by Sarah Wynde
But she heaved an impatient and frustrated sigh. “And I much prefer to blame you than myself. I was told not to leave the house that day, but I was tired of being cooped up. I took Misam for a walk, knowing I would get into trouble for it. I simply thought the trouble would be a scolding from my mother-in-law about my impudent ways, not our deaths.”
“What’s happening?” Grace asked.
Noah shook his head, dizzy with confusion. And maybe with blood loss, too. The floor seemed to be racing toward him, but he put his hand out and caught himself.
“I didn’t kill them,” he said. The kaleidoscope was spinning again, the world spinning with it.
Grace grabbed for his arm, squeezing the inner elbow as Noah grunted with the pain.
“Still bleeding,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t kill them, but I hope to hell you haven’t killed yourself. Hold on, Noah. Nat’s coming, I promise.”
Down the hall, the doorway to Natalya’s scanner room opened.
Noah lifted his head to look as Akira stepped out. She was cradling her belly and she looked pale, as pale as he felt.
“Um, Grace?” she started.
“What’s she’s doing out here?” Dillon said. “We’re too dangerous for her!”
“Are you okay?” Grace said sharply, without letting go of Noah.
“I thought I wet my pants,” Akira said, sounding tragic.
Noah wanted to reassure her. Accidents happened. He’d had a company commander explain it once, something to do with the limbic system and the fight-or-flight response, but he couldn’t remember the details.
He couldn’t find the words, either. His brain was too fuzzy, his vision a mix of light and dark spots. But he retained enough awareness to understand her next words.
“I don’t think I did, though,” she continued. “I think my water broke.”
35
Dillon
This was a disaster. Dillon wanted to run around in circles, screaming, and if it would have helped, he would definitely have done so.
Instead he stood motionless in the hallway, halfway between Akira and Noah. He and Joe and Misam had backed away from Noah when Noah cut himself, not wanting to take energy from his blood. When Nadira started reforming, Joe and Misam had ventured closer, but Dillon had stayed where he was.
“It’s too early,” he told Akira.
“I know that,” she responded, sounding grumpy.
“It’s too early,” Grace called from where she still crouched by Noah. He’d fallen forward from his kneeling position, not unconscious, but definitely losing control. She was helping him to a sitting position against the wall, while trying to keep pressure on his arm.
The amount of blood was horrifying. The red was so intense on the white of the tile floor, under the bright hallway lights, that it looked surreal.
“I know that,” Akira repeated. “What the hell happened out here?” But before either Grace or Dillon could answer, she grimaced and folded over around her belly. She started panting, quick, sharp breaths.
“We need a doctor,” Joe said. He was hovering over Noah and Grace, fists clenched.
Nadira had scooped up Misam and was holding him close, her eyes closed. She might have said she didn’t need Noah’s blood, but the expression of exhausted relief on her face told another story. Or at least revealed that it had been a close call.
“What did that feel like, Mama?” Misam was bubbling over with questions. “Did it hurt? Could you hear me? Were you talking to us?”
“The Hulk? Really, Misam?” Nadira answered him without opening her eyes, resting her lips on his hair.
He laughed, part relief, part glee. Leaning back, he put one hand on either side of her face, pushing them together until she pursed her lips. “Never do that again. Do you hear me?”
“Never,” she agreed. “Shielded rooms, one more thing that we must stay far away from.” She opened her eyes and looked down at Noah. He was slumped against the wall, eyes closed, face white, even his lips turning pale. His head was down, chin against his chest. “Is he going to be all right?”
“Not unless we get some help here,” Joe replied.
Akira stopped panting and straightened. “I think you’re supposed to elevate the injury.”
“Elevate it?” Grace looked blank.
Akira lifted her arm above her head, as if she were a student answering a question.
