Chapter 15 #3
I throw myself between the seats, dragging my bag after me.
Retreating into the little bedroom at the back of the camper, I lock the door behind me, huddle with my back against the headboard of the bed.
It doesn’t help. Putting space between us doesn’t teach me how to breathe.
Every time I shift, I smell the sheets. Freshly washed, they waft the smell of Mom’s fabric softener, the hint of her perfume.
I scrub my sleeve across my eyes. When that doesn’t help, I shove my palms into the sockets, trying to trap my weakness in my rattling skull where it belongs. I don’t feel like a weapon. I feel like a fuckup.
How many people—living and dead—are in pain right now because of me?
How many more are in danger? How many are suffering? God, I didn’t even text my mom. She must be so worried. This whole time, I hated her, but she’s only ever been worried.
And I left her behind, no note, all her ghost trackers broken and DNR bearing down—she didn’t deserve that.
She was just trying to keep me safe, six schools in three years and her unrelenting silence the currency she used to buy me a childhood.
She thought she was helping. She thought she was saving her child from the monster in the night.
You are my daughter, she told me. Nothing is more important to me than you.
Maybe she wasn’t lying. Or, at least, maybe she didn’t mean to.
How could she have known her baby was the monster all this time?
Fabric shuffles outside, a weight sinking down into the mauve shag carpet.
“I don’t understand why you’re mad,” Bas murmurs, his voice so close he must be sitting with his back against the door.
My chest constricts. I have to swallow twice before I can speak, spend a long minute scavenging the wasteland of my head before I can even think of something to say to him—to sum up every fear, every injury, every agony of the last seventeen years and salt ground in the wound with this gentle new betrayal.
I settle on, “You knew.”
“Of course I knew. I’ve never not known.
” He huffs, something like a laugh, something like the broken edge of grief clotting my own throat.
“I knew you when you hung the stars. I knew you in the Nile, in the asphodel and in Helheim. I knew your legs under a shitty library table. I’d know you anywhere, any piece of you. I have always known.”
“So you chased me across the country? You hunted me down?”
“Of course I did. Something cracked open the world and stole my other half. Jenny, what the hell else would I do?”
A laugh rips out of me, frantic and half terrified. “This is crazy. We’ve known each other for two days.”
It tastes like a lie.
I’ve known him forever. I’ve known him since the world began. I knew him the moment life sparked into existence and winked at me and offered up his hand. I have always known.
Outside the door, Bas hums, a tiny laugh of his own.
“It’s been nice,” he offers. “Meeting you new again for the first time.”
My soul shivers, threatening to scatter.
Tears seep down my cheeks and I scramble to scrub them away, squeezing my eyes shut against the ghost sensation of his mouth on mine, the sour blue raspberry memories of the un-life we built together.
The security of purpose—of shared responsibility—his calloused palms cupping my face, cradling me close in the autumn chill, asphodel blooming at our feet.
God, I feel crazy. I am literally insane.
How can I be lovesick and grieving at the same time?
How can I miss him this much when he’s right outside and anyway, I barely know him?
When I certainly don’t know his babynapper, currently committing several felonies to help me? And why? Because he feels guilty?
Or because he had everything to do with the event that made me?
Balling tight, I thread my fingers through my hair, forehead shoved to my knees as outside, Cain climbs back into the driver’s seat. The door clicks shut. The engine grumbles awake.
“She sleeping?” he asks.
“Mad at me,” Bas answers quietly.
“You should try and sleep, then. Get some rest. We’ll need it tomorrow.”
“Driving through the night?”
“Hit a couple states. Hopefully throw them off the scent.”
Throw them off our scent he means. The people hunting us both now, because of what I started, what I am…
What I chose to be again.
And Cain didn’t say it, but I would bet hard cash they’re the same people he and my mother used to work for.
I can’t tolerate the stillness anymore. I throw myself off the bed, unlock the door.
“Is that an invitation, Jenny?” Bas asks.
“That’s not my name,” I grind between my teeth, staring him full in the face. “What is my name?”
“I’m not great at lying to you.” He tries to smile. “Gotta give me time to practice.”
“Sebastian. What is my name?”
But the second his name leaves my mouth, I taste the lie in it, wrong and overwhelming. It’s too small, too poorly fit, tasting as bitter as a little body, helpless fists, screaming while every precious thing in the world shatters and falls.
“I lost it,” Bas chokes, a confession, a knife in the night and a slow exsanguination.
His fists ball in his hoodie pocket, pressing hard into his stomach, into a wound too old to stop the bleeding.
“There’s not room for everything. There’s too—too much of me to fit inside this meat and I…
lost pieces. I had to lose pieces if I wanted to keep looking for you.
I had to cut them away or I’d burn this body out and you’d be alone. ”
I can’t speak. His last word hits me harder than a final flower on a grave.
I want to tell him I lost his name too. To tell him that I reached for him, that I tried to save him like he tried to save me, but I was too slow, too scared, too weak. That I howled while he died and died and died and cursed the souls of everyone who laid a finger on him but only a baby cried.
I want to—but I don’t know the words. They boiled from my bones and useless meat, lost in the distillation from divine to tragedy.
The enormity of its absence bears down on me, too large for the one language I have left.
All that remains is the absence, the evidence that something was taken, a thin ghost of what we used to have, the things—people? —we used to be.
“You don’t remember either,” I breathe, a small agony.
“No,” he admits, “but I feel like I could”—his black eyes so hot on mine—“when I’m with you.”
I relent. How can I stay mad at him when he’s the only thing of mine I truly have?
Stepping back from the open door, chewing on my bottom lip, I tell him, “There’s only one bed back here. Is your… babynapper gonna be cool with that?”
In response, Cain flicks on the radio, spins it to a classic hits station with the military precision of an old man seeking his people.
Randy Travis, tinny and distant through the old RV speakers, promises a love that lasts forever. I wonder if he knows it feels like this? Like coming home and finding all the furniture gone, the structure empty, nothing left but the loss—the absence and the wrongness and the grief.
I reach out a hand. Sad smile flickering, Bas takes it. Our fingers tangle.
Stepping back from the doorway, I invite him in.