Dying Day

by Kory M. Shrum

  “Jesse has lost her mind,” she says quietly.

  I feel like someone has kicked me in the stomach. “What?”

  “Michael is tearing apart her timeline. He’s drowning her in all that could have been or will be. I suppose it’s all the power in her. Gabriel was her transistor, but Michael has wounded him, separated them. She can’t control the power on her own.”

  Gloria looks on the verge of tears. As if I needed to be any more frightened, the woman who I believe is the strongest, most fearless person in the world is on the verge of tears.

  “If we don’t get to her soon—”

  Dr. Gray walks into the room holding the sketchbook and pack of pencils taped to the back of its thick cardboard folio. I was the one who added that tape, terrified I’d lose her pencils if I didn’t attach them to the folio.

  “Where is Jeremiah?” I ask as Gloria takes the book from her and flips it open in her lap with a stiff arm.

  “He sent her on his errand.” Gloria hisses in pain as she tries to adjust her position, but given all the casting and bandages, doesn’t get far. I don’t miss her press of the morphine drip. Twice. The lines in her face soften—either from actual relief or just the promise of it. “He ran up to control so he could see if he could listen to all this.” Her eyes flick up to the black dome camera in the ceiling. “Didn’t you, Tate?”

  I unzip the pencil case taped to the back of the sketchbook and fish out a pencil for her.

  “It’s not a pen—” I begin, recalling her exact request.

  She waves me off. “It’s fine.”

  I help slip it between her two trembling fingers. Her movements are jerky and her hands shake. But she looks undeterred by this. Whatever she needs to draw, she intends to draw it.

  She presses the lead to the page.

  “You can see yourself out,” Gloria says, casting a cool look at the doctor.

  Instead of leaving, the doctor offers Gloria a hand. “I’m Doctor Evelyn Gray.”

  Gloria doesn’t even look up.

  “May I please check a few things before you dismiss me?” Dr. Gray says, with as much tolerance as she gave Nikki earlier. I catch myself tracing the curve of her brow and strong chin. Her bright, quick eyes. She has a kind face, but a voice that says she won’t take nonsense from anyone.

  “Just do enough to keep me conscious,” Gloria says. “I’m going to see this through.”

  Dr. Gray’s hard stare softens, looking a little surprised. I guess she was expecting more of a fight.

  But the only thing Gloria is fighting is the pencil, trying to get the lead pressed to the page.

  I slide up beside her and angle the book for her. “Here. I’ll hold it. Just move the pencil.”

  She scowls at me. “Easy for you to say.”

  The three of us are silent for a long time with only the sound of Gloria’s pencil slowly dragging across the page. It moves faster and faster as time stretches on, until there is a moment when I look up and see that Gloria’s eyes are wide, vacant and unseeing.

  No, not unseeing. More like fixed on a point far off in the distance that neither the doctor nor I can see.

  Dr. Gray’s face freezes in fear.

  “This is normal,” I whisper, as if raising my voice will frighten Gloria out of her stupor. “She will come out of it when she is finished.”

  Dr. Gray only stares for a moment and then says. “Right. Well, she is doing better than I think she has any right to be. She is healing remarkably well. Her contusions are horrendous. I don’t need to tell you that. But the swelling is down, and her blood pressure and all other vitals have returned to manageable ranges. She could do with a month of sleep, but I won’t ask for what I won’t get.”

  “Please be patient with her,” I say, casting her a sympathetic a look. “You can’t possibly understand what she’s been through.”

  I expect Gloria to tell me never to make an apology for her—that nothing she has done deserves an apology—yet I can’t help but feel that winning over one doctor to Gloria’s side might be worth the effort. After all, I can’t be everywhere all the time. I need good people in every corner. Whether or not Dr. Gray is willing to defy Jeremiah on Gloria’s behalf is yet to be seen. But this is the first step.

  Dr. Gray’s face remains absolutely unreadable. Then her lips twitch into a smile. “I don’t mind women who refuse to suffer fools. I don’t suffer them myself.”

