Chapter 28
Cathy led them into the kitchen.
Dustin and Greg sat at the table while Cathy poured coffee without asking if they wanted any. Black for herself, a splash of milk for Dustin. She shot a questioning glance at Greg.
“Cream or sugar?” she asked.
“A lot of sugar,” Greg said. He sat in Tyler's chair, but Dustin didn't mention this. Neither did Cathy, as she dropped the sugar in Greg's coffee.
“Thank you.” Greg accepted the coffee with a smile. “Sugar's the only way to make the coffee at work taste like anything.”
“Oh?” Cathy asked. “Where do you work?”
Dustin intervened before Greg could say anything involving the words reaper, HQ, or liminal office space. “He's a reporter. For a sports magazine. He's doing a profile on me and wanted to talk to my family.”
It was the first lie that came to mind, and it was a terrible choice, because it required Greg to act like a reporter, which required Greg to act normal, which required Greg to be an entirely different person.
“Which magazine?” Cathy asked, sitting with them.
“Outside Edge,” Dustin said, pulling a name from thin air.
Cathy looked at Greg. “You work for Outside Edge.”
“Yes.” Greg's voice went up half an octave. “I do. I work there. At the magazine.”
“What do you do there?”
“I'm um…” Greg turned his mug between his hands. “ I'm a writer… of articles. About sports. Outdoor sports, I mean. The kind that happen outside.”
Cathy sipped her coffee. “How long have you been a journalist?” she asked.
“A long time. Several...” Greg seemed to be calculating how long was plausible. “...years.”
Cathy set her mug down. She looked at Dustin with the expression he knew too well — the one that said I raised you and your brother and I've heard every lie two teenage boys are capable of producing and you really thought this would work?
“Try again,” she said.
“Mom—”
“That man is not a reporter. He's holding a clipboard, not a notebook and he's looking at my kitchen like he's never been inside a house before.” She turned back to Greg. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Greg said miserably.
“So.” Cathy folded her arms on the table. “You drove all the way here with a dislocated shoulder to bring me a man who isn't a reporter, and you won't tell me who he actually is. And all of that after the talk we had last night. What is going on?”
The kitchen was very quiet.
Dustin looked at Greg. Greg looked back at him with an expression that clearly said I told you I wanted to be honest.
“He's not a reporter,” Dustin admitted.
“Obviously.” Cathy's voice was steady, but her eyes were calculating. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Not exactly.”
“Is this about the jump? Devil's Needle?”
“No.”
“Does this have anything to do with why you're wearing a sling?”
“Partly.”
“Dustin.” Her patience was fraying. He could see it in the set of her mouth, in the way her fingers tightened around her mug. “Say what you came to say.”
“I came here because something is keeping me alive,” Dustin said.
The words came out blunter than he'd intended, but then, Cathy wasn't a woman you eased toward anything. She stood in front of you and demanded you get to the point.
So he did.
“I should have died last week,” he said. “I survived a fall that should have killed me. I dropped 800 feet and I walked away without a scratch.” Dustin decided not to mention the duck incident.
Cathy's expression didn't change. Her posture was straight. But something behind her eyes went very, very still.
“Greg is helping me figure out why,” Dustin continued. “And he was wondering if you knew anything about that?”
The kitchen clock ticked.
Cathy didn't look at Greg. She looked at Dustin. Only at Dustin. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said. “If you'd dropped 800 feet you would be dead.”
“That's my point, Mom.”
“You're not making any sense.”
“Only because you're not listening,” Dustin insisted. “There's something supernatural happening here.”
Cathy raised an eyebrow at him as if to say he truly was going insane now.
“Greg,” Dustin said. “Walk through that wall.”
Greg looked at him. Then at Cathy. Then at the wall in question — the one between the kitchen and the living room.
“Now?” Greg asked.
“Now.”
“I just want to note that this is not how I would have chosen to—”
“Greg.”
Greg stood up and adjusted his glasses, and then he turned and walked straight through the kitchen wall.
Cathy's mug hit the table and coffee sloshed over the rim. She didn't notice. She was staring at the wall—the solid, unbroken, completely intact wall—with her mouth open.
Greg's voice came from the living room, muffled. “Should I come back through?”
“Yup,” Dustin said.
Greg walked back through the wall into the kitchen. He straightened his shirt, adjusted his glasses again, and sat back down.
“Sorry about that,” he said to Cathy. “I should mention that I'm not human.”
Cathy's mouth was still open. She closed it, then opened it again. Her hand found her coffee mug and gripped it like an anchor.
Dustin had never seen his mother speechless before.
It almost made him smile. “He's a reaper,” Dustin said. “He was sent to collect my soul. But I didn't die and he got kind of stubborn about it. Now he's trying to figure out what's keeping me alive.” He paused. “He's also a friend. That part was true.”
Cathy looked at the wall. Then at Greg.
“Do it again,” she said.
Naturally, Greg obliged. He was polite like that.
