by S. K Munt
Maybe he did, though! Maybe he’s been watching over you since the lady left and didn’t want to wake you! Maybe he’s gone to the bathroom or to get a coffee or a bunch of flowers or a toffee apple or-
Leigh’s heart twisted hard enough to snuff out that hopeful spark before it could catch and blaze brightly enough to incinerate her. Ryan wasn’t waiting for her. Ryan knew that she could only be in two places; the hotel or the hospital. The old lady had said that he’d been okay- that Melody had pulled him out of the car’s path as she had saved Leigh and that was a relief. But he wasn’t with her now, which meant that he either didn’t care, or was too lost in the return of his memories for Leigh to even warrant a visit now.
God! How much could he have loved her, for him to go from the most thoughtful man on the planet- to the most thoughtless once he had her in his sights again? Wanting to split up now that he remembers who his true love is, is one thing- but seeing me almost get hit by a car… and walking away? God was he HOPING I’d die, and get him out of an awkward entanglement?
Tears of horror filled her eyes. Leigh didn’t want to believe that Ryan was capable of such things- but she’d already believed the best in him, and where had that gotten her?
And he has a child with her- he has everything. Married or not, Melody Marks looked every bit as shocked as he to find him again. She didn’t abandon him- she’s no Kylie Lyle. He must have gotten lost and for him not to have been introduced to his daughter… gosh… he must have been in that state for years! Is that why he jumped? Was it because he’d been a deadbeat dad? That kid was at least six and she didn’t know him… he must have had her as a teenager! Oh my GOD! Is she going to leave her husband? Or is Ryan going to lose again- and go off the fucking falls again? Don’t I count AT ALL? Don’t I even get a good-bye? I…
Leigh couldn’t hold in the tears any longer. She bowed forward and sobbed into her hands, losing her balance in the process and tumbling off the bed and onto the floor in a cold, crumpled and broken heap. It hurt her everywhere, waking up bumps and bruises from the accident that she hadn’t felt before when her body had still been in shock. She’d been pulled back so hard that the woman had lost control and flung Leigh right into the gutter. Her head had hit there and she now had four stitches on her crown, and her ankle had slammed into the tyre of a car parked on the side of the road. Nothing was broken, nothing but her heart, but combined the agony was unbearable, and the cold floor only made it worse.
I have to go home.
Sobbing openly now, Leigh reached up for the visitors chair in the small private hospital, and began to pull herself to her feet, hoping that she’d at least been with it enough to thank the old woman properly. And then she saw the copy of Black Beauty that had been left on her chair on top of a stack of outdated magazines, and felt the soft cloth bookmark on her un-punctured wrist- and the irony of it all made Leigh’s blood boil. She picked up the book and hurled it hard at the window, enjoying the thud of rejecting words now that she had none.
‘Don’t you think…?’ she whispered bitterly, and then draped herself over the chair and cried as though she’d never stop, knowing she deserved all of this and more, for having wanted to leave the only two people in the world who could ever truly love her- her mother and father.
Ryan
‘What did you do, Imogen?’ Calliope’s voice sounded brittle around the demand, and Ryan was surprised to find the sound of her melodic voice grating after years of having worshipped it. ‘I don’t understand!’
Imogen pulled back from Ryan and wiped his tears away with her thumb. ‘I didn’t do anything intentionally,’ she answered him, not Calliope, and he was grateful for that. After years of treating him like a dust mite in the air, Ryan was finally being acknowledged as a being worthy of a goddess’s time and he felt as though he’d earned that much. ‘You have to understand that there was almost no precedent for this. I mean, I brought father and mother back after inspiring your old school friend Marnie Winters to pen a series about them… but they were supreme, cosmic beings, and I didn’t think that what had worked for them would work for you.’ She looked down at their now laced fingers, and her tiny hand was trembling. Ryan had no idea what she was talking about, but Imogen looked up, smiled gently and continued on. ‘I met Kathryn Praser at a writer’s conference. Ironically, she was the one writer there who was there as a spectator. She’d never written a whole book before, you see, and was just there to get a look-in to the industry.’
