by A. E. Watson
He will be my last victim.
There is no one spared from my wake.
Everyone suffers.
Everyone sacrifices.
My fingers leave a dark bloody trail along the counters and doorways as I stumble across the dank castle where there is no light. No heat. No love.
My ragged breath makes steam as I stagger through the dimly lit halls.
Sitting, staring at the wall from a ruined old Queen Anne’s chair, I find him. His dark hair is ruffled and longer than it should be. He doesn't look like a gentleman. He looks like he has sat for a very long time, staring at the wall. Everything about him is less, except the love I still feel. I think that is the only thing in this whole world that is more.
“Why have you come?” he mutters softly but I can smell the rage on him. It's delicious.
“I need a favor.” I almost laugh weakly at the request. He has never seen me before in this life, and yet somehow I sense he knows me.
“Can I guess what that might be?” He sounds like he might also laugh but there is a sinister bitterness to his tone, even if it is barely audible.
“Why not.” I shrug as I land at the stone hearth and slump into a heap, gripping my spasm-riddled stomach.
“You want me to cut you with a dagger.” His dark stare flickers to me.
“How—?”
“It’s a funny story actually.” His dark eyes are filled with pain and humor, and I don't know which one is stronger. “Once, many years ago, actually centuries—” He starts to laugh like he’s insane. Perhaps he is. I know I am close to it. “Let me start over.” He clears his throat and I realize how much I have missed his accent and deep voice. Just being near him I feel better. Grounded and safe. “Once, many centuries ago, I was at a party. I was wooing a girl so I could sneak her outside and compel terrible things from her.” His smile changes as he recalls the moment perfectly, so perfectly I can see the images dancing in his eyes. “She was beautiful and I was going to ask her to marry me. I was going to change her to be my bride, forever.” He gives me a look. “I’m a vampire.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.” He sniffs like he’s insulted that I am not impressed. “Anyway, I was at the party and the most remarkable event occurred. I glanced out the window at just the right moment to catch myself walking through the yard and garden. Of course I had to excuse myself and leave her side, so I could inquire as to how there were two of me.” He chuckles, again staring blankly.
“Then what happened?” I ask, not sure why he’s staring for so long at the wall.
“I went and confronted myself. The other me told me we had no time to speak and that I had to listen to him. He said he came from the future using a magical mirror. He showed me a magical item with dozens of photos of you, which I now know is a cell phone, and said I needed to remember you. He said something irrational about how you, Ellie, and Maggie would never happen. He said he hadn’t involved himself with the Van Helsings, thus he never ended up saving or falling in love with a girl named Maggie.”
“He was right. I erased our entire past. That's what he was talking about.”
“Still doesn't really make sense though.” He shakes his head to contradict himself. “At any rate, he was so upset about losing everything in the world that mattered to him. He said nothing would have meaning unless I found you in the year two thousand and twelve, around Boston. He said you were the sin eater and I would be able to track you. He said everything would make sense one day. Seeing myself standing before me, of course I knew it was something dire, but I assumed it was magic. Until I heard of the Ellie girl being killed at the party. Then I wondered how much of it was true and how much was magic.”
“It was all true.”
“He said you were the most important thing in the world.” He stares at me, maybe trying to see how a beaten, bloody mess of a girl could ever be that important.
“I’m not. Just my death is.”
A smile grazes his lips. “Death.” He sighs. “Such a strange request.” His eyes land on my wings. “You are not easily killed, sin eater.”
“This dagger. It can kill me easily. Just stab it into my heart. It’s blessed. It’ll pull all of my life essence from me.”
He stares at the dagger, not moving. My hand starts to shake from holding the blade out to him.
“Please, take it.”
He shakes his head. “I never finished my story.”
“I don't have much time.” I pull the dagger back in, hoping he isn’t much longer.
“I found you well before two thousand and twelve, at a house where the earth witches lived. I couldn't come inside so I watched you from outside for a very long time. I didn't understand why I felt so drawn to you so I stayed and tried to figure it out.” He looks somber. “One day when you were just a girl, a lower angel came, intent on killing you I think, but I stopped him.” His eyes fill with tears but I don't know why. “You were sitting in the garden, coloring and must have heard the noise when I ripped his head from his shoulders. You came around the corner and saw me standing there with blood dripping from my hands. You looked so scared. I couldn't handle it, I don't know why.” He pauses. “I wiped my hands and hurried to your side. I compelled you to forget but something else happened. When I touched you everything came back. I remembered everything.” His right hand lifts, covering where his heart lies in his chest. “I saw the magic and the changes. I saw who we were in a world that never existed. Things were different from then on. I stayed close by, always in the shadows but always near.”
Tears fill my eyes again, but I don't know what to say.
“I remember loving you, but I don't have the love or the warmth. I’m a shell, hollow and broken. It’s the worst fate a man can have. I know how it feels to be happy, but it is just out of my reach. I wish the breeze would lift me up and blow me away.”
“I’m so sorry.” I don't even know where to start being sorry.
