The Next Chance

by Shannon Reber

  Unconsciously, I guess you could say I reeled that cord in. It was the only way to describe it. And as I followed the golden-white line, Quinn’s kitchen disappeared from around me.

  I blinked, trying to orient myself as everything around me began to solidify. No, that wasn’t it at all. It didn’t solidify. I did, sort of.

  My breath caught in my chest as I looked around. I floated above a hospital bed . . . that held me. And I did indeed look dead.

  My skin was pasty. My lips were colorless. At least a dozen cords were attached to my skin in some way.

  I floated a little closer, able to see a huge, blue bruise on my chest around a stark, white bandage. That must be where I’d been shot. The problem was, all around that bruise were red lines that fanned out and a blood red rash.

  Sheenan’s bullet was poisoned. That must be what had caused the skin irritation. How could they not know what that poison was?

  My eyes flicked around the room and comprehension dawned. I wasn’t in a normal hospital room. I was in a PSA hospital room. Could they be withholding treatment simply because I had helped to dismantle the control the demon had over them? It was possible there were people who were loyal to the demon itself.

  No. That couldn’t be it. Quinn, Daw, Dawson, Erkens, and my dad were all there in my room as well. If any of them saw anything resembling neglect of my care, I was positive they’d be all over it.

  I stopped when I realized Ian wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have hurt me as much as it did. Where was he?

  I did my best not to allow hurt to fill my heart. It didn’t work. I was very hurt. Why wasn’t he there?

  I could feel myself fading back to that coma-dream place, so I again grabbed hold of the tether and pulled myself back to . . . myself. I had to focus on the issue at hand. I needed to know what my symptoms were.

  The beautiful thing about being at the PSA was the fact that everything was electronic. There were no paper charts. What there was, was a computer.

  I drifted closer and peered at the screen. There was a lot of information listed. The thing that stood out most was next to a red mark on the screen.

  HR: 32 BPM

  O2: 76%

  I was no medical professional but I knew how bad that was. My heart was only beating thirty-two times a minute. That was dangerously low.

  The list of drugs I was being given was not small. I did my best to memorize all the names. I had my doubts about truly remembering them all. I did have what I needed, though.

  I looked around the room one last time, love filling me. My family. They were right there. I did my best not to think about the fact my mom and Ian were both missing.

  Mom’s absence was no surprise. Even if she COULD be there, she wouldn’t. She had stopped even trying to look like she cared.

  But Ian . . . what if something had happened? What if he was hurt? That was the only reason I could think of for why he wasn’t in my hospital room.

  Then again, maybe he’d simply gone to the bathroom. There was no need for me to panic. Okay, so I panicked a little.

  My mind fogged and all of a sudden, I was back in Quinn’s kitchen. I was aware that it was a dream. It didn’t matter. If I could figure out what poison had been on Sheenan’s bullet, I would be able to get back to my body and help to protect the people I loved.

  NINE

  Noah wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He’d thought his job would be a lot more exciting. He figured he’d play the hero like the boys in the stories Quinn told him.

  He didn’t feel very heroic as he sat on the couch, watching Ian clean the house. He’d offered to help but Ian had refused, his eyes making it look like he listened to some kind of conversation in his head.

  Maybe he was talking to some ghosts. Noah wished he could do that. He could only see the spirits and demons who wanted to be seen, not all of them like Ian could.

  Noah fiddled with the laser light again, making the last few adjustments before he stuck it in his pocket. He wanted to do something. Anything. He was tired of being in one place for so long.

  Noah stood up and walked toward the door, his face set in lines of determination. He stared fixedly at the door, not wanting to meet Ian’s eyes. He knew something was wrong with him but he couldn’t understand what it was.

  He’d always known there was a darkness inside him. He’d seen a lot of people cringe away from him when he was angry. Could it be because of a demon?

  No. That couldn’t be. Quinn tested him all the time. Salt. Holy water. The scanner. She had always said he was normal.

