Crucified

Ryan Schow

River City Publishing

Copyright

The eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy so that you may read it with a clear conscience and not one day end up in hell over a shitty technicality. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

CRUCIFIED

Copyright © 2018 Ryan Schow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, cloned, stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this eBook via the Internet or via any other means without the express written permission of the author or publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents—and their usage for storytelling purposes—are crafted for the singular purpose of fictional entertainment and no absolute truths shall be derived from the information contained within. Locales, businesses, events, government institutions and private institutions are used for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes only. Furthermore, any resemblance or reference to an actual living person is used solely for atmospheric, entertainment and fictional purposes.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover Design by Milo at Deranged Doctor Design

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Contents

Also by Ryan Schow

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Afterword

Also by Ryan Schow

THE COMPLETE SWANN SERIES:

SWANN

MONARCH

CLONE

MASOCHIST

WEAPON

RAVEN

ABOMINATION

ENIGMA

CRUCIFIED

THE COMPLETE LAST WAR SERIES:

THE LAST WAR

THE ZERO HOUR

THE OPHIDIAN HORDE

THE INFERNAL REGIONS

THE KILLING FIELDS

THE BARBAROUS ROAD

THE TERMINAL RUN

Chapter One

No one’s high school years should ever suck as much as mine, but they did, and I survived. Barely. At this point, however, I’m convinced most kids feel this way about school. If not, if high school was your thing, I’m truly delighted for you. Perhaps even a tad jealous. Nevertheless, I got what I needed from those years, so lamenting the past just feels like an exercise in futility to the new and improved me.

Besides, why brood over the past when the present holds so much promise? Why brood when everything I ever hoped for I now have?

I mean, think about it…

My mother loves me. I love her. I love my father too, who always loved us both the way we were, even if we were both certifiable. And Rebecca? Ah, my heart leaps at the thought of her! I now have a sister! And boys? Oh, yeah. Got that worked out, too. This genetically modified badass with tits now has the best boyfriend ever, which makes me feel like I’m grabbing blue ribbons on every front.

Not to be one of those annoying little shits who gets the world handed to her on a golden platter then squeals with delight and pretends to be surprised (ugh…vomiting right now!), but my family and I have been blessed to start life anew. We’re all the freshly unwrapped packages of our wildest dreams. Our better selves incarnate. And despite the dark days looming, if I obsess about just this moment, I swear to Jesus I’m paralyzed by the wonderment of it all. For all its conquests, all its sorrows and all its future promises, I find myself eager to dive headlong into this unconventional life of mine.

You know what they say—in for a penny, in for a pound.

So yeah, I’m all in.

That doesn’t mean I don’t consider my life on a more existential level. Some people spend half their waking hours trying to decide who they are, where they have value in the world, how they will define themselves in their social circles, their community, the entire species. Honestly, I get it. We all ask those questions. But my hand to God, most of us never get a reasonable answer. Our existence is burdened by complication. Clashing beliefs and ideologies. Floundering morals. When every single day with these politics, this media, this swiftly unraveling social climate feel like the drip-torture of gaslighting, the idea of searching for higher meaning has a way of giving you emotional constipation.

Now that I’m through all that (thank God!), I know who I am. In fact, I’m perfectly clear on it. I’m a justice junkie who thrives on delivering payback. I’m a girl who wants to stop others from hurting those of us who just want to live in a free and happy society. I’m someone who loves but struggles to be loved. Beyond all that, though, I’d say I’m now just a freak of nature searching for a normalcy I might never find.

Jeez…normalcy.

What in God’s name does normalcy even mean? Is it having best friends? Doing Saturday night sleepovers? Staying up late into the night on the phone gabbing about boys and clothes and who’s doing what (and whom) at school?

Yeah.

All of that.

Plus—and I know this sounds silly, maybe even a bit naïve for someone like me—there’s this part of me that wants to go shopping at the mall, sip overpriced coffee in outdoor cafes, lay out by the pool in a bikini and not worry about peeping neighbors or the cockroach paparazzi.

Is that so wrong? Am I being unrealistic here?

Maybe. But maybe not.

I suppose that’s why I’m obsessed with the lives of superheroes. Random, right? I’m no superhero. I would have to be a self-centered troglodyte to even think such a thing! Which is why I don’t. What I’m thinking about, what’s confounding me on a God-sized level, is the conflicting personas. Specifically how someone like me balances them. Spiderman has this problem. So does Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman. And just like them, my life is ass backwards and upside down, as in there is no owner’s manual to me. The point of all this egocentric pontification is me taking stock of my life and thinking what I want most these days is not more for me, but more for others. My inner philanthropist is shoving my whiny teenager aside and now my needs feel less pedestrian, less self-centered.

Can someone please dust off the “Humanitarian of the Year” award? Yep. It’s not all about me anymore. My focus is about everyone else, how I want more for this world of ours than what we’re getting.

If you can imagine, I have Alice Jr. to thank for this. The demonic five or six or seven year old, not the level headed traveler. Ever since I first laid eyes on the future that young Alice all but forced me to see, I’ve had to readjust my views to consider the ramifications of cause and effect. Knowing what lie ahead for us as a species is what has nurtured in me this intense desire to care for more than just myself. The need is so absolute it has become a monumental encumbrance, but not in a bad way. It’s in this powerful, singular reality that I realize my life now has purpose.

I have purpose.

* * *

I’ve seen the future. There’s a lot of death at the hands (and jaws) of mutated things that people like you and me with our limited imaginations could never fathom. What I saw when I traveled to the time and the coordinates Alice Jr. gave me, I can’t unsee. Which tells me I’ve got bigger problems than making time to do my hair, my nails and spend time with my besties.

What sweet little Alice—the fire breathing imp—showed me was how not killing a certain horrible scumbag from decades past (his name rhymes with Shitler) does something unforgivable to our world years into the future. This is worse than nukes. Worse than catastrophic loss of life or scorched earth. What Alice Jr. showed me was infinitely worse. Like something you’d drag out of the ghettos of hell.

The hard part of all of this is that Alice Jr. was right: this is my fault. So yeah, the future is my fault and I need to fix it. I’m on it, I swear.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, before I become this righteous, exalted woman on the path to a Zen lifestyle and an angel of world peace and all that syrupy crap, I’ve got to kill some people, behead a dictator (like I should’ve done in the first place) and pretty much save the future from itself. Maybe then I’ll be that girl with all those friends. Falling in love with that boy. Living that storied life of the heroine who saves the motherfreaking world.

Chapter Two

I’m standing in the lab looking at a guy whom I know for a fact is now mine. Yep. August. He’s hot AF and he’s mine, all mine. Right now my heart is actually shaking at the thought of him. How beautiful he is. What we’re going to have together. The life we’re going to live.

Looking at him in that tank, unconscious, my heart slows a bit, beats out of rhythm for that split second, then almost returns to normal.

Almost.

August has a bomb inside his head. August, my one and only, he has this death sentence looming over him should either of us get out of line with Holland. My eyes find the immortal doctor. He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him and the thoughts I’m having are damn near homicidal.

What the hell would posses someone to plant a bomb like that in a boy’s head? The doctor…he’s not Holland, not Gerhard, he’s not even Mengele. No, this man before me is repugnance incarnate. He’s a deeply scarred psychosis. A broken, broken brain. I want to hate him, make him suffer for who he is and what he’s done, but I can’t.

If I pull back from my own hatred long enough to logically assess the situation, my more rational side would say he’s just a man following his dark dreams, clinging to a life I could take at any minute.

It’s true, the things he’s done are unforgivable, beyond atrocious. He’s a hundreds-of-years-old creature who got bored of a normal life and this is what he does to pass the time. I hate him, but one day I may become him. Raven took that path. Well, sort of. Will I? Ugh. The way trust fund babies sometimes get everything they want in life only to turn to coke and whoredome and end up killing themselves—that’s how Holland is. Except for him, it’s genetics and mass slaughter instead of drugs, and sadly, he’ll probably never kill himself. On a long enough timeline, what will I turn in to? Who will I become because of him?

“I’m not sure I like that look you’re giving me,” Holland says.

“You’d like the things I’m thinking far less,” I reply, my voice both emotionless and cruel at the same time, if such a contradiction were possible.

Just when I think Holland and I can be on the level with each other, he goes and gives me another reason to despise him. Another reason to remind me of who he was, what he is, how this tiger will never change his stripes. If only he was anyone other than himself, I could deal. But this? What he did to August? Booby-trapping the boy I love and sending him under before I could arrive to see him off? Un-freaking-acceptable.

“You saw what you did,” Alice Jr. says, startling me. So consumed was I with animosity I never even sensed her coming. That’s like missing the foul energy of Satan. Not good. Turning, seeing her standing in the doorway with future Alice, I try to process. Future Alice is kind of normal on the outside, but Alice Jr.? Monster.

“I saw what you needed me to see,” I tell the little she-beast.

“Then you know what must be done,” she continues. Her body is so small, but from her little being are waves of soul-sucking darkness, a pulsing sort of doom that would nauseate you in the pit of your stomach if you could feel the things I feel.

“I don’t need a lecture from you,” I snap. “You showed me what you needed to show me, I saw it, and now I’ll do something about it.”

She just looks at me, her eyes neither dark nor restless, her skin white but not translucent the way it looks right before she tries to roast you. Still, her aura feels…depleting.

“Why don’t you kick rocks already,” I retort. “I don’t need you staring at me like some kind of munchkin mass murderer.”

I look up at future Alice who says, “What’s wrong with you?”

“God I wish you could read minds,” I say. “Please, just go. And take baby Charles Manson with you.” My eyes are intense, but my mind is fighting to be elsewhere. It’s needing to figure out what to do with my booby-trapped boyfriend and the creature who made him.

The girls leave and already I feel better.

“There is something about you that’s not quite right,” Holland says. “I remember when my balance was off, how I felt a little crazy—”

“You killed five girls, chopped them to bits. I’m not like that. I’m just looking at the group of people surrounding me and wondering what I did so bad to deserve this.”

“You’re a product of your environment.”

“Save it, Mengele.”

He shakes his head, goes back to cleaning up the mess I made of his lab. I feel bad for being so mean, but these people…my God, they truly are insane.

* * *

Whatever these eyes of mine now see, I’ve seen worse. Endured worse. It’s no longer fear that moves me, it’s my distinct lack of patience. Lately, with everything that’s happened, I’m seriously on edge, which makes me a bit intolerable at times.

Thinking of my trip to the future, how August lays in his tank changing, I have to look back and reflect on one thing: at least I chose my return date well.

I could have come back from the future the week prior, when Brayden was going under, but I didn’t. There was no way I could wait out his transformation. Someone would have lost their life. Holland probably. I mean, seriously, those seven days of waiting would surely feel like seven years the way I’ve been ready to crack. Rather than watch over his every change on pins and needles, I simply came back from the future a week later and man it was the right decision!

That doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to relax into life and now this is being thrust upon me. But whatever. I’m not going to tantrum out on you. Not just yet…

Holland is sweeping up broken glass, righting a turned over table. Some things broke in my return, but not the most precious things. When I returned to this timeline, I returned to an empty lab. It was the middle of the night, which was perfect because it allowed me uninterrupted time with August. For the most part.

Besides, I needed to think.

The way Brayden was behaving just before going under, good Lord, the kid was wrestling with some demons! Before Holland put him in the tank, before I went into the future to see what Alice Jr. needed me to see, I slipped into his mind long enough to see what he’d done at the FBI. How he piggybacked a nasty computer virus using it as leverage to get an early release from the FBI. It was brilliant. Illegal and ballsy AF, but that’s my Brayden…the male version of me.

And Sabrina. God, what a mess! No way to un-fuck that fairy princess’s life.

Still, I’d needed my conversation with her. She had to know the truth about Tavares, about me killing him. And she had to hear it from me. She pitched her fit, beat me until she could beat me no more, but in the end, what she did—giving up her mother to that twisted sect of the Hollywood elite—that was far worse than me being used by psychopaths to kill her brother. She made her bed, she had to lie in it, and she damn well knew it. That’s why she was perfect for Holland. With a pack of Satan worshiping blue bloods on her heels, she knew there was no escape. We both did. She had to erase herself. Arabelle was forced to do the same thing after escaping Ukraine and the sex trade she’d fallen in with.

So now here we are: me waiting for August, Holland cleaning up the mess made by my returning temporal outburst, the future written in blood but not set in stone.

The sound of broken beaker glass being dumped onto other shards of glass in the garbage can unnerved me. My face frowned so hard, Holland looked up. “Next time try not to break so much shit on the way in, then maybe it won’t be so loud when I clean it up.”

Yeah…I’m working on my soft landing. It’s getting easier. Coming in this timeline without it packing such a massive temporal punch…I’m not perfect. Not yet. Not bothering with a reply, I wander over to Sabrina’s tank, study the girl inside.

“Pretty amazing, right?” Holland asks, still annoyed but trying not to be.

“She looks exactly like Arabelle,” I say. To my surprise, tears boil behind my eyes. I look up at the ceiling, blink fast enough to dry them out. “I’ve really missed that cold block of ice,” I mutter, mostly to myself, but loud enough that Holland can hear, too.

“As have I,” he says softly. I finally turn to face him. Our eyes meet. I lock in on him, feel him, make that soul-to-viscous-soul connection. If this sadistic cockroach actually had a heart, would he even know it? The way he looks at Sabrina/Arabelle 2.0, I know he does and this sort of surprises me as well.

My eyes go to the other man in the tank, an older gentleman with his head down, his new body almost done.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“No one you’d know,” he says with the dismissive wave of a hand. “Why are you not glued to Brayden’s tank. Are you not concerned for the outcome? Are you not curious?”

Taking a deep breath, thinking screw it, I say, “We’ve already met. In the future. I already know we’re together because in the future we were. Rather, we are.”

He seems taken aback.

“It’s not wise to tinker with the fabric of time,” he tells me.

“It’s not wise to tinker with genetics either, but you did and look at me now. Look at Georgia. Look at all of your precious dolls and consider your own behavior before you lecture me on things like ethics or morality or whatever it is you want to call this.”

“This is a warning. Not a lecture.”

“Whatever.”

My eyes return to Arabelle. I’m not sure what to make of this. Of her. It was sort of my idea to give Sabrina Arabelle’s DNA, make her into the only woman to ever emotionally affect the dark soul of the man once known as “The Angel of Death.” Like Arabelle, a girl who had the kind of past you barely ever see in the civilized world because it’s that bad, Sabrina was ten types of twisted. A real mental case. Not that I blame her.

Still, for as much of a butthole as Holland is sometimes, he’s got this savior complex for hot Russian girls. Well, maybe just young girls in general. It’s a little creepy, but not pedophile creepy. Take Alice for example: he could have put that little creature out of our misery, but instead he used to let her babysit…until she…did what she did. Now Rebecca has one less kid. Wow, this is a terrible example.

Moving on…

Rebecca doesn’t remember having children. I felt that putting a mental block on her memories was the humane thing to do. In the future, Rebecca’s daughter Skye is an integral part of her life, a part of Professor Jake’s life. My Professor Jake. The man I gave my virginity to who is no longer. The man who refused me the same way everyone else refused me. A big part of me doesn’t want to see Skye, but now I feel like I have to. I feel Rebecca has to as well, but in due time.

I turn these troubled eyes on Holland. “When can he come out?” I ask. I’m talking about August now. Trying not to take the pressures of my life out on him.

“About two hours ago.”

Hands on hips, the flame inside reaches my voice. “And you were going to tell me this when?”

“I just did.”

“You are a real piece of sh—”

“Save your manufactured outrage,” he snaps, “nobody warms to it…ever.”

“Get him out of there,” I bark. Holland crosses his arms, refuses to move. Blowing out a sigh, I decide to do it myself.

He stops me, shoves me aside and says, “Let me.”

While he’s preoccupied with August, I’m in back procuring my stashed syringe of the Fountain of Youth serum, the one I hid in the lab before leaving Alice and Alice, Jr. August is definitely going to need it if we’re going to survive the future holocaust together. Or if a bomb goes off in his head for whatever reason that such a bomb might go off in his head.

Holland doesn’t know I’m doing this. He can’t know. Basically I have to inject August with the stolen serum and test it without Holland’s knowledge.

Once I administer the serum, a simple stab wound will do; if he heals just fine, then the bomb is coming out. If not, I’ll take it out anyway. I can just heal him with my mind the way I healed Sensei Naygel after The Operator gave him the beating of his life.

Either way, the last thing I need is August’s head exploding because Holland pitched a bitch fit and punched a button, or whatever. Basically, there’s no way that Nazi plague is going to put the brakes on my love life. Especially after Tavares. One dead lover is enough for me, spank you very much.

Dutifully, and without hesitation, Holland works the control panel on August’s tank. I return to the tank. Holland is at the main computer executing a sequence of commands via the older keyboard. The tank turns from vertical to horizontal and starts to drain.

Holland moves in and stands beside me; my attention is now fully on August.

Once you see him, if you’re a girl, trust me when I tell you, you do not want to look away, he’s that good looking. Holland has him in special boy shorts so he doesn’t have to look at his junk all day (color me sad…yeah…I admit, I wanted to see it!), but other than that, what my eyes are feasting on is sheer and utter perfection.

“You did good with him,” I tell Holland.

“Good Christ,” he says, his contemptuous voice dripping with sarcasm, “is that a compliment I just heard?”

The humorous yet hateful look in my eyes says everything.

* * *

I’ve crammed a hundred years of life into two. At least, that’s what the other versions of me would say. They’re old AF. I’m not. Still, they can teach me things, if they want. I’d listen. Who knows if they’ll want to even speak to me again? What could I say that they wouldn’t have already thought of a thousand times over? We have each other though, and to me that’s better than being alone. Is it crazy I want them here right now?

Deep breath, sigh, make that sad, sad face…

Once upon a time, I thought there had to be more like me in existence. I thought that when I was trapped in Dulce. When I was released by The Doctor who turned out to be some sort of cave-dwelling reptilian hybrid, I was convinced there was someone like me going through the same things I’ve been going through. Now I know there is. But it’s not people like me that are existing, they are two exact versions of me and I can live with that. It’s better actually. I’m me, but I’m not alone. I have Raven if I need her, and Elizabeth.

Me, but not me.

They’re doing their own thing now. Separate from me. Making their lives here in this timeline, but in other cities with other people—former friends of mine, former lovers. Perhaps there are more of me here. Not three. Maybe ten, or fifty…maybe a hundred versions of me. This is what happens when you live long enough. When you are a traveler. Time seems to shrink because it’s no longer linear.

Early on, it sort of melted my mind thinking like this, but I have to say, when you’ve done what I’ve done, time becomes irrelevant. The idea of “here” is no longer something you think of as constricting. Nowadays, with me, everything—and I mean everything—is possible.

If only I can not screw it up. Alice Jr. says I did. Last week, she and her bigger, older self just looked at me like I walked my muddy feet over the future’s white carpet. Had it been anyone else telling me I ruined all of eternity, I would have brushed them off. That it was Alice and Alice Jr. concerned me greatly.

The creepy duo wasn’t exactly known for their sense of humor, unless you consider melting people’s guts funny. Which I don’t. And there wasn’t a twinkle in their little homicidal eyes either. Which means I’m in the shit and that’s not good for anyone. But more on that later. This little tease has a boyfriend now.

* * *

He’s ready. OMG, he’s waking up. Eyes open, fingers and toes flexing, vision clearing.

“Savannah?” he says.

I breathe a sigh of relief. He remembers…

“It’s me,” I say, fighting back the tears. I slide my hand into his and he squeezes, but lightly. I look to Holland and he’s got towels. I look back at August and everything sharp and hostile inside me melts. For a long moment, I even managed to forget about what I saw when I traveled, if such a thing were possible.

“How do I look?” he asks, his eyes starting to settle shut again.

“Like a God.”

“Don’t stroke his ego this early,” Holland says. “I still have tests to do.”

“He’ll pass them,” I say.

He’s drifting off again. “I’ll pass…” he says, then he’s out again. Holland hands me the towels while he gets a large needle.

“What’s that?”

“Wake up juice. He went under harder than most.”

“That’s because you were hurrying…”

A few minutes later, he’s waking back up. I’m using my abilities to scan his body, zeroing in on the bomb at the base of his skull. I feel myself heating up. Looking at Holland I’m thinking if I turned him inside out and washed him down the drain, he’d have one hell of a time coming back to life.

When he wakes up, Brayden comes to easier.

No, August.

We’re still holding hands. He comes to this time with considerably more strength. I help him sit up. Start to dry him off. Taking his hand I help him out of the tank, steady him as he stands on new legs. He doesn’t wobble.

“I want to wash you off,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. He looks down at his body and he smiles. “Yeah…okay.”

“Try not to have babies in there,” Holland says, to which I look at him and say, “Really?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“Your timing sucks, Holland,” I grumble. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“It would make no difference if they did,” he replies.

“On that,” I say, walking August into the bathroom, “we both agree.”

Chapter Three

The phone rang and he composed himself. He’d been waiting for this call all week, not that it softened the interruption. It didn’t. Aloysius was in the shower, holding the body. The woman was draped over his arm and he watched with disdain as she writhed half in pain and half in ecstasy. Disdain not for her, but for the disruption.

Gently, he laid her on the tiled shower floor.

Bent on one knee, leaning over her naked form, he drew in the scent of her. Inhaled deeply and exhaled with a sigh that quickly turned to irritation. The phone kept ringing. He turned, scowled at the noise.

What dismal timing, he thought.

He stood and shut off the shower, collected himself, then answered the call right before it went to voicemail.

“Aloysius here,” he said, curt, his eyes locked on the girl. He was mesmerized by the throbbing of the carotid artery as it pumped all that blood through her body. God, she was exhilarating!

“He’s ready,” Dr. Enzo Holland said into the phone. His father. Adolf.

“I’ll be there shortly,” Aloysius replied.

He was thinking if he didn’t get to this girl before attending to his father, she’d slip from his spell, and he couldn’t let her do that. Even if his father was ready. Her blue eyes had that sleepy, euphoric look to them, like she was drugged on love, like she was drenched with ecstasy. He’d put her under, undressed her, let her run her hands all over him, his name falling off her tongue, her eyes taking in everything dreamy about him. Soon that syrupy look would fade.

Awareness would return.

He didn’t know how long he stared at her, but she finally rolled to one side, her body curling into a ball, the draw of rapture becoming something of a sob.

He only had moments.

“Don’t come in just yet,” Holland replied, oblivious. “I have another client waking right now. I’ll be in the lab with him until two at the latest. If you come by later this afternoon, that would be best.”

Aloysius hung up the phone, sunk to his knees on the shower floor and cradled the girl in his lap.

“Hang on, sweetheart. It’s always most painful right before the pleasure.”

He kissed her face, twice, lovingly brushed aside the wet hair smashed to her forehead, then he made a fist and focused a short, hard burst of energy into his top two knuckles and braced himself for the sting. Two pointed bone spurs shot through the flesh. Each was jagged yet sharpened to a point, neither longer than half an inch. Without hesitation or remorse, he punched the two spurs into the girl’s carotid artery. She gave a hearty jolt. Her tortured eyes flashed hard for a second, then returned to that sort of lost ecstasy. From the two puncture wounds, twin streams of blood trailed down her lovely neck.

Using the same bone spurs, he opened his mouth, then sliced open the corners with two vicious swipes. They skin of his mouth tore back, allowing him to open his mouth impossibly wide and attach his face to half the girl’s neck, creating an incredible suction. The anticipation that had been growing quickly spiraled into need, into a feeding frenzy, into him draining her in near record time.

When he was finally done with her, he sat back and gave a great, heaving sigh. Looking at the girl, her eyes struggled in their sockets. They jumped, then sunk low, then they climbed the walls, falling, then getting up again, working with every last effort against the darkness pulling so ardently against them. His nostrils flared as he gulped in the iron-rich ends of her.

She tasted so beautiful.

So young.

Her mouth fell open, a thin line of red running from lip to chin to bare breast. The girl tried to speak, but what came out was a strained whisper, a plea, then some gibberish he couldn’t quite understand. Her eyes lost focus, rolled in failure into the bottoms of her sockets. He felt her body waning, her spirit giving up.

The sides of his mouth, where he’d cut them open for better feeding, were healing at an impossible rate of speed. His eyes feasted like some post-coital nourishment over the puckering of her flesh. He lapped up some of the remaining blood as he waited for her to transition from the living to the dead. He watched a bit more blood roll out of her, mix with the beaded water, then drain in several streams down her body.

Time was precious, yet he still felt ravenous. He wasn’t feeding enough, he knew this now. He’d need to remedy this.

His extra long tongue rolled from his mouth, swiping across her chin, her breast, then back up to the last of the blood leaking from her torn open neck. Everything that made her beautiful and warm and invigorating was now out of her and into him. He fed off the last bits of her, ushering her into a dark, lifeless chasm.

Her body suddenly weighed more, the limbs pulling earthward, the muscles becoming elongated, bloodless, heavy. When at last he felt her corpse start to cool and relax into death, he shoved her aside then bent on hands and knees and slurped up what was left of the dark red juices that had spilled from her.

The tile was cold, as was her blood.

It didn’t matter.

There were still shimmers of life-force to be had, even if he was drinking from the shower floor like a slave.

When he sat up, he exhaled loudly, satisfied. His belly was full and his face was smeared with the carnage of an uninterrupted meal. Now he was ready for the day. Ready to head to Holland’s lab and pick up his brand new father.

Standing up, naked, he started the shower, washed himself down, then washed the body. Looking down at her, he thought about what he had to do. He didn’t exactly hate this part, but he didn’t love it either. This was a task of necessity.

It was how he kept this secret of his…secret.

* * *

He shut off the shower when he was done. Gathered a breath. With his exceptional strength, he dropped down, flipped the dead girl over so her chest was pressed to the shower floor, then began rolling up the body the way you’d roll up an old tube of toothpaste. He started with her toes, gripping them, curling them under. Dozens of bones cracked and broke, the metatarsals popping then splintering out of her skin, the shards sticking their needled points into his hands.

All the cuts and lacerations he endured in this task didn’t much matter. His wounds healed quickly, so he kept at it, breaking a labored sweat as he rolled the tarsals up over the ankle bones. The tibias and fibulas broke in a dozen places as he continued on her legs, into her knee pits. When he got to the femur, he gave it his all and each side snapped in multiple parts.

By the time he reached the girl’s hips, he was drenched in sweat, in dire need of another shower, perhaps another pint of blood. Leaning his two hundred and twenty-five pounds on her, he rocked and pressed until things cracked, compressed, shattered and became more…manageable. To get the spine to do what he wanted, he repositioned his body on top of hers, then broke her ribs from bottom to top, crushing the smaller bones into pieces.

Fresh wounds in his hand opened—blood spattered everywhere, instantly, but short-lived as the wounds closed up and healed.

He leaned on the body, manipulating her like a wrestler might, or how a jiu-jitsu practitioner might. He rolled her into herself inch by inch until he came to the head. Splattered red, sweat mixing with blood, he grabbed the rope that had been sitting in the corner of the large shower and tied her body up the way you’d tie a rolled sleeping bag, or a bale of hay.

The rope held.

The body strained against the binding; flesh pushed out to cradle the ropes; bones stuck out everywhere—all these little red and ivory spikes.

And still the rope held.

Standing up, stretching his back, Aloysius washed the compacted body clean once more, washed himself again, then he went downstairs to start the furnace.

Back upstairs, he grabbed the bundle of meat by the top knot, carried her like an awkward package, then jammed, kicked and shouldered the body inside the big furnace, her head being the last to go. Shutting the large iron door, he watched through the thick, tempered glass as the body caught fire.

The girl would cook all day, the roasted flesh dropping into the pan below, the steady heat sucking the moisture from the bones until they are dry and brittle. When he returned that night with his father, Aloysius would gather up the residue, then go out back and use custom equipment to press the remaining bones to dust. He’d then collect this and the other ashes and take a drive, scattering her over a one mile stretch of road.

Of course, Aloysius didn’t need to go to these lengths to dispose of this or any other body, but he wasn’t up to eating her either. Not now, not later. He preferred blondes for their blood, but not for their meat. For more choice cuts of meat, he preferred a healthy black girl. There was something about their meat he found intoxicating.

* * *

Aloysius got to the lab where Holland was already raising his father. Aloysius was dressed in a three piece suit and tie, his hair combed stylishly to the side. He looked like what Clark Kent would look like, if only Clark didn’t look so nerdy. His father came to slowly, but when his eyes opened, there was a light in them Aloysius hadn’t seen in decades.

Adolf looked at his son and said, “Aloysius.”

He took his father’s hand, smiled warmly. He was grateful the man hadn’t died.

“You need your strength,” he told his father.

“I feel better already,” Adolf replied. “Amazing actually.”

He was looking down at his body, flexing his fingers and toes. He had a five day beard, and his hair was ink black and thick. When it was time for him to regain his honor, his dignity and his place once more as a world leader, Aloysius would suggest he shave his face, leaving only his small trademark mustache. The world should recognize its leader for what he had become: an immortal.

Holland helped Adolf Hitler out of the horizontal glass canister, walked with him to the bathroom where he was able to shower. When he was finished, Aloysius stood by as Holland administered a bevy of tests. After an hour or so, Holland said his father was perfectly healthy, as expected.

Adolf looked at Dr. Holland and said, “I trust your generosity still extends beyond my occasional treatments…”

His father held Holland’s gaze, unblinking, as serious as Aloysius had ever seen him. This was a conversation from before, he assumed. One he was not privy to.

“You want to travel,” Holland replied.

“You can’t travel,” Aloysius said to his father, understanding the veiled request being made. “Not now. It’s too soon.”

Holland disregarded Aloysius with a dismissive wave. “Actually,” Holland said, “he’s probably better off traveling now, him being of such impeccable health.”

Adolf glanced at his son, his eyes softening, his expression masking some unspoken delight. Aloysius refused to blink, or look away.

“If I don’t travel, my son,” Adolf said, “you won’t be born.” Aloysius simply looked at him, the question in his eyes but no words necessary between them. Meeting Aloysius’s gaze, he said, “Your mother awaits.”

“You can’t jump back too far,” Aloysius warned once more, his powerful body standing tall, rigid, certain. He felt the potency roaring through him at the thought of losing his father, but he knew he must relax. He had to force himself to trust.

“You standing before me is proof that my jump was successful. Had I not been successful, you would not be alive today.”

“I know,” Aloysius told his father. “I just worry about you.”

“That’s touching,” Holland said, his sarcasm cloaked so thinly he might as well be smirking. Both Aloysius and Adolf turned to Holland, assaulting him with the kind of dispassionate stare that made even a sadistic butcher of Holland’s caliber squirm in his shoes. Catching himself, Holland said, “To what time will you be traveling?”

“August 21, 1614. Naturally, I’ll need some help with the timing and the final coordinates.”

The worry presented itself across the entirety of Holland’s face. His manner was far less guarded. “Where exactly are you going?” Aloysius had not been privy to all the details of his birth until now.

“To see the Blood Countess at Čachtice Castle in Transylvania.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Holland gasped.

“I’m afraid not,” Adolf said, turning to his son, who now stood there with a look of shock that left his bloodless face more pale than ever. Aloysius knew his mother was from the past, but his father never bothered with the details of when, or whom.

Until now she was always a mystery.

Holland took a deep breath, ran his hand through his hair, then leveled the Führer with a stare of such seriousness, the doctor looked like he wanted to kill them both right there.

“With all due respect,” Holland finally said, “have you lost your fucking mind?”

“To rule as a beast,” Adolf explained in perfect German, “one must commit a number of beastly acts. This is but one titanic act, although its importance is shadowed by no greater event in either my life or his.”

Basically what Adolf was saying was that he was going back in time nearly five hundred years to mate with Elizabeth Bathory, a mass murderer of horrific evaluation and purportedly—in some circles—considered the first vampire.

Chapter Four

Brayden…I mean August…sleeps with his head against the passenger side window most of the drive home. Several times I check to make sure he’s still doing alright. That he hasn’t fallen into a coma or anything. But mostly I let him sleep. On deck is the latest Slayer album, but out of consideration for this man who will now be my whole life, I drive my beloved Audi RS5 in near silence, obeying the rules of the road, keeping mostly to the speed limit.

Mostly. Okay, maybe not mostly.

I’m a girl who loves fast cars and adrenaline, so maybe a few times I go over a hundred, and maybe once I push against one oh five. Seriously, though…can you blame me?

So yeah, we’re home in record time. I almost feel bad waking him up, but I’ve waited as long as I can, and now we’re in my neighborhood.

I put a hand on his thigh, relishing the feel of it, giving him a subtle squeeze. He opens his eyes, turns toward me, drowsy, then smiles the smallest most beautiful smile.

“We’re home,” I say.

He licks his lips, sits up, then lets his eyes clear. We’re pulling into my driveway and I’m just wanting him to be awake when he meets my parents for the first time as August. I haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to tell them he was once Brayden.

I probably won’t.

He draws the deepest breath ever, yawns, then says, “I just need a bed.”

“I know. Can you be awake enough to make a good first impression on my mother and father?”

He nods, but it’s not terribly assuring. “I think so,” he says.

“Will you promise me something?”

“Depends,” he says on another yawn.

I’ve pondered this all the way home, how I’d phrase the question, so here goes…

“We’re going to be girlfriend and boyfriend, right?”

This thought sobers him. He looks at me, takes me in with his eyes and I know he’s in love with how I look. With me. He smiles, and in the sexiest tone ever, he says, “God, I hope so.”

I steal a breath. Then: “Can you promise me that we won’t take it slow?”

“What do you mean?” he asks, some color rising to his face.

Now he’s wide awake.

“When you’ve had a nap, and maybe a little social time, I want you inside me. I don’t want to wait. If you make me wait…oh, Brayden…please don’t make me wait.”

He snorts out a laugh, which manages to look incredibly charming on him, and he says, “Absolutely. I mean…yeah. I don’t need social time or a nap or anything. Honestly, right now I’m half staff on the road to a freaking pirate’s plank at the thought. Seriously…look at it.”

I look down and blush.

“Holy balls,” he says, now fully away, “my first erection!”

I reach over and touch it and he says, “Whoa, don’t do that. It’s too sensitive. So yeah…unless you want me to have an accident…”

We both start laughing and I say, “Can you imagine meeting my mother with a giant wet spot in your pants?”

“Yeah…not so much.”

“Alright, well, think of something awful and when you’re decent, let’s go inside.”

He brings his knees up, wraps his arms around them, then closes his eyes and takes ten deep breaths. “If you flex any muscle in your body for twenty seconds straight,” he explains, eyes still closed, “you can induce rapid shrinkage.”

“Is that true?” I ask, laughing at this stupid conversation we’re having.

“Yes, but if that doesn’t work, I just think of Michael Moore.” When he sets his legs down, he points at the non-event in his pants and says, “Time to meet your mother.”

* * *

We walk inside to an empty home. Once you enter the foyer, you can see to the other side of the house, to the wall of windows facing the backyard, specifically the pool.

“Everyone’s outside,” I say.

My father wanted the back of the house converted to an indoor/outdoor living area, so he had about twenty linear feet of the rear wall opened up. The whole thing was made of glass and worked on remote controlled sliders.

“Do you smell that?” he asks. “Oh, sweet Jesus…”

We both look at each other and together we say, “Hot dogs.”

He’s suddenly giddy, taking my hand, walking me out there. I’m thinking about this new boy, August. I’m thinking in the last ten minutes he’s had three significant highs: his first erection, the knowledge that I want him in the worst way ever, and his first smell of hot dogs as a new person. Well, it looks like he’s off to a roaring start in this new life of his, and honestly, that makes me so happy.

Rebecca, Jacob, Christian and Orianna are all out by the pool sitting under a news of heat lamps. It’s almost dinner time and there are indeed hot dogs on the grill. They smell amazing! We step outside and see Christian in the pool with Rebecca while Jacob is sitting poolside (his legs dangling in the water; his chest and face pink enough that I wonder if he’s sunburnt) and Orianna is reclining on a chaise lounge in a stylish white two piece. I swear, she’s so freaking gorgeous I’m afraid for a second that I can’t breathe.

Good God, my mother…

Before any of them see us, I lean into August and whisper, “If you stare too long at my sister or Orianna I swear I’m going to punch you in the peen.”

Orianna looks like a bikini model, and I’ve seen Rebecca naked so I know she’s perfect, too. Wow. When did I become so insecure!? The thing about living in a family with genetics geared toward absolute perfection is that guys like Brayden…August…are going to be statistically prone to developing a wandering eye.

Even I’m smart enough to know that’s how guys are wired.

Before he can reply, Rebecca sees us, and then they all see us. “Hi everyone, this is August, my new boyfriend.” It’s the clunkiest introduction ever, but I’m not sweating the small stuff.

“That’s explains it,” Christian says with a smile.

“Explains what?” I ask.

“The one week absence,” he replies.

“You got me,” I tell him, looking sheepish, but more for appearances.

Everyone introduces themselves to August, then Christian suggests we put on our swimsuits and join them for dinner and dogs. He’s getting out of the pool and heading toward the grille and the slow roasting wieners.

“Sounds good,” I say.

Did I tell you I completely adore my father?

Yeah, totally.

When he first got his makeover, my father was goofy, unsure of himself, but doing his best to be younger, sound younger, act younger. It was a veritable disaster with a few choice moments he chalked up to being a bachelor. The single life didn’t suit him, though; he was still in love with my mother even though she was going through her own mid-life crisis which included banging this asshole writer who once hit on me at a restaurant while he was waiting for my mother. Now that my parents are back together, they’ve both seemed to settle into a healthy, loving relationship that involves something that was absent for years: lots of amazing sex. I didn’t want to know these things—no kid does—but when you have access to the minds of others, sometimes you stumble across things you don’t want to see, things you can’t unsee.

“How are you guys not cold?” I ask.

“Pool’s heated, and the sunlamps are just divine,” Orianna says with a grin. “Come stand under them. Trust me, this is the very best place to be!”

“While you catch up with you mother, I’ll put on a few more dogs,” Christian says. Then, looking at August, he says, “How many wieners do you want?”

Okay…I take back what I said.

Awkward.

Everyone seems to want to smile at my father’s juvenile humor, but they aren’t sure how August is going to respond. August just stares at my father for the longest moment, then he says, “If by wieners you mean hot dogs, then I’ll have two.”

Everyone starts laughing and it seems August is going to be alright.

Sneaking a peek into my father’s head, I see he’s happy with my choice of boys, and Orianna looks smitten, though what she’s happiest about is that August and I seem like a natural fit. With such immediate acceptance, I can’t help wondering once more, would they feel the same way if they knew August was once Brayden James?

And Rebecca? She can’t stop staring either, but not in a rude way. It’s like the redhead is seeing a unicorn for the first time and not knowing what it is, only that she’s mesmerized by it.

Rebecca looks twenty, but she’s still developing out from having been in the tank for nearly a decade. I think she’s got the mentality right now of about a fifteen year old, so I understand how she has yet to grasp the nuances of meeting hot guys for the first time.

When I look at Jacob—the boy I once crushed so hard on, the boy who once made fat Savannah want to kill herself because of his tormenting—I have to say he seems a little bummed out at how good looking August is.

My boyfriend clearly has Rebecca’s eye, so I say, “Jacob, have you been hitting the weights or what? You look really good!”

The moment lifts. Smiling, he says he has, and then he seems to relax as Rebecca’s eyes return to him. He’s sitting poolside with his legs dipped in the pool and she’s in the water floating in front of him, running her hand up his leg, inching toward his inner thigh. Orianna clears her throat which causes my freshly adopted sister to slide her hand back into the parental safe zone. I jump into Rebecca’s head inadvertently and realize she and Jacob had sex for the first time last night.

My nostrils flare and I work to conceal my emotions while steadying my breath.

Half of me feels stunned by the revelation, but the other half is thrilled for Rebecca. Jacob was never right for me. Not when I had guys like Jake Teller, Sebastian Fray and now August wanting to be with me. Jacob would never be the one who got away; instead, he’d be the one I made right for my new sister, and I can live with that.

By the feel of things, at least with Rebecca, it seems like there might be some permanence to this relationship. Honestly, I tell myself this is what’s right, and something settles over me. A peacefulness not only about Jacob, but about my years in school with him. The past is dead and gone. Time for new experiences. After all, I am no longer the chubby, insecure Savannah I once was. Most of you who’ve come to know me would say, uh duh…yeah already, but going through what I’ve gone through in real life…it’s not what you’d expect.

“You two make the most beautiful couple,” I tell Rebecca, my heart overflowing.

She thanks me, then says, “I was thinking the same of you two.”

“Yeah, we’re a good match,” I say, taking August’s hand. “Don’t you think, August?”

He blinks his eyes like he wasn’t paying attention, then he says, “Sorry, I was thinking about those wieners just now,” eliciting more than a few snickers.

