Harken

14 Nightlights

If there was a way to describe the feeling that overcame me, it was like my entire body was being pulled down the drain of a tub, water fighting to drown me as my bones were mashed together. No matter how much I struggled or how badly the force mangled me, I could not fight hard enough to escape.

I looked up from the pictures, letting them fall into my lap, staring at Callista and Thad with fright and inwardly hoping that one of them would protest.

They were looking at me with wide eyes, probably a mirror of my own face. But they didn’t say anything. Why weren’t they arguing, why weren’t they at least trying to prove me wrong? Didn’t Callista always try that—why wasn’t she now?

Thad bent forward, resting his head on his knee and running his fingers into his hair, leaving them there, letting the realization flow through him.

“The dreams were real,” I said, pieces still coming together like keys into locks. “We’ve lived before. Everything I saw…those were my lives. I’ve already failed twice.”

I pointed to the pictures. “This is what Anon wanted me to know. That’s why I saw both of you in my nightmares. We were running from the Guardians in the first, and you tried to save me in the second life, but it was too late. And now we’re back.”

“This is insane…” Callista breathed out, her voice dropping to a nearly indiscernible level. It was affecting her just as much as me. All along, we’d been far more important than we’d thought. Suddenly, we all knew why the Guardians wanted us dead so badly. How could this have happened?

Nothing we could have spoken would have been of any comfort. What we’d thought was larger than us was now even a hundred times bigger. But who was I supposed to hate? Myself, for dying and pushing it onto me? That was the worst part, because if what I’d found was true, I was the only person to blame for it.

“We need a plan,” Callista said.

“I don’t have one,” I replied, unintentionally whimpering.

“We need a damn plan!” she exploded at me, screaming so loudly that it bounced off the walls and the furniture, ringing on the glass of the TV.

“I don’t have one!” I barked, my head snapping up as the roar left my throat, so harsh that it was painful. She didn’t back down.

“Do you understand that they are going to kill us?” she shouted straight into my face. Her hands were in fists so tense that her knuckles were white.

“Do you understand how big this is?!” she said. “We will die. They will make sure.”

“You think I don’t know that?” I was just as loud as her, refusing to back down. “They’re after me. I’m the target. I’m the one who has to die.”

“And if you die then we do too,” she said. “So if you let yourself die because you don’t even have any of this thought out, then you’re our murderer.”

My hands slid down to my sides on the bed, ready to push myself up and face her, fury pumping through my veins. I moved but only made it to standing halfway before Thad lashed an arm out, slamming it across the front of my shoulders, forcing me to sit.

“Sit the hell down!” he yelled at me. I fought, but the muscles on his arm were almost twice the size of mine.

“You too!” he ordered Callista, just as harshly. “Sit down, now!”

Callista didn’t take orders. But I’d never seen Thad so furious, arm still latched across me like an iron brace, fire in his eyes as he glared at Callista—lions in a war of territory. She bit her lower lip, but in the end, she sat halfway on the edge of the dresser, turning her head away with hot, angry tears in the corners of her eyes.

“That’s enough from both of you,” Thad snapped. “We’re not going to get anywhere if we’re fighting with each other. That’s not what we need right now.”

“What we need is a plan—” Callista started. He lifted his other hand.

“Do you see I have another arm right here?” he growled threateningly. “I could pin you to a chair, and Michael here to another chair, until both of you shut up.”

She shut up.

“Don’t you dare yell at Callista again,” he told me. “We’ve given up a lot for you already, and we don’t owe you a single thing anymore.”

I pressed my lips together tightly, teeth together too. I knew they’d given up a lot for me, and just having them there with me at that moment was something I should have been extremely grateful for. There was just no room for feelings of appreciation amidst everything else in my head at that moment.

When I said nothing, Thad turned to Callista again.

“And you,” he said. “We’re all upset right now. But you need to keep in control. None of us want to be here, but we’re here now. And we have to move ahead from that.”

