A Matter of Forever (33 page)

Without even looking up from her stitches, she reminds him sweetly, “You wanted to play.”

It’s so hard not to giggle at the wounded expression he favors her with. “You could have warned me, woman!”

“Here’s your warning: don’t ever play cards with Lotuses or Whitecombs. You will always lose.”

Everyone in the room stops. Turns and stares at the bed and the person within whose scratchy, tired voice says this.

Kellan is awake. Eyes clear and wide open. Words soft but coherent, looking like he’s just woken up from a nap. Astrid flies out of her chair; so do Callie and Jonah. And all I can think as I join them is thank you, gods.

Thank you.

Kate has been paged. Astrid is hovering; Kellan is tolerating it well. Jonah isn’t saying much, and it worries me, because lines riddle his forehead as he studies his brother. Astrid is doing most of the questioning, and all of Kellan’s answers are clear, if not soft. How are you? Good. Tired. Are you thirsty? A little. Are you hungry? Not really. Are you in pain? Not at all. Are you sure? Yes. Positive?
Yes
.

She’s on her way to another round of questions when Kellan abruptly says,

“Chloe, I need to talk to you. Alone.”

The entire room goes silent.

“Sweetling,” Astrid says, smoothing back some of his hair, “Kate is on her way to check you out. I’m sure you can—”

He takes hold of her hand and kisses the back of it. “This cannot wait. I’m sorry.” His attention switches to Jonah. “J, can you please help me here?”

Jonah is silent for a long moment as he merely studies his brother. Kellan eventually says, “Jonah. Please. Just for fifteen minutes. Then everyone can come back in.”

It doesn’t make him happy, but Jonah herds everyone out and shuts the door behind him. Once everyone’s gone, Kellan and I have a stare-off.

I’m the first to look away.

I clear my throat, count to ten to steady myself. “You cannot believe how glad I am you’re awake. You had us all scar—”

“I can’t hear my brother.”

My mouth snaps shut; my eyes fly to his face. He’s struggling to sit up. I hurry over and try to urge him to relax, but he’s having none of it. “Did you hear me?”

“I—”

“I can’t feel my brother.” There’s so much anxiety reflecting out of his beautiful eyes. “Or you. Or Astrid. Or Cameron. Or anyone else in this godsdamn room. Or building.”

His words are soft and shaky and hard to hear over the pounding in my ears. “When Jonah woke up, he ... he had trouble feeling me for a few hours, too, so—”

“I’ve been awake for a while now, most of the day. Just ... watching you guys.” He lets out a frustrated sigh. “I kept nodding on and off. Was too tired to talk for some time, could barely keep my eyes open, so I just listened. Listened and did a lot of thinking. And the thing is, in this entire time, I have not been able to hear my brother.”

I grab his hand; he takes it away.

“I cannot surge with him, either. Or you. Or anyone else.”

I fear my knees are going to give out. I fumble for something, anything that could explain this, because Kellan looks so heartbroken right now. “You two were blocking each other, right? Before you left?”

“I stopped blocking him the moment his pain shattered through our walls,” he says calmly. “It’s how I found him. I tracked him through our thoughts, like I did when you froze time.”

“Maybe he’s still blocking you?” I know it’s stupid even as the words come out of my mouth because Jonah would never block his brother in a situation like this.

He goes to his wrist, instinctually wanting to twist his cuff, but it’s not there. Astrid has it in her purse. “I remember, Chloe.”

My knees do buckle now as I drop on the bed like a brick.

“I remember us in that room.”

Oh gods. Oh gods.

“I remember ... something ...” His eyes go to the window, as if he’ll find the answers there. “Something weird happened. You became a blur, you and Enlilkian both.”

No. No. No.

“I remember something picking me up. One of those incorporeal Elders. And I remember something slicing right through my body.” A hand comes to rest over his heart. “Something right here.”

My eyes close. No. He cannot remember this.
No
.