* * *

August and I stroll inside the house hand in hand. I take us to the guest room, shut and lock the door, then I turn to him and say, “Take off your clothes.”

He takes them off, leaving his skin-tight boxers on. My eyes feast on every exposed part of him. There are primal things in me that are dying to touch him, to feel the flesh of him beneath my palms. My eyes are positively devouring him. He’s at half mast because he sees the way I’m eyeing him. He feels my heat, the explosion of sexual energy, how badly I want him. Everything about me has turned predatory.

“I’m going to need you now,” I say, my voice velvet-edged but insistent.

“What do you mean?” he asks, playing coy.

With a low swirling taking shape just beneath my navel, with that syrupy sense of wanton lust unfolding deep inside me, I slip my shirt over my head, then reach behind with both hands and slowly unclasp my bra. I don’t rush it even though anxiousness is coursing through me at a blistering pace. Slipping the bra straps off one shoulder then the next, the garment falls away.

August goes visibly weak with a yearning so deep it has its own aura.

He’s no longer coy.

“What I mean to say,” I tell him, “is that I’m going to ride you ‘till you’re dry.”

“Holy crap,” he says, his voice unsteady.

He starts to walk toward me but I hold up my hand, stopping him.

“Stay there,” I say. “Eyes only for now.”

My fingers unbutton my pants, slowly, surely, savoring every single moment that August’s eyes are glued to my actions. He’s consuming my every move, swallowing hard while refusing to blink, looking at my fingers at work and wishing they’d both slow down and hurry up.

One button, two buttons, three buttons, four.

I inch out of my pants, the texture and the pace of my breathing changing, my body delving into a heightened, almost restless state of eagerness, of barely veiled want, of unrestrained need. With my pants nearly at my ankles, I take them off, set them on the foot of the bed.

Standing in only my panties, my eyes dip to his privates the same way his are dipped to mine. He’s every bit of himself right now and that sends lightening bolts of electricity crashing through me.

He starts toward me and I say, “No, not yet.”

The greediness of his desire is an increasingly uncontrollable force inside him. He’s not going to hold back for long. He’s about to go primal.

Sliding my fingers into my panties, I begin to touch myself, to seductively rub myself. He can’t take it. My breathing changes completely; he might have stopped breathing all together. The pad of my finger slides over my swollen self, wet, firm, so absolutely ready for him.

God I want him!

There is only this first time, I remind myself, so I go slow, make each movement more seductive than the last. Two fingers glide up either side of my labia, but then I push one down the middle, and inside myself. A rapturous sigh escapes me. This sets his jaw, deepens his breathing even further. Any minute now and he’s going to slide down the evolutionary scale.

“You can’t…I mean…if you don’t stop, or let me…” he says.

At this point, he can’t even form whole sentences. Finally, he turns away from me and I know it’s because he’s terrified of going early.

Sauntering up to his turned back, I wrap one arm around his waist, press my chest into his back, then slide my wet fingers across his lips, making sure he has me on his mouth. Standing on my tippy toes, leaning over his shoulder so my lips are to his ear, I whisper, “How do I taste?”

He opens his mouth and I ease my two fingers inside, let him suckle on them. The way he takes my hand and sucks my fingers tells me I taste amazing. Slowly, almost cruelly, I slip a finger or two in his waistband, almost touching him. Almost…

“If you do that right now,” he says, taking my fingers out of his mouth, “I won’t last.”

“There’s always forever,” I whisper, walking his shorts down his hips until he comes out. “I want to touch it,” I tell him, my teeth lightly biting his earlobe.

His breathing is high, and there’s an intense heat in his cheeks. He’s a veritable furnace. I’ve never met a boy as sexually charged as he is right now and this has me roaring with ecstasy.

“I…I think maybe…just…just do it.”

I wrap both hands around him and his knees nearly buckle. My breasts are pressed to his back, his earlobe now in my mouth as I whisper things like, “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” and “Do you know how good you feel in my hands?”

His body breaks into gooseflesh; mine does the same.

“We’ll never have this moment again for as long as we live,” I tell him. “It’s what we waited all our lives for…this moment with each other.”

He removes my hands, turns around, looks down and locks eyes with me. There is a primal hunger in him that’s so sexy. It’s staggering how much he wants me. His eyes take all of me in, his gaze slowing for my breasts, my nipples, then making their way down to my panties.

“I’m so wet right now,” I tell him, my body writhing, my mind knowing what hearing that does to him.

He takes my panties down, slowing at the ankle. He goes to his knees to take them off. Hands then slide up my calves, work their way up my legs, cup and squeeze my butt cheeks. Kisses dot the skin around my center, warm, slow, purposefully teasing. I feel his breath against my skin, warm, wet, needy.

“Now, Brayden,” I say, the hard tingling erupting from the center of me outward.

My hands grab his new hair, grip it as deeper sensations swirl around me. Elbows locked, I move his face into me, then soar the minute he takes me into his mouth. Before I know it, he’s lifting me, carrying me to the bed, pinning my wrists to the headboard with one hand, then easing himself inside me like he knows exactly what he’s doing.

We find a rhythm quickly, and he varies his speed and intensity long enough to tell me he not only knows what he’s doing, he’s damn good at it and perfectly determined to make sure he makes me happy. In his head, he repeats the mantra over and over again: “You only get one fuck to make a solid first impression.”

For some reason, this has me not only turned on, but falling hard for him. Well, harder. Yes…much, much harder.

Wink, wink.

* * *

When we finally step outside in our bathing suits (I have to borrow one from Christian until we get August an appropriate wardrobe), everyone knows what we’ve done. It’s all over our faces, our bodies. In my head I’m like, super awkward…

Whatever.

I’m in love with the boy I will forever be with. This is my dream come true. So sue me if I want every last bit of him every second of the day.

We eat hot dogs, talk about this and that, listen to August talk about his family in Texas (his real family, but with the Augustin Sandino spin) and we listen to Jacob talk about his plans for school at SFU. It’s nice to see Jacob so relaxed around the family, but it’s August who clearly steals the show.

August is actually quite charming, and peeking in on his mind, I can tell looking the way he does is giving him that boost of confidence he’d been so desperate for as Brayden. I’m proud of him. Proud that he settled the matter with the FBI. Proud that he managed to change himself on his own, that he didn’t do it when I blackmailed Gerhart to do it for him. And I’m proud of who he’s become on his Vegas excursions. He’s grown into this incredible man, sewn his needed oats, tested the waters of whoredome (Julie Sanderson and a number of lesser known conquests who might feel revolting to me later), and now that he’s got that all out of his system, it seems that all he wants is to be with me. In fact, that’s all he’s ever wanted and I love that about him.

Just before eleven that night, August tells me he wants to take a shower and turn in for the night, that he’s wiped out. When I think of all he’s done after just waking up from his full bodied genetic makeover, it’s pretty incredible. To give me the best sex of my life by a mile alone was a feat in and of itself, one he made look effortless.

“I’ll be to bed shortly,” I say, catching the eye of Orianna who gives me the we’ll-talk-about-it-after-he-leaves look. If she thinks I’m not sharing a bed with him, she’s off her freaking rocker. I want to say, Mom, seriously, just look at him!

But I won’t.

It’s her house, so it’s her rules.

When he turns in for the night, Orianna looks to me and says, “You totally had sex with him before you got in the pool, didn’t you?” and I’m like, “Mom, it was amazing!”

“Was that the first time?” she asks, clearly thrilled to be having this conversation with me. I nod like a giddy schoolgirl, my smile positively enormous. “Wow.”

“I know, right?”

“So I guess it would pretty much be pointless to tell you that you can’t share a bed with him. And even if I do, you’ll just sneak in there after I turn in.”

My answer is an affirming grin.

“So how long have you known him?” she asks. “Really known him. This lie about you two just meeting…I know your reactions better than that, even if you are…new to this body.”

“A couple of years.”

“So he knows about…”

“Yeah, he knows. Apparently Astor Academy not only provides full service makeovers, they do modifications, too. It’s crazy how that place is making money hand over fist, and turning everyone into more interesting versions of themselves, which might be anything but that for some of those narcissistic buttholes.”

We share a laugh, but my amusement is tempered because one of those buttholes (Cameron) is in her grave right now.

“Is he—?”

“What do you think?” I say.

“How can someone be so perfect and not be modified?” she asks, answering her question at the same time.

In her heart, she knows he’s modified. Part of me is dying to tell her he’s Brayden just so I don’t have to keep hiding it, but in the end that’s August’s decision. Not mine. For him, being August means never having to return to Brayden, and I can’t say I blame him. I never want to return to the original version of myself either. Like ever.

“You met Damien. Genetically speaking, he was one hundred percent untouched. If only he didn’t have a thing for his step-sister—”

“Then you’d be with him and not August and trust me,” Orianna says, finishing my sentence, “August is better.”

“I agree.”

I haven’t actually thought about Damien in awhile now, which to me is an improvement. The way I sometimes don’t get exactly what I want in life, perhaps at the time a greater force knew Damien wasn’t right for me because said force somehow knew August was in the works. Maybe there is a God, a plan, a fate not of our own design.

Holy cow, am I becoming religious? Spiritual? This blemish on the face of creation? Perhaps. Maybe God doesn’t hate me so much after all. Maybe He doesn’t hate me at all. This thought never occurred to me before now.

Orianna and I talk a little more about August, but then I finally ask her if she’s been in touch with either Raven or Elizabeth.

“Not Raven. Last she text me, she said she was with Sensei Naygel, and that she was going to talk to Netty this week. I guess that would be now. Who knows? The older versions of you seem less intent on having me as a mother.”

“It’s not that. It’s just…you can’t imagine the lives they’ve lived. And this is not their timeline, so basically they’re fish out of water here.”

She nods her head, solemn.

“I am me though, and I am intent on having you as a mother. And it’ll be easier with you being older than this version of me.”

She nods her head, a gleam coming to her eyes. She has that faraway stare that comes with the sudden shine of tears just before they form. She then looks at me and says, “I’m sorry, I just get emotional when it comes to you these days.”

“That’s a good thing,” I tell her, taking her hand.

“You want some tea?” she asks. I tell her yes and she boils water for Chamomile tea and honey. We sip it gingerly, then she says: “Elizabeth asked where you were a couple of days ago.” Looking at me intently, she asks, “Where were you really?”

At first, I don’t want to tell her, but Orianna has proven to be rather resilient of late, so what the hell...

“I was in the future.”

“How was it?” she asks, swallowing past a lump in her throat.

Here’s where I start to get uncomfortable. Here’s where I try not to squirm. My poker face with her has much to be desired, though.

“I can see you wanting to lie to protect me right now,” Orianna admits, almost like she’s disappointed.

“I am.”

“If it’s that bad,” she says with a dismissive tone, “then maybe you shouldn’t tell me.”

So I say nothing.

“It’s that bad?”

“Worse.”

* * *

August is in my shower. He’s in my shower and he’s naked and all I can think about is that we’re about to go to bed for the first time together. You might be thinking about Santa Monica, back when he was Brayden and I was just becoming Abby; it’s not the same thing. We were different people back then, different bodies, out to kill a pedophile music executive, but not now.

Now we’re both new—new people, new bodies, new relationship—and instead of contemplating murder, we’re looking forward to a life together. Is it stupid that I feel giddy AF right now? Probably not.

I have good reason to feel this happy.

Then again, would this be as exciting had I not traveled into the future and seen my future self with future August? Who can say for sure. Honestly though, who gives a crap about the world of what if? I don’t. This is real! Besides, had I not seen the future, I might not have made the bold choices I did earlier, and thank God for that.

My mind travels back to the sex.

As Netty would say, holy cow, Batman! My body warms to the thought of him. This memory…it’s calling back that low swooping feeling, that carnal hunger, that absolute need to be as close as possible to this man, to this destiny of mine.

The bedroom door is unlocked, the shower still going. Stepping inside, I think about taking off my clothes, joining him under the water, then thoughts of Maggie return and I’m paralyzed with that grief. It’s not like before; the paralysis breaks quickly. Still, I can’t help thinking of her when this is where I found her.

Maggie died in the tub. Took her own life. It was a selfish thing to do, but it was a necessity for her. If I could crawl into the next life and find her, I’d slap her as hard as I could across the face, then I’d pull her into a hug and never let go. Maggie was truly damaged, but I am not. Not yet anyway. And neither is August.

The bedroom lights are off, but the bathroom is ablaze with light. I feel a bit pervy thinking about peeking, but whatever...I’m in love! Closing the bedroom door, I kick off my sandals, pull my shirt over my head and take off my shorts and bikini. In a second, I’m in clean panties and a pink tank top. My choice of sleepwear says I could do it right now, that I’m up for more sex if he is, but I could just as well go to sleep, too.

The water shuts off, casting the room into near silence. A shower door opens, a towel is taken, a shower door shuts. Pulling back the comforter, I crawl into bed, loving the cool sheets on my sun-kissed skin. Waiting for August to join me feels like a lifetime. Finally he arrives, his head buzzed short (when did he do that?!), his body smelling like a freshly showered girl. I almost laugh, but I refrain because the truth is, he smells good. We’re talking flowery shampoo, scented body gel (a raspberry and orange rind) and light face cream to keep his skin from drying out.

Cute, I’m thinking.

“Do you want to go to sleep, or…”

“Can we do that in the morning?” he asks, quickly. “I want to, it’s just…I don’t feel very good right now.”

“Are you okay? Are you having a reaction from the treatment?”

“No,” he replies. “It’s my father. He text me just before I got in the shower, insisted I come home.”

“Because he misses you, or is it something else?”

“He says he knows I got plastic surgery. One of the guys who works for him, the guy who signed for my car, he finally told him.”

“Oh, boy,” I say, understanding what this means.

“You can’t begin to imagine the complications of this particular problem.”

“Will finances be an issue? I mean, if he cuts you off?”

“No.”

“Because I can help if that’s the—”

“I’m financially prepared, should it come to that. Thank you, though.”

Curling into him, melding my body to his, my palm on his chest, my face nuzzled into his neck, I say, “I need to tell you something. It will explain why I’ve been so forward. Why I didn’t want to take things so slow with you.”

His body stiffens for the news.

“It’s a good thing, Brayden, I swear.”

“No more Brayden,” he says. “It has to be August from now on. Brayden’s dead.”

When he puts it like that, my heart sort of hurts for him. Then again, how many times did I kill off myself? Savannah Van Duyn, Abby Swann, Raven de’ Medici? Three times now I’ve said good-bye to my previous selves without any intention of going back.

“I’ve been to the future, August,” I admit. “A few years from now.”

“Personally?” he asks.

“Yeah, in the flesh.”

“And?”

I didn’t expect him to so willingly accept news of my jump, but he does which means either he’s tired and just wants me to get to the point, or he’s accepted whatever insane reality I put in front of him regardless of the impossibility of it all. For Christ’s sake, he knows my eight hundred year old self came back and visited me, and that I killed and incinerated her upon request! After that, is there even such a thing as shock value?

“We’re together. You and I, I mean. We live on a little house in the country, not in California. Closer to New Mexico.”

I feel him turn his head in the dark, his eyes on me, the question like some insistency in his aura, in the energy he wears like a silken cocoon.

“Are we happy?” he asks.

“We are,” I tell him, my voice abloom with tenderness, my tone resonating nothing but exultation. What I want to say, what I have to say—but maybe not now—is that we were happy right up until the time the bombs go off and kill us both. I wasn’t dead dead, but I think he was. Rather I’m terrified he was. But before that? Yeah, we were magical.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks.

“Because what’s mine is yours. I want you to know that, in case you decide to go home and things don’t exactly go the way you want.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Don’t sound so formal, ding dong. This is a gesture of love, a measure of my commitment, my chance to give to you everything you’ve been wanting from me for like forever.”

He rolls over inside my arms and kisses me. Not out of obligation, or to make me be quiet. His kiss tells me so many things. That he’s scared of starting over like this. Scared to be with me. Scared of his family and not being wanted because he chose to be different from them, to violate his father’s trust when his father has been nothing but benevolent and generous with him.

I get it though. I’m not taking this personal.

The way you want something so badly, and then you get it, you always have that moment when doubt creeps in and drains you of the celebration. When it comes to his body, this is that moment. This is the time when he’s wondering, “What have I done?” Right now he’s thinking, “I have exactly what I want, what happens if I lose it?”

You won’t lose it, I want to say.

“Whatever you’re feeling,” I tell him after his lips unseat mine, “I’ve been there. I can help you, even if it’s just being a good listener. Even if it’s just you telling me how you’re feeling. You might not know it, but having me to usher you through this transition will help you see you made the right decision. With you, with me, with us.”

“Is this how it’s going to be with us?” he asks, his voice more certain, more appreciative.

“Yes,” I say, moving myself against him, upon him, but not sexually. “It’s going to be like this, but better.”

His fingers find me, walk down my arm; our hands interlock, our fingers curling into each other. I used to read romance novels and dismiss the meaning of holding hands early on. It’s not like kissing, or making cookies, it’s just …different. This is an act of love, of tenderness, of safety, and right now, this means the world to me.

“When you put it like that, I have to say, this removes all doubts, all concerns. With you and I that is. Not my father. I just really want him to understand and accept my choices.”

“That takes time, trust me.”

“He’s going to shit circus clowns the second he sees me,” he says, the rigidity finally leaving his voice.

“Then I’ll go with you,” I tell him, mildly amused by the bad joke. “He already doesn’t like me, or trust me, so whatever anger he has to give, I’ll take the brunt of it, then you can deal with what’s left.”

“He’s definitely going to flip his lid. I wasn’t kidding about him shitting out circus clowns. Seriously.”

“If he manages such demonic trickery,” I reply, “we’ll deal with it together. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, more solemn.

Within moments his breathing settles, then changes. Swallowing the tension, I quietly let him drift off to sleep. For a long time I just snuggle against him, inhaling the scents of his new body, moving my hands on him to make sure he stays real, that he stays mine. For nearly an hour, I lay there wondering if such a thing as my happily-ever-after is even possible.

I think maybe it will be.

No, I think it is.

Rather, it will be if he agrees to take the Fountain of Youth serum. Everything would have been so much better if only he didn’t have that bomb in his brain. Holland, I think, as if his name is a disease.

Holland, that shifty, shifty wizard.

When at last I slip into that unconscious void, I fall into neither a restful dream, nor a dreamless slumber. It turns out the corridors of my brain are teeming with memories, like some kind of hoarder’s space that’s taken on too much junk and is now spilling into the walkways, the living spaces, the whole of my consciousness.

These memories of mine won’t stay tucked away any longer. And right now, they’re weaving the heavy tapestry of a God-awful nightmare. A nightmare that is no fictional construct, but rather an abysmal truth set upon my dreams like some sort of fast acting cancer. What bleeds out of my brain as I sleep are the deplorable memories of the future, a future Alice Jr. sent me forward in time to see.

For the first time in awhile, I feel The Operator stir, then wake…

Chapter Five

These horrors I’m suffering in my sleep, they’re the collective memories of the future I experienced. The unfolding revulsion of it. The grim, destructive wonderment of it all. Ensnared in the web of this nightmare, the memory holds me prisoner, trapping me willfully in this dream state, not letting me go. It makes certain I know that by not killing Hitler at the end of the second World War, the future I experienced—this future I’m seeing right now—is my fault. This memory now masquerading as a nightmare is showing me how the world wept just as it fell to fire and bloodthirsty ruin.

In the dream, I’m standing on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan, right across the street from something that used to be a park. The world around me is a wintery scene of raining ash. One look and I know this is a nuclear winter. The air is suffocating, stifling. It’s burning my lungs and eyes; it has me in a fit of coughing right off the bat. My hand goes to my mouth, covering it. I try to wipe a few grey flakes off my tongue. It’s useless. My hands are dotted with the ash as well. It’s all in my mouth, settling on my eyelashes, dusting my hair.

Then I hear it. Rather I sense it before I hear anything. Out there, in this grim, steel colored nightmare, things are moving swiftly, using the gloom for cover.

Distant, feral screams make me squirm. Are those even human sounds? The high-pitched bestial cries pepper my skin with goosebumps.

The word savage springs to mind.

Then the word enemy.

My eyes run to black, my hands claw at my sides as instinct takes over and I prepare for whatever is making these unseen cries. To my left, jolting me into an even greater awareness, there is a howl of pain, wet ripping sounds, then the gurgled moaning of someone’s last moments of life. I try to see through the haze, try to see the source of all this barbarous noise. The sounds change, almost like breaking bones and tearing. And then it sounds like licking and chewing.

It’s when a regular looking business man in a three-piece suit suddenly appears across the street that my attention shifts. I zero in on him. If I had shackles, they’d have risen already. If I was an animal, a low growl would have started at the back of my throat. His entire demeanor is GQ perfect, but the lower half of his face looks like he’s been bobbing for apples in vats of blood.

“What the hell are you?” I ask, loud enough for him to hear.

His head cocks sideways, moving to an odd, almost unnatural tilt. One eye holds me while the other looks around. WTF? Then both eyes find me and he starts to yawn. Except that’s no yawn. Half his face pulls open with a bloodcurdling shriek that has him hunching over and rigid. He’s like an animal calling out its prey.

Oh, God.

This thing launches at me, moving so fast I almost can’t see him. I know I need to eviscerate this unhinged mutant, but I’m so taken aback, so terror stricken, that where I should be been mounting a counter-attack, I’m instead jolting awake in my bed and letting out an embarrassing, high-pitched yelp.

* * *

In bed next to August, I sit up fast, sweating, panting, shaking. For some reason, my eyes burn from the air inside the nightmare and my lungs feel clogged with wet cheese-cloth. On the nightstand is a glass of water.

I down the thing in a couple of gulps, still thirsty, still in shock.

I can hardly believe I was there. The way I ejected myself from the dream, however, was not the way I ejected myself from that reality. Alice Jr. was there. When I traveled, I mean, not in the dream. Instead of that thing coming after me, Alice Jr. went after it, putting it down with fire.

She then stalked back to me, white dress filthy, and she said, “This is all on you!” A different version of an older Alice was there, too. Both girls hit me with hard eyes. Alice Jr’s were the worst, though. They were obsidian black and cruel, so chock full of stress and disdain I could not pop my time travel device into my mouth and swallow fast enough.

Back when I was there, more things materialized through the fog; Alice Sr. then did something I did not even know possible. The last thing I saw before returning to this timeline (and back to August), was a massive pillar of fire shooting out of future Alice’s hands, hands that were like industrial flamethrowers.

Lying next to August, listening to him sleep, I’m so glad I’m home and not in that awful future that Alice and her younger, mini Charles Manson self sent me to. My head is still in that place, the memories still too fresh.

I close my eyes, seeing this appalling future as plain as day.

The way future Alice looked when I was there, she was going to burn all of Manhattan by day’s end. I didn’t blame her. I was terrified of what I was seeing. Unable to even fathom how I could have caused something this horrifying. Then, when that GQ thing’s face split open across the middle revealing an extra long tongue and rows upon rows of sharpened teeth, parts of me panicked. Even The Operator woke up for the show, but decided not to look too long.

“You forget all the in-between years,” The Operator said to me. “You forget why we moved into the clouds.”

I wanted to tell him this was all new to me, that I wasn’t the eight hundred year old me I thought I’d left behind, but what would be the point?

The less I had to converse with that nut cake the better.

* * *

Ever since I returned from the future, I can’t stop thinking of these creatures, the war torn section of New York, this hell I supposedly created. Those things had to be genetically modified creatures, right? I can’t think of another explanation. Unless they were something else entirely? Maybe this future was the product of some war between good and evil and those creatures were detestations coughed out of hell by Satan himself. The way their faces could just tear open to row upon row of razor sharp fangs…

“You alright?” a voice says to me. August. I didn’t even hear him wake up.

“Nightmare,” I say, my throat still chalky.

He rolls back over and goes to sleep, leaving me to think of all the things I’d rather tuck away into the deepest recesses of my mind. The point is, you can’t tinker with genetics and not expect bad things to happen. Perhaps this is what this future is: mutations gone very, very wrong. Perhaps the way to stop these unholy anomalies is to just stop Holland once and for all.

But it’s not just Holland.

There are geneticists like him everywhere. Well, not exactly like him, but smart and willing to conduct off-the-books human trials on people like me. People like Rebecca. And Skye.

Being as quiet as possible, I crawl out of bed, slip out of the room and walk down the hallway to my old bedroom—Rebecca’s room now. The door is ajar and I can hear her sleeping. Part of me thinks I should handle this a different way, but the whole Skye issue has been on my mind. Rebecca has a child she knows nothing about.

The baby…good God, I can only imagine its life with Alice Jr! At the time, I knew young Alice was a menace to others, but I never stopped to consider how she’d be with children. What was Holland thinking making her the child’s ward? Out of preservation for Rebecca’s already fragile mind, I’d masked and buried the memories of her childbirth deep inside her head. I hadn’t thought much past that. It was barely even a conscious decision I made. What I wanted most was to protect her. To keep her from falling into a Maggie-level depression.

I simply acted on instinct.

Like an erased hard drive, though, the data still remains tucked away but veiled. Can I reveal this to her? Just give her access to these memories once more? Everything would come roaring back painfully, emotionally.

Would the memories hit too hard?

Sitting beside her on the bed, I close my eyes and enter her mind. Finding the memories is not hard if you know what to look for, and I know exactly what to look for. Accessing different areas of her brain, I slip the threads of memory into an ongoing dream she’s having.

The intrusion hits her immediately.

Sometimes, when your dreams shift (almost with no rhyme or reason), you have to wonder if this is random happenings of the human mind, people like me interfering, or others giving us hints about our lives. Doing what I’m doing, it makes me wonder if my own dreams have ever been invaded. Well, invaded by someone other than the reptilian hybrid from Dulce, New Mexico.

Rebecca turns on her side, her breathing quickening, her body trying to pull itself inside itself. Then she rolls completely over and wakes up. I slip out of her mind as she draws a sharp breath.

“It’s just me, Rebecca,” I say, trying to calm her.

“Are you okay?”

Wiping my eyes, I say, “You were having a nightmare, I think. I just wanted to check in on you.”

“I dreamed that…I was…having…”

“A baby?”

She sits up, not blinking, not taking her eyes off me. “How did you know that?”

“How did it make you feel?” I ask, calmly, my tone even and casual.

For an eternity she just sits there, looking at me, looking down, trying to understand her feelings. “I felt scared, I guess.”

“For the baby?”

“For the baby. For me. Do you think this is…maybe…are dreams punishment for doing things you shouldn’t have done?”

My lips form a smile and I scoot close to her, pull her into a sideways, sisterly hug. “I know you and Jacob had sex. It’s okay. This isn’t that, Rebecca.”

“How—”

“The tough thing about being me is I know so much. Too much if you want the God’s honest truth. The great thing is that all these people who look normal and act normal and both live in judgment of themselves and others, they’re just as messed up as you and me. Probably worse. Which technically means we might not be all that messed up after all. Perhaps we’re all just normal. And that’s why I don’t judge you.”

“You don’t?”

“What do you think I was doing while you guys were in the pool yesterday and August and I were changing?”

A short laugh puffs out of her.

“Really?”

“Yep. Up and down, in and out.”

Her girlish giggle cracks me up. Half of me wonders how she’s even processing all this being mentally so young. She’s catching up, I tell myself. This is the most reasonable explanation I suppose, so I guess I should probably go with it.

“So…maybe dreaming about that…I don’t have to feel bad?”

“What if that was not a dream but a memory, about a baby. Would you want it to be true? Would you want a child?”

She thinks about this for a long time, then says, “I don’t know, maybe. With what happened to me though, do you think I’m ready for that?”

“No. But you have the support system if you need it. Christian, Orianna, me.”

“I don’t know how Jacob would feel.”

“You can’t tell him,” I say. “Not about any of it, any of us. Ever.”

“I know.”

“What if this was real, and the baby wasn’t just yours? Maybe it was ours. The family’s, and we all raise her together? That would make it so you wouldn’t have to tell Jacob anything, not until he’s ready that is. Not until you decide whether or not he’s the one.”

“I think if Jacob made the baby, he’d help take care of it, too.”

“What if it wasn’t his baby?”

“Whose would it be? Are we still talking about the dream? Wait a minute, what are we talking about here?”

Now this is where part of me says to stand on the proverbial brakes, but the other part of me knows Skye is being babysat by a pint-sized, vaginafied Charles Manson who—for some completely insane reason—still carries Skye’s dead sister in her backpack. The fact that Holland hasn’t put the kibosh on that super creepy shit already makes me want to do very bad things to them both. Then again, maybe Holland thinks if he lets her carry the baby corpse, it’ll keep her from killing Skye.

“The dream was real,” I tell Rebecca, my mind made up, “the memory of the child is also real.”

“No, it was just a dream.”

“Your child was one of three children Dr. Heim put in you as an experiment.”

Pulling the blankets around her, fear crawling into her eyes, she says, “Savannah…don’t say these things.”

Tension consumes me in spite of the fact that I don’t want it, that it’s counterproductive to this impromptu conversation.

“She’s not safe, Rebecca. She’d be safer with us here, and that’s why I let you have that memory. It’s also why I buried all the other memories of this. I want you safe first. I want you taken care of. Now that you’re okay, we need to take care of her.”

Her eyes are already flooding; she’s already pulling away.

“Baby, don’t do that,” I say reaching out for her. She draws back even further. “You don’t have to retreat.”

She’s crying now, curled into herself beside me, sitting up, but wanting to hide under the covers. “It’s just a dream,” she says, reaching one last time for an easier explanation to the dream than I’ve provided her.

Repositioning myself in front of her, sitting on the bed with my hands on her knees, I say, “Some really, really bad things happened to me, things that are just as awful as what happened to you, but different. Good things can happen to us, too. You know that. We can take these lives of ours and balance them out, but it will never erase the past.

“That’s easy for you to say,” she says, sniffling.

“Sweetheart, our past won’t let us go. It’s a reality we must accept. And the people in our past? They love us and they need us, and that’s why we have to be strong for them, why we have to be better people.”

“I didn’t have a baby otherwise I’d remember it.” She’s practically hiccupping out now, but at least she’s keeping the volume down.

“Do you want to remember?” I ask her.

Lowering her head, she shakes it back and forth and I can see the pre-teen in her. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve just decided that. I’m going to get Skye and bring her home no matter what. I’ll tell Orianna and Christian in the morning. The more I think about it, the more I know for certain she can’t spend another day with Alice Jr.

“Well when you’re ready—and one day you will be ready—I can help you with your memories. Until then, just know that everything I do for you I do because I love you.”

She won’t look at me, but I hear her as she says in the faintest voice, “I know.”

I move her hair out of her face, tuck it behind her ears, tilt her chin the slightest bit so she can see me eye to eye. “I love you.”

She pitches into me with a hug that is so real and so teeming with emotion it makes me wonder if there will ever come a time for me to have a child. Even though she’s older than me, technically, she feels like the child I rescued. She feels like my child. Which means my love for her is unwavering, unconditional.

“Go back to bed,” I say.

She gets all the way under the covers, and I tuck her in then kiss her on the forehead.

* * *

Back in bed, August is sleeping peacefully. I crawl in beside him, close my eyes and fight against a mounting dread. What will the remainder of this night yield? To my great delight, however, I settle into a dreamless sleep, only to be woken several hours later by my phone.

No, August’s phone. It’s his father.

Half drowsy, feeling drugged and unable to sufficiently open my eyes, I listen to August talk to his father, telling him his voice is different because he’s tired, because he was having a lot of fun last night at a music festival…blah, blah, blah. All the lies we tell to protect the truth from those we love.

When he hangs up, it’s because he finally promised his father he’d catch the first plane out of Vegas. He didn’t tell his father he was in Palo Alto. With me. He told him as little as possible, which honestly, was pretty intuitive.

I’m sitting up now, staring at him, worried.

His eyes catch mine and this stops his train of thought. He finds himself wholly immersed in my expression, which either pleases or worries me.

“What has you so troubled?” he asks.

“Who says I’m troubled?”

“Your body’s changed, but your expressions have not.”

Lying back down, I pull the blankets over me, then turn away from him. “I have to tell you something,” I say.

“Then tell me,” he says.

Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and focus. Just freaking say it already.

“Holland planted a bomb in your head.”

“What?!”

I hold up my hand to stop him, then say, “One way or another, it has to come out. So I have a question for you and you don’t have to answer right away, but the sooner you answer the better.”

“You had to tell me this now?” he says, gently turning me over by the shoulder so we’re looking at each other eye to eye. His intensity is both scary and sexy all at once. He’s no longer a boy. Augustin Sandino is most definitely a man.

I reach around his head, to the base of his skull, just below his brainstem. “Here,” I say, touching his head lightly. “It’s an insurance policy.”

“When you were radiated…” he says, letting the statement hang.

He’s referring to my first transition, how The Virginia Corporation used radioactive isotopes and RFID chips to basically melt half my body. He tells me this so I know he understands the gravity of what I’ve just told him.

“I can get it out, but again, I have a question for you and you need to answer it. How you answer will determine how much pain I put you through, and how much effort I’ll have to exert to keep you from dying.”

He pushes my hand away, turns his eyes elsewhere, his entire being shrinking away from me. “You knew he did this.”

“Only after,” I say, taking his arm gently.

He shrugs me off.

“Honestly, there is so much good happening right now, but there is also a world of bad. Sabrina is gone because of satanic worshiping nut bags, I’m a different person but with a bomb in my head, you’re with me now but you might kill me getting this thing out, and I’m supposed to go home and face my family? Of all of these things, seeing my family is what scares me the most.”

“It’s too much, I know.”

“You don’t know,” he says.

“Can you really say that, knowing what you know about me?” I ask, my tone delicate yet pointed.

He runs his hand over his scalp the way he does when he gets frustrated. He stops at the place on the back of his head that I pointed out only moments ago.

“I kind of liked your hair,” I confessed.

“I’m not the kind of guy who wants to spend more time doing my hair than I do putting on deodorant.”

He tells me this almost like he’s grumpy.

“It still looks good,” I say, touching his scalp. He lets me and this causes me to scoot toward him. I sit behind him, curl my legs around his waist, pull him into my arms and say, “How long have you been dreaming of having sex with me?”

“Since I saw your tits for the first time,” he says, honestly, not a trace of humor in his tone.

“And how was I?”

He puts his hands on my calves, my thighs, then he turns inside the circle my legs have made around him and says, “You were like nothing I’d ever let myself dream of,” and this makes me smile. I know he’s scared, that he’s trying to adapt to a lot very quickly, and I know his mind is still trying to settle from the swift and sudden genetic changes. “Ask me the question.”

“Will you marry me?” I tease.

“Not that one, not yet. The other one, the more serious one you said you needed to ask.”

My body stills to match my mind. Part of me wants to ease into this, but I am not that kind of girl. I prefer blunt, the way Netty does it. “Do you want to be immortal?”

“Like you?”

“Not like me, with me.”

“That’s possible?”

“I took a large vile of Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum, not just for this moment, but for the future if your answer right now is ‘no.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, God,” I say, not wanting to get into this right now, not with so much on his plate, “how do I put this?”

“Just spit it out,” he says.

“We live together in the future, on this little ranch out on fifty acres of property, and we’re happy. I already told you that part. What I didn’t tell you in detail is that our lives in the future were interrupted by me from this time coming into that time to stop something really bad from happening.”

“Bad like what?”

“Something that requires you having this serum if you have any chance of surviving.”

“I can’t hear this right now,” he says, getting up. “It’s too much.”

He’s shutting down, and I don’t blame him. I’m a lot to take these days. But isn’t this how you get an iron spine? You face the truth time and again no matter the shock? No matter the emotional strain?

Or perhaps that’s just me. Maybe I’ve become so inhuman that listening to rational responses damn near borders on exhaustion.

It’s just me. I know it is. I’m different, I tell myself. Not all the way human anymore. Rebecca is just human; August just human. And even if I give August the shot and successfully take the bomb out of his head—even if he survives the impending holocaust—he’ll still be human. Maybe he can heal from any wound, and not show any visible signs of aging, but the fact is, he will still be human. And I won’t be. Because of the human/reptilian hybrid from Dulce. Because after he switched me on, I’m something else entirely.

I need to realize this and be sensitive to August’s feelings. To Rebecca’s feelings. There’s no way I can push these things on either of them so quickly. They should have a choice in the matter. Just then I look up and August is standing there naked and looking at me.

My heart bumps and clunks a bit, then drops gears and starts to race. My pulse doubles, my face warms and a hot rush of warmth and need overwhelm me.

“Are we showering together or what?” he asks.

Getting out of bed, breathless and grinning and taking off my clothes, I say, “We are. We most definitely are.”

* * *

After a righteous round of shower sex, we get ready for the day, and naturally, he’s ready before me. I can’t exactly shave my head, even if it would cut forty minutes off the time it takes me to get ready.

When I leave the room, I find only Orianna in the kitchen. August and Christian are out back talking, and getting along by the look of it.

“August and I have to go to Texas,” I say. Yeah, I just sort of blurt it out.

“Oh,” Orianna says.

“But then I’m off to see a man about a baby.”

She raises her eyebrows and so I tell her the entire story of Rebecca’s children, which leaves her speechless on so many levels.

“Here’s the kicker,” I say, and she waits for it, still dumbfounded by the revelations, “you’re going to have to cover for Rebecca, say the baby’s yours. That she’s adopted or something, or maybe she’s your dead sister’s child.”

“My sister’s not dead.”

“Yeah, but you never see her so she’s pretty much dead to us.”

“What’s your point?” she asks.

“My point is, if Jacob finds out she’s Rebecca’s child, he’ll ask about the father. And if Rebecca tells him about Heim, he’ll want to do something about it.”

“Someone should do something about it!”

“We already have, and keep your voice down!” I whisper harshly.

“You and who else?”

“The doctor who did this, Dr. Heim, he’s as good as dead.”

“You killed him? Oh my God, Savannah…what the hell kind of life are you living?”

“Stop!”

Fully panicked, she says, “You stop!”

“He’s technically not dead.”

“Then what is he?” she asks, the old demandy version of herself coming out.

“He’s buried under a coffin in a cemetery in Auburn.”

“Then surely he’s dead!” she barked, leaning over me.

“Who’s dead?” Rebecca asked from behind us. We both startle, then at the same time say, “Nobody.”

“Who’s dead?” she asks again.

It seems the revelations about her baby early this morning might have forced a touch of maturity to blossom in her. One look at her and I know she’s considering the whole idea of getting Skye back.

“The man who took you. Dr. Heim.”

“Good,” she says, walking into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee. “I’ll be out at the pool when you’re done talking to her about…the child.”

My heart stops. Rebecca doesn’t seem to see this.

To add that unnecessary punch, she says, “I’ll be out there looking at August.” She says this thinking it will sting, but inside, it makes me want to laugh. My little sister is growing up!

“Remember what I told you,” I say, straight-faced.

“Everything you do you do because you love me,” she says, coming around. “I know this.”

Turning to Orianna, who is barely keeping up, I say, “Well, it looks like we’re going to have a baby.”

Chapter Six

We book tickets on the first plane out of San Francisco International. As we’re waiting to board, August tells me his father got the letter from the FBI.

“I guess that’s what triggered this whole thing. I thought he found out about the plastic surgery. Turns out it started with the letter about Vegas.”

“If you hadn’t agreed so easily to going home—”

“This isn’t easy,” he says, flashing me a look.

“I’d have told you to sack up and see your father, not because you owe him that, but because he loves you and he should know the truth.”

“He loves me because he doesn’t know the truth. When I get home with this face, this body, as me now…who the hell knows what’s going to happen? He’ll say I’m breaking my mother’s heart.”

“Which mother?” I ask, grinning.

His eyes go cold. “Are you really cracking jokes right now?”

“Sorry.”

“If I ask you not to talk to me on the way home,” he says cautious, “will you promise not to take it the wrong way?”

“Are you asking if my feelings are going to get hurt?”

“I guess.”

“Then, yes. I promise not to take it the wrong way. Just don’t get mad if I want to touch you, or be affectionate. I’m still thinking about getting dicked in the shower this morning.”

And with that, an older couple gives me a stern, sideways glance.

“Inside voice, please,” he says, and we both smile.

Looks like it’s going to be a long, quiet flight. Not that it matters. We’re going to have the rest of eternity to talk if I have my say in this. I’m just hoping things will be okay with his father so I can get a “yes” on the immortality thing and pull Holland’s bomb out of his head.

* * *

When we reach cruising altitude my body starts to shut down. The stress of everything is taking a toll. If I think about it, it was yesterday morning when I got back from the future. Yesterday morning when I woke August from his genetic slumber. And the sex? Oh, Lord…don’t get me started! The point is, it’s crazy how when it rains it freaking pours. And sometimes, just sometimes, it can get downright torrential.

Before I know it, my eyelids are bobbing, then magically…I’m asleep.

