Earthbound

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Sobs are wracking my body before I realize I’ve started crying. And almost as soon as I do, I’m laughing, laughing at the power Rebecca’s trying to exert over me as soon as I want someone who isn’t Quinn.

“Get out of my head!” I scream to the sky, and she retreats, but her presence is still there, slowly melding, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it is not her and me, but us.

“Tave,” Benson says, his hands still on my face. I take a calming breath and ground myself by studying him—his wire-rimmed glasses, slightly askew, the streak of mud across his forehead, his lips. They’re red from my rough affections and all I want to do is kiss them again.

I try to speak, but my teeth are chattering from both cold and nerves and I can’t get anything understandable out.

“Come here,” Benson says, opening his jacket to me. I tuck myself close against his chest and he wraps me up as best he can, holding me tight as the chattering turns into full-body shudders, then slowly subsides.

“Can you talk about it now?” Benson whispers.

I don’t lift my head; I’m not sure I can make this confession while looking at him. “I saw the whole thing. The night they were supposed to die.”

“You mean like you were seeing through Quinn?”

I shake my head violently. “No, I had that part totally wrong. This was never about Quinn; it was about me! Quinn’s not trying to possess me—he’s just trying to get me to remember who I am.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Rebecca Fielding.” Saying it aloud threatens my grip on reality. Less than a week ago, I thought loving a stranger was crazy. Where does that leave me now? “I was. Two hundred years ago, I was her, and I was here. With Quinn. We’re …”

We’re Earthbound. That word in Rebecca’s head. The word Elizabeth spoke. The one I read in Quinn’s journal.

But there’s another word, too. One that terrifies me to my bones.

Gods. I am a goddess. But I don’t say the words out loud. I hardly dare to think them, but their truth resonates through me. Even though I’m still not entirely sure what they mean.

For months I’ve accepted my limitations, accepted the parts of me that will never heal. Accepted that I am less than I once was.

But now I’m not.

I’m more. So much more.

I am forever. I am eternal. I am powerful beyond imagination. It’s why I can make things. Rebecca could. Quinn could. And now I can. The cast-iron covering Benson and I dug up, like the cast-iron manacles I trapped Elizabeth in. I understand why, in that moment, it seemed so familiar.

And that’s only a fraction of what I can do.

Rebecca and Quinn were better than I am now. My creations disappear—two hundred years later, theirs are still here.

I have the potential to do the same thing.

But I have to do something. And not just anything—the most important something in the world.

It will unlock my abilities … . if only I can remember what it is.

My body starts to shake again. That kind of power makes everything more dangerous, more dire. Maybe I can harness it, but if I can’t, it could destroy us all.

“I don’t understand,” Benson says, and his voice is unsteady. “Like, a past life?”

“Yes. And not just one. A hundred. A thousand. At first I saw Rebecca, the same way I’ve always seen Quinn. But then, it’s like my—my soul, I guess, came out of me and I was inside Rebecca, looking out of her eyes and feeling everything that she felt on the night they tried to kill her.”

Benson is silent, but his brow wrinkles in obvious thought.

“And it was … familiar. I knew I’d been in that body before.” It was like coming home, I think. But I don’t say it.

“So, do you … remember things now?”

“Sort of. Flashes. It’s not much,” I admit. “But she … I was so afraid. They’re after her, Benson.”

“Who?”

“The Reduciata.” Just saying the word makes a storm of fear roil in my chest.

He swallows hard.

“And that’s why they’re after me. Because she is me. I can’t let them catch me. They’ll—they’ll—” I don’t know how to end that sentence. But the terror that twists my insides in knots is enough to let me know that I would rather die than be in Reduciata custody.

Again.

Again?

“You can’t even imagine what they’ll do,” I finally say, my voice soft. I shake off the awful memories.

Not even memories—shadows, hints of memories.

“We can’t go to the Curatoria either. I have to do this on my own.” Panic quivers inside me and I spin back to Benson. “Not alone,” I emphasize when I see the despairing expression on his face. “Please help me?”

He reaches for my shoulder, then changes his mind and lets his hands drop. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need—”

The necklace. Rebecca’s voice, I think. It sounds so much like my own.

“The necklace,” I obediently parrot. “The one Quinn wrote about in his journal—then I’ll remember.” I don’t want to give Rebecca more access to my head—to my heart—but somehow I know that getting the necklace will give me more power, not less. I have to have that power.

“Do you think it’s in the dugout place?” he asks.

“It’s got to be.”

“Let’s go back to the car.” He helps me to my feet, but my fingers and toes are numb and I stagger.

