by Willow Rose
As I slowly came closer to the sound, I felt someone behind me. I turned and saw Mrs. Higgins flying right by me with a frightened look on her face. Raphael followed her with a serious look on his face. They didn’t seem to pay any attention to me as they passed me.
“It is right in here,” Mrs. Higgins said with a slightly trembling voice.
I followed them silently while I heard more upset voices coming from one of the chambers. The screaming continued unabated. It sounded like a woman in extreme pain. I followed Raphael until he entered the chamber but stayed outside the door while I heard them talk on the other side.
Mrs. Higgins spoke with an agitated voice. “Her roommates told me she just woke up like this,” she said. “It started when she was sleeping.”
“Hmm, how long has she been screaming like this?” asked Raphael.
“For almost fifteen minutes now,” said a female voice that I didn’t recognize. I guessed it had to be one of her roommates. “She was tossing and whining and crying and waking everybody up. Then all of a sudden she sat up and just started screaming. We tried to wake her up, but she just kept screaming. It is like she is stuck in a dream and can’t get out.”
“And the screaming. Has it been the same all fifteen minutes or has it changed?” asked Raphael with his deep voice.
“It is the same all the time. It is unbearable,” the roommate cried. “The screaming seems to go right through my body. It feels like it is drawing all happiness out of me. It feels horrible. Please make it stop.”
“We have to take her away from here,” I heard Raphael say. “I have sent for people from the infirmary to come and take her to the hospital tower. No one will be able to hear her screaming from there.”
As I was about to leave, someone crept up behind me. The sound of a voice close to my ear made me jump.
“Eavesdropping, are we?”
I turned and looked into the face of Mrs. Ohayashi, my teacher in The Art of Transition. A small Japanese woman in a red kimono, she had narrow, almost black eyes that seemed cold and empty. I had a hard time looking in her eyes because she always made me feel like they would suck me right into her.
“No, no. I was just … leaving,” I said.
I tried to fly past her, but with a quick movement she grabbed my arm and held it tight with her long-nailed fingers. How she did that I didn’t know. Our bodies are made of a fluid-like material and it’s really hard to hold on to each other. Somehow she managed to do it so hard I couldn’t move.
“Some eventful night, huh?” she asked while putting her small face close to mine.
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
I tried to pull my arm free but I still couldn’t.
“First the horse and now this? What do you make of that?” she said.
“A Pegasus. Yofi is a Pegasus. And I don’t really know.”
“Evil powers. That is what it is,” she said, staring closely at me. She was smaller than me and had to look up.
“Demons,” she hissed.
“Demons? In the castle? How is that possible? I thought the Angels kept them out of here.”
Mrs. Ohayashi burst into creepy laughter. “No one can keep the evil out. If they want in all they need is a weak heart, a troubled soul, or a mind that lacks faith,” she said and pointed at my heart with one of her long purple fingernails.
“What you have right there is their entrance,” she said.
I looked down at where she had been pointing. When I lifted my head again she was gone. Only the sound of a wind blowing was left.
Chapter 6
The next couple of weeks were quite calm and uneventful. I missed Jason like crazy but tried not to think too much about him and it kind of worked. The more I was away from him the less I worried about him.
The whole school soon heard about the screaming woman and talked about it. Some thought she had just gone crazy while others supported Mrs. Ohayashi’s theory that it was a demonic attack. I tried as hard as I could to avoid all rumors, as well as Mrs. Ohayashi. In her classroom I would sit in the back, hiding behind the textbook.
Yofi had healed from the burns, with help from Adahy’s herbs and chanting, but no one was allowed to come near him yet, let alone ride him. So I got assigned to another Pegasus. Abhik finally got the hang of it and we had a lot of fun riding together.
Mick was really happy about this new arrangement. Because I wasn’t allowed to leave the school premises, I spent a lot of my free time with him instead of going to visit Jason.
We went to the old school theater and saw a show that was—I have to admit—quite funny. We had picnics on the weekends in the butterfly garden. Most days we would just hang out and talk. Mick loved that.
One day when we went for a walk, or a float, in the garden I lay in the grass and stared at the blue sky above us with its many rainbows. Mick lay down next to me. He was smiling.
“This is really nice,” he said.
Butterflies in all colors circled over our heads, even green and pink ones. They made the sky look like a living painting.
“I know. I love this place,” I said and pointed into the air. ”Look there is a turquoise butterfly.”
But Mick wasn’t looking at the butterflies any longer. He had turned his head and was staring at me.
“What?” I said when I felt his glare. I turned my head and looked into his blue sparkling eyes.
“Nothing. I just wish it would always be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like this. You and I spending time together.”
“It is kind of nice,” I said and smiled. It had been really great to just relax and live my own life for once, to really fully enjoy where I was right now and not worry so much about what was going on back on earth.