The dream that swallows me up quickly becomes a nightmare, and in the nightmare, pieces of my journey to Alice Jr.’s apocalyptic future return with fiery force.

My God, why is my mind doing this to me?

It’s just a dream, I tell myself inside the dream, but it’s not. Not inside the dream. In there, it’s real because when I was there for real, it felt exactly like this.

It’s just my mind replaying the events, I tell myself. Still, it feels real. And this dream is unfolding exactly as I saw it, exactly as I experienced it...

I’m standing inside the lab. Standing before the two Alice’s. Then I’m gone. Blinked out of that timeline and sucked far into the future. The pain of traveling is a cerebral feeling on par with being crushed to death then pulled apart over and over again. This cycle of degeneration and regeneration does things to me that defy description. I’m never fully destroyed in the wormhole, but I’m never fully remade either. At least, not until the shatting-out of this body into the desired timeline. The year is 2147. The place is New York. I blink into the future on wobbly knees holding down my guts, stumbling twice before falling to a knee on the sidewalk edge smack dab in the middle of hell.

This trip forward in time is my longest yet. Already this is worse than Berlin.

Alice Jr. gave me the coordinates, but now that I’m here, this place looks nothing like New York. I mean, it almost does. It almost feels like it.

But everything here is deeply, fundamentally wrong.

Standing in a bleak downfall of pillowing ash and ubiquitous fog, I break into a coughing fit then cover my nose and mouth. The air is all warm ash. The trees are skeletons, the crispy looking grass dusted grey and starved for water and sunlight. Looking up, the sky’s usual brilliance is lost. With the sun tucked so far behind the devastation, it’s but a subtle glow in a sea of smoke. Half the buildings disappeared into it. Half of those have been shelled to shit. Utterly destroyed.

This New York I’m looking at is nothing like the New York you know. Nothing like the New York I know. The thing about the air is, it’s like being downwind from a forest fire. The sting of it hits my eyes, burns my throat, dries out and squeezes my lungs. Everything smells like charbroiled garbage. Barely anything moves. Almost like this is a photo of a nuclear winter and I made my way into an animated backdrop, but for what? What is happening here? This is no December in New York—not even a romantic January. But I know this already.

I know this in the dream because I was just here for real.

Standing in the middle of the street, I find Elizabeth’s home in ruins. It looks like it survived a bombing. And everything around it? The park? The trees? They all look the way your garden would look if you took a flame thrower to it, then shot it all to hell with rock salt and then emptied your fireplace into a standing fan just to watch it settle over everything.

There is so much I love about New York, but not now. Right now I can’t help being scared. Attuning my senses, I pick up the subtle sounds of activity. People murmuring, arguing. People running. Then it’s perfectly quiet. So still you can hear the compressed sounds of ash being squished beneath your shoes with every little shifting of your weight.

These brief pillows of silence could suffocate a grizzly.

In the back of my mind, I try to remember Spring. The trees in bloom. The delightful scents of fresh flowers and cut grass. For a second, tapping into Elizabeth’s memories, I remember how the park bustled with people, with their animals on leashes, how families used to picnic here just soaking in the amazing New York atmosphere. In these memories, everyone looked happy. Children were playing. Dogs were chasing Frisbees and barking at other dogs and generally enjoying life. My heart breaks a little at the sight of things. I almost start to cry. This is the aftermath. There is no other explanation: this is a nuclear winter. My God, what have we done to our planet?

What have I done here?

New York is no longer the great, beautiful migrant city that was once the result of so many cultures and trades. It is now a dystopian movie set dragged up from the innards of hell, replete with the choking filth of smoked oxygen and an endless, desperate twilight.

That’s when I hear different sounds. Screams. Shrieking. Something dying in the distance. And then he’s there—standing across from me. Eyes like black onyx, blood all over his face, those clawed hands and that half torn open, detachable jaw.

“I see you, motherfucker!” I yell, enraged, shaking with an influx of too much energy.

That’s when I wake up in the plane to everyone looking at me. August is shaking me, trying to wake me up. In the next row over, I hear a woman say, “Wonder what kind of life she lives to have to use that kind of language.”

I’m a bit embarrassed. I know my mouth is a problem. And I know that, contrary to our California way of life, the f-word is still an uncultured word in many circles. Like religious circles, or the Bible belt, or most all of Utah.

“Same old Savannah,” August mutters, clearly embarrassed.

“Are we almost there?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

* * *

When we land and collect our bags, I see a woman holding a sign that says BRAYDEN JAMES and we walk right past it, Brayden not even giving it a glance. Outside we hail a cab and he gives the cabbie the address.

Half an hour later we’re pulling up to this gigantic palatial estate and August is telling me he feels like puking.

“You only have to do this once,” I tell him.

“I know.”

“Just let me start.”

He looks at me, eyes squirming with desperation, his entire demeanor more representative of Brayden James than of Augustin Sandino. Sitting next to me is not an Adonis of a man but a screaming insecurity in need of that which we all crave so mercilessly: acceptance.

I understand the feeling all too well. I understand the need, the obsession, the crippling, crippling nature of it.

“Get out, be a man,” I tell him.

He nods, opens the door, makes the death row march up the pathway leading to the front door. His arm weighs a thousand pounds, his finger this hesitant thing that can’t touch the doorbell, much less press it.

Moving him aside, I push the button, listen to the doorbell chime and say, “If you shit yourself now, it’s coffin nails on your ego. Sack up.”

His nostrils flare as they draw a sharp, confident breath; his entire state changes, and for a second, he feels like someone else. I glance at him and his color is back.

“You’re an alpha,” I say. “No matter what your father thinks or says, you’re an alpha.”

His chest puffs up the slightest bit.

“You’re a man now, August. You’re my man. Be my alpha.”

His father answers the door, and he’s bigger than I imagined. Uglier with that I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-much look on his face. If I told you he was imposing as hell, you’d probably roll your eyes and say, “Uh, yeah…no kidding.”

“Can I help you kids?” he says.

“Hi, Mr. James,” I say, “I’m Savannah Van Duyn, a friend of Brayden’s.”

He looks at me, then at August, who is holding his eyes just fine, then back to me. “Where is my son?”

“He’s on his way,” I say. “I guess there was a mix up with taxis.”

“And who are you?” he asks, looking at August.

He steps forward, extends a hand and says, “Augustin Sandino, sir.”

Okay…

“You are every bit as beautiful a young lady as Brayden claimed you were, but behind those eyes, I wonder the trouble you’ve gotten him in to.” He says this jovially, but there’s deep meaning in his words, a jagged edge you’d almost miss if you weren’t as intuitive as me.

“Are you going to invite us in, or make us stand out here like a couple of Bible salesmen?” I say, exerting my own dose of awkward charm.

Naturally, he invites us in.

Before closing the door, he pokes his head back out to look down the street. You can see for miles because as flat landed as this place is, there’s nothing to obstruct the view but open fields, fences and cow turds.

He closes the door and says, “Can I get you two something to drink?”

We both shake our heads and I say, “I can only stay for a moment, but I wanted to meet you.”

“After our last conversation…on the phone…I wouldn’t have imagined you’d foster such a desire. I’ve been wrong before, though, and I’ll be wrong again. I just didn’t think I’d be wrong about that. About you.”

“Reality isn’t always what you hope it will be,” I tell him.

Just then a gorgeous woman walks into the room with a couple of mineral waters and sets them down before us. Brayden’s father—a man of strength and size, but not good looks—has a natural ease about him around this younger, extremely good looking Southern woman.

Now I see why Brayden might have had an uncomfortable crush on her.

I look at him, and he’s looking at his step-mother, Lenore, and she’s looking at August thinking he’s flat out gorgeous, but that she can’t think things like that being a married woman.

Her eyes tell me none of this, and her demeanor dares not whisper a word of her desire to her husband, or their guests (us), but it’s there, in the air, in her soul. It’s there and I can feel it and I want to tell her he’s mine, but I’m not going to be jealous.

I’m entirely too dangerous an individual for an emotion as petty as jealousy.

“Oh, boy,” I hear myself say, eyes on the wife, my eyes simmering with knowledge, almost like I’m drawing a line in the sand. Then, to Mr. James: “So, as you know, I’ve undergone some genetic modification at school.”

“I’m not sure I feel comfortable discussing these kinds of things in front of my wife,” he starts.

“It’s okay, honey—” she says, but he lifts his hand.

Now his eyes are on August. If I bounce off his mind, I’m afraid I’ll pick up thoughts of him starting to understand the situation. He’s not a stupid man. He’s not imperceptive.

“What about you, good lookin’?” he says to August, his mouth turned down, his fingers gripping the arm of the chair he’s sitting on, almost like his conduct belies calm—if only a touch manic—but inside dams are breaking and the floods are about to usher in a cold rush of anger. “You been modified, too?”

My skin prickles, all the little hairs on my arms standing. Something in the air changes. He’s seeing it, fearing it, convincing himself August is really Brayden, and Brayden is now August. If I don’t do something, all hell’s going to break loose, present company be damned.

“Look at him, sir,” I cut in. “Of course he’s been modified. Just about everyone at Astor Academy has had some procedure or another. It’s why they pay off the teachers and the staff. It’s how the secrets don’t leak, although, with social media being what it is these days, the shelf life on a secret will soon be measured by minutes rather than years.”

“What’s your name?” he all but growls at August.

“You know his gosh damn name,” I say, standing before him. I may be small in form, but what I lack in mass I make up for in ferocity. “You know who he is and why he’s here. Why he looks like this, and not like you. You know this, and it’s time to accept it. It’s time to accept him.”

Standing ramrod stiff, the second wife stifles a cry with her hand.

Now she knows, too.

“Get out of my house!” Lloyd screams, the devil in his eyes, the heat of his rage blowing out everywhere.

August stands to leave.

“Not you!” he hisses. Looking at me, he points in my face and says, “Her.” Then back to August, he says, “You sit your ass in that chair and stay there until you can tell me why in God’s name you would undo everything me and your mother did.”

“You know why,” he says, low, looking up at his father beneath hooded eyelids and a held down head. There is fire in his voice for the first time. Flashing back, I heard it in him the day I landed in that lab in New Mexico, that day just before the bombs went off and killed us, that day when he’d killed all those people guarding the lab just to get to me. I heard a strength in him that I’d never heard before in Brayden James. But I hear it now. Perhaps this is ground zero. Perhaps this is where he gets his balls.

“Get out!” he roars at me, the chords straining in his neck, his hands gripping the arms of the chair he’s sitting on so tight the wood is beginning to whine and splinter.

My own temper flares. I begged Brayden not to change. I didn’t want him to become August, but I knew he would because I’m me—a mind reader, a traveler, a justice junkie who can’t leave well enough alone.

But Brayden was none of these things. In my book, Brayden James was good enough.

I lift a hand toward the door and it swings open. Silence suffuses the room. Stalking through the open door, knowing August’s father is freaking out about what I just did, I don’t look back. Part of me wants to pull the door shut behind me, close it like a civilized girl meeting her future father-in-law for the first time and being rejected, but I don’t. I walk through it and with my mind I slam the door shut so hard the door frame stress cracks down the middle like a gunshot, the glass breaking loose of the frame completely.

Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. In fact, I’m kind of embarrassed that I’ve done that, but in my mind, no one talks to me like that. No. One.

The cab is waiting as instructed. August rushes out the front door and calls to me. I don’t turn to look at him, I just get in the cab and tell the driver to take me back to the airport. Seeing what happened, he’s quick to comply.

Not half a mile down the road, my cell phone chirps.

It’s a text.

August is wanting to know if I’m okay. I text him YES. He says he’ll head back to Palo Alto if his father doesn’t kill him first. I send him a smiley face then try to put it all past me. Whatever issues those two need to work out, August’s father saw that I’m much larger than him, but I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Still, he has to know the old way of doing things no longer works.

This is a bold new era, and we’re in the driver’s seat. Either that or I’ve seriously become a world class butthole.

Yeah, that’s probably it.

* * *

By the time I get to the airport, my ego deflates and I realize I handled everything all wrong. I came on too fast, too heated. I’m about to board when I decide something important. I make the call. August answers right away.

“Please put your father on the phone,” I say as gently as I can.

At this point, I’m thinking I might miss the flight I just paid a small fortune for. This is more important, though.

Finally he answers.

“Mr. James, I owe you an apology. But I want you to hear me out. I didn’t want this for your son. I am in love with him, but I was in love with him the way he was. He did this. All on his own. I begged him to reconsider, but I saw it in his eyes there was no way back for him.”

“He said as much,” the old man grumbled.

“I shouldn’t have been so abrupt in your household. It wasn’t my place. Now that I’ve had some time to think about my actions, I realize you lost your son today, that in him changing his appearance, he was in fact rejecting you. Although he doesn’t see it like this, you do and I was insensitive to that, and so that’s why I needed to call you, to talk to you. Mr. James, I’m sorry.”

His breathing changes and I refuse to speak before he does.

“Thank you,” he finally replies, and I can tell by the tone of his voice he means it.

“For what it’s worth, I didn’t get a choice in my transformation, so I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

“We should all be so blessed,” he says, thinking I’m a gorgeous girl crying about how I’m so damn beautiful.

“You see one blessing, Mr. James, but you do not see the thousand curses simmering just below the surface of my looks. Perhaps one day you’ll ask about that, and on that day, I will tell you exactly why I didn’t want Brayden changing the way I have.”

“What you’re talking about, does that have anything to do with my front door being wrecked to all hell?” he asks. Rolling his brain, I realize his thoughts have just caught fire with a dozen questions, a dozen more fears, and worlds of concern for his son.

“It does. And I’ll pay for the door. I’m sorry about that as well.”

The overhead speaker is saying my flight is on its final boarding call and I’m walking to my gate, handing the man my pass, being one of those rude cell phone people I used to make nasty faces at.

“It’s fine,” he says.

“If there is one measure of comfort I can give you, it’s that with August at my side, you will never have to fear for his safety. I love your son. He’s about to become my entire world.”

Again, a phone line full of silence. Then: “If I misjudged you, I’ll be the first to admit it, but if not, if something happens to my son—”

“Something’s already happened to your son and I suggest you let him tell you what it is so that you can give him the one thing he wants so badly from you, and that is your approval as a father. In my eyes, and the eyes of his peers, your son is a big deal. A really big deal. I have to go, Mr. James. I pray that all my bad first impressions won’t have a lasting influence. Once you get to know me, you’ll see I’m as sweet as cherry pie.”

He laughs and says, “Tell that to my front door.”

Then I’m on the plane, trying not to fall asleep, unwilling to have the open vaults in my head draw out any more bad memories and slumbering f-bombs. We take off, heading toward San Francisco International Airport. Outside, the sky is growing dark, the earth below illuminated by the glittering cityscape and the red and white dots of the going-home traffic.

Untethering my mind, reaching out into the black void, I find Holland. He’s not yet asleep, but Skye is, and when I get to her, she’s coming with me, even if Alice Jr. needs to lose her life in the process. Which she won’t because I’m nice. I’m reasonable. And above all else, I’m the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen.

Yeah, right.

Somewhere between trying not to fall asleep and feeling absolutely spent, I order a drink, then sit back and subconsciously reflect, not on Brayden’s transformation to August, or even on the showdown between me and his dad, but the past.

The past where I went into the future.

* * *

“What the hell is this?” I hear myself ask. This was days ago. This was me arriving in the future after leaving the lab and the start of August’s transformation.

This was New York, circa 2147.

So I landed on a sidewalk just outside my New York home not knowing what the hell was going on. The sky was grey, the air full of ash. All around me, cars lined the street, but no one moved. A cursory look around me had me thinking everything had been shelled to shit, disintegrated, all sharp edges and rust.

Behind me, a door opens and a door closes. Footsteps walk through the inches of ash, making their way toward me. Two sets of feet. Two people.

My senses tether out, find them, identify them. I don’t look behind me; I don’t feel threatened. Now that I know who they are, I’m actually relieved they’re there.

Alice is an adult now. Beautiful. An angel with black, black eyes and skin so thin you can almost see the inner workings underneath: veins, musculature, the more detailed network of arteries. She wears a hooded cape, her face somewhat hidden from view; on her hands are metal type decorations, although they are not statement pieces as much as they look like survival tools. On her index finger is a silver claw, bloodstained and sharp. Beside this cloaked Alice, holding her hand like some rag-tag child, is Alice Jr., the Alice from my time.

“Proud of your handiwork?” Alice Jr. asks, looking up at me. The child almost never speaks, so when she does, begrudgingly I listen. Part of me wants to know why she’s followed me here, since this is not her world, but then looking at the older Alice, I know it will be.

Looking at older Alice, I say, “Are you from here, or did you follow me from Holland’s lab?”

She doesn’t look at me.

If the center of this version of Manhattan was anything but a wasteland, I’d swear by her lack of response she didn’t hear me. But I know different.

The little bitch hears me just fine.

“Take your pick,” she finally says, “and either answer will be right.”

Her little black eyes are scanning the wasteland around us. Her attention finally falls to me and I bear the physical weight of her gaze. She is not that Alice. This Alice is the Alice from here. From now. This is the hardened, heartless version of the girl living in a nuclear bomb timeline.

Alice Jr. lets go of her hand and walks off into the gloom. She has that stalking walk like she’s hunting, which is concerning, her being so small and not dressed for war.

“The air isn’t right,” I finally admit. My lungs are searing hot, a condition of both the nasty air and the distinct lack of oxygen. I nearly clutch my chest, stopping short only because doing so might be construed as a sign of weakness.

Still, I struggle to breathe.

“Look around,” older Alice says. Beneath her dark cloak, she’s dressed head-to-toe in studded leather battle gear. Not battle gear that looks like something you’d wear to a club if you are into the Goth scene, or blood drinking with wannabe vampires. No, this is more like a hardened cast you’d wear to save your ass in a knife fight, or survive a bombing, or recklessly charge into the hot center of an all-out war.

The reality of this existence is crushing. This isn’t a game. And Alice’s outfit sure as hell isn’t some kind of fashion statement in response to some kind of misguided youth, or whatever.

“I’ve been looking around,” I tell the older Alice. “And this place looks like Hell.”

“It’s only barely inhabitable after the blast of 2134. Now this, a second bomb.”

“Why would anyone stay?” I hear myself ask. Ash dusts my hair, flitters down my cheeks and nose, settles on the ledges of my shoulders. I brush my face, the tiny flakes causing me to itch.

“Wait for it,” Alice says.

“Wait for what?” I ask.

“Not you.”

There’s no one else around. Alice is watching the gloom. It lifts a little, not much, but enough. Families appear; they’re on the move, slinking through the park quickly, quietly as they can. I watch them hustle from one point to the next. It’s clear they’re terrified of someone.

Or something.

In the distance, the sounds of pain-filled shrieking put an end to the quiet. All around us, the snowy texture of the air thins out, becomes more white than smoky. A blot of fire cuts through the sky—which must be the sun—although for a second it seems much larger than I remember. Much brighter and considerably hotter.

“It’s coming,” Alice says. “Can you feel it? The attack?”

There’s a niggling in my soul, an ominous feeling I can’t describe.

“Yes,” I tell her. “I can feel it.”

Off to the right, standing in the middle of the gloomy street, Alice Jr.’s hands are at her sides, palms forward, ready to conjure fire and death if necessary.

Looking at her, my eyes stinging, my lungs ablaze, I can feel her in my bones, in my psyche, in my soul. Her eyes bleed to black as her entire body bristles with energy, with an otherworldly glow. Plumes of smoke lift from her pores, small at first, then more pronounced. Like she’s heating up. Or about to blow.

Holy shit, I can’t help thinking. This isn’t a person, this is a bomb.

Everything in me compacts and stretches out, my body severely at odds with itself. If a war is brewing, am I ready for it? I’m not. But I can be if needed. Shaking away the nerves, my muscles strained and ready, I force my body into fight mode. Alice Jr.’s black eyes zero in on something, someone.

What are they sensing that I’m not?

“Ten seconds,” this timeline’s version of Alice says. Turning ever so briefly, she says, “It’s good to see you, Savannah, but this is not your fight. She brought you here to watch, so relax, and watch.”

Some of the tension leaves my body, but some remains.

Alice Jr. extends a hand before her, palm up, her other hand churning the air above it. A wraithlike glow appears, brighter than the sun, torrid. I take a step back as it expands in size and temperature. What the hell is coming, and how is young Alice summoning this kind of fire?

More of the haze has burned off, showing me the park. People appear in the roasted gloom. Like sheep led to slaughter.

I watch, and oh my God, a pack of bone thin men appear before a family of nine. The pack is five; the family is herded by the men until they are trapped in the circle of wraiths. The family is corralled together, terrified. These five wily creatures could be coyotes for how lean and hungry and predatory they look.

One of the girls in the family makes a run for it, heading for the widest gap in the circle. She races through, but this is a game to the predators. They can stop her. They let her get away instead.

Then, one of the men leaps into the air to impossible heights, landing on her back, both feet crushing her spine. The girl is driven face down with an ooof!

She can’t breathe, even though she’s still alive. The four members of the family break into terrified, protective screaming, but the remaining men hold them captive as they just stand there, silent, brooding, smiling their creepy smiles.

“We should do something,” I hear myself say.

Alice of this time doesn’t reply.

The beast attacking the girl, he grabs her by the hair, and I swear to Jesus, half his face opens up to a maw of teeth and a long, forked tongue. I zero in on them, my vision better than ever. The tongue moves gracefully, like a snake ready to strike.

“Alice, you need to let me intervene!” I turn and say.

The air is nearly clear at that point. I turn back around and, my God, those teeth! There are double rows of them, all Parana sharp, all perfectly capable of shredding whatever they tear in to. When the creature’s mouth finally clamps down, it’s on the girl’s neck.

Like an attack dog sinking its fangs into its prey, the thing whips its head violently back and forth, the spray and slop of carnage downright vile. When the creature’s mouth finally rips free, there is no arterial spray as much as there’s just a ruined, drained girl.

“Vampires?” I ask future Alice beside me, mortified, confounded, scared.

“Sort of,” she says. “These ones are immune to sunlight.”

* * *

Sitting on the plane, I’m wide awake, my face pale, a pain in my gut that feels like an air bubble, one so large I nearly double over from the pressure. Even though my eyes are open here, I can’t stop thinking of there.

I remember everything…

I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene unfolding. The remaining family tried to reason with those things, but the pack was not listening. It was almost like they couldn’t understand the language, or even words for that matter.

One moved forward. The leader. He was large, his fingers long, at least twice the length of my fingers and claw-like.

I drew my gaze away from the horror unfolding, turned to Alice Jr., who was twenty feet away, and now putting off blast furnace heat, her body lit to a bright, unexplainable glow.

The creatures in the park rushed the family in a blur and it all got bloody from there. That’s when I realized the heat coming from young Alice was burning my clothes, my skin, my hair. I don’t care. I told myself I’d heal.

But this…this family…they weren’t going to heal at all.

A hot hand took mine again, pulled me back. It was future Alice. “You can’t do anything for them.”

“I…I can’t…those things…” I stammered, unable to form complete sentences.

“Young Alice will deal with them now.”

Just then a deluge of fire thundered from Alice Jr’s hands, almost like dragon’s breath, consuming the vampire things and the family, who were already too far gone. When she was done, the park was in flames. The fire wielding child hunched over the slightest bit, breathing heavy, covering her mouth so as not to ingest the ash, or the smoking ruins of the dead.

She collapsed, sat down hard, planted a hand to keep her weary body from collapsing completely.

“You should have done that,” I told older Alice. “Not her.” I go after the child, sadistic as she is, but future Alice’s hand grabs my arm, burning it.

“Don’t touch me, Alice.”

She held on, not letting go even the slightest bit.

“She needs to do this alone,” future Alice said, only steps behind me now. “This is how she learns to control her fire. This is how she learns to manifest flame without taking it from herself. She must fall a thousand times before she realizes the truth of what she is.”

“Which is?” I’d asked. Glancing down at Alice Jr., I shook her hand off my blistering skin.

“A psychic vampire, but not like them,” future Alice says. “She does not sustain herself through the blood of others. Rather she can pull from the energy of others to strengthen the fire within herself without falling before its effects. She hates that I force this upon her, but she also understands the necessity. And that is why she is so mad at you. Why I was so mad. You did not do what you were supposed to do. You did not stop Adolf Hitler in the twentieth as you were supposed to, and so you didn’t stop this.”

“What does Hitler have to do with anything?” I asked, dumbfounded that he would have something to do with this.

“Who do you think set off the first bombs? Those in 2024? You can’t even begin to imagine the series of events that catastrophe kicked off. This is a domino effect.”

“Is Hitler dead?” I asked.

She laughed, a small chuckle at first. And then she laughed a little louder, more of a bitter ruckus leaving her throat. But then, thankfully, she stopped.

“Of course he’s not dead,” she all but hissed.

Slowly I shook my head. Not at her divulgence, but because I’ve now realized the full affect me not killing that shit bird dictator has had on the world.

The air was growing unnaturally thick again, a choking heat boiling over like a steadily mounting fog. A dirty, smelly fog. The park and its carnage became cloaked before me, cutting my lines of visibility to about ten or fifteen feet.

I turned to Alice and said, “I can stop this.”

“And you will. And then this timeline and I will cease to exist, never having known we ever existed at all. This is the beauty and the calamity of time travel. You throw chaos into an otherwise balanced system, and it counterbalances beautifully.”

“Yet here you are, training a child to kill.”

“She needs to learn to harness her power, to unleash it, so that it is not a mystery to her, or something that happens when she gets upset. This is about control.”

“Sure it is,” I say, studying the healing wounds on my arm from where Alice just burnt me.

“Watch,” future Alice said. “Just watch what an experienced pyrokinetic can do.”

“A pyrokinetic?”

“Someone who can conjure and control fire,” she said.

She looked left, then extended and arm, like she was reaching for something. Then she reached right with her other hand and the air around me crackled to life with energy, making the hair on my arms stand once more, but for a very different reason. She then thrust both hands into the sky and her entire body pulled in on itself with such tension, a funneling of the air around us drew the raining ash toward her.

Light and heat infused her arms, but strangely, that was not the most startling thing. What looked like twin pillars of fire exploded out of her hands and into the sky a hundred feet. The flamethrowers set the sky on fire, searing the edges of the ash in a glittery show of fiery brilliance. The drawing of air sucked the ashy fog from the park, revealing dozens upon dozens of these vampire things now going after new people who were clearly in the fight of their lives.

I didn’t know how this was possible. It didn’t seem possible that this was happening, but my eyes weren’t lying to me, that much I could say.

Alice then dropped her fire on both vampires and humans alike. The last of the flames shot from her body and her smoldering arms dropped to rest at her side.

One look at her told me she was unaffected.

“I will no longer exist, but young Alice will have what she needs in your timeline, so she is ready for whatever future unfolds.”

The smoke of a hundred bonfires rolled through the park like a fast moving cloud in our direction, but then he was there: the creep in the three piece suit, the unaffected thing. The smoke boiled around him, never enveloping him, just swirling out of his way, like it knew something…

Half his face yawned open, the right side falling lower than the left, its mouth torn open, his face and teeth stained and dripping red. Face taught, eyes shivering mad, his hands at his side became claws—long, bony talons. The screech that came from its mouth was one of unfettered rage. Alice killed his pack. I had to kill it.

“I see you mother fucker,” I growled, hands at the ready.

The vampire was suddenly a blur, launching after us. In those fractions of a second, I was preparing to turn this terrifying thing inside out when something blasted him hard from the side: Alice Jr.

“What the hell?” my mouth said.

“It’s time for you to go,” future Alice answered. She was pulling off her hood, assessing the situation with new eyes. “You need to fix this and now you know how.”

“What about Alice Jr.?”

“What about her?” future Alice asked.

“She’s not ready for this.”

“She will be,” Alice answered. Those eyes of hers were no longer seeing me. They were elsewhere, sensing the threats, scoping out the landscape, preparing.

“What about you?” I asked as Alice Jr. mounted this thing and pumped fire into his body by touch alone.

I turned back, looked at future Alice. With a wicked, serial-killer-like grin, her eyes turning so black again they were as hard looking as polished diamonds, she said, “I’m ready for anything.”

New layers of smoke and ash were drifting down, becoming alive with the start of vampire screeching. It got louder, like coyotes, but worse. It almost sounded like they were coming for us. I couldn’t leave Alice Jr. I refused to.

Then like a boss, future Alice conjured her flames and sent them blasting toward the source of the noise with an earth-shaking roar. I stood back, the heat explosive. Fire exploded out of future Alice’s mouth, blowing back the smoke, revealing hundreds of vampires pouring into the park from surrounding buildings. The wall of fire consumed them all and that (and my absolute, unabashed horror) was my cue to leave.

“Let’s go, Alice,” I screamed at the younger one. She turned and was glowering at me, but then her face went perfectly blank, which was her entering her return time and coordinates into the time travel dashboard in her mind. I wasted no time doing the same.

So yeah, that was just a couple of days ago.

“Would you like another drink?” the stewardess asks me, pulling me back into the now. Awareness returns as I blink back into reality.

At this point, we’re somewhere over Arizona.

“Sprite, please,” I say.

My stomach is unsettled. Part of me thinks I can still taste the ash from that apocalyptic wasteland. Somewhere in my stomach, it’s there: the airborne residue of 2147. But I can’t think about it. I can’t think like that.

I must fix this.

“Thought you’d gone into a trance,” the woman next to me says. “Just sat there with your unblinking eyes for like ten minutes straight. Sort of freaked me out.”

I look at her, at the serious nature of her, and I say, “I appreciate your concern, but your kid’s over there trying to steal that boy’s iPad.”

She turns and looks at the struggle across the aisle. Her son is trying to wiggle another boy’s electronics out of his hands, and now the parents are getting involved. There’s squealing and it reminds me of the future I just came from. Dread pours into me. A kind of PTSD. With my mind, I crack the iPad in half and split it down the middle, then everyone is dumbfounded.

And me?

I turn to the window and stare outside, wondering if this life of mine will ever be as uncomplicated as those blue, blue skies.

Chapter Seven

Adolf Hitler landed in the middle of a small, medieval room with a very tall ceiling that appeared to be constructed entirely of quarried stone and hand scraped woods. The chill hit him immediately. It cut straight to his bones. He stepped backwards, bumped into a tub—the rim catching him mid-thigh. His olfactory senses flared. The air smelled dank, coppery, old. He hugged himself to ward off the chill, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

The absolute silence alone was bitter and compressing!

Overhead, at the top of what looked like a twelve foot ceiling, was the 16th century answer to a skylight. Slivers of indirect moonlight made seeing possible, but only after his eyes had a chance to adjust to the lunar light.

He found a countertop, myriad candles. He felt through them, finding the longest, thickest one. He then fingered the wick, felt the stiffness in one and found it waxy, unburnt. He took that one, but knew in the bathroom he’d find no way to light it. He could see now, though, with the overhead light, so he moved around the room, not only to get a better idea of the space, but to find a door out of there.

He returned to the bathtub, stopped. The moon was directly overhead now, nearly full, and it provided direct light into the tub. Inside, rust colored stains looked thick and dry, but once heavy and viscous. Squinting his eyes, he peered deeper inside, then stood back in awe. It looked like entire cows had been slaughtered in there. The blood, however, was not of bovine descent as much as he knew The Countess preferred to bathe in the gore of young girls.

Hundreds of them.

Overhead, two giant meat hooks hung directly over the bathtub. This had his imagination spurring to life.

In his mind, he could see Countess Bathory now, luxuriating in a bathtub filled with the blood of the young, a child or two overhead, hanged upside down and gored, their life-force generously filling her tub.

Moving from the bathroom into the castle itself was daunting, even to him. The hallway was wide, bare stone and wooden floors, and the ceilings were inordinately tall and shrouded in so much darkness, his eyes had no chance to adjust. It took him the better part of an hour to find her, and only because he’d been fortunate to have enough moonlight cutting through enough windows to make his way to the kitchen where a constant fire burned, one he could use to light his candle.

The Countess Bathory had been caught.

The common folk who caught her had locked her in her own castle, bricked her into a room with a heavy door locked from the outside. Because she was royalty, her slaughter of more than six hundred girls earned her not a death sentence, but life confined to a prison cell inside her castle built specifically for her. The guard assigned to watch over the imprisoned countess was asleep. He was snoring heavily, as if he’d found his way into the otherworld of night at the bottom of a few pints of local ale.

The keys to a heavy wooden door sat on the table beside him.

Adolf collected them slowly, silently. The guard’s snoring stopped and he shifted in his seat. Adolf was prepared to end the man’s life if needed, but he did not want the struggle.

The heavy breathing returned, the snoring, the open-mouth noise making.

Adolf moved forward, sliding the big metal key into the wooden door’s oversized lock. The hanging mechanism sprung open easily. Quietly throwing the latch, his hand pressed to the iron to muffle his entry, Adolf opened the door, taking the big lock inside with him. No sense in risking capture like that.

Ever so quietly, he eased the door shut behind him.

The Countess was asleep on the floor, her body in mild disrepair. A thrill shot through him at the sight of her, at the labored sounds of her breathing.

To be here with her, as I live and breathe!

He was a bit star struck. As an avid student of history’s most notorious mass murderers, Adolf considered this moment to be one of the most exciting highlights of his very, very long life.

As quiet as he could be, he sat down on the cold, hardwood floor next to this enchanting murderess. Could she really be history’s first vampire? Even if she wasn’t, she’d been graced with the honorary title of the world’s first female serial killer, and that in itself was thrilling!

To Adolf, she was a legend, something to behold. She did not have legions of men and women spanning an entire continent put to death as he had, but she was no slouch either. The woman knew what she wanted and she took it.

As a member of high nobility, The Countess was not only given the castle, she was given the seventeen surrounding villages as well. From her kingdom, she lured young girls inside where she slayed them, bathed in their blood and drank them like wine, all with the idea of preserving her beauty, her vitality.

Though modern day men and women believe in the buoyancy of youth—so much so that drinking the blood of the young is thought to not only preserve but even restore their own youth and vitality—Elizabeth Bathory was simply mad with bloodlust. In studying her methodology, he believed the kill was every bit as important as the spoils of such a routine conquest.

He brushed her uncut hair over her face, studied her sleeping form. The way the candlelight flickered off the walls and off her pale skin made this new version of Adolf Hitler simmer with lust. He roared with need not for her body—a body now withering away—but for the power of a child in possession of both his and her DNA. Slowly, he rolled the woman on her back. Several times she stirred, but did not wake.

Quietly he undid his belt, removed the clothes below his waist, then hiked up The Countess’s dress to reveal a sophistication of old underpants he barely understood. In a sudden rush of force, he tore them down, then clamped a hand over her mouth and set himself upon her.

The struggle—at first unwanted by The Countess—became an effort she finally fell into rhythm with. How long had she been denied human contact? When was the last time she’d had a man make love to her? By his study of history, it had been entirely too long. When he was done, as she lay her head back on the ground, spent, he wondered if they would have connected so well in current times. Looking up, the swell of her breasts still rising and falling from the exertion, she said something to him in her native tongue, something he didn’t understand. For a moment, she seemed enchanted, almost grateful for the contact.

He sat up, crawled over the top of her, then punched her in the face with all his might. Her head jolted sideways and sat unmoving on the floor. As she lay there, unconscious, blood drizzling from her left nostril and trickling down her face, he fixed her clothes, then stopped and briefly gasped at the sight of her.

Scurrying away backwards on palms and heels, he could barely find his breath.

My God, he thought, it’s true!

Only after a moment or two, when he was sure she would not awaken, he crawled on hands and knees toward her face, specifically to her hung-open mouth and the rows of fangs contained within. Had she physically sharpened her teeth like that, or had they gone to points for him just now?

“Vampire,” he whispered in his German tongue, more thrilled than horrified. He never imagined the rumors could possibly be true. For a second, he wondered if Aloysius was like this. If these genes transferred to him as will.

Was he a vampire?

Aloysius never liked the sun, but he could be in it. And though he was moody as hell, Adolf never dealt with issues of bloodlust or hunger.

Unless he hid them…

Adolf put his clothes back on, then slipped out of the prison cell, locked the door and returned the keys to the guard who had dutifully slept through it all.

Outside in the castle’s main hall, where he knew his leaving would not disturb the guard, he accessed his time travel dash board, entered in the time and coordinates for nearly nine months from now. Moments later he was stolen from this time and returned with force to the very same place, nearly nine months later.

* * *

Adolf Hitler, in his original form, appeared in a room full of people with a riotously loud entry. Adolf appraised his surroundings. By his count, there were six or seven or eight women and a pair of men. They all reeled from his sudden, boisterous appearance. No one said a word. They couldn’t speak. They just stood there, aghast.

Adolf strolled over to the table that looked like it was being prepared for a feast, grabbed a knife beside an overflowing plate of various cuts of meat, then charged the two men first before running down the women moments later.

When he had slaughtered them all, he sat down on the floor, legs weak, chest heaving, practically hyperventilating from exhaustion.

Looking around, the place was washed in gore. There were dead people everywhere, splayed out, eyes open but glazed over. Somewhere along the way, in the struggle, his shirt had torn open and he now wore three sets of bloody fingernail trails, the long lines of self-defense raking down his face and arms, his exposed chest.

Invigorated, his heart rate finally slowing, he lay down on the floor, his head resting on an arm. He pushed it away, lie next to the last dead woman. It didn’t matter that he was lying in her blood, that it smelled rich with copper, that it was intoxicating and revolting at the same time. All that mattered was that he’d won.

He didn’t look at her, but she was slumped over sideways with a butcher’s knife sticking out of her throat.

When he finally had the strength to climb to his feet, he retrieved the knife, then found his way to Countess Bathory’s cell. At first he wandered through the various hallways looking for something familiar, a landmark from last time, but it was the distant sounds of mewling he eventually followed.

Ah, the sounds of a woman in labor!

Splendid.

Adolf crept down the hallway, past the bricked up room that held The Countess captive, and to the wide open door. He couched low, kept himself out of sight. He stole a look inside the room, quickly, sparingly.

He spotted two guards and a midwife inside.

The guards remained oblivious to him, their downcast eyes taking in The Countess’s overgrowth of pubic hair, and her nudity. Taking three deep breaths, Adolf readied himself, then he stood and charged the larger of the two men, knife clutched in hand and ready to fight to the death.

The knife found its way into the man’s throat in spite of the Grizzly bear beard he wore. The two of them went down hard, but Hitler spun out of it, rolling fast to his feet and ripping the blade free. He then launched himself at the other guard, aiming for his throat but catching the man in the collar instead. The knife struck bone, twisted sideways, failed to reach anything vital, much less an organ or two.

The beating that followed was unlike anything Hitler had ever experienced. He was the Führer! No one dare lay a hand on him! Yet the guard laid hands and feet upon him both in a fury and without mercy. For a second he thought he would die there, in that castle, in the Countess’s prison cell on the day of his son’s birth.

Would they even know who he was?

Would they care?

No.

Here, he was not the Führer, he thought as he sustained blow after brutal blow. This was the 1600’s and he was just a maniac with a knife.

A man yet to be born.

This man, this guard, he pummeled Adolf over and over again, cracking bones in his face, breaking bones in his arms and legs, punching apart his ribcage. His body was howling in agony while at the same time getting overrun with a blast furnace heat: Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum. The heat alone told Adolf the serum was working diligently in his body, making his recovery quick.

Unfortunately it was not quick enough.

The man finally stopped hitting him, exhausted. Adolf was laid out on the floor, his face busted all over, blood splattered everywhere, arms and legs and fingers broken, his ribcage in tatters. The guard assumed he was dead. No one could survive that. But Adolf Hitler could.

And he did.

He laid there quietly, playing dead for longer than he wanted. The guard pulled the knife from his collar, buried it just under Adolf’s own collar bone with a grunt of satisfaction. Adolf masked the pain. He waited. When enough time had passed—when his body had the time it needed to get him ready for round two—he opened his eyes and quietly got to his feet. His skin was still burning with the heat of healing and agitation bellowed in his heart.

Slowly, he removed the blade stuck inside him, wincing as he tore back the flesh that had healed all around the blade. Adolf wrapped up the last guard from behind, drove the knife down into his chest, twisting and turning and yanking it out, then twisting and turning some more.

The man was trying to grab him, and then the knife, but Adolf jerked the blade out and stabbed him over and over again before the he staggered forward and finally dropped first to a knee, and then down flat on his face.

Adolf stood there, huffing, hurting. He turned to The Countess who was now screaming in pain both from labor and fear. The midwife was sobbing, not hiding her obvious fear. She couldn’t seem to decide whether to run for her life or continue trying to deliver The Countess’s baby. The Vampire Bathory sounded like a dying cow with her knees propped up and her bedclothes collected around her waist. Her wet, frantic eyes went from her knees to her midwife to Adolf. She was trapped, helpless, vulnerable.

