Destiny's Revenge (Destiny Series - Book 2) (7 page)

I knew I had his attention, but he didn’t say anything, so I continued. “I remember the whole thing, Max. This thing came into our camp. It looked like a man at first, and I thought it was just a guy lost in the woods. He wouldn’t talk to me for a long time. He just kept watching me.” I could see my hands starting to shake. I hadn’t told anyone the truth other than Rewsna. “After I started to get scared, the stranger said I had to choose a damned life or a quick death – then everything went black.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Okay, so my girlfriend was ripped to shreds by a psychopath in the woods. I still wasn’t there; I was chasing after a stupid horse.” I could only imagine what he was feeling right now.

I didn’t want this to turn into a fight, but I needed for Max to know what had really happened. I abandoned further discussion about the attack in favor of trying to explain what had occurred when I was comatose. “What happened was unavoidable - It could have happened anytime, anywhere. Let me fill you in on some pieces of the puzzle. When I was in the coma, I thought I was stuck somewhere between dead and alive. I called out to Rewsna; she helped me break free from whatever it was. Then I woke up and found out it had been over two years. The doctors told me they didn’t know why I was in a coma, but Rewsna told me that this thing was just holding me there.”

“So a man did this to you?” His disbelief was apparent, and he stared at me as if daring me to lie to him.

“No, it wasn’t a man. It looked like a man, at first, but he was something else.” My stomach knotted and I felt like I was going to vomit. Reliving the whole ordeal with Rewsna was one thing, but reliving it while explaining it to Max was horrible.

He must have noticed that I was about to heave. Max looked to the ground and quietly asked, “But why? What was he trying to do?”

“Rewsna says he is essentially pure evil and he was targeting me. If it hadn’t have happened on the mountain, it would have happened somewhere else. Don’t think that you could have stopped him. If you had been there, he probably would have attacked us both.”

That realization was clear. I wasn’t sure if he really believed me or if he thought he should play along with my fantasy. “All the more reason for me not to let you out of my sight.”

“Max, you can’t keep this up. I’m telling you there is nothing you could have done to stop it.”

Max opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. I could see he was deliberating on what he wanted to say or how he wanted to say it. “You will never understand the emptiness I felt. I don’t expect you to comprehend it. You lying there was in some ways worse than death. I died a little every day, sitting there watching you waste away, knowing it was my fault…”

I cut him off, “I just told you that you couldn’t have prevented it; none of this was your fault.”

“It was my fault, and I couldn’t do anything to make it right again. I was with you day and night for a year. I pleaded with you to come back, I prayed, I would have done anything. Then I saw an old man crying in the nursing home because his grandson had been killed in Afghanistan. I felt if I couldn’t help you, I could at least help someone. I had been a reservist in the Navy for a few years after high school to help pay for college so I called the Navy recruiter and asked if I could go active for a little while. I signed on for a year thinking I could get past some of the guilt if I could help someone.” He bowed his head, “It turns out it didn’t matter how many people I helped, the guilt still consumed me. So I finished my time and came back. The last thing I expected to see was you up and moving around like nothing had even happened.” He took my hand in his, “You have to know I never would have left if I had known there was even a remote chance that you would recover.”

I squeezed Max’s hand and nodded. “Everyone told me the same thing. Max, I don’t blame you for anything. I want you to know there was absolutely nothing you could have done.”

We stayed silent for a long time. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I could feel my pulse picking up speed. The last thing I wanted to do was relive the incident again. As bad as it was for me, at least I don’t remember what it did to me, not really.

He finally broke the silence, talking but more just to get it off his chest, not really talking to me. “I had caught Ursula, and I was on my way back. I couldn’t have been more than a mile away. I could hear you screaming.” A tear rolled off his cheek; he wiped it away hard. “I heard you calling for me – screaming for me to help you. I knew you were in trouble. It was the most terrifying, blood-curdling scream I’ve ever heard. I let go of Ursula and rode as hard as I could. You were screaming for a couple minutes solid, then just as I was approaching the clearing to the campsite, nothing. You went silent. It was so dark I couldn’t see you. I called to you. You didn’t make a sound, not a word. When I finally found you, it looked like you had been stuffed behind a bush. I could hear blood in your lungs. Your body was ripped to shreds, deep gashes everywhere with blood oozing out.” Max put his face in his hands, not speaking for several minutes, just sobbing silently. I leaned over to put my arms around him, but he wouldn’t lift his face, needing to hide his grief from me.