  An immense relief lightens my chest. “Thank you.”

  Dr. Gray leaves us alone.

  I note the clock again. The urgent sense of time pressing in on me. I need to see my brother and Maisie at least one more time before I leave. And it wouldn’t hurt to get a message to Gideon. But I don’t dare leave Gloria’s side until she’s finished drawing whatever it is she needs me to see.

  At one point, Gloria takes the sketchbook and moves it closer to her face. It seems like a subconscious movement, as if she is unaware that I was holding the book at all. I let it go. She doesn’t stop drawing, and her eye never strays from the page.

  Instead I tug Gloria’s socks back down toward her ankles to make sure she is warm enough. Then I settle into the chair and wait.

  And wait.

  And I think too much about Jesse and what she must be doing now. I find my mind going over the usual concerns. Has she eaten? Is she cold? Has she slept at all in days?

  Jesse has lost her mind.

  I think of Rachel in her final hours. The Rachel who lost her mind and tried to kill me. Rachel who tried to kill Maisie. Is this what Gloria means when she says that Michael is tearing her apart? Should I expect a fight when I arrive?

  I can still see the fire in Rachel’s eyes as power raged through her.

  And now Jesse has more power than all of them.

  She seemed lucid—if a little confused—when I saw her in the hospital. But she hadn’t stayed very long, had she? And even addicts can hold it together for minutes, can’t they? They deceive family and friends all the time.

  The truth is, I have no idea how Jesse is.

  She barely knows who she is or where she is. And what if that is true. What if I get down to Antarctica and she doesn’t even know who I am?

  I picture walking across the ice toward her and seeing that vacant expression of unrecognition. It will be like walking into her Nashville office all over again. I was happy to find her alive. Thrilled. Beyond ecstatic. But facing the fact that she had no idea who I was after all we’d been through—I won’t lie—it hurt.

  And if she has forgotten me again? If this unimaginable power has blown through her mind and taken every memory of me away…every trace of the woman I love…what then?

  I don’t care.

  I don’t care if we meet on the ice as strangers.

  I don’t care if her only desire in that moment is to kill me.

  I’ll do what I did in Nashville. I’ll stay anyway. I’ll do what I can to help her. And with time…with time, maybe it’ll all be okay again.

  You don’t have any more time, that cruel voice whispers.

  The pencil falters on the page. The sudden snap of the lead pulls me from my dark thoughts. I realize Dr. Gray has left and Gloria’s eyes are open. She’s looking down at the page, and scowling.

  “What is it?” I whisper. For no reason, my heart starts pounding in my chest.

  Gloria doesn’t say anything. She goes on staring at the picture, each side of the sketchbook, gripping the edge so hard the color seeps from her fingers.

  “Let me see,” I say. The chair scrapes across the floor as I stand to look over the picture.

  The page has been quartered, each corner of the page offering a different event around an enormous centerpiece image.

  The drawings aren’t her best. She usually renders her visions in such painstaking detail, but now…I just see the pain. The restricted movements of her fingers and the agony she must be feeling, even in her fingertips. Drawing this couldn’t have been easy.

  In t
he top right, there is a seat…the back of a seat. Car seat? Airplane seat? It’s too close to be sure and the focus seems to be on what is under the seat.

  In the bottom right frame, there is Maisie running down a hallway with Nikki. The two of them looking as if they are running for their lives—hair streaming out behind them—and further down the hall, I think that’s me and Gideon close behind, but we are less defined, more shadow than anything.

  In the top right frame, I’m yelling at Jeremiah. My face screwed up in unmistakable anger. Someone is behind me, twisting my arms behind my back. But that person isn’t in the frame, so I can’t be sure if it is Nikki holding me back or someone else.

  And in the last frame, the bottom right panel, Gideon flies a plane, giant earmuffs fixed over his head.

  I note and process each of these in turn. But my eyes keep coming back to the center picture, the one that each picture bleeds into.

