Chapter 33
Warm spring sunlight shined through the glossy leaves of the apple trees where Ellie sat on the violet-speckled grass and cried into her hands. Eleven-year-old Jack held her in his arms and twirled the end of her braid in his fingers. "It's okay, Ellie. He'll be happy here. He loved this place."
Ellie wiped the tears from her eyes. She brushed her palms over the soft violets and tried to smile before she shuddered and went limp again in Jack's arms. "He . . . he loved to eat the flowers. Why is he gone? Why?"
Jack did all he could to comfort her while Niki dug the shovel into the soft earth to scoop out enough dirt for a tiny grave below a nearby blossoming apple tree. The shoe box containing Mr. Nibbles, Ellie's pet rabbit, was tied shut with a pink ribbon and had been covered in stickers of stars and unicorns. "I'm sorry, Ellie."
"I love him. I loved Mr. Nibbles!"
"I know. We all did. He was a good bunny."
"Why is he gone?" Ellie asked.
"Because he got old, so he died."
Ellie sniffled and sat up, her pink lips quivering. She clutched the frills of her yellow sun dress with her little fingers, her fingernails coated in pink glitter polish. "I told him to never leave me. Why did he leave me?"
"He didn't choose to leave. It just happens sometimes."
"You'll make sure I'll never die, right, Jack? You'll keep me safe."
Niki wiped the sweat from under his feathered black bangs that hung into his eyes. "Don't lie to her. She's old enough to learn the truth."
Jack reached up to gently wipe away the tears from Ellie's cheeks. "Everything dies, Ellie. Everything and everyone will die when it's their time. Think of it like a song. Imagine your favorite song. You love it and you sing along, but that song has an ending. If it kept going forever, it would never be finished. You gave Mr. Nibbles a good life with all the carrots he could eat. He was happy, even at the end. You should be happy, too, because you were a part of his story. Now he's all tied up with a pretty bow and his song is complete."
"I don't want to die."
"I know."
"Is it scary for him?" Ellie asked, her voice a sad whisper. "Will Mr. Nibbles be alone?"
"I'm not sure." Jack watched Niki place the shoe box into the grave and begin to cover it with soil once again. "I like to think that we have all our family and our friends with us when we go, you know, the ones who died before us. Then, when the others die, they'll join us, too. And we'll all live happy forever with nothing to worry about."
Niki patted the dirt with the back of the shovel then wiped his hands on his jeans and came over to sit next to Jack. "I like that. Ellie, I'm sure Mr. Nibbles is hopping through an endless field of millions and millions of violets and daisies with new bunny friends and birds that he can play with forever."
"But he doesn't have me there."
"Not yet, but he will. Sometime, hopefully many years from now, you'll join him there and he'll come hopping into your arms to cuddle with you like he always used to do. I'm sure of it. Am I right, Jack?"
"He's right, Ellie. Mr. Nibbles is happy now."
"I don't want to die alone."
Jack looked at Niki who shrugged his shoulders. He gathered the sobbing girl in a hug once again. "Don't worry. You won't. If you die before us, we'll both go with you. We're always here for you."
"Really? You promise?"
Niki sighed and leaned back against the tree trunk. "Yeah, I promise. We'll be right there with you. You know me and Jack won't let you go alone. You need us."
Jack held onto her for an hour as she slowly cried herself to sleep with her face in his lap and her fingers clenched around his hand. He vowed in that warm field of flowers that he would never let her cry that way again. It was his job to keep her from hurting. With Niki at his side, he would keep her safe and protected from the horrors that the world had waiting for her.
Stale coffee and old fashion magazines. The dull droning of a daytime talk show on a television mounted on the sea foam green wall. The peeling beige vinyl of the lumpy chairs with the sticky wooden arms. The tables with boxes of tissues and brochures about grief counseling. A clock on the wall with a broken face. A wafting scent of biting citrus cleaners. A weeping woman in her teenage son's arms, clutching her husband's plaid shirt. A sleeping man with a pink 'It's a girl' balloon tied to his chair and fresh needle marks on his inner arms.