After what seemed like forever, he continued. “You must have put up one hell of a fight. By the time I found you, it’s like you were just gone. Your eyes were glazed over. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t make the life flight to the hospital. To this day, I still don’t know how you did. The fact that you were alive was more than I thought I deserved. I prayed to God, to Allah, to Jehovah, heck I may have even sneaked Buddha in there. I prayed that if you could just live, I could make it up to you. You lived, but I wasn’t strong enough to stay with you. I told myself it was better to help strangers than to sit and watch you die, so I left. Then you were awake and alive, and I wasn’t there for you again. I guess what I’m trying to say is I failed you twice; I don’t ever want to fail you again.” His quiet sobs turned into loud uncontrollable wails as he pressed himself into me.

His guilt was deeper than I could have imagined in my worst nightmare. I tried to comfort him, telling him it wasn’t his fault, that there was nothing he could have done, but nothing I said could ease his regret. Every kind word I had only made him cry more. I sat there on the ground with my arms around him, trying to think of a way to ease his pain. I knew no matter what I said, it wouldn’t ease the ache he was feeling, so I just sat there crying with him.

After the sorrow seemed to subside a little, I said flatly what Rewsna had told me. “I was targeted by a beast. He was waiting for an opportunity for me to be alone so he could attack me. If it hadn’t been on the mountain, it might have been in a park or my parents’ back yard. The circumstances aren’t all that important: he was going to attack no matter what.”

The torture was still evident on his face, but he was finally composed enough to speak, “So this thing, Rewsna told you it was targeting you? Why?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but Rewsna said it saw me as some kind of threat.” Max looked at me as if he needed to process, and I didn’t wait for a question. “I know you’re pretty decent about my
weird stuff,
but I do have something else to tell you. I guess when I escaped from this Beast, I took a piece of it with me, kind of.”

Max’s eyes got wide and a confused expression flashed across his face. I continued, “You know how I can tell when someone is lying to me, and I get weird vibes from people sometimes?” Max nodded. He had witnessed these skills first hand. “Now I can kind of see things. I know I told you about dreaming about you before. It’s a little hard to explain, but I can project myself away from my body now.”

He didn’t say a word. I could see him trying to absorb it. “Max, I was there in Afghanistan with you.” He cocked his head sideways as if trying to reason through what I was saying.

“When you were dragging Ski up the mountain, I was with you all day.” A bewildered expression stared back at me because he hadn’t shared anything with me about Afghanistan, the fire fight that wounded his friend, or anything about Ski at all. “I could see you, I could touch you, I was right there – you just didn’t know I was with you.”

“While you were in a coma?”

I shook my head, “No, after I woke up. The first time, I thought it was a dream.”

Max cut me off again, “The first time?” A look of wonder appeared. “How many times did you see me?”

I couldn’t help but laugh when I had to confess, “I’m not very good at it. Rewsna said I needed to practice. I was there twice: the first time you were dragging Ski up the mountain, the second time you were about to be rescued. By the way, what happened to Ski? Is he okay?”

Max stuttered for a second when he said, “He’s, he’s fine. So you were right there the whole time?”

I shook my head, “Not the whole time. The first time I was there I thought I was dreaming, I didn’t realize that I was really with you, but the second time I was really trying. Once I knew you were okay, I came back.”

“So can you go anywhere?”

I hesitated for a second, “I’m not sure. I really only wanted to see you. Once I knew you weren’t stuck on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, there didn’t seem to be a reason to do it again.”

“Wow, so you knew I was coming to see Gramps?”

“No, that was a shocker. Joe said his grandson was coming to see him, but he had never shown me a picture, so you walking through my door was a complete surprise.”