His eyes lift to mine and bore a hole in my heartless chest. “And now you wish for me to kill you. To end the small measure of feeling I still have living in me that will die with you.”
“I need to die to free the world. If I stay alive I’ll become the Antichrist and help rule the world in darkness. If I die it all gets reset. You knew this and you still helped me.”
He chuckles and sounds like the old version of Constantine. He laughs too hard, like he has something up his sleeve. He wipes his eyes as he giggles on for a moment, echoing off the walls around us. He sighs. “That is a good one.” He nods. “I needed that. I don't remember the last time I laughed.”
“What?”
“Oh, Rayne. Of course I knew that once. I told myself you would come with that dagger and ask me to kill you. The version of me you were with realized your plan before you even did. He knew you would need to die by the dagger. He told me not to do it.” He shakes his head. “And I won’t. He said we could easily live with the version of you that is the Antichrist.”
My jaw drops.
His Miss Havisham impression fades a little as he settles back into his worn chair. “Of course I won’t kill you. I don't care if you’re evil, I love you.”
The dagger weighs a ton in my hands, but I see now I will have to do it myself. “I had hoped you would spare me purgatory. I did want to go to Heaven. I can’t lie.” I force the image of him dressed impeccably in his SUV, eating fast food and laughing at me. Tears try to blind me from seeing the image of him the way he is as I lift the dagger and drive it into my own chest.
The red-hot pain sears through me. I scream; I can’t even stop myself.
“No!” He jumps up, rushing me. “No! No! No! Don't do this to me. Don't do this.”
I lift a bloody hand to his face, laying my palm on his cheek. “I love you too. I didn't always see it, but I have always felt it.” It’s the most truthful thing I have ever said.
Tears flood his face as he bends forward, cocooning me in him. He shakes and grips so h
ard I think he’s pushing the dagger in farther, helping me along. My breaths seize as the magic sucks me from my body.
“Stay with me. It’s not perfect but we’re here together. Stay with me, please,” he whispers into my hair. His sobs fade as light fills the dark room, fracturing of into a million splinters. He drags the dagger from my chest, making me cough and rattle with the lights coming from me.
He says he does, but he can’t know why I am so eager to die. He can’t truly understand that we have already lived so many lives together. He doesn't understand the hurry. Not the way the four girls standing behind him in the light do.
My sisters, the dead, wait for me with soft smiles on their faces.
They know how hard it’s been to get to this moment.
What we have each given up.
His lips press kisses as he tries to save me but there’s no stopping this. I am free. I want the freedom more than any boy or love in the entire world.
Ellie and Maggie understand the love I have for the man holding me, so when I am free of my body and able to walk to them, they don't look at me the way Liana and Ezara do. They stare at him as if this is the last chance they have to see him.
The way he sobs, rocking my body, our body, is heartbreaking, but I can’t feel the sadness I know I should.
I’m free.
I breathe unrestricted for the first time, ever.
Turning my back on the man I love and my body, I let my sisters wrap themselves around me. They’re the same as I am. Not human and not dead, not ghosts and yet not solid. Something else. Our wings are lights and our hearts are whole.
“You ready to go home, Rayne?” Liana asks sweetly.
“I am.” I let them show me the way. We don't fly or walk into a bright light. We hug and suddenly we’re there.
I would know the smell of the place even if I couldn't see it.
I am finally home.
Chapter Twenty-One
There are no reunions. I don't see the people I think about.
Mona is in the garden, so she isn’t here obviously.
Willow is with her.
Michelle might not have come here, I suppose. This place was never much of anything to her.
Lillith and Lucifer are likely somewhere unpleasant, somewhere hot and hateful like them.
The nixie aren’t here. There’s no water. I can’t imagine a nixie away from the water.
It’s just me and my sisters in a small house.
The air is bright and white and misty.
Absolutely nothing is the way I expected, and yet it is the place I realize now I have always seen as home.
The room we’re in is mine. It’s not the dorm room or the one I had at Constantine’s. It’s the room I had with Willow in our little house, before it burned to the ground.
It’s just like it was. The flowers she painted on the walls are here and the smell of her herbs linger.
This is the happiest place I have ever had. In all my lives it is the childhood I loved the most. I never knew it wasn't perfect.
My life as Ellie is the life I would choose if I had a choice.
But this one is the best childhood. Willow tried the hardest and loved me the most.
I guess at the end you look at the beginning. I’ve had five, technically six.
If I had to choose how to do it again, this is the beginning I would seek out.
“Do we just hang out here?” I ask after a long silence.
Ellie laughs. Her accent makes me happy. “No. We’re waiting for him. We’re finally free.”
“Him? Him who?”
“Him me.”
I turn to see the man with the white eyes who became a stag in front of me in the garden.
“Yahweh,” I say his name in confusion.
He nods, almost bowing slightly. “At your service.”
“I think you have that backwards.” I say it with a nice dose of sarcasm, realizing I have some bitterness left in me. I thought Heaven would be all kindness and sweetness.
“You are my greatest creation, ever.” He smiles so peacefully I almost forget the centuries of pain I have as scars in my heart. “You girls are the true meaning of humanity. Even without souls each one of you is a selfless creature. It’s a complete conundrum.”