Jack sat in the back corner of the waiting room where the fading evening light from the nearby window couldn't reach him. He remained there where he had been for twelve hours after being patched up and released. His right arm was in a plain white cast and in a sling. He received forty-three stitches on his legs and back, burn salve on his stomach, and had shards of glass pulled from his calves and knees. His front teeth were chipped and one of his incisors was gone. He was a mass of black bruises, burns, and pain. The doctors told him he was lucky he got away relatively unharmed.
Lucky was far from how he felt.
Still in the smoky clothes from the night before, Jack drifted in and out of restless sleep, stretched out on the chairs with a magazine over his face to block out the snapping fluorescent lights. He hadn't eaten. He only downed cup after cup of bitter black coffee and popped handfuls of ibuprofen to help with the shooting pain. When he wasn't asleep and dreaming torturous dreams of Ellie, he had his eyes fixated on the door where the surgeons would occasionally enter to speak with the waiting family members of patients to give updates.
No one had come to find him. He assumed they had given up on him surviving the crash and he was okay with that. Jack wouldn't have spoken to them even if they had hunted him down. The only word he muttered after waking up in the hospital room that morning was Ellie's name. Now he waited in silence while his mind went blank. He simply existed, living breath to breath, his entire existence centered around that door opening.
Jack had closed his eyes in his growing exhaustion when someone sat next to him. He ignored them, hoping the intruder would notice that he wanted to be left alone and move. After a few minutes, the person spoke softly to him and he knew that the man wasn't going to leave.
"Any updates?"
He opened his eyes to see Niki sitting next to him with crutches propped up against the side table. His friend was beaten and bruised as bad as he was and bandages peeked out of his unbuttoned shirt, winding all the way down his torso to the top of his sweatpants. One pant leg was cut off mid-thigh and the rest of his leg was in a giant cast. When he looked up to his Time Knight's face, he bit back more tears.
Niki tapped his fingers against the bandages that crisscrossed over his head and left eye that was covered in a dense gauze pad. "They say I might not see out of this eye again. I broke my leg in three different places, shattered my knee cap, and broke some ribs. I missed being paralyzed by less than an inch. I'd be in a room right now if it wasn't for Opal. She made me some high-powered elixirs."
Jack only stared at him.
"I jumped. Dean and I went to Zurvan Tower in Memphis and we set explosives to bring the whole thing down. He left, but I stayed behind with my mother until I got a warning through my helmet. I took off running down the stairs to get down as many floors as I could. I leapt down entire flights at once until I felt the first explosion on the ground floor. That's when I ran out onto the floor I was on to the far end that overlooked the river. I thought I was a dead man, but I jumped through the glass and held my breath. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in recovery. I don't know if someone rescued me or if I was just super lucky."
Jack picked up his stained paper coffee cup, but stopped and set it back down. "How many did you kill?"
"Hmm?"
"How many potentially innocent people did you kill?"
Niki's jaw tensed. "They weren't innocent, Jack. They got what they deserved. We might have taken out Xander."
"You can look me in the eyes and tell me that no one in that tower was innocent?" Jack asked.
"Well, I mean, there were some
Time Skippers, but we couldn't do anything about them. Jack, they were just collateral damage. We would have saved them if we could, but you know how those poor people are once they've been attached to the ships like that. They can't recover. We did what we did because we had a chance to stop the Syndicate for good."
"So you bombed a building. Who are you?"
"Don't do this. Not now, not here. Jack, I know it's difficult to understand. I know it's confusing. Please don't be mad at me while we're waiting to hear that our friend is dead."
Jack snarled at his friend. "She's not dead. She's alive and she's going to recover. You don't get to say things that you don't know anything about. Ellie wouldn't die in a car crash. She's too young. She's too strong for that."
