arms resting on his thighs, and he leant forward, turning his back on the picturesque scene. Joey was at his feet again, sitting quietly, waiting, watching. Stephen angled his head to watch both.
“He’s lost faith?” In everything they had done … in everything they believed in, this was the part where they gave up? It was him they’d all believed in, wasn’t it? Everything they had done, everything they had said, it had all rested on Stephen getting out and coming to save the fucking day.
“I will save everyone. I will save your son too.” Realisation was an iron fist in Stephen’s gut that twisted and knocked the breath out of him. Joey was watching him, his expression blank. “You’re in there somewhere, aren’t you? At Norton’s place? Like Amelia?”
Joey said nothing. He neither confirmed nor denied Stephen’s statement.
Backing up and turning away from the sight of a helpless father and a lost son, Stephen gripped both hands in his hair. “There must be a way. There has to be.” Stephen was young, foolish … sometimes his father had told him he was a tornado tearing through paper the way he handled things. “I can do it all. I can.” Of course, there was a flaw to that. The clock was ticking faster than he wanted to admit to himself.
When Xan
der got up again, and whatever burdens he was carrying eased enough for him to go on, Stephen went to follow, but the dizziness was a switch in his head and his vision blacked with the snap of a step. He gasped, stopped and put both arms out at either side of himself to keep from toppling over. His brain rattled inside his skull and floated away like it was suddenly laden with cotton wool. His ears become nothing more than muffled, fogged up holes at the sides of his head. He blinked hard.
“No. Not now.”
Eden must have been taking more blood from him, but he refused to go down this time. If he went to the ground now, he knew without a doubt he would not get up. Not until it was over, or he was dead, whichever it was that came first.
The wind ruffled his shirt, but then he realised it wasn’t the wind, it was Joey, tugging on the edge of his top. Like always, he was silent, but his actions spoke enough to him.
"I'm trying," Stephen said, gasping. Lifting one foot and then the other, he moved slowly. Each step was a painful ache in his muscles. They bent and howled, and he had to blink so hard just to keep himself conscious.
After a few steps, he had to stop and catch his breath, not that there was any breath to catch. He couldn't breathe deep enough to get the air into his lungs. He couldn't inhale enough to expand his chest. It felt like someone had their hand on his face and all he could take in was weak, used, warm air. He choked and shook his head. “I don’t think I can make it.”
Joey ignored him and pulled on the edge of his shirt. He grabbed more of it, fisting it in his little hand.
Bending over, Stephen rested his hands on his thighs. "You know, if you told me what it is you want, I might be able to help."
Joey tugged again, this time harder.
With the back of his hand, Stephen wiped perspiration from his forehead. He was hot, so damn fucking hot. The back of his shirt stuck to him. Using the front, he wiped his whole face. “I don’t understand.”
