Jake struggled to keep his grin from betraying him.
“That’s what I thought,” Ray said, ruffling the younger boy’s shaggy hair. “I can see right through you by now.”
III
JILL HAD NEVER TRULY KNOWN EXHAUSTION UNTIL TODAY. THE PAIN prodded her relentlessly with each step, but this was something she needed to do. The others had been great through the whole pregnancy, right up until the very end when she had squeezed Evelyn’s hand on one side and Missy’s on the other to deliver her baby girl into Adam’s waiting hands. They had all taken such good care of her, but there had been one face conspicuously absent.
She walked along the beach with her daughter in her arms, which cradled her perfectly as though designed solely for that purpose. Sand sluiced between her toes as she passed Adam and Evelyn where they stared out toward the distant island, now fuzzy and green with the signs of forestation.
Jill followed the white line of the wooden fence to the gate, opened it, and stepped inside. The mounds of sand had been leveled by time, though the paths between them were choppy and well worn. She walked nearly to the end on the left as she did every night, and lowered herself uneasily to the ground, her child snug against her chest. Her eyes rose to the marble headstone of the Virgin cradling her infant son, which sat atop the marker nearly exactly as they were now.
A wan smile traced her lips and her lower lashes welled with tears.
“Hi, Mare. There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, tilting her daughter to face the tombstone. The red-faced girl, her head still misshapen from the birthing canal, parted her lids and revealed eyes just like her mother’s. She smiled as her lids fell closed again. Her father’s smile. “This is Mary.”
IV
MISSY SAT ON A ROCK AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE, DANGLING HER FEET INTO the cold water, the setting sun sparkling on the water like so many jewels. She’d aged by lifetimes in the year since the world ended, a shock of white scarring her raven-black hair, which now hung to the middle of her back. The first three months following that fateful day at the evil tower had been the worst. She had slept all day and stared up into the sky all night, furious with God for taking the two people she had loved most in the world. She wished she could have just stayed dead, where there was no pain. Why couldn’t she have just been allowed to remain with those who mattered most? She remembered nothing of the minutes she had spent in the afterlife, though when she focused on the distant stars and lost herself in their beauty, she felt like she could almost grasp the memories, but she never did. Sometimes she imagined her brother and the love of her short life looking down at her, winking through the twinkling of the stars, and she didn’t feel quite so alone.
There hadn’t been a single cathartic event that had roused her from her fugue, but a gradual understanding of the magnitude of the gift she’d been given. Her brother had given his life in exchange for theirs, for the amazing child now sitting on her mother’s lap by his grave. Phoenix had sacrificed himself to eliminate the threat of Death, and had given his life force to her so that she would live. To not take full advantage of her life would be to dishonor their memories and tarnish their final act of love. She often wondered if the amount of himself that he poured into her to resurrect her would have given Phoenix the strength to vanquish Death without having to die in the process. Had he just left her for dead, would he still be alive? She had blamed herself for the longest time, but eventually she had realized that Phoenix’s destiny had always been to give his life as he had. He had been groomed for it since his birth. Now she understood that she had been fortunate to have had what little time she had with him. She had known and loved the most wonderful exotic bird, but she had never been meant to keep him. His destiny had always been to rise from the ashes and ascend to the heavens in a ball of fire.
Yet a part of him would always remain in her heart, his fleeting beauty commemorated by the lives yet to come. Lives that would know nothing of the suffering they had endured.
She stared ahead at the future on the gentle, glowing waves, not toward the end, but toward a new beginning.
The time had come to live again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Ancient Enemy, Bloodletting, Burial Ground, Fearful Symmetry, Innocents Lost, Sunblind, The Coyote, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Territory with his wife and kids.
To explore the author’s other works, please visit www.michaelmcbride.net.
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