by Alisa Valdes
Suddenly I felt a hand wrap around my wet, matted hair, yanking forcefully. My head was jerked so violently I saw stars, and I stumbled, and fell with a sickening crunch as the rocks smashed into my nearly bare kneecaps. I rolled my eyes up, as my head was tilted vigorously backward, at such a sharp angle that I felt the bones in my neck begin to crack. The back of my head was flush up against the top of my back now, and a fiery pain seared my spine all the way down. From this loathsome angle I could see Victor’s face grinning down at me madly, as he held me powerfully in his unwavering grip. He was still in human form. His nose bled, his lips were swollen and split, and his eyes were blackened from being beaten. He had the wickedly happy look of a man who was only getting started.
I saw Travis stumbling up from behind, also badly battered. In the distance, I saw Logan tied up on the ground like a calf. I had only enough time to connect my eyes with Travis’s before the knife was out, flashing in Victor’s hand as he raised it high above him.
“Here’s how it’s done, Logan!” cried Victor, in a voice so loud it boomed.
Travis’s eyes lost their usual careful composure, filled instead with a look of pure dismay and horror that I had never seen on him, and could not imagine seeing on him except that here it was, staring down at me with complete despair.
Victor’s hand slashed downward through the air in front of my face, the handle of the hunting knife held fast and tight in his fist. So, so fast the terrible thing happened, so fast that experiencing it felt like remembering it. There was only enough time to register that the knife had been sunk deep into my throat, a brief and horrifying moment to experience it sawing back and forth, as I felt the syrupy warm wetness gushing out of my neck with alarming volume and speed, before everything became dark, and cold, and still.
A complete and holy silence washed over me, and molded itself into a hard, quick shell, over everything I was and had ever been. I was, suddenly, nothing, and that brought its own brand of fear, a new terror of lostness I could not name; it was worse than the horrific, mind-boggling pain that had preceded it. Lamentably, I understood, the girl I had been no longer existed. I had no body. No breath. No heartbeat. No vision. No sense of smell. No hearing. No future. Would there be no Travis? But just as fast as I felt fear, it faded into nothing. Just nothing. I had nothing. I was nothing, and as nothing, frozen in a thick, infinite web, woven of endless nothingness, I felt, unsurprisingly, nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was pulled up into a funnel and stretched toward a small point of light, and into that point I flowed, as small as I’d ever been, as large as I’d ever been, everything and nothing at once, churning. There was light. Such light. A lot of light. All around. A brightness. And blinding heat. Searing fire that ebbed and washed. Cooling spaces. Circles that danced, orbs that moved. Smears of great numbers of these things all working in concert together, spirals of things that moved large exactly as they had moved small, for there was no scale here, just the same patterns, at every turn. There was a huge, enormous, massive, indisputable outward motion from every place and every thing, moving away from everything else, all of it going where it was supposed to be. I felt myself moving away from itself. Expanding. Stretching. Rising. Falling. Spreading. There was no up, no down, no forward, no back. Perfection. I was light. Then colors, and sounds, and harmonies, and music, and movement, and I was falling, falling, forever I fell, in every direction, at every speed, all at once.
And then I had feet, and there were drums.
I stood upon these feet, new feet, familiar and yet not, and they were whole, and bare, without pain, without scrapes or scratches. I was complete and I missed no one because everyone I knew and loved was also here, would also be here, had been here, came through here, was of this everythingness as well. I remembered all that came before and after. But I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and the music was so beautiful. My feet were made of music. I felt light as air upon them, and I was moved to dance.
And then there was space before me. Familiar space, not home, not the Vortex, but very like them both, yet different. The desert stretched out before me in every direction toward infinity. Six moons hung in the sky. And the sum total of it all moved. I moved, too. The music told us how, and where, and why, and what, and I was free.
And then there were people and animals. So many of them, some I had lost and known when I was someone else.