KATHRYN PRASER?!
Ryan’s lips parted on a surprised inhalation. ‘So… so I am THAT Ryan?’ The moment the question was out though, he instantly understood that the answer was a hard ‘yes’. Of course it was him! He re-read the book in a heartbeat then with his memories in place, and saw that there were almost NO differences between Ryan Weaver from The Hardest Fall and himself- only the circumstances.
Imogen nodded. ‘Yes. I could feel her gift from the other side of the room and I ended up joining her at the banquet later that night. We chatted, we exchanged numbers… this was in Toronto, and I went and got the Niagara residence the very next day so that I could be closer to her.’ Without releasing his hands, Imogen swished her hair off her face and onto her shoulders. ‘She started writing about you that very night. I hadn’t even gotten around to implanting the idea of a rock star like you into her head yet either! She must have just picked up on whatever vibes I was sending out and…’ Imogen blew out a puff of air and shook her head. ‘I could not believe how she’d pegged you, Ryan. Every detail- every word every pretty little tooth- right where they had been in my memory! Of course she wrote a slightly different story in a different location and different characters-’
‘Kylie Lyle, instead of Callie Clay,’ he said softly. ‘Niagara Falls instead of the gorge…a heart transplant instead of a heart episode… but I was the same, and Justin and Hunter are pretty close...’
‘What about me?’ Callie asked, sounding fascinated.
‘Just as beautiful. Just as unattainable,’ Ryan said, smiling softly at her.
‘Just as selfish and prone to re-bounding,’ Imogen added lightly, and Calliope threw a handful of grass at her sister- turning it into black ants on the way. But both girls giggled, and Imogen shook off her dress, and rose petals floated down to the grass where the ants had been. Ryan stared at them, shaking his head in amazement. Imogen’s power had quadrupled in his absence!
‘Anyway, when I read the name … GOD. I begged her to change it, worried it would call attention to your death, so many years before- but she refused. She said she’d dreamt of a musician named Ryan Weaver and that was who you were and would always be.’
Once again, Ryan could not believe what he was hearing. ‘I didn’t even know you could do that…’
‘Neither did I!’ Imogen shook her head, and her eyes were almost as wide as Honey’s. ‘But it happened, and I can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once I’ve stepped on it- none of us can-’
‘American Pie would be a verse shorter if we could…’ Calliope groused, earning an understanding wink from Imogen.
‘I’ll see your long-ass song and raise you ten thousand crappy Indie novels,’ she teased, before turning back to Ryan. ‘In the end, I rationalized it away by thinking that really, I’d wanted your memory honored, and I’d done so. If the people who had known you back in Horizon had put the two and two together, they might have thought it a coincidence, or they would have dug into Kathryn and found no ties…. Regardless it was out of my hands and under her name, and it was hardly the first time I’ve inspired a fictional character using a real one, and most of my authors get away with it. Hell- a lot of them do it on purpose but at least in Kathryn’s case, she could plead plausible deniability.’
‘Wait… you’re saying that you got an author to bring Ryan back to life the way you did with Zeus?’ Calliope demanded, swooping over and sitting on Ryan’s left.
‘That’s what I did, yes. Only I only ever meant to brin
g back a shadow of him in tribute, you know? Like in some of Hunter’s songs.’
Ryan swallowed. ‘Hunter’s written songs about me?’
‘Dozens,’ Calliope whispered. ‘That man hasn’t let two minutes pass him by without thinking about you Ry.’
Ryan’s eyes grew wet again. ‘Wow.’ He looked at Imogen, puzzled. ‘That makes sense I guess, because I was the guy’s best friend. But you…?’
Imogen stared down at their hands again. ‘I couldn’t get your death off my conscience,’ she admitted softly. ‘I’ve done some messed up things in my time- we all have. Sometimes as goddesses, sometimes as human raising hell… but what I did to Calliope in Harley’s name- well- that was different.’ She swallowed again. ‘It wasn’t for my craft. It was done out of spite. Yes I taught Calliope a lesson she sorely needed to learn… but you paid the price for it more dearly than anyone.’