He took a large breath and let it out quickly in exasperation. “You two are gonna drive me crazy if you keep this up.”

Finally, his arm slid away from me, and I sank back to let some of the tension ease.

“Am I allowed to ask what the next step is?” Callista said. Thad cleared his throat.

“Michael,” he said. They were looking at me again.

“Um…” I started. “Well there’s the bank cash box at the bottom of the letter.”

I produced the paper. The number was typed a space below an address in downtown LA.

“We can go down there and take a look,” I said. “That’s the next obvious thing to do.”

“Are we actually going to go after this Blade?” Callista said. Thad didn’t move but I could sense that the same question was on his mind too. Because that was really what all of this had pointed to, wasn’t it? I’d been led down a winding path to find the truth, and now that I knew, it was time for me to pick up where I’d left off, decades before.

I knew I was a Guardian. And with all I’d found out, I couldn’t just stop here.

But I couldn’t expect myself to go deeper, a part of me cried in counter. I was just a teenager. My goal was to go home somehow, right?

“I don’t know,” I replied, just like I’d replied to so many other questions.

“And that’s going to settle it for now,” Thad said, standing up quickly, clicking his pocket watch open. “It’s two-forty-three PM. We’re not going to argue. We’re going to stay here tonight, eat something, and tomorrow we will go to the bank, and take this one step at a time.”

That sounded very anti-plan and I knew Callista wasn’t happy about that. She managed to keep her dissatisfaction to herself by promptly leaving the room, but the heat of her anger emanated down the hall.

“You really get on her nerves,” Thad told me, shaking his head. I sighed.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be alright.”

“I didn’t mean to yell at her,” I said.

“Look, this is a lot,” he told me. “We’re gonna deal with it in different ways.”

I turned to him. “How come you seem so calm about this?”

Out of all of us, he’d reacted the least, and actually seemed to have already adjusted to our new discoveries. I could sense his coolness under pressure, the calculated way in which he absorbed everything. I envied his ability to let go of inhibitions because I was so much the opposite.

With questions still in the air, we left the room and headed in search of something to eat. Why did things have to be tenser now, even when we weren’t running from people trying to kill us? I felt stupid. I’d had to go and fight with Callista when that was the last thing I wanted us to be doing.

I thought about apologizing, but I never ran into Callista as Thad and I got to the stairs. When we reached the bottom, we saw the paper grocery bags at our feet.

“This was thoughtful,” I said, reaching in to the first and pulling out a sack of almonds. All of the bags were full of food: green apples, more almonds, a handful of fresh avocados, cans of white tuna, boxes of cheap crackers shaped like animals, and jars with some type of dough and fruit. The bags were full of them, assorted throughout like someone had picked them up from the store in a hurry and dropped them there.

“Glad he gave us something to snack on,” Thad said, taking one of the apples and biting in to it. I was far hungrier than I had realized, so I grabbed one of the tuna cans and ventured off in search of a can opener.

Around the corner, the area opened up into a gigantic kitchen with the same gray tiled floors as the entryway. The counter was made of smooth blue granite and seemed to go on forever around half the parameter of the room, not a spot or smudge on it. In the center of the floor was an island, covered by another slab of granite at least twice the size of my bed. The walls were full of cherry-colored cabinetry and drawers, except across the room where tall windows were covered by blinds. A small table sat beneath the windows.

The kitchen was stocked with plates and cups and utensils hiding in the cabinets. But the pantry was entirely empty and the fridge’s shelves were so clean it appeared it’d never been used.

It was difficult to let my surroundings sink in. Any other time, I’d have leapt at the opportunity to stay in a house like this. Spud would want to hear all about this giant home, only to be bored by the things I’d actually used it for: hiding upstairs at night and watching out the windows with my camera, attempting to see the neighbors as they got home. Most times, wealth didn’t impress me. Being star struck was a waste of time. I wasn’t the person who stood outside the gates of the Beverly Hills taking pictures; I was the person who grew scales and flew over.

