Jillian Cade

by Jen Klein

  I wished it could detect all things that were hostile.

  I’d been there once before, so I was familiar with the layout. I parked on the dirt track near the entrance and, ignoring the signs that the area was closed after sunset, climbed over a yellow gate and onto the trail. I used my (now fully charged) phone to light the way. I had downloaded a flashlight app, which was surprisingly bright.

  With its help, I reached the radar tower in less than ten minutes of silent walking. I paused for a moment at the base. A crooked ramp led up into the darkness.

  Halfway up, I saw that Sky was already there, standing in the center of the platform on top. When he heard me, he flashed his own phone to light my way.

  “I should have met you in the parking lot,” he said. “It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.”

  “That’s never been your strong suit,” I said, walking past him to the edge of the platform. As I set my hands upon the chest-level railing, I had a brief flashback to the last time I had been this high above the ground with my hands on a scabby metal bar. That time, someone had died. I shook off the memory and turned to Sky. Of course he was even more angular and messy and beautiful by starlight.

  “Why here?” I asked him.

  Sky set his hands on my shoulders and gently turned me back to face the way I had been looking, out over the Los Angeles Basin, where millions of lights twinkled up at us, the dark silhouette of the mountain ranges beyond. “Because this is your city,” he told me. “Because it’s mystifying and dangerous, but it’s also beautiful and complicated.” He wrapped his arms around me from behind and tucked his face down close to my ear. “Like you,” he whispered.

  If I had been a normal girl with a normal life, the moment would have been perfect. I would have spun around in the circle of Sky’s arms. I would have risen up on tiptoes to kiss him. This would have become our preferred spot for make-out sessions. Maybe I would have changed my online status to “in a relationship.”

  But I wasn’t a normal girl. I was the daughter of an ancient betrayer. And my life wasn’t normal because the boy who liked me was also the boy who had deceived me.

  I pulled away and took a step backward, putting distance between our two bodies. “Tell me about the obituary.”

  “I will. I promise. But I want you to know something.” Sky smiled the most gentle, saddest of smiles. “I have no regrets about any of this.”

  Well, that makes one of us.

  “In that first moment by your locker, the whole world opened up,” he continued. “Before, I didn’t really believe in anything, and now, everything is possible.”

  I wanted to cry, but I didn’t know why. “Say it,” I whispered. “Please just tell me.”

  “Will you believe me?”

  I registered the pain in his eyes, but I still told him the truth. “Probably not.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because I want to hear it anyway.”

  Sky nodded. He ran his fingers through his hair, making it messier than usual. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, like he was releasing more than air. Then he pulled a tablet out of his jacket’s interior pocket, turned it on, and tilted it toward me.

  On the screen was a photo of a taffy-yellow two-story home. “What am I looking at?”

  “My house in San Francisco. It’s three blocks from the bay.” Sky swiped a finger across the tablet, and a cocker spaniel came into view. It was lounging on a rug in front of a fireplace. Nearby, a tabby kitten was caught midlick, cleaning its paw. Sky pointed to the dog. “That’s Odie. The cat is Lars.”

  “Cute.” I wasn’t sure why I was getting a tour of Sky’s personal life, but I figured it was best to play along.

  Sky swiped again, and now a middle-aged couple smiled at me from a picnic bench. “Dad’s a partner at an insurance company and Mom’s an architect. And this was me, last year.” It was a picture of Sky himself, lying on a queen-sized bed in the middle of a messy room. He was asleep, one arm draped over his face. He was wearing . . .

  “A letter jacket?”

  “Varsity soccer. Team captain.” Sky’s smile widened into one that was more familiar. “Oh, you would have hated me. I made good grades in everything except math. I fiddled around with a guitar. Sometimes I partied.”

  “You were a jock.” I shook my head. “That’s almost as weird as finding out the cheerleader was a succubus.”

  “Right, but it all changed last spring.” Sky’s grin fell away. My stomach muscles tightened.

  “What happened?”

  “I was asleep.” Sky pointed to the photo of himself. “But in the middle of the night, something woke me up. I don’t know how because I don’t remember a sound, but suddenly I was awake, and there was a shadow standing over my bed. It should have been super creepy . . .” He paused, remembering. “I mean, it was creepy, but then the shadow started talking in this delicate, silvery voice, and suddenly it wasn’t scary anymore. It was just . . . weird. The shadow said, ‘I’m not really here.’” Sky shook his head. “I guess I should have yelled for my parents or something, but its voice was so fragile, and it chose its words so carefully. I didn’t feel like I was in danger.”

  I had a hard time believing I would feel so safe with a stranger looming over me in my sleep, but who knows? Crazier things had happened in the last week.

  “It leaned close to me,” Sky continued. “Close enough that I should have been able to feel its breath when it whispered in my ear, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel anything. All I could hear was what it said. ‘You have to save the world.’”

  I must have made a tiny sound, because Sky stopped talking and turned to look at me.

  “What?”

  Out of habit, I was about to make a snarky comment—Delusions of grandeur, much?—but the look on Sky’s face made me decide against it. “Nothing.”

