Divide (13 page)

Mick

“Holland,” I began, raising my hands. I still didn’t really know what to say.

She sat cross-legged on the desk again, having returned sometime this evening while I nursed my knee—and my ego—on the couch. The only difference between then and now was the occasional shiver that sporadically ran through her body.

I limped into the room, ignoring the glare she shot me. At least the cold forest had tempered her rage down into slightly less of a burning inferno.

I slowly sat down in the giant desk chair, cringing as my knee reminded me what a clumsy asshole I was. “I can explain.” I placed the ice pack back on my knee, then looked up at her.

“No, you don’t need to
explain
, Mick.” Her voice was sharp and accusatory. “You don’t have to explain anything because I can see it all here for myself. What I want to know is why you didn’t tell me.”

“I couldn’t.” I quickly scanned the discarded papers, trying to gleam a little insight into what she’d discovered while I’d snoozed peacefully earlier, and what still lay hidden. I hadn’t returned to the office to investigate because my damn knee hurt so badly. I stifled an angry groan. Who twists their knee and falls like that? I’d developed the grace of a ninety-five-year-old man at the worst possible time.

“That seems like a pretty shitty answer, Mick.
Wouldn’t
sounds more like the truth. You
wouldn’t
tell me. Though I can’t figure out why. I mean, this is my story I’m reading here, is it not?”

“It is.”

“And this is
my
future—” she picked up another piece of paper and shook it in my face, “—and my past, correct?”

She shivered again, a bit more violently this time. I wondered if she’d managed to get hypothermia out there.

“Yes, Holland, but please, let me—”

“So it isn’t a dream. This is actually happening to me? I’m cursed?”

“Yes. But I couldn’t tell you yet. You barely knew me—”

“Wrong. I barely
know
you Mick.”

“You’re right. You barely know me. And I can imagine how this all seems.” She scoffed, but I continued. “I can imagine how this all seems, Holland, but please trust me when I say that I will explain everything to you, and you can ask me anything. I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”

“Yeah. Now.
Now
you’re an open book. But what if I hadn’t come down here to find you sleeping with all of this information splayed across your desk? What about then? Would you feel so inclined to be an open book then, Mick?”

“Yes. I would have told you, Holland. Eventually. I just wanted to figure some things out before I told you the truth, because something is off.”

“You mean more
off
than the fact that I’m gray…and you’re a stalker?”

I glanced back up at her, gauging her expression.

“I’m kidding, Mick, relax. I mean, you are kind of a stalker, but I guess you were meant to be my stalker, so…” She shook her head as her words trailed off. “Weird.”

“Can we stop using that word? It’s pretty creepy.”

She laughed, a small, forced sound, then picked up her high school transcripts. “Creepy?”

“I know it seems strange to you, and if it was any other situation, it would be creepy; I’ll give you that. But this is different. This is…destiny.”

Holland rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, destiny? Seriously. Stop. This is just too much.”

“I know. That was a poor word choice. But you know what I mean. This is something beyond us, beyond you and me. But there’s something different, something that hasn’t happened in any generation before us.”

“Really? What?”

“Your birthday. It’s wrong in the paperwork. But everything has been pre-determined, pre—” I paused to offer a teasing smile, “—destined. There shouldn’t be any mistakes. There’s no room for error in this.”

“I was born early.”

I whipped my head up from the paperwork in response to her statement. “What?”

“Yeah. I was a preemie. What does that have to do with anything?”

“That has
everything
to do with everything. You weren’t supposed to start changing until well after your birthday, which was supposed to be next month.”

“Yeah, March twenty-seventh. So, now what?”

“Well, nothing, I guess. I mean, the change has started, and we’re here, and now we have to work on controlling the anger, but as far as the birthday glitch goes, I can’t see how it has anything to do with anything aside from completely blindsiding me.”

“Blindsiding
you
?”

“Touché. Though this would have blindsided you regardless. I’d been waiting for this and thought I had more time to prepare.”

“To prepare for what, exactly?”

I paused before answering; noticing the way Holland was so easily talking with me. It seemed she’d forgotten to be insecure about her skin, and her initial anger—
wrath?
—had subsided. She moved to the studded leather Chesterfield couch across from my desk and curled up under the old blue afghan. She twirled a frayed edge of the blanket in her fingers and looked up at me as if realizing I’d taken too long to respond. Her eyes tightened for a second before she again focused intently on her hands, then tucked them under the blanket. The chills had subsided with her rage, leaving her looking like a normal, but worn out, eighteen-year-old girl.

Minus the gray skin.

“To prepare for what, Mick?”

I sighed. “To prepare for what these next few weeks—possibly months—will hold. We should have had more time together, more time to change our fates. But now, I don’t know how long we have…each girl before you had a set time frame. The curse follows an exact timeline every. Single. Time.” I shook my head, glancing at the calendar in my hands. “Until now. The stuff that’s going to start happening to you because we are already so far into the change—the rage and the violence, the emotional and physical trauma—I have no idea how long it will take.”

She didn’t flinch when I said rage and violence, which indicated to me that she’d already realized what caused the blow-ups she’d experienced thus far. I didn’t tell her those were possibly minor in comparison to what may come.

“For me to become…the beast?” Her voice hitched at the end.

“Yes.”

“So, you expect me to believe that I’m going to turn into an angry, hairy creature, and
then
turn into a statue? Is that correct?”

“Well, the word
beast
is really more…metaphorical. You won’t become a
creature
. Angry, yes. Hairy, no. But that’s not going to happen. I refuse to fail.”