“Only kind of?” He asked.
“No, it has been great. I think I needed this little break,” I said.
Mick sighed and turned his head away.
“What?”
He looked at me again. “Sometimes I would just wish that you would open your eyes and see what I am seeing.”
“And what are you seeing that I am not?”
“That you are just torturing yourself by going to see Jason all the time. That you are preventing yourself from living the life that you were supposed to have. It is almost as if you are punishing yourself.”
I sighed.
“No matter what you do, he will get older and older. Have you even thought about that? You will continue to be sixteen while he will grow older. As long as he is still on earth in a human body he will grow older while you remain the same. Even if he manages to escape his addiction, even if he begins to see you again and you can be together, he will still continue to grow older. You live in two different worlds. How could you ever create a life together? It is not a life for him, and it is certainly not a life for you. You can’t protect him forever. At some point something will separate you from him. It might be his age, the drugs, or a human being who is all you are not. Someone could give him what we both know he really needs.”
He paused before he continued. “Think of it,” he said and rolled over on his side while leaning his head on his hand. “It could be like these last few weeks all the time. Your life could be that easy—only going to school and hanging out with me.”
I smiled. “That does sound nice. And you would like that, huh?” I said and gave him a friendly push.
He looked at me seriously. “I would indeed enjoy that very much.”
I smiled awkwardly. My heart pounded in my chest. Mick had a serious look in his eyes as he leaned over and pressed his lips against mine. I closed my eyes. He hadn’t kissed me like that since the night he caught me in the cellar on my way back to Jason. It had been more than six months ago. I had missed his lips and that feeling of kissing another spirit when the lips kind of melt together. It’s hard to explain—so soft, so gentle. Every part of me wanted him to grab me and hold me tight. And I never wanted the kiss to end. It had been such
a long time since I last felt this kind of love. So when Mick released my lips and drew his head back, I grabbed his neck and pulled him back toward me until our lips met again. He was surprised, I could tell, but he didn’t mind me kissing him.
When I let him go he smiled that handsome white smile.
“I want you so badly,” he whispered.
I smiled and enjoyed the closeness. It was like I wouldn’t let him go. I kept hugging and kissing him and pulling him close.
Then I stopped and looked into his eyes.
“If we are to see each other—really be together—then you will have to accept that I will visit Jason from time to time. Once I get the permission to leave the castle again, that is. Could you accept that? I promise it will not be every night like before.”
He pulled away from me with a sigh. He stared at the grass for awhile and picked a couple of blades. Then he made his decision. He turned his head.
“If that is the only way I can have you, then yes, I will accept it.”
Most of the fall passed and still no one knew who had burned the message into Yofi’s coat. As the months went by, I eventually gave up hoping. Once a week I went to Rahmiel’s chamber to ask her if I could get permission to leave the school area again, and every week she looked at me and shook her head.
“It is not safe for you to enter the human world when you have a threat over your head. In the world of the humans there is no protection from the evil,” she said.
So I went back to spending another week without seeing Jason. I still missed him a lot, but now that I had started seeing Mick, I felt like I didn’t need Jason that much anymore. I began to think Mick had been right. Maybe I had just been torturing myself by going there. Jason was lost and belonged to a different world now. I would never be able to be with him, no matter how often I visited him. So maybe it was all for the best.
Mick gave me all I needed. He made me feel better and that hole in my heart just wasn’t there when I was with him. It was actually nice for once to be with a guy who really saw me, heard what I said, and responded to me. Right now Mick gave me all that I had been longing for in Jason. There was only one problem. He wasn’t Jason.
One day the snow came and we couldn’t ride the Pegasuses anymore.
“We have to wait until spring comes,” Adahy said.
The butterflies left the garden, waiting to come back in the spring. Still Mick and I liked to be outside in the afternoons while holding hands and stealing kisses behind the trees.
No one in the school knew about us and we preferred to keep it that way. During the long winter months I grew increasingly fonder of Mick. I began to think that maybe we could create a nice eternity together. Maybe it was real love.
“You never told me how you died,” I asked one day.
He froze for a second before he continued. “That is because there is not much to tell.” He turned his head and smiled at me.
“But you do know it, right?”
“Sure, I saw my file when I graduated. Just like everyone else. But it is many years ago.”
“Do you ever visit your loved ones?”
“I do not have any.”
“Oh. Are they dead?”
“All my family is dead, yes. I have been here a hundred years, remember?”
“Oh yes. Of course.”
We floated side by side in silence for awhile.
“But you visit them in Heaven then?” I asked.
Mick sighed. “No, I don’t.”
“You never visit your parents?”
“I cannot. They are not there.”
“What do you mean?”
“They are not there. I guess they went to … you know, the other place. The world of the damned.”
