11. Chace #2
My boy version was young, and several years would pass before child me could be of any real help to me, but young Chace―young me―was wise and brave.
And, as it so happened, here. A better choice than the only other being I’d witnessed enter the room during my stay, the elder reaper and aforementioned father.
“Help how?” Younger me’s face appeared wide open with wonder, curiosity, and mild trepidation.
“My vessel won’t last much longer,” I said.
Young me’s face clouded with confusion.
“My body,” I clarified, and my younger version nodded. Caged me coughed, and droplets of blood splattered down my shirt. “I will soon require a new vessel to hold my essence. And by soon, I mean quite soon.”
“You don’t—” Young me bit down on my question, but he didn’t need to vocalize it for imprisoned me to understand.
The colors swimming around boy me communicated everything.
“I will not return to the Underworld until I am summoned or my job is done.” My breath became ragged. My heart labored.
How long could I force this body to hold on? Endure?
My younger version’s lips tipped into another frown. “Isn’t death a summons?”
“I am not of your kind, and I am not governed by the same rules,” I replied. “This realm is where I will remain until—”
An attack of coughs overwhelmed me. I wiped the resulting bloody residue away with my shirtsleeve.
“You want me to help you,” young me said, and caged me nodded. “You want me to be that vessel thing?”
Again, I nodded.
“But I’m dying. I wouldn’t be helping for long.”
“With my assistance, you need not be dying in the same manner. I can give you extra time before your spirit departs. Time to make peace with your parents. And when you do go, if you are amenable, I would continue to use your vessel to finish what must be done.”
“What must be done?”
Prisoner me tried to grin, in hopes of creating the sense of adventure any child might seek, but with the burn of my eyes, I knew the expression fell flat. “I must save a goddess.”
“A goddess?” Young me’s eyes burst wide. “Yes,” younger me said, quick and breathless. “I’ll help you. You’ll help me. And together we’ll help her.”
Let’s hope it all works so easily.
“Then together, we shall live the adventure.” For as long as the boy’s soul prevails. Caged me wheezed, and the remnants of my strength drained. “But I’m fading, so if we are to do this, then I sense we need to do this now.”
Young me wrapped my small hands around the bars. “And if we don’t…before you die?”
The kid didn’t need to speak the complete sentence for dying me to understand the question.
I huffed a sad and barely audible laugh. “Then I guess my essence will drift until a suitable host is found.”
My boy eyes grew wider. “That. That can’t be good.” After a drawn-out moment, young me glanced at the door across the room, as if checking for my parents, then swung back to imprisoned and dying me. “Okay. I’m in. Let’s do this.”
Caged me closed my eyes in prayer and resignation and then expelled my last breath from my dying husk. The body slumped to the floor, lifeless and unmoving…even as my inner essence floated through the air and slipped beneath the skin of young Chace Badden…the new me.
Boy me gasped, sucking a breath deep into my core. Releasing the bars of the cage, I took a step back and patted my chest.
“I can feel us both. Inside,” I said.
Are you comfortable? Older, more experienced me pushed the question forward.
“And I can hear you too. I feel—”
The door at the back of the room swung open, and my dad entered the laboratory. As I spun to face my dad’s approach, my finishing word, “fine,” was lost to a whisper.
Reaper Badden jabbed a point at young me. “What did I tell you about being in here?”
His voice boomed with authority and irritation. He crossed the room, arm outstretched, clearly planning to grab me and drag me out. But then his gaze dropped upon the lifeless being in the cage, and he froze, his lips pulling taut and white. His eyes grew ever dark.
Snapping free from his momentary stupor, Reaper Badden dashed to the cage, shoved me, now a young boy, out of the way, and snatched at the prisoner’s limp wrist, felt for a pulse.
The body left behind in the cage was no longer me. Would never be again.
“The vessel’s dead,” I said.
My dad’s back went rigid, and he slowly turned to face me, his gaze intense, scrutinizing.
In a breath, my father grabbed my upper arms and shook. “What have you done?”
I, both young Chace and older, other me, now living within the one, merely smiled.
My dad tossed me into a nearby chair and tied me in place.