‘I said I’d die for her,’ Ryan argued. ‘That was Ardos’s doing, not yours.’
‘But she wouldn’t have been made mortal and needed you to make such a promise, if I hadn’t insisted that she be punished as severely as possible,’ Imogen contradicted. ‘I didn’t understand you, any of you, until I spoke to you and heard your side of the story. That led me to seeing my own soul-mate for the first time, and I am so grateful for that. I know that one day- even if it’s centuries from now- I will need him more than words, and I look forward to that. But I haven’t felt a true moment’s happiness since the night you died, and I needed to do something.’ She squeezed his hands. ‘I needed to give the world a little bit of Ryan back.’
Ryan blushed and felt the warmth in his heart. ‘So I exist, because of you?’
‘No. You exist because of imagination, just like here-’ Imogen released his hand and gestured to the area around them and Ryan realised that they were now on a huge stage that he did not recognize. ‘It’s from the book,’ she said softly, then clicked her fingers and they were sitting on the banks of the Niagara River, where Ryan busked, only there was not another soul in sight. ‘Your character, like Memoria and Zeus, was so beloved that you were willed into existence.’
‘What?’ Calliope sounded more shocked than him. ‘How is Ryan walking around because of a book I’ve never heard of, but not the sparkly dude from Twilight, or the cat-girl from The Hunger Games?’
‘Katniss,’ Leigh hissed the word at her sister, and thunderheads piled up above them. ‘And I assume the reason why you know about them, and not The Hardest Fall, is because you’re still waiting for the movie to generate enough buzz before you bother with the book.’
Calliope narrowed her eyes at her sister. ‘Thespia needs help too, you know,’ she said, naming the muse of the theatre, whom Calliope had always had a strong bond with. ‘I read, Imogen but don’t forget that I’m living as a mortal now- which means I have to actually raise a child, clean a house, tour-’
‘Don’t even start me on that,’ Imogen said, making it plain that she was as wary of Calliope’s human existence as he had been upon first learning of it. She turned back to Ryan. ‘But the point is, yes you were brought back to life by a book. That was easier for my mother and father to accomplish, because they only existed because of imaginations in the first place; a few million people worshipped them thousands of years ago, and thought them into existence. Then the world changed and Zeus and Memoria lost their hold on their follower’s hearts, and faded until a very talented writer, inspired by their daughter- wrote them back into relevance.’
‘But like you said,’ Ryan whispered. ‘They’re gods- they’re relevant but I was only ever a mortal who-’
‘Won one heart.’ Imogen said softly, her eyes shining. ‘Millions of women fell for you because of The Hardest Fall, but one girl recognised the man behind the character as a soul mate, and loved him so devoutly that six months after the book was published, he returned.’
Ryan’s heart felt like a thunderhead in his chest. ‘Leigh.’
Imogen nodded and then opened her hands- revealing a piece of paper. ‘I’ve been researching her since yesterday- I KNEW there was something about her, an ancient soul who has come back time and time again and could truly bloom under my guidance- and found this bit of fan-fiction. It’s an epilogue for The Hardest Fall… it takes place right after the second last chapter.’ The paper shivered in Ryan’s hands when Imogen handed it to him. ‘In it, Ryan goes over the edge of Niagara Falls, but doesn’t die. He washes downstream, and into the arms of a girl who was sitting on the riverbank, reading. He falls in love with her at first sight and she with him… and Kylie gets a transplant from someone else and ends up with Justin.’ She wrinkled her nose when Ryan looked up, shocked. ‘Yes I know, it’s cheesy as hell but-’
‘I love it.’ Ryan stared down at the words, but they shimmered and blurred behind his tears.