When Adolf flung the blood off the blade and stalked over to the two women, Countess Bathory pointed an accusatory finger and hissed one word, a word he knew in spite of not knowing her language.

“You!”

Kicking the midwife out of the way, Adolf sliced open Elizabeth’s swollen belly amidst her struggle and amidst her strain, and he found the child.

In seconds the boy was cradled in his arms, the umbilical cord crudely sliced, the afterbirth a slimy coating he had no time to remove. From his pocket, he pulled out a time travel device, swallowed it, and then he entered in his return time and location. He couldn’t wait to be swallowed from this barbaric world.

Before he left, he had the joy of seeing The Countess Bathory in the final throes of death. In his arms, the child was in the middle of a hiccupping/crying jag that was murder on Adolf’s ears. Looking down, he showed Elizabeth their shrieking child, then said one word, the most important word: “Aloysius.”

Her mouth opened, a labored gasp.

Adolf stared down coldly upon her, and then he stomped on the side of her head before being sucked out of that timeline.

The second he arrived back at the lab, the baby was dead as Adolf feared he would be. It wasn’t an easy trip, even for him—a grown man in the height of his youth. For a baby, he couldn’t imagine.

Holland readied the crash cart, immediately went to work reviving the child. Traveling had suffocated him. Within moments, however, young Aloysius was breathing again. By that time, the grown Aloysius was in the lab, alive and well, overseeing everything.

Adolf looked up at him and said, “This is you, my son.”

The child was a filthy thing—the umbilical chord cut an inch too long and sticking out like some eyeless, sackless dick. The alien-looking afterbirth cloaking the child’s squirming body gave a less than savory first impression. The child was crying though, which meant he was alive.

At least there was that.

Aloysius put his hands over his ears and then to his father, he said, “Get this…child…cleaned up and meet me in the other room. We have many things to discuss.”

In his native tongue, Adolf Hitler, the Führer, looked up at his son and said, “I would caution you to use a less direct tone with me. You’re a driven man, admirably so, but I am still your father.”

Aloysius stopped, thought about it, then continued on, not a word of acknowledgement to the man.

Chapter Eight

After returning from New York and saying good-bye to Savannah at the San Francisco airport, Raven caught a cab to Netty’s place. She took the elevator to her friend’s floor, started to knock, but stopped herself just before her knuckles hit the door.

She took a deep breath.

Technically she would have been there less than a year ago, but in her reality, it was more like seventy years.

Using her heightened senses, just to make sure, she read the energy signatures inside the apartment.

There were two females.

She relaxed the minute she recognized the swirling energy of her friend. Raven knocked on the door lightly. Netty answered. Netty, her best friend who had not seen this new version of her. Instead of smiling, the Russian looked her up and down, then frowned.

Okay…

“Another perfect girl,” Netty finally said. Raven felt the weight of her friend’s sour mood. Sadly, she expected this.

“Genetically speaking, yes,” Raven replied.

“All these perfect girls are making me suspicious,” Netty said, letting her in. Raven shut the door behind her, saw Irenka sitting on the couch, pregnant, beautiful, relaxed.

In a casual, almost dismissive tone, Netty said, “This is my mother, Irenka, but since you’ve come from the great cosmic egg, I’m sure you know that.”

She didn’t bother to introduce Raven by name, but then again Netty didn’t know it, so Raven really couldn’t blame her for being such a butthole about the whole affair.

“Hello, Irenka. I’m Raven,” she said. “Raven Swann.”

That caustic energy swirling around Netty seemed to peter out for a second, the air between them settling into a perfect stillness. You could feel it—that tension turning to understanding. Slowly the Russian girl turned to look at her. The encumbrance of her gaze bore a cold, substantial weight.

It was a small admission her friend recognized, a pseudo-confirmation that put her bitch fit on pause. In Netty’s eyes, Raven saw understanding, but she also saw hurt and the sting of betrayal. The emotion surprised Raven, left her feeling more uncomfortable than she already felt.

She loved Netty.

She loved her and never wanted to hurt her, but she did. And why wouldn’t she have hurt her? Netty felt abandoned by her. Because she had abandoned her friend. No denying that.

Irenka shook Raven’s hand and offered a polite smile. Otherwise she remained on the couch, one hand on her pregnant belly, rubbing it slowly, lovingly the way an expectant mother would.

“Can we talk in your room?” she turned and said to Netty.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, flummoxed. “I’d say follow me, but you know exactly where my room is, don’t you?”

“It’s not that hard to figure out,” Raven replied. “Living quarters up front, bedrooms and bathrooms at the back.”

“Look who’s the architectural genius,” she quipped. This was snarky Netty. This was about-to-lash-out Netty.

Raven knew her friend was harboring old suspicions. As a deep weariness took shape inside Netty’s mind, Raven felt the young Russian gearing up for a fight. She could only imagine what was coming next. Knowing Netty, she would either deliver a profanity-laced tongue lashing or an immediate dismissal followed by the kind of silent treatment Raven thought of more as a long winter than a short-lived retribution.

Netty stalked into her room, plopped down on her bed, folded her arms and said, “Tell me everything, and if you lie to me, if you withhold anything, this will be the last conversation we ever have as friends.”

“You’re rather sharp for meeting me for the first time,” Raven said, sitting down on the bed a few feet away from her friend.

“My mother and I are not getting along.”

“The pregnancy?”

“Her boyfriend. She wants us to move in with him. I said I’m staying here. We’re two Russians in a Mexican standoff over an Italian man and a bastard child.”

An unexpected giggle escaped Raven.

“This is the cute one with the Bugatti, right?” Raven asked. Netty’s face went slack, her body completely still. “Is it because he’s hot AF, or because she has her baby and you lost yours?”

Netty’s face became a gathering storm. “You were never this direct before, Savannah.”

No longer feigning pretense, Raven said, “Yes, but that’s before my DNA was hijacked and I became…everything you see now and so much more. It’s the ‘so much more’ part I haven’t told you about. Not because I don’t trust you, or love you, but because I think once I tell you what has been done to me, the things I’ve done, you might not want to be my friend anymore and that would kill me.”

“After my baby was taken—”

“Yours and Brayden’s,” Raven corrected.

She swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“Go on.”

“I realized whatever it was you’d become, it was affecting more than just you. Our entire school is dead, Savannah. Sensei is…” She abruptly stopped speaking. Fresh tears gathered in her eyes and she seemed to go someplace else.

“Broken,” Raven softly whispered. “I know. I healed him though. Physically. But mentally, I told him he couldn’t give up because even though they’re all gone, you and I are not.”

“Does he know you’re…you?” Netty asked, wiping her eyes.

“He does.”

“Why?”

“Sensei is intuitive on a level I’ve never seen before. He doesn’t just see me. He sees my expressions, my nuances, the way I walk, talk and fight. He is not fooled by outward appearances.”

“He’s probably only seen three perfect people in his life: you, you and you.”

“You had your inklings,” Raven said.

“Of course.”

“Yet you didn’t talk to me?”

“Why didn’t you talk to me?” Netty shot back. “Why do you think I kept beating on you at school? I wanted you to talk to me!”

“I was going to, but then I learned you were pregnant with Brayden’s baby and that really shocked me. That’s why I barely hit you back.”

She looked down, then away.

“That’s it?” Raven asked. “You just look away as if you have nothing to say for yourself?”

“I can fuck who I want, when I want and I don’t need anyone’s permission.”

Netty’s brash tone, complimented by her ability to so recklessly drop f-bombs (even though it sounded kind of cute and sassy coming from her), never failed to move Raven. She cleared her throat, vowed to be the bigger person.

“He was your first,” Raven said.

“And my last,” she said, “as of this moment.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to have another Chloe moment. Because being a pseudo-lesbo wasn’t the answer to boy problems then and I doubt it will be now.”

She made a face, glared hard at Raven.

Raven scooted closer to her. She felt Netty’s energy open up, fold around her, almost like a cocoon. She put her arms around her Russian friend. Netty sat stiff for a moment, fighting her hardheaded instincts, but just as Raven knew she would, Netty put her arms around her and let herself be held.

The tug and pull at her heart, the sudden well of emotion, Raven knew what was coming next.

“You left me,” she whispered.

“I was protecting you,” Raven replied. “I was looking out for you, trying to keep you safe.”

“It didn’t work, did it?” Netty said, her voice choked with so much emotion.

The problem with knowing what people were feeling is too often you knew how they were feeling, too. Raven learned early on to tread lightly around other people’s emotions, specifically their more intoxicating emotions. More often than not, they’d accidentally become hers. Like now. She felt the nudging of those feelings bumping against her, blossoming inside her.

Netty’s pain lanced her, tried to grab hold of her. Netty lost her baby. She still lost her best friend, her entire school, her sensei. If not for her mother, whom she was losing to Dante and their baby, she would have lost everything.

“Things aren’t always going to work out,” Raven said, “but we have to have each other. None of us is an island, Netty. I think once you hear me out, you’ll see that I tried to be an island for the sake of protecting others, but it didn’t work.”

“So what are you saying?” Netty asked, suddenly cold, the edges of her words frosted over and jagged.

“We need each other. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Just saying that made her friend start to pull away. Netty was wired to not need anyone, to not be weak, needy or dependent. She was pulling away for all the wrong reasons, which only made Raven want to try harder. The girl could run a deep freeze like no other. Under those brittle edges, however, was a girl who just wanted to be loved, cherished and protected.

But wasn’t that what all of them needed?

“Netty, please. I love you, you’re my sister,” Raven pleaded. “Actually, you’re more than that, so please don’t shut me out.”

Raven felt Netty’s tears coming about the same time hers were coming. Something in the girl finally broke. Letting go of everything, she turned her head into Raven and hugged her, putting her chin on Raven’s shoulder as her petite body trembled and shook.

“Everything went bad when you left,” she said, half sniffling, half crying.

Raven heard her friend, but it wasn’t the words that shattered her, it was the profound emotion behind them. Netty’s father went to jail, she had her first love, her first pregnancy, her first forced miscarriage. Her mother cheated on her father with a guy she was crushing on who quickly got her pregnant and now Irenka wanted to move them in with him. Netty couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t. Not when she was so incredibly attracted to Dante she felt constantly jealous of her mother.

“We need each other,” Raven whispered again, her words almost hypnotic.

“I know,” Netty said, sitting up, wiping her eyes and straightening her short blonde hair.

“Netty, if I tell you everything that’s happened to me, will you please at least hear me out?”

Her friend didn’t move. The stillness in her was a spark of indecision. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not Netty would listen. What Raven was really asking for (and Netty knew this) was that she consider the possibility of forgiveness. That, of course, meant Netty would have to let go of the past and be vulnerable once more for the sake of starting anew.

Netty couldn’t take anymore hurt. She could no longer harbor that debilitating feeling of betrayal from the one person who mattered most to her.

“Netty, please,” Raven implored, her emotions teeming once more. She took her friend’s hand, cradled it. “You’re my best friend, my oldest friend, and the way it looks, we might be all we have right now.”

She gently pulled her hand back and folded her arms. Then, turning those impossibly blue eyes on Raven, she said, “Okay then, I’m listening.”

Raven proceeded to tell her everything, leaving nothing out. Well, almost nothing. She didn’t tell her about two other versions of herself being in this timeline. And she didn’t tell her about Brayden being August. That was not her secret to reveal.

An hour passed before Raven finally stopped talking. Netty interrupted only a few times to ask questions, but then she was done and the two girls just sat there, dry-eyed and staring at each other. Yeah, it was like that. Netty finally blew out a breath and released all the tension she’d been holding in her neck and shoulders.

“I’m going to tell my mother you’re moving in,” Netty finally said. “I’m going to tell her I’m staying and she can go live with Dante. That we’re old enough to be on our own.”

“I certainly am,” Raven joked. Netty laughed half-heartedly, but Raven knew she was still processing everything and it would hit her in waves over the next few days. It’s not every day you hear such outlandish tales from a person who actually lived them.

In fact, it’s never that day.

“Are you working right now?” Netty asked. “Like, do you have a job or something?”

“I have money. Enough to pay the rent until you finish school. Do you really think your mother will let us live here without her supervision?”

“I think so. It’s just…the rent is a lot.”

“Netty,” Raven said, taking her hands, “I have more than enough money, and I have investments that grow monthly, which means you don’t have to worry about money. Just finish school and we’ll talk about what’s next for you. College or a job…it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is we’ll figure it out, if that’s what you want.”

Slowly, not taking her eyes off Raven, she nodded her head.

“We have to talk to your mother, though,” Raven said.

“It’ll be okay,” Netty said. “Remember when we had fake ID’s and she was mostly concerned with us getting caught?”

“She looked at mine for days,” Raven said, grinning.

“Yeah…like I said. I think it’ll be alright.”

* * *

“Absolutely not!” Irenka said, sitting up.

“Absolutely so,” Netty retorted.

Raven sat in the middle of the discussion, which wasn’t terribly comfortable. “I can step outside, if you’d like,” she said.

“No,” Irenka replied. “You want to live here, you can sit and be a part of this discussion.”

“I don’t need to live here,” I interjected, “I simply thought I could take over the lease and Netty could stay here and let you have your privacy with Dante. There’s no greater love than the first love shared between a new couple, especially one who is expecting, and I figure this was the best way to honor your relationship.”

“Cut the crap,” Irenka said, flashing her a look.

“It’s either this or live with my family,” Raven said, undeterred. “My parents and I get along best when I’m on my own, if you catch my drift.”

“What kind of trouble will you be getting in to?” Irenka asked, turning her full attention to Raven.

“None, actually,” Raven answered.

“You are two beautiful girls,” she mused. “Trouble is going to come after you no matter your intentions.”

If only she knew…

“I’m a writer, Irenka. A novelist. Any trouble I get in to will be on the pages of a book, not in real life. I mean look at me, I’m too delicate even for me.”

In the corner, I hear Netty cough out a laugh.

“What?” Irenka asks, shooting her daughter a fiery look.

“There was a boy at a club giving us a hard time. He was aggressive and beyond unpleasant, and he was very grabby,” Netty said.

Raven bumped off her mind and realized she was talking about the two boys who tried to rape her before Chloe intervened, the two boys they later saw in a club that Raven put down when she was Abby.

“Raven punched one of them in the face and dropped the other with an elbow. If trouble plans on finding us, believe me when I tell you, it’s in for a surprise.”

“Wasn’t that someone else who did that? One of your other friends?”

“Raven was there, too. She’s a student of Sensei Naygel’s as well, and a friend.”

“Like I said, trouble.”

“Says the woman with the baby in her belly and the boyfriend half her age,” Netty quipped.

Uh oh…

“The decisions I make—”

Netty held up her hand and said, “Just stop. Be quiet for one second. I have an arrangement we can come to.”

This suddenly had all the flavor of a mafia movie, but Raven held her tongue and let Netty do her thing. Irenka, on the other had, folded her arms, took a laborious breath and scowled, waiting…

“Netty, don’t—” Raven said, suddenly realizing what her friend was about to do.

She looked at Raven, knowing her friend could read her mind and she said, “It’s the only way.”

Raven sat back, closed her mouth, not agreeing with what was coming but unable to stop it either.

Back to her mother, Netty said, “Either you move in with Dante and let me and Raven stay here or I will march right down to San Quentin and tell daddy exactly what’s going on. You think you can pretend the baby is mine when he gets out, but I will tell you right now, I’ll tell him about you and Dante, and about your baby.”

“That is preposterous!” Irenka snapped. Raven saw it in her face, though, in her features and in her feelings. The woman was painted into a corner and she knew it. “You are an uncivilized child. To go and hurt your father like that, over a tiff, a negotiation, speaks very little of your character.”

“What are you going to name your child?” Netty countered.

“Fine, fine, I agree,” she relented between gritted teeth. Then: “This is not an ideal situation, but there is no need for threats. Especially ones as pointed as these.”

“Can I add something?” Raven asked. Both sets of eyes flashed her way. “What is the one thing you’re most worried about with Netty?”

“Her getting pregnant,” she said without hesitation. “Again.”

“That won’t happen,” Netty said.

“Until it does,” Irenka responded. Motioning to her belly, she said, “Do you think I expected this?”

“She can get pregnant whether you live together or not. I’m a responsible person, Irenka. I’ll take care of the bills, the rent and the food. Netty will only have to focus on school. We’ll continue with karate, if Sensei wants, and on occasion we will use our fake ID’s to go to clubs, drink a little, meet boys who we may or may not make out with. But we will not bring them home, nor will we let them get us pregnant because neither of us wants that.”

“I don’t want that,” Netty said.

“I don’t want that for you,” Irenka added, “at least until it’s from a boy you love.”

“Do you love Dante?” Raven asked.

“I am infatuated with him. How he looks, how he takes care of me, how he loves me. So yes, I suppose in some sort of grown up way, I am.”

“What about daddy?”

“He made choices that put our family at risk. He left me alone, with you, without enough money to maintain our former life. I was humiliated. Desperate. Now I am not. The man I’m with is not a criminal, and he is not so unruly that he’s difficult to love.”

“I’ll make sure Netty is taken care of, and she can come and stay with you whenever you want. Likewise, you can always come back here if you need to. In fact, we can keep the lease in your name, so if circumstances ever become too difficult, or you need time alone, you will be giving up neither your freedom nor your independence.”

Now she looked at Raven and there was a measure of agreement in her eyes. “I think I can live with that,” she finally said. Then to her daughter: “Netty?”

“I won’t get pregnant, and I’ll finish school with good grades.”

* * *

Now that she had a place to stay, she headed over to the dojo looking for Sensei. Raven found him cleaning, the dojo’s signs torn down.

“I don’t know how to feel seeing you,” he said.

“I understand.”

“Should I hate you for bringing this to me, or thank you for healing me when I should be dead right now.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“They cleared me of all charges, put the story in the paper, painted me out to be a victim, which they thought would absolve me of the stain of guilt, but it just made me look weak. I let my whole school die.”

“Not everyone reads the papers or watches the news anymore since mostly it seems full of shit these days, or too negative. You’ll start with two students, me and Netty. And from there we will rebuild.”

“I can’t pay the rent on this place without students,” he said.

“I’ll cover the rent until you get on your feet.”

“What can I teach you that you don’t already know about self-defense?” he asks, taking a long hard look at her.

He’s still undecided: should he let her help, or should he throw her out of his life for good? Bumping off his mind, he’s thinking she’s the darkness that converged upon his otherwise well founded life, and he has yet to resolve this dilemma in his head. Yet at his heart, she knew he still liked and appreciated her.

“You can teach me meditation, and possibly forgiveness,” she said. “By the way things are looking, we’re both going to need it.”

Chapter Nine

Elizabeth strolls into Sebastian’s surf shop, sees him and smiles. The very sight of him stills her beating heart, filling her mind with rich memories of them enjoying each other. Sebastian smiles back, but it’s a bit hesitant. Like he’s not sure how to act or behave. She could already tell what he was thinking. He was remembering New York. Mostly, however, Sebastian was thinking about Raven and Elizabeth telling him about the future, telling him they were the same person.

When he left New York to head back to California, he said he’d be with Elizabeth, but since then Elizabeth knew he’d been wondering what he was getting himself in to. Elizabeth was hoping now that he’d seen her, now that she had come back for him, he’d feel more resolved.

“Hey baby,” she said, grinning.

Just then, Corrine popped out from the back shop. Her smile became a frown. Elizabeth knew she was there, but that didn’t deter her.

She’d have to deal with the girl one way or another.

“Hi Corrine,” she said.

Corrine crossed her arms, frowned harder.

“Oh come on now,” Elizabeth said, “don’t be two years old here. We can all be adults about this.”

“You didn’t spend years with him,” she said. “But I did.”

“Yes, but you cheated, too, and that wasn’t right,” she said. Corrine’s face dropped, like a bomb was about to go off. Elizabeth wanted to stop it. “I’m not judging, or trying to flip the bitch card here, I’m just saying sometimes when things are bad but there’s no clean break, you do things like hook up with other people when what you should have done was take time apart, or cut it off.”

“I don’t really want to talk about this,” Sebastian said.

“You need to decide,” Corrine said to him, dropping the ultimatum. “Her or me.”

The very air around them changed, grew heavy, began to sour. Elizabeth didn’t like where this was going, but she also knew it needed to go there.

“I don’t think it’s that easy of a conversation,” he said, looking from her to Elizabeth. He failed to hide the sheepish look on his face. Elizabeth did her best not to judge him, but she was kinda irked by Corrine.

“It’s that kind of bullshit that drove him away in the first place,” Elizabeth heard herself say. “You go and cheat, then come back when he’s been with me and act like yours is the great, untold love story.”

“Don’t act like you know me,” Corrine said.

“Actually,” she said, pulling back, “I want to offer you a peace offering.”

“You’re going to head back to New York?”

“No, I’m staying here with Sebastian. Whether you want to come here and be sweet, act like the girlfriend you never really were and then slap down an ultimatum or not doesn’t matter. The second you let another man take you, you tore his heart out. He told you that, but you thought there was a way back. There isn’t.”

“Now you’re going to be his everything?” she said, crossing her arms, giving Elizabeth that challenging, bitchy look.

“My peace offering is a new chance at love.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going to find you a guy, so you can leave me in peace with mine.”

“I haven’t said I will be with you,” Sebastian said.

“You don’t need to,” she said. “I can already see in your face what you want. You should just tell her already and get it over with.”

Corrine looked at him and said, “Is this true?”

Painfully, with a heavy heart, he turned and looked at Corrine. Elizabeth saw it all. Felt it. He wanted to tell her the truth, but he was afraid of what she’d do, how she’d act, what she’d feel. He still cared about her. Elizabeth didn’t blame him. He had a different plan for her than she had for him.

“Yes,” he said.

Now Elizabeth watched the defiant girl become the bruised girl, the wounded girl, the dejected girl.

“Is it because she’s better looking than me?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s because you cheated.”

“I know it was wrong, but that’s what helped me realize I want to be with just you. Not just as boyfriend and girlfriend, but for life.”

Corrine was talking about marriage, and though Elizabeth knew she wasn’t lying about how she felt and what she found, it was affecting Sebastian. This made him think about what he’d wanted for them, about their life together. He turned and looked at Elizabeth with an aggrieved look in his eye.

Holy crap, she thought. Am I losing him?

Elizabeth was thinking she could be the hottest girl ever, she could be the best sex ever, and she could give him everything he ever wanted, but she couldn’t take away the years he and Corrine spent together. And he couldn’t remove his history. Well, she could if she wanted to erase their minds, but that would be cheating and she wasn’t going to be that kind of a girl.

“Well I’m a bit hungry, so I’m gonna grab a sandwich and a soda,” Elizabeth said. “If you want to sort things out with her, I’ll be at a table, by myself.”

She started to walk out of the surf when Sebastian said, “Wait.”

Elizabeth stopped, purposely working not to invade his thoughts. She just stared at him as he took a deep, stabilizing breath.

“I spent years of my life being in love with you,” Sebastian said to Corrine. “You were beautiful and fun, and we got a long so well that sometimes I can’t remember being in love with anything as much as I was in love with you.”

He looked at Elizabeth then, leaving Corrine standing there, blushing, her eyes moist with emotion, some of that emotion arguable guilt.

“And you,” he said to Elizabeth. “My God, where do I start?”

“With you approaching me,” she said.

“My heart stopped when I saw you. I saw you and knew I needed you.”

“Even though you had me?” Corrine asked, discretely wiping her eyes. Elizabeth’s heart was hurting for the girl. Still, she wanted to tell her not to interrupt. Choosing her battles, not trying to be cruel, Elizabeth decidedly kept her mouth shut.

“Someone else had you by then,” he admitted. “That destroyed me.” Looking back to Elizabeth, he said, “I knew there was something special about you the moment I saw you, and now that I’ve spent some time with you, I have to say I’m terrified to be with you.”

“Why?”

“You are everything I want, everything I can’t ever be. You’re twice the success story a beach rat like me will ever be. Two times,” he said, holding up two fingers. One for Raven, the other for Elizabeth.

“I get it.”

“You’ll never measure up to her,” Corrine said, crossing her arms again.

He turned to her and said, “No, Corrine, you’ll never measure up to her. You’re good, but she’s better, nicer, more…exciting. Plus she’s better in bed.”

“Sebastian,” Elizabeth said, “don’t be cruel.”

“She won’t ever stop,” he said, looking at Elizabeth. “That’s her thing. The charm will cripple me, us. I want to be with you, but she has her hooks in me and I need them out.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” she said.

“And if she feels like she has one finger on me,” he continued, unabated, “just one tiny connection, she will not stop until she gets what she wants.”

“You’re making me look like a monster,” Corrine said, her eyes flooding uncontrollably now with the pain of their break up.

To Corrine, he said, “But I don’t want that anymore. I want you to take Elizabeth up on her promise. I want you to let her find you someone else.”

Wiping her eyes, she turned to Elizabeth and said, “And how do you think you’ll do that?”

“If you can believe it,” Elizabeth said, “I want to get to know you. Find out what you like in a boy, what you want in a man. And then, when I understand that, I’ll introduce you to someone right for you. From there it’s up to you to be his smoking hot everything.”

Wiping her eyes again, she looked at Sebastian for a long time. Then she walked up to him, pulled him into a hug and kissed him fiercely on his neck. When she let him go, she headed straight for Elizabeth.

“Alright,” she said, looking sideways at Elizabeth as she walked by. “You win.”

With that, Corrine left Sebastian and Elizabeth standing there alone in the shop. She looked at him and he looked at her, and then he said, “It is Elizabeth, right?”

“We’re all the same person at different points in our life, which means there’s only one me. It wouldn’t matter if I was Elizabeth, Raven or Savannah. We’re all just us.

“Savannah?”

Shit.

“Yeah,” she said sheepishly, “Savannah is the most current version of me.”

“Did I meet her?”

“Yeah, when she was Raven.”

“But you’re not Raven or Savannah?”

“I’m both, but I’m not. Just call me Elizabeth because that name is as real as Raven’s, and Savannah was my birth name, but not Savannah Swann.”

He pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the mouth, slow, tender, not like someone intensely in need of human affection. More like someone who has fallen in love and knows it, but wants to walk lightly so as not to ruin it all if it’s just a dream.

“It’s not a dream,” she said when he pulled away.

“It feels like it,” he said. “I’m hungry, but not for food.”

“Are you talking about sex?” she said with a grin.

“You know I am.”

“How old are you at this point in time?” he asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

“I do.”

“A touch older than you,” she teased.

“How much of a touch?” he pushed.

“This much of a touch,” she said, trailing a finger down his chest, over his abs. Then: “This much of a touch, too.” She ran her finger over his business, eliciting a grin from him. She turned and with her mind, she flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and pulled the drapes. She did a quick scan of the building with her mind and found it empty, as she suspected.

“Um, how…”

“With age comes experience,” Elizabeth said as she undid his belt. He was wondering if this was all still a dream, so she said, “Still not a dream.”

And then she pulled down his boxers and right there in the middle of his surf shop, she showed him the value of an experienced woman without telling him she was nearly ninety years old.

* * *

When she finished showing Sebastian why she had been the right choice of women for him, when she watched him fix himself while thoroughly satiated at the same time, she said, “You go finish whatever you were doing when I came and interrupted, and I’ll go and grab us some sandwiches.”

“If I told you I loved you right now,” he said, red cheeked and out of breath, “would you think it improper?”

“If you said it,” she replied, giddy and pleased, “I’d believe it.”

“I love you.”

“You love what I can do for you,” she said, twisting a lock of her hair.

“I do,” he said, blushing.

She pulled a pack of gum from her purse, offered him a piece, which he took, then put one in her mouth and said, “If that truly is the case, then you’re going to love me even more tonight.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Because tonight I’m going to give you your first heart attack,” she said, moving in on him. Hand on his abs, fingertips pressed lightly against him, she took his ear into her mouth and said, “I’m going to fuck you out of this life and into the next.”

Breaking into gooseflesh, he turned and kissed her, and then—nearly breathless—he said, “If I wasn’t so scared of what you could do, I’d think that was the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“It is the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to you. And you are scared. But by night’s end, that little morsel of love in your heart—that unexpected yet delightful protestation of love you mentioned a moment ago—oh, baby…tonight you’re going to explode into a shimmering bliss the likes of which a mortal like you could never fathom.”

In his mind, he was exhilarated, thrilled beyond measure. All he could think was omigod, omigod, OMIGOD over and over again.

She gave his ear a nibble, finished with a nip, then said, “Now that I’ve got you ready again, I’m heading out for real this time.”

“Yeah,” he said, clearly rattled, but in a good way.

“Drink with your sandwich?”

“Large Pepsi, please.”

With some extra bounce in her step, she headed up the beach, grabbed their favorite sandwiches, but on her way back she saw her standing there: Corrine. The young bombshell seemed surprised to see Elizabeth, but that surprise fell into a frown that quickly bounced back up to a flat slash that was as neutral as it was emotionless.

Elizabeth stopped as Corrine walked over to her. Corrine came face to face with Elizabeth and said, “Did he mean it? What he said earlier?”

“Mean what?”

Elizabeth saw the pain etched into her features. “Did you guys…did you have sex already?”

“Of course, we did,” she said, concealing nothing.

This revelation hit Corrine hard; her eyes began tearing up again. After a moment, she composed herself and said, “He used to love sex with me.”

“I bet when you put your heart into it,” she said, “you’d be a great lay.”

Corrine blinked quickly, then stuttered a bit. “For a guy you mean?”

“You think a girl like me sticks to guys only?”

“You’ve been with girls?”

“Just one.”

“And?”

“She was like no one I’ve ever experienced before,” she said, holding Corrine’s judgmental eye without flinching. “It’s girls like her that keep the idea of girl crushes alive.”

“So you’re bisexual?”

“If you’re only playing half the field, you’re only getting half the action,” Elizabeth said.

“What does that mean?” she asked, clearly not getting it.

Elizabeth changed tact.

“Why does everyone feel the need to label everything? The second you slam down a judgement or a name or a label, you stop considering the fact that there’s more to an experience than what I could tell you about in seven words or less. I’m not bisexual. I love. And sometimes I like. Then there are those times when I make no judgments at all. I just go with it. Follow that unconventional path to wherever it leads.”

Looking away, she said, “Well I couldn’t do that.”

“It wasn’t the flesh that was so intoxicating,” Elizabeth heard herself saying, “it was the way she wanted me so badly, the way she looked at me, how she touched me. A guy could never do for you what a woman could. Men don’t exude that kind of sensuality. I swear, if you close your eyes and let your inhibitions fall away, sex with the right girl is the best drug you’ll ever take.”

“What if I want the D?”

“Your generation is too uptight,” she says.

“I just don’t eat pussy,” she told Elizabeth, almost like it was a slant.

Elizabeth laughed at the girl, who was now swimming in insecurity. “You really don’t get it, Corrine.”

“Maybe you could explain it to me,” she challenged.

Standing there, new memories unfolding in her head, it was almost as if the memory she had of her girl sex was new, even though it was in the past. Slowly the details of that night became clear. But then she thought of Sebastian. How the first time he’d peeled off his clothes and took to her, she’d been overwhelmed with need, intoxicated by lust. She’d smiled at the scents of sand and sunscreen, at the taste of his breath, how his hands were nearly impatient as he explored her for the first time.

Her eyes cleared, her body warmed by the memories.

“Some desserts you just have to eat for yourself,” Elizabeth finally said. “Do you want half my sandwich?”

She looked at Elizabeth and said, “What kind?”

“Vegetarian.”

“Okay, I guess,” she said. “I’m starving.”

“Let’s go grab a seat and eat together. I can eat with Sebastian later. Besides, he’s got more work to do, and I want to get to know you.”

As they sat on the beach shoulder to shoulder with their pants cuffed up over their ankles, their toes dug in the sand talking and eating, Elizabeth found she was starting to like the girl. There was something about her that was pretentious, but only because she was lost and didn’t want to show how vulnerable she was.

Corrine knew she made a mistake cheating on Sebastian. She knew she’d lost him after that. She was also a bit star struck being out here with her favorite author, even though for a moment or two as they were talking, Corrine also found herself getting pissed off that Elizabeth had not only stolen her man, she’d outdone her in bed.

When they were done eating, Corrine and said, “I appreciate you trying to hook me up with someone new, but I can get my own guy.”

“I know you can.”

“I just wish I wouldn’t have done what I did.”

Looking at her, feeling Corrine’s emotions like they were her own, Elizabeth felt an incredible sadness. For a second there she almost felt bad for taking Sebastian. But then she remembered that Corrine brought this on herself.

“I understand I’m the last person you’d ever want to be friends with, or confide in, or even hang out with,” Elizabeth said, “but if you ever feel like you want to not be enemies, maybe we could hang out. Girls only, no boy talk—that sort of thing.”

Corrine turned and looked at her a long time, and then she looked away. She started nodding slowly, like she was trying on the idea and not hating the absolute shit out of it just yet. When she laid her eyes back on Elizabeth, there was a surrender in Corrine’s expression, a non-verbal proclamation, the look that said she knew she’d been beaten, that she knew she couldn’t win this war.

It doesn’t have to be a war…

“I don’t need your pity,” Corrine said, “but I also know I brought this on myself. I’m going to be the big girl here and apologize for being rude to you.”

“You broke his heart, Corrine.”

She looked down, ashamed. Elizabeth sensed her pulling away, so she leaned against her shoulder, slid an arm around her and pulled her close. A tear dripped from her eye. She wiped it, but it was too late. They’d already started up again. Within seconds, she began to fall apart under the weight of her sadness.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Elizabeth said softly.

“I still love him,” she said, wiping her eyes. She reached up, took Elizabeth’s hand and said, “but I suppose that doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Honey, I’m the queen of having to live with bad, painful decisions.”

Looking up, her eyes wet, red and desperate, she said, “Does it ever get any easier?”

“For me, no I’m afraid not. But for you? I’d say yes.”

Elizabeth reached out and wiped a tear from her cheek and said, “You really are so beautiful. Be kind to yourself. It’ll be okay.”

“Even though I hate you,” she said, “I’m glad we did this.”

“Enough to do it again?” she asked.

“Probably not,” she admitted. And then she finished her chips, letting her eyes dry as she stared out to sea and contemplated the next moves in her life.

Chapter Ten

The flight from Texas back to California is largely uneventful. The Sprite is fresh though, the toffee peanuts not so bad, my seat mate completely into his own digital world. I want to go home and crawl into my own bed more than I want my next breath, but I have things to do. There’s an immortal sadist to confront, a psycho child to keep calm and a miracle infant to kidnap.

The drive to Holland’s San Francisco apartment comes quick. The last time I ran a kidnapping mission in San Francisco, it didn’t go so well. Rather it had a bumpy start, a violent middle and a happy ending. Rebecca is now my sister. A part of my family.

But would there be a happy ending this time? As I pull up to his place, find a parking spot and then head inside his building and upstairs, I’m praying for the best.

I knock and Alice Jr. opens the door.

“What?” she says.

“Move,” I say, breezing past her.

“You can’t just come inside,” Alice says, catching up with me.

“Where’s Holland?”

“Bathroom.”

I pick up Skye and say, “Where’s her diaper bag and formula?”

Alice points to the kitchen table. I head over there, gather it up in my arms and say, “Do you have a diaper bag?”

Alice just looks at me, her black hair hanging over an eye, her white dress dirty, the toenails on her little feet unclipped for far too long.

“You forget how to speak?” I ask.

“What are you doing?” Veneshia asks. She’s Holland’s African American assistant, a girl who works with Holland, but works under Quentin Russell, formerly Tate Russell of Monarch Enterprises—a man who ordered a hit on me when I was Savannah version 2.0.

“I’m taking her to her mother,” I say.

“Best hurry while Holland’s…indisposed,” she says quietly, like she’s all for the idea.

“I need a diaper bag, or something to carry all this crap.”

She hurries in the kitchen, grabs a few paper grocery bags and starts stuffing everything in there. Meanwhile I’m ordering up an Uber, hoping my ride will get here soon enough but not too soon.

“What the hell are you doing?” Holland’s voice booms.

“Taking Skye to Rebecca,” I answer, looking up.

“The hell you are,” he says, moving fast toward me. Instinctively my shields arise making an invisible wall between us. He hits the wall like he’s slamming into a glass door. “Are you kidding me?!” he asks, looking up and down to try to figure out what he just ran in to.

“She’s not your baby. Heim is gone and you aren’t running a baby factory where deliveries come at fast food speed.”

“You are a peasant trying to tell a king his place,” Holland roars.

“Really?” I ask, my temper taking hold. I drop the wall between us and walk toward him with Skye like I’m going to eat his heart.

He steps back, startled.

“You are NOT a king anymore, Holland! You’re the help.”

I feel my guts starting to heat and I look at Alice Jr. Her hands—held low with her palms out and clawed with heat—she sees my eyes zeroed in on the eye not hidden behind her hair and her hands relax.

“Good dog,” I say.

She frowns.

How the hell will we ever become civil if the future is still a mystery I have not solved?

“I’m taking Skye because she’s critical to our future. She can’t be here, being raised by people who view her more as an experiment than a child.”

“You’re taking away a livelihood that will support millions,” Holland growls.

“Oh are you an employer now?” I ask.

“YOU ARE OVERSIGHT!” he all but screams, his face red, his chest puffed up, his hands made into fists at his side.

“I’m oversight on your life in case you haven’t figured it out,” I say, calm as a Hindu cow.

“What is all this?” Veneshia asks.

Answering the question, but in a way she does not expect, I say, “This is the child that serves as a test case for two experiments. One is a quick birth experiment, as I’m sure you know. Two is a longevity experiment. But she is also my niece in a really twisted way, the wife of the first man I had sex with, and a woman who will prosper in the future as long as I don’t allow her to be his guinea pig.”

“I’m totally lost,” Veneshia says.

Holland’s nostrils are flaring now. My protective bubble is down. Looking at Alice, she’s still just one angry eye waiting for Holland’s command.

“She is not your weapon,” I tell Holland while nodding to Alice.

Alice’s one eye doesn’t blink. Not that the room isn’t heating up…it is. A quick glance at her hands and they are loose at her sides, not gnarled and conjuring fire. But the fire’s on tap. I can feel it. She’s warming herself up the same way you rev an engine before you slam it in first gear, dump the clutch and smoke your tires.

“You don’t know what she is to me,” Holland hisses, now pacing like an angry lion.

“I know what she is,” I snarl back. “She’s your AIDS monkey, your patient zero, but with genetics rather than disease. If you want a killer, just tap into that shitty soul of yours and be who you are.”

“You are not taking that baby,” he says, wild-eyed with rage.

“Your little bomb there is about to blow.”

“Alice, calm!” he turns and shouts. Her angry eyes flick at him. “And you…you’re not leaving.”

“Watch me,” I say, shouldering past him.

When I get to the door, I open it with my mind and no one stops me. When I get to the sidewalk, my ride is arriving. Skye starts to shift and squirm in my arms, her little face crinkling out the first signs of crying.

I set my bags down on the sidewalk and rock the poor thing, talking to her, filling her little body with telepathic peace. She stops crying, looks up at me, her eyes seeing me for the first time. She makes them wide for a second as a smile crosses my face.

The window rolls down and the driver, a heavyset Hispanic woman, says, “You got a car seat for your baby?”

“It’ll be fine,” I say.

“No it won’t,” she tells me, puffing up.

Drilling into her eyes, into her soul, I say, “It. Will. Be. Alright.”

“Yeah,” she says, visibly relaxing. “I guess it will be alright.”

Looking down, Skye’s face breaks into a small smile for the first time, and then it curls to the side and she lets out a small grunt. I’m thinking she might be crapping, but I can’t deal with that right now. I’ve got to get us home where Orianna can change her diapers, if she is indeed…oh God, yep. She’s totally making mud.

“I can do this,” I say to myself. Rocking her, I gather up her things and say, “If you can sit in your own crap for a few minutes I can get you home where you’ll meet your mommy for the first time.”

Holland storms out of the apartment with a pacifier in his hand. Handing it to me, he says, “If I need her, for some samples, or even for a day, how will I find her?”

I open the sedan’s back door and place the bags inside. “You won’t,” I tell him. “Heim is gone and with him, your little speedy-incubator experiments are done.”

“I want Heim back,” he says, irritated and far from hopeful.

“And I want a Lamborghini.”

“Want to trade?” he asks, sheepish, almost like he thinks he has a chance.

“The man came into my house, put a rubber hose into my heart, filled it with gasoline and lit the match. He is a monster, like you, but unrefined and beyond sadistic.”

“You did take his subject.”

“Rebecca isn’t a clone. She’s human. The girl was kidnapped, changed and dropped into a tank for the better part of eight years.”

“Don’t talk morality with me, Sunshine.”

“If you so much as try to find us, I will smoke your brain. You got that?”

“Smoke my brain?”