I shouldn’t have smiled. That thought had run through my mind countless times since we’d taken up space in the same body. It had been the smile that had set the older reaper off, the gesture all wrong in the moment.
Now after days…or maybe it had been weeks or months…
of potions and pills, the elder version of myself within our shared vessel could no longer remember my name or mission.
There was only that of the young me. We were now both Chace, clinging to the mission to grow up and become one of the best reapers of my generation.
A nagging at the back of my head suggested there was something else I should be doing…needed to be doing. But what that was I couldn’t recall.
I was merely Chace Badden, youngest reaper from an extraordinary reaper family, who was destined to carry on the family’s superior legacy.
I released a throaty groan and wanted to rub at my eyes, but my limbs, my everything, were lead weights. Too heavy for what little strength I found available to me.
Reward is on the other side.
I now understood that the reward was to remember. Remember what I was and what I needed to do.
Only the years of suppression had changed me. I felt dissimilar, internally, than I had before I’d made the deal with the boy…young Chace. I had survived but had been molded into something different. Not a reaper, but not completely a hunter either.
The boy had been dormant, slumbering for so terribly long that all aspects of his personality had long ago merged with the me of now, or no longer factored into the male…
the being…I had become. The boy should have long since transitioned, but I sensed a sliver of that young soul lingering on the periphery of the individual that now was.
As if that part of what I once had been waited for this forgotten piece of myself to awaken so that a farewell could be made.
One I knew would take place, if I could only open my eyes.
I’m sorry my dad hurt you…hurt us…again, the boy’s voice whispered through my head.
The me that was no longer just the boy, nor the being that had asked the boy to be a vessel.
I was some mixture of the two. I had been for many, many years now.
I held the memories of the boy, before and after our merge, as well as fragments from far before, but they were like a jumbled puzzle with missing pieces.
I rallied against the weight of my lids and dragged open my eyes.
I lay on the drunkard’s cell floor as I had been for death knew how long.
A blanket was draped over the top of me, another folded beneath my head.
A bowl of water and a wet cloth sat nearby, as well as a half-filled tankard.
The cell door stood wide open, and a faint sliver of young Chace’s soul shimmered in the open space.
“My dad should have never done what he did, but I’m happy we finally remember,” the shimmering soul said. “I wish I could have been part of the saving. It sounded exciting, but it’s way past time.”
I pushed, agonizingly slow, up on my elbows and nodded.
This sliver of the boy’s soul, claimed by a fatal illness long before we’d struck our deal, had already stayed beyond what had been expected.
No doubt the daily dose of medication somehow played a part in everything.
Our confusion and forgetting. Our personalities possibly blending.
Who was the goddess I was supposed to save? And was she truly a goddess, or was the title merely an endearing term?
“I know.” My voice cracked and scratched from dryness and countless days of disuse.
“I think, maybe, you may have more than one you must now save,” the soul continued.
I nodded again, knowing the “more” pertained to Raven, now relocated to the palace. And how many days ago had that now been?
“I like her,” young Chace said. “I think you do too.” The shimmer of his soul dimmed and then vanished from the cell doorway. “Good luck.”
And just like that, a piece of myself slipped away. An innocent youth that likely had no place in that gods-forsaken citadel―a fact that did nothing to lessen the pain of the crevice widening through my chest.
I pressed my eyes closed and sucked back a sharp breath, then I exhaled the emotions and diverted my focus to something slightly more manageable.
“I like her… I think you do too.”
A Badden liking a Gunn. I wanted to laugh, and yet I didn’t. Didn’t feel the conviction behind such a response.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I’m going to need it.”
I pushed to a full sit with a wince. The blanket slipped to pool at my waist.
Rushed footsteps scuffed across the floor, and Aoes darted into view, clinging to a bar as he swung into the open cell.
“You’re awake!” His eyes blinked wide. “Are you awake for good this time?”
“Awake,” I whispered, the word holding a far deeper meaning than Aoes intended. “Awakening,” I continued, because I wasn’t fully whole yet, but I was on the right path to recapturing the many pieces of myself, my many memories. “And I remember.”