  Lies had become a part of everyday life for them. If they told the truth all the time, they would be dead many times over. Quinn had taught him how to lie in ways that were hard to detect.

  So maybe that meant he was possessed. Ian had been. Maybe Noah had been possessed by a weak demon who only came out when he was angry.

  Noah needed to get away from Ian. He had come back in time to stop the demon uprising. He would not sit around anymore.

  “You need to stay inside,” Ian said as he laid his hand on the doorknob.

  Noah didn’t look back, though neither did he open the door. “I didn’t come back to watch you clean your house,” he said, annoyed by how sulky his voice had sounded.

  He’d wanted to sound strong and determined, not whiney. He closed his eyes and took in a slow breath, counting to three as he did. It was something he remembered Ian teaching him to do.

  Ian let out a small groan and chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I’m sorry, Noah. I really am. But the world is changing right now. There’s a curfew. No one is allowed to be outside after dark.”

  Noah rolled his eyes. “That’s stupid. Demons don’t care about light and dark. The only reason they want you all locked up in your house is so you can’t run away as easy when they come for you.”

  Ian raised his brows. “I understand that but getting arrested for being outside the house would make running even more difficult.”

  Noah scowled, slowly turning back to face Ian. He didn’t quite look at him, his eyes fixed on something to Ian’s right. He could feel the anger rise inside him again. “I have a job to do,” he stated, counting to three again as he tried to suppress his temper.

  “So do I, Noah.”

  “No, you don’t. You lost your job at the mechanic place.”

  Ian snorted out a small sound of amusement. “Yeah, I did. My dad isn’t very happy with me. That’s not my only job. I also work for Erkens.”

  Noah narrowed his eyes. “Who’s that?” he asked, not recognizing the name.

  “TC Erkens isn’t around in the future?” Ian asked, his mouth hanging open in surprise.

  “Oh. You mean the demon king? He’s around but he’s scary. He likes cutting parts off people and watching them bleed,” he said matter-of-factly, his mind blocking out the terrible things he had seen.

  Ian cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck again. “Yeah. You’re right. Sitting around here waiting for it to be legal to go out isn’t going to save anybody.” He motioned to the back door. “We should go out the back. I don’t know the routes the patrols take, though.”

  Noah smiled, pulling a phone-like device from his pocket. “The radios the police and military use are on the same frequency. This can tell me when they’re close to us.”

  “You made a radar detector app?” Ian asked, his lips quirked in an amused expression.

  Noah shook his head. “Those already exist. What I did was add the sensor. Now, we can know if the cop car has demons or humans and we can stay away from all of them.”

  “You really are Maddie’s son, aren’t you?” Ian asked rhetorically, rubbing his hand over his heart.

  Noah cocked his head and then shook it, his gaze flicking upward. “I already told you that,” he said, not understanding the idiom.

  “You did,” he agreed, moving to turn off the lights as a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  Noah nudged his chin tow
ard the door. “You should lock the doors. It’s not safe to leave them open,” he said, looking around the house again.

  “Wait . . . I never even asked you how you got in,” Ian said, his eyes turning to look at the door. “It was open?”

  “Unlocked, yeah.”

  Ian’s face slackened, his body going tense.

  He sprang toward the other bedroom door and threw it open. There, lying on the bed was his roommate, Anton. There were two round, red holes in the center of his chest with blood sprayed over the wall behind his bed.

  Ian sprang forward. He suddenly stopped, his eyes going wide as he looked at something next to him.

  Noah didn’t look at the body. He’d already known it was there. He hadn’t seen it himself but Quinn had told him it had happened.

  What he didn’t know was if it was Anton’s ghost that Ian was looking at or if it was something else. He wanted to ask. He had a feeling it wasn’t a good idea.

  He simply stood in the door of the bedroom and waited. He watched Ian for a minute, unsure what he should do. Maybe he should hug him.