“Hell?”
“I guess.”
“But why?”
He sighed deeply.
“It is a long story.”
I found a bench and brushed the snow off. Then I sat down and smiled up at him.
“I have plenty of time,” I said.
Reluctantly he agreed to sit down next to me. I really wanted to know his story since it was a big part of him. We all had our baggage from earth that we carried with us. I hadn’t been told mine yet, but I would one day, and I would definitely share it with Mick no matter how cruel it might be.
“Just tell me the story,” I said.
“Well, there is not much to it, really. It is not that sensational,” he said, probably hoping that I would let it rest.
But he knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t.
“I just want to get to know you, really,” I said.
“Do you not know me by now?”
“Just tell me, please?”
He sighed deeply again. “All right, then.”
Chapter 7
I looked at him with anticipation. He didn’t look at me but stared into the air with an empty look in his eyes.
“As you might have guessed, Mick is short for something else. My real name is Mikjáll Haraldsson. I was born and raised in Iceland, a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean where it is cold and the weather is rough. My family was very rich and powerful. Times were tough back then and everybody, both men and women, had to work hard to put food on the table. Most people had to start working when they were still teenagers. They would work on a farm or go out on big fishing boats. Some of them never came back. Everybody was poor except for two families on the island. My father, Harald Grimsson, and his best friend, Leif Eiriksson, had enough money so their children and wives didn’t have to work. Their friendship went back for several generations and my parents wanted it to stay that way. Therefore they had promised their firstborn in marriage to one another. They had sworn it in blood.”
“So you were supposed to marry some girl you didn’t know?”
“Solrún was her name. And that was expected of me, yes. I would have done it for my family.”
“How old were you when you died?”
“Just turned eighteen.”
“And that was when you were supposed to marry this girl?”
“Yes. My father and mother stood very strongly on this. The whole family honor was at stake. You don’t run from a promise made by blood.”
“Did you marry her?”
He shook his head. “No. It never happened.”
“So what did happen?”
He sighed again. His eyes gazed at me.
“Sólrun came to me two nights before the wedding. She told me that she couldn’t follow through with it. She was crying and had tears running down her cheeks. It was horrible. She was afraid of her father. She had fallen in love with a young fisherman named Jón and she knew her father would never approve of it. But she loved him and didn’t want to marry me.”
“That’s perfectly understandable. I mean if she was in love with someone else,” I said.
“But back then it was a very serious matter. You could not break a promise made in blood by two lifelong friends. It would bring shame to the family and, back then if someone brought shame upon their families, it had to be vindicated.”
I gave him a concerned look. “What do you mean?”
Mick sighed deeply. “If a woman abandoned an arranged marriage, she would have to be killed.”
“Killed?”
Mick nodded.
“Wow. Why?” I asked.
“To restore the honor of the family. It was the noble thing to do. It showed that a strong family was not going to just accept this kind of mistake. It was seen as the father’s duty.”
I looked at him, almost not believing what he was telling me. How could people think like that? Who would kill their own daughter because she fell in love with the wrong man?
“Mistakes? How could love be a mistake?” I said.
“I grew up under very different circumstances than you. The honor of the family was the most important. That was just the way it was.”
I shook my head.
“That sounds so tough.”
I nodded and stared at Mick’s fair skin. He was so beautiful. “So what did you do?”
“I told her to run away and try to hide. But there are only so many places you can hide on an island and with only eighty-five thousand people, someone would eventually tell her father where she was. So I told her to try to get on a boat and get away from Iceland as soon as possible. But I knew she probably would never make it in time. The big boats did not leave Iceland more than a few times each year and it was extremely expensive to get on one. So I gave her a bag of money and I told her to leave our hometown immediately.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was. And it got worse. I knew my family would not take this well. They would want some kind of compensation for this breach of promise. They suffered humiliation in public and thereby lost a lot of honor, so they demanded something in return. And one day our two fathers sat down in a chamber at our house for hours discussing how they both could get their honor restored. I remember I crawled into a small closet next to the chamber, where I knew there was a hole in the planks and I could peek in. My heart raced so badly I almost could not hear what they were saying. My father was terribly angry at his friend for not raising his daughter well, for not controlling her.”
I had to stop Mick. This was so far from anything I knew and believed in. “How could that ever be his fault?” I asked. “She just fell in love with someone else! I don’t get that.”
Mick stared at me. Now I felt that he didn’t understand me.
“I know times were different, but still—” I continued.
“It was his responsibility to control his daughter. That is just the way it was in a patriarchal society.”
“Poor girl.”
“That was exactly what I thought. But I was the only one. Imagine how I felt when they came to the conclusion that the only way the honor both families could be restored was if she was killed by the man she had left at the altar.”
