Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

I wasn't afraid at the beginning. I couldn't remember anything worth being afraid of. I just knew that I was warm. God that felt nice. I could bottle that feeling and become a billionaire.

  I tested my eyes and saw that I was in heaven.

  I saw an angel.

  A radiant angel, with a tranquil smile on her smooth, perfect face. Her fair hair fell forward as she looked down into my eyes, ready to take my hand and walk me to paradise.

  "Wake up, girlfriend," the angel sang.

  Wrong. I was in hell. My own personal hell simply wouldn't be complete without Jesse Cannon.

  "Jesse?"

  He was seated beside me, leaning over me. And he was smiling. Something was wrong about that. I tried to remember what.

  "What's your name?" he asked with a bored sigh, flipping a tumble of hair out of his face when he sat up straight. "I'm supposed to ask you that."

  I froze for a moment, stunned that I didn't quite know the answer. So I said the first thing I could think of:

  "Whitney Leroy Jackson," I slurred. "But you can call me Jackson."

  Jesse's face lit up and he stifled a laugh. "Oh, honey," he said. "That one's new."

  Why, why, did he have to be here? I groaned and scrunched my eyes against a headache, blinking them open again. My surroundings blurred into focus: white walls, a television, my feet, a heavy oak door. I was lying on a bed with railing and buttons and lights. Hospital room. Not the bar. Not Steve's apartment. Not the L.A. beach house or the bus. My heartbeat picked up, faster and faster, and I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to hide.

  "Where are we?" I could hear the terror in my own voice, but I didn't understand why it was there.

  Jesse's bemused smile quickly faded, and his brows creased with an almost maternal sympathy. "Someplace completely safe," he said patiently, pushing a tangle of hair off my forehead. "I promise."

  I decided to believe him. My eyes roamed for a long time, looking at the same objects over and over again, searching for something that would pull everything together in my mind and make sense. It wasn't working.

  "You're fine," Jesse assured me, his hand still meandering idly through my hair. "You just have a percussion."

  I frowned and surveyed myself, realizing that I was wearing one of those stupid, papery hospital gowns. Sleeveless. My left shoulder, from what I could tell, was a mess of tubes and gauze and tape. I didn't dare pull up the blanket to investigate further. The electrical burn was a numb, dull thud and nothing more. Bless you, Madam Morphine.

  "A concussion," I corrected him in a surly tone.

  Jesse yawned and patted my shoulder. "There's my Jordan. Still the smartest girl I know."

  Something about his very presence still bothered me. It wasn't that I was necessarily irritated with Jesse, not anymore than usual. I just felt for some reason like he shouldn't be there.

  I focused on him, listening to the toothless ache beneath my burn bandages. It all began to crash back, out of order, the memories dizzying and horrific and indistinct: Rushing water. Ghi, the blood. The elevator. Jesse, writhing and wailing on a tiled floor, his hands evaporating into thin air.

  "Jesse!" I gasped, wanting to spring upward, but I had no leverage. The hand that had been petting my shoulder was suddenly pressing me down.

  "You died!"

  "I know," Jesse said calmly.

  Hysteria gripped my insides. "And you and Ghi and Corin and everybody. Everybody died. All of you and ... what? How?"

  "Jordan, I know," Jesse said, stern and composed, but also tired. So wretchedly tired. "I know what you saw. But you have to calm down. We're okay. All of us are fine, I promise."

  The scalding stairwell door. The ghastly white skin, bursting apart, and Dahrkren's mind-numbing scream. Where had it all gone, if this place was safe? How were they alive, if I had seen what I did?

  "How?"

  "Just relax, please."

  Relaxing wasn't an option. He looked so perfect, whole. It made no sense at all.

  "But ... is it over?" My mind raced to filter the images, to put them in order. "That guy, that thing, is it dead?"

  Jesse's lips stiffened and he shook his head.

  "No. It's not over. He ran before we could―" He had to interrupt himself; such was the sudden increase in my panic. "Listen, he can't come here. No Hollow can, I promise. Okay?"

  Not okay. I needed details.

  "Where's here?" I demanded. "Tell me what happened."

  He owed me. He owed me whatever I wanted.

  I told Jesse as much with a stern glare, making my case perfectly clear without saying a word. And while I glared, his unmarred appearance dawned on me anew. There was no evidence of his disfiguring wounds, not a single scar, not even the shiner I'd given him myself. Stranger still, he appeared lighter somehow, buoyant, ethereal. His hair a little more weightless, limbs leaner, eyes slightly more slanted. Hell, if I was seeing correctly, then Jesse Cannon looked more physically immaculate than ever before, and that was something I wouldn't have thought humanly possible.

  Yet he also looked so profoundly worn out, crestfallen. Things were not as alright, as safe, as he was trying to convince me. I was sure.

  "Jesse. Tell me ...."

  He sighed, insolent and exasperated. Still the same Jesse.

