by Lila Felix
Sitting next to her, I tried to put my arm around her. I expected my strong, firm female to resist. Her sandy hair was plastered to the side of her face with the glue of tears and any color in her blush had been replaced by the stark milk of shock. She leaned over and collapsed against my side and finally began to really cry. Before, her cry was the side effect of shock, but then, as her tears soaked into my chest—those were the real cries of complete sadness.
Being unable to console her was nearly unbearable. She just cried and cried, while mumbling inconsistencies.
It was my honor to hold her while she mourned.
After an hour, she finally crossed the line between inconsolable and semi-coherent.
Something snapped inside of her. Shifting away from me, she savagely wiped her eyes as if she had no right to mourn her grandmother.
“We need to go see mom and help her make arrangements. Then we need to get to Portugal and set everything up.” She stomped over to her closet and threw the doors open with such spleen that one of the doors protested by breaking free of the tracks and almost slammed into her. I caught it with one hand and pulled it away just in time to stop it from nailing her. In her duress, Colby didn’t even notice. She started simple enough, moving hanger by hanger from right to left, callously inspecting each garment and finding it not up to her standards. Halfway through the rack, it all turned disastrous. Dresses, shirts and skirts were tossed behind her, each with a matching curse.
“Colby, I thought we were going to see your mom. What are you doing, Querida?”
A long, lithe finger was suddenly in my face, “No you don’t Theodore Ramsey. Don’t you sexy Portuguese talk me into whatever you’re talking me into. Look at this,” she thrashed her arms out toward the closet. “Colby Sage Evans—probably the best shopping diva in the entire world. The girl who flashes into Bloomingdale’s and H&M in the middle of the night to pick up the latest fashion trend—her grandmother dies and she doesn’t have one single white dress—that—would—ever—do Rebekah—justice. I’m just a failure.”
She’d broken down again. I ignored her self-reliant attitude and pulled her to me without a second thought. She cried for another three or four hours before coming back down from the mountain.
Chapter Twenty
Colby
All Lucents are to be buried on the land of Xoana.
There were now two goals in my life—be there for whatever was in store for Theo—and kill Regina. I would never tell Theo about the last goal. Mr. Rule Stickler would gasp and cough and probably have some kind of seizure.
It was my goal nonetheless.
I knew it was the Synod. There was no other person so hexing, so foul that would ever kill a person as revered as my grandmother. And their little warning to me about complacency was well remembered. The Almighty should’ve struck them down with a murderous lightning years ago.
The next day Theo took my grandmother to Portugal, her throat stitched up by a Lucent surgeon. My mom wrapped her in a length of white silk over a white silk dress—making sure that her hair was just right and her appearance was just so. Theo handled her as if she were made of glass, but somehow held onto her hands in a grip that told me she would be safer than safe with him.
Lucent funerals were void of music and void of speaking. I’d never understood that as a kid. I’d been to several funerals as a kid and wrestled with the silence of it all.
It was so clear to me as I looked at the pedestal, adorned with every white flower from every country the Lucents could pluck them from, that not only was silence the most respectful thing to do, but there was no music in this great world that could ever do my love for my grandmother, and the sorrow I felt in losing her, justice. And this time, this one time in my life, I would have no trouble keeping my damned mouth shut.
A pinch alerted me that my mother needed me and tore me away from staring at that pedestal any longer. Her pinch took me by the sleeve of my dress into the house of Xoana.
“I think we’re in the wrong garden.”
I gave her as stern of a look as I could muster, “No talking.”
“If we have her funeral in the wrong garden, she will haunt me forever. Look at the maps and compare it to her letters.”
We sat down at the larger than life marble table and scanned everything quickly. I couldn’t tell heads or tails about the damned maps. For someone who spent her life travelling, I was horrible at directions.
“It’s not the right place,” Theo burst through the glass French doors.
These two together were going to drive me nuts.
“How do you know,” I doubted his theory.
“The voices—they’re angry. I’ve never heard them angry. This is a mistake. We must move her to the keyhole.”
As he spoke, Theo unknotted his tie from his neck and unbuttoned the top button on his perfectly pressed white shirt. Lucent’s didn’t wear black to a funeral. Black signified death to us and we preferred to think of our loved ones as travelling to the light.
“Look at the map, Theo. Can you see?”
Through all the incessant studying and reading, we still didn’t have a clear hold about Theo, his gifts and especially not the voices. There had been no time for me to speak to him about what Regina had told me and I didn’t know when a good time would ever be.
I shoved the papers in his direction as he approached the table. There was no hesitation, no pause in his movements. His pointer finger pinpointed a garden, deep within the surrounding acreage.
The honest dour in his expression left nothing to doubt. He knew where we should be—or they knew where we should be. Our eyes were still locked when my mom circumvented what was proprietary and announced to those already present that we had to move everything to the other area. Theo led the way while an empty, yet determined air commanded his path.
And once we got there—it was as if we’d stepped into the knowledge of the ages. Topiaries of all heights and breadths formed a key shape and in the middle was a perfect circle around the most majestic marble, center-staged pedestal. It put the rest of the gardens to shame.
