Infinite Harmony

by Tammy Blackwell

  Joshua made a face. “I don’t think anyone wants to see Liam in blue spandex tights.”

  “Speak for yourself, Immortal,” Scout called back to them.

  A line appeared over Ada’s eyebrows. “How..?”

  Even more so than the night he told her what he was, Joshua felt like this was a turning point. This moment, this conversation was going to put something in motion, and once the words were out, there would be no going back. He didn’t realize how long he’d lived without fear until it came creeping up on him. But even stronger than his desire to shelter her and keep her out of the ugly business that was becoming part of the Shifter and Seer world, was his conviction his friends knew what they were doing. If they wanted this, then there was a reason, and the reliable thing about his friends was they always did what they thought was right.

  “Shifters have super-sensitive hearing,” he said as if it was nothing. “Scout and Liam can probably hear conversations going on in the cars passing by on the interstate.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jase said at the same moment Liam said, “Not quite, but almost.”

  “Shifters?”

  Joshua nodded. “Shifters. People who turn into wolves or coyotes under the light of the full moon.”

  He tried to read her expression, but it was hard with so little light. He could only vaguely make out the shape of her eyes, nose, and mouth, but she was sitting close enough he could feel every small shift of her body. He took it as a good sign that she hadn’t tensed up as if ready to run.

  “And these guys - Jase and Scout - they’re Shifters?”

  “Jase, Scout, and Liam. Talley is a Seer. That’s something different.”

  “Of course,” Ada said. “That’s why they’re all so attractive, right? All those animal genetics or whatever.”

  “Exactly.” Of course, it wasn’t the animal genetics as much as normal genetics, but between the Change’s ability to keep all the Shifters in top physical shape and generations upon generations of only the most dominant of Shifters mating with Seers, most of them looked like they belonged on the pages of fashion magazines. “You still get the occasional bad egg, like Jase, but a century or more of breeding the best of the best with the brightest of the bright has resulted in a race not only strong and talented, but pretty to look at as well.”

  The corners of Ada’s lips twitched. She tried to pull them back into a serious expression, but she couldn’t control it. The twitches turned into a full smile, which in turn changed into a peel of laughter.

  “Werewolves,” she giggled. “You thought I would actually believe these guys are werewolves?”

  “Shifters. Jase turns into a coyote. And Talley is a Seer.”

  “Shifters. Of course. Sorry.” Again she tried to school her expression only to end up doubled over in laughter. “Whose idea was this? Jase’s? Angel says he’s always trying to pull practical jokes.”

  Joshua was genuinely perplexed. “It’s not a joke. They’re really Shifters.”

  “Except for Talley,” Jase called from the ground.

  “Except for Talley,” Joshua corrected.

  Ada gave his knee a condescending pat. “It was a good try. Your facial expressions and tone were perfect, but I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t believe me?” His shoulders shook with silent laughter. She’d accepted that he was an Immortal without blinking an eye, but apparently people who could transform into animals or could glean information in ways most humans couldn’t even imagine were beyond her realm of possibility. Or maybe it was just too much to ask her to believe these people she’d known her whole life were something other than what they appeared to be. Either way, Joshua found it funny. In the world of Shifters and Seers, he was the supernatural no one believed in, but to this one, perfect human girl, he was the only one who made sense. “What would it take to convince you?” he asked.

  She tapped her finger against her chin in an overly-exaggerated manner a few times before saying, “One of them could go all furry and prove it.”

  “Not tonight,” Scout answered before Joshua could say anything. “Soon though.”

  “Is that a promise?” Ada asked.

  Scout glanced up at the sky, the moon glinting off the pale blue of her eyes. “More like a threat,” she muttered so quietly Joshua wasn’t sure Ada even heard her. But he had, and he didn’t like the ominous tone in which she said it. It seemed he and his friends were going to have to have a little discussion once they got back to the resort.

  The conversation tapered off after that, and eventually they started actually watching the movie. Even though they’d missed the first half, they quickly figured out the plot. Ada kept up a running commentary, turning a night at the drive-in into a Mystery Science Theater 3000 experience. By the time the credits rolled, Joshua’s stomach ached from laughing so much.

  “Do you have to go?” he asked once the mega-watt light above the screen came on and blinded everyone in the audience.

  “Unfortunately,” she said as she began gathering up the collection of food wrappers littering the truck bed. Between the two of them they had made a significant start on a trash heap to rival Fraggle Rock’s Marjory. “The second movie is rated R, so that’s a no-can-do for the Jessup girls. We might learn that cuss words and sex exist. And my dad is the type to do all the running time and drive time math to figure out exactly when you should walk in the front door. If we’re off by more than ten minutes, we’ll both get grounded.”

  It had been so long since Joshua had real parents, he’d forgotten what a pain they could be sometimes. Sure, the Donovans lectured him about taking care of himself and not subsisting on a diet of chocolate, but it was all done with love and caring, and in the end, he knew they had no power over him. He would keep doing whatever it was he wanted to do and there was nothing they could do about it. Where Ada’s parents were concerned, however, there were rules made for the sake of being followed and consequences for breaking them. He wanted her to stay. He wanted to tell her to screw the rules and spend the night under the stars with him, but he cared too much about her to say anything. Her day had been hard enough already. Adding some righteous fatherly fury on top of it wasn’t going to do Ada any favors.