“We had the light.” Maggie scowls.
“Some of you did indeed. You who were born of Lillith always had a little piece of it, each of you. Lillith thought she had it all, but she didn't. Each pregnancy gleaned some of it from her until she had none of it left. Her last pregnancy took the last of the light. By killing each girl, you drew the light into the dagger, and then by stabbing yourself you made the light whole again. And when you died the light left you. It filled the earth with love, all the love it was missing. It put light in every corner, chasing away the shadows. You saved the world, Rayne. All of you have sacrificed more than any one person ever has.” He shakes his head. “For that I am sorry. I never wished for you to be my lambs for slaughter, but I had to teach your parents a lesson. I had to make them clean up the mess they made of the world I worked so hard to perfect.”
“Do we go to Heaven or do we just stay here in this house?” I can’t help but dread the idea that this is the place I’ll spend all of my eternity.
“Where do you want to go?” He smiles wide.
“I want to be a willow tree near a river so I can see all the work we’ve done and watch the world heal,” Liana speaks up first. She is technically the eldest of us all.
“I want to be a speck of dust floating on the breeze, free of form and people. I just want to float forever,” Ezara says next.
“I want to be part of the water. I want to be something beautiful in the ocean. So I can see everything the nixie saw,” Maggie beams.
“I wanted to be ash with my lover, but he is not ash now.” Ellie sighs. “I suppose if I can’t be with him, I want to be a star so I can watch him always. An eternity of seeing him, that is my wish.”
I don't know what to say so I just sit and watch as Yahweh nods. “Done.” He turns his eyes to me. “What do you wish?”
“I don't know. I guess to go to the garden and be with my friends and family.”
His eyes narrow. “The garden isn’t a future for you. You may visit once. After that you need to decide how you wish Heaven to be for you.”
A smile crosses my lips. “Heaven is our wish, whatever we want it to be?”
“Of course.” He says it like I should know that.
Liana rushes us all, hugging and kissing. “I will miss having you in my dreams and thoughts.”
We embrace one another as we realize this is the last time we will see each other. There will be no reason to—we have done the thing we needed to do.
There are no tears in the encirclement. We cling to each other with our eyes closed as if we’re taking a little something from each sister. Something to hang on to.
When we break they each fade, leaving the bedroom until there is only Yahweh and me.
He gives me a look. “You ready?”
“Yeah.”
He takes my hand in his and in the space of a blink we are in the garden, right where Mona said he would come from.
It’s warm and pleasant, as always.
“Is there anyway to see what it looks like outside the gates?” I ask when I see the path to the village.
“There is. We’ll discuss it later. For now, enjoy the day you have here. It will be the only day you are ever granted. Don’t waste a second.” He waves and then he’s gone again.
I don't waste the second to sigh like I want to. I don't waste anything. I follow his advice and make a run for it, sprinting through the garden and village to the castle.
It looks like it did when I first arrived here. It’s pristine.
I hurry past the guards and servants to the throne room. Gill is in his seat, looking handsome and noble and too attractive for one person to look.
His eyes narrow when he sees me, like he doubt
s what he sees. I smile and run for him but it takes him a second to not look startled. “Rayne?”
“Hey, Gill!” I wave like an awkward moron.
His face is stoic and then a wide smile crests his lips. “RAYNE!” He jumps up, rushing me and hugging hard. I wheeze and pat him on the back as he spins me around. “You came! You’re alive!”
I hug and pat again, hoping he’s going to put me down but he doesn't. It’s officially the longest hug ever. I squirm from his octopus arms, getting my feet on the ground. “Where’s Mona?”
He doesn't answer. He grabs my hand and drags me through the castle to the room where I came out of the mirror once.
She and Willow are sitting with a small blonde girl. She might be two, if she’s a day. She looks like a tiny fairy princess.
Her eyes are Gill’s, sparkling and bright. But her lips are Mona’s for sure.
Mona glances back with a smile for Gill. When she sees me, her dark eyes widen as she jumps off the bed, attacking.
Willow joins in and the room fills with squeals of delight and sobs of regret.
But we are together. Nothing hurts. Nothing stings. I don't have to avoid the scent of evil. I don't even have to be careful being around others. I’m not starved. I’m not tired.
I’m grateful, even if it’s just for the day. It’s better than anything because I didn't expect it.
“Nene!” Willow sobs into my neck, burying her face.
“Momma!” the little girl behind us calls out. She sounds worried. When I pull back Mona lifts the tiny creature into her arms, letting the girl see my face.
“Ray, meet Auntie Rayne.”
I blink a tear from my eyes so I can see her little face clearly. There is no doubt this child is the one who was meant to be born. She beams with light and love.
I might have been the light of the world, but I was never going to be the mother to the savior.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Ray.” I reach for her, unsure about touching babies or toddlers. I don't recall a single memory where I have spent much time with them.
The little girl’s sparkly green eyes widen and her little mouth tightens but just like her mother, she bravely reaches for me, a perfect stranger.