I grinned at the thought of Spud seeing me now. That was if I ever saw anyone I knew again. Slowly, the possibility of never being able to go back seeped into me. It was nearly unfathomable. Never? Of course I’d be going back. Maybe if I waited a week, or even two weeks, all of this would blow over? Maybe I could fix all this, then sneak home and take my family far away, where we could get new identities and hide so deep that the Guardians would never find me again.

A week or two weeks? another part of me thought. Are you serious, Michael?

The Guardians had tracked down a billionaire hiding in Japan. If they could find him in a crowd of millions and would set off an earthquake just to get him, surely they could find me anywhere I went.

I sighed. I didn’t want to think about this, so I dug the last bite of tuna out of the can and chewed it down slowly.

As darkness settled over the mansion, we found ourselves growing restless. As large as the house was, it still felt like being trapped in a trench. I tried to step outside, just for a few minutes onto the back porch, but Thad wouldn’t let me. We had to stay indoors for now. If we were going to follow Anon’s instructions, we couldn’t take any chances of the neighbors alerting the police about trespassers.

In the interest of not calling attention to ourselves, we knew that turning on lights would be a bad idea. Thad found flashlights in the kitchen though, unscrewing their caps so that the bulb was like a candle. We sat in a circle in the first bedroom we’d entered and had a light dinner of mashed avocados and more tuna fish together. I pulled out the bag of crackers.

“Animal crackers and tuna fish,” Thad observed, grabbing some. “What a true meal of etiquette in this fine mansion.”

“I don’t think I’m using the proper tuna fork right now,” I added.

“I can just feel the walls trembling with disdain,” Callista said, taking a handful herself and dropping them into one of the crystal cups I’d found in the cabinet. The room was still very cold because even though we’d searched, none of us could find the thermostat controls.

I was thankful that we were able to talk like that, because earlier I’d been wondering if Callista would ever speak to me again. Her anger quelled itself over time: I was slowly learning that about her. I chewed my food slowly as we passed the box of crackers around.

No one spoke of what we’d discovered earlier. Callista picked the lions out of the animal crackers and kept stealing Thad’s lions too, so they had a mini skirmish on the floor. We even laughed together quietly.

When we were full, we laid around continuing to snack, me leaning against the side of the bed with Callista lying on her stomach nearby. Thad kept trying to balance his plate on his knee by placing crackers on each side like weights. It kept falling over. So in the end, he dropped it to the floor, and reached into his pocket, clicking his watch open.

“Oh, hello there,” he piped up. “It’s 11:11 right now. Make a wish everyone.”

I threw a cracker at him.

“Why are you so obsessed with that stupid watch?” I said, laughing.

The cracker hit him straight in the face: unflinching, his hand not moving to catch it as it fell to the floor. The room dropped into a hush.

What did I say this time? I thought, food still in my mouth, hesitant to chew. I looked to Thad, but he’d already caught himself. His face had gone stony.

“It’s just a watch,” he said in a hurry. Not true. He was covering something up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”

“Let’s watch TV,” Callista suggested, standing up abruptly and grabbing the remote from the stand. She switched it on before Thad or I could say anything else. The static burst swept throughout the room but I could feel that I’d touched a nerve.

“It’s alright, man,” Thad told me, cutting his hand in the air dismissively. I chewed slowly, watching Thad stuff the watch back into his pocket. He didn’t appear angry… but there was hurt on his face. If he’d shown a Glimpse, I’d already missed it. His teeth were clenched slightly, though he pried them apart as he turned around to face the TV.

I just can’t keep my mouth shut, I scolded myself. This was why I didn’t have many friends in real life. I just couldn’t deal with all of this, people and their problems. Their feelings.

So we watched TV. Callista had turned it to an old black-and-white sitcom, so hyper with its canned laughter and sound effects that it became the room’s anesthesia.

“We should talk about before,” Thad said suddenly.

“No,” Callista replied without hesitation.

