by May Dawson
He shook his head. “I dropped hints, but I didn’t tell her. Not really. I wanted to believe that if she knew, she’d come back and rescue me.”
“But you weren’t sure?”
He sat gracefully, cross-legged, and began to unpack the basket between us. “I can’t say that around Ryker or Levi. They just see her as the perfect mom. The perfect hunter.”
“But you and I both have our mommy issues.” He might be surprised if he talked to them more. There were so many secrets left tangled between these brothers.
I unknotted my hair tie, shaking my hair loose over my shoulders; the sun felt good, warming my hair and my tense shoulders.
“You have to wonder, when they sent us away, if they were really looking out for us,” he said. “Or if they were looking out for themselves.”
He was looking out over the hill, the breeze ruffling his curls. But then he returned to pulling out glass containers from the basket. “Anyway, I thought you’d like to have some British stuff. I know you think I’m the least romantic guy on the planet—which is probably true—but I made you a fucking pie, Ellis. So that should count for something.”
I grinned. “It depends on how the crust came out.”
“Oh, the crust came from a box, I don’t like you that much.” He handed me a can of bubbly water. “Hydrate. You still have to hit the gym when we get back.”
“I thought we were taking a day off.” Before he could call me a dosser, whatever that was—besides bad—I added, “I’m kidding. I like staying busy.”
He nodded. The spread he put out—strawberries, grapes, meat pie which I thought was going to be an atrocity but was actually deliciousness, cheese and crackers—kept us busy for a while, eating in amiable silence for once.
Still thinking about both staying busy and the ticking clock that no one knew about, I said, “I’ve been trying to figure out how to project. You know, like Ryker does? I found a thing in one of the books.”
“Which book?”
“Pacific Chronicles. The third one.”
“You can’t trust anything from the west coast,” he said. “Optimistic magic, every time.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“And why the hell are you doing that on your own?” He raked a hand through his curls, suddenly angry with me. “What if you manage to get out of your body and get into a situation you can’t handle? Like into the Far?”
“I didn’t think it was that easy to end up in the Far.”
“You don’t think, period,” he grumbled. “Has Ryker or Levi been helping you?”
“No,” I admitted. I was worried I’d tip my hand to my dead sister’s ghost, who might or might not be reporting on my every move to Mr. Joseph. “I just have so much to learn and so little time—”
“You have time!” he said. “Time to do things right and not end up dead.”
“So you don’t think it’s possible for someone who’s just ordinary to project like Ryker does?”
“Who the hell is just ordinary around here?” he muttered. “You’re certainly an extraordinary pain in the ass.”
“What do you care?”
He shot me a look. “We’ve covered this already.”
I opened my mouth to answer him, and he leaned in and kissed me.
9
I froze. Jacob’s lips pressed against mine, a gentle, chaste kiss, but his lips were firm. I inhaled his bitter-coffee-and-harsh-soap scent, something spicy like aftershave, and I thought I should push him away even as my lips parted against his. I felt myself soften despite my best intentions.
Those bright golden eyes closed as he felt me respond, and he kissed my lower lip, slowly, like he was savoring me. But I kept my eyes open; I wanted to see him, those long lashes resting on chiseled cheekbones, the scar that cut into his eyebrow that I’d not noticed before.
His eyes fluttered open again as he pulled away slightly, running his thumb slowly over my lower lip.
My heart was beating so fast that my chest ached. I tilted my chin up, out of his grasp, trying to get myself together. “Well, that’s a bummer. Nothing burst into flame that time.”
I knew it was too far the second I said it—he had been unexpectedly vulnerable, first opening up about his mother and his time in England, and then kissing me—and I sunk my teeth into my lower lip. I wished that I could take it back.
There was a space between us, a breath while he regarded me steadily. Then Jacob grinned. “You’re such an ass, Ellis.”
I let out a long, slow breath, relieved that he wasn’t mad.
“Why’d you kiss me?” I asked.
“Cursed,” he said shortly.
“You’re not so cursed that you can’t resist kissing me.” I poked his hard-muscled bicep. Because, as he liked to point out, I was so mature. “You wanted to kiss me.”
“And you wanted to kiss me,” he said. He was looking away over the hill again, the slightest smirk still turning up the corners of his kissable lips. The wind ruffling his curls made me want to run my hand through them and try to tame them.
The cocky ass.
He was right, though.
He fell back on the blanket, his shoulder brushing against my leg, and stared up at the sky. His golden eyes seemed to reflect back the light of the sun. “Are you done eating? Should we get back to reality now, Ellis?”
I shook my head, and his lips arched up a little more.
I wanted to smack him. “No, because I want you to teach me to project. I know Ryker’s gift is special, but when we were in the hospital, Levi said he was talking to you. That you were their guy on the outside.”
“Oh, that,” Jacob said. “We have a place we all go when we need to talk. You have to know where you’re going, you have to have a clear picture.”
“And I wouldn’t know.”
He glanced over at me sharply. “What’s troubling you?”