“You need to fill in the rest of the pieces for me, C. And you need to do it now.”

I shake my head slowly. He’s fine. He’s alive. He’s here. He’s talking. We survived. We’re all here and we’re okay.

Something warm touches my hand; when I open my eyes, I find his fingers across mine. “Please C. I’m ... I know I’m grasping at straws here, but I need to know what’s going on.”

“Kate’s coming,” I whisper. “Kate will check you over and you’ll see. You’re fine.”

He shakes his head slowly. And then he says something that makes my stomach bottom out. He says, “I am not fine. I cannot hear my brother. I don’t ...” The sigh that escapes him gently pushes strands off his forehead. “I don’t feel the same.”

Just ten minutes before, I was so relieved he was awake, and now here we are, and it seems all so fast, like we’re on a speedway going two hundred miles per hour and everything around us is just a blur. There is no time to let it all sink in or savor this moment. It’s only life pushing us forward with each second.

I can barely find my voice when I offer up my last defense. How does one just say it? How does one tell another that they died? Or that I refused to let him go? “You’re alive. You’re here. That’s what counts.”

When his fingers curl around mine, squeezing gently, insistently, I find all those numbers that have gotten me through so very moments in the past are just not enough for this one.

I tell him the truth. I tell him he’s right.

For the next five minutes, he doesn’t say a single thing. He listens to me recall things I don’t ever want to think about again, ones I fear will haunt me until the day I finally die. And when I tell him the final truth, of my inability to let him go even in death, his hand leaves mine to lie over his heart.

So many other words fight to leave my mouth, but I keep them in. But if I could, I would tell him, I would say Kellan, I love you. If I had to do it again, I would, no questions asked. I will always make this choice.

Silence hangs between us so long that I wish I knew what words he was fighting to keep in, if they are even there at all. There are no visual cues for me to cling onto, no ticks, no twisting of bracelets. I have no idea if he’s glad I did what I did, disappointed, or angry. There is just Kellan staring at me and me staring right back.

Finally, his head slants away, toward the window. Gulfs grow between us, ones built on hushed unease. It isn’t until I get up to go open the door to let his loved ones back in that he says something.

“It’s funny how I always believed you owned my heart since the moment we met. And now ...”

I pause, my hand on the knob as I turn back toward him.

“And now it really is yours.”

He says it all so quietly as he stares at the leaves blowing in the wind just inches away from the glass, so ... unemotionally.

There’s no room to breathe in here anymore.

“Does he know?”

My answer is barely voiced. No, I tell him. No one does yet.

His eyes drift shut, but not before he says, “Open the door and let them in.”

I go to dinner with Will later that night; Jonah stays behind to talk to Kellan. To say my nerves are fraying is like saying the ocean is made of salt and water.

“I would think you would be over the moon right about now,” Will says, shoving a Gnomish equivalent of wontons in a red basket lined in waxed paper toward me. “All is right in the worlds. Those bastards are dead.” A tiny salute accompanies a wry grin. “You are back in one piece. Jonah is fine. Kellan has woken up. Annar is in the midst of rejoicing.” The grin fades. “Yet, you look a wee lost. What’s going on?”

For the hour following my confession, Jonah stuck close to his brother during Kate’s check-up. Concern traced lines across his forehead, but he stayed silent the entire time. So did Kellan. And now they’re together, alone, no doubt talking about what I’ve done. What I’m guilty of, even though I don’t regret my actions one tiny bit.

“Do you ever look back on your past and wonder what things would have been like if you’d taken a different path?”

Will sets his chopsticks down, both eyebrows raising high, then low. “I think every person does. I think it’s human nature to do so.” The chopsticks are reclaimed, now tapping against the side of an ornate bowl. “Are there things you wish you’d done differently?”

Oh, to be sure.