In this, none of us had turned to each other, staring ahead as the screen fizzled lights onto our faces. It was something we’d been avoiding.

But it had to be brought up. We were here together, in some strange house, not knowing what would happen the next day, the next week…the rest of our lives. It was the three of us against everyone else; a trio who, by fate or chance, had been shoved together against our will.

“I think we do,” I said in agreement. Callista’s head bowed forward slightly—there we went again, two against one. Thad cleared his throat.

“I don’t know my parents,” he began. “Not even since I was a kid. They’re either dead or too high right now to realize I’m alive. I live—I lived—with my uncle in Washington. He won’t go looking for me, so I’m not worried about going back.”

He uncrossed his legs, tilting them in front of himself and draping his arms over his knees. “So if we get shot at again and I can’t make it, and I die, not many people are going to really care all that much. Just so you know.”

It was such a despondent thing to say. It was almost like Thad was outing himself as expendable, telling us to not worry about police being sent to search for him. He didn’t say it in a self-deprecating way: just a fact.

The TV babbled on. No one volunteered to continue. I swallowed nervously.

“I live in the Valley,” I said. “It’s this town called Arleta. I have my mom and my sister…that’s mostly it. If I can keep them safe long enough to figure this out and take them someplace else, I’ll be happy.”

And if not? I didn’t want to think about it. There wasn’t another option. I would go home, and I would get my life back in order. I could fix this. I could make all of this better and make it all go away. I’d never faced a problem I couldn’t solve, so I could solve this, right?

There was only one person left to talk. At first she didn’t, and so much silence went on after me that I assumed she wasn’t going to speak at all.

“My family is dead,” Callista’s voice cracked.

It took great effort for her to get the words out. She wiped her eyes swiftly.

“That’s all,” she said. “They’re gone. I watched them being killed. It was nighttime. I watched that Guardian with the white eyebrows—Wyck—he shot them all. He shot my mom first, then my dad, then both my brothers. They were just crying.”

A quick breath tumbled out of her.

“They weren’t doing anything but crying,” she insisted. “And he just shot them in the back of their heads. And then they put the bag over me, and Wyck took me away, and when I woke up I was in the white room.”

Callista curled over into a sitting ball. The white room. The way she said it made me feel cold inside, bumps rolling across my skin at the desperation and terror that had infused her thought of that place. It hit me how long she’d been kept a prisoner, not even allowed a few moments to recover from the death of her family before she was thrust into whatever living nightmare I could see scrolling in memory through her eyes.

“So even when this is over, I don’t have anywhere to go,” she finished.

She stood up suddenly. Neither Thad nor I acknowledged her as she left, staring at the floor, the weight in the room pushing against our chests. The door opened and closed behind her, and then it was only Thad and I. Again.

The TV babbled on.

When I regained power over myself, I stood, picked up my plate and the cans of food, and left Thad. I crossed the hall, toes sinking in to the gentle carpet. Callista had taken the blue bedroom, the door now closed, so I went into the green one. The door clicked solidly behind me.

I shone the flashlight into the dark corners, checking the closet just because I knew I’d feel safer if I made sure nothing was in there. The shelves and racks were empty, no clothes or even a single coat hanger.

The bed’s mattress was so thick that it nearly went up to my hips, and the sheets were so tightly pressed that I had some difficulty getting them pulled back. I pushed most of the pillows off onto the floor and chose the flattest of them, which was still overstuffed. I flicked the flashlight off.

In the sudden darkness, I could have easily been disoriented into thinking I was in my room, until my eyes adjusted and my surroundings proved otherwise. As I lay facing the ceiling—which had no fan on it, and made me miss my room even more—I realized that I’d already been away from home for far longer than I’d ever disappeared before. My mom was surely at the police station already, calling my friends, calling the school. She wouldn’t find any information on my clients because I kept those locked away. But she’d worry. That was the worst part. There was nothing I could do about it either.