‘It was published the day I saw the bolt of lightning hit the falls, Ryan,’ Imogen said softly. ‘Six months ago I was in my house, trying to track someone online who I’d been interested for in a while to see if they needed me to come back… when I saw the lightning from the tower and felt this compulsion to run to the river. I knew exactly where to go and there you were- washed up on the side, returned as a human and so badly injured from the un-cushioned fall that I was terrified that you wouldn’t make it. After that, I kept you near, trying to wrap my head around what I’d done and what would become of you, for three months before I realised that so long as you had me to love and care for, you wouldn’t attempt to leave my side, and as deeply as I love you now Ryan, your destiny isn’t meant to be linked to mine eternally.’ She scratched her head and made a face. ‘Besides, I hate posing as an old lady. That’s no fun at all.’
‘So you faked your death?’ he asked, frowning. It was unsettling to know that he’d bonded with Imogen, almost to the degree that he’d bonded with Calliope only to be cast off by both. He was like the muses plaything!
‘Yes, and I asked my sister Clio keep in contact with you, posing as my elderly sister in Greece. I thought you’d make a nice little life for yourself, but I couldn’t sense you once I left. You are truly mortal now, you see, demi-god no longer so I was genuinely shocked when our paths crossed yesterday. I’d assumed that you would have found the book and the papers right after I died, and would have taken off or something. But there you were- with a girl who was a big enough fan of that book to chase you and put ideas in your head…’ she cringed. ‘I was worried about how you’d take the news as a surprise instead of just finding my letter, so I followed you yesterday after you left us- I tracked you all the way to Vegas and when I realised that Calliope was there too… god.’ She pressed her hand to her heart. ‘I didn’t know what seeing her would do to you, and I was terrified!’
‘Seeing ‘her’?’ Calliope asked cattily. ‘Jesus Imogen, you make it sound like I’m a plague upon him! Ryan or rather Ardos, was mine, and I’ll remind you that I died for him in the end! I know it was too late but-’
‘This isn’t about you or who he belongs to,’ Imogen snapped. ‘The Harmony had him wash up at my feet- not yours, and fate had you save his life last night while I saved hers- but those minor accomplishments are where our connection with him ends, don’t you see? He’s meant to be with Honey, only now that we’re involved… I don’t know what The Harmony will do!’
Ryan stared at her, dread creeping back into his heart once more. ‘You think The Harmony will punish me for having crossed paths with Calliope again?’
‘Mortals aren’t supposed to know about us Ry. They can dream- but to be told?’ Imogen closed her eyes and seemed to shake off something dark. ‘You came back without your memories for a reason and now that seeing her has brought them all back-’
‘Then you should have told me that he was alive, so I’d know to avoid him!’ Calliope jumped to her feet, looking vexed. ‘You shouldn’t have kept this secret from me!’
‘Tell me that you would have left him alone, if you’d known that he was back!’ Imogen also
got to her feet, her eyes and tone accusatory as the century-old rivalry blazed anew over Ryan’s head. ‘It’s just as dangerous for you to try and carve out an existence with Hunter, without accepting father’s offer to make him a demi-god so that he can be safe. Hunter’s going to work it out one day, and lord knows how The Harmony will punish you both for trying to have a perfect life on earth and then as immortals afterwards!’
‘Hunter’s destiny is to be a rock star and that is what he is doing! You call me selfish for staying by his side instead of forcing him to die so that we can be together, Imogen, but yanking him from the spotlight while he’s dominating it just so I can keep him all to myself is every bit as self-serving!’
‘Tell yourself that Calliope but you and I are cut from the same egotistical cloth. You never took the chance to stay with one of your more successful wards before and live within their love and fame and now that you have- you’re in love with the lifestyle! You want to be the rock star’s wife for as long as humanly possible, even though you know that it’s asking for too much- and you wonder why I didn’t risk Ryan’s second chance at life on you as well?’ She wrung her hands. ‘Zeus has guaranteed Hunter’s immortality for the good things he has done with his success- you could leave him now and wait for his life to come to an end but you won’t because YOU love the attention!’