  It’s Jesse. She stands in the shadowed landscape lacking definition. She could be anywhere. A plume of bright light envelops her, pouring through her—or from her—in all directions. It doesn’t even look like her feet are touching the ground as she hangs airborne in this shaft of light, her head thrown back, her arms extended. She looks like a body suspended under water.

  “What does it mean?” I ask. Because I can’t interpret these on my own, though it isn’t for lack of trying. My eyes keep roving over each, looking for clues that I may have missed at first glance.

  When I meet Gloria’s eyes, they’re full of tears.

  “What?” I ask her, taken aback.

  “I have no right to ask you.” Her lip quivers and she pinches her eyes closed.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. I don’t even know what I’m saying is okay, but it doesn’t stop me from saying it again. “It’s okay.”

  “You will die if you go,” she says. “You will die.”

  My vision darkens, and all I’m left with is the sound of my breath in my ears and the blood pounding in my temples.

  “But if you stay, we all die.”

  No, you might die. No, it’s very dangerous.

  “I knew there was a risk,” I tell her, but my voice sounds dreamy, spoken like a sleepwalker.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. And she does look sorry. The thick black circles under her puffy eyes. The tears standing in their corners, eyes bright and shining. The tremble to her voice… all of it together conveys her regret. “I would never ask you to go, but she needs you. She’ll never survive this if she has to go it alone.”

  “But she might not even know who I am,” I say. It isn’t a question.

  Gloria lets the sketchbook fall across her legs, her head hitting her pillow again. Her despair makes my heart hurt. If my throat were any tighter, I don’t think I could speak.

  “I want to go,” I whisper. And it’s true. “I don’t want her to suffer alone.”

  “Even though it will kill you,” Gloria whispers.

  “Even if it kills me.” Because losing her again will kill me, too. I’ve learned the hard way that dying isn’t always when the heart stops. Often it is everything that happens after. There is such a thing as a slow and painful death, and it has nothing to do with the body or health. I have no interest in experiencing that again. I’ve lived in the world without Jesse Sullivan. And it isn’t a world I want.

  I’m nodding as if she’s spoken. “We’re leaving tonight. I’ll be with her soon.”

  “That’s too late.”

  I look up to see if she is serious.

  “You need to go now,” she adds. “Before Michael changes Jeremiah’s mind. And…and there is something wrong with the plane.”

  “What do you mean there is something wrong with the plane?”

  She shakes her head. Her face screws up with irritation. “He’s blocking me. The fucking angel.”

  I flinch at her swear. “Gabriel?”

  “No,” she says. “The other one. The one who is trying to get you killed before you can get to her. I think he is the one sending Tate’s visions.”

  More talk of angels. More things I don’t understand.

  “But I’m certain that you have to go now. If you wait any longer, she won’t make it.”

  “Gloria, I can’t fly a plane!” I hiss. “I can’t just steal one. I’d also have to steal a pilot.”

  “Nikki will take you.”

  My words falter. “You saw Nikki in the plane?”

  I want to say more. Clearly there are parts of this vision that she understands that I can’t discern simply by looking at the picture. I open my mouth to beg for an explanation, but the breath leaves me in a whoosh. I feel electricity race along my skin, wringing every morsel of air from my lungs. My back bows, and I cry out as sparks ignite in my veins.

  I’m going to be blown apart. My skin is sliding off my bones.

  It’s like when I stepped off the elevator with Nikki and Jesse’s power overtook me…but this is much much worse.

  “Go now,” Gloria whispers. Her eyes wide and showing far too much white. “It’s already begun.”

  Chapter 18

  Jesse

  Helicopters cut across the sky. Only they aren’t helicopters. They’re also angels with enormous wings sent to tear this world apart.

  You thought you won, but you didn’t, my father whispers in my head.

  The father who hunted me. The father who tortured and killed me. The father who manipulated me into killing.