They moved with me, flowed along, and together we were perfect and I was new while being infinitely old. I sensed it was at the center out of which everything else spoked and spun. We had come from this place. We always came back to this place. I remembered it now and how it was in the past and would be in the future.
I felt joy, and I danced.
And the man came toward me, and the woman came toward me, and they were beautiful because we all were, and young, because we all were, and they held golden cups and they gave them to me and I drank. One was hot and one was cold. Both were right. I remembered this taste in my mouth, and I remembered their smiles, and I knew these people. They loved me, as I loved them, but there was no urgency in our reunion because we knew it was how it should be and would always be, back then and into forever, which flowed in all directions. There was laughter, and sound. We were so very old now, though we had only just been born. Their touch bore electricity, and I remembered this faintly from somewhere, this sensation, this fullness, this, ah—magic.
He touched me then, and she touched me then, and they pointed to a spot on the rock wall, where I was needed. I remembered this place from the future. There was a white light, and it moved with me, and I knew it as I knew that I must rise and join this beam of pure white light that came from the wall.
She told me to go in peace. He wished me happiness. They congratulated me on a life lived with love and compassion, music and beauty. She promised I’d see him again and I knew she told the truth. He would always wait for me, I would always wait for him.
I rose up, and the beam took me. It moved me toward the wall, and below they waved and the dance continued for the others, a constant stream of them breaking through, coming in, looking down to find feet they thought they’d lost, bodies whole and healthy, every need met, every question answered.
And I flew. Into the light. My grandmother. My great-grandfather. Others I had never met but instantly recognized. My future people from the past. Oddly, Gregory Hartwell was there, too, smiling at me like I was a long-lost daughter. I felt, overwhelmingly, that I was home. They reached for me as my feet came down. They touched me, welcomed me, loved me.
There was a gate that glowed and was made of pale blue light, a beautiful thing. Slowly it came open, and they welcomed me, and I wanted to be there. To stay. To rest. I raised a foot, and moved it forward, but it didn’t go. It would not go. I cried out because there was a horrible pain I felt stabbing up through me in a place that was supposed to be free from pain. My neck. My neck. I held it and I screamed and boiling sounds came from my mouth, wet and dark, dark red. The people all looked at me in surprise. There was commotion.
Talking. Whispers and pointing. Gossip. Ripples came over the surface of what had been a smooth and infinite pond.
The voices said: This has never happened before. This is something new. This is not right. This is not how it was written. This is not how the story is supposed to go. They were afraid.
The light changed now, growing purplish, and the gate began to close and pulsate with an angry orange light. No longer welcome, and the patterns broke apart.
“No!”
I cried out for forward motion, but something pulled me backward, sucked me the wrong way. I grabbed for something, anything, to hold me in place, but there was only void. The voices were moving backward, too, a jumble of sound and time, and time was back again, where it had been gone before. The gate slammed shut. The arms reached for me. The smiles faded and in their place were screams of confusion, and cries of longing.
Sadness came to this
place.
Reverse motion came for me, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, until I was unstuck, and I went. Backward through a magnificent spiral, and kept moving, a nothing that sucked, pulled, forced, mashed me in a massive rotation, through the funnel, through a terrible screech, through a deafening sound that I knew, somewhere in the memory that came flooding back to me like blood from a wound, was the terrible, miraculous, impossible song of the Maker, resetting the gears of his clocks.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rain fell onto my closed eyelids, and into my open mouth. I coughed down a gagging sensation, and gasped for air, my collapsed lungs filling again, hacking out whatever had drained into them. I rolled convulsively onto my side in the wet desert dust, and I heaved; I coughed up scabs and gooey blood clots from my throat into my mouth. The pain still gripped me, but it was fading, like the sound of a parade that has rounded the corner already. I remembered nothing for a moment, and wondered where I was. An angry sky, a barren landscape, sagebrush. Highway 550. The descansos. The word boomeranged back to me: Chaco. I’d been there.