  “The shadow said, ‘There is someone who must be protected. If she dies, so will the world.’” He looked at me again. “Which I know sounds nuts. It sounded nuts at the time too. But when I heard it . . . that’s when I felt like I was finally all the way awake, because I suddenly had all these questions. I think I said something, like ‘What?’ or ‘Huh?’ and the shadow said, ‘You have to protect her.’”

  My heart lurched. I flashed back to the empty parking lot, to the moment right after Sky kissed me and right before we went searching for the succubus lair. He had said it to me then. All I want to do is protect you. I wanted to remind Sky of that moment, but he was still talking. Still telling me his story.

  Still telling me our story.

  “The shadow said I was being sent into a time that didn’t exist yet. It said that I had to make sure that it never would, because if it came to pass, our world would end.” Sky paused. “That was the phrasing. ‘Your world will end.’”

  “Our world.” I said it out loud. What I didn’t tell Sky was what Corabelle had called my mother. Destroyer of worlds.

  “I tried to get more information,” Sky told me. “I asked, ‘Why me?’ and the shadow said it saw the paths of the future and that they’re always twisting and changing, but that when it saw hers—”

  “Hers,” I repeated numbly.

  “Yeah, now I know it was talking about you,” Sky said. “But at the time, I asked the shadow who it meant, and it was really sketchy about answering. It kept saying things like ‘Her’ and ‘She who must be protected.’ I told it that I got that part, and I just wanted to know what we call the person who must be protected. The shadow said, ‘We call her by her name,’ and I said, ‘Right, that’s the part I’m trying to get. What’s her name?’” Sky gave me a wry smile. “It told me to stop interrupting. I actually apologized, if you can believe that. Anyway, then it told me that when it looked into the future, it saw me on your paths.”

  Sky’s tablet suddenly turned itself off, because
we hadn’t been using it. As my eyes readjusted to the starlight, he slid the tablet back into his jacket and looked down at me. “It said that it saw me on your good paths. On the happy ones. It said that sometimes I meet you in a room filled with books, and sometimes over a glass of ruby liquid. It had seen me stumble into you in a patch of open grass, and it had seen us find each other while walking over warm sand.” He gazed down at me. “It said that the futures that bring you to me are all the ones where you are happy and strong and filled with light.”

  I knew I wasn’t any of those things. I was scared and sad and filled with confusion. None of this made sense. “What was so bad about the other future, the one you had to stop?”

  “I asked it the same thing,” Sky told me. “The shadow said that it would show me. It waved its hand over my head. I started to reach out, to try and grab it, but I was suddenly tired like I hadn’t slept in a month. Like it did something to me. I tried to keep my eyes open, but I couldn’t. Everything faded to black, and as I fell asleep, the shadow said, ‘Save her. Save her and you save the world.’”

  “So you were dreaming?” I asked him. “You were asleep the whole time?”

  “No, then I started dreaming,” Sky told me. “I could tell because everything was weird and twisty and blurry like in a dream. I was outside a church. A small one with wooden doors. A handful of mourners were walking in. I could tell they were in mourning because everyone was wearing black, and some of them were crying. I started to follow them in, but—because it was a dream and you know how sometimes this happens in dreams—suddenly I just was in. It was the church’s lobby, I guess. There weren’t that many people inside, but . . .” Sky trailed off for a moment, remembering.

  “What?” My voice trembled when I said the word.

  “It seemed like more. It seemed like thousands. Or millions, even. I could feel their sadness. It was heavy and awful, like the entire world was crying. And there I was, in the middle of all that private grief. Feeling it all around me, but not understanding . . . until I saw it. Over by the entrance to the sanctuary, there was a bulletin board on a stand. I . . .” He paused, searching for a word. “I ghosted over to it. That’s what it felt like when I moved around, like I was a ghost. It didn’t seem like anyone could see me.”

  “What was on the bulletin board?”

  Sky gazed at me for a moment before answering. “Someone had decorated the edges with rose petals and leaves, and in the very middle of the board, there was an obituary.”

  My lips went cold. Sky kept talking.

  “I took a step closer so I could read it, but everything was still all blurry and watery around me. Before my eyes could focus, someone shouted at me. Someone across the lobby. They yelled, ‘Wake up!’ and I knew I’d been found out. Someone knew I didn’t belong. There were footsteps pounding toward me, and everything started to dissolve. The whole church was going away. The air shimmered and I could hear the rain against my bedroom window at home. I knew I had to do something to hold on because I hadn’t figured out who the shadow wanted me to save. So I lurched forward, grabbing at the obituary . . .”

  “And you got it.” The words managed to escape from between my frozen lips. “You got the obituary.”

  “Only half of it,” Sky told me. “A hand grabbed my shoulder, but I already had the paper in my hand. It ripped away from the bulletin board, and everything started to fade. All the shouting and crying grew dimmer and then evaporated into nothing at all. I was back in my bedroom. I had been gone—or asleep or whatever—for most of the rest of the night, because it was very, very early morning. Light was just beginning to come through the blinds, and the shadow was still there. For just a second, it was still there. And it wasn’t a shadow anymore. It was a girl.”

  “A girl?” I said.