It felt like ages ago when I’d first found the website with Spud, first heard the word Guardian from Father Lonnie, first seen his body dangling from the church. I’d only uncovered a scratch of what the Guardians did, and already I’d seen earthquakes that killed hundreds, people stuck through steeples, cars and planes blown up. What else might they be responsible for?

Sleep drifted over me slowly, but as I was exhausted I couldn’t resist its pull. I floated away into the black, and soon I was gone.

Again, I didn’t dream. It seemed as if no time even passed between the closing of my eyes and their opening again. I was still in the dark, thinking a second that I was home and then finding to my disappointment that I wasn’t. Would I ever wake up again and not think that everything previous had been a bad dream? I sighed, rolling over.

There was a dim light shining under my door, unnaturally turquoise.

It didn’t move like someone walking by with a flashlight. I didn’t know if I should be worried—it hadn’t been there when I’d gone to sleep. And now I wasn’t going to fall back asleep because I’d already spent too much time concentrating on it. So reluctantly, but with some curiosity, I slid my feet to the floor and walked to the door. I peered around the corner of my doorframe.

Callista was sitting on the carpet at the end with her back against the wall. Her face was illuminated by a multitude of softly glowing nightlights, one in each plug going across the floor—six in all on both sides. She was absently flicking a cigarette lighter in her hand, letting the flame pop for a second before killing it and starting over. She didn’t appear startled by my emergence, turning her head up at me.

“It’s past your bedtime,” she said in a low voice. No malice though.

“You’re the one who’s sitting out in the hall,” I replied. When she didn’t seem suspicious, I stepped outside. She leaned her head into the corner. Flick. Flick. The tiny flame kept flashing and disappearing.

“Where’s Thad?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” she replied. Flick.

“You’re not tired?”

Callista shrugged passively. “I don’t sleep easily.”

I glanced across the curious line of nightlights, their bulbs casting little glowing circles on the floor and tall ovals on the walls. I had no idea where she’d gotten them from, unless she’d somehow collected them from the bathrooms. I didn’t feel right just leaving her there, so I walked across and slid to sit a few feet from her against the opposite wall.

“You can’t sleep?” I questioned, rubbing my eyes. “It’s got to be super late by now.”

“I don’t like nighttime that much,” she said. “Insomnia.”

“You can take something for that,” I offered, trying to be as considerate as I could, to make up for earlier. “We can get you some sleep aid tomorrow.” Or Valerian Root, as my mom would have corrected.

“That won’t help,” Callista replied. At first I thought she’d stop there, then she shrugged.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m tired, but…well, it’s hard to sleep in the dark now.”

Immediately, her face told me that she regretted saying that, though it’d tumbled out in her exhaustion before she could catch it. I figured out the scene at once. From her position pressed in the corner of the room, to the lights that protected her in a soft circle, it hit me all at once that Callista was afraid of the dark.

That came as a shock. Callista was the most brutal of us all—she’d taken down a plane! But the anxiety on her face was real.

I slid down to sit until my feet touched the opposite wall, at a loss for what to say. In the low lights, though, I watched her relax slightly, now that I didn’t look to be leaving anytime soon. Her finger stopped and she set the lighter next to her. Thoughts of our fight were still swirling in the air.

“I’m sorry for earlier,” I said. It was hard to say the words but I managed to wrestle them out.

She didn’t reply. So we both sat in the empty quiet, listening to the sound of the air conditioner. I let my head rest behind me.

“Wyck came at night,” Callista broke the silence. I opened my eyes. She was staring straight ahead.

“If I’m in the dark, I start to see their faces,” she continued. “My mind makes shapes with the dark and they just slip out. Sometimes it’s my family, sometimes it’s him. That’s why I don’t like the dark.”

I said nothing. Inside, I felt arrows going through my chest.

“He didn’t have to kill them,” Callista said. “But he did it anyway, to make a point to me. He wanted to break me down so I wouldn’t fight them later.”

Her gaze remained distant. When I dared to venture a look at her eyes, it was almost like I could see a movie of the horrible night she’d gone through playing behind their pupils.