  “I’ll walk you back to your car,” he said instead. He took the wrappers from her, enjoying the shocks of sensation he felt as her cool fingers brushed against his warm palm.

  “Thanks, but I’ve already given the gossips enough to talk about today.”

  “Are you sure?” He knew she was right, but he wanted those three or four more minutes with her.

  “I’m positive,” she said, laying the carefully folded blanket on top of a stack of pillows. “Thanks though. It was really solid of you to come to my rescue and everything tonight.”

  “Anytime,” Joshua said, and once he said it, he realized he meant it. Anytime she needed him, for the rest of eternity, all she would have to do is ask, and he would be there.

  Which was why he was going back to Plan A and stay away from Ada Jessup. Because no matter what Talley might believe or any Seer might have Seen, Joshua was not going to fall in love.

  Chapter 13

  Ada Jessup was falling asleep, which should have been nearly impossible with the racket her vest was making. But even though she could still hear the hum of the machine and feel the way it shook her up like James Bond’s martini, she had grown so accustom to it over the years it didn’t bother her anymore. Falling asleep while strapped into the thing was almost as much a part of her routine as wearing it every morning. Of course, Monday mornings were supposed to be different. On Monday mornings she had to organize the 315 pills she had to take that week, and falling asleep in the middle of that routine meant an extra hour of trying to figure out what medications were already in the old person pill divider and which ones still needed to be added to the pile.

  She cranked up John Denver’s voice on her headphones, knowing she had to keep her eyes open, but it was so very hard. She’d been i
n a fairly decent mood when she got home from the drive-in last night. There hadn’t been any more incidents as she walked to her car, and her dad hadn’t said anything more than, “How was the movie?” to Kinsey when she got home. She’d planned on going straight to bed, but then she got the text.

  It shouldn’t have surprised her, really. She had already received her fair share of “OMG! What happened?” and “Is it true you’re pregnant with some random guy’s baby so Marsden dumped you?” texts. There had been a whole long list of them waiting for her when she checked her phone after leaving Joshua and his friends. But it was the one she got right before crawling into bed that kept her up for hours.

  “Die u fucking bitch”

  The number wasn’t one she recognized, which was a bit of a relief. It wasn’t like her friends didn’t cuss. Even the churchiest of teenagers drops an f-bomb every once in a while. But death threats were a bit extreme, especially considering the crime. If she’d slept with someone else’s boyfriend, then she would have shrugged it off, but Marsden was her boyfriend, or at least he had been at the time.

  She knew it was most likely a wrong number or some idiot playing a practical joke, but it had been the rotten cherry on top of a mostly craptastic day, and she’d let herself freak out over it for longer than was entirely necessary. It wasn’t until she switched her brain’s single-minded focus to the part of her day that hadn’t sucked that she’d finally been able to relax and fall asleep, and when she nodded off, she’d dreamt of Joshua.

  Joshua.

  The Immortal.

  The boy she’d almost kissed.

  Her heart gave a little kick in her chest, and she realized she was smiling like an idiot at a bottle of prednisone.

  She grabbed her phone, intending to send him a text message, but she couldn’t think of anything clever and non-stalkery to send, so she threw it back on the bed. Then she picked it up again, pulled up Joshua’s contact information, and stared at it for a long time before throwing it back down. Her Elvis phone cover seemed to mock her. She’d about made up her mind to grab it again when another hand, one that most definitely did not belong to her, stitched from her lavender bedspread.

  Ada tried to jump, but she was still attached to the vest, and screaming didn’t work either since it only resulted in a coughing fit. Shock quickly turned to humiliation.

  “What” cough “are” cough “you” cough, cough, cough, “doing here?”

  Joshua threw his hands up in front of him, as if he was trying to calm a startled animal. “Sorry!” She only saw his lips form the words, and he must have realized it, because he waited until she took off the headphones to continue. “I was supposed to take Kinsey and Angel to swim practice today, and your door was open, so I thought I would say hi. And I did. From the doorway. Like ten times, at least. But you never heard me. I was going to type it into your phone. Obviously, I didn’t think it through very well.”

  Joshua was at her house. In her room. Standing in front of her while she was doing her morning treatments.

  Her brain refused to even try to make sense of it.

  While she sat there being confused, Joshua started tapping away on her phone. When he was done, he turned it around and handed it to her. There was only one word on the screen: hi.

  “Hi,” she said, which set off another series of coughs. By the time she shut off the machine and extracted herself, she could talk again. “What was that about swim practice?”

  “May I?” Joshua asked, nodding to the vest. Since there was no way of hiding it now, she let him pick it up. He held it up until it was practically touching his nose and began bending and stretching it this way and that. “Yeah, swim practice,” he said, his attention still on the vest. “No one bothered to tell me Angel wasn’t actually on a swim team and by ‘swim practice’ she really meant, ‘go over to Kinsey’s house and play in the pool’.” He flipped on the machine and watched as the vest inflated and began to vibrate, then switched it off again. “How effective is this?”