I pushed myself to sitting, and wiped the rain and blood from my eyes, still coughing with the taste of iron and death in my mouth. I looked down and saw my feet, battered in torn black stockings. I wore a black party dress whose pretty pink sash was ripped and soiled, and lay in a miserable scribble on the ground at my side. I saw other feet then, two pairs. I looked up, stunned to remember I was not alone. Kelsey. My best friend. I remembered her now with a rush of love and happiness. She stared down at me with her jaw hanging slack and open, her blond hair flattened to the sides of her pretty face by the rain, her bright blue eyes blinking back tears, a strange sort of cry garbled in her throat, unable to come out, as if she were witnessing a birth, or a murder. Or both.
The brown cowboy boots belonged to Travis, a haunted look in his beautiful brown eyes.
“You did it.” Kelsey finally managed to choke the words out in a hoarse whisper, shifting her eyes from me to Travis. “You did it. You brought her back to life.”
Travis nodded solemnly, and looked to his right hand. Clutched in it was a bright, blindingly white stone that I recalled having seen somewhere before. On the ground at his feet lay a large, curved hunting knife, its half-serrated blade coated in blood and bits of flesh. My flesh.
I remembered now.
My hand rose to my neck, to the place where the knife had sunk in as easily as if it had been cutting cake. I touched it gingerly, lightly, just with my fingertips, not wishing to know what was there, but having to know at the same time. Astoundingly, there was only soft, smooth skin. No gaping incision, no bloody gash. Just me, as I had been before Victor killed me.
I turned my neck, and it moved smoothly; the bones no longer cracked and yanked back. My scalp no longer burned from the pulling of my hair. I was stunned, amazed, and, for a moment, ecstatic, until I remembered how sick and twisted Victor was, and realized that he could be anywhere. I spun around with a hunted look in my eyes, searching for him, and jumped up from sitting, landing in a defensive crouch.
“It’s okay,” Travis told me, his eyes wide with an unnamed worry, as though he was still processing what he’d done here. “He’s gone. He got what he wanted.”
I straightened to standing. Kelsey wept into her hands, and walked over to me, slowly, cautiously, muttering to herself that she could not believe what she had seen. Logan squirmed on the ground, still hog-tied, his eyes red with horror and flooded with tears of what seemed to be regret.
“The life stone,” I said softly, touching Travis’s hand that still held the stone.
“It was an emergency, right?” he said, taking my hands in his.
Overhead, the dark clouds gathered swiftly, churning above us as though a tornado might be forming. I had never seen the sky move like this in New Mexico, only in movies. It was agitated, and seemed alive. Travis eyed the storm warily, guiltily, sadly, and returned his gaze to me.
“I couldn’t imagine never looking into your eyes again,” he said. “I had to do it.”
“But we would have found each other, right? I was in the Afterworld, Travis. You could have met me there, right?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe. But I might not make it out of the Vortex. I couldn’t risk losing you, or putting your friends and family through your loss. I—I don’t know if I did the right thing, Shane. It just felt like I had to. I couldn’t stand to see you like that.”
“What happens now?” I asked, eyeing the sky.
“I don’t know,” he said plainly. I could tell that he was afraid, but resigned. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
“But what if you go now and I never see you?”
“I have faith the Maker rewards us for doing the right things, Shane. This was the right thing to do.”
I collapsed into his arms. The familiar electricity was there, and flowed through me. I breathed deeply, relieved and still a bit disoriented.
Travis held me tightly, and I felt that his breathing was labored, wheezing, and his body felt weak. He wasn’t the same Travis anymore. He seemed ill.
“Are you all right?” I asked, backing up to get a better look at his face. He was terribly pale. Dark circles were starting to sink themselves around his eyes.
“It took so much out of him,” said Kelsey. “Using that incredible energy to heal you.”
Travis doubled over in pain, gripping his abdomen, groaning.