“Yeah, that’s something I can do now. I can read minds, but I can also tinker around, disappear what I want, mask your memories, hide them in a hole so deep inside you that you’ll never know they even existed.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Famous last words, Cupcake,” I say, patting his cheek before getting in the car. Before shutting the door, I look up and say, “You try to find me, and I’ll wipe your brain for a thousand years.”

“This is like a bad marriage,” he snarls.

“You lips to God’s ears. Now go fizzle your bomb,” I say, referring to Alice Jr. “She’s running hot.”

Holland leaves and by some miracle, we manage to get Skye back to Palo Alto without incident, unless you consider making the car smell like the inside of a baby’s ass an incident. I’ve got the windows rolled down and diapers packed around the baby, but damn…

As we’re pulling into the neighborhood, I find myself nearly outraged that Holland had all those people “taking care” of the child and no one was really “taking care” of the child. Just feeding her and changing her diapers isn’t all a child needs.

Nowadays, that just isn’t enough.

“Up here,” I say to the driver. “On the right.”

She pulls into the driveway. I get out, gather up the child while trying not to gag at the smell. Orianna will know what to do with her.

I give the woman a hundred dollar bill and apologize for the smell. Her eyes are watering. She looks like she’s in pain.

I walk Skye and her things up to the front door, open it with my mind, then push through and head into the kitchen where Orianna makes a big fuss over her. Rebecca comes to see what all the commotion is about and I know she knows Skye is hers.

She doesn’t say anything. Seeing her child, it’s like she’s paralyzed in place.

“She shit her pants,” I tell Orianna, handing her over, “and I’m not changing them.”

Orianna doesn’t miss a beat. To Skye she says, “Let’s go get you a clean diaper,” but in a baby voice.

Even when she leaves, Rebecca stands there, almost like she’s staring at the spiritual residue of what’s left of Orianna and Skye. Her eyes begin to water and her hand moves over her belly. I go and hug her, lightly, not letting go—like a sister just wanting to be near her, not solving any problems, just offering comfort.

“Have you thought of a name?” I ask.

She nods her head, a wayward tear dripping over, skimming her cheek.

“Skye,” she says.

“That’s a beautiful name,” I tell her.

“What do I do now?” Rebecca asks. Then, with a sob, she says, “I don’t know what to do.”

Looking in the direction of that awful smell, I say, “Orianna needs to teach us how to change a diaper. After that we have to find out if you have milk.”

“There’s milk in the fridge,” she says.

“We need to find out if there’s milk in this fridge,” I say, nudging the side of her boob. She looks at me, sheer panic on her face, then down at her chest. “If we’re going to do this, you’re just going to have to go with the flow.”

“How…how do—”

“Orianna will tell you if you have milk. Bodily fluids for babies isn’t my thing. But if you have any questions about vomit or nervous diarrhea, I’m a freaking encyclopedia.”

It turns out she does have milk and so Orianna teaches her the ins and outs of nursing while I throw on a bathing suit and head out to the spa to enjoy an otherwise warm winter day.

The cuteness of Skye captures Christian and Orianna in ways I didn’t expect. By bringing Skye home, I’m not only bringing Rebecca closer to my parents, I’m bringing all of us closer together. We’re going to rally around this child, give her an amazing life, and raise her to be a good, strong woman, so that one day I can lose my virginity to—and later get shot in the head by—her widowed, time-traveling husband.

God, what a total mind f*ck!

I don’t miss Jake, but I kind of do, too. I take a psychic mind bump off him, realize he’s got a hall pass from his future wife, this Skye but far older. She’s going to let him be single here. He doesn’t want it. All he wants is to be with her. When Jake saved her from the life ending shot Holland was about to administer to her, she returned from the future to tell him they’d meet up later in life, just not now. He saved this child’s life to have the woman. Now the woman didn’t want him back. Not just yet. When future Skye winked out of this existence and left Jake behind, he fought to be okay with it. Now he’s terribly sad. At least she’s alive. But due to the altering of historical events, he’ll have to wait longer to be with her because she’s with someone else right now. How’s that for getting gang raped by your own well laid plans.

Sadly, it won’t take him long to find a young student, or a barmaid, or someone he meets in the mall or at the Apple store. He’d going to go through a bit of a man whore phase, but it won’t last long. I know this because I saw one potential outcome for him and it wasn’t him being with me. For him, the prospect of starting anew was never a possibility. I was merely a distraction. A sideshow. Now I’m thinking about giving him a time travel device, but I’m also squashing the hell out of that thought. The man shot me in the head! And not just that, he rejected me repeatedly and took my virginity. But I’m a big girl now. Capable of forgiveness.

And I’m always a sucker for a good love story...

Chapter Eleven

That night, after dinner and a relatively tame evening with the parentals, Rebecca and Skye, I crawl into bed, only to be woken sometime later by a warm, gentle energy. I open my eyes, look up and see the reptilian doctor from Dulce standing at the foot of my bed in the dark.

I startle, but not like before. His energy is very different. Not hostile, but kind. “That’s a nice change from nosebleeds and headaches,” I say, yawning and waking to his arrival.

“I have my more civilized side,” he says.

“What do you want?” I ask, rubbing sleep crust from the corners of my eyes and sitting up.

“We need to talk.”

“I’m listening,” I say, laying back down because I’m soooo tired. Using my mind, I turn on the bathroom light—a soft light that lets me look at him as a person rather than a shadow.

“You’ve created quite a stir among the elders who know history as a contained series of events rather than a linear unfolding.”

“Meaning?”

“If you put ten thousand years of human history into a box, there are definitive beginnings, middles and ends. You can pull every last detail about every last person from it if you have the mental capabilities to not only separate people and events, but observe the trajectories of said people and events.”

“And these elders of yours can do this?”

“Our elders are the same as your quantum computers of the future. They are thousands of years old and wise in ways you humans could never fathom.”

Admittedly, this is interesting. I find his words a bit intoxicating. The air slowly permeates with the subtle smells of cognac and chocolate. Is this the smell of him? How have I not picked up on this earlier?

“So what are you trying to say?”

“You were supposed to kill Adolf Hitler,” he says, pointed.

“Yeah,” I say, “I got that.”

Waves of his energy roll over me, soothing, awakening, slightly electric on the edges. This is him. Intoxicating smells, the warm and fuzzies, civilized conversation…have I misjudged the Doctor?

“You say you got it,” he says, “but I don’t think you do, or I wouldn’t be here.”

Sitting back up, brushing my hair out of my face, I say, “Apparently I don’t get it right now, this very minute, because I’m sleeping, but I’ll get it in the morning.”

“By allowing Adolf Hitler to live, you’ve allowed other things to come into this world.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Think of them as a pestilence you let in your body without even knowing. This pestilence seems harmless at first, but before you know it, you’ve got sickness and death inside you and it’s rooted in like a tick, impossible to expel, your eventual undoing.”

“You’re talking about the vampire-like creatures I saw in the future?”

“Among the highest elders are seers, and these seers talk of dark days ahead. As the timeline progresses, we are forced up to the surface to try to help you take back your world. Many of us perish in an apocalyptic war, one of our casualties being our top elder. That is why I am here. A distress signal was sent out among us. A distress signal from the seer about the future.”

Okay, now this is getting interesting…

“Future Alice showed me a world of ash and destruction. But as you know, she also showed me those creatures.”

“Your species crossbreeds its way into a race of mutants unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Dr. Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum insures they do not expire. Natural selection never favors the weak, and everyone who is not mutated is weak and dies out. This is a perfect example of few having control over many. These monsters destroy almost everything. Even us.”

“A bomb went off,” I hear myself saying.

“That wasn’t a bomb,” he replies, his energy changing. The smells change, too. The chocolate smell deepens, takes on notes of cinnamon. The crackling edge of his energy softens to a subtle vibration.

“It sure looked like a bomb had gone off.”

“That was a nuclear human being. You saw what Georgia was able to do with the child assassin, what future Alice can do with her fire?”

“I did.”

“Imagine the force of this Alice multiplied by ten, by a hundred, by one million. This is our future. This is the tangent you’ve put us on.”

“I have it handled…bro,” I say, my words more confident sounding than they are. The reptilian sees through it. He sees my lie like I’m not trying to hide squat. And besides that, what the hell am I supposed to call him? Doctor? Humanish thingy? Lizard man?

“Draco. Not lizard man, humanish thingy or doctor. And certainly not bro.”

I look at him, cough out a smile.

“Is that like lizard humor or something?”

“Or something.”

“Like I said, Draco, I have it handled.”

“You don’t,” he retorts. “But you know that, don’t you?”

“Then do it yourself, butthole,” I grumble, totally over it already.

The crackling edges of his energy sharpen to needle points, then disappear. His scent is gone, too. He’s protecting himself now that I’m mad.

“You come into my bedroom, interrupt my sleep and tell me the same thing I was told earlier this week. I screwed up the past and it threw us into this vile future and I said ‘I got it’ because I got it.”

“Yet you cannot figure out why this happened and so you don’t act.”

“Why can’t you act?” I spit.

“Because I am not you. Your human component allows you the ability to walk through the world as you. I cannot hold this form for very long. It takes an incredible amount of energy.”

“Then stop pretending.”

“You don’t want to see me the way I am,” he says softly.

“I’ve seen you in your form before.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“You do you, boo,” I tell him, yawing again, my body in protest.

He looks at me, nods slowly, and then the façade falls away and I’m staring at a monstrous reptilian humanoid. At first my eyes are feasting upon the tall reptoid with scaly greyish green skin and eyes that become slits, but then this form begins to lengthen, growing taller still, his head barely a foot from my ten foot ceiling. Instead of two arms and two hands, Draco has four arms and four hands. Clawed hands with excessively long fingers that are as sharp as talons at the end. If he wanted to, I’m sure he could swipe across my mattress and tear it in two that’s how dangerous all four of these hands looked to me.

My eyes gaze upon him in a new light.

At first blush, he is this horrifying creature with a block face like a snake and scaly armor that almost looks plated. Looking down, his legs are muscular and lean to his form, but huge to someone like me. Behind him is a long, scaly tail that must be seven feet long or more. He is so far around the hideous side of the circle he’s touching the high side of beautiful.

“You are just as ugly to me by my standards as I am to you by your standards,” he says telepathically through a link I didn’t realize he’d opened.

“I’m glad we’re clear on that,” I say aloud. Then: “So how did this happen? I’m talking about this mutation, this human bomb, the attacks on our species?”

“It is best I show you,” he whispers into my mind, raising his top two hands my way while gripping the other two on the bed. “Come…”

Scooting back, I say, “I have enough horrors in my head, plus whatever bad shit you put there is like fresh porn to The Operator.”

“Ah yes, him,” he whispers, still in my mind, but now standing up straight.

Looking past his plated torso, to my bedroom door, I see the door handle, envision the lock, turn it with my mind. If anyone came in and saw this gigantic reptilian God standing at the foot of my bed they’d probably drop dead of a heart attack right then and there.

His hypnotic whispers permeate my mind. The soft reptilian voice becomes the warm edge of everything, a summer breeze with weight and the slightest hint of moisture.

“Adolf Hitler spent decades in hiding, strategizing, planning, preparing to drive the world to its collective knees in reverence to him. The world has forgotten him, though. They’ve moved on to fear new, more menacing dictatorial fiends. So he tells himself he must remind them of why he was so feared. Of why the Third Reich had reigned supreme for so long.

“In South America he has amassed stores of dirty bombs he will eventually set off in cities in South and Central America. After that he will hit San Diego, Tucson, El Paso, San Antonio. He will ride that wave of terror up into the heart of America.”

“He’ll make it to New York,” I say, remembering future Alice’s nightmare.

“I told you, that was the human bomb, and not directly related to what will be Hitler’s failed attempt at relevance.”

“How is that a failure?” I ask, aghast.

“Middle Eastern terror factions will take credit for the destruction Adolf Hitler created. This is not something they have ever done, but the Saudi’s relationship with America disintegrated in the 2020’s, leaving the world to wade through murky waters. Now the Saudi government is as much a terror organization as The Taliban, al-Qaeda or ISIS.”

“Did you say The Taliban?”

He laughs softly, more of a hissing sound in my mind. “The awe inspiring destruction, the catastrophic loss of life,” he continues, “will all prove to be too much for the openly extremist government to ignore. Hitler will not take credit for it just yet, because they believe Hitler is dead. But he is not dead. He will be enraged. Beyond salvation. Just as he is to step into the burning light of the world he’s transforming through terror, the corrupt Saudi’s step in and claim responsibility.”

“I can’t imagine how he’ll feel,” I say of Hitler.

“With no more bombs and the Saudi pretenders taking credit for his great comeback, he will dream of darker, more insidious ways to punish not only America, but their enemies. In the future, the future you went back to initially, you hunted him down in South America and found him at his factory. That factory location has changed though. I’m not sure why.”

“I’ve killed him once,” I say. “I can do it again.”

“Perhaps. Either way, his son survived. He will become our undoing if not taken care of now.”

“Hitler didn’t have a son.”

“His name is Aloysius,” Draco says.

“It could be Chucky Cheese for all I care and it won’t be his.”

“I already told you, this universe is organic. It responds to hundreds of trillions of small decisions per second, as do all universes containing biological species similar to yours and mine.”

“That seems a bit chaotic,” I say, settling into bed again.

“You have no idea.”

* * *

If a few months ago you would’ve told me I’d be talking to a nine foot lizard in my bedroom in the middle of the night and be completely chill about it, I’d tell you that you’ve absolutely lost your shit. I’d tell you to kick rocks. I’d tell you to double time it. But look at me now. Pushing out the borders of what is and what is possible. So now I’m sitting here in bed, sleep dragging at my face, listening to Draco from Dulce as he tells me how I completely screwed the pooch when it came to me not doing what I needed to do in Berlin. Right now we’re going from the big-picture look at my SNAFU to the more intimate details of why.

“The thing about time travel is, it’s banned in most universes because the travelers have a tendency to change things to their own liking,” Draco says. “After a long series of changes, some travelers find they cannot get back to their place of origin because they’ve changed everyone’s place of origin by tinkering with the past.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I hear myself saying.

“For some travelers, the second they change one thing, everything changes and they cease to exist, stamping out their future, erasing their birth itself. This can create the kind of nightmare paradox the likes of which you cannot imagine.”

“Try me,” I say propping a pillow up behind my back.

“Universes self-destruct all the time,” he says with the wave of one of his hands. “But with a family of billions of universes, it’s hard to keep track of which ones once existed but now don’t exist at all.”

“When you tell me these kinds of things, almost without pause, they have my brain hurting in the worst imaginable way. So maybe just tell me about this Aloysius guy.”

“Ah yes,” he says, changing directions. “Aloysius joins forces with Holland and his father in an attempt to use his rare condition and Holland’s science to create monsters.”

“Aloysius does this?”

“Yes.”

“What is his rare condition?”

“Have you ever heard of The Countess Bathory?”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Elizabeth Bathory was born in Holland in the mid 1500’s. Even though she is considered to be the first serial killer, she’s more notably considered the first vampire, a woman with the dark soul of a mass murderer and an unquenchable thirst for blood.”

A dark sense of foreboding falls over me, sending icy shivers up my back. “If I hadn’t seen what I saw in the future, I would tell you’re full of it.”

“You only say that because you have not seen what these other universes have produced.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I will give you what you want when you want it, but only when you ask me.”

“Another gift I assume?” I muse, but with zero humor in my voice.

“One day you will ask me for something big, and it will be sooner than later. When that time comes, I will give you what you want because you can handle it.”

“What exactly will I ask you for?” I challenge, even though I know he needs no challenge.

For some reason, Draco seems content to give me whatever I want. Is this because I was able to kill myself and live at the same time? Or am I safe because he knows I have no interest in dominating the world? I almost want to bump off his mind, but there’s no way in hell I’ll try that. Who knows the horrors I’d see?

“You will want the ability to see and communicate with people in other universes,” he informs me, “and then eventually travel there.”

Um, holy cow, Batman! There are other universes I can travel to?

For real?

“Why would I want to travel to another universe?” I ask, calm and coy despite him knowing exactly how thrilled I am about the possibilities of the future.

“This is for you to figure out, not me. But when you ask this of me, because of how you have handled the other gifts I’ve given you, I will trust you. I trust you implicitly, if you haven’t figured that out by now.”

“Okay, so tell me about this Bathory bitch,” I say, my mind starting to squirm and revolt against all this information. I scoot back against my pillow, the one smooshed between my back and the headboard, and then I wrap the sheets and blankets around my waist.

“Countess Bathory was all about sacrificial death. She fed off hundreds of her subjects long before bleeding them dry and disposing of their corpses. These were mostly terrified young girls. Girls whose clothes were torn from their bodies before being violated by The Countess in the most unspeakable ways. She drank from their cuts and gashes and torn open throats. She hung them from hooks above her bathtub, filling the tub with their blood so that she may bathe before them, while watching them. Second by second, they drained themselves empty and died. Seeing them transition into death was an incredible high for her.”

“She sounds lovely,” I say.

“Hardly.”

“What does she have to do with Shitler?” I ask.

He looks at me, understands I’ve used humor to express hatred, but he doesn’t know how to respond. He tries anyway.

“Adolf Hitler went back in time, raped her, then stole their child and brought him back to this timeline. Aloysius is that boy.”

“You’re telling me there is a vampire walking the earth now and that vampire is Hitler’s son?”

“He’s half vampire, half day walker, all psychotic. Even worse, he’s got Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum and…some other modifications. Like you, he is not restrained by time,” he whispers into my head telepathically.

I start to laugh, but he is not amused. This is the first real sound we’ve made since going telepathic and it’s a bit unsettling.

“Holland is obsessed with mutation,” he tells me. “First it was mass murder, then mind control, and now it’s genetics. Soon though, he will no longer desire the perfect race or healing. He will only want what he’s always wanted, and that’s more subjects to experiment on. First he had Alice, and then the boy you think of as the Cow Killer, and then Georgia and you and everyone else. When he gets to Aloysius, Hitler will allow Holland to take the proverbial gloves off.”

“So Holland does this? He’s got a hand in all this?”

“Holland, Hitler and Aloysius. After you destroy Hitler’s factories in a fit of rage, he and Aloysius return to Holland, present to him a sordid proposition. This is what I must show you.”

“I said no.”

“I don’t care what you said!” he roars telepathically, his voice shaking not just my brain but my very soul. My hands fly to my head as my body shrinks back in revulsion. The edges of my vision pulse and a sickness rolls through me with such force I damn near pass out.

Then it all stops. After a moment, I look up and say, “You miserable f*ck.”

“Our foremost elder is dead,” he reminds me, his telepathic tone gentle again, but sad. “I need your help, not your resistance.”

“Okay then,” I say after a minute. “I’m ready for you to show me.”

“Come here,” he says.

I push aside the blankets, crawl to the foot of the bed where he’s standing, sit up on my knees before him. He places two hands on my temples and two hands on my shoulders. I suddenly smell a robust earthy smell, and beneath that a musky odor that isn’t gross as much as it’s a bit coppery and unique.

In fractions of a second, my mind explodes into the picture of a future I honestly don’t want to see.

Adolf Hitler is traveling to the middle east with his son, Aloysius—a devastatingly handsome man with mesmerizing eyes and the kind of body most women would deem irresistible. The pair eventually arrives at the home of the top Saudi prince (a sadistic fiend) where Hitler and his son begin a polite and cordial conversation.

The security is heavy, but Aloysius is not fazed.

What begins as civility, however, soon devolves into a murderous frenzy of bullets and the kinds of beatings no mortal human is capable of delivering. Watching Aloysius work feels the way I imagine others would feel watching me work. Except for the feedings. Aloysius is a vampire, but not like any vampire I’ve ever seen. Some want to romance their food, capture it, mesmerize it, and then gently savor it. Aloysius looked like he wanted to enrage it, to maul and kick it and beat it to death before devouring it. But he did not kill then feed. He just killed with a morbid frenzy that left me feeling sick with fear.

Never have I ever heard of a vampire using bone spikes in his knuckles to punch holes into the necks of his victims. What happened to fangs? Yeah, so this is not your Twilight vampire story. This is Twilight on meth with some Saw level torture porn sprinkled in everywhere.

When Aloysius is done killing, he uses these same jagged bones to deftly slice open the corners of his mouth. This extremely wide opening allows him to almost detach his jaw and latch on to his victims like some nightmarish sucker fish.

What the balls?

The day walker runs through the bevy of guards the way you’d go through a slaughterhouse with an axe and a chainsaw, but then he found his feast, his meal, the dish he would delight in. Two young Saudi girls.

Apparently the Prince has two daughters, both startlingly beautiful. These are Aloysius’s twin enjoyments. As they stand before him paralyzed, he trails a bloody finger down the sides of their cheeks, a streak of red drifting from temple to chin. They gaze upon him with such adoration. One of the girls unfastens her top, letting her breasts hang free. He pays them no mind. His desire appears to be too much for even him to contain. He sets upon the girls with a ferocity like I’ve never seen before.

As he feeds, his entire body jolts and convulses, almost like he’s draining all the blood from each body in minutes rather than an hour. It’s grisly, ugly and revolting.

If I could turn away from all this, I would.

Aloysius fills his belly with the blood of these two young women, practically inhaling pint after pint. When he’s done with the second body, he tosses her aside, weary, falling to his hands and knees quivering and shuddering. Everything goes still for a moment, and then in one giant, heaving roar, he expels a splashing stream of red.

Exhausted, he sits back, leaning on the heels of his hand. With blood all over his face, he takes a big breath, lets it out slowly, the lower half of his face still coming back together. His sated eyes look murderous and rapt, so engorged with life his body appears prime for another slaughter in minutes rather than hours.

“Your eyes were always so much larger than your appetite,” Hitler says to his son. He’s got the Prince down on his knees, a pistol to the bawling, mewling man’s head.

Aloysius stands, his chin tucking down, his eyes narrowing. He walks to the Prince. Towering over him—this sniveling cretin—Aloysius stares at him long enough to make the Prince piss himself.

“Drag this weak ass piece of bitch meat to his feet,” he says, his voice deeper, more gravely, like the sound of sandpaper grinding together.

Hitler hauls the man to his feet, one hand hitching up his undergarments to keep him off balance, the other holding his head using a fistful of hair above his right ear.

Aloysius’s hands become fists. He’s turning almost animalistic, the way you’d think of a werewolf right before the turning. But he is no wolf. His skin begins taking on a different texture, almost like it’s becoming harder, and then—impossibly—his bones began to shift and pop.

I blink hard and fast.

WTF?

Right before our eyes, the beast that was Aloysius grows six inches in height in what looks like the most painful way ever. The Prince begins to sob. Aloysius is now nearly seven feet tall. He reaches down, grabs the man by his head, lifts him a good twelve inches off his feet. A dripping yellow puddle forms beneath him.

Aloysius looks at Hitler and growls the words, “Bitch meat.” And then he punches the man in the neck, feeding from him only slightly before saying to his father, “We stay here until he turns. And then we feed him and set him loose on these fools. He is our Trojan Horse.”

“Make sure we do this right,” Hitler tells him.

“Yes,” Aloysius hisses.

Aloysius violently rips the man’s garb down, shredding the garment and leaving the man’s chest bare. He draws in one of the six inch bone spurs, then uses the other to carve the words “Compliments of A. Hitler” into his chest. The man begins screaming to the point of nearly passing out.

Aloysius drops him, the mutated vampire already shrinking back to his original size. With the task before him done, Aloysius falls into a chair as Hitler kicks the Prince almost repeatedly, as if the man were a sack of garbage rather than human. One solid shot on the chin has the Prince passed out. After a few minutes, however, he stirs, then slowly starts to writhe and moan. Aloysius moves toward the downed coward, puts a hand to his face and says, “He’s close.”

A few moments later the man turns over, his gaze lost, distant, his hands clutching his throat, clawing at the skin first, and then clawing at the floors as his cries for help become garbled.

“Go,” Hitler says.

Pushing a bone through the knuckle of his middle finger, Aloysius slices open his wrist and begins to drain his blood into the Prince’s mouth. The Saudi gags and squirms, tries to push Aloysius away. The effort is weak. Aloysius grabs his head, holds it in place. He drains more blood into the man’s mouth, so much so that eventually he’s forced to swallow.

Over the next three days, as the traitorous Saudi suffers pain and near death and the thirst, he writhes and churns and screams. On the third day, as he’s frothing at the mouth and shrieking intermittently, they drive him thrashing and snapping at the mouth to his father’s house.

“If you don’t drink, you die,” Hitler says to him. The Prince’s eyes are loose in his sockets, his teeth gnashing together, his hands clawing at his own arms like some crystal meth burnout trying to scratch that impossible itch.

Hitler walks the Prince to the gate. Hesitant, alarmed, the guards let him through, taking a long second look at Adolf Hitler, almost like they were seeing a ghost.

“He’s sick,” Hitler says. “Needs his mommy.”

Before the Prince goes inside, Hitler grabs a handful of hair above the man’s ear, twists it tight so he doesn’t turn his face into Hitler and bite him, and then he says, “If you feed, you will become a God. But if you deny yourself this feast of flesh and blood, you will die a peasant’s death. It will be excruciatingly painful, and your body will eat itself from the inside out long after you beg God for a merciful, immediate death.”

With the guards safely behind him, Hitler knocks on the front door and waits. When one of the servants opens up, the infected Prince—driven mad with bloodlust—viciously attacks this innocent man. The guards sprint toward him, racing past Hitler, paying the Führer no attention at all.

Hitler strolls back to the vehicle where Aloysius is both smiling and waiting. Captivated by the scene, his eyes narrowing, a scorned Adolf Hitler mutters, “You didn’t bomb America you Saudi dog. I did.”

With the help of Draco, I’m seeing these future events unfolding, almost like this is a movie of the past rather than a version of the future.

“Within weeks, the royal family become monsters who take to each other with violence. They rip, tear and ravage their way through each other in no time at all,” Draco says telepathically, taking his four hands off me.

My bedroom and the Doctor suddenly appear where before all I saw were these future events in Draco’s head.

“By the time they turned,” Drago continued to say in my mind, “these creatures shrugged off bullets like they were nothing. They took the worst beatings while still managing to overwhelm and feed. If vampirism was a cancer, then Hitler and his son infected the Saudi regime. The results of Holland’s and Aloysius’s attack gave them some rather nefarious ideas.”

He puts his hands back on my head, back on my shoulders. A new vision fills my mind, the movie screen before me in full 4D sharpness and brilliance.

* * *

In Holland’s new lab—a new lab I’m not familiar with—I see ten glass canisters with ten men in stasis. In three side-by-side reclining medical chairs are three unconscious subjects. One of these subjects is Aloysius, another is me (although it doesn’t look exactly like me), and the third is a man I don’t recognize.

Draco lets me see this, and then he removes his hands from my head. I am back in my room, Draco standing like a giant before me, a splash of artificial light cutting though the darkness.

Inside, a low psychic roiling upsets me.

I feel The Operator stirring.

He starts to laugh, but that laughter devolves into a sobbing fit, which becomes invisible hands on an invisible cage shaking, shaking, shaking the hell out of my insides. This imprisoned soul, this extra few ounces of abhorrent contagion, he begins to really buck and twist inside me, upsetting me on a base level.

“What an irate little creature you carry around inside you,” Draco says in observance of what I’m experiencing.

“Can you excuse me for a second?” I ask.

He gives a dismissive wave with one of his hands and says, “Do attend to your toddler.”

I close my eyes, dive down inside my mind, follow the sounds of The Operator’s tantrum. I swim down to his cage, slam a fist against it with such force it rattles everything. The tantrum stops. The energy of this imprisoned soul is dark and hateful; it is malevolent and murderous.

“You are here until my end you sour little tart,” I roar. Then, more congenial, I add: “Unless I stamp you out.”

“You wouldn’t…”

“I can make you not exist at all,” I say, carrying the tone.

“If you had that kind of power,” he half sniffles half growls from the dark corners of this mental prison I’ve trapped him in, “you would have done that already.”

“Perhaps I like torture as much as you liked dragging all your little sheep to slaughter.”

“You aren’t me,” he says, low and forlorn. “No one is.”

“Yet I have you. You are mine. The roach I always keep underfoot. Remember that you snot nosed bitch.”

He falls still, his energy settled. I pull away from him, let myself drift up through the layers of my mind until I open my eyes.

“Why was I in the lab next to Aloysius?” I ask. “And why do I look different? I mean, I look similar…but not the same.”

“That was you, but not you.”

“Elizabeth?”

“No,” Draco says.

“Raven?”

He shakes his head.

Now I get it.

“How many of me are in this world?”

“You still only see this as one world. You still only see time as something you can travel though, but that is only the time of this world. You don’t see this existence of your world for what it is, for what it can be.”

“And that is?”

“Your universe is but a single page in the tallest book ever, a book so tall you cannot see its ends. Each page in this book is a universe. In this book of universes are billions of different universes, each containing millions of worlds.”

“Wait, slow down. What?”

He continues on, unabated. “You have contained timelines and untold species. A million years in one world is but a blink in time for another world. We are one page, and each page contains variants of all of us.”

“Are you talking about multiverses?” I ask.

“I am. But until you move from this universe to a parallel universe—which is the easiest way to surf the multiverse if you’re a novice—you will only see this world as linear, yet we do not live in a linear universe.”

“You already described it as a box containing all time. That everything is happening all at once. My future self is impacting my past self, my current self, other versions of me, right?”

“Yes,” he says. “If you can travel from one universe to another—which you can—then you can also travel to any time in that universe’s history. All times are happening at once. They are not unfolding in real time. Nothing is linear to you or me.”

I blink my eyes, try getting my head around this. If I was to tell you I’m having a hard time unpacking all this, I would be exaggerating on a massive scale.

“So you’re saying the girl in the chair isn’t exactly me, rather it’s some version of me from another universe?”

“That is precisely what I’m telling you,” he says telepathically.

“Wow,” I hear myself utter out loud.

“This is but one of hundreds of you, thousands of you, perhaps even millions of you. This version of you, she comes to deal with…a problem.”

“What problem?”

“The problem of Enzo Holland, Adolf Hitler, his son Aloysius and The Operator.”

“What does The Operator have to do with any of this?”

“In this transfer, The Operator was scraped loose. He took on a host body—Aloysius. The original Aloysius, horrific as he was, is no longer.”

“So you’re saying Aloysius is now The Operator?”

“He is a variant of The Operator, but worse. He has no clones, but he has this body, Holland’s immortality serum, a vampiric thirst and some rather monstrous abilities.”

“How did that happen?” I all but cry out. Having The Operator loose is one of my greatest fears. “He’s in a cage inside me, imprisoned. I wouldn’t let it out, ever.”

“I took him from you,” he admits.

I look up through the darkness. Standing on my bed, looking face to face with him, I say, “Why would you do that?”

His reptilian slits blink back and forth, his scaled head tilting slightly. “It’s no secret, child, I have developed a bit of an affinity for you, as all monsters do.”

“Am I that bad?” I ask.

“You have untapped potential. An endless amount of power about you. And because of this, there is always a war raging inside you. The struggle for good and evil. You are a good person, but you carry evil in you, and you are more powerful than even I imagined. Eventually it tears you apart.”

“I saw that.”

“This is why you’ve changed bodies.”

“It is.”

“Yet you love the rage you feel in vengeance. This is your euphoria, your addiction, your fix. I believe you call yourself a justice junkie.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“You love your righteous indignation, the confrontation, the fight. You love to stand nose to nose with the worst monsters because you believe you can kill them, that it is your right, your duty.”

“You say that like that’s a bad thing,” I say out loud, defiant.

“There will always be monsters,” he whispers into my mind, so low I barely hear it.

“I’m not in this existence to buy better shoes, nicer clothes, make more money and drive nicer cars. There has to be a greater purpose to me. A reason for all of this.”

“Are you getting religious on me?” he asks, amused.

“I’m becoming philosophical.”

“Well don’t,” he replies, more serious. “You were a natural born killer with that thing inside you. It needed liberating. I care about you, if you can believe that, and that’s why I pulled it out of you.”

“Wat happened to me after that?”

“Those men you saw in the tanks, ten of them, they are the perfect male specimens. Clones from Monarch Enterprises. After the bloodshed unleashed upon the royal family, these men were ordered up and infused with the most lethal form of DNA imaginable. A mix of you, Aloysius and the third man—a mute with the power to scrape souls from men’s bodies.”

“Is he sort of supernatural like me?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“We have our own species. Our own…experiments.”

“Of course you do,” I say with a bitter edge.

“You are one of them, Savannah.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“These ten men in the canisters will become raging machines of death and large scale destruction. They will be unleashed upon the rest of the Saudi Royal Family, and from there they will multiply, tearing a bloody swath through the country in a display of such grotesque violence, it will forever scar not just the country but the entire world.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“In this future, I make a deal with Holland to transfer The Operator into Aloysius when he is unconscious. I do this in exchange for your multiverse sister’s DNA. From what I know of me, I believe I can oversee the transfer of souls, then kill Aloysius and these men once the transfer is complete.”

“You know that won’t get rid of The Operator,” I say. “He’ll just be another soul who will get another body.”

“This is of little concern to me now,” he says.

“Why is that?”

“When he wakes, the instant Aloysius opens his eyes, The Operator controlling his body shoots out of his chair and eviscerates both me and the multiverse you. He literally rips us to shreds in seconds. After that he goes after your family and you in particular. He kills them all. He kills you. This is why I stopped the memory. In this future, I should have contained him better, but I did not realize how cunning he was.”

“He killed you?”

“Yes.”

“Then how are you here?” I ask.

“This time has not happened yet. One of our seers showed me a way we can fix this problem. How we can alter this timeline. This is why I want to show you how this future we have began and what it means for me. For versions of you. For our world.”

“You say you took The Operator from me because it was making me crazy, and that I wanted it out. I assumed that burden to protect others. You can’t just take it from me.”

“Your greatest dream, your only wish after hundreds of years, will be for all of this to come to an end. I came back in time to let it be over for that version of you.”

“But?”

“But then the ten monsters happened. When Holland, Hitler and Aloysius saw what they could create, they bred into existence things far worse than they could ever have imagined. They did not take into consideration the unique measures of your DNA, your other self’s DNA and the mute’s DNA.”

“What did they miss? I mean, how could they not see this coming?”

“Random mutation generation. It is selectable in the alternate universe, but here it is uncontrollable. One day you might be what you call a fae, another day someone with dragon’s blood and the ability to conjure fire, a telekinetic, a shifter. This universe was not equipped for what that version of you brought here, but our merry band of misfits harvested your DNA and then they joined it with the blood of the multiverse version of you. From there they set into motion the events that will eventually destroy all human life on this world as we know it. That is why you must kill Hitler before the bombs go off. Why Aloysius must be killed before he can be born.”

“I have all of time to do that,” I say, unsure of how I’m going to do this but resolute that I must.

“This universe is organic, which is to say it is influenced by each and every person in it each and every second of the day. All of their seemingly inconsequential thoughts, to a large degree, form it.”

“I don’t need all that psychobabble shit to go to where Hitler’s at and kill him.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” he says. “The past you went to last has changed in slight degrees, as it is ever changing based on minute adjustments made by those occupying it.”

“English, please?”

“I went there and he is not there. I went to the time when the bombs went off and they had already detonated. If I go there again, to where history says Hitler is, it will have shifted once more. Traveling ahead isn’t the same as traveling backwards. Even traveling backwards has a certain degree of…uncertainty.”

“So I’ll go backwards, then?”

“The future version of Hitler went back in time and scurried him out of Berlin. That’s how he got away from you. If you return another time, you’d be chasing a ghost. Which means you were always chasing a ghost.”

“What about the history book with a picture of us before we cut his head off?”

“Changed. A streak of luck.”

“Is that why Elizabeth and Raven couldn’t stop the nuclear war after I failed to kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Or stop the bombs?”

“Yes.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“You need to find him the same way Raven called out to Alice from the desert. You need to track him over time and I cannot do that.”

“I don’t know how to do that yet,” I admit.

“You need to start by relaxing, maybe having some fun.”

“I’m not sure this is the time.”

“I just told you, child. You need to have some fun. You are wound so tight, even my own even disposition is being sucked into the gravitational pull of your toxic teenage angst.”

“This isn’t exactly my perfect life.”

“Of course it isn’t. But what are you going to do? Sit here and drown in your flood of crybaby tears?” he asks, snide.

I crawl out of bed, walk back to the bathroom.

“Like I said, Draco, I’m not sure I’m capable of having fun anymore.”

I pull down my underwear, go number one. He’s seen me at my worst, so modesty around a giant reptile is probably on par with taking a dump in front of your cat.

It’s just not a weird thing for me anymore.

“My point is that you are a dark cloud, an agitated child, always primed for some kind of fight. You need some humility, a way to relax, the knowledge that for the next thousand years you will be important sometimes, but irrelevant to the world most times. In those times of irrelevance to this world, you must live your life. This is a gift if you use it appropriately. But if you fight it, it will be a curse.”

“Perhaps you could just get to the point,” I say, wiping then flushing.

“Stop fighting unless it’s necessary.”

“Raven thought it was necessary,” I say, pulling up my underwear and returning to my bed.

“The Raven who laid waste to the world is gone. She is but one timeline that you changed. Like I said, the future is organic based on seven billion minds in constant states of creation.”

“Alright, so how do you suggest I find Hitler?”

“Meditation.”

“I can do that,” I tell him snuggling back under the covers.

“When you find him,” he says telepathically, “you must go and you must be thorough.”

“But for now you say I should relax?”

“Get Anetka, go to a club, drink, dance, let go of this burden enough to cleanse your mind. Georgia, Cecily and Tempest will be there.”

“School hasn’t started yet.”

“Bring them to town early. Use your newfound abilities to compel them.”

“Isn’t that like mind rape?” I ask. I’m not sure why I still see this as a moral dilemma, but it is. If you take away free will, then you are a slave to someone else’s ambitions.

I could enslave the world, I think to myself for a moment. This is a truly humbling thought. I’ve never considered this before.

“What you do with them will be for their own good. So no, I’m not sure rape, or even slavery, is the appropriate word to use.”

“My friends are not my friends anymore,” I confess.

“You buried your history with them.”

“I did.”

“There is a reason they are at the club. There are reasons all of you are there. So go dress up, do your face, spritz your perfume, drive your car fast. Have fun.”

“I’m not exactly a party girl. Besides, I’m with August now.”

“A fine choice. But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him.” I start to speak, but he holds up a claw and says, “Make of that what you will when you are there. I must go now.”

“What’s got your tits on fire to leave?”

“There is distress among the elders, as I indicated earlier. Messages like these are coming more rapidly now that a shift in the future has occurred.”

“And they sent you to see me?”

“Yes.”

“How special for you.”

“It is actually a punishment,” Draco says, which surprises me.

“And here I thought I was good company,” I joke.

“They know what I did for you.”

Sitting up, crawling toward him, I stand on the bed and put my hand up to his chin, feel the scaly flesh beneath it. I have never done this before, but I feel compelled to make a connection to him. For the first time I see him, and I feel him. He’s not bad. He is not a monster. He is simply a rational being who found he could feel for something, for someone, and that someone was me.

“Now you know,” he says.

I smile. “Now I know. And I’m truly touched.”

I stand back as he becomes his human form. Leaning forward, he kisses my forehead. I warm to his affection this time, then feel sad when he tells me he has to leave.

“Just so you know,” I tell him, “I think you look fucking awesome in your natural form.”

“As do you in yours my sweet, scary child.”

Chapter Twelve

So Draco tells me I have to have fun to relax my brain so when I save the world I don’t have my undies in a twist. I get it. That night, I roll into the minds of Georgia, Cicely and Tempest. Within a few hours, the girls are booking their rooms and plane tickets to San Francisco. They suddenly had it in their mind that a few days of R&R in the city before school would be a great way to start the second half of their senior year.

I call Raven and she says, “What’s up?”

“Do you know?” I ask, sort of getting how this tripletish thing works. “The things Draco said, I mean.”

“Yeah. Both Elizabeth and I know.”

“So then you know why I’m calling, right?”

“You’re going to steal dad’s R8, come and get me and take my place, right?”

“Right.”

“What if I want you to stay while I take your place hitting the clubs with Netty and our former besties?”

“Is that what you want?” I ask, hoping she’ll say no.

“Actually I want to see Mom and Dad and Rebecca,” she says, causing me to sigh with relief. “So if you want to head down tonight, we can switch.”

“So I’ll come to you then?” I ask.

“Yes. Just text me when you’re here and where you’re parked and I’ll switch out.”

“Why don’t we just tell Netty there are three of us?” I ask.

“She’s got too much on her plate already,” Raven tells me. I sense a sadness in her voice, something about her that’s holding back. “I think she’ll be excited to get out and dance her woes away.”

“Are you worried about her?” I ask.

“I’m worried about all of us, about this world, about this Aloysius creep.”

“Have you talked to Liz about it?” I ask, hoping to get a laugh from her. She graces me with a giggle at the shortening of Elizabeth’s name.