Guilt crept upon me. I still had my family. How could I have dared to think that I’d given up anything when I still had something to go back to?

I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but I couldn’t just leave her sitting there like that so I turned around, switching to the other side of the hall to sit closer to her, a safe five inches between us. At first she looked at me as if wondering what I was doing, but when I settled down she relaxed again. She didn’t push me away at least; that was good.

But again, more quiet. More wordless novels being spoken between us by our breathing. The silence composed a sonata of loss.

I absently studied her resting hands, the skin uninterrupted by lines or cuts that should have marked where the scales would emerge. Just an eternity of skin that continued up her arm and to her neck and disappeared where her hair began.

She looked uncomfortably tense. Suddenly I had an urge to reach across the four or five inches between us, to touch her shoulders and try to ease the anxiety out of her with my thumbs. Seeing her bent over made me ache. And it just looked like she needed that.

But I wasn’t brave enough, and I figured she’d recoil and ask why I was being ridiculous if I tried. Thad maybe could have, if he was there. They’d been stuck together for days before I’d even arrived, and in our situation that was almost like years. He felt like her brother, and I still felt like an outsider.

I let the inches remain, and crossed my hands so they wouldn’t wander away against my will. I just wanted her to feel better.

“Do you want to know a secret?” I said abruptly. Callista gave a half grin, her head still resting and eyes closed. It was almost a whole grin, but she suppressed it; I didn’t mind because her attempts were telling.

“Alright,” she said, playing along.

“So, when all this started,” I said, scooting down on the wall so that my head was level with hers, “I was with one of my friends, and we found a newspaper article about you…dying.”

Of all things, to bring that article up. So I deflected quickly.

“It had your picture,” I said. “And when I pulled it out, the first thing from my friend’s mouth was something like, “That’s a shame, she was hot.”

Callista couldn’t hold in the hiss of laughter that escaped when I said that. It came out as a snort through her nose, and that ridiculous sound made me chuckle too.

“I mean,” I went on, “he’d just found out you were dead, and he was sad because he thought you were hot. That was the worst thing in the world to him.”

She couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, because even when she pulled one corner down it went up when she pictured the scene again. I felt a thrill just watching her struggle. Success…

She shook her head at me in a scolding way, finally opening her eyes to glare at me. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You thought it was funny,” I told her, and she didn’t argue. The way she rolled her eyes away grabbed my attention. I’d never actually been that close to them since she’d come out of my dream, so I found myself almost enthralled by their blue infinity. She caught me staring.

“There was something else too,” I said, trying to act nonchalant as I looked away.

“More about how hot I am?” she said, giving a slow and unimpressed blink.

“Do you not want to hear the story?” I asked with a faked sharpness. She snapped her mouth shut, lifting her eyebrows innocently.

“That’s better,” I said, pulling my knees up. “So, after I got the newspaper article, I actually sneaked it back home with me. Because I have a wall, see…”

How was I going to explain my Great Work? It was impossible to boil it down into a few words.

“Well, I take pictures,” I tried. “See, I can read emotions through people’s eyes.”

She looked at me strangely. I guess I’d forgotten to explain that part. I stumbled on my words again.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “But keep up with me. I can read people’s emotions and mental reactions through their eyes, especially in photographs: I call it the Glimpse. So I just take pictures of people all the time, and then I put their faces on my wall. And… and…”

You’re going downhill, Michael. You’re boring her. Pull up before you crash…

“Anyway,” I said, “so I had your picture. And on my wall there are different places for different emotions I’ve found Glimpses of, like love and anger and sadness and stuff. But I couldn’t figure out where you were supposed to go on my wall.”

“Did I not look happy enough for happy?” she said. I shook my head.

“It didn’t fit there, there was something stronger,” I said. “I had to pick the strongest one out of a million, and I couldn’t figure you out. But I think I just did.”

I held up a finger. “You belonged on the Love wall, up on the ceiling. I got confused because you weren’t exactly in love with a person; you were just in love with your life.”

