“Doesn’t matter.” Simon said. “Theo could still come back. We owe it to her to stay. She was nice to us. And she did die on the Arena floor—she’ll get better, I know it!”
I quivered at the shaky tenor in Simon’s voice.
Garfunkel sighed. “Sure she did. And yeah it’s magic and she’s breathing again … barely, but how long has it been since she was out? She’s not an Other. The Arena isn’t meant for humans—they’ve got souls and all that. Without Theo’s body going into a rejuvenation tank, she doesn’t stand a chance. Half her brain cells are probably dead. And look at that throat.”
I attempted to lower Soul-Me closer to my body but my soul shot erratically to the right and then the left. Controlling my soul on the physical plan was like playing a rigged arcade claw machine.
So I stopped trying to maneuver and focused downward at the dark ugly ring around my neck and the white pallor of my face, the slightly swollen eyelids. Thankfully they were closed—I didn’t want to play a staring contest with myself.
My chest rose and fell so shallowly my body might not be breathing. Maybe Garfunkel was right—what if I found a way to reenter my body only to find out I couldn’t think, couldn’t move?
“Yeah,” Simon said. “But what if, I don’t know, she just needs a kiss from Prince Charming?” He angled his head at Orion.
Garfunkel shook his head.
“Or, what if her spirit is here with us. Yes, what if Theo’s a ghost and she’s trying to communicate to us?”
Garfunkel cupped his hands into binoculars and placed them over his eyes, sighting around the room. “I know you’re trying to remain optimistic, but that’s not how things work in the GoneGod World. Theo isn’t here with us right now. Her soul is … Gone.”
“I am too, here,” I said. “Right beside you.”
“They can’t hear you, Theo,” Edward’s voice wavered into my ears as if spoken from afar. His voice sounded calmer now. How had I gotten away from him in the first place?
I disregarded Edward’s voice.
“Come back to me,” he said again.
“Screw you,” I said, and turned my attention back to my familiars who had started a new conversation.
“… Maybe it’s for the better,” Garfunkel said, “Being around Theo was dangerous. We had to keep burning time and turning into Libra and she just wouldn’t understand the risks of changing each time. Uh, hello, we’re literally a barrier between Cosmic Balance and Cosmic Chaos. If she only knew what could happen—”
“But she doesn’t,” Simon said, wiping the corners of his eyes.
“Yeah … But that girl is too curious for her own good.” Garfunkel threw his tiny arms up. “At least we’ll always have the Battle Cat memory in her apartment. Gee, wonder how Luna is doing?” Garfunkel hopped to the floor of the laboratory. “It might be time we hitch a ride on someone else’s shoulders. Lucy, maybe, if we can find her.”
“Lucy? Oh no!” Simon gripped his thinning hair and then glanced back down at my body before lying down across my collar bone and put one ear to my chest. “Theo, oh Theo, if you can hear me, please come back! Please! We need you. Please!”
“I’m right here,” I said as energetically as I could. “I am with you. I’m not going to abandon you. Not like I did to … father. I’m not—”
A cold hand gripped my shoulder—or rather, Soul Me’s shoulder—and spun me around. Edward. Ghostly and shimmery.
“You can’t go back to your body until I release your soul from the InBetween.”
I batted his hand from my shoulder. Edward’s form wavered and I realized he wasn’t actually down here in the lab with me. He was calling me from the In Between.
“Then do it! Release me.”
“Not until we have a talk.”
“We already had a talk—”
Suddenly a door tore open in the laboratory wall and Dickie Man busted into the lab, bleeding from cuts and scrapes on his arms and cheek. Next into the room stumbled Echidna and then Typhon, his face etched with fury. Gan followed with an oaken box tucked under his arm. and then the Minotaur who threw the door shut behind them.
They bent over with their palms on their knees and sucked in air.