“Easy,” Benson says as he curls his arm around me and leads me away from the ruins of the house I lived in, lifetimes ago. I lean my head against his shoulder and wish we could forget about all this for a few hours and just go back to the hotel. Any hotel. The farther away the better.

But I can’t. I have to remember and then get the hell out of here before they catch up with me. I can protect myself, protect Benson, but only if I remember.

Remember.

A few drops of melted snow from the trees drip onto my face as a gust of wind finds the towering boughs above us. The sudden cold pricks on my skin and I’m myself again. Completely now. Even though I know—know as surely as I know the sky is blue and grass green—that I was Rebecca Fielding in another life.

“I’ll drive,” Benson says. “We shouldn’t stay in one place very long while people are following you—especially around that house. What used to be the house. If they know about Quinn, they might know about this place already.”

“Just a sec,” I say, reaching past him into the passenger seat. “It might be in the stuff you grabbed.” I open Benson’s messenger bag and sort through the contents.

A ring, a small pouch still mostly full of gold, and a lumpy bundle wrapped in a handkerchief.

That’s it.

An energy only I can sense pulses through it and I know what’s inside even as my fingers reach for it, pulling at the sparse stitches that hold the yellowed handkerchief closed.

The necklace.

It’s here.

It’s mine.

My hands are shaking too hard to undo the strings. “Benson? Can you please?”

He takes the delicate fabric and holds it in his hand for a few seconds before untying the thin strings to reveals a heavy pendant that glints silver and red.

It’s the one from my vision.

He looks down at the necklace with a tight expression. “So this will bring everything back?”

“I think so.”

He tries to speak, but his voice cracks and he stays silent for another few seconds. “And then what?” he finally asks, not looking up to meet my eyes.

I step forward and he draws the necklace closer, as though to keep it from me, but I’m not reaching for it. I run my hands up and down his arms the way he so often has with me.

Slowly.

Calmly.

Somehow I have to help Benson deal with all this. Help him see I still need him—need the guy who has seen me through absolute hell the last week. He didn’t ask for this, wouldn’t have had anything to do with this if I hadn’t walked into his life. Come to the library for help.

Help. If only he knew then what he was getting into.

My hands freeze, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Benson, if you could go back in time to the day we met, and you knew everything that was going to happen, would you opt out?”

He looks down at me, and his eyes are hollow.

And he thinks.

Really thinks.

A prickle of annoyance threatens at his hesitance, but I stamp it down. It’s an important question and not one to be taken lightly.

“No,” he finally whispers.

“Me either. And this,” I say, pointing at his fist, still clenched around the necklace, the thin chain spilling out like sand, “isn’t going to change things. I don’t care what Rebecca thinks she wants, Benson. I want you. All this is going to do is give us answers.”

“You don’t understand,” he whispers. “You won’t feel the same.”

“Benson Ryder, put that necklace down!” I snap.

He drops the necklace on the trunk of the car with a thud, wary and confused. As soon as it’s out of his hand, I push my arms inside his jacket, just under his shirt. He shudders when my fingers touch his bare skin.

“Benson?” My heart beats wildly.

He just looks at me, and I could drown in the pain in his eyes.

“I love you. You.” I kiss his bottom lip, more of a gentle brush of skin than a kiss. Tingles spread through my body and I suppress a smile.

I said it.

I meant it.

I stand on tiptoe and kiss the scrapes on his face, then his nose, his cheeks. I let my hands slide up his neck and pull him down to me, kissing him gently, coaxing him with my mouth. “She can’t change how I feel,” I murmur against his lips.

“You don’t know that,” he whispers, and his voice is filled with an agony I’m desperate to heal.

I entwine our fingers and hold them against my heart. “I do. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I think you’ve more than proved the lengths you’ll go to for me.” I kiss his knuckles, one at a time, avoiding the reddened, broken skin on his right hand. “Now it’s my turn to prove it to you.”

I look up at him, and his entire face is tight with an emotion I can’t quite read. He draws in a ragged gasp and pulls his hand away. He turns halfway and picks up the necklace. “Shall I?” he whispers with near reverence.

“P-please,” I stutter.

He lifts the necklace, and rubies sparkle in a beam of sunlight. The chain is long, and Benson holds it up and gestures for me to turn around. Then the pendant hangs in front of my face, still suspended from Benson’s fingers. He hesitates, and I feel his breath close to my ear—in and out in a loud hiss.

“No matter what happens next,” he whispers, “I love you too.”

He drops the necklace over my head.