When he'd come back through the wall one more time, Cathy pressed her hands flat on the table. “A reaper,” she said.
“Yes, ma'am,” Greg said.
“You collect dead people.”
“I guide souls through the transition between—”
“Dead people.”
“...Yes.”
Cathy looked at Dustin. Her face had changed. The dismissiveness was gone, replaced by something harder to read. She was recalculating. “You said something is keeping you alive,” she said slowly. “And he's trying to find out what.”
“Yeah.”
“And you think I know something about it.”
Dustin held her gaze. “Do you?”
Cathy didn't speak and something about her silence made Dustin's chest draw tight.
“Do you?” he demanded again, wanting her to say yes. “For three years, you've been calm about everything. I jump off cliffs, I take on stunts with a fifty percent kill rate, and you don't care.”
“Of course I care!” The words burst out of Cathy with enough force to make Dustin sit up straight. “Of course I do!”
“Then why do you never act like it?” Dustin made himself ask. “Because you knew, didn't you? That I can't die.”
“Stop,” Cathy said, sharply.
“What did you do?”
“I said stop.”
“What did you do, Mom?”
“I made sure nothing would happen to you!” Cathy's voice cracked through the kitchen like a whip.
“That's why I'm calm! You can throw yourself off every cliff on the planet and it won't matter because I did what had to be done. Because I—” She stopped, but it was too late for her to take back her words.
Her face had gone white. She was staring at the table like she could undo the last five seconds by refusing to look up.
“You made sure,” Dustin repeated. His voice didn't sound like his own.
Cathy said nothing.
“How?” he asked. “How did you make sure?”
Her jaw was clenched. But the wall she'd put up had a crack in it now and everything she'd stored behind it was pressing against the fracture.
“It was after Tyler,” she said finally. “Maybe a month after the funeral.” She swallowed. “I couldn't sleep. I couldn't be here. So I went to the cemetery at two in the morning. I just needed to be near him.”
Dustin's chest was being crushed from the inside. He didn't want to hear this, but he knew he needed to.
“There was someone there,” Cathy said. “Standing by Tyler's grave. A man. Except he wasn't really a man.” With her thumb, she traced the rim of her coffee mug. “He said he could help. He said he could make it so I'd never lose another child in my lifetime.”
“And you believed him,” Dustin said.
“I'd have believed anyone.” Her eyes were wet now but nothing fell. Held by force of will. “Tyler had been in the ground for only a few weeks and you were already back in the air. And I knew — I knew — it was going to happen again because I'd let it happen the first time.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. She pressed on.
“I should have stopped you. Both of you. When you were sixteen and planning that jump behind the school. I should have said no. I should have grounded you. I should have locked the doors. Done whatever it took.” Her hands were shaking now.
“Instead I put you in training. I taught you how to do the thing that killed your brother.
I looked at my two boys and I said, well, I can't stop them, so I'll make sure they do it right.” She laughed, a horrible, brittle sound.
“He did it right, Dustin. Tyler did everything right. And he's still dead.”
Dustin couldn't breathe.
“So when that thing at the cemetery offered me a way to make sure it never happened again… yes, I took it.”
“What did he want in return?” Dustin made himself ask.
Cathy looked at him, looked him right in the eyes, and what was in her face was not grief or fear but flat, resigned exhaustion.
“My soul,” she said.
The kitchen went airless.
“Mom,” Dustin whispered.
“It was a fair trade.” Her voice was steady now, the way it got when she'd decided something and didn't want to discuss it.
“I'm the reason Tyler is dead. I enabled you two. I signed the permission slips and drove you to the training and watched you jump and told myself I was being a good mother by supporting your passions.” The last two words came out like poison. “My soul for your life. That's fair.”
“That's not fair. How could you do that? It's not fair. It's not—”
“It's done, Dustin.”
Dustin couldn't move.
Every phone call was rewriting itself. Every conversation.
Every time he'd hung up thinking she didn't care.
Every time he'd mistaken her composure for indifference.
Every time he'd thought she's not even worried — she hadn't needed to worry.
She'd already paid for the answer. She'd made a deal with something inhuman in a cemetery at two in the morning and sold her soul because she thought Tyler's death was her fault and she'd be damned before she let it happen to her other son.
Literally damned.
“Mom,” he said.
Her face crumpled. Not gradually but all at once. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry. I should have stopped you. I should have stopped both of you. And I didn't, and Tyler—” Her voice broke. “So I did the only thing I could think of to make sure I didn't lose you too.”
“Mom.” He was out of his chair. He didn't remember standing. His good arm was around her and she was smaller than he'd realized, so much smaller, and she was shaking against his chest.
“I don't care what happens to me,” she said. “I don't care where I go. I just wanted to keep you.”
Dustin held her. Over her head, he looked at Greg.
His face was pale. His eyes were too bright behind his glasses. He looked like someone who'd found the last piece of a puzzle and wished he hadn't.