Typhon glanced up, his eyes locking onto Orion. “Wayfinder.” He chuckled which devolved into a wheeze. “I should have known you’d beat us here.” Rising to his full height and turning to the rest of his group, he said, “That was too close. We need weapons!” The last word came out almost like a snarl.
Dickie Man wiped some blood oozing from a cut on his forehead as he opened a metal vault door in the wall which looked like it belonged in a coroner’s office. He retracted a steel cot loaded with a weapons cache of various guns, blades and grenades. Quickly sorting through it, he handed Gan a pistol and the Minotaur a gigantic halberd, its axehead and spike gleaming with the fluorescent lighting. Then he started tossing rifles to nameless thugs entering the room from a side door.
Typhon glossed over the combat shotgun in his hands. “Where are the Oni demons?”
Gan checked over his pistol and sighed. “Most of the Oni demons are still recovering from the fight with Theo and her friends,” he said, indicating the shell of my body with a sad gesture. “The ones who made it out unscathed are … ah, striking.” Gan swallowed. “Demanding health insurance and even life insurance policies—”
“Yes, yes. I know!” Typhon roared.
“Now, now,” Echidna whispered, placing a hand on her husband’s arm. “You really must calm down. You’re going to turn into a monster.”
He turned to her. Blinked twice. Softened his gaze. “You’re right, Sweet-ums.” He lifted his hand and made a fist. “I haven’t felt this much rage boiling up inside me since the assault on Mt. Olympus. It’s just, I thought our forces had crushed the Brotherhood of Zeus. And now they’ve got us bottled up like rats in a maze.”
Gan glanced off to the side as he inspected his pistol.
Echidna brushed the back of her hand against Typhon’s neck. “Dear, we’ll get out of this. You’ll think of something.”
Her voice was but a whisper, her words a soft cooing, like a whisper of sin. Didn’t surprise me—she may have been the Other-incarnate version of Martha Stewart but she was also a monster just like her husband.
Fists beat upon multiple doors hidden around the room. Shouting. From farther back on the other side came gunfire.
Garfunkel paced while Simon cried himself into hysteria. The scene would’ve broken my heart, if I currently had one. Being a soul, I guess I truly was heartless, just as my familiars tended to accuse me of when they wanted to tug at my heartstrings for saying something mean.
“If Theo doesn’t wake up soon,” Garfunkel was saying, “we’re going to have to leave her body … It’s going to be a bloodbath in here!”
Simon gripped his head in both hands. “But I think our magical presence is the only thing keeping her alive. Her soul is gone! I don’t want to kill her!”
Garfunkel glanced at me. “Souls go nowhere after death. It sucks but I don’t think she’s going to wake up.” He turned his gaze upon Typhon’s lieutenants and henchmen. “So who’s it gonna be? The Minotaur? Nah, too daft. And loud …”
Simon looked utterly destroyed. “Don’t talk like that—Theo wouldn’t leave us. We’re not going to leave her.”
“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe …” Garfunkel turned to Simon. “I don’t want to die. Do you?”
They both faced the door as it shuddered inward. One or two more strikes might do it.
“Guys! I’m right here! I’m right here!” I waved frantically but to no avail.
The door shuddered inward again and my familiars exchanged a look.
“Trick? Or Treat?”
With every ounce of soul I could muster, I focused my body and directed myself toward it like an arrow. But instead of rejoining it my soul deflected upward, and the top half of my body passed right through the ceiling.
Talk about tripp
y. I guess I can enter the Ghost Pub now, I thought as I slid back down, falling toward my body as dust dislodged itself from the ceiling.
I—my soul—bounced off and ricocheted to the side but Simon’s face lit up when he saw the dust from the ceiling.
“She’s here! Theo’s with us!”
Somewhere behind me a door slammed open, but before I could turn, I felt myself sucked backward. I clawed toward my body, but then I blinked, and I was back in the InBetween.
Edward stood facing me under the temple roof. “Theo—”
“Send me back!”
“I … can’t do that unless you promise to help me.”