  "It's just hard to explain," he complained. He paused to study me with a smirk. "Not to mention I've sort of told you about it like, seven times already ...."

  Right. The concussion.

  Like I cared. "Go on," I coaxed. "What happened after you died?"

  "We didn't die, Jordan," Jesse insisted. "We were all just ... something else for a little while."

  I thought about his body trailing off into nothingness. The monstrous tidal wave, and the blinding light. I remembered the kicking of the earth beneath me and the crackle of thunder, the heat, the water, and the ripping wind.

  "Something else," I repeated.

  Jesse nodded.

  "Our true forms, let's just put it that way," he said. "We just became our true forms for a little while, out of necessity. That's all. And then, back to this." He gestured at his not-so-true form, which he was obviously still very pleased with. Some things never change.

  But I still didn't understand. My mind tried to wrap itself around that concept, grasping to distinguish between relief and horror and morphine. If he was talking about what I thought he was talking about, then we should both be dead.

  "Jesse? You Became? Isn't that supposed to kill you―"

  "Oh, no, no, no." Jesse frowned and stopped me, surprised that I'd come to that conclusion. Evidently, we hadn't gotten this far during my previous bouts of consciousness.

  "You didn't witness the Becoming," he said, crossing his arms somewhat haughtily. "We can only do that under certain, pacific conditions, you know."

  "Specific. Fine. What the hell was it then?"

  Jesse uncrossed his arms, opting to place his hands on his hips for more effect.

  "Well. I don't know. But it wasn't that," he declared, agitated. "It just ... happened. We all changed, but it was too soon. That's what they were telling us the whole time. Not out loud, but in our heads. Except we didn't have heads, so―"

  Okay.

  So maybe Jesse Cannon wasn't the best person to get me all caught up on the Vessels' supposed out-of-body experiences. I squinted my eyes closed, waiting for a brief surge of headache to pass, and then held up a hand to curb his rambling.

  "Come here," I said.

  It could wait. What mattered most was clear: I was breathing, and Jesse was―well, he wasn't dead. He bent toward me, and I reached up with my right hand to touch the surface of his face, the side that had been more or less gone before, just to be sure. He held still and watched me expectantly, unoffended by my soft gasp of surprise.

  Jesse wasn't human.

  Whether or not he had been before, he definitely wasn't now.

  There is no way to describe what he felt like, not a single analogy in existence which really
nails it. Sticking an open hand out the window on the highway at 80mph comes to mind, and yet it was nothing like that at all, because nothing was moving and there was more tangibility to him, more substance. He felt how the mist from a dry ice machine would feel if it were something firm, something solid that you could actually touch.

  What had happened, how it had happened, and the impossible physics against my fingers―it didn't have to make sense anymore. Jesse was alive, unhurt, and here with me. I wanted to keep my hand where it was, afraid he would start evaporating if I moved it.

  "So you're really okay?" I asked. "I'm really okay?"

  "We're really okay." Jesse smiled. The slight shift of muscle felt almost like a breeze against my palm.

  And then his expression changed again. It plummeted to a serious and resigned melancholy, a very un-Jesse-like expression. He lowered his head down, pressed his forehead into my good shoulder. "I'm so sorry," he murmured.

  "Save it," I said. The apologies could wait. I'd never forgive him, of course, but at the moment, I was content to let the morphine keep dripping and to have my closest friend sitting with me. Letting all nightmares melt away into drug-induced oblivion, I closed my eyes, breathed in Jesse's smell―which hadn't changed, I noticed―and put my arms around him.

  I put my arms around him ...

  I put my arms around him ...

  Let's try this again:

  I put.

  My arms.

  Around him.

  Well, one of my arms went around him. The left one―why wasn't it moving? It was still under the blanket. All the damn tubes and bandages were in the way. It had been numbed. Yes. Yes, that was it.

  Jesse tensed, like he wasn't ever going to move again so long as he could help it, like he wanted me to stay just as I was, sleepy and assuaged. I withdrew my right arm and reached to touch the other, to feel the bandages, see how much it hurt, assess the damage.

  I remember reaching, feeling, for much longer than I needed to.

  Like it would just be there if I checked more thoroughly.

  "Jesse." My voice cracked, and then it grew a dangerous edge. "Jesse ...."

  He sat up, watching my face. So tired, so tired.

  I choked. Heat rushed to my face. I spoke but the words had no sound behind them.

  "Jesse! What is this? What the fuck is this?!"

  That last part came out just fine. I screamed. I threw the sheets and blankets to the foot of the bed, looking at myself in frantic disbelief. I pushed Jesse away, took a swing at him, and he just sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, looking so completely exhausted and despondent.

  Of course he did. I woke up more than once that day, facing a fog of total confusion, a murky blank slate. I only remember losing my arm the one time.

  Jesse remembers all eight times, and it serves him right.

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