The thinnest breeze from behind me raised the hairs on the back of my neck, reminding me that I might not be alone, not ever. I felt my features twist briefly. I didn’t even know for sure that my sister couldn’t be trusted. She had always tried to protect me—I remembered her leading me into Levi’s arms when Tom was intent on murdering me—but she was trapped by a monster. She might not have a choice.
Jacob sat up on his elbows, his eyes still steady on me. “Is it your mother? Did you want to see her?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to learn everything I need to learn. So I can go into the Far and help my sister.”
My voice came out too loud, like I was saying that for someone else to hear.
Jacob gave me a strange look and sat up the rest of the way, resting his elbows on his knees. He seemed like he was thinking about something, and then he scrambled up to his feet.
I glanced to one side through my blur of tears, staring at his denim-clad legs and his boat shoes. Boat shoes. Ryker and Levi wore steel-toed boots, but apparently Jacob was confident he could slay poltergeists in the most preppie footwear possible.
“Well?” he asked impatiently, his hand held out to me. “Are you going to get off the picnic blanket so I can pack up?”
He must be done with our date, especially as I’d reminded him we had training to do. Especially as I’d started crying. That was always bad luck on a date. Jacob wasn’t the only person who needed Dating 101.
“I’ll take you where we meet so you’ll have it in your head. If you know where to go, you’ll always be able to find us.”
I wiped away my tears quickly and put my hand in his, letting him pull me to my feet. “Thank you.”
“Please don’t mention it,” he said drily, as if he savored his reputation as the asshole brother.
Half an hour later, we’d packed everything back up and hiked back out to the Jeep. My heart was still beating too fast, but now it was because I was so desperate to tell someone my secret. I felt like something had to go wrong. I’d been trying to find a way to tell them without my sister following us for so long. I fel
t the secret like a pressure in my chest, like I was going to explode if I didn’t tell the boys that I’d been keeping something from them.
Jacob drove us back to the house, and as he pulled into the driveway, I side-eyed him.
“Come on,” he said, ignoring the look I gave him. He parked in front of the garage instead of opening the door. He didn’t want Ryker and Levi to know we were back yet.
I threw my door open and clambered down. My leg felt restless, like I wanted to run, and when Jacob started across the yard towards the running trail, my pace quickened, outpacing him slightly, until I stopped and turned back to look for him.
He was right there behind me, his long stride matching min. He slipped his hand into mine. His fingers were warm and lithe, his palm warm, and I felt comforted by his hand on mine even though I looked up at him in confusion. It was hard to imagine Jacob, even if he found his romantic side, ever being the hand-holding type.
He matched my quick pace, and when I broke into a run, he ran with me, our hands linking us as we ran down the path. The low-slung branches above our heads seemed to whip past us as we ran, until I felt him tug me towards the right. We stumbled to a slower pace to make our way down a narrow, overgrown path through the woods.
There was a pile of rocks, set deliberately to form a pyramid as high as my waist, and I squeezed his hand in mine. It made me think of where the boys had laid Wendy to rest. “Is that a grave?”
“Yes,” he said. “For our dog. The one we had as kids.”
“Where are we going, Jacob?”
“To our old hide-out.” He shook his head faintly. “I can’t believe I’m showing you this. It’s so stupid. But it is where we meet when we can’t communicate by cell phone or whatever like normal people.”
We came to a stop at a treehouse.
I started to smile, because there was something so boyish and innocent about a treehouse. It was nice to think of these rough men as little boys.
There was a lean-to at the base, much more crudely built out of plywood than the lean-to they had made for the helicopter, and a rope ladder up to a platform in the spreading branches of an old tree.
Jacob pressed his hand over the words written above the door, and my smile dropped as his hand fell away. It was a child’s writing, Jake & Levi. Sometime later, a different childish hand had added & Ryker. Suddenly I imagined what this place would mean to him: the house in the woods where he’d played with the little brother who would forget him.
“You and Levi built this?”
“They went on playing out here,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “It’s not Levi’s fault he forgot me. Childhood amnesia. My mother’s secrets…. She burned damn near every photo she had of me so Ryker and Levi wouldn’t come looking.”
“How do you know that?”
Instead of answering me, he ducked through the opening. I followed after him, although I had to crouch to slip inside; he was already sitting down, his long legs folded awkwardly in front of him. It was dim in here and smelled of wet leaves.
“Anyway,” he said. “Now you’ll know. You can picture this place, and if you can picture it and if you know what direction to go—southeast or whatever from where you are—you can find it in your mind with the help of a home spell. But you don’t need a compass today, since we’re here.”
His voice was brisk—no time for sentiment—and he used a stick to draw symbols in the dirt floor. “Most of our spells are a circle—for the eternality of life—but home spells start with a square. Do you remember the symbol for family?”
“I remember reading it,” I said.
“Well, that’s helpful,” he said. He passed the stick to me. “You do it. I’ll walk you through it.”
Together, we made the symbols that would focus the spell.
“The place we go to is not, actually, here, of course,” he said. “It’s in the slipscape. A parallel dimension that overlays ours. And the slipscape is next door to the Far, and you’re going to be not-stupid for once, right, and…”
“I won’t go alone,” I promised. “Not until I know what I’m doing.”