Xoana’s gardens were open for all Lucents, anytime. I’d often flashed there when I was going through something or just needed to be closer to my people. It was the only place that I ever really felt like I belonged—almost like I was destined to be there.
It was said that her gardens took up one fourth of the entire country of Portugal itself.
Lucent females filed in all around us. We’d had the funeral so quickly after her death that only those who could flash, or those who were close enough to fly in could attend. There must’ve been thousands of Lucents gathered to celebrate the oldest Prophetess.
And then Regina stepped into view, wearing a cream colored gown.
It hadn’t escaped me that ever since my little meeting with Regina that the Resin weren’t on our tail anymore. She tucked a stray hair into her conjured coif and all of it, the off white dress, the hairdo and as I starred at her, the way she sneered back. It was all more than I could take.
Suddenly the impact of everything slammed into me. Ari was in my face, holding my hands down. Regina backed away into the crowd. She was smarter than I thought.
Ari widened her eyes, begging me not to wig out. I calmed down at her prompt, but I knew that one day, one way or the other, Regina’s days were numbered.
She didn’t deserve to live.
I distracted myself by taking in the garden and trying to make eye contact with those who came to truly mourn.
I hadn’t missed the fact that neither Collin, nor Pema were present.
Theo insisted on flashing my grandmother’s body from the house, directly into the garden. He’d taken care of everything for us through this whole thing. He’d intercepted phone calls and took over when my mom and I just couldn’t say the word ‘funeral’ one more time.
When I tried to argue with him, fearful of his flashing becoming common knowledge, he insisted that Rebekah didn’t dese
rve to be carried on the backs of anyone. She deserved to travel one last time.
And how could I argue with that.
And after he did, he came to my left side to hold my hand, while Ari kept a tight rein on the other one. Collective gasps could be heard above the silence and the wind. But I didn’t want him to be constantly in hiding like Eivan.
That wasn’t living.
Sway had also made her excuses even after I offered to flash with her.
Instead of allowing myself to mourn during the funeral, which was little more than each person silently paying their respects, I chose to count the people as they admired Rebekah. When the line ended, there were six hundred and seventeen people in total. The counting was the only coping mechanism I could come up with.
Some left directly after seeing her one last time. Others hung around, taking in the gardens. I chose to admire the place we were in, the place she’d chosen to be remembered.
My mother, myself, Theo and his family were the only ones who tagged along to see her laid to her final rest.
When everyone was gone, only the three of us remained. Me, Theo and Ari. My mom had gone back to Rebekah’s. She wanted to get everything cleaned up. She said Rebekah wouldn’t want anyone seeing her house like that.
Three days after the funeral, I’d decided to tell Theo the truth about my visit with the Synod. He needed to know and I desperately needed to get it off my chest. If they would kill my grandmother for my failure to show up at a summoning, then they would kill him or me for not giving them what they wanted—whatever that was.
I strolled through the gardens, focusing on his location. He was back in those gardens. I’d begun to call them the keyhole gardens. Ari had begun to call them the butthole gardens. He was always there and the day before, when I found him there, his head was in his hands. Slumped over in what seemed to be pain, he rocked back and forth. Whatever was consuming him never let him rest.
“Theo?” I called to him. There was no answer. He was on his knees on the circular plate of marble next to the pedestal. He didn’t hear me, but clearly he heard something.
The atmosphere was different in this garden. I’d thought I had imagined it during the funeral—chalked it up to an air of sorrow. It was something more. Looking around, mentally comparing this garden to the rest, I realized the difference. The grass wasn’t growing in this garden. In the past days, the greenery in the other parts of the vast property had grown up a bit, but the grass in what I was now calling the keyhole garden wasn’t. Through the holes in the topiaries that gianted over us, butterflies fluttered and danced in the neighboring areas.
But no insects or butterflies meandered through this place.
“Theo,” I yelled at him this time. He never budged. I ran to him, desperate to relieve him of whatever I could.
I reached him just as he’d raised his hands to cover his ears—as if he could squelch the voices inside with the act. Kneeling down beside him, his reaction to my touch was immediate.
“Thank you,” he covered my hand that lay on the side of his neck with his own, keeping it there. “I don’t know how you can get rid of them, but thank you.”
“Are they getting worse?”
He shrugged and consulted the sky before answering, “No. Yes. There are more of them and they’ve gotten louder. They get louder and instead of demanding that I help them—they demand that I come here over and over again. So here I am, but they are relentless. What do they want from me?”
A new voice entered our conversation then. I missed that voice. “They want what we all want in death, Eidolon. It’s simple, really.” Collin came to perch on his haunches near the marble circle, but not touching it. “There’s some correlation between the Prophets and those who are stuck in the fray. Some have said that the Prophets giving their wisdom was actually words straight from the mouths of the soldiers of God. The Eidolons in the past have heard the voices from the other side—and in order to quell them, visited the fray to help them find their way to heaven. Before, being the Eidolon was a gift.”