Grace looked dubious, but she raised Noah’s arm. She was using two hands, fingers clenched on the sopping shirt, but blood was still trickling through her fingers. “Hang on, Noah. Stay with me. Stay with me. Shit.” She brushed her face against the top of her own arm as if she were trying to get her hair out of her eyes, but Dillon could see that she’d started to cry, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Oh, hell,” Akira said. She hurried toward Grace and the ghosts, skirting her way around Dillon. “None of you zap me, all right? Being premature is gonna be hard enough on Henry.”
Dillon trailed along behind her, and the others backed away to give her room.
“This room’s got medical supplies,” Dillon told her, pointing out the room that he’d opened for Noah.
“Got it.” She reached for the door handle.
“It’s locked,” Grace started as the door swung open. “Damn it,” she breathed, then quickly added, “Look for a trauma kit. Nat’s got them in there somewhere. Maybe one of the bottom drawers? Not like we have a lot of use for them, but…”
She let the words trail off because Akira was already inside the room, hunting through drawers. “Hang on, Noah,” she said again, her voice soft.
Akira emerged, already ripping open the plastic bag surrounding the medical supplies, as the elevator door at the far end of the hallway slid open. Natalya stepped out, followed by Kenzi, Rose and Sophia.
Natalya immediately broke into a run, the others hurrying after her. She skidded to a halt next to them and shook her head. “Geez, Grace, really? In your underwear?”
Grace’s smile was wan. She tried to wipe her face again, only succeeding in smearing it with blood. It mingled with the tears.
“Good lord, he did a really good job,” Natalya said, eyes seeming to measure the quantity of blood surrounding them. “Was he trying to kill himself?” She didn’t wait for an answer, glancing at Kenzi with a worried frown.
The little girl gave her a pleading look, her hands folded in front of her, but made no move toward Noah until Natalya nodded, adding a firm, “Gently.”
Kenzi darted forward. With total disregard for the blood and gore, she placed her fingers on Noah’s arm as Grace moved out of the way.
“Ooh, you killed him, after all,” Sophia said as she arrived. “And I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“He’s not dead,” Joe snapped. “He can’t be. He won’t be.”
“He looks awfully dead to me,” Sophia said. The words were callous, but her frown was uneasy.
“Kenzi will fix him,” Rose said, but she looked uncertain, too. And then she wrinkled her nose, looking around at the others.
“If she has enough energy, that is,” she added apologetically. “I’m not sure I can help her. I don’t suppose I could borrow some of your energy?”
“Whatever you need.” Joe held out his hand to her.
“Me, too,” Dillon said.
“Me, me!” Misam waved. “I was very upset. I must have lots and lots of energy right now.”
Nadira held him closer, but then said, only a little grudgingly, “I don’t mind helping. This was stupid of him, but he did it for me. It was a generous thought, I suppose I can’t just let him die.”
Rose beamed at them all. “Lovely.”
Akira bit her lip. “My water broke. Save Noah, but you might save some of that energy for Henry and me, too. He might need some help.”
Rose clapped her hands together. “How exciting!”
Akira rested a hand on her stomach. “I’m not sure that’s the word I’d choose.”
Natalya pulled her watchful gaze away from Kenzi and reached a hand out to Akira. “You and the baby are both going to be fine. I promise.”
Maybe she meant her gesture as reassurance but Akira passed her the pouch of medical supplies.
“Ah, thank you.” Natalya’s smile flashed. She squatted next to Noah and Kenzi as Noah stirred, his chin lifting. “Okay, that’s enough, honey.”
Natalya loosened the sleeves of Grace’s makeshift bandage and let it drop to the ground as Kenzi lowered Noah’s arm. The little girl stroked her fingers along the length of the incision. On his wrist, at the shallowest point of the cut, the skin closed, turning pink as a scab began to form along his inner arm. At the deepest point, inside his elbow, the blood stopped seeping.
“Whoa. That’s cool.” Sophia peered over Kenzi’s shoulder as the little girl swayed.
“Rose?” Natalya directed the word to empty air. She shot a glance at Akira and Akira nodded in reassurance of her own, so Natalya turned back to Noah.