He nodded curtly. “Good. Take my hands. We’ll try to go together.”
He held out his big, scarred hands, and I rested my fingertips on his palms. “Not like that,” he said impatiently, grasping my forearms. I slid my fingers under the sleeve of his shirt, pushing aside his leather bracelet, bare skin to bare skin.
“I like to use Latin,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, really, if you use English or Spanish or Latin. It’s just all in your mind. Using a language you don’t know makes it feel more purposeful. Helps you focus.”
Together, we closed our eyes and repeated the words he used. “Detrahet me in domum iterum. Detrahet me in domum iterum.”
I shivered. A cold ripple seemed to pass through my skin, like a sudden cold blast from a fan, and then cold swept over me, a chill as deep as bone. I gasped, but it was already gone.
I opened up my eyes in a hurry. Jacob sat back, letting go of my arms; we were still sitting facing each other, and we were still surrounded by the dim of the treehouse with cracks letting in the light.
Except the light was bright. Brighter than in the treehouse, which was shaded by trees. I started to turn, eager to push aside the tarp that hung in the doorway.
Jacob stopped me with a hand on my knee. “You don’t want to look out there,” he said. “The slipscape is a weird place. We use it for our purposes and then we get out.”
I nodded.
He looked at me, his eyes bright in the darkness as if he knew I was hiding something. “What is it, Princess? What were you so desperate to tell me?”
“Can a ghost follow us here?” I asked, my voice soft.
He shook his head. “When I say slipscape, I mean a dimension just parallel to ours. We aren’t really there. It’s like we’re the ghosts this time. It’s...” He trailed off. “It’s just a parallel version of reality where I died at the demons’ hands. Where the grave out there is for me, not the dog.” His gaze sharpened. “Why?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to talk to you guys,” I said, my words tumbling over each other in my eagerness to shed my secrets. “My sister might be working for Mr. Joseph. Not that it’s her choice. He’s got her body on ice.” My eyes widened. “Actually, maybe she’s not a ghost. Maybe she’s here.”
He reached out and grabbed my hands impatiently. “Ellis. She isn’t here. Focus. What do you have to tell me?”
“Mr. Joseph said he’d kill my mother if I didn’t work for him. He wants me to go into the Far and find his dead wife. I’m supposed to have thirty days… twenty-six left.”
“And your sister Ashley is…?” he trailed off.
“He has her body. He said that he bound her part of her soul in his little box, that she’s trapped and she can’t move on to Heaven because of him. He said that he can stuff her back into her body, bring her back to life.”
“He’s got to be lying to you, Ellis. Telling you what you want to hear.”
“I know he could be,” I said. “I don’t know what to believe. But I didn’t want to get my mother killed.”
“How did he tell you all this?”
“When we had the car accident? Ash was there, in my dreams, and she led me to Mr. Joseph. He said he can control her.”
I hadn’t even realized I was shaking until he pulled me closer. My hands trembled against his chest.
He shushed me into my hair and wrapped his arms around me. “Calm down, Ellis. I’m going to get Ryker and Levi here to listen too. And you tell us everything, from the beginning, all right?”
I nodded.
I could feel his lips against my hair, and I wondered if he had just kissed me. He turned my chin up, his golden eyes intent on mine. “Weren’t you a clever girl?”
I stared back at him, more surprised by a compliment from Jacob than I was to be in a parallel dimension.
“Be right back,” he told me
.
Then Jacob shimmered and disappeared.
10
I squeezed my eyes shut to will myself not to look out into the slipscape. I was going to trust Jacob for once. I could imagine myself too easily as Pandora, wrenching open the lid of the box, breaking a nail in the process. I had trouble enough at the moment.
I felt a rush of cold, and I opened my eyes.
Three big guys did not fit easily into their childhood hideout. Jacob folded his lanky legs up. Levi’s big shoulder was against mine as he hunched over, looking slightly miserable, and Ryker’s knee was pressed against mine.
Ryker rested his hand against mine as if to comfort me. “You okay?”
“I’ll be a lot better in a minute,” I said. “Keeping a secret from you guys has been driving me mad. But I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you without tipping my hand.”
Ryker started to ask a question, and Jacob cut him off. “Just tell us the story from the beginning, Ellis. We were driving away from the hospital, and the Company car rammed us. And then?”
I took a deep breath, feeling steadied by Jacob’s confidence, and told them everything that had happened. Everything Mr. Joseph had said, about how I had to go into the Far to save my sister and my mother, and how if I did, he would bring my sister back to life.
It was already a tight space, and when Ryker and Levi erupted, the noise felt deafening.
“No,” Ryker said firmly. “The happy ending is that your sister moves on to Heaven, Ellis. You can’t bring her back. That isn’t how this ends.”
“How would you know?”
“How would I know? How about sixteen centuries of recorded lore establishing that nothing good happens when you bring the dead back to life?” Ryker shook his head.
“But she’s not really dead,” I said. “Mr. Joseph said he restored her body.”
“Mr. Joseph said,” Ryker said, and when he said it in that deadpan tone of voice, it sounded completely preposterous. Like I was being stupid and naive.