My first impulse was to say yes. I had to protect my familiars. Instead, I said, “Help you do what? You won’t tell me your real name. And I almost died here when I woke up. This place stinks of deception.”
A nearby ogre sniffed his hands.
“Apologies for your initial experience,” Edward said, “But souls are tricky things and have never before entered here. I swear to you that from now on, no harm shall come to you in this place.”
“I don’t care about this place. I care about my family. I need to go back to my family.”
Edward clasped his hands together. “By agreeing to help me, you’ll be helping them.”
I threw my hands to the side. “Stop with the doubletalk. And how can I help them when they could be dead by now?”
Edward sighed. “They aren’t dead. Earth time apparently freezes with the presence of a soul in this realm.”
“Ugh. First off, why should I even believe you? Secondly, I get it. You broke who knows how many laws of the universe to bring me here, which means you’re some mysterious and very powerful Other. Big whoop. I don’t care.”
Edward shuffled his feet for a bit. When the fox creature popped up beside him, he petted its triangular head again before saying, “I was afraid it’d come to this. Although I did prepare for it.”
Uh oh …
The vampire, or whatever he really was, closed his eyes and silently clapped his hands out in front of him as if in meditation.
I clenched a fist. “Hey, hey, hey. What are you doing? Burning more time? Stop that—”
But time had already been burnt, and a shining white doorway suddenly appeared before me.
“What is this?” I said, relaxing a bit while Edward bowed ashamedly.
“A trick worthy of my father.”
“Who’s your father—”
My words dropped out of my mouth like marbles spilling from a jar as a woman stepped toward me.
“M-mom?”
“My little baclava,” my mother said, stepping out of the doorway and stroking my cheek with her palm. For the first time in years, her arm didn’t shake. “Are you well, Theodora? Still sweet as honey?”
The experience was so real, I could feel the gentle creases of her palm and I didn’t know what to do, what to say, so I just stood there and my mom wrapped two loving arms around me. I guess I expected her arms to pass right through my ghostly body but they clasped around solid flesh and bone. For the first time in a long time, I felt truly safe and without a care. No worries about how I was going to pay my Internet bill or what I was going to fix my familiars for dinner. The level of comfort I received in that moment reminded me of my childhood home.
Before it got shot to hell.
Emotions tugged at my chest, emotions I didn’t want to experience. Pain, regret, inadequacy, shame.
“Oh, mom!” I blurted finally, and clutched at the back of her paper-thin gown. “Is it really you? Is it really?”
It couldn’t be. And yet, here I was staring back at and clutching my mom for dear life. I could feel individual strands of her hair against my face, could smell her.
Suddenly another emotion hit me. Anger at being tricked. I locked onto Edward’s eyes. “You admitted you can control the environment so you can make me see whatever you want me to see. Right? So this really isn’t my mom …” I scoffed. “I can’t believe you—”
Edward silenced me with a simple raising of his hand. “It is her. She appears as she presently appears in her earthly body, except that I’ve stripped away the physical effects of her disease.”
I clutched my mother even tighter against my chest. She emanated so much warmth, so much love. “But … how?” I managed.
“I have brought your mother’s soul to you, by using my magic and burning a great expense of my time—”
“My mom is dead?” I gripped my mom’s eyes tight, pulled back enough so I could study her face.
“No, my dear love,” my mom cooed.
“Then how … I don’t—”
“Theo Apollonia, you ask too many questions,” Edward said.
My mother smiled weakly at me. “The nice handsome young man is right, my dear baklava. I don’t understand how I came to be here, but I know I cannot stay long. Please, let us cherish this time together.”
I gasped, choked back a sob. “Your speech. Your words. You’re not stuttering anymore.”
She smiled again, this time her physical weakness melting away, the creases of her face softening as youth flowed through her until suddenly she was a few years older than my current age, and I found myself at that playground in my youth—what was I? Ten? Eleven?—clutching my plush bunny with the buttons sewn on for eyes and a nose, sliding down the enclosed, plastic slide—the very tall one, not the short one used by the littler kids—fright gripping me like a nightmare and then I was out the bottom, almost sticking the landing in the mulch but not quite nailing it, stumbling, scuffing up my hands.