“Travis!” I cried, holding on to him as his body trembled and convulsed. “What’s happening?”
He turned his eyes toward the sky, which churned as though it was opening a vortex of a new kind.
“They’ve come for me,” he said, seeing something we could not. “I have to go.”
“No!”
For a brief moment, his entire body flickered, like a flame that was about to go out, and for a split second, he disappeared. Then he was back, doubled over with pain once more, as though he’d been punched hard in the stomach.
“Travis!” I screamed. “No! What’s going on?”
Struggling from the pain, he forced himself to stand against the increasingly violent wind. With a dignified expression, he looked me straight in the eye. He took both of my hands, and stepped toward me.
“I have to go now,” he said.
“But where? The Vortex?”
His eyes were frightened as he shook his head no. He wasn’t going there, and this did not look like the beauty and peace of the Afterworld. He was going somewhere else.
“But why? You didn’t do anything wrong!” I screamed.
“You shouldn’t bring someone back from the dead,” he said. “It messes with the order of things.”
Travis locked eyes with me, resigned, stepped closer, and pulled me to him. “I have no regrets, Shane. I’m ready to face whatever it is. Maybe it was selfish, but I have faith that this way, I’ll see you again.”
Lightning flashed, and he flickered out, and reappeared, but paler than before, his breath even more ragged.
“No!” I shrieked, clinging to what was left of him. “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
In a raspy, weakening voice, he told me, “Find Randy. Tell him to watch over you until I figure out a way back. Victor’s still out there. This is what he wanted”—Travis looked down at his flickering, fading body—“but it might not be enough. Tell Randy my wish is that he protect you.”
“They can’t do this to you!” I wailed.
Travis pulled as much strength into himself as he could, and lifted my chin with his hand, grimacing against whatever violence erupted and raged within him.
“I need to know if you’re my Kindred,” he said, looking at my lips and then my eyes. “So do something for me.”
“Anything!” I cried, desperate to keep him with me.
Travis smiled at me, beautiful as ever, and said, sorrowfully and simply, “Kiss me, Shane.”
“But if we’re not Kindreds . . . ,” I whisp
ered.
“Then I’ll disappear immediately,” he said. “But if we are, I’ll have an extra minute. I have to know, Shane.”
I nodded, and he stepped closer, embracing me in the growing tempest, as the wind whipped around us like witches laughing, and the stinging rain struck our faces like tiny bullets. He tilted his head to the side, and so did I, and I closed my eyes as our lips, at last, touched. A massive thunderclap marked the kiss, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from this that I felt the earth move, or if it was from the kiss itself. He tasted like sunshine, like safety and beauty, and his lips sent a trembling, wonderful shock through me, to the center of my being, filled me with a deep, wonderful satisfaction and longing. I kissed him harder. There are no words to describe what that kiss felt like, only that it was, like everything else about Travis, perfectly suited to me. His kiss felt like home.
The wind kicked up more strongly, and began to wail. I heard Kelsey scream in fear, and I broke from the kiss to see what had startled her. Above us, the dark and menacing clouds sent down a funnel, shaped alternately like a finger or a tongue, pointed at the end and aimed directly at Travis. I was terrified it would take him immediately; but it seemed to pause in the air.
“It’s halted!” he said, ecstatic, and then looked at me tenderly. “You are my Kindred.”
I was overcome with a bittersweet happiness, followed by confused horror.
“Then you can’t go! Right?”
He looked at the storm brewing and shook his head. He suddenly bent down, and grabbed my severed heart necklace from the ground.
“Touch this,” he said, his speech difficult and labored. I did as he asked, and to my amazement, the pendant knit itself back together again, glowing with a shared energy from both of us. It was then that I spotted Victor, off to the side, watching the pendant with great interest. He wasn’t gone. And whatever he saw in the necklace upset him a great deal, from the look on his face.
“He’s still here,” I told Travis.