  That was what he’d seen other kids do when their dads were sad. He vaguely remembered a time when his dad had hugged him, the feeling of safety it gave making him wish he remembered it more clearly.

  Noah shook his head when Ian pulled a cell phone from his pocket. “You shouldn’t call the police,” he said as forcefully as he could.

  “Why not?”

  “The police got taken over super fast. Quinn said to stay away from all of them.”

  Ian stared at his phone for a few seconds before he turned back to look at Noah. His lips were pressed flat as he set his jaw. “Did you know about this?” he asked in a hard voice, stepping out of the room and closing the door behind himself.

  Noah nodded. “Quinn told me your roommate got killed. She said there was a group of people who got the demon uprising started and they went around and killed the people you and Madison love most.”

  Ian recoiled. He leaned back against the wall as if his knees had given out. “Who else?” he whispered, though it was clear he already knew.

  “Your mom and dad, Madison’s dad, a bunch of other people. I don’t remember all their names.”

  Ian balled his hands into fists and closed his eyes. “Can we save them?” he asked, his voice shaky with the power of his emotions.

  Noah scratched his nose, turning his eyes up to meet Ian’s full on. “Quinn says there’s rules about going back in time but I think that’s stupid. I think we should save as many people as we can,” he stated, shrugging a single shoulder. “I think we should go back and save everybody.”

  Ian glanced at the bedroom where his friend’s body lay, then stood straight. “What reasons did Quinn give you for why she didn’t want you to save everybody?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

  Noah blew out a long breath. “It’s called the Grandfather Paradox. If I go back in time and kill my grandpa, I wouldn’t exist anymore.”

  “We’re planning to SAVE your grandparents and everybody else, though.”

  “That’s not really it. It’s about making changes in the timeline. Some people think that if you go back in time and save somebody’s life, that’s bad because there’s a plan. They think people die for a reason. They think going back in time and changing stuff is messing with the natural order. I think that’s stupid.”

  “Are there laws about time travel?”

  Noah made a face. “So what if there are?” he challenged, his lips poked out sulkily.

  Ian flicked his eyes toward the bedroom door again before he motioned to the back door. “Let’s go. We’ll go back to the PSA and you can talk to people who’ll actually understand what’s going on.”

  “Are you going to get in trouble?”

  “Trouble?” Ian asked as he closed the door and locked it behind them.

  “You said Quinn told you to leave.”

  Ian glanced down at him, giving a slow shake of his head. “I’m not worried about Quinn being mad at me. I’m more worried about the fact the people I love are being killed by some group I don’t know anything about. I was under the impression Maddie and I had started this thing when we agreed to open the door to hell.”

  Noah shook his head solemnly. “They used you but they had a bunch of different plans to let the demons out.” He tipped his head to the side. “You didn’t know about the Apostles?”

  Ian shook his head.

  “They’re super bad. Like they planned to bring the demons to earth for years. There’s a lot of them but the biggest baddest guy is Sheenan. He serves under the Demon King and he’s evil.”

  Ian jerked to a stop, resting his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “You’re saying that me and Maddie opening the door to hell was one of many plans they had to end the world?”

  Noah nodded.

  Ian cursed, shooting an apologetic look at him. “I’m sorry, Noah. I’m having a hard time processing all this.”

  Noah smirked. “Quinn says those are driving words. She says she hopes I have more imagination than to use swear words but it doesn’t count when you’re driving because people drive stupid and you need to tell them that sometimes.”

  Ian glanced back at the house once again. “I kind of feel like I’m driving right off a cliff right now, so I guess that means it’s forgivable in Quinn’s eyes.”

  Noah patted the hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell. I think we should go.” He held up the demon-detector, showing a map of the city with a red dot moving closer to them. “We got a bogie.”

  Ian grinned, motioning Noah to get into the car. “Something I learned when I was a kid, having somebody keep a secret for you gives them power over you. If you own up to your mistake, life is a lot easier.”