  “She disappeared into thin air,” Sky told me. “Just . . . vanished. I probably would have thought it had all been a dream—a regular, normal dream—except for two things. The first was the scratch on my left shoulder blade, where someone had grabbed me. Even that I could have explained away, like maybe I did it to myself while dreaming.”

  “But you still had my obituary.” It came out as a statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” said Sky. “It came from my dream of the future. It was solid and it was real, and when I did an online search for you, I found your dad’s website.”

  “So you’re not a crazy longtime fan of my father,” I said slowly, as the last of my anger slid away.

  “I’d never even heard of him until I searched for your name online,” said Sky. “But once I realized he was a professor of the occult, I knew I had to learn as much about that stuff as I possibly could. So I watched his videos, and I ordered his books, and then I researched every other paranormal expert I could find.”

  “That’s why you know so much about succubi,” I murmured.

  “Yeah, and about you.”

  I cocked my head at him. “Then why put the obituary in my locker? Why not just hand it over to begin with, and save me the heartache and the torture and all of it?”

  “Would you have bought it?” Sky asked. “Would you have believed that the new dude in school just happened to possess a partial copy of your obituary that came from the future? Would you have taken it seriously?”

  I opened my mouth, and closed it. “Well . . . probably not.” I considered. “What did she look like?”

  Sky frowned. “Who?”

  “The shadow.” I was curious, but mostly I was trying to buy time while I sorted through my thoughts and feelings.

  “I was just blinking awake, and she was gone so fast. I didn’t get a really good look, but . . . I can still picture her eyes.”

  My mouth went dry. “Why? What about her eyes?”

  “They didn’t have pupils,” said Sky. “They were white, like her hair.”

  That’s when I knew for sure that Sky was telling the truth.

  “Rosemary,” I said. “That was my sister, Rosemary.”

  Twenty-Nine

  On Friday morning, I took Norbert to school early. I had stayed over at his house again because, although I didn’t plan on making it a regular habit, I figured a few nights would help defuse my aunt and uncle’s great desire to watch over me.

  Besides, it was kind of nice. Uncle Edmund made a delicious lasagna, and my aunt’s homemade brownies were to die for, plus Norbert taught me how to play contract rummy. It felt safe there. Nice.

  Normal.

  Best of all, we didn’t talk about any of it.

  Until Aunt Aggie cornered me before I could get to my car where Norbert was waiting patiently in the passenger seat. She pulled me off to the side of the porch and peered into my eyes. We were about the same height. I had never noticed that before.

  “It’s not your fault,” Aunt Aggie said.

  I blinked, not sure which part she was talking about or how much she knew.

  “Rosemary,” my aunt clarified. “It’s not your fault they sent her away. I offered to take her back to North Carolina with us, but your mom said she had to go further than that. Things were happening in the house, and your mother was afraid for both of you.”

  My heart beat faster. “What kind of things?”

  “Sounds, mostly. Like whispers in the air.”

  I stared at her. “You said ‘mostly.’ What else?”

  “Oh, Jillian, it sounds so crazy when I say it out loud.” She shook her head, giving me a rueful smile. “Lights went out, and things would fall, and once—” She stopped.

  I swallowed hard. “What? Say it.”

  “Her crib burst into flames.” My aunt reached out to touch the arm she wasn’t holding. “Rosemary was fine but your parents were scared. For both of you.”

  “Where did she go?” My lips were numb, but somehow I got the words out through them.

  “I don’t know, honey
, but I can tell you that on our visit, I saw the two of you together. Rosemary was in this little basket on the living room floor, waving her hands and feet around. You toddled over and peeked at her, and she looked straight at you. It was the first time I thought maybe she could see after all. Your mom ran over to pull you away, but your dad stopped her. He said sisters should get to know each other.”

  The numbness had descended to my throat, becoming an iceberg of pain. I was afraid that if I swallowed again, it would shatter into liquid, and there would be only one place for the water to escape. My eyes.

  Aunt Aggie’s grip on my other arm tightened. “Rosemary smiled when she saw you,” she told me. “That time and every time you came near, she would smile. Sometimes you babbled at her, and sometimes you touched her, but every time—every single time when we were there—you made that baby smile. Rosemary loved you. You have a sister somewhere and she loves you.”

  The sun came out. The iceberg floated away and melted. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Then, for the first time ever, I initiated one of Aunt Aggie’s angel-love hugs.

  At school, I found Sky surrounded by lilac bushes, on the bench where Corabelle had first told us about Todd Harmon. I sat down beside him, breathed in the scent of the flowers, and gazed into those amazing green eyes. He reached for my hand, and I allowed him to take it. Then I said the three most difficult words I had ever spoken in my life.

  “No more kissing.”

  Sky frowned. “You mean at school, right? No more kissing at school.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked relieved. “Good, because at first I thought—”

  “Or at home or in cars or succubus night clubs or on benches. Especially not on benches.”

  “Jillian.” He scooted closer to me and leaned in, like maybe his nearness would change my mind. It came awfully close to doing so. “I told you the truth. I told you everything.”

  “I know. I believe you. And that’s why we can’t be together.”