“My pleasure,” Rose said and put her hands on Kenzi’s shoulders. The other ghosts clustered around her.
“What do we need to do?” Joe asked.
“Just relax,” Rose answered. “You won’t feel a thing.”
Akira was watching, wide-eyed with wonder. Dillon couldn’t see any energy flowing, but Rose’s color deepened, the gold coming back to her hair, her skirt changing from its translucent pastel back to its original deep pink shade.
And he could easily see Kenzi bouncing back as if she’d never touched Noah at all. She shook herself like a puppy after a bath, and chirped, “Sizzles.”
Noah’s eyelashes fluttered. He lifted his head.
Grace sat down on the floor. She put her hands up to cover her face, maybe to hide her tears, or maybe to cry more freely, but stopped before she touched herself. She lowered her hands, fingers wide, as if she’d only just recognized that they were covered in blood.
Nadira was frowning at Joe, her expression puzzled.
“What is it?” Joe asked her.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.” She tipped her head to the side, shifting Misam on her hip. “What is that behind you?”
Joe looked over his shoulder.
Dillon followed his gaze, then drew back, blinking in surprise.
It wasn’t a door. It looked nothing like any door he’d ever seen. There was no doorknob, no hinges, no frame. And it wasn’t a passageway, either. It didn’t look like a hallway or an airlock or a cloud or any of the things that he’d ever imagined.
But the air shimmered with a vibration that practically begged for him to step into it. It wasn’t exactly visible, but it was present in a way that made it seem as if it had always been there and always would be.
Joe poked at it. Gingerly.
It didn’t move and his hand didn’t disappear into it, but its essential door-ness didn’t change. Dillon knew that if Joe turned around and took two steps forward through it, he would disappear into the shimmer as if he’d never been.
“It sparkles.” Misam sounded awed.
Sparkles? Dillon frowned. He didn’t see sparkles.
“Mama, mama, look!” Misam pointed over Nadira’s shoulder.
Nadira turned her head and glanced behind her.
She had a shimmer, too.
Her mouth opened, then closed without comment. Carefully, she set Misam down on the ground and crouched to peer beyond him. Now that he was standing apart from his mother, Dillon could see that Misam had a shimmer of his own.
Dillon could barely breathe.
He wanted to look.
He was terrified to look.
But carefully, as if the shimmer might be a bird perched on his shoulder, he let his head drift sideways until he could see behind him.
It was almost like a soap bubble, a big one. Except it wasn’t like a soap bubble at all. There was no roundness, no sense of a surface. And it wasn’t a light. Dillon didn’t know why Misam was saying sparkles, because there was nothing glittery about it. But at the same time, it felt like light, or maybe warmth, as if it was emanating energy just beyond his ability to perceive it.
“What is it?” Sophia asked. She was looking from one to another of them, her brow furrowed with puzzled concern.
“What are you looking at?” Akira asked.
“Doorways,” Joe said, his voice hushed, reverent. “We have our doorways.”
“But what happened?” Nadira said. “Where did they come from?”
“Maybe it was because Noah almost died again?” Joe replied.
“Or did die?” Nadira stood, but she put a hand on Misam’s head. “For a moment or two, long enough to open a path that closed once before?”
Akira didn’t look like she was paying attention anymore. She was panting again, entirely focused inward, one hand resting on the wall, the other curled into a tight fist.
Suddenly everyone was talking at once. Dillon let the words flow past him, too overwhelmed with his own emotions to listen to the others.
He had a door.
His own door, his own path. Whatever had been keeping him here, whatever had made him a ghost, his time in this dimension was coming to an end.
Akira stopped panting. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said, just as if she’d been part of the conversation all along. “Why would Dillon get a doorway just because Noah almost died? When I died before, no one got any doorways out of it.”
“Maybe my grandma did?” Dillon offered.