I heard a long and deep breath go in and out of her, difficult but not painful… just lamenting. Remembering. I’d stepped onto dangerous ground, bringing up her old life. It could have been the right thing to say but I found it tough to gauge her thoughts. Maybe I’d dug too deep.

“That’s really sweet of you,” she said. Then her head bent over and fell onto my shoulder.

I froze into ice. The top of her head was now pressed into the side of my neck, the dark strands of her hair against my ear and flattened around my cheek. She had leaned over the four-or-five-inch ravine, her warm shoulder against the side of my arm.

Had she done it on purpose? Was she just using me as a prop? What was she doing? Why did she just do that?

She was bent against me, her arms still around her knees. I’d never gotten that close to her before. I’d never smelled her before.

Could she tell that I had turned into a statue? She had to hear my heartbeat because I could feel it pumping through my neck so close to where her ear was.

What’s wrong with you? What’s going on? Michael? Are you functioning? My brain was resetting its internal computer, trying in vain to compensate. I wanted everything to stop because I was too confused to figure out what was happening, but I didn’t want it to stop—no, don’t stop. Don’t move. I had to keep my shoulder as still as I possibly could so she wouldn’t leave.

She jumped, as if realizing what she’d done. Her head jerked back up as she sat straight.

“I—I’m sorry,” I said, even though I hadn’t done anything. Then I saw what was probably what I wanted to see the least at that moment: tears, falling out of Callista’s eyes. She wiped them away quickly but was unable to hide them in time.

“We can’t do this, Michael,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, eyes filled with guilt.

“I understand, you’re just…tired,” I said, trying to brush it off. I still didn’t know what’d happened.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, wiping her eyes with her sleeve in a vain attempt to dry them. She looked wrecked. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I’d done something, and I didn’t know what… maybe I shouldn’t have even stepped out of my room at all.

Callista shook her head again as if she could flick out whatever painful thought was in it.

“I lied to you,” she said.

“When?” I asked.

“Earlier,” she replied, sniffing again, face full of even deeper remorse “I didn’t…I didn’t actually lie. But I didn’t say something when I should have. A long time ago.”

She cleared her throat. “I knew that we’d lived before and had other lives. I just didn’t say anything.”

All along? Had I missed so many clues that she’d put it together long before me? Confusion hit and a barrel of questions broke open in front of me.

“How?” I asked. She scratched the back of her head, ruffling her hair nervously before pulling it back behind her shoulders.

“I—I had different dreams than you,” she admitted.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I felt lost. I couldn’t think of any reason why she’d have withheld that. It wasn’t like I’d have been angry with her. It just might have helped me to figure things out much faster.

She shook her head. “It’s not what you think, Michael. It was about us. You and me.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant and her voice refused to give me any indication. She gathered her courage and pressed on.

“I think I had more dreams than you,” she said. “Maybe Thad did as well; I haven’t asked. I didn’t just dream of finding you and then getting killed. I dreamed of other things.”

She nodded, voice going melancholy. “You and I and Thad, in some other life. In my dreams, I called you Daniel but I didn’t see him, I saw you, just like you are now.”

She waved her hand at me. I remembered how my dreams had also shown her and Thad as they were, not who they’d been in the other lives. I guessed it’d been a part of our connection—something that’d linked us in this real life.

“We were outside, in a garden,” she continued. “It was giant like a courtyard, with all red flowers hanging from the trees and the ground just…littered with them. Like that was the ground, these bloody-looking red flowers all over the place. And I just stood there with Thad next to me, there was nobody else but us and you.”

She lifted her right hand. “Thad was whispering something to me and showed me his silver ring. It only had one mark on it then. He said that every Guardian has two rings for picking their Chosens: two humans that a Guardian trusts more than anyone else, and wants to keep for eternity. It was almost like he was reciting something from a ceremony.”