I didn’t cry though, not even when I glanced up and saw the concern etched into my mother’s face, at the time thinking it was because of me scraping my palms.
And then her body trembled and she collapsed at my feet in the mulch, convulsing and trying to speak with her words coming out like a harsh whisper, like a cold wind and it most definitely was not the voice of my mother and besides I was ten—ten!
I didn’t cry.
I shrieked.
My mom’s speech had devolved into babbling by then, her eyes the only still feature, staring at me as I watched, clutching my stuffed rabbit.
“Honey. Honey are you okay?”
My mom’s hands yanked me from the memory, back to the InBetween, and pulled me into her warmth. I stood there for a moment, some mistrusting part of me still doubting it was really her standing before me. And then … then I sobbed like the frightened little girl I had been all those years ago before I could possibly understand what ALS was.
“I missed you, Mom,” I said, clutching her all the tighter.
“I know. I’m so sorry you had to take care of me for all these years. I … appreciate it.”
I sniffled.
“But you don’t have to anymore.” She dabbed tears from my cheeks and for possibly the first time since we’d bonded, I missed having my familiars on my shoulders.
“I was just so alone,” I said as I wiped away a tear she missed.
“Oh honey, you were never alone. I was always with you, watching over you.”
I pulled back again enough to see her face. “Always?”
My mom clucked her tongue, a weak imitation of how she used to signal to my father and me that dinner was ready. “When you needed me most.”
“So …” I shuffled on my soul feet. “Are you, like, embarrassed by how I turned out?”
Giving my arms a gentle squeeze, my mom gave her biggest smile yet and said, “Of course not. You are a girl who is trying to find her way in this world. Never be ashamed of learning from your mistakes and growing—”
“So you’re saying I made a lot of mistakes?”
“No, no. My dear baklava. I remember when I was your age. Right now you feel lost—and for good reason. There is a lot going on in your life. Much change, and change is never easy. Or painless.” She paused. “Everyone loses their way at some point in their life; many never find it. They simply wander along th
e path set before them, never stopping to consider even glancing down the other paths available, the ones which may provide a more satisfying and fuller experience.”
I expected this sentiment to come from my father, and I cocked my head to get a better look at her clear eyes, eyes that had once held so much strength when I was a child but as of late had seemed so fragile whenever I visited her.
“Are you saying I’m on the wrong path in life?”
My mom flashed me the smile a teacher gives a child who repeatedly fails to learn an important lesson even though it’s been laid out before them as plain as a stack of building blocks. A look of resolved defiance to persevere.
And I felt I was letting her down.
My mom and I stepped slightly apart and she placed a warm hand on my shoulder. “You are not like most. You are as curious as a cat. Always were, always will be, I suppose—”
My mom twisted her head and glanced back the way she had come from, through the white doorway which if I wasn’t mistaken, seemed to be closing incrementally. Off to the side of us, giving us space, Edward watched with his shoulders thrust back, his hands clasped in front of him, his face the annoying epitome of kind patience.
My mom’s head jerked back to face me, her eyes failing to focus on me correctly for a moment.
“What, what is it?” I asked, my heart catching in my throat.
“Life Ain’t Always Beautiful—Neither Is My Hair”
My mom turned back to me, and maybe it was just me but her face looked a shade paler.
I brushed my hand against hers—it was colder now. “Mom. Mom, what is it? What did you see? What’s going on?”
She smiled at me but this time it was watered-down, like ink bleeding across a page or water squeezed from a sponge.
“You’re starting to scare me,” I said. As I spoke the words, my mom’s smooth, creaseless face I remembered from my youth grew … well, old. In no time at all, she looked how she did every time I visited her at the hospice.
Axes and Angels: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Novel (Better Demons Series Book 1) Page 43