“Fail,” she whispered the world slowly, as if not realizing she even spoke aloud. She brought her gaze back to mine, her head tilted to the side. “So you’re, like, what? My guardian or something? My
Destined
?” The word was laced with disbelief. She lifted the papers up again, indicating what she’d read, as if she needed tangible evidence to refer to. “This is ridiculous.”

“I know. But it’s true.”

“And I’m a doppelgänger?”

“No. You’re not a doppelgänger, not a look-alike. You’re a reincarnated soul.”

“I’ve been reincarnated over and over?”

“Yes.”

She watched me with tightening eyes. “I don’t remember that.”

“You’re not supposed to. Each life is a new chance to break the spell. If you succeed—if
we
succeed—then the curse is broken, and that’s the end of it. If we don’t succeed, you will die, only to come back as one of Cameron’s descendants later on down the line, going through all of this all over again. Though you won’t remember it, just as you don’t remember it now.”

“Do you remember it? All our past lives, I mean?”

“No. It doesn’t work like that for my family. We don’t get to die and come back. We have to move on, living with the weight of letting you down, letting our family down, and the knowledge that in four generations, one of our descendants will have to go through this themselves.”

“Wow. That’s even worse than living a million lives you can’t remember.”

“Yeah.”

“But
descendants
would indicate that you move on, right? So you’ll obviously find love and go on with your life, regardless of what happens to me.”

She didn’t say the words with sadness, or even annoyance, that I could tell, but her gray eyes glistened with a silent challenge. Did the thought of me moving on without her upset her?

“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t get to move on from this. But it’s also why we study the stories before ours, and why we are more prepared with each generation.” I recognized my father’s voice in my words, and wondered if I was trying to convince Holland, or myself.

“Your
training
—” she put air quotes around the word, “—did I read this right?” Holland paused to rifle through a stack of pages in front of her, searching for something to reference. “You left high school to prepare to meet me? Seriously? Who does that?”

“I still graduated with my class. I was just homeschooled for the latter part of high school because my dad moved us up here.”

“You couldn’t have gone to a high school here? Big Bear does have schools, right?”

“Yes, Holland, Big Bear has schools. My dad was adamant about making sure I was prepared to save you. His grandfather told him stories. Stories that deeply…well, they really screwed him up. He didn’t want his son to go through the pain of failing to save you.”

“Okay. So, you’re extra super-duper prepared now, and I’m a cursed beast who will soon be a statue—only after I become a complete lunatic and start attacking everyone and everything around me—am I correct so far?”

I opened my mouth to respond. To clarify that my preparations meant I’d be able to handle each of her outbursts, that I wouldn’t be afraid of her rage or her psychotic breaks, that I would be able to calm her down and bring her back from the brink…I wanted to tell her that I’d studied each of the men before me, and each of her incarnations, and I knew where they’d gone wrong, knew how to do better than they had. But she didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Why make me turn into a rage-beast first? Why not just skip straight to the statue part?”

“That has to do with who placed the curse.”

“A witch?”

“Yes, but you already read that.”

“Uh-huh.” She swirled her finger in the air. Her attempt at boredom was humorous—she actually sat on the edge of her seat now, both physically and metaphorically.

“From what I’ve read, your original self, the woman who was first cursed all those centuries ago, well, she was perfect. She was—to quote my ancestors—‘kind and gentle, soft and feminine, her beauty timeless, her kindness effortless’ …basically, everything the witch wasn’t. Everything she wanted to be, everything she despised.”

“So, she was the rage-beast?”

I chuckled at her repeated use of the made up moniker. “Yes. And her curse wasn’t just for you to never fall in love, never truly be saved, but to be tortured every time by the rage that consumed her all the days of her life.”

“Wow. That’s sad. And sick.”

“Yeah.”

Her gray eyes unfocused for a minute as she stared off into the distance, then she quickly brought her gaze back to mine. “And you. You’re my Destined, right? So, assuming you’re more
prepared
—” more air quotes, “—than the last guy, how do we break the spell?”

“You already know that, Holland. It’s all in there.” I pointed to the stack of paperwork she still held.

“Love? Seriously? This isn’t a Disney movie, Mick. This is real life.”

“Is love so hard to believe in?”

“Um, yeah. And this conversation is hard to believe in. Guys don’t usually talk about falling in love, so I shouldn’t be playing the part of the non-believer. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“For starters, I’ll ignore the fact that your statement is sexist—not all guys have trouble believing in love. I’m sorry you’ve had experiences that have shown you differently, but I’m not Ro—” I stopped myself before saying her ex’s name, trying to cover up my slip with an unbelievable cough. “Second of all, you’re just learning about the curse, and I’ve been studying it since I was fifteen—and that includes the love part. I couldn’t actively plan for something I didn’t believe in, could I?”

Again, as if not truly believing my words, Holland quietly analyzed me. That was okay—I’d show her that love wasn’t impossible. I had no other choice than to do so. And what I’d said was true—whether or not I’d been born believing in love didn’t matter. I’d been prepared to. I was her Destined.

But even the best training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for how I actually felt when I saw her.

Love was her only hope. It was our only hope, or we’d risk this situation occurring again in four generations. Ridiculous or not, we were without choices in the matter.

Luckily, I knew it would be easy to love her. Natural, even.

“What if you fail, and then I die, and instead of moving on, you just don’t have any kids? Will that break the curse? I mean, if there are no more generations to go through this, then it doesn’t exist, right?”