  You thought you could come in and destroy this world that I built, he says. That voice echoes through my mind as it has so often.

  “You’re supposed to be dead. I cut off your head with my own hands.”

  I sit up. I turn in every direction of the beach.

  Gabriel, Michael, and the angels are gone.

  The house is destroyed, what is left of it is broken boards and shattered windows. A wave slams into me, tumbling me along the sand. I pull myself to standing and find that I’m up to my waist in ocean water. The tide sucks at my legs, eroding the sand beneath my feet.

  The water isn’t blue-grey anymore.

  It’s red. It’s red with blood.

  Footsteps sound, and I turn expecting to find someone—something—creeping up behind me.

  Caldwell is here. His green eyes bright. His freckles darker than they had ever been in life. He looks more like the man I knew as a child: Eric Sullivan, the mechanic, the man with a young daughter, married to Danica and living paycheck to paycheck. Before he died. Before he became a monster.

  But it’s a monster in those fiery eyes I see…no matter which of his faces he wears.

  “Did you really think you’d gotten rid of me so easily?” he asks. His voice is perfectly clear despite the storm kicking up around us. “I’m inside you now. Your power is my power. I’ll never leave you.”

  I feel something brush my leg in the bloody water. I look down and see blond hair floating along the surface, a bleached, silky seaweed.

  A face rolling over, wet skin bobbing to the surface.

  Flat, lifeless brown eyes. Ally’s face. Her white teeth bared in a grimace of agony. The bloody water settling into the grooves between her teeth.

  Something inside me erupts.

  A force rips through me and tears me in two.

  I pull a helicopter from the sky. Helicopter after helicopter. It isn’t the beach they crash into, black smoke rising. It’s the tundra. I’m not sure when I shifted back. I’m not even sure they are two separate places anymore: the gate and the convergence place.

  All I know is that my father’s words are pulsing into my mind, and the more I use my power the stronger his voice gets.

  But my shield is back. And it ripples around me, warping against an impact.

  The nearest helicopter is firing bullets. They ricochet across the face of the glowing force field and zip across the tundra. Shards of ice splinter from the landscape.

  I throw a firebomb, and it catches the right side of the aircraft. Yellow-r
ed flames leap from the windows. The glass explodes, and black smoke escapes. It drops, circling like a dragonfly with one wing ripped from its back.

  There are four more helicopters. No. I blink to clear my eyes and count again. Five, six…eight. A whole fleet has come for me. They are my father’s men. I know this because I reach out with my mind and touch theirs. Their love and loyalty and the confusion surrounding those affections oozing from their cracked minds like pus from a festering sore.

  Circle back. We need to know her range.

  What can be done about the shield.

  Holy fucking god we’re all gonna die—

  —what am I even doing here.

  Jesse—Jesse, my god, what the hell happened to you?

  That last voice…

  Where do I know that last voice from?

  It doesn’t matter. These people are working under my father’s orders.

  I bring them all down. I reach out with the gift that was Rachel’s, and I seize the blades, I seize the engines. I start to peel them apart like skins from oranges.

  They spark. They flame. They spiral to the ice in rivers of exploding glass and billowing smoke.

  The ones who reach the ground start running toward me. Men with large guns held across their chest as they close the distance between us.

  I find that gift in me that used to belong to a boy named Jake. The earth responds. It rumbles like a giant awakening from slumber. It stirs, and the earth quivers.

  The men stop running. They’re looking at the snow-covered plain under their black boots like they’ve never seen it before.

  Then it starts to split open, and they split themselves. Half run to the left, the others to the right. Scattered like roaches confronted by the light.

  As the ice divides, deepening to a full-blown chasm, one of the collapsed flaming helicopters is swallowed up by its great, thirsty mouth.

  Some of my father’s more determined servants are still coming toward me. They don’t find a little earthquake or flames to be enough of a deterrent.

  I wait until they’re close. I wait until I can see the whites of their eyes, and then I unleash Georgia’s gift.