“You know she hates it when you call her that, right?” Raven says.

“That’s what makes it so funny.”

“Yeah, she knows,” Raven says. “But she’s too busy getting dicked by Sebastian to want to think about this.”

“It’s a good place to be,” I say.

“Yeah,” Raven says, reminiscing. “Well I’ll see you in a bit then?”

“I’ll call you when I get there.”

* * *

When my friends get to town, I ask my father if I can borrow his car. He asks which one and I tell him the R8 of course.

“No way,” he says.

He’s cleaning up from dinner and preparing to romance Orianna. Rebecca is watching TV and I’m bothered that he thinks I can’t handle the car’s horsepower.

“Is it because you don’t want the miles on it?” I ask.

“No,” he says, washing a stack of plates. “It’s because it’s mine.”

“Let me try this again,” I say. “I’m taking your car and I’ll have it back in a few hours, with a surprise no less.”

He dries his hands, reaches into his pocket, takes out a key and hands it to me.

“Did I just make you do that?” I ask, taking the keys.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he says.

I reach up and kiss him on the cheek.

“You’re the best.”

“If you bring it back with so much as a scratch, I’ll turn from the best into the absolute worst.”

“Your daughter loves you,” I say, smiling.

“Your dad loves his daughter,” he says.

“And your mother loves you both,” Orianna says behind me, her hand reaching for my hand, nothing but love in her eyes.

“And your new sister loves all you silly goofballs,” Rebecca says. We get into a four person hug that’s pretty funny, but actually quite nice.

“This girl loves her goofy ass family,” I say, my head next to Rebecca’s head, next to Orianna’s head.

“I’ll see you clowns later,” I say with a smile.

I want to be with my friends, have some fun and see Netty, but in this moment I feel such a profound love for these people, such a connection, I almost change my mind. But Raven needs to see them, too. Which is me, I guess.

Who am I to screw myself out of family time?

The drive into the city is exhilarating in the R8, and true to my word, I don’t so much as lay a scratch on it, hit a pothole, or run through a puddle. When I find a place to park outside Netty’s house, I text Raven, tell her I’m downstairs. She shows up a few minutes later. I get out of the R8 looking at her and seeing myself.

I give her a hug because even though she’s me, she’s also like my sister, which is super twisted if you think about it.

“Miss you, bitch,” she says.

I kiss her cheek and say, “If I told you that you look fucking hot, would you believe me?”

She laughs and says, “You know I would.”

“Well you do.”

“Dad said he’d kill us if we scratched the car,” I tell her, “so be careful.”

She takes off and I head upstairs, walk inside and see Netty and her mother and my heart soars. Netty looks at me looking at her and says, “Okay, this is weird.”

“What is?”

She walks up to me, looks at my eyes, sees them watering for her and says, “Wow, freaking unbelievable.”

I give her a hug even as she just stands there. “Slide those bean poles around me woman, I missed you.”

She does and then she says, “So who are you?”

“It’s me dummy,” I reply. “Just…different.”

“But you just left,” she says, pulling back to study me again. “And in different clothes no less.”

“It’s a long story,” I say.

“You already told me a long story,” Netty says.

“It wasn’t long enough.”

We go into her bedroom and I give her the details about us. I tell her Raven wants to be with her in this time, just as I want to be with her.

“So there are two of you?” she asks. “That’s it?”

Taking a breath, looking at her, I see myself smiling, acting so honest while I’m telling a total lie and I hate myself for it.

“Actually there’s three.”

“What?!”

“Remember when I said I went down south and met Sebastian?” She nods, slowly, hesitantly. “Well Elizabeth is the version of me that’s down there smashing ass on the beach.”

“Lucky bitch,” Netty mumbles.

“Right?”

“Listen,” I say taking her hand. “We’re going out and we’re going to have some fun tonight, so if you have something sexy, dust it off, and if not let me know and we’ll go shopping.”

She brightens up at the idea of going out. “Really?”

“For sure.”

“I’ve got some stuff,” she says. “What about you?”

“I need to check Raven’s closet.”

“Do you still have your fake ID?” I ask. She nods her head. “Good, because we’re going to Monarch, the nightclub on 6th and Mission.”

“Monarch?”

“Yeah. It’s this sexy little Art Nouveau, Steampunk, Victorian-Inspired hotspot. We’re talking concrete bars, expensive drinks, acrobatics on the bar, an elevated DJ booth with a downstairs nightclub. That’s just downstairs. Upstairs it’s super cozy if you want to engage in some mild to moderate debauchery, which we might.”

“You sound like a commercial,” she says, laughing.

Acting extra mechanical, like a human robot, I say, “Monarch San Francisco is where you go to drink, dance and grind your problems away.”

“Sounds amazing,” Netty says, making dreamy eyes.

“The only problem is the five hundred pound bouncer outside. Some animal with a ponytail and a keen eye for posers. You’re not twenty-one and you’re small, so if he harasses you, let me handle it.”

“What are you going to do that I can’t?” Netty asks, flippant, her Russian attitude showing up.

“C’mon now,” I say, laughing.

She makes two fists and shows them to me. “This one’s for crowd control,” she says, her accent heavy and her eye on her right fist, “and this one’s for whichever mouthy bitch wants to flex her tits on me.”

“Are you for real?” I ask, a little less laughter in my voice, “because you’re like a hundred and five pounds and even though you may be able to take down some mouthy, rancorous slag—as you claim—you’re going to want to holster those weapons against someone five times your size.”

She drops her fists, frowns. “But you can handle him?”

“You know I can.”

“Well alright then,” she says, the frown falling away, giving way to a sly smile. “Looks like it’s time to find something slutty/sexy.”

“Never have more truer words been said,” I say.

* * *

Netty and I are the bright and shiny dick magnets of the world. We exude sexuality. Our faces are gorgeous, our makeup spot on, our nails and toenails freshly polished. I look her up and down, then I look myself up and down and love what I see. Her breasts are pushed up; so are mine. She’s got a half shirt on with her midriff exposed; so do I. Our skirts are short, our legs are tanned and our shoes look like something you’d wear to a Hollywood after party if you were dying to have all eyes on you.

“You ready?” I ask.

“I am.”

“Good. Time to be different people. Time to see if this town can take a punch.”

Netty and I hit the SoMa district, find a place to park at the corner of 6th and Market, then walk to the club. The night is cold on our skin, but we’re warm inside. The anticipation alone is worth the night out.

And me?

I’m keeping an eye out for my friends. I’ve had psychic tethers on them all day. I’ve been making sure they got to town okay, got their hotel okay, got the idea in their head that Monarch was the club they wanted to come to. Monarch. Ha! The irony of the name is not lost on me. The kid that killed me when I was Abby, he was a product of Monarch Enterprises, a company that Holland, Heim and my father bought clones and bodies from. It’s also where they hired their child assassins from.

“Are you alright?” she asks me.

“Just thinking about this bouncer,” I say, turning my attention to him. “His name is Spanky and he’s extra irritable tonight.”

“How do you know that?”

“He ate a bad shrimp taco and now he’s got the kind of stomach pains you get if you’re about to give birth out of your ass. It’s a cramping that comes with sickness, gas and eventually enough diarrhea to make your entire life flash before your eyes.”

“You’re not going to make him shit himself to death, are you?”

I laugh, unsure of what I’m going to do.

“Let’s just chill. Act like it’s no big deal, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And don’t be a smart ass.”

“Do you know what you’re asking of me?” she asks, nervous delight in her voice.

“I do,” I say as we get in line. I see Spanky, see the pained look he’s working to keep off his face. His studded jeans look extra tight, his shirt straining at the buttons against his exceptionally large frame, his guns on display—a pair of well-defined biceps that have to be mid-twenties in circumference. The man is a good six foot seven, long braided ponytail, and right now he’s hassling a young guy and his girl.

“This ain’t you,” he says to the girl, handing her back her ID.

“Yes it is, oh my freaking God dude!”

“It’s not,” he says, hooking his thumb our way. “Beat it before I call the cops.”

“You can’t talk to her like that,” the boyfriend says, ever the protector.

“I can and I will!” he barks down at the guy, sending him reeling backwards.

To the kid’s defense, he’s maybe five-eight, five-nine, a buck seventy and not as exercised as he should be. His dick-sized arms and his bony legs fit in today’s fashion, but in a world full of men who’ve become pussies, this guy is the poster child for today’s feminized male.

“Let’s go, this place sucks anyway,” he says, talking tough.

“It does,” the bouncer says, waving the next person forward. “So take your little girlfriend and go.”

I feel Netty’s emotional butthole pucker.

“It’s cool,” I say. “Just stay cool.”

Now I’m thinking not only about me, but about Cicely, Tempest and Georgia and I’m wondering how they’re going to get in. We all have fake ID’s, but this guy has a perceptive eye, a short temper and the sort of shrimp taco cramps that are causing him to squirm.

We smell something like raw sewage waft by and Netty grabs her nose. The guy just totally creeped out an air brownie. This master blaster just grunted out a heinie hiccup and now everyone’s making those hard eyes that say, alright, who TF just did that?

“Good God,” she says.

Yeah, it’s like an opened corpse. At least he feels better. But then a gas bubble rolls and as he’s checking ID’s and we’re moving forward, he’s thinking with every moving bubble comes the promise of the eventual mudslide.

Right now he’s thinking there’s no one to do his job for him while he lets Polly out of jail and it’s got him sweating. I’m feeling inside him, fully feeling every distressing emotion. I feel his shins starting to sweat, his underarms getting damp. He takes a hanky from his back pocket, dabs his forehead, waves us forward. All he wants is a toilet and some privacy.

“ID’s, ladies,” he says, looking at us. He’s already thinking we’re full of shit, and he’s right. But not as full as him.

“You don’t look so good, Spanky,” I say.

“I’m fine,” he says, flashlight on the ID’s.

“Shrimp tacos?” I ask.

He looks up, studies me. “What about them?”

“I had some a couple of days ago. Felt like an angry badger crawling and scratching its way out of my colon.”

He gives a genial laugh, hands me my ID. Now he’s looking at Netty’s ID. He looks up at her and I say, “You know how you think you eked out that one trouser cough that’s just been kicking down the backside of your butthole and that was the relief you needed?”

He looks up at me and says, “What the hell, kid?”

“Yeah, but then what you did, you realize all that fart juice, it was like an air cushion holding back the landslide.”

“Do I look like I’m going to shit myself?” he says.

“I know you’re about to shit yourself,” I say. “Give her back her ID, let us through.”

“She looks like she hasn’t even hit puberty yet,” he says, wincing, holding back a groan. He’s looking down at her tits and I’m thinking this guy needs a bit more pain.

“Both of you, beat it,” he says, handing Netty her fake ID.

“You can’t turn us away,” Netty says.

“The ID is good, but you’re not twenty-one and you know it.”

“Neither of us are, Spanky,” I say.

Netty steps forward, looks up at him and says, “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”

Netty’s not afraid to drop the f-bomb, and it sounds good coming from her. Me? Not so much. But on her it’s kind of sexy.

“Tell it to the bouncer at the kiddy club,” he says, looking over us to the people behind us.

I turn and say, “Stay.” Then to Spanky: “There are three girls coming here tonight, girls so beautiful they hardly look real. They’re all my age, which is to say, underage. You’re going to let them in even though it flies in the face of everything you as the bouncing sort stand for.”

He laughs at me, then he looks at Netty and that laugh becomes a sour frown.

Jeez…

“I’ll make you a deal,” I tell him, snapping my fingers in his face. He looks down his nose at me. “You let us through and I don’t make you crap yourself. But if you tell us to leave one more time, I will wring your colon dry in less than ten seconds.”

“Are you threatening me?” he asks, his tenor sharp, but louder. “Because that’s the strangest threat I think I’ve ever had. I mean, people tell me they’re going to report me, kick my ass, kill me…”

“She could do all three,” Netty says.

“Perhaps, little lady,” he says with a grin made painful by the gas bubbles. Looking down at Netty, but pointing a meaty finger in my face, he says, “but she can’t make me shit myself.”

He turns and flashes the light in my face and in that minute, I roll hard into him, use my psychic hands to get a grip on his colon, just behind the fullest section. He startles because he watches my eyes bleed to black. And then he feels it: the boiling agony of me keeping my word…

“Those are my hands around your colon, Spanky.”

“Bullshit,” he says, doubling over. “Just an air bubble.”

I start to squeeze, start to twist his colon, the pain escalating from moderately uncomfortable to downright distressing. A new layer of sheen maps his brow.

Beads of sweat trickle at the temples.

“This is not the kind of situation where you spit out a poo crumb, or maybe blow a diarrhea-bubble. See, if I twist a little harder”—and now he’s doubling over and really groaning—“I can move everything a little faster. Imagine I really give you a good squeeze...”

He lashes out, lightening fast, trying to grab my hair, my shirt, an arm, something, but I step back, grab his hand, flip it over and bend his wrist backwards so hard he takes a knee. This all happens too quick for most people to comprehend, yet I keep the psychic pressure on his colon. I realize I shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m becoming more of a jerk than I already am, but Draco said relax and I need to relax.

I need Monarch.

“This is what’s going to happen,” I say, standing over the top of him, “you are going get off your knees, you’re going to let me and my friend in and you’re going to let the three girls I told you about in as well. They are about ten minutes out. You’ll know them when you see them. And like me, they are not twenty-one, but tonight that won’t matter to you. At least it shouldn’t.”

“I’ll let you in,” he growls through gritted teeth, “but not them.”

“See now that would be really bad. It would be so bad that if you do that, I’m going to come out here and snap your wrist. Not this one,” I say, pushing back and cranking down harder, “your jerk wrist.”

I feel him cringe at the thought of what I’m suggesting.

When you can walk into anyone’s brain like it’s an open house, you see a person for who they truly are. Not the version of themselves they present to the world, or their mothers or their church. No, not at all. What I’m talking about are all the dark secrets we bury to protect the world from us and all our debauchery. I’m talking about all the shameful things they think and do when no one’s watching.

Our friend Spanky here isn’t called Spanky because he looks like a Little Rascal. He’s called Spanky because…well, you get it. He’s a chronic masturbator. Then again, so is half the male population, but not as bad as Spankadoodle-dandy here.

I lean in close to him, keeping the extra pressure on his wrist and say, “If I break this wrist, you’ll have to switch hit when you’re beating off, right Spanky? But you can’t scroll with the mouse and jerk off with your navigation hand can you? I mean, think of all the fun I’d be taking away from you.”

“What the hell is your problem?” he snarls, violently pissed off that a hundred and fifteen pound girl is controlling him. His burst of rage, however, is tempered by his pain.

“I have a world to save and right now what I need is to clear my mind.”

“Your ID is illegal,” he says, entirely missing the point.

“Of course it is you block-headed knuckle-dragger.”

“Why are you so strong?” he says, looking up at me with bulging eyes and red, red skin. The sweat is now rolling down from his temples, down his forehead. “And why are your eyes black?”

I smile at him, a sexy little grin that has him considering my looks. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but believe this, you’re my bitch now, Spanky.”

“You’re evil,” he says.

“Not usually.”

“What did I ever do to you?”

“You said ‘no’, my friend. No is the opposite of what you needed to say to me.”

“If you let go of my wrist,” he says, his shoulder smooshing down painfully in his socket, “I’ll say ‘yes.’”

“You’ll say whatever I want you to say, Spanky, or I will take away your pride, your dignity and your personal entertainment.”

“I said I’d say ‘yes,’” he says, tears giving that extra shine to his eyes. I feel the fight in him break in that moment. He is complete surrender. He is malleable. He’s mine.

“Good,” I say, letting go of his wrist, and his colon, “get up.”

He gets up.

“Something’s wrong with you,” he says, rubbing his wrist and ushering us through.

“There are about a million things wrong with me, Theodore,” I say, using his real name. “But you won’t fix any of them tonight.”

His nostrils flare with disbelief. No one has called him Theodore since his mother died. His mother’s last gasping breath held those eight letters, that name, her final plea. He thinks about his mother, and he is afraid of me. He doesn’t know what I am. But he’s scared.

He should be.

“Remember my three friends,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything, but I know he’ll let them through because his mind is turning a hundred miles an hour trying to figure out what just happened. If he had been a nice man, not an abusive bully who was wholly despised not only by many of his co-workers but girls like the one he just turned away—a girl who was actually twenty-two but young looking—I would have used my charm. That works, too.

But you know me by now, I freaking hate bullies.

* * *

The club is absolutely jumping inside and Netty and I are certainly the standouts. Maybe we’re too sexy. Did we overdo it? I look at Netty but she’s mesmerized by the décor, and by the people. This club inside is amazing. But there are also some good looking guys around. None as heart-stoppingly beautiful as August, but a few are somewhat close.

“My God,” Netty says under her breath.

“Drinks first,” I tell her. “Take the edge off.”

At the bar, I ask the bartender, “How are you with your drinks?” Downstairs, the music is thumping, but up here, even tame, it’s kind of loud but in a thrilling way.

“If they’ve got a name for it, I can make it,” he says, making eyes at me. Like really making eyes at me.

“Two drinks then,” I say, looking at Netty and then back to him: Brandon. “I’ll take a Short Trip To Hell, and she’ll take a Juicy Lucy.”

He looks at me for a second, then it clicks and he says, “Almost forgot what a Short Trip To Hell had in it.”

“But you have it now?”

He grins and says, “If it has a name…”

“Then you can make it,” I say, finishing his sentence.

“I’m Brandon, by the way,” he says, reaching out to shake my hand.

“Of course you are,” I tell him, taking it. Looking over at Netty I say, “And this sexy little number is Netty. She’s petite and sweet when she wants to be, but when you get the real her, she’ll pack a hell of a punch, hard enough to make you forget you ever wanted my name.”

He looks at me and in my head I say, Look at her.

“I can see that,” he says, shaking Netty’s hand.

Netty says, “What’s a Juicy Lucy?”

“Vodka, gin, Blue Curacao liquor, orange juice, and Sprite. It’s good.”

She lets go of his hand and says, “If you just sit here and stare at me all night, you won’t make any money.”

“Right,” he says, smirking to himself, “Juicy Lucy and A Short Trip To Hell.”

When he’s gone I turn to Netty and say, “Sounds like an Indy film, right?”

“He’s hot AF,” she says.

“Totes.”

He brings us our drinks, but Netty’s got her beautiful eyeballs on this guy and his friend. His friend isn’t terribly cute, but he’s cute enough. They head downstairs and I ask, “Do you want to chill up here or go down there?”

“What’s down there?”

“The DJ’s spinning, obviously.”

“Down, please,” she says, grinning.

“Driver, follow those boys,” I say and her laugh is melodious.

It’s always so surprising how this wound tight anti-hero feels when she’s relaxed. It always has the same affect on me: it makes me want to be a better person, not this person. It makes me not want to have this life. It makes me want to be a normal teenage girl.

I follow Netty downstairs where the EDM is on tap. The huge floor is all bodies grinding out to techno-dance music. It’s progressive house music, which is giving everyone that feeling like they’re somewhere more angelic than here, like they’re floating through space on a cloud of fairy dust with nothing but the beauty of life to fuel them through what feels like a drug-free acid trip.

Netty’s in the mix, arms up, dancing. I follow her, imbue myself to the beat, let it carry my body. I’m here with strangers, but we could all be soul mates; this isn’t the kind of music that makes you want to release your inhibitions, this is the kind of music that makes you feel like you’ve never even had inhibitions. Is this what it’s like to live? To be free?

I see Netty moving toward the guys she followed down and I stay put, letting the hypnotic ocean of music guide me.

Some guy moves up against me, works his way in front of me, and I feel him, his soul. He’s clean. Nervous. I walk him to the dance floor, give him my attention. It’s easy to find his groove. I ride it with him, letting go. My hands caress my body and suddenly I’m remembering Netty’s almost lesbian girlfriend and how she took me and showed me what it felt like to be the music, to pull it into you and let it have its way.

Chloe. I feel her. Which is super weird.

Is she here?

That’s when I look up and see my three other besties walking down the stairs with drinks. My heart soars as the music changes. I turn to the guy in front of me, run my hand down his chest, but my eyes are on my friends. I see Netty with the guy, glass in the air, her body in sync with both him and the music, and suddenly everything is right with the world.

“What’s your name?” the guy asks, leaning in.

“What do you want it to be?” I say.

“Piper,” he says, enjoying the game.

“It’s funny that you say that,” I say, leaning close, my body doing things I didn’t know it could do with the beat, “because Piper is my name.”

“Really?”

“Who do you want to be?” I ask him.

“I feel like my parents should have named me Rohan,” he tells me.

“Lord of the Rings fan?” I ask.

“And here I didn’t think you could get any sexier than this,” he says. “But there you go, proving me wrong already.”

“Well, Rohan, it’s nice to meet you,” I say. The song changes again, but my feelers are on all my friends.

Rohan and I find our way closer to each other, keeping to each new beat through each transition and he says, “How are you here right now?”

“Right place, right time,” I tell him, my body with him but not my mind.

“Are you with someone?” he asks.

“I’m with you,” I say, my eyes focusing.

“No, but I mean, are you with someone with someone?”

“Oh that,” I say. “Yes.”

I feel his energy waning, like he thought we made the connection and was letting himself imagine something more happening between us. But there is no more to be had. This is it. He is my escape tonight, and I am his for as long as he realizes I’m not going to kiss him, swap numbers and then date.

“Where is he?”

“Texas.”

“Does he know you’re here?” he asks.

“I’m not a dog on a leash, Rohan,” I say, cute and sassy, “and he doesn’t need me to be.”

“What’s he like?”

“Are you asking so you know what a girl like me wants in a guy?”

The beat transitions again, seamless, and I look over at Netty, whose body is against the guy’s she likes and I’m really happy for her. I take a bump off her emotions and she’s let go of all the things plaguing her: her fears of boys, her lost baby, her mother’s child with Dante, her anger at me for leaving her.

“It’s funny,” he says after a moment, “I didn’t know that’s why I was asking, but then again, I didn’t know it consciously.”

“I’m good like that,” I say, most of me stuck in the gravitational pull of the rhythm, and just enough of me out and willing to converse with him.

“I guess,” he says, letting go again.

“It’s not looks,” I hear myself say. “Even though looks are important. It’s confidence, I think. It’s a guy who doesn’t get his dick in the dirt over every little thing, a guy who can go with the flow in parts of his life, a guy who creates that flow in other people’s lives.”

“That’s interesting,” he says, and I can tell he’s interested.

“I think a sense of humor is more important than a paycheck. Although girls like me are shallow and expect that you should make a lot of money. This means that job you have right now needs to go because sixty-eight thousand a year just isn’t going to cut it.”

I say this smiling, but his face falls flat and he says, “How do you know that?”

I just do.

Looking away from him, leveling him with that mysterious grin, I say, “Tell me a joke,” and this is his chance to be funny, but he’s put under the gun and—what the hell?

The smell of the air changes from mixed colognes and perspiration to a sort of sandalwood infused charcoal. Under that is the smell of man and earth. Just beneath that is the coppery hint of blood mixed with a dab of clearwood, which is a cleaner smelling patchouli scent. Individually it would feel like it works, but together, the scent is mesmerizing, haunting, dirty.

I follow my eyes and see a man walking toward Georgia. He moves in the shadows, but the way he moves is freaking sexy.

Interesting.

He’s tall and muscular, but not in a body-builder type of way. It’s like a Hollywood build. The kind where you can wear normal clothes. He radiates raw sexuality and arrogance, but it’s some of the underlying scents about him I don’t understand.

Why am I smelling this? And why can’t I see him?

“Are you okay?” Rohan asks me. Rohan’s real name is Noah, but he doesn’t like it because it makes him feel like an old dude on a boat and no one ever said they wanted to get drunk and get boned by a prophet.

“Yeah, good,” I say, pulling back to him. I realize the beats have transitioned again and I’m off. “I just saw an old frenemy and I’m trying to remember how we left off.”

“So you’re from here?” he asks.

“We went to school together a few years back,” I lie, “but I think maybe I need to say hello because I have a feeling the guy trying to game her is no good.”

“Bad boy no good, or date rape drug no good?” he asks. Noah has great hair, big blue eyes and the features of a new man in his early twenties. He wants to go with me, but he’s feeling like if I leave, he’ll be left here.

He will be.

I lean in, give him a long, warm kiss on the cheek and say, “If I wasn’t already taken, I’d let you to have me. I’d want you to have me.”

“I think maybe that hurts worse,” he says with a smile. “But thank you.”

“When you meet a girl named Sarah, she’s going to make you forget about me, and then you’re going to get her pregnant,” I say. “Just stay with her, Noah. You’ll be happy that you did.”

His face goes slack, but he recovers quickly, which surprises me. “Are you some kind of psychic or something?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Piper the psychic.”

“Sarah you said?” he asks.

“Sarah.”

And then I leave and head straight for Georgia. Georgia who doesn’t know me. Along with Tempest and Cicely who don’t know me either. I buried everything about me so deep in their memories it would take a fleet of backhoes months to extract it. Unfortunately it’s left them all with some strange gaps in time, gaps they’ve discussed. They all chalk it up to having been changed by Gerhart who’s become Holland, but they also know that’s not it.

They just can’t think of any other explanations.

As I’m walking over there, I’m missing everything about Brayden…August. I’m missing him and feeling him missing me, too. He’s so madly in love with me it’s got me level inside. But when I bump off him, I feel the connection falter, like the last breath of life falling from my mouth for just the briefest moment.

When I left him, he was talking with his father, telling him about his exploits. The two of them were feeling good together. They were feeling fine.

The reason I cut my connection short is because his step-mother is bringing them drinks, and unfolding inside of her at an alarming pace is the insatiable desire to be with him.

A quick bump off August’s dad tells me he feels her feeling it, too.

He’s looking at her and knowing his wife (who married him for money) is now flowering with need at the sight of his new son. August is no stranger to the affections of older women, so he’s feeling it, too, and for the first time, this kind of attention is making him uncomfortable.

He’s finally understanding what it means to sometimes suffer the lust of others, something he never had to know as Brayden.

He was always attracted to his step-mother as Brayden, but now that he’s feeling that discomfort in the air, he’s realizing he needs to cut his time here short.

That was about the time I pulled out.

Now all I see is Georgia.

Looking out on the floor, I see Tempest and Cicely dancing and I see the crush of guys looking to snag their attention. Seeing them working it, I realize these two girls are now comfortable with the attention of others. They have their force fields up, though, like they see the looks they’re getting but it has no more meaning to them than the name of a song, the color of a shirt or the taste of water.

Back to Georgia.

I slide up to a seat nearby with a group of people I don’t know. I look at them looking at me and say, “Hi, I can only stay a minute.”

“What’s your name?” a girl says. I look right at her and my heart damn near stops. I see the eyes, the face, the body, but it’s all different. Not modified like me, just…refined.

“Savannah,” I say.

“I was just going to grab drinks,” the girl says, “do you want to come?”

Bumping off Georgia and the new guy, a guy I know will be too much for Netty, I say, “Yeah, I could use a lift.”

What is this feeling? I wonder.

When we get out, the girl is stunning, exuding the same kind of soft but insistent need for me that plagued Rohan.

She reaches out her hand and says, “I’m Chloe,” to which I say, “You look like a Chloe.”

Pleased with my answer, she says, “What does a Chloe look like?”

“Every Chloe I ever met was gorgeous, so with those high standards, I expect you to be hot, and you are. My God, what did you do to yourself?”

“Do we know each other?” she asks.

That’s when I realize I was Abby when I met her before, Abby when she took me on the dance floor and kissed me. She was my first girl kiss when she was nerdy cute with her glasses and her plain hair. But now she’d come into her own and damned if it wasn’t working.

“Maybe it’s just me,” I say. “I feel like I should know you.”

“If you keep talking like that,” she says, “I’m going to insist you buy me a drink.”

“You do the first round and I’ll do the next,” I say.

At the bar, she turns and says, “Have you ever had Sand in the Crack?” and I’m like, “Isn’t that a bit personal?”

“The drink,” she says, amused.

“No on the drink, yes on the real thing. I summered in Huntington Beach.”

“You sound uppity when you say it like that.”

“It was supposed to be endearing,” I tell her, not wanting her to think I’m some snob. Why did I say it like that?

When the bartender approaches us, he says, “What’ll it be ladies?”

“Sand in the Crack for me, Hop Skip And Go Naked for her because she likes the beach,” Chloe says.

When she turns to me, I say, “Are you trying to get with me?”

“Of course I am,” she says, and it’s flattering.

When she kissed me before, it was the softest most sensual kiss I’ve ever had. I remember thinking, only a woman can kiss like that, even though back then Chloe felt like a girl. Now she feels like a woman coming into her own and for some reason this is so very attractive. Maybe I want what she has. That easy confidence. Her peace. She’s with friends, falling in love, not staking the world on it, not wanting anything more than what she already has now.

The bartender brings us our drinks and I have to say, her choice for me is perfect. It has me looking at her in a whole new light. It’s got me thinking about how she was with Netty, broken up at the loss of her, jealous of me when I was Abby, and now I don’t feel that.

If I feel anything, it’s the essence of her.

“You are so beautiful to me,” I say, knowing I shouldn’t say it, but unwilling to hold this truth so close.

“I was thinking the same about you,” she says.

Looking out on the dance floor, I see the man Georgia was talking to dancing with her. Inside my heart aches to be with her again, to have her as a regular friend. A girl needs her friends, and maybe Georgia’s not in much danger now that I’ve changed, even though I’m not liking the guy she’s with. Why the f*ck can’t I see him? I try to bump off him, but all I get is that smell. Like he spritzed himself with cologne after eating a medium rare steak.

Chloe takes my drink from my hand and says, “Do you want to bring a few guys to their knees?” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

She takes my hand, guides me to the floor and from there we fall into an easy groove. Now there are hot girls everywhere. It’s not just me. Tempest and Cicely have their crowd, Georgia is a stunning red head and fire in a dark room, and then there’s Chloe and yours truly. She’s close to me, closer than Rohan—so close I can smell the spark of bourbon with the sweetness of a Sobe energy drink on her breath.

Her hands go to my sides as she works me.

“Tell me if I’m going to far,” she says in my ear, her breath warm on my skin. “But just know we have an audience now.”

I look up and see several guys watching us, slack jawed and dripping with lust.

“Do your thing,” I say.

The music builds in tempo, the tension rising, like it’s building up to something and though it’s dark, there’s enough light happening to become that thing that brings everyone to their collective knees.

She’s got her hands on me, running across my ass, over my tummy and to my breasts. If she was a stripper, I’d be her pole.

She loves this kind of attention because Chloe is the kind of girl who needs to feel wanted, needed, relentlessly desired. It stems from her desire for companionship.

Her mother left her when she was young and her father was at work all the time. Until she got her first job in the city, she was a lonely child. Nerdy and without many friends. When she came into her own, she realized she liked men, but she liked women more. Although at first she felt so ashamed by this, she was now hot enough to go with it and not think twice.

She liked me as Abby, a lot, but as Savannah, she wants to believe there is something here. Maybe that thing she’s always wanted. That one true love to fill all the holes inside her.

The beat hits a crescendo and she’s about as high on me as she can get, and that’s when I pick the perfect moment to take her and kiss her the way she kissed me. I don’t know why I do this, but I do. I think it’s because I’m inside her, feeling all these things I cannot feel on my own and I’m beyond intoxicated.

All around us guys are clapping and whistling and I feel Chloe’s mouth smiling against mine.

She takes my hand, walks me off the dance floor, takes our drinks and sips hers, her heart racing not from the dancing but from the feeling of me. And me? Oh boy, this girl is riding the wave of Chloe, feeling every single thing she’s feeling.

She hands me my drink and I sip it gingerly.

We get our own private section of booth and the way she’s looking at me, I can tell that she’s let go, allowed herself to believe that something here could mean something, maybe be something.

Cicely and Tempest walk past us, catching my attention. This stifles a bit of Chloe’s spirit because they’re gorgeous, but when I look back at her and tell her I’m in love with her eyes, she’s like, “You keep saying the same things I’m feeling.”

“Perhaps that’s a sign,” I say.

I know I shouldn’t say it, but honestly, I knew I could feel the fear of people, the lust of people, even read their minds, tinker in their memories, influence them. But this…this is something else entirely! There is a euphoria I feel like some magic carpet ride I thought I could only take with August.

But with Chloe, it’s different.

Where there’s a strength with August that’s attractive, Chloe possesses a vulnerability that has kept her cautious over the years. Now that her desire is unleashed and she’s not caging it, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

Just then Netty walks up to us and says, “I see you’ve met Chloe,” but not in a bad way.

“Netty,” she says, surprised. Chloe gets up, gives her a hug and says, “You two know each other?”

“We’re roommates and friends.”

Netty looks at me and I can tell she’s like, WTF is going on here? But I’m smiling at her, giving nothing away. In her mind, I say, Introduce us to your friend already.

Netty’s eyes flash wide as she realizes what I’ve just done. “Charles this is Savannah and Chloe,” she says, sounding awkward. “Guys, this is Charles.”

I know Charles already. I’ve seen him before in the future. Charles is going to be her husband. I stand, shake his hand and say, “Nice to meet you, Charles.”

He’s pleasant on the eyes and even keel emotionally, but what makes me really, really like him is that he’s seeing Chloe and me and no matter how attractive we are, he’s fully into Netty. My heart damn near breaks with joy because I know this love is going to consume them both.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” he says, letting go of my hand. “We were going to get a table if you want to join us.”

“Actually you two do your thing,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you, Charles.”

As they walk away, Netty looks over her shoulder at me and I hear her in my mind thinking, “Oh my GOD!”

In my head, to her, I say, He’s the one.

“I have this unquenchable thirst,” Chloe says over the music. I feel her intensity as she looks at me. She’s floating a bit on adrenaline and booze, but she’s feeling for the first time in a long time. Really this is the first time she’s wanting a girl since she was dumped by Netty. “But in seeing you, it’s like for the first time I know exactly what I want.”

“Which is?” I ask, sipping my drink.

“What is it you want?” she asks, pulling back a bit because I’m being coy. I’ve never been seduced by a woman before.

“I saw you once. It was when you and Netty were together. You don’t remember me but I remember you now and there is something different,” I hear myself saying. “What is it? What’s changed?”

I’m slightly intoxicated and I like the feeling—this floaty, easy suspension between what is real and that which I cannot control.

She sits up a little straighter at the revelation, then she says, “Contacts, new haircut, plus I’m getting my hips.”

“I noticed,” I say. “Stand up.”

She stands up in her cotton dress and yes indeed, she has her hips.

“Run your hands down them,” she says, “they’re simply divine.”

“That’s okay,” I say.

“Don’t be a bitch,” she quips. I look up in her eyes, and there is that thing inside her. It’s the same thing I feel in August’s step-mother, Lenore. It’s the feeling of someone else needing every last bit of you. She’s practically overwhelmed by me, and since I’m feeling what she’s feeling, I’m nearly overwhelmed by her as well.

Is this a gift or a curse? I ask myself.

I feel myself falling into this field of emotions, almost like these are her feelings, but they’re also becoming my feelings. I touch her hip, marvel in the feel of her body meeting with mine.

“Have you ever been with a girl?” she asks.

She moves closer to me and I put both hands on both hips, my eyes at the same level as her breasts.

“Before tonight, I kissed a girl once,” I say, not telling her I’d kissed her on the dance floor of a club just like this one when I was in a different body. It was magical, took me by surprise, left me with an impression. “Just let me touch you.”

I pull her torso even closer to me, slide my hands around to her butt. I sense the sharp inhale by her, feel a smile creeping onto my face. When they say every girl at some point in time either wonders about their first girl crush or just plain gives in to it, I wonder if this is what I’m feeling.

These are not my feelings, I tell myself.

I’m floating and tangled in her emotions. Wrapped up in her lust. I am trapped here, inside her, but there’s a curious part of me that wants to be here, snared, enchanted.

I dip off August’s mind, finger through the folds of his intrigue, try to imagine if he thinks being with Chloe will be the same as cheating. Draco said let go. Did he know she’d be here? Suddenly my arms are wrapped around her butt and I’m pulling her into me even more, turning my face, pressing it against her stomach. There is part of me that’s held in rapture over her body, but the greatest parts of me are her, how she’s feeling, what she wants.

She leans down, tilts my chin up, kisses me. Her lips are so soft, so sensual. I kiss her back. When she kissed me as Abby, I let her do it; this time I want to kiss her because this is what I want. My hands slide up her ribs. My breath steals at the feel of her, my body charged with want, a need so cerebral, so physical, I’m bogged down and drowning in desire.

I have to be with this girl. I have to know her. To love her. These are not my emotions though! Are they? I tell myself it’s the booze and the primal sexuality coming from this love-starved vixen.

My hands travel up her body, find her breasts, feel her nipples stiffening between my fingers. She pulls away from me, and I am left looking up at her, wanting.

“My God,” she says, touching her lipstick.

All I can do is look at her, breasts heaving, mouth open with want.

“I didn’t say you could touch me all over,” she said.

I’m in her head though, knowing what she wants. I stand up in her space, take her hands, put them on my ass, tuck her hair behind her ear and kiss her neck. She all but melts. Neither of us care that people are staring now, starting to talk.

That’s when Georgia and her mystery man walk by and I’m rubber-banded out of this dream state and struck with the fact that he’s here! Right now! Aloysius. The smell of Adolf Hitler’s son isn’t sexy or carnivorous—it’s the smell of death. The smell of a kill on his lips. The smell of their essence seeping out of his pores.

And why can’t I bump off him?

He looks at me, sneers, walks by. Chloe’s hand slips up my waist, into my shirt, and then up into my bra. She brushes her fingers over my nipple by the time I’m rebounding back to her. I look at her, concerned. Chloe slips her hand out of my bra, looks up and kisses me. I kiss her back, but it’s a distant kiss, the fires in me cooling. She looks over and sees me looking at Georgia and her own fires cool.

“What is happening here?” she asks, almost like she can’t get a read on the energy.

“It’s not you,” I say, the warrior in me emerging.

“It feels like me, and you. But then you see her and that guy, and now you’re gone.”

“It’s not for the reasons you think,” I tell her.

Inside, I’m cowering at the look he gave me, the almost animalistic edge he threw my way, like it was shade, but with the promise of violence. It was like he knew me and was saying, I’m going to take her from you, and then I’m going to take you.

My insides are distinctly nervous. I don’t get nervous. Eyes back on Chloe, I feel her like she’s going to burst, or suffer a monumental letdown.

I look at her and say, “Not a letdown.”

She looks at me with wide eyes, and I say, “I know the look. But trust me when I say, it’s okay to keep your guard down around me.”

“Who said it’s down?”

“It is,” I say. I take her hand and say, “Come with me.”

As I’m walking toward Georgia and this nightmarish creature I can hardly believe is here right now, taunting me, trying to steal my friend, I’m thinking of August, and what I’m considering with Chloe.

I focus in on August and make that connection and it’s so easy.

I pull off him though, try to reach through time and find a future August. This August is still letting go of Brayden, but the future August (the one I’m with years from now) is most certainly not Brayden. Brayden was the boy who always wanted me, who couldn’t have me, but who got me only after he decided to change.

But August…

As I’m walking with Chloe through the crowds of people, up the stairs and after Georgia, I feel myself opening up a cerebral wormhole; the crushing weight on me has my left eye squinting hard, like my head is compacting, but then it eases and I feel myself traveling.

Then the wormhole is gone and I am in his mind.

I don’t know what time I’m in, or if this is even real, but I’m in his head. Feeling him. I feel him stir, and then I’m looking through his eyes at a version of me and I see myself looking back. This version of me shifts, narrows her eyes.

“It’s me,” I say through his mouth.

“Savannah?”

“Yes.”

The future version of me sits back, lets out an exalted sigh. “I knew you’d come, I just didn’t know when.”

“So you know what I’m about to ask,” I say through August’s mouth.

“Yes.”

“Will it bother him if we’re with her?”

She smiles, then shakes her head slowly and says, “No.”

“Will you tell him?”

“Eventually, yes. Sooner than later.”

“And?”

“He thinks the idea of girl on girl is the hottest thing ever. It’s now something I use to get him going.”

“What is?” I ask, confused.

“Memories of us being with Chloe.”

I feel my heart still, like all my anxieties are tiny lights future me just shut off, or turned on as it were. Holy shit, I feel myself feeling.

This night…

“Be careful,” future me says. “He’s not what you think he is.”

Instantly I know she’s referring to Aloysius.

“But with Chloe,” she says, “let go and have fun. Oh, and get the fuck out of August’s head. We’re about to have dinner and you’re creeping me out.”

I feel myself smiling, August’s face responding. She leans forward and kisses us, and then she says, “It’s just like that, but better.”