"I saw footage of the crash and the cleanup. What happened? Why were you there?"
"They took her. Cleopatra and Kage, someone I met and trusted, gave her to Syndicate agents. They betrayed us. They shoved her in a van and took off. I took a motorcycle and chased after them. When we got to the tunnel, I shot the driver and . . . oh my God." Jack drew a whimpering breath. "I did this. I caused the crash. I did this to Ellie."
"It's not your fault." Niki touched his shoulder, but recoiled when Jack nearly bit him. "You can't start down this road of thinking. You did what you thought would save her."
"No, I remember now. Sasha was telling me to not try anything inside tunnel, that it was too dangerous. That's where the Syndicate, where Xander, killed my mother and grandfather. I thought it was worth the risk. I didn't know how bad it would be . . . I . . . wanted to save her. What have I done?"
"They hurt her, Jack. Not you. You couldn't have known what would happened. Her blood is on the Syndicate's hands."
"How much ibuprofen does it take to overdose?"
Niki held out his hand in a demanding gesture. "Give it to me. Give me the bottle."
Jack reluctantly dug it out of the crease between the sticky vinyl cushions and shoved it into his Time Knight's hands. "I wasn't going to do it, not yet. We made a promise. We made a promise, Niki."
"What are you talking about?"
"In Mr. Richard's apple orchard. It was years ago. Mr. Nibbles had died and we took him to the field to bury him. Ellie was scared to die alone, so we promised her that if she died before us, we would go with her. She was so afraid. I can't let her go alone. She needs us."
Niki let out a long, low sigh and leaned back in his chair below the watercolor painting of a lily-pad-covered pond. "We were kids. We didn't know what we were saying. You can't take that promise seriously. I won't let you hurt yourself. If you try, I'll stop you. I'm still stronger than you, even with a busted leg and one eye. Don't try me, Carter. It's my purpose in life to keep you safe, so it's killing me right now that I let you get banged up like this. I won't let anything else happen to you."
"You killed hundreds of people. I just can't . . . why?"
"We're here for Ellie, not for arguing. We can fight it out later, after she gets better."
"Where's Dean?" Jack asked, trying to quell his growing rage.
"No one has heard from him since the tower collapsed."
"Oh."
Niki looked over Jack's head at the television before taking the remote control from the side table and bumping the volume up. "Oh, hell, no."
Jack looked at the screen where Xander was giving a speech in a purple suit, without a single scratch on him. His anger blocked out the words. "Was it worth it, Niki? Was your collateral damage worth it?"
He muted the television then threw the remote across the room, startling a nurse who was refilling the coffee maker. "Barry was sure Xander was there. He assured me there was no way we would miss him."
"You killed hundreds of innocent Chronomancers whose lives were already in shambles and for what? Tell me. Tell me! What did you kill them for, huh? Why did they have to die?"
"Mr. Carter?"
The deep man's voice drew Jack's attention to the surgeon in the blood-smeared green scrubs with the surgical mask around his neck. He jumped to his feet, bumping into the table and knocking off his coffee. "Oh, my God. How is she?"
"Do you want to see her before we take her to the morgue?"
Breathless. Speechless. Numb.
Jack's bruised lips moved, but no sound came out. He tried to breathe, but his lungs only burned.
Niki struggled to stand and hobbled up next to him on his crutches. He said something to the surgeon before turning to Jack.
He couldn't hear anything. He couldn't hear his friend's words. Like he was struck by lightning, Jack was welded in place, his feet refusing to move. His body turned frozen and stiff. When he finally managed to blink, he found himself being led slowly down a long hallway that was empty aside from nurses who moved from station to station. His body moved without his consent, carrying him towards a door at the end of the black and white hallway.
"I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Carter. I can tell you with certainty that we did all we could to save her. We don't believe she suffered for long."
