Chapter 13 #2
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Agreed. Just tell me how.” Turning to him, she asked, “Is there anybody besides Stefan to help us?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of. Stefan runs a group of people like him from all over the world. If he can’t do something about this …” He let his words dwindle off.
She got the picture. “Great,” she mumbled, scrubbing her face. “Maybe I should go look for Toby.”
“I’m here,” Toby announced, as he came in through the front door. “What happened to Tabby?” He raced to his sister’s side.
“One of the entities touched her,” Devon snapped.
He looked up at her, his face pale. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt.”
“I know you didn’t,” she muttered, closing her eyes and wishing she hadn’t been quite so quick to snap at him.
“I do know that. Yet you guys brought into being something that is not quite so simple to stop now. Take a look at the backyard.” She watched Toby’s face as he looked outside, then scrambled back several steps.
“No, no, no,” he cried out. “That can’t be.”
“And why can’t it be?” Camden asked, studying his face.
“It just can’t,” Toby repeated, disbelief on his face.
Camden snapped, “I need to see the book your mother gave you. Do you know where she got it?”
“She’d been looking into it for a long time, ever since she knew she would die,” he replied. “She got this book from somebody, about how to—” Then he froze.
“How to live forever, by any chance?” Devon suggested.
He just looked at her and said, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re wrong, Toby. I do understand. However, I also understand that this situation,” she added, pointing to the backyard, “is not normal. We have inadvertently done something with things that should never be tampered with. This isn’t small stuff.
If they can knock out your sister with a single touch, who will be next?
Will they roam around, knocking people unconscious right and left? ”
“They’re supposed to stay here. She was supposed to stay.”
“She?” Devon asked.
“Mom,” Toby cried out. “She’s supposed to stay. When I get her here, she’s supposed to stay here with us, forever.”
Devon gasped at the idea of that and what that relationship could do to Toby and Tabby. “Oh my God, what have you done?”
“Nothing. It’s not working,” he cried out. “Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot wrong,” Devon snapped. Again remembering he wasn’t solely responsible for this, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Dear God, Tabitha. What have you done?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Toby wailed, his tears threatening. “She told me that it would be fine.”
She looked at him and shook her head. “But she didn’t know, did she? She didn’t have a chance to do this before now.”
“She tried it before, years ago.”
She stared at him, the color draining from her face. “With her mother?”
“Yes,” he confirmed, looking at her. “See? You understand now. … It worked, didn’t it?”
She swallowed hard. “No, not really.”
At that, Camden turned to her, his eyes sharp. “What does not really mean?” he asked, his tone deadly quiet.
She winced at opening up about something so personal from Tabitha’s life. “Her mother made an appearance,” she began, “at least that’s my understanding. Yet she wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same loving, caring mother she had been.”
“How was that?” Camden asked, frowning.
“She was a caricature of who she’d been—and not a nice one,” she explained. She turned to face Toby. “The fact that your mom gave you that book after the experience she had is just … unbelievable.”
“She told us that she didn’t do it right, that what happened was her fault, not her mom’s. And she’s felt guilty about it ever since.”
“Oh, good God,” Devon muttered, closing her eyes.
“So, she’s felt guilty this whole time for not having done something correctly?
And now, here you guys are, following her instructions to try and recreate the process properly, so that she can come back?
Is that what this is all about?” She kept herself rooted to the spot, the wheels spinning in her mind. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”
Toby just stared at her mutinously.
She closed her eyes for a long moment, but, inside her head, she thought, God damn it. Tabitha. What the hell did you do? What did you expect your kids to do?
Then Camden looked over at her. “It’s Stefan.”
“What about him?” she asked, looking at him blankly, having forgotten about his friend in light of Toby’s confession.
“He’s here.” And, with that, he took off outside into the backyard.
She stared after him, as if her world had suddenly gone totally crazy, but that part failed to have her attention.
Her mind was still on the comments that Tabitha had made years ago.
A scene was starting to filter back into Devon’s mind about how Tabitha had tried so hard …
and hadn’t managed it. But she felt she could do it, if only she had another chance.
Devon had chalked it up as crazy talk at the time. So, when she’d mentioned something to that effect, Tabitha had gotten irate. Almost violently angry, shouting that Devon didn’t understand because she’d never lost anybody. But Tabitha was wrong. Devon had lost people.
It was a long time ago.
So, the losses weren’t as sharp and as intense as they had been for Tabitha.
But never in Devon’s worst imagination could she possibly have envisioned this—that Tabitha would be trying to fool death in a sense.
To get her kids to do whatever they could to call her back.
She turned to face Toby, who was staring out at the backyard.
Searching through all the entities, she asked, “What was your mother planning on doing? You know, if you did succeed in getting her here?”
He turned and looked at her as if she were crazy or something. “She would come back of course. What else?”
“Right, okay. Yet I don’t know how she would come back, since she still would have been in an entity form.”
“No,” he argued, frowning at her. “She had that all arranged, and that’s why we needed to go with you.”
“What do you mean? Why did you need to go with me?”
“Because she would come back and …”
“And?” Devon’s voice froze, as if that whisper in her brain refused to compute was what her heart already knew. “She would come back and—” Devon prodded.
“Become you.”