“Maybe.” She narrowed her eyes at him, sounding skeptical. “I suppose it’s possible. When she was red, she didn’t have a doorway or she would have used it. But I don’t like it.”
“Maybe it’s because we all gave Noah energy.” Misam leaned into Nadira. His eyes were wide with excitement, but he clutched her robe with a ferocious grip. “Maybe we needed to save his life, maybe that’s why we were here.”
“I would have given him energy, too,” Sophia said, half sulky, half defiant. She couldn’t see the doorways, Dillon realized. And she hadn’t gotten one of her own.
“We didn’t really save him, though.” Joe nodded toward Kenzi. “She did it. We just helped her recover faster.”
Natalya had been focused on Noah, but she looked up and frowned at Akira. “Dillon has a doorway?”
Akira nodded at her. “And the others, too.” She gestured at Noah and the bloody floor. “I don’t intend to ever emulate your method, but you did something right.”
“I’m not sure it was this,” Noah said slowly, staring at his arm. “I think maybe…” His gaze flickered to Grace and stayed. “Maybe I let go of something I’d been holding on to for a long time.”
Grace met his gaze. She took a breath, then released it, and brushed away her tears, ignoring the blood on her hands. “Maybe. Maybe I did, too.” She looked as if she wanted to say more, but then she shook her head and pushed herself to her feet. “I need to get cleaned up.”
“Do you have a change of clothes here?” Natalya asked her.
As the living people began consulting on the practical details of their physical reality, Dillon turned his attention back to the other ghosts.
“Well. This is very exciting.” Nadira didn’t sound excited. She was looking at Joe. “I suppose we all go through our own doors now, to our own afterlives?”
“I suppose,” Joe agreed. He didn’t sound excited either.
“I didn’t get a door,” Sophia said. She wasn’t crying, but she was staring at the floor. “I guess that means I stick around.”
“You could come with one of us,” Dillon offered but he already knew that Sophia wasn’t going to agree. She wanted to see her parents. He glanced over his shoulder again, less tentatively. The shimmer was still there.
Sophia shook her head. Her nose looked like it was getting pink and her eyes were starting to glisten, but she lifted her chin and said, “I’ll be okay.”
Nadira and Joe weren’t paying attention to her. They seemed to be engaged
in some sort of wordless communication, but Misam let go of his mother’s robe and took Sophia’s hand. “Are you sure, Sophia? Won’t you be lonely without us?”
As the two of them started talking, Dillon sighed.
For a fleeting moment, he was tempted to dive through his doorway like a character in an action movie escaping a hail of bullets.
He was ready to leave. He was tired of being a helpless observer to events in the material world. And more than that, he wanted to know what came next. He wanted to see his grandmother again. He wanted to find out what Rose’s flying — metaphorical or not — would be like.
But maybe not quite yet.
Rose’s doorway had lasted for all the years that Henry had lived with her, so a doorway, once it appeared, was probably pretty stable.
And how could he leave while Akira was in labor? So maybe he’d stick around to meet Henry again and make sure that the two of them were okay. And then there was his parents’ wedding. And his aunt’s wedding.
Plus, he wanted a chance to talk to Rose again, to try to persuade her to come with him. The universe was a dangerous place for spirits trapped on the material plane.
And if all that meant that he was around until Sophia had talked to her parents… well, there was nothing wrong with that.
He could wait until Sophia was ready.
36
Noah
The last words Noah remembered before going under were something to do with water. He remembered nothing from being unconscious: no white light, no visitations from the welcoming dead, not even a sense of mystical peace. He’d felt himself fading out and then he was awake again, while his voices talked about doorways and a little girl magically healed him.
Grace could say all she wanted about the science of werewolves and cellular transformations, but Noah knew magic when he saw it.
Or delusion, he supposed. Maybe he really was dead and this was the universe playing an elaborate practical joke. Or maybe he was locked up in an institution somewhere, unconscious and dreaming. Or maybe life really was one big virtual reality and they were avatars believing they were alive while a computer controlled their environment.