I snap out of that time, whenever it was, and now I’m firmly rooted in this time. For whatever reason, my one minute conversation stole not even a second from this time. I feel Chloe’s hand in mine, and my eyes resolutely on Georgia and Aloysius.

“Hello,” Chloe says, smiling, taking me out of Georgia’s business. “Where are we going?”

I look back, tell her, “This will only take a moment,” even though I don’t really believe that.

Draco told me to let go, and my future self said have fun and make it good, that this will be a highlight of mine and August’s sexual lifestyle.

I wouldn’t lie to myself, would I?

In the face of these new memories though, I’m starting to worry about Georgia. We come to a crowd of people, and I’m waiting for them to part, to make room. I could just use my mind to clear a path, but if Aloysius senses me like I sense him, I don’t want him knowing anything about what I can do until I do it to him.

Turning to Chloe, I say, “I never really considered being a lesbian. It’s not something I’ve ever considered because I like men entirely too much.”

“I like men, too,” she says. “I just like women more.”

The crowd starts to shift, to move. I make my way through them, my tethers anchored on Georgia.

“Why is that?” I ask.

“There is a sensuality we exude that men cannot match. They just think we like being dicked, but I like a woman’s touch. It’s not rough like a man’s, but when it is rough, there is something so different about it, so sexy, I can’t seem to explain.”

This stalls me, bumps me off my near manic chase. I’m sort of moved by what she’s saying, enough to have me thinking about this experience not through her, but as me.

“Is it something I just have to find out for myself?” I ask.

At this point I’m feeing her again and playing to an audience. My night tonight will be the porno that future August watches. That’s what future me basically said.

“It is, if you’ll just slow down,” she’s saying.

“Are you wearing any underwear under that dress?” I turn and ask her.

“No.”

“What about you?”

“Yes,” I say. “White cotton, extra thin.”

The crowd bogs us down again, causing her to practically press her entire body against mine when I come to a sudden stop.

Leaning forward, she says, “Are you wet right now?”

Actually, I am.

“Yes.”

We’re almost to Georgia when I say, “I know that guy.”

“Yeah, who is he?”

This is where I look at her and tell her that thing that I’ve told no one else. “He’s a guy I need to kill.”

“If I tell you murder is sexy, will you think less of me?” she says, not missing a beat.

“Absolutely not. But you have to wait for a second. Don’t leave, okay?”

“I won’t,” she says.

“Promise.”

“I promise,” she says, squeezing my hand before letting go.

I catch up with Georgia and Aloysius, my stomach in my throat.

“Georgia Quick?” I ask.

She turns around, but so does he.

“Hi, I’m a friend of Brayden’s,” I say because it’s all I can think to say. I look up at Aloysius and suddenly I’m drawn into the gravitational pull of his eyes.

“I know you,” he says, and the very timber of his voice and the heavy gaze he lays upon me is like nothing I’ve ever felt. It’s like what I have been experiencing with Chloe but a hundred times stronger and dreamy.

“You know me,” I say, lost in his eyes. I blink fast twice, try to pull away, but I can’t. Almost everything falls away to this eternal bliss: the music, the crowds, Chloe, Netty, my friends…

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Georgia says, almost spellbound. I step forward, put my hand to his cheek, cupping it. The things that explode into me look like something you’d see if you trolled the Manson Family’s minds all at once. The gore, the bloodshed, the bone crunching disposal of his victims, it has me reeling. Thankfully it also ejects me from his head.

My eyes clear as he stares at me, amused by his hold over me, and his hold over Georgia.

“You sick fuck,” I say.

“See,” he says. “I told you I knew you.”

I refuse his eyes. He has a vampire’s gaze.

“Georgia, let’s go,” I say, taking her hand.

“I don’t know you,” she says, still dreamy. I send fire into her chest. It’s just a gut reaction, but it works. She cries out, jolts back, tries to get her hand free of Aloysius’s hand, but he doesn’t let go.

“If you don’t take your hand off her,” I say with force, “I’m going to take your hand for myself.”

“We lovers now?” he says, sly, coy, insulating.

“I know what you are,” I hiss.

“Then you know what I’m going to do to her.”

“Yes, but you don’t know what she’s got inside of her.”

“And what’s that?” he says, like he’s entertained by my horror.

“Fire.”

Now Georgia looks at me. This is her secret, but now a stranger knows: me.

“I like a little spice in my meals,” he says just loud enough for me to hear.

Suddenly he jerks his hand out of Georgia’s like he’s been burned. Looking over at her, the redhead’s eyes are ink black, her skin translucent.

“You’re not the Alpha here, Aloysius,” I say.

“You know my name.”

“I do.”

“Well, Savannah Swann,” he says, letting out his own little secret, “I’m pleased to finally meet you.”

He reaches out with his burnt hand to shake mine, but I use my mind to slice open his palm, the skin flaying, blood boiling to the surface.

He winces, then abruptly claps his hands together, splattering both Georgia and me with speckles of his blood. We both reel. Grinning, he wipes his hands on his black pants then shows me both palms.

Like a magic trick, there is no wound.

“Parlor tricks,” I say.

With my mind, driven by fear and wrath, I break all his fingers on both hands.

He flexes them into fists, little popping noises emitting, and then opens them back up and says, “Who’s got the parlor tricks now?”

But then his face erupts into flames and he tries to stamp them out. He ends up hitting himself in the face fast enough and hard enough to put out the fire, but by then he’s burnt to a crisp from nose to chin.

“Well done,” I say with a smirk.

Okay, that was shameless. It was shameless and no one laughed, but inside, I swear to Jesus the humor was spot on.

Leaning forward into the burnt taste of him, I say, “Fix that, fuckface.” Then: “C’mon Georgia.”

“You burned me!” he snarls as we’re leaving. Looking back I show him the middle finger and smile.

“Well done?” Georgia asks with a grin.

“I knew someone would find that funny!” I say, and she laughs, but only for a moment.

“When we get out of here,” Georgia says, “you’ll have to tell me what that was about and who you are to Brayden.”

A second later, Netty is by my side with Charles. She’s looking a little freaked out by the hysteria that’s gripped the people behind us, the people who saw Aloysius’s face catch fire.

“I’m going to go home with Chloe if you’re okay with that,” I tell her.

There is a long silence between us, then I feel her burrowing into my mind. Trying to understand what the F I’m thinking. I open up a telepathic line and say, “I want this. But only if you’re okay.”

I am, she thinks.

Okay, so she’s fine. Good. I open my emotions up to Chloe, feel her insecurity, then take her hand in mine.

“So you said you know Brayden?” Georgia says.

“He’s in Texas,” I say, my tethers fully hooked into Aloysius, who is making his way out back, away from me. “He’s telling his father about his chin and nose implants.”

Georgia blanches, like she knows what this means.

“Those were implants?” Netty says.

Georgia looks at Netty and says, “You know him, too?”

“He stayed with me after the whole…” and that’s where she stops.

She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to bring up the fact that she slept with my bestie-with-a-peen, or lost their baby. And she certainly doesn’t want to do this with Charles here.

“It’s time for you to get back to your friends,” I tell Georgia. “If that guy comes at you again, don’t look at his eyes. Just roast him. Fully.”

Everyone else thinks roasting is an expression, but I tap into Georgia’s mind and say, “He’s a mutant vampire. We’ll talk later.”

She looks at me, then looks around like she’s not believing the things she feels are true. She’s wondering, did I imagine that?

“Did you just say something?” she asks.

“Of course I did,” I say aloud. “But we can talk about that later.”

“How?” she says.

“I’ll call you.”

“But you don’t have my number.”

I recite it to her in her head, and by now everyone’s feeling extra drunk because this sort of choppy conversation is making all of us uneasy.

“Tomorrow,” I say. “Now go. Tempest is getting worried.”

She goes.

Turning to Charles I say, “You’re taking her home, yes?”

“If that’s okay with her,” he says, looking at Netty. She nods. “Then yes, I am.”

“Treat her good, Charles,” I say, but I only say this because I know he will.

Turning to Chloe, I say, “You want to get out of here?” She looks over at me and I can see it in her eyes. The answer is yes. “Good. You can text your friends from the car.”

Chapter Thirteen

On the way home, as I’m following Chloe to her place, I call Raven and tell her I’ll be staying overnight.

“Are we going lesbian tonight?” she asks.

“Is that okay?”

“You want to know what’s weird?” Raven asks. “I never really thought about that before, but I’m thinking of hooking up with her the way you’re thinking of hooking up with her and that’s okay.”

Just then a call comes through.

“Hang on,” I tell Raven.

“Hey,” I say.

There’s no need for caller ID. I have my own caller ID.

“Hey,” Elizabeth says back. “Patch me in.”

I conference Raven in.

“So now we’re going lesbo?” Elizabeth says.

“I think maybe we should try this,” I add. Then: “I want to try this.”

“We’re all us,” Raven says, “so whatever you feel, we feel as well.”

“And?”

“We’re not lesbian, but we do like Chloe,” Elizabeth says.

“A lot,” Raven adds.

“So this is okay?” I ask.

“You want to see where this goes,” Raven says, like she’s telling me this rather than asking. Of course she’s telling me this!

“You know I do,” I say. Then: “Future us said it was okay that we did it. That we did this.”

“So we should,” Raven says.

“Yeah, but she’s not a long term thing as much as it’s a one time thing,” Liz says. “Right?”

“I guess,” I say.

“Don’t think of me as Liz,” Elizabeth warns me.

“Sorry.”

“Go have fun,” Raven says. “But like Liz said—”

“Don’t call me Liz!”

“—don’t make a thing of it because August is cool with once, but maybe not twice.”

“I already know that,” I say. I’m here now. They know this so they say good-bye and I’m glad all of me could weigh in on this.

Chloe parks and I find a nearby spot for the RS5. Inside, her place is gorgeous. She uncorks a bottle of wine, pours me a glass, hands it to me.

“Can I wash up?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, taking me to the bathroom.

I close and lock the door, pull out my phone and call Georgia to make sure she’s okay.

“How do you really know me?” Georgia says.

“I told you, I’m a friend of Brayden’s,” I say.

“You said that already.”

“I’ll explain everything when I get there tomorrow.”

“I don’t live in SF.”

“I know, ding-dong. You’re at Astor. If for any reason that guy sees you again, do to him what you did to that boy in the lab.”

“H-how do you know about that when I barely know about that.”

“What exactly do you know about that?” I ask.

“A girl was killed, and then I burned a boy.”

“But why?”

“Because the boy killed that girl.”

“Who was the girl?”

“I-I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out.”

I take a deep breath, hear a light knock on the bathroom door and say, “Almost done.” Then to Georgia I say, “I’m the dead girl. But we can talk about that tomorrow.”

“You’re…you’re the…what?”

“I’m that girl, Georgia. I have to go. Just stay away from that guy.”

“Who is he and why did he target me?”

“He’s Hitler’s son.”

“Savannah?” Chloe asks.

“I have to go, Georgia. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

When I open the door, Chloe is standing there with a glass of wine and that look on her face.

“What’s going on?” she asks, concerned.

I step forward and kiss her. Not like I’d kiss someone for the first time, but like I’d kiss August. When I break away, I look at her and say, “This is new for me, so if I hesitate for a moment or two, you have my permission to move me forward.”

She hands me the glass of wine, I take a sip, and then before I know what’s happening, our mouths meet, we make our way to her couch and after that, she’s peeling off my clothes, laying kisses on me where I am now naked.

Most of the night is a blur, a haze of lust and exploration, a taste of all things scary and new and wildly sensual. But during that erotic hour and a half of letting go, I learn what it’s like to be with a woman. I can’t say if I’m good or not, but I can tell you this, I was so swallowed up in the emotions of Chloe that I rode them like a wave and from her perspective, I felt like I was amazing.

When we wake in the morning, I ask her, “Do you need to get to work?”

“I already texted my boss, told her I’d be in after noon.”

She leans over, kisses me on the mouth, then shoves off the covers and walks naked through the room, stopping at the door to the bathroom to look back at me.

“If I didn’t tell you,” she says. “I absolutely loved last night.”

I’m still cresting the wave of her emotions, not necessarily sure what my own emotions are at this point.

She starts the shower, sits down to pee, and that’s when I start thinking about peeling out of her head. A moment later, she’s at the door again saying, “You want to shower together?”

I love the way her body looks, and I love the way she’s looking at me, so I stay in her head and say, “I do.”

I crawl out of bed, walk naked toward her, then follow her into the shower. She offers to wash me, and I let her. She wants me to wash her and I want to because I’m her and I want what she wants.

She kisses me when we’re clean, and then she kisses me some more and after that, honestly, I’m too embarrassed to tell you what happened. All I can say is I loved it. And for some reason, I realize this is going to be the moment August will love to hear about most.

We eat breakfast at the table in front of the window overlooking the city.

“Can I see you again?” Chloe finally asks. I knew it was coming.

“If I tell you no, will you think it’s you?”

Her expression softens. Her eyes dip slightly and she says, “I might.”

“If I beg you not to think that,” I ask, “will you believe me?”

“Did we go too far last night?” she asks, teasing a lock of her hair around her finger.

I laugh and say, “Hell, no.”

She glances back up and says, “Is this your token lesbian experience?”

“I’ve kissed a girl before—”

“That’s not the same as what we did.”

I feel a surge in her emotions brought about by memories of last night. They rush over me as well and I have to say, I like it. I know what Liz and Raven said, but it’s hard for me to step out of this energy. Chloe is beyond enamored with me. She’s desperate for more of me, and honestly, I don’t care that we’re both women.

The same sex notion concerned Netty after she was done with Chloe, but how do I feel now that our night is over? How do I feel as me and not her? I pull out of her head completely for the first time since I stepped in there.

I draw a deep breath, look at her with my eyes, feel her with my own feelings, and I have to say, it’s not much different from how I’m feeling.

“I like what we did,” I say.

She reaches across the small table for my hand, takes it and says, “Then let’s do it again.”

“Okay,” I hear myself say. I should have said no, broke her heart while it was less fragile, but I actually want to see her again.

“When?”

“Let me think about my schedule here for a second.” I dip into August’s head, roll through his mind, realize he wants a few more days with his father, who is finally coming around, then my eyes clear and I say, “I have to be in Sacramento later today and maybe tomorrow, but maybe tomorrow night?”

“Okay,” she says, shy again, hungry again.

“Can I ask you an honest question?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Do you think there’s a possibility with us?”

“Do you want me to be perfectly honest back?”

She hesitates, then says, “Of course.”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“Do you love him?”

“I do.”

“Then why do this with me?”

“Because he’ll like hearing about it.”

“So he’s into this?” she asks, unsure of how to feel.

“Yes,” I admit, “he just doesn’t know it yet.”

“So how do you know he’ll like it?”

“Because it will only be one encounter between us.”

“You said you’d be with me again.”

“And I will.”

“But you’ll tell him this happened only once?”

“I won’t lie to him. Which means between now and tomorrow, I’ll be figuring out how to tell him we saw each other twice.”

“What if we really like each other.”

“I do like you.”

“But enough to see each other a third time?”

I sip my juice, then look her in the eye and say, “Let’s be together tomorrow like there won’t be a third time. Can you do that?”

“Honestly, I don’t know that I can.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Nor will you ever again,” I tell her again, smiling.

“But I want you to myself,” she says, more a girl than a woman now.

“With me you can’t be selfish.”

“And that’s why I don’t know if I can do just one more time with you.”

“So what does that mean?”

She trails her fingers slowly over the collar of her robe, slides it slightly open enough to expose her breast. Then: “I guess it means we put everything into one last time. Then I spend the next week crying and trying to pull myself together.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Do I have another choice?” she asks.

“Not really.”

With that, she stands and takes off her robe, then says, “Come ruin me now.”

I stand, take her hand, and—staying in my own head this time—I walk with her to her room, looking at her ass, wondering if mine looks that good walking.

Chapter Fourteen

Driving home in my RS5, I’m thinking about everything: August, Chloe, Netty, Raven, Georgia and now this creature, Aloysius.

I reach out to find him and it takes a moment, but when I do, I am swallowed up in the darkness that is this man. But he’s no man. He’s a monster. A truly horrifying monster. He’s a serial killer with the Fountain of Youth serum, a voracious thirst, and dark plans for the future. Plans that involve destroying humankind as we know it.

And why is that? Because things are wrong with both his brain and his genetics.

When you have mutations like ours, there are always complications. I’m on edge all the time because I love the fight, I love violent justice, and apparently I now love surfing other people’s emotions.

I call Raven when I get near and tell her to come out. She says she’s eating.

“Pack a doggie bag bitch,” I say in jest. Now she’s both chewing in my ear and laughing at the same time. Then more serious: “I don’t want us being in the same place with our family.”

“Stop being an asshole and come inside already,” she says. “We’re going in the spa in a few minutes.”

Letting out a sigh, I head inside and as weird as it is, I say hello to my family, who are kind of freaking out for a second that there are two of us in the same room.

“This is fucking weird,” Rebecca says.

“Language!” my father says.

“Hi Dad,” I say. He gets up and hugs me and whispers, “This is fucking weird.”

“Language,” Raven says.

We eat and laugh together and slowly but surely, the five of us start feeling like the four of us but with a plus one. Me. Or her. Whatever. The point is, it’s nice outside and the spa sounds amazing.

Rebecca, Raven and I get into our bikinis and head out back. It’s cold outside, but the spa is nice and hot, clouds of steam lifting off it, the jets bringing the water to a near boil. We slip inside the water, smiling and relaxed, the contradiction between the weather and the heat of the spa simply euphoric.

“Glad I stayed?” Raven asks me.

“I am.”

“Me, too,” Rebecca says.

“I have to get up to Astor,” I say.

“I know.”

“You know because I know,” I say, understanding this. It’s not a telepathic connection as much as it’s a base of knowledge we all share.

“That goes without saying,” Raven says.

“I need the car,” I tell her.

“Of course you do.”

“We need another one, unless you want to live off Uber in the city.”

“Do you think I want to do Uber?”

Smirking, I shake my head.

“Liz needs one, too,” Raven says.

Rebecca knows about Elizabeth, and she’s trying to understand all of us together, but she’s not really making the connection with the fact that there’s a third version of me down south.

“Did she tell you this?” I ask.

“She’s been thinking about it,” Raven says.

“So what’s she getting?”

“She’ll call us tomorrow and ask if it’s okay to get the new Audi S4.”

“Another Audi?” Rebecca asks.

“Shocker, right?” Raven tells our new sister, then: “We might have a problem.”

I laugh. It’s hard not to.

“I know,” I admit, “we’re obsessed with Audis.”

Raven says, “If she gets that, and you take the RS5, what else should we get?”

“The RSTT.”

Raven nods her head and says, “Can we do tradesies?”

“It’s going to be a necessity,” I answer with a grin. “How would you feel about getting it later today and I’ll take the RS5 until you’re ready to switch?”

“That’ll work,” she says.

We savor another half an hour in the spa, but it’s mid-afternoon and I need to get back to Newcastle, to Astor where Georgia and the girls are.

Dressed and ready to go, my hair done, my makeup sufficient, I give Raven a hug and thank her, me. So weird.

“I saw the reptilian,” I finally tell her.

“Lizzy and I talked about it,” Raven says.

“So you know what I know, about the future, about what we have to do?”

“You know I do,” she says.

“Then you know then about the whole parallel universes business, right?”

“Still trying to figure that one out.”

“Whatever we think we know,” I say, slightly discouraged, slightly behind the eight ball on this one, “we don’t really know shit, right?”

“That’s the pervading thought.”

On the way out, I say good-bye to Rebecca, Orianna and Christian and then hop in the RS5 and hit the open road doing my best to keep it under one hundred, but failing miserably (naturally).

Chapter Fifteen

My Audi (in beast mode) and I hit the freeway like a rocket ship heading to deep space before I remind myself that the highway is not my personal playground. Being a good California driver, I dial it back to ninety and feel good about myself. Thirty minutes later, flashing lights draw my attention to my rear view mirror and dammit, I’m getting pulled over.

I signal right and move to the shoulder, put the car in park. I collect my license and registration and wait.

Even though the sun is going down and it’s still dusk, the California Highway Patrol sedan hits its spotlight, turning my side mirror into the freaking sun. I shade my eyes, click off the CHP cruiser’s spotlight using my mind.

A second later it comes back on and so I blow the bulb, which isn’t right, but whatever. Anyone who knows me will tell you I toe the line on these types of things and I won’t ever claim to be anyone’s moral compass. I’m just not that girl.

I’ll never be that girl.

So the CHP cruiser’s door opens and a man heads my way. Cars blow by him on the highway, noisy and gusting. A small gap in the traffic appears, but it’s short lived. The cop walks up in plain clothes, his held tucked low in the shadows of his face.

When I roll down the window, I find myself looking at him: Aloysius.

“What the hell is this?” I ask.

“When I realized who you were, who you are, I looked in on you, studied your history, first as Raven, then as Elizabeth and now as Savannah. Now I know you.”

“You don’t know shit, bloodsucker.”

“Yet I knew you got pulled over going ninety in a sixty-five on this day at this time on this stretch of road in this truly beautiful car.”

“So what do you want?” I ask. “Good conversation? A sordid ending to the increasingly interesting story that is my life?”

“I want you to stop what you’re going to do. Do your thing in this universe, or go to another one, I don’t care, just leave me and my father alone.”

“You know about that?” I ask. “Hopping universes?

“Of course, I do. But you can’t jump yet, so you can’t get away from me at this point.”

“If I want to leave, I can.”

“Not at this point in your life, and not this version of you, so that’s out. Oh, and you can gobble down a time device if you want, but not before I tear out your throat.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is we’re talking candidly because I could kill you if I wanted to—”

“Then do it.”

“There are three of you. I tried this once, in another timeline. You died, but not before another one of you hopped universes and put me in a rather nasty predicament.”

“Either way, we end your little planned reign of terror.”

A half dozen cars whoosh by, some close to Aloysius, others on the outside lane. Aloysius just looks down at me, grinning.

When the traffic breaks and the noise dies down, he says, “There are a trillion possible outcomes to this situation, Savannah. One where I end you, one where you end me, one crazy one where I seduce you the way I know how—”

“With your vampiric gaze? Give me a break.”

“—and we become lovers.”

“Can you hear my vag getting extra dry? Yeah, you don’t do it for me.”

“The point is, I will fight this fight for as long as necessary.”

“Why? Why is there a fight? Why must you fight so hard to end the lives of so many innocent people?” I ask. “What is your end game?”

“This is the least settled of universes,” he says. “There are control measures in other universes that make what we’re trying to accomplish here in this one impossible.”

“Such as?”

“Monsters. Things worse than you and me. Things far worse than your little reptilian friend.”

“Why can’t you just stay here and forget about those other universes. They’re not converging. Besides, I kind of like it here. It works.”

“It works for you now, but you are a monster, like me. Forced to hide. Unable to be who you really are.”

“Which is what, exactly?” I ask.

“A hunter,” he says, a glint in his eye. “A stone cold killer.”

Any girl in my position would take this as a compliment, but for some reason, this turns my stomach.

“You are not meant to be here,” he says. “And I’m not meant to be here. But this is how it starts, the corruption of our DNA, the experimentation. People like Holland, in this universe, he is genetically predisposed to chaos, same as my father, same as me. We are anomalies, immortals, and these are the games we play.”

“I don’t crave power, like you, you freaking psycho. I don’t look to end others to make my life better.”

A few eighteen wheelers cruise by, the heavy gusts lightly rocking Aloysius, but not enough to unbalance him. A little louder, he says, “You are a proponent of justice and freewill.”

“Yes, if you’re going to water it down like that.”

“But there is a darkness in you I can feel, a part of you that did not start out that way, but is that way never-the-less.”

“Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Dr. Phil.”

He grins, unblinking, not trying to seduce me, but thinking of me as a woman instead of a warrior.

“Oh young Savannah,” he muses, “the babies we could make. We could be greater than Holland could ever be. We could combine our DNA into a child, children—this is where the true, unstoppable vampire race begins. My blood, your supernatural talent…we could literally rule this universe and others as well. This is the benefit of our meeting.”

I make the mistake of holding his gaze. There is an unencumbered beauty there, a magnetic draw with a gravitational pull like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It is mesmerizing, intoxicating, bursting with the promise of a nearly overwhelming desire the likes of which this heart and mind of mine have never known.

If I rode Chloe’s emotions to get high off her lust, then that was but a drop of what life with this man could provide. Then it all stops. This multiverse of emotion simply falls away, leaving me breathless, disappointed, scared.

“I could give you that feeling always, my dear. But you would not like me to feed it to you without your permission. This is how we did not work before. When we were together in another life, in another timeline, under different circumstances, you loved almost everything about me. Just not that.”

“I would never be with you,” I say, my voice faltering, the affect of the trance I was just under sitting low in me like sexual need.

“Ah, but you were, and we were a lovely, almost charming duo.”

He knelt down before the door so we were face to face, and he said, “I have never met a woman so enthralling, so utterly amazing and so powerful as you, Savannah Swann. You are everyone else’s nightmare, but to me, you are perfection personified. I want you, I need you, I have to have you.”

In that moment of such deep confession, I hit him with a psychic punch so hard it kicks him off his feet and into traffic where a Toyota Avalon going just over eighty smashes into him, launching his body a ways down the highway and leaving him rumpled, broken and distorted on the asphalt.

The Toyota skids to a stop, slides sideways, two wheels lifting off the ground in what will become a massive barrel roll. With my mind, however, I keep this from happening because this is my fault, not theirs. Correcting the car, I make sure it doesn’t roll or skid into the ditch and kill the passengers.

Another vehicle behind the Avalon, an older Chevy Tahoe, runs over Aloysius’s crumpled body leaving behind a smashed lump in the street.

I start the car, check to make sure traffic is stopped, then I ease forward and drive slowly up to him for a better look.

Everything is crushed and leaking. His arms are splayed out, his legs bent at wrong angles, half his head caved in. His eyes see everything and nothing. Seeing him like this reminds me of future Alice in the desert after being hit by the big rig the new future Alice arrived in.

I sit there long enough to make sure he’s not coming to, and he’s not. There are people piling out of their cars, crying and shrieking, telling someone, anyone, to call 911. Window still rolled down, only a few feet from the corpse, I say, “Try and wake from that potato pancake,” then navigate around the stopped cars and take advantage of the break in traffic.

One hundred miles an hour comes quick. One ten isn’t unreasonable. I settle in at one-twenty until I hit the next city.

Chapter Sixteen

I get in through Astor Academy’s gates the way I get in to anything. The free will of Savannah Swann. I mean no harm, so I guess trespassing is okay. After parking, I head to my old room. It’s empty. There are lots of empty rooms after the incident with The Operator. After the death of Cameron O’Dell. Everyone saw that day as the Astor Massacre, even though it was one dead girl and two dead clones. It was the brutality of The Operator’s deaths that shocked everyone.

I crawl into the bed, almost unable to sleep because of the onslaught of memories I have of this place. They pour through me, almost at will, certainly at random. Seldom are they kind. Most of what I remember is being obsessed by Damien while my future husband became my best friend as I sat there oblivious to all of it.

I won’t lie: sometimes I’m pretty dumb. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit too self-destructive. But then I fall asleep and it’s like the sleep of the dead. When I wake, it’s to the rising sun. I lay here for awhile until it’s time to get up.

At seven-thirty I call Georgia, who is obviously still asleep.

“When’s breakfast?” I ask.

“Where are you? This is the girl, right? From Monarch?”

“Savannah.”

“Yeah, that’s it. It’s you, I mean,” she says, yawning so hard I find myself yawning with her. Then: “Where are you again?”

“My old room. Downstairs.”

I give her the number and she says when she’s ready, she’ll come get me.

She’s down by eight and I’m answering the door with a smile on my face and hope in my heart. Unfortunately I open the door and she’s standing there with her arms crossed and a frown on her face.

“You need to tell me everything,” she says.

“Over breakfast or in here?”

“Considering this place is barren, breakfast will do. Unless what you’re going to tell me is going to be upsetting.”

“It will be.”

Her hands fall to her side and she says, “Seriously?”

“I know you burned your parents favorite plant,” I say. “I know you killed that boy, not at Holland’s underground lab, but in Canada.”

She quickly steps inside, closes the door and says, “You can’t just blurt things like that out. What if someone hears you?”

“I erased your mind. Wiped it clean for your safety.”

“You what?” she says, aghast. Slowly it all starts to make sense. “All those blank spots? Are you saying…that was you?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“And Cicely and Tempest, too?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Why?”

“Do you want me to show you?” I ask.

“Why would you do this to us? I mean…hell, I don’t know what I mean. Just, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“Do you remember the girl who ripped that kid in half last semester? The kid you set on fire when everyone wasn’t looking?”

She takes a deep breath, lifting her chin and setting her jaw.

“I was the girl whose eyes got roasted. The girl who found Cameron. The same girl who died in the lab when you smoked that bald kid.”

“Most of that is foggy.”

“I can clear it all up for you,” I say. “But only if you want that.”

“I do,” she says, slightly apprehensive, a touch breathless. “I mean, I think I do.”

“It’s going to hurt.”

“Just do it,” she tells me.

I walk to her, put my hands on her head, open a connection between our minds and let my memories flood into her brain. She closes her eyes against the rush. I also release all the stored memories of me that were hers so that she has everything.

When at last she opens her eyes, there are tears in them. She pulls me close and says, “Savannah?”

“Yes,” I say, holding her.

“I think maybe we do this too many times.”

“I won’t be changing bodies anymore, and hopefully I won’t have to tinker with your thoughts either. I hate that part, but mostly I hate looking at you when I love you so much and seeing you looking back at me like I’m a total stranger.”

“You were a second ago.”

“If you knew what was in my head, you’d do the same thing, too.”

“Let’s get breakfast before I digest my empty stomach,” she says. And then: “Don’t erase me again, Savannah. Seriously.”

* * *

School hasn’t officially started yet, so there are no classes. Later that morning, Georgia calls Cicely and Tempest and asks them to come to her room. When they get there, Georgia introduces me to them and we all meet like we’re strangers. Georgia sees that look in their eyes and telepathically I say, “See?”

She nods unconsciously and then catches herself and stops.

Cicely is looking at her weird.

“So you’re new here?” Tempest asks me.

“Yes and no,” I tell her.

Any minute Georgia is going to do to me what she did before, and that’s make me tell them who I am. Instead of making a big thing of it, I slink into both their minds and unlock everything.

They stop and stare at me.

“Abby?” Tempest asks, like she just blinked back into existence from a trance. Her memories aren’t as clean as if I made the same connection and had the same time with them as I did with Georgia, but that would come.

“I’ve missed you guys,” I say, smiling. Now, surprisingly, my eyes flood with tears and I feel overwhelmed by my emotions.

“We do this too much,” Cicely says, echoing Georgia’s earlier sentiment.

“She said she won’t do that again,” Georgia replies.

“Why would you do this to us?” Tempest asks, half excited, have bothered. “I mean, I know it’s because you’re protecting us, but what from?”

“The future.”

“Explain,” Georgia says.

“The boy I killed here on campus, he was a soul using bodies from a set of clones created for him eight hundred years into the future. He made the mistake of inhabiting the last body. When I killed him, I took his soul.”

“Took it where?” Tempest asks.

I tap my head, then say, “He’s buried here. Caged actually.”

“You have that creep inside you?”

“I do.”

“Why can’t you let him go?” Cicely asks.

“Because in here, I can make sure he doesn’t do anymore damage.”

“But you killed him,” Tempest says.

“This is the soul that brought a body back to Whitechapel in the late 1880’s to kill five women.”

“Are you…are you talking about Jack the Ripper?” Georgia asks, gulping.

“The one and only.” All three of them just stare at me like I’ve got monkey butt fever or something. “I am something not-human, I have telekinetic powers, and I can time travel. But apparently I’m also some kind of super max prison for creeps like The Operator.”

“That’s his name?”

“It’s what I call him when I’m not calling him ‘asshole.’”

“But you have him now,” Georgia says. “Is that why it’s okay?”

“You met Aloysius,” I tell her. She nods. “He’s Hitler’s son.”

“Good God.”

“I was told Aloysius’s body would contain The Operator. What neither of us knew was how badly he’d fail to maintain control. Within seconds, all hell breaks loose.”

“How will he get The Operator?”

“My friend from the future transfers him in there and then he kills me. He kills my family as well, and my friends. He also kills my friend’s top elder, and that’s a problem on a much larger scale than we can imagine.”

“Jesus,” Cicely says. “Can you stop him?”

I’m not sure I can.

“I’m going to try,” I tell them. “But this battlefield we’re fighting on is not a linear battlefield and it’s not exactly contained…”

“Contained to what?” Georgia asks.

“Any particular timeline, or even this universe.”

This gets everyone quiet. Ladies and Germs, the crowd falls to a hush as everyone’s brain suddenly implodes…

“What do you mean, this universe?”

“Apparently there are millions of universes like ours, parallel universes. Billions maybe. Some people learn how to travel between them.”

“Aloysius?” Georgia says, swallowing hard, her face pale.

“I think. I mean, I don’t know much about this. But at some point, I think maybe me, too.”

“So you’ll be able to…cross over to other universes?” Cicely asks.

“Yes. In fact, one version of me from another universe crosses over first to do what my friend thinks will work to fix this.”

“And?”

“We all die by Aloysius’s hands. Well, not Aloysius. Rather Aloysius’s body, which will be taken and controlled by The Operator. The problem is, Aloysius has a rather unique…biology.”

“He’s a mutant vampire,” Georgia blurts out.

Cicely snorts out a laugh, but then catches herself before stopping.

“Wait, for real?” she asks.

“I’ve watched him tear through a dozen bodies like they’re paper mâché. He slices his mouth open with bones that punch out of his knuckles and he can drain a person inside of a minute. It’s disgusting, and a bit frightening. Which is saying something when you consider I’m not really scared of much.”

“I burned him, though,” Georgia says. “His face caught fire.”

“He came after me on the way here yesterday,” I admitted. I don’t want to scare them, but they had a right to know what was happening. Of course, I’m operating under the premise that if this all gets too heavy, I can wipe their minds again. That would be a super uncool bitch move, but if they need protecting, I’m going to protect them, even if it’s from the truth.

“You saw him?” Georgia asks, aghast.

“He stole a cop car and pulled me over because he knew I’d been pulled over for going ninety in a sixty-five. Apparently in the future it was a matter of public record. So that’s how he found me.”

“What did you do?”

“Shoved him into traffic so he got run the f*ck over.”

There is a collective gasp that sort of bothers me. With everything the three of them know about me—with all we’ve been through—I wish they weren’t so overly sensitive to matters of this caliber. This is some world ending, world saving shit we’re talking about and it requires a backbone.

“So he’s dead?”

“Not really. He’s in a morgue for now, but his body is coming back together. And when he wakes up, trust me when I tell you, it’s not going to be pretty.”

“So how do we stop him?” Tempest asks.

“I need Georgia’s help. And maybe future Alice’s help, too.”

“That girl is the devil,” Georgia grumbles. She should know better than any of us.

“Your fire is building,” I tell Georgia. “You need an outlet, and she can help you with that.”

“How?”

“She is your sister in fire,” I tell her. “A fire mage like you. She’ll be able to help you bleed out the heat.”

“Like I said…”

“She’s not the devil,” I admit, “but she is close. If it’s any consolation, with age she becomes less creepy. She’s actually someone I think I might like.”

“So I need to meet her? Like, some future version of her that’s less unnerving?”

“Exactly. But I’m going to help you bleed off the heat now.” I pull out the small satchel of time travel devices, hand one to her and say, “Are you ready?”

“For?”

“The bleed off, your first time jump.”

“I’m not doing that,” she says, stepping back from the marble-like device.

“I need you two to stay here,” I tell Cicely and Tempest. “Just in case.”

“I said I’m not going,” Georgia says, resolute.

“Aloysius targeted you,” I say. “Remember?”

“He’s targeting me because of you!”

“And now if you want to stay safe, you’ll come with me and we can cut the head off this snake.”

“By killing him in the past?”

“Not him. His father, Adolf Hitler.”

They all get really quiet again, looking back and forth from each other. “So, you’re saying you want me to come with you and burn Hitler to death?” Georgia asks.

“Yes.”

“And if I say yes?”

“Then I need to meditate, get a lock on him somewhere in time. Wherever his signal is strongest, that’s where I can catch him. But when I locate him, we’ll have to go.”

“So you’re going to meditate right now?” Tempest asks.

“I’ve never really done this before, so I don’t know how long this will take. But I need Georgia to stay here so that when I open my eyes and tell you I’ve found him, we can go right away.”

I tell her how to use the time travel device, then I get into Lotus position, close my eyes, clear my mind. I don’t exactly know how to do this, other than to thread out my psychic tethers. It takes awhile as I fight the noise in my head, the endless stream of semi-conscious thought and the occasional random musings, but then my tethers reach out into vast unknown with no limitations on either time or space.

When I finally hook onto my target, I get a vision of his time, and then I get a date and coordinates. When I open my eyes, most of the night has passed. Everyone is asleep. It takes a moment or three to get back into my body. When I feel fully connected, I stand and stretch, and then I rouse Georgia and tell her it’s time.

The other girls wake up as I’m giving Georgia the coordinates. In my mind, I feel him coming together: Aloysius.

“Don’t go just yet,” I tell Georgia. “Just hang on.”

I tap into Aloysius’s mind in this time, ride his thoughts for as long as I dare. It’s like surfing through sewage and violence and darkness. My mind is slogging through these manufactured barriers, reaching through the layers of his mental security until I find what he’s hiding: he’s conscious.

I sift through his short term memory.

After being run over on the highway, he’d managed to right his mangled body enough to drag himself into a prone position. When the startled driver who first hit him got out to see about helping him, Aloysius whispered something, made a show of tilting his head up and acting distant, like he was facing the light and ready to leave this world. The woman dropped to a knee, leaned close to hear what he was saying, and that’s when he grabbed her, latched on and bled her dry in moments.

He reset his bones to the horror of those watching this odd, almost animalistic exchange. He grabbed a nearby man by the ankle, jerked him off his feet, reeled him in. Half of Aloysius’s face was blood soaked and mean looking. His jaw hung open revealing a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. Viciously, he bled this man dry as well. People were freaking out, calling the cops, keeping their distance.

When he awkwardly managed to get to his feet, he shook some of his bones back in place the way you’d shake out a wrinkle in your suit jacket or a stiff arm. A few of the bones held and healed at an alarming rate, but he needed more blood. The only problem was he was already full. Looking around, half his head still smooshed, only one eye working, he realized he needed to get out of there. At this point, some people were running, other’s barking their tires as they sped off. He staggered back to the highway patrol sedan he’d stolen, got in and haphazardly vacated the scene.

With a belly full of blood and the Fountain of Youth serum working its charms, his reset bones were mending fast. He flipped on the light bar and made his way through traffic before turning off the road into an open dusting of bare land. He bounced and bottomed out the suspension, slowing only when he’d smashed into a boulder and high centered the cruiser.

By now some of the blood was assimilating. He was still starving for more blood, his body damaged so badly. There was no one around and the thirst, matched with the healing powers overtaking him, proved to be too much.

The CHP officer he’d mortally wounded an hour ago was slumped over in the seat next to him. He drank the blood of the man like it was his last meal, but the blood was cold and congealing. He gagged, puked, pushed his way out of the car. He stood on shaky legs in the dirt and spotty weeds, a warm gust blowing over him, the sounds of nearby traffic hurting his overly sensitive ears for some reason.

He was having the worst pains in his stomach. He started walking, but he wasn’t sure where he was going because his vision was blurring at the edges and he was having the most awful feeling. It was how he imagined dying would be like. He wasn’t sure how he could fix this. It was like his soul was halfway out of the body and feeling so hollow, so empty.

Aloysius collapsed to a knee then fell over sideways, his ear in the dirt, his eyes having a hard time staying open.

It had to be the cop’s blood, Aloysius thought.

Above him, in the deep blue skies, he saw a circling of carrion birds, big and black, waiting for him to die. If they feasted on him, would they die, too? Would they turn? As he lay there feeling the last of his strength leave him, he thought it would be the most amazing thing to have a vampire bird, but then he closed his eyes and an ocean of darkness swept over him, pulling him under, dragging him out to sea.

* * *

When I come to, I’m certain Aloysius of this time won’t come after me here, at least not in the next few minutes. Popping the time travel device into my mouth, I fall back behind the travel dashboard, enter the date, time and coordinates, then pop back into what I’ve come to think of as forward consciousness and tell Georgia the same date, time and coordinates.

Georgia doesn’t look like she’s listening.

Oh, shit.

“Take it,” I say urgent, knowing I have only seconds. Right then I know she isn’t going to take it. “Dammit, Georgia—”

But then I’m sucked down into the wormhole, my body crushing and remaking and disintegrating and remaking itself over and over again through the cosmic trash compactor for like forever.