Jack stepped into the frigid room where the love of his life was positioned on a bed like she was asleep. Her charred hands were placed delicately on her stomach and most of the blood had been cleaned away. Nurses were already busy removing the machines and tubes from her bedside. Jack shuffled forward into the dim light that shined down on her hair like an angel's halo. His chest twisted into knots that threatened to rip his heart out of his ribs as he lifted his left hand.
His fingertips grazed her eyelashes then down her dirt-streaked cheeks to her button nose and finally to her slightly parted lips that had started to turn cold and blue around the edges. Something sparkled in her tangled hair, so Jack dug into her locks to find the small silver object. When he brought it out into the light, he held the daisy-shaped charm to his lips.
He didn't cry. He didn't scream or yell or make a scene. He didn't curse or throw things. Jack simply leaned down and kissed her soft lips one last time. He then stood back up and left the room. It wasn't until he was outside the hospital and breathed fresh air that it hit him.
From somewhere buried deep down in the hidden reaches of his soul, Jack howled with a cry that wracked every cell in his body. He dropped to his knees on the sidewalk and screamed. He screamed and screamed until his lungs threatened to collapse, but he screamed louder. He screamed until static and darkness crept into his vision. He screamed until he broke down coughing and spitting out blood. He screamed without ceasing, even when nurses rushed out to help him. For every person he lost, for everything that had been stolen from him, for every hope he had for the future that had been shredded, Jack screamed.
Chapter 34
As if even the heavens mourned for her, the remote field outside of Mana Glen had been drenched with showers off and on through the morning. Her oak casket had been engraved with daisies down the sides and was slicked with a sheen of rainwater. Everyone in attendance held umbrellas as the rain pattered softly on the dead grass and the tarp that had been spread out to cover the recently-dug hole that would be her resting place.
Sasha and Barry said a few words that Jack was too distracted to hear. Police Chief Daniels and Leo sang a sad duet of Amazing Grace. Bradley and Nathan openly cried and passed around a box of tissues. Opal rubbed Niki's back where he leaned on his crutches and remained the ever-present steady rock at his friend's side. Even Thyme had written her a sweet poem and recited it.
Jack stood there, stoically in his long black coat with his arm in a sling and his polished loafers sinking into the mud. He had no umbrella and he didn't care. The rain washed over him, disguising his tears and soaking through his ill-fitting suit that Niki forced him to wear. His chin was prickly with stubble and dark bags hung under his bloodshot eyes. His lips were cracked and his skin was pale and sickly.
The past four days had run together like water-smeared ink on a page. There was no sleep, no food, no morning or setting sun to break up the bleakness of the hotel room where he had be
en watched every moment of the day and night to make sure he wouldn't harm himself. He languished in the grey light that had dared to filter in through the curtains.
Jack had only crawled out of bed to use the bathroom one time, but he crumpled to the tiles and stayed there for hours until Leo came to carry him back to bed. Not even the elixirs Opal crafted for him made a difference.
Now here he was, the last place on Earth he ever wanted to be.
Niki took something from his father then slowly hobbled up to Ellie's casket. He paused and his voice cracked as he spoke. "We were inseparable, the three of us. We grew up together as friends, as siblings, as close as three kids could be. We loved each other and Ellie was in the middle of that. Everything we did, she called the shots. We would have done anything to see her smile. She was so filled with life and love for everything around her. She was too good, too pure for this place. Ellie . . . Ellie wasn't like us. She wasn't rough around the edges or moody or sad. She was innocence, she was grace, she was happiness."
Jack bit his lip.
"I'm not a very religious person, as most of you know, but I have to have faith in one thing. I have to believe that there's something after this. There has to be. We feel too much, we experience too much, we love too much to just burn out into nothing. But if we do go into the darkness, I know that Ellie's light is shining so bright in that void that it's bringing beauty to the bleakness. She was like that. She lit up every room she entered with that smile that I would have died to see again."
Jack stuffed his trembling hands into his pockets when Opal wrapped him in a comforting hug.
Chronomancer (Time Mage Saga Book 1) Page 55