  “It works really well, actually. It broke a year ago and I had to go a few weeks without it. I ended up in the hospital.”

  Joshua gave a distracted nod. His attention was centered on the vest instead of her, and Ada couldn’t decide if that was better or worse.

  “I’ll make you a better one,” he said. “It might take me a few months, but it will be quieter and send more vibrations through your body without jarring you any more. I’m assuming vibrations are the goal?”

  Ada tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and pulled her knees up to her chest. She realized she was wearing her normal sleep clothes - a pair of basketball shorts and an old church camp t-shirt. Coupled with the hair thrown in a messy knot on top of her head, the look screamed, “I am a hapless bum!” Joshua, on the other hand, was the definition of effortless cool in his worn jeans and Ramones t-shirt.

  “It breaks up the mucus in my lungs,” she said, cringing over the word “mucus.” Could she be any less sexy?

  The corner of his mouth kicked up. “Yeah,” he said, mostly to himself, “I can definitely make this better.”

  “You can build a better vest?”

  He finally looked at her, although she was fairly certain he wasn’t actually seeing her. His big brown eyes seemed focused somewhere beyond her, beyond the physical world.

  “I’ve got this idea. Sound waves. Thermodynamics.” Another enigmatic shake of the head. “Yeah. It’s going to work.”

  He was so excited it was like watching a puppy discover a new toy.

  “So, what? You’re like an expert on thermodynamics now?”

  This time his eyes actually focused on her. “I am,” he said with a smile. “I decided to give college a try in the sixties. Turns out, I like science and engineering. I have a few degrees in each.”

  Ada thought she understood how long Joshua had been alive, but hearing that he’d earned multiple college degrees seemed to drive the point home in a way nothing else had. She’d already mapped out her college career, and it was going to take her six years to score an undergrad degree once she scheduled her classes around all the treatments and therapies she had to do every day.

  “Science and engineering, huh?”

  She could see it, of course. It was in the way he looked at everything, including her, as if he was trying to figure out how it worked. She’d spent days worrying he would actually figure her out, and now here he was, surrounded by the evidence of her illness.

  “I have cystic fibrosis,” she blurted out, part of her wanting to take back the words the moment they were out and the other part feeling relief they were finally in the open.

  Now it was her turn to focus on something other than the only other person nearby. Instead, she looked around her room, trying to see it through his eyes. The gray walls with lavender accents. The beaded lavender bedspread. The mountain of stuffed animals engulfing one corner. The stack of old LPs sitting on the floor next to the record player she’d rescued from her grandparents’ garage.

  The giant mountain of stuffed animals engulfing one corner.

  For the first time in her life, she wanted those stuffed animals to disappear. Did Joshua really need a giant, fuzzy-faced reminder of how young she was? She didn’t even know why she still had them. Five years ago, when she’d convinced her mom to finally trash the pink daisy-themed decor she’d had since she was in elementary school, Ada had insisted on keeping every stuffed animal sent to her during her numerous hospital stays as a child. She called it her collection, but in reality, she saw it as a sign she was loved and cared for. Since then, she’d realized she wasn’t the thing people cared about. It was the illness, and she’d stopped being nothing more than “the sick kid” a long time ago.

  The first thing she was going to do when Joshua left was bag up all the bears, dogs, and giraffes and drive them to the Salvation Army.

  The mattress dipped down and she moved her nebulizer out of the way.

  “So, this is why you don’t belie
ve in God,” he said. “You can’t believe in a God who would make you sick.”

  He was leaning more than sitting, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress. The pinkie of his right hand was less than an inch from Ada’s ankle, and she could swear she felt the air warm in the small space between their flesh.

  “No, I don’t believe in God because of Lucy Carmichael.” Saying her name still caused a hollow feeling in Ada’s chest. “You would have liked her. If you’re God’s warrior, then she was his press secretary. We met at the children’s hospital at Vanderbilt when we were eight, and her first words to me were, ‘I’m so glad God decided to make us sick at the same time so we could meet and become best friends.’ Eight years old, barely able to breathe, getting pumped full of antibiotics via IV, and she was thrilled with God for putting her in that situation because she made a new friend. She was always like that. It was like she didn’t even realize what a pain in the ass being sick is.”

  No, that wasn’t exactly true. “Actually, it was more like she didn’t realize how much of a pain in the ass being sick was for her. She understood how much the rest of us struggled. She was always making cards of encouragement and sending them to the other kids in the hospital. By the time we were ten, she was making a dozen cards every single day and mailing them to hospitals all over the United States. She knew the name of every kid she’d ever been in the hospital with and prayed for them and their families every night.” She’d sent Ada a card every week. They were now all locked in a fireproof box and tucked beneath Ada’s bed.

  “The amazing thing was,” she said, “her parents weren’t big believers. I think they went to church on occasion, it’s not like they were atheists or anything, but you would have thought she was raised by my parents instead.”

  “It’s been my experience that faith isn’t an inherited trait,” Joshua said. “When did Lucy die?”

  The hollow feeling in Ada’s chest grew to the point she thought it might suck her entire heart into the void.