I wish ... I wish the first time Enlilkian had found me, in that bathroom, I’d not broken down and allowed him to set his sick game in motion. I wish I’d spent more time learning who Noel Lilywhite was, rather than resenting who I believed him to be. I wish I’d not broken the hearts I treasure so often and so easily; I wish I’d told my mother I loved her more when I was younger. I wish, with all the immense powers within me, my touch was delicate rather than destructive. I wish I could let go of Kellan; I wish his life to be everything it isn’t because of me. I wish I didn’t hurt my husband because of my bond with his brother. I wish I’d been here for Jonah when he needed me after Karnach, and that on that first day he came to California, I’d had the guts to talk to him, and him to me.

I wish I could breathe without feeling tendrils of guilt lopping through the soft tissues of my lungs.

“I think,” I tell Will, “that it’s sometimes hard to finally stand still when you’ve been running for so long.”

“Oh, to be sure.” A wonton is flipped over and mashed in his bowl until its guts spread across the waxed paper. “I called Becca while you were gone.”

Ah. He says this so evenly, like we’re simply discussing the weather. “Is that how we’re dubbing it?” The corners of my lips incline upward.
“While you were gone?
Isn’t that a movie name?”

I like how he laughs, how his head tilts to the side so his hair falls across his forehead. “If it is, do you think it’s one I’ve watched?”

I do my best to keep a straight face. I may be able to sweet talk Jonah into watching chick flicks with me, but never Will. “Perhaps there are lots of explosions in it. And alien abductions. Then you most certainly would have watched it many times.”

He sticks his tongue out at me. I readily return the favor.

A hint of a smile remains, sincere and soft. “The point is, I’m ready to let her go.”

There’s a good five seconds of hush before I murmur, “Yeah?”

Hope is such a fragile, lovely thing. No matter how many times it fails us, it’s still to be cherished. And it blooms in me again, this time for my friend.

He cups the back of his neck and looks up at the ceiling. A long sigh fills the space between us. “Yeah.”

I poke him in the belly with my chopstick. “Is it too soon to ask if this has anything to do with a certain lady whose name starts with a
C
and ends in an
allie?”

He bats the wood away, amused; no, exasperated is definitely a better word. “Most definitely.”

“Do you feel at peace with this decision?”

“Yeah,” he says again. “I really do.”

“Then nothing else matters.” My hand covers his and squeezes. “Nothing.”

He looks away, toward the kitchen and the clanging pots and sizzling fires, but not quickly enough before I catch the look of hopeful acceptance in his eyes. “Another thing happened when you were gone.”

I lean back in my chair. “Did the boy and girl meet cute, perhaps in the alien spaceship?”

“It’s eerie how close you are.” The side of his mouth quirks up. “Paul and Frieda eloped.”

My chopsticks clatter to the table. “SHUT. UP.”

He digs out his cell phone and scrolls through his texts until he finds just the right one. And there our friends from Ancorage and the Moose on the Loose diner are—wonderful, warm Paul and gothic, pale Frieda, and I’ll be damned. She’s smiling: genuinely, joyfully. It’s so incredibly brilliant to see that tears come to my eyes. The good kind, though. The kind brought up from the well of blessedness.

I need to call her soon.

“Seems like you’re not the only one who has been running to stand still.”

I laugh quietly, marveling over how lovely our friends look in the photo. How happy. Hope explodes throughout me. “How very old-school U2 of you, Will.”

He tips an imaginary hat at me; I gently expand the photo to focus on their faces.

Love finds a way. It always does.

I sit down in a chair and take in the view before me. Sophie Greenfield is handcuffed to the table, her eyes red and raw, her once enviable hair a snarled mess.

The Guard found her just two days after I sent them after her. Lee Acacia, the Tracker who hunted me down in Alaska, found her without even breaking a sweat. She was on the Human plane, in her parents’ home in London, packing up some belongings as she no doubt prepared to run. She’d escaped Karnach’s carnage thanks to the Elders, only to realize she better get out of town immediately.

And now here she is, sitting across from me in handcuffs.