“Then you started talking,” Callista went on. “You told me I could still leave if I wanted. If I wasn’t absolutely sure of what I was doing, that I shouldn’t go ahead, and you wouldn’t hate me.”

She shook her head. “But I wasn’t going to hear any of that. I didn’t have any control over myself, but I knew that I wanted it, back then. And when you finally got your hand up and put the ring on my finger, everything just went black, and I woke up.”

Here she reached over her shoulder, massaging the back of her own neck just like I’d wished I could have done minutes before. I held my hands as she eased her own pain out.

“Then all the other dreams kept going. Can you imagine what that did to me?” she said. “This real-life ring started growing from my finger and I was still dreaming about you night after night. My parents already had me going to a psychiatrist for the nightmares. I think that’s how the Guardians found me—all my wild stories in my medical records about claws and Chosens and someone named Daniel Rothfeld…it had to have sent up a flag to them somehow.”

She was fighting back tears. “Then they found me, and…you know. But the dreams kept going until the scales appeared while I was lying in their cell. I kept seeing you at night, watching you die in your lives, watching Thad die…watching me die.”

She sighed, the sound almost agonizing to me.

“I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I couldn’t stop watching you get killed. Every dream just made me remember. Like those other lives are still buried somewhere in the back of my head: just old torn-out chapters to my life now. And I begged for the memories to stop: how many dreams do I need to endure? How many times do I have to die before I can live with you again?”

The words rang like a saddened bell, so permeated by lost hope that they were excruciating just to hear.

“I missed something and I didn’t even know why,” she said. “I missed you. It was like an echoing feeling that stuck around from the other life. And I fought it, and that worked for a while, but now…”

Her hand stopped rubbing the corner of her eyes to wave once with dissatisfaction at me, sitting so close to her, unaware that my presence had unearthed something she’d tried hard to bury.

“So you have to understand,” she said, grabbing my hand between both of hers, squeezing them like she’d fall if she didn’t hold on to me.

“I don’t hate you,” her voice broke, weakly forced. “I just can’t get close to you. Everyone I’ve known in every life I’ve had is dead. And I know you’re trying, but I can’t risk it. You’ve already died too many times to me, and I can’t go through that again. I can’t get close to anyone, and that’s especially you.”

Our eyes were locked with each other’s, the corners of hers red and leaking tears that ran down her cheeks in zigzagging lines. She was begging me, pleading that I not let happen what had already sealed her fate. In some other life, when she’d been such a close person to me—however impossible that seemed– she’d given herself to become my immortal Chosen so that we would never be separated. But in that forever, somehow it had become her downfall, and that was why she was there, thrust into a war that wasn’t hers, crushing my hands, regretting a decision she hadn’t even made as herself.

I swallowed hard. Her gaze didn’t break, studying my face like it was the first time she’d ever really seen me. Her hands shook; or maybe they were my hands that moved?

“I want to promise it,” she whispered. “It’s for both of us. If we’re going to be stuck here, we can’t let it happen again. We can only work together; we can’t be what we once were.”

I’d never consciously thought of it. The idea of having the slightest of attachment to Callista hadn’t even presented itself to me, so unfathomable that I’d glossed over it. Or had I? From far away, I could sense them nipping at me, as I stared at Callista and her anxiously waiting eyes, ready for me to commit to the promise. This should have been easier. I didn’t even know her—the promise she asked for was like me promising to never be a trillionaire. It wasn’t like I was ever getting close to her anyway, so what did it hurt to promise what would never be?

“Alright, I promise,” I finally conceded. It was much harder than I’d expected. Callista’s chin trembled. But she understood me, in the fewest and strongest words I could muster. So she gave my hands one final squeeze, our silver rings touching each other as she did.

“Thank you,” she said, letting out a breath. I couldn’t tell for sure if it was relief or not. Then she let go of me and settled back into the corner, and closed her eyes.

Why did I feel a pain inside my chest? It made me sick. I wanted to sleep again. I could have gone to bed, but I chose to stay with her, four or five inches away again.