As I listened to Collin, I should’ve been amazed at his knowledge. I should’ve been grateful that finally we were being given straight truths, or what I hoped were truths, about what Theo really was.
Instead, anger pulsed behind my closed eyelids and drummed between my temples.
How could he keep such information from us?
“And now?” No matter my level of anger, we needed to know what we were up against.
“During the time of Eivan, the Synod, through the torture of Sevella, found out that Eivan was travelling from the fray and then to Heaven and back to Earth, bringing back stories and revelations that the Prophets were no longer able to give.”
Theo was focused on Collin and twitched as he eagerly waited for his chance to propose a question, “So what? Why did the Synod care?”
The more Collin spoke, the lighter the air became around us.
“Why did the Synod declare the Prophets’ revelations void,” Collin shot back at him.
Theo hesitated, but I didn’t. “They wanted to make their own rules. The Prophets spoke of an Earth where humans had full knowledge of our gifts—and we lived in peace.”
“Yes,” Collin switched from a crouch to a sitting position. “And the Synod wishes for us to remain elite. Which is why when a weak link is discovered, they simply remove the weakness.”
“I don’t understand,” Theo and I both spoke at once. What was he trying to tell us?
“There is no difference between the Synod and the Escuro. They are one in the same. Didn’t you ever wonder how Demetrius was killed by Sanctum when that was before there even was an Escuro? The Synod and the Resin council came about at the same time, during the rise of Eivan. So what happened to Demetrius? Sanctum was Demetrius’ brother.”
I was more confused than ever. All these history lessons were fine and good, but the only thing I really was concerned about was Theo and how to relieve him of the madness that was slowly consuming him.
“Just tell him what to do!” Screaming at Collin wasn’t what I intended. But it happened anyway. The last two weeks made me feel like I was constantly teetering on the edge of sanity myself.
“The Synod want to enter Paraíso —not for the gift of seeing the Almighty, but rather to ‘borrow’ the Army of God for a sole purpose.”
My hands moved him along with a paddlewheel motion.
“They want to annihilate the human race.”
Even though I was supposed to be strong for Theo, the information overload made me lay down in place, resting my head in Theo’s lap. I still didn’t understand Theo’s place in all of this. And more than anything, I needed to know. After all, the former Eidolon’s didn’t fare so well.
A groan of complete frustration erupted from me. Collin was vomiting out a lot of things, but none of them were actually helping.
“Where’s Pema?”
I turned to face Collin, hoping that the fierce expression on my face would make him spill his guts and her whereabouts.
“In Tibet.”
“Call her, please. Tell her we need to see her.” I pointed at the Viking, “And don’t even think about telling me that you don’t know how to contact her. We all know better.”
“Theo,” I implored him, dragging him out of another deep thinking session. I’d itched for days to flash but I felt guilty travelling when my grandmother could no longer. “Let’s go somewhere far away. Just come with me. By the time we get back, Pema will be here and we can get some answers.”
He didn’t answer, so I took control of bringing him back to sanity. Enveloping his waist in my arms, I flashed us to the first place I thought of—the Haiku Stairs in Hawaii. I was so careless, I didn’t even think about the time difference or about anyone spotting us—I just needed to get Theo away from it all.
He needed to be reminded that he was the Eidolon but the Eidolon wasn’t all of who he was.
When we arrived, it was right before dawn
and thankfully the only people awake that I could see were eager surfers who probably thought that a storm was now brewing from the sighting of the lightning. The entire island could be seen from that vantage point. It ranked in my top ten places to see the sun rise.
“Do you remember this place,” I asked him, framing his chiseled jaw with my hands.
After a few minutes, he shook himself free of the depths and met my eyes. “Hawaii, when we were fifteen.”
“Welcome back,” I grinned and as he mirrored my smile, it became apparent how long it had been since we were happy. It seemed like decades past.
We stared at the ocean for hours as the sun rose. I missed the sun rising. I missed my gift. Lately it had just been used to run from the Resin or the Synod, whichever one they were.
“Can you promise me something,” Theo asked with an attitude of lament. His hair was out of control now, blowing this way and that. High School Theo would’ve offered him some gel and a comb. He laid back as he spoke, taking a more relaxed stance against one of the steps behind him.
“I will promise you anything.”
He blew out a breath, heavily laden with sorrow, “Sometimes I can’t pull myself out of it—like today. It’s like the voices anchor me to that spot in the garden. Can you promise to get me away from there if it gets too heavy?”
“How do I know when? Is there like a code or are you going to knock twice and whistle once?”
It was a lame attempt at a joke but hearing him laugh proved it was worth the shame.
“Use your intuition. It worked pretty well today.”
Who knew I had intuition. That little attribute may have come in handy all the times I’d stepped out of line.
“Come here,” he commanded, patting the spot between his legs. “You’ve been taking care of me when it should be the other way around.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just always been that way.”
I tilted my head back so that I could see his face upside down, “Maybe that was the problem, Theo. Maybe all the time you were taking care of me, we should’ve been taking care of each other.”