  Noah swallowed hard, not sure if Ian already knew his secret and was toying with him or if he was simply giving advice. He did have a secret. If he owned up to it, Ian wouldn’t trust him ever again.

  TEN

  It was not easy to concentrate. I’d never had that problem in the entirety of my life. Right then, my usual focus was nowhere to be found.

  I blinked, looking around the kitchen. It looked wrong. Or not quite right. Then again, maybe it was fine and I was the one who wasn’t quite right.

  Okay. Concentrate. I had to tell Quinn something. No. That wasn’t it. What was going on?

  I blinked and scrubbed my hands over my face, trying to figure out what was happening. There were things I needed to remember. I knew it was true. I couldn’t remember what they were.

  Quinn pushed my cup of coffee toward me along with the sugar bowl, a sweet smile on her face. “Madison, you do know that you can go back to bed if you’re this tired, don’t you?” she asked, a teasing tone to her voice.

  I dumped some sugar into my coffee and stirred perfunctorily before taking a drink. “I don’t think I can. I need to do something,” I told her, hoping she might be able to jog my memory.

  Daw took the sugar bowl from me and dumped some into his own cup. “You were talking about poisons, remember?” he said, taking a long drink of his own coffee as though to fortify himself for what was to come.

  Poisons. Oh. Right. A poisoned bullet. A slowed heart rate. A hospital room. It all felt so vague, though.

  In my mind’s eye, the woman I’d seen in the hospital bed had been me. That couldn’t be true . . . or could it? And the memories clubbed me over the head.

  It WAS me. I had been shot. I was in some kind of coma. How had I forgotten?

  I did my best to push those questions aside for a little bit and simply relayed what I could remember about the hospital room. I snapped my fingers as the picture formed in my mind. “Heart rate thirty-two. Oxygen seventy-eight percent.”

  “Whoa,” Quinn said, her eyes so wide, the white could be seen all the way around. “You said she was shot and the bullet was laced with poison, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And we need to figure out what the poison is?”


  I nodded again, glad I didn’t have to try to explain what had actually happened.

  Quinn pursed her lips. “You’re the one who researched those things,” she reminded me, resting her elbows on the table as she leaned closer. “What poisons do you know of that slow the heart rate like that?”

  I thought back through all the research I’d done after our case having to do with the serial killers from the past. Arsenic was the one I’d done the most research on. The symptoms did include an abnormal heart rhythm but reddening skin, nausea, and vomiting were also on the list. I didn’t have any of that so far as I knew.

  What if whatever the bullet had been laced with wasn’t from this realm, though. There must be billions of things from other worlds Sheenan could have used.

  Then again, Sheenan was human. He might have allies among the people of the Axis Mundi, yet I guessed that wasn’t the case. My guess was that it was a toxin from our world that had been tinkered with to make it more potent, less easy for the doctors to figure out an antidote to.

  Cyanide was a possibility. It did cause the heart rate to lower as well as the blood pressure. Seizures were among the list of symptoms as I recalled, though. I hadn’t had any . . . that I knew of.

  How would I know? It wasn’t like I could feel any pain in the dream world I was in. Would I even know if I died in the real world?

  That stopped me cold. If my body died, would the piece of my soul in this holding place cease to exist or would it go on? Would I become a ghost? Was I one already?

  No. I was alive. I knew it was true. There was no time to waste, though. My body was not in good shape.

  Okay, so I needed to figure out the poison. That had to be my first priority. Once I figured it out, I would come up with a plan on how to get my soul back into my body and fix the damage Sheenan had done to me.

  I thought back to everything I had seen in the hospital room. For some reason, I remembered things looking odd. Colors hadn’t seemed quite right and my vision had been hazy.

  Could that be because my soul was hovering over my body? I didn’t know much about out of body experiences. I’d never heard of anyone having blurred vision during astral travel.