When I’m shat out on the ground just to the side of a country road, it’s to a blast of temporal energy. A circle of dust blows outward, the weeds bending. I stand and flex. It only takes a moment for confirmation: Georgia isn’t coming.

Looking around at the meadow grass that seems to stretch on forever, I realize I’m in Argentina. The Misiones Province on a hard packed dirt road cutting through the countryside. I walk for only a few minutes up the RP219, which is the name of this nearly damp lane. On the left is a series of buildings. The entire facility is cordoned off with tall fencing topped with razor sharp concertina wire. German Shepherds are charging my way, barking. I muzzle them from here, which breaks their otherwise scary offensive.

In my mind, I envision them sitting down and they obey. I stand on the other side of the chain link fence, staring inside. There are about five or six very large barns. Further into the property, nestled into a large grove of trees, is the main home. It is beautiful, but not ostentatious by any means. If anything, it blends in too well.

Up ahead, a man with a rifle at his side comes to see what the dogs were barking at. He sees me, stops, picks up a radio. I crush it in his hands with my mind. Not blinking, not taking my eyes off him, I make a hole in the chain link fence, walk through and head directly for him. On the way by the dogs, I look down at them as they sit there, muzzled and paralyzed, but whining in the backs of their throats.

There is fifty feet between the man and me, then thirty, then ten. I have his feet pegged to the ground using telekinesis, which I’ve come to have a comfortable control over. There is much more to do in terms of managing my abilities, but if I’m never going to die, then I have all the time in the world to use it.

A shot is fired and my shoulder kicks forward, my mental control lost momentarily. The man who is ten feet away from me pulls a pistol and the dogs get to their feet and race for me as I stagger forward. Behind me, the man fires a second shot, which hits my lower back, punching a hole through me. The bullet blows through my stomach enough to stagger me a bit. Before this unseen assailant can pull the trigger a third time, I imagine him turned inside out and a sound of exploding gore follows.

The man in front of me, he stops, sees what he’s seeing and that’s when the first dog hits me high on the back. I go down hard, face-first into the weeds as teeth sink into my traps. The second dog is on me just as quickly, but I refuse to kill them. I send them flying instead. I fling them fifty, maybe sixty feet away, far enough over the fence to knock them breathless in the field across the road. Using my mind, I crudely zip up the hole I made in the chain link fence.

The heat of healing hits me hard and fast, but I’ve learned to love the pain, so this kind of heat brings a wicked grin to my face. That’s when a bullet slams into the back of my head, hitting it off-center and at enough of an angle to ricochet off my skull.

Good freaking Christ, it’s like getting struck with a sledgehammer! My head bucks hard, my hair flying out in response. I feel the man whose walkie-talkie exploded kneel down before me. He takes a handful of my hair pulls my face off the ground and finds me looking back at him, eyes ink black, face translucent, a ragged smile on my beautiful, dirty mouth.

One thought and his face caves in like a time-lapsed pumpkin rotting. He falls over and I manage to get up. The dogs are barking like mad on the other side of the fence, one of them favoring his back leg.

“Not this time, doggies,” I say to them, but mostly to myself.

I feel the others. There are four more of them in the large barn. They heard the gun shots and they’re hiding. I turn and feel like crap, but just about ready for round two. My head still hurts. I’m still overheated. Creating a tear in my shirt, I look at where the bullet exited my skin and the hole is stitching itself back up.

Good.

I walk into the barn, which is a good twenty feet tall and the size of a community church, sans the steeple and the divinity. The entire inside is a giant weapons factory.

My God, I’ve hit the motherlode.

A man calls out to me, asks what I’m doing in some guttural form of Spanish. I don’t understand, so he asks again in what I know to be fluent German.

“Hitler,” I say.

He grabs a giant tool off a nearby countertop. A tool that looks like a pipe wrench but isn’t one. He comes at me, speaking to me in German again, this time faster, more intense. The other three men join him, each looking ready but not ready.

“Aloysius,” I say.

He turns, looks at his co-workers. These aren’t roughnecks. They’re scientists who were once soldiers.

“Hitler,” I say, harder, more insistent.

One of them says something and looks at my breasts and this has me rolling my eyes. You have to be shitting me, I want to say, but I don’t know German.

The four of them laugh.

“Adolf Hitler,” I say again. Then: “Arschloch,” which means asshole in German.

This gets his attention.

With his wrench at his side, he approaches me, confident he can overpower me. He comes face to face with me and I can smell some sort of meat on his breath.

It’s sour, gamey.

He starts talking sweet to me in German, and then he reaches for my hair, like he’s going to romance me before they try to rape me.

I punch him in the throat so fast no one really sees it happening. They just see him staggering backwards, gasping, grabbing at his throat. With my mind, I remove both his hands at the wrists and they fall to the factory floor, still clawed. His wrists start pumping blood onto the floor.

All that the three remaining men can do is stare at the spouting stumps and their dying friend. I open my mouth to bark his name again, but something hits me over the head so hard I literally see stars.

When I wake back up, I’m tied to a chair not with rope but with industrial chains. Chains like you’d see in a mechanic’s shop. Chains you’d use for an engine hoist. Four men are standing around me. They’re all looking at me. They’re half scared, half bewitched by my looks. Three of them have guns on me, but they don’t realize this only makes me more dangerous.

I smile. I feel the blood that rushed out of what first started out as a grizzly head wound. It’s dried on my neck; it’s soaked my shirt.

Yes, I should be dead. No, mother bitches, I am not.

Part of me wants to shrug off these chains, disembowel these chicken neck shit birds, but I wait because patience is a virtue.

That’s when I see him walk in.

Adolf Shitler.

My inner child is beaming!

He looks me over without saying a word. It’s almost as if he’s appraising me, like I’m a piece of art rather than a prisoner. He lifts my hair just above my right ear, which is blood soaked from where I was shot. He looks at my back where I was shot twice, then walks around me and lifts my shirt enough to see the flower of blood where the bullet exited. Yet there is no exit wound.

He lifts my hair on the top of my head, moves his fingers over me and then he says, “You are not a normal child.”

“I’m a monster hunter,” I say. It sounds tough and stupid coming out of my mouth, but dammit if it didn’t sound menacing in my mind.

He gives a slight chuckle, but that chuckle grows into a roar, and as he is crying and laughing he’s also trying to tell his men what I said in German and it’s coming out in fits and starts. And then another body joins us. I sense him, but I also sense he is closed off to me. It’s the smell of clearwood that gives him away.

Aloysius.

“Father, she is not restrained,” he says.

Hitler sobers up, then turns and grabs one of my chains, gives it a mighty yank and then with some residual humor in his voice, he says, “I fear for your eyesight, my son.”

“Those guns you point at her, she could turn them on all of you and end your lives in seconds,” Aloysius says. Turning to his father, he says, “All three of these fools would be dead in an instant.”

Turning to me, he says, “Get out of those chains, Savannah.”

In one single thought, the chains shatter and fall to the floor. Startled, one of the men fires his gun and I somehow manage to stop the bullet millimeters from my eye. I try not to show it, but the sharp intake of air through my nostrils forces them to flair, giving me away.

I reach up, take the round in between my fingers, examine it, then give it back to the shooter. Not sure what to do, he takes it. The other two men are backing away. I stand, turn and face both Hitler and his vampire son.

“I made you play in traffic,” I say to him. “It didn’t end well.”

“Perhaps in some future you do,” he says with a fair amount of amusement in his voice.

“You’d do best to take me seriously, Aloysius.”

“Why is that? Because you’re here to kill my father?”

“Yes.”

Now Hitler is paying attention. Now he’s feeling the gravity of the situation.

“And you think that will stop me?” Aloysius says.

“That’s kind of how it works, douchebag.”

Hitler laughs again, this time a bit more reserved, like he’s not sure how to take this whole conversation.

“I’m glad I can entertain you,” I tell him.

He frowns.

I turn to Aloysius just as Hitler backhands me. I felt it was coming, but Aloysius didn’t. So when he hit me, the smack was so loud and so forceful it shook my head sideways. I turned my body with the hit, making it look real. When I come back though, I use the motion to whip my own hand back. Relying on both physics and my own telekinetic ferocity, I pimp slap the dictator with the kind of force a man like him has never in his life experienced.

Aloysius looks at me, startled.

“That’s right dingleberry,” I say, “I just bitch slapped Hitler.”

He comes after me, but I sidestep him. He changes direction fast, too fast. His hand grabs at me, gets my shirt. I rip the shirt myself where he’s got ahold and he falls away. Hitler is on the ground face-first, knocked out and laying there like a dead fish.

I step away from Aloysius, put up my fists.

He looks at his father.

“He isn’t dead,” I say. “Not yet anyway.”

Aloysius moves toward me lightening fast. I’ve already adjusted for him, though. What he doesn’t expect is the kick I snap in off his nuts. It hits flush. He folds forward, holding back as he gets a touch red in the face.

“Got them nuts,” I say with a grin. “I call that the Dracula Ball Breaker. If it was a drink, it would be two squirts of coconut syrup, a splash of Vodka and eight ounces of bitch juice.”

His fists are up and he’s not amused. Two bone spikes punch through his knuckles and now I know it’s on. I step closer to Hitler, stand in between him and his father.

He hesitates.

Behind me, Hitler’s body levitates into the air ten feet so he’s hanging above us, suspended in mid air.

“You can kill him all you want,” he says, looking up at his unconscious father. I don’t have to look at the former dictator to know that not only did I break his jaw, I shattered it and his teeth completely.

“You say that now…”

“I’ll give you this,” Aloysius says, “you’ve got a wicked backhand. But you’re not that smart.”

“And how’s that?”

“If you kill him, you’ll kill the 2021 version of him, not the version of him that found my mother and made me.”

Shit.

Without waiting, violently, I turn Hitler inside out in a wash of red then step aside catching only part of the downpour.

Aloysius stands there, unmoved, washed in the gore of family. He doesn’t even blink. His fists become so tight, something cracks. His body starts to click and rattle, almost like his bones are breaking and growing at the same time.

He suddenly looks taller, a good twenty pounds heavier.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he growls. And then he takes his two protruding bones, makes two sharp slashes at his own mouth, opening up his jaw to impossible size. In that mouth are now rows of razor sharp teeth.

Jesus Christ!

Um…so yeah, I admit, I’m sort of shitting my pants right now.

I drop into a ball, channel the girl who blew up NY, turned it into a nuclear wasteland, and though I do not have her power, the force I expel explodes out of me like a nitrogen bomb. Aloysius was mid-air diving after me when the blast caught him. My detonation must have ignited all the other bombs inside the lab because what I gave and what came afterwards in terms of explosive charge were two entirely different things.

I’ve never felt myself launch out, but after I exploded outwards, the protective shell I placed around myself so I wouldn’t get hurt came down. In that second, the other bombs went off and I went tumbling through the air. I don’t know how this happened, but when I wake up, I’m draped backwards on the fence, razor wire chewing though my back, both arms blown out of socket, my legs splayed out and ragged.

As I lay there feeling helpless and smoked to death, I realize I did it. I killed that f*cker before he blew up South America and then America. He’s dead. Hitler’s dead! And so is that butt plug son of his. I start to laugh, but it hurts because most of my body is burned really badly and the deep black smoke drifting over the land is both stinging my eyes and roasting my throat.

Closing my eyes, I bring up my dashboard, enter in the date and coordinates for my return, then set it in motion. A moment later, I’m sucked up into the wormhole where the real pain starts. When I’m spat out on the floor in Georgia’s room, it’s as a bloody, burnt corpse that just happens to not be all the way dead.

I land hard, the last of my consciousness all but gone. I hear my three besties gasp and squeal and then I’m out.

And awake.

I see three faces looking down at me, scared. Then I’m out.

And back again.

I roll over, but the skin on the back of my right hand sticks to the floor, pulling off.

“Dammit,” I mumble. It looks like a flap of cooked chicken skin just stuck there. “That’s freaking gross.”

And then I’m out.

And back.

I feel much better, but I know time has passed. How much time I’m not sure. Before I open my eyes and acknowledge consciousness, I throw out my tethers, see if they can find Aloysius.

They cannot.

Now I open my eyes and look around. Georgia is asleep on the bed beside me, her body close to mine, but not so close that we’re touching. She was afraid of hurting me.

I feel her stir.

She turns over and sees me looking at her.

“How the hell are you not a toasted marshmallow anymore?” she asks.

“I heal much quicker now,” I tell her, sitting up.

She gives me a hug and starts crying. She’s suddenly sobbing and it’s happening so fast I know she’s been holding these emotions at bay for entirely too long.

“I’m so sorry, Savannah,” she cries. “I was so scared. I’ve never time traveled before and I just…I froze. I couldn’t do it.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s okay. Everything turned out as it was supposed to.”

It didn’t, but whatever. I set out to slay a monster and slayed two instead. Why? Because I kick the most ass ever. I’m a badass bitch is why.

“I hate to interrupt you,” I tell her, “but I’m so hungry.”

She pulls back, wipes her eyes and says, “We can do dinner if you want. It’s nearly four.”

“I want a steak, but I don’t want a steak, if you know what I mean.”

I’d had enough burnt meat to last a lifetime, but for some reason a filet mignon sounds simply divine. With a baked potato, some steamed carrots and a green salad? Oh, hell yeah!

I could totally go for that right now.

Chapter Seventeen

August does the one thing his father has been asking him to do for years: go to his job site with him.

“How will you explain me to your partners, or your employees or whatever?” August asked.

He didn’t need to elaborate this to his father, for Lloyd James was a practical man, not the sort to get his feelings hurt. Dealing with this issue was all about logistics.

“What do you suggest?” his father asked.

“You could say I’m Lenore’s nephew,” August said.

“That’ll work.”

On the way to a potential drill site where the geologist was waiting for him, his father said, “Do you know how oil is created?”

“Not really,” August replied, not terribly excited about meeting with some dude who studies rocks for a living. He was happy that he was with his father, though. And even happier now that the old man was done flipping bitch over everything he’d done.

“Basically oil’s created from the remnants of small plants and animals, like plankton, that died in the old seas somewhere between ten million and six hundred million years ago. After these organisms died, the basically sunk into the sand and mud at the bottom of the sea.”

“So oil is just plants and animals squashed to death forever and a day ago?”

His father laughed. “Sort of, but it’s more complicated than that,” he said.

They came to a stop light and his father turned to face him. There was an excitement in his father’s eye, a spark of life. His father truly was an oil man.

“So these long dead organisms broke down in the sedimentary layers where there was little or no oxygen present,” his father continued. “The microorganisms then broke the remains into carbon-rich compounds, which eventually formed organic layers. The organic matter mixed with the sediment, which produced a fine-grained shale we call source rock.”

“Am I going to need to know this to look at what you’re doing?” August asked just as the light turned green and his father stepped on the Dodge Diesel’s gas.

“Nope.”

“Okay, go ahead,” August said as they hit the freeway on-ramp and gathered speed.

“As new sedimentary layers were deposited, they employed extreme pressure and heat on the source rock. This heat and pressure condensed the organic matter into both crude oil and natural gas. Over time and with the shifting of the earth, the oil flowed out of the source rock and accumulated in thicker, more porous limestone or sandstone. This is called the reservoir rock.”

“So drilling for oil is about getting through the layers to get to the reservoir rock?”

“In laymen’s terms, yes. The problem is the movements in the earth have trapped the oil and natural gas in these reservoir rocks between layers of granite or marble, which is impermeable rock, or cap rock if you want to get technical.”

“So you’re trying to find these reservoirs, right? That’s what the rock star is about?”

This elicits a laugh from his father. “I spend a crap ton of money on my rock star,” he said. “If you get the wrong geologist—which is ninety percent of these shysters—you can go bankrupt real quick, maybe even get your ass sued into a tent on the side of the interstate. But if you find the right geologist, oh boy, that guy will make you dirty, rotten, filthy stinking rich.”

August’s father started at the bottom of the corporate ladder as a cable tool driller, or a rope choker. He worked his way up the ladder until he learned about a man named Archibald Dreyfus. Dreyfus was an oil man out of South Texas who made a name for himself on his first and only gusher. It was the Jesus Christ of gushers though. The man made a king’s fortune. His bright light burned out quick because he made his millions and retired on the mine.

When you had hundreds of millions of dollars, what else do you need? That was the question. August’s father would say it was the rich man’s responsibility to help make other men wealthy, but Dreyfus didn’t care about that.

He didn’t care about much since he was set for life.

When August’s father approached him with an idea for funding, when he said they could help enrich men like Dreyfus, the old codger shook his head and said “nope.” He was firm. His father left only to return two months later with something far more valuable than an idea or even his own knowledge and experience: he brought a geologist. Marcus Wright. The best in the United States.

Now his father, Dreyfus and Wright were partners.

After an hour of driving, they went off-roading hitting nothing but raw land until, up ahead, August saw what looked like the biggest Tonka Truck he’d ever seen. This mammoth beast looked like it was built from steel plates hammered in place by Thor himself. It had four foot tall tires that were at least three feet wide and looked like Monster Truck tires. In between the tires, a huge stamp plate was mounted. This was taking Hulk smash! to a whole new level.

“What the hell is that?” August asked, mesmerized.

“Thumper truck. Slams those heavy plates into the ground and reads the signals. They used to use explosives, but blowing shit up is only fun if you haven’t lost your hearing, or taken on shrapnel.”

“So that thing’s going to slam into the ground?”

“Yes. But that’s only one tool. Marcus has basically got the best sniffer lab in the state. Plus his own sniffer is amazing when it comes to finding an oil trap worth a damn.”

“So you hammer the earth, and then what?”

“You use seismometers to listen. The way the signal comes back, and the speed it comes back with, will give you good indications on whether you’ve got oil and gas traps.”

They moseyed up to the site, met with Marcus and his team, then discussed things a computer nerd like August just didn’t understand. They were talking about seismic surveys and magnetometers and hydrocarbons—all things that at first went right over his head.

“So in laymen’s terms,” August finally said, “is there a way to even explain what you’re doing?”

“I’ll try,” Marcus said. “In a nutshell, we use a three axis geophone. That’s a x and y horizontal axis and a vertical z measurement for acoustic energy—vibrations for the layman. The thumper over there”—he says, pointing to the truck—“does its thing and the energy returns to the geophone where it’s processed by seismic computers.”

“What are you measuring?” August asked.

“The return times of the introduced energy,” Marcus said. “To be blunt, we’re doing this to try to compute the location of underground rock strata based on the processed reflections of those sounds.”

“Like a sonogram?”

Marcus looked at August’s father with a look of both surprise and delight. “Looks like Lenore’s got a little oil in the family blood, too.” Turning back to August, he said, “I honestly didn’t think you’d get all that.”

“The truth is, I hardly know what the fuck it is you even said,” August admitted to the uproarious laughter of Marcus and the crew.

With his father’s broad overlay of oil discovery and drilling, he was able to understand bits and pieces of the process. They were basically looking at the shifting in the earth, shifts caused by the change in the earth’s magnetics. From here, with the help of Marcus and his sniffers, they somehow managed to get a feel for possible oil flow.

“So is this site worth the high hopes and ball sweat needed to make our next hundred million?” his father asked.

This was the question…

“From what we’ve found over the last couple of days,” Marcus said, “it’s worth getting some core samples, but this is where you come in.”

His father nodded his head and said, “I think we could have something here.”

“I think it’s worth the gamble,” Marcus said.

“Me, too.”

And with that, Marcus and his father gave sampling instructions to the crew. A few minutes later, August and his father said good-bye and headed for lunch. On the drive out of there, August couldn’t help thinking this Marcus guy was to geology what August was to computers, and for that he started to understand why his father liked the man so much. Half an hour later, they pulled up to a dusty looking boxed structure on the side of the road with big red signage that said, Slappy’s Food Shack.

“If the food here doesn’t convince you there’s a God above, I don’t know what will,” his father said. “The waitresses are pretty damn cute, too.”

Slappy was an old Texan with mottled skin, wet eyes and a toothless mouth that had long ago caved in over his gums. But true to his father’s word, the waitresses were Texas sexy and the burgers were like nothing you could even describe, they were that good.

He’d ordered the Super Slapped and fries. His father had ordered the Slapped Thrice because he was a burger man and he always went heavy on the meat.

The three waitresses didn’t know what to make of August, but it was clear to August and especially to his father, that these women had just become girls and these girls were too smitten to even bother hiding it.

“I see why you wanted to look the way you do,” his father finally said, chewing his fries but looking at one of the girls just over August’s shoulder. It wasn’t because he was a pervert, or some sexual miscreant; August had the distinct impression his old man didn’t want to look at him when he admitted August was right to do what he did.

“It sure beats staying at home blasting rope in front of the computer,” he muttered as he took a drink of his strawberry shake.

“Blasting rope?”

August felt his face go red, took another swallow of his shake. Then: “Yeah, rubbing one out.”

His father nearly choked on a fry, coughing a small fit, enough for one of the waitresses to come over and say, “Are you alright?” When she glanced up at August and pulled her hair over her shoulder, there was that look in her eye, that obvious lust sitting just below the thin layers of concern. “Is he going to be alright?”

“He is. It’s what eating and laughing at the same time can do to you. By the way, you have an interesting smile. I think I like it.”

He watched her neck flush red, but rather than leave, she graced him with the slow rise of what became a very seductive smile.

“You’re not from here, are you?” she asked.

“Why? Because I don’t say shit like, ‘little lady’ and ‘ma’am?’” he said with the look that was pure Vegas, pure debauchery.

Now that his father was breathing again, the waitress (Annabelle), stood up, her nostrils flaring, fighting back a grin she just knew would give her away. Her eyes were sparkling as she looked at August.

August then turned to his father and said, “You still alive over there?”

“I am,” he said, dabbing the corners of his eyes with a napkin.

Turning to the waitress, August said, “Well look at you, all ready to save the day.” She stood there a bit longer, so he said, “Maybe you could come back in ten? Check on him again, make sure we’re both okay?”

“Oh I know you’ll be okay,” she said with those lustrous eyes of hers.

“Naturally,” he said.

There was that flushed neck again. When she left there was an extra bit of pep in her step. So many people think that having game is saying a line, or having a look. Maybe it’s just knowing what a person wants or needs, and being the guy to give it to them.

August got good at being that guy when he was Brayden, but the game had a way of wearing on you. To Brayden it served a purpose. But right then, looking the way he did and having refined his pickup skillset, August felt damn near lethal with his charm.

It almost wasn’t fair.

When Annabelle was out of earshot, his father said, “You think you could get with her? With your looks and all the skills you have from that Vegas retreat I sent you to?”

“You saw her, what do you think?”

“I think you can.”

“Not just her. I could get with her and her friends, too,” August said. “But I have Savannah and she’s going to be enough. Maybe a bit too much.”

“Seems like it.”

“She’ll be worth it though. She’s got a huge heart and an impossible burden, one she never wanted, but one she’s come to accept, it seems. I have a lot of respect for that.”

His father says, “Like I said, I guess I can see why you did this.”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you did for me, Dad, it’s just…this world is changing and I had an opportunity.”

“So you did this…for her?”

“I would have done it for her the first time, but this time I did it for me. I did it after Abby said she never wanted to see me again.”

“Abby who was Savannah.”

“Yes.”

“But she found you?” he asked.

“Yes, and she begged me not to change.”

This stopped him cold in his tracks. His father looked frozen in place, a wax statue until he blinked. “Wait, so…she liked you…for you?”

He nodded.

Both of his eyebrows rose, held for a moment, then settled back down into a brief look of contemplation. “Perhaps I misjudged her,” his father said, a sort of sadness in his eyes at how he had behaved.

“I think you did.”

“An old man is not without his faults, and sometimes judgement fails even the greatest of intellects.”

“Are you saying you’re the greatest of intellects?”

They looked at each other for a moment, and then they both burst into laughter. It was probably the most relaxed he’d ever felt around his father. He really did love the old man.

“I’m going to be with her, and I hope you’ll accept that.”

He looked at August a long time, nodding his head, then he said, “I’ll work on it. But only after she pays for the door.”

“She’s not hurting for money, but like me, she just wants to be loved and accepted. That’s all either of us ever wanted.”

“While I work on that with you, which won’t be hard, I’ll work on that with her, too.”

Right then, with his fork in his hand, August felt an impossible weight gather behind his forehead. His neck strained against an unseen force. Slowly he felt his eyes roll back into his head, almost as if they were being pulled back against their will.

His mind was plain black and then a picture of a man burst forth, his face handsome, but something cold and nasty in his eyes. The man’s mouth then opened to a row of teeth that scared the ever loving crap out of him.

Savannah’s disembodied voice slid into his head.

“If you see this man, if he approaches you, use all your focus and attention to scream my name into my head,” she said. “He’s dangerous and he’s after me, but I will handle it. I just want you to know ahead of time, just in case. Think the word yes if you understand.”

The word “yes” popped into his mind and struggled out of his mouth. The otherworldly hold on him broke and his eyes rolled back down.

His father was staring at him.

“Holy balls,” August said, returning to the world of the living. “I feel like I was just raped.”

His dad just sat there, eyes popped wide open, his fork full of food but stopped halfway to his mouth.

“What the hell was that?”

“Savannah just sent me a…a telepathic text.”

He drops his fork. “Are you shitting me?”

“She just showed me a picture of someone dangerous, then told me to send her a signal in my mind if he shows up.”

“How…”

“How does she do this?” August said.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to know,” he replied, taking that last bite of his burger. “Trust me.”

“Why would she skull text you a picture of someone dangerous? Are you in trouble? Or is she?”

Now he looked at his father and said, “One day I’ll tell you everything.”

“What’s everything?” he asked, shifting in his seat and straightening his back.

“All the things you don’t know and would barely believe.” Just then Annabelle came over with a second batch of fries, giving August the out he needed. To Annabelle, he said, “Now I know I like you. Before you go, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” she said.

“It’s personal,” he replied.

“I’m good with that,” she answered, crossing her feet and standing straight to accentuate both her hips and her breasts. This gave her an air of what she seemed to think was shy sexuality. It was overt and so on point.

“Are you an empath?” August asked.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a person who, almost by some psychological or spiritual means, seems to know what someone needs the moment they need it. Do you feel like that’s you? Because I feel like it is, but we don’t even know each other. I just get a sense about you.”

“Are you an empath?” she asks.

“I know what people need when they need it, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “But for me it’s my understanding of human nature, not an emotional connection.”

“I feel like that describes me. The emotional connection part.”

Now he left it perfectly quiet. The next move was hers. She cleared her throat, tilted her pretty head and said, “How long are you in town for?”

“I’m leaving after dessert.”

“And what’s dessert?” she asked, flush once more, glancing only barely at August’s father.

“Pie.”

She looks at him a long time, then she said, “I have a boyfriend.”

“I do, too,” he said. “I’m from California. Guys dating guys is the new norm.”

“You’re…gay?” she asked, totally upended.

Now both he and his father started laughing uproariously.

“He’s not gay,” August’s father said.

“Oh,” she said, flustered, “because we don’t judge here.”

“You’re hot as hell Annabelle,” August said, “and if I was a local and not taken, I’d steal you from your boyfriend and spoil the absolute hell out of you.”

“How do you know I’d want that?” she asked, her entire face red now. “Because you’re like five or ten years younger than me.”

“I do well with older women.”

Oh my God, he thought, this is too easy. She fixed him with a look that he didn’t mind. There was something in her eyes that totally arrested him.

“Do you think I’m a jerk?” he asked with that smile.

Her expression slipped into a frown and she said shook her head in a weird way, her mouth halfway open, almost like she wanted to say something, but had no idea what to say.

“I am, but I mean no harm. I’m taken and you’re taken, but what’s to say we can’t have a very brief, very innocent flirtationship?”

“What does that entail?” she asked.

“Me embarrassing myself in front of my father, you turning red, then maybe you getting a big tip because you’re good at your job and you seem like an amazing person I want to get to know in our next lifetime when we’re both available.”

“I’d like that,” she said. Then, with that smile again, “The big tip.”

“Innuendo,” his father said, like he was catching on.

“In my end-oh,” she said with a sexy grin before she turned and sauntered off.

“Jesus on the cross,” his father said, running a hand over his head, same as August when he was Brayden, “who the hell are you and what have you done with my son?”

“I just want you to know that even though I don’t have the same passion for oil you do, and that I’m not as big or as strong as you, I am your son and your opinion of me matters.”

“Well I love the hell out of you and I know you’re damn good at whatever it is you choose to do, so if that’s worth something to you, it’s sure as hell worth more to me.”

“I’m good at what I do, but gaming is part of my past. There’s not really any challenge anymore, and it’s not fair to a girl to just game her and bang her and move on. That’s how you ruin lives.”

“So why are you gaming Annabelle?”

“I’m not. I’m just making her day. A girl like her isn’t going to get this kind of attention from a guy like me for awhile, so I like doing this for her.”

A few minutes later, Annabelle returned with the check. The two other waitresses were trailing behind her. August smiled at all three then said to Annabelle, “I like your thinking, bringing all your friends like that.”

“We want a picture with you, for the wall.”

There were a few framed photos on the walls, but they were mostly pictures of old guys who were once relevant but now might be dead. Guys like Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter (pass the peanuts, please…), and some action movie star stunt man that looked like a young Sylvester Stallone.

“I hope you’re thinking of rehabilitating this wall, because these old guys make my grandpa seem spry. I mean, for real.”

“It’s not for that wall,” one of the waitresses said.

“Yeah,” her friend said, “we’ve got our own wall in back.”

“How many guys are on it as of now?” he asked.

“Including you?”

“Including me.”

Anabelle grinned, snuck a look at her co-workers, and said, “One, if you let us take your picture.”

She had her cell phone out.

He looked at his dad and said, “Dad, let’s not keep these ladies waiting.” Then to the women, he said, “Well pile on in here with me, let’s make this a good one.”

The women found a way into the booth, their bodies leaning on him, curled around him, damn near making him the happiest puppy in the pack. His father took the camera, stood and moved back, getting them all in the frame.

“On the count of three,” he said.

When his father counted out the word one, August said, “Kisses right here, ladies,” and pointed to his cheek. The two that could reach him leaned in and put their lips on him, and that’s when his father took the picture.

“That one’s free,” he said to Annabelle. “The next one will cost you.” And then the smile. The one Aniela said was a real panty stealer.

So close he could smell her minty breath and see a smattering of freckles and a few old acne scars, Annabelle whispered, “I’d pay the price.”

True to his word, they left a big tip and his father didn’t say a thing until they hit the road.

“If you really love me,” his father said out of the blue, “if you really care about my well being, you’ll do me one favor.”

“What’s that?” August said.

“When we get home, or maybe tomorrow morning, you have to pack your things and leave. In case you haven’t figured it out, Lenore’s been making eyes at you.”

“I saw that,” August said, humbled.

“I don’t need you messing up my marriage on account of you looking like every woman’s waking dream.”

“I have to leave anyway,” he said.

“What about that guy?” his father asked. “The one you got the head text over.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Sure, I’m sure.”

As they were driving home, August thought about Savannah, about how much he missed her. He could go on autopilot and pick up women, and he was good looking enough that it wasn’t hard anymore, but the only thing that fulfilled him was Savannah. The truth was, he was a closet romantic—a guy who wanted one woman and the adventure that came with it.

God, he missed her! He was also starting to worry. He knew she couldn’t really be killed, but when she was shot in the head back at Holland’s lab, he dealt with fake Abby because repairing the real one was beyond Holland’s skillset.

An awful feeling spread through him thinking back to that time. The fake Abby was no bowl of cherries.

This had him wondering about the life he was signing on to if he decided he wanted to live with her forever. There was no way in hell riding second chair to her would be easy. He was no slouch in life, but he wasn’t her.

“What are you going to do about school?” his father asked, breaking his trance.

“I don’t need school, Dad. I have other things I can do.”

“What about a career?”

“I created an app,” he admitted, “and it’s made a ton of money. Plus, well, I hate to say this, but when I got caught by the FBI, I got caught because I wanted you to know that I was someone in that world. I’m still someone. I’m someone who will never get caught if I don’t want it.”

His father shifted in his seat, adjusted his hands on the steering wheel, set his jaw.

“This is your thing, isn’t it?” he asked, obviously afraid of what the answer would be, but a realist nevertheless.

“It is. For now anyway.”

“There’s no guarantee you won’t get caught doing it again,” his father warned.

“There is. I’ve seen the inside of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Division. I’ve seen it legally all the way to its heartiest firewall.”

The stopped for a red light. When his father looked at him, it was with his most serious face. He said, “Did you create the hack that got you out of there with time served?”

“Not the original hack, but the five subsequent ones, yes. It helped me control the situation.”

His father was quiet for a long time, then he said, “You have to promise to visit me. Don’t just run off and leave your old man to rot.”

“I won’t.”

“I can give you some money if you need a start,” he said.

“Money is just numbers in a computer. It’s got a trail that can be altered, buried and wiped clean with ten minutes concentrated effort and a Red Bull.”

“What else am I going to give you then if you don’t need money?”

“Just be proud of me.”

“You’re about to live like a criminal,” he said.

“Who is more criminal, the person changing numbers in a computer, or the banks using those same numbers to acquire interest and real assets as security? It’s all a game. If I put a million dollars in my account and buy a car, the bank doesn’t go broke, the auto dealer gets his money, I get my car and no one gets hurt.”

“We’ll hurt if you go to jail. Being this good looking out in the world is something to behold, but it will be a curse in the slammer. You’re every felon’s future tossed salad looking like that.”

He gave a conciliatory laugh, but his father was afraid for him and it showed. He said, “If I get caught, Savannah can get me out. She can stop all of it.”

“What is she, anyway?”

“A dream wrapped in a nightmare wrapped in a person I fell in love with when she was overweight and insecure and having the hardest time in life. We are each other’s soul mates. I’d do anything for her, and her for me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Well then, whatever it is you choose to do will have to be okay with me.”

“Please don’t say it if you don’t believe it,” he said.

“Do I have a choice?” his father asked.

“Always.”

“Then yeah, I believe it. Still I wonder what kind of person you’d be if you had to deal with what you were given.”

“You mean if I still had my birth body?”

“Yeah, if you looked like me.”

“I’m not sure, but what I can say is that if you’re going to tell me about the days when you couldn’t modify your body or face, it’s going to sound a whole lot like you telling me you had to walk uphill in three feet of snow for miles to get to and from school, and that you had hair on your balls by the time you were eight.”

He chortled at a low volume, and at a low intensity for longer than August expected, but then he said, “You know your generation is a bunch of pansies.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” His father glanced over at him and August followed this up with: “I won’t be a pansy. With Savannah being who she is, by virtue of that, I will most definitely not be a pansy.”

“When you see the guys I work with, how hard they go after each day, what they can tolerate, how big they are—”

“When you talk about not being a bitch, you talk about being big, working hard, not quitting things. That is not the only way to harness and wield power.”

“Your little friend already showed me that.”

“Honestly, Dad, what are you afraid of for me?” August asked.

He took a deep breath, then glanced over once more and said, “That you won’t measure up in my eyes.”

Smiling, but sad inside, August said, “Look at us, having something in common after all.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“What is it? Money? The ability to lead and feed a group of men? Produce something of value? Something more than a fart app?”

“That’s the app you made?” he asked. “A fart app?”

August nodded. Now his old man was smiling.

“Made a shit ton of money on it, too,” he said, causing his father to laugh.

“Shit ton on a fart app…”

He told his father what the app was about and how it worked. When he told him what he did to Cameron when he first developed the app, his old man fell into stitches, literally laughing to the point of tears. As August sat there with his father, smiling, laughing, telling him just about everything, it was almost possible to forget that he had a bomb inside his head. That he had a decision he had to make: Mortal or immortal?

Who would ever get to make such a choice?

His smile slipped a bit, but he held on to it, even though now it felt like it bore real weight on his face. If he chose to lead life as a mortal, he would fall in love with Savannah and she’d never age. She’d move on from him when he started getting old, crapping his diapers, drooling.

He wouldn’t let it get to that point.

He’d leave her a long time before she could see him begin to age like that. But if he was an immortal, if he could live forever, what the hell would he do with all of eternity?

One decision was the promise of pain and insecurity, a love destined to be lost; the other decision was hundreds, maybe even thousands of years on the same planet, seeing everything, becoming so smart and so talented he could literally become a God among men.

He never wanted to be a God, he just wanted a girl, a way to see some proud luster in his father’s eyes. More important, he wanted a way to live with himself, maybe even love himself.

The smile came back on his face. He made his decision. And just like that, it felt like the entire landscape of his life began to change.

Chapter Eighteen

How long had it been since he drank the dead highway patrolman’s blood? And how long had he been officially dead? Aloysius didn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to feel pain for such an extended period of time, but he did.

A sharp, debilitating agony worked its way through him, holding him half in slumber, half in a nightmare. It was as if his mind wanted to awaken, but his body ached to simply give it all up.

He tried to move, found he was in utter darkness. The barest of movements told him he was on a metal table, under a sheet he assumed.

Figures…

Everything on him felt tight and hot; not an uncomfortable hot, but the kind of hot that felt like you were sitting in the cremation oven just before you crumble.

He did not have the reserves necessary to pull through this, not having used so much energy trying to heal himself after being run over. He couldn’t stop wondering how long it was going to take. It was taking forever! Where he was at—in the county morgue surely registered as a John Doe—he was toe tagged and left under a sheet for awhile to see if anyone had come to claim the body.

No one would come.

A pair of females entered from a nearby door. He listened to their voices, tried to smell them, but found he was still in such horrible shape. He was barely even breathing as it were, let alone able to sniff them.

“So did someone call the authorities yet?” one of the two girls asked. “To let them know this dude’s seen no love yet?”

“No one’s come forward to claim him,” the other girl said.

“That’s what I just said,” she replied. “So like, do we put it in the box to chill, or leave it out to rot? Because he’s super hot for a dead guy but the second he starts to stink is when my love affair with him ends.”

There was hollow laughter he found inappropriate. By the sounds of them, they were young. Twenties, maybe. He felt something graze his privates, a small hand copping an over-the-sheets feel.

Unbelievable, he thought to himself.

“Who knows?” one of the girls answered. “Let’s just leave him for a bit because surprisingly, he’s not smelling like a fart salad sandwich yet.”

“But like, how long are we supposed to wait before someone tells us what to do?” the girl asked again. “Because when he does start to stink, honestly, it’ll ruin everything.”

“Jesus Jasmine, obsessed much?”

“Take my picture with it, will you? Nothing gross. Just me and him.”

“Are you shitting me right now?”

“Don’t be a bitch,” she answered. “Just make it quick.”

She pulled back the sheet, realized it was time to make his move, but found he was without much energy. He tried to peel back his lips, grow his teeth, but alas, the dead blood was playing hell on his body. Almost like a car with oil in the gas tank rather than fuel.

He drew up his strength in time for the girl’s flash to send a million tiny needles through his eyeballs and straight into his brain. His pain sensors flared, but his body was too weak to even flinch. So the sheet went back over him and he laid there like a slug on a hot day, unable to move, unsure of how he’d even recover.

Nearly a day passed before he heard someone say, “It’s right here, Detective.”

The sheet came up and a distinctly older woman said, “I think this is the one. I mean...good fuck, would you just look at the color of that skin!”

“You sure this guy’s been dead?” the detective asked. “Because…I mean, I don’t know. He doesn’t look right.”

A finger poked his cheek.

“He’s cold,” the detective said, “but not a block of ice either.”

“He’s just been here. Not in the fridge. Not enough room these days. Now if you’ve got someone to claim him, or you want an autopsy—”

“I said I didn’t need one,” the detective said. “Not until you do the other two I need. Those are pending cases. This guy’s…he’s a two hundred pound sack of shit taking up a good table if you ask me.”

“The other two are on the books,” the woman said about the other two autopsies. “It’s just, there’s been a lot of activity lately and we’re short-staffed.”

“They aren’t going to slow down.”

“True.”

Aloysius took a mental assessment of his body, knew the limitations, realized that he needed more time before he made any kind of move. But at this point, even being able to move at all would be something.

Patience, he told himself. A healing of this magnitude took time.

“Well,” the woman said, “we might want to put this on ice. After you look at it, of course.”

The Detective checked Aloysius’s fingers, studied his prints for anomalies. Nothing would turn up in the database. No dental records either. The detective peeled back Aloysius’s lips, studied his teeth.

“What are you looking for?” the woman asked.

“A cat,” he said. She laughed, then: “They look different. A little…sharper. Even though that makes no sense.”

Aloysius heard him stand up straight, remove his glasses, rub his eyes for whatever reason. “Either I’m tired or these things are changing.”

“He stole a cop’s car, right?” the woman asked.

“A CHP cruiser.”

“Killed him, too, right?”

“Worse.”

Aloysius actually heard the woman swallow over a huge lump in her throat. “Ate him, I heard. Or he tried to at least.”

The detective looked at her and said, “That shit goes no where, you got it? No where.”

“Jeez, what’s the biggie? We get freaks