It felt good to finally fill Max in on everything, more like old times. Every minute we had spent together since his return was great, but so much had happened in a short period of time that I didn’t want to tarnish any of our bliss. This was my first real stab at trying to share everything with him.

“So this thing, you took visions from it? How?”

“I wish I knew. Rewsna says it’s a good thing, because now it shouldn’t be able to find me again.”

“Find you, again!!! What do you mean?” Horror was looking back at me through Max’s eyes, and I could feel his anxiety immediately. “It’s still out there? What is it?”

I shook my head. There wasn’t much of an explanation that I could offer that would make any sense. “I guess it is something like a demon, maybe? It is supposed to be able to shift into any shape it wants. Rewsna said it feeds on people’s spirits. She thought whatever it was – was extinct, but obviously that wasn’t the case.”

“Why you? Does Rewsna think it’s going to look for you again?”

Not wanting to lie to him, but terrified to tell him the truth, I just shrugged my shoulders. Max nearly yelled, “You are the world’s worst liar! It is coming for you, isn’t it?”

In barely more than a whisper, “It’s a possibility.”

“Lauren, tell Rewsna to come here now. Tell her I want to talk to her, now.” Max sounded fierce, a cross between fury and fear.

Without having to call to Rewsna, I heard her answer resonate in my head. “
Tell Max I am on my way. It is good you finally told him. I will be there in an hour
.”

Rewsna pulled into the driveway, and I could feel her energy before I could see the expression on her face. She wasn’t overwrought like Max. He had been pacing for over an hour, switching between horror, madness, and anger from one minute to the next. She was here to help, and I believed her serene way not only would calm my nerves, it might even diffuse some of Max’s hysteria, too.

The three of us sat at a picnic table in the shade. Rewsna was not at all troubled with Max’s demeanor; she must have expected it. She went into a much more detailed explanation than she had with me previously.

“Max, you know how special Lauren is, but you think of her gifts as isolated parts of who she is. You must wrap your mind around the idea that her gifts have a specific purpose. Her friend Paul, whom you disliked so much - do you know she was summoned to delay his death?”

Max shook his head that he didn’t, and she continued. “There are errors in everyone’s destiny. Paul was supposed to have been killed that day with Mr. and Mrs. McMasters. The Council would not have involved Lauren had it not determined her assistance was necessary. If Paul’s murderer was not caught, he would have executed two more families in an effort to cover up his actions. To prevent those other tragedies, a murder suspect had to be caught. By Lauren intervening in Paul’s destiny, she merely delayed the inevitable, but in the process the police looked more deeply at other suspects and did find the real killer. Had she not intervened, the killer would have escaped and may never have been stopped. Involving Lauren before the man developed any level of proficiency or thirst for murder prevented the slaying of more innocents. She was critical in stopping a serial murderer-in-the-making.”

She looked at me, “I know you believe you failed Paul, but I can assure you that you did not. He saw both paths after his death, and was pleased that his family was given closure, that seven people whose destiny was not to be murdered were spared, and that he was cleared of all wrong doing. All of this was possible because of you, Lauren.” I looked into Rewsna’s face as she said this and understood just how truly profound she was.

Rewsna redirected her gaze from me back to Max, “The Beast studied Lauren, knew that her path in life was to alter destinies, not change them, but bend them to suit the needs of the souls. Paul would have died in vain had she not involved herself. Because of his death, his sacrifice allowed others to live. The Beast has plans, plans that he does not want Lauren to prevent. He knew of her gifts, but he grossly underestimated her strength.”

Max cut in, “So this Beast is still out there? Lauren said he could come for her again.”

“Yes to both. He is unable to see her remotely. If he could have, I believe he would have killed her at the nursing home. He did send a creature to locate her, but Lauren fought it off very quickly.”

Max flashed a disturbed look at me – I could see that he believed I had hid information from him. Rewsna continued her explanation with, “I think that creature simply used process of elimination. It must have followed someone to the nursing home that had visited her. It tried to attack Lauren but she only saw a flash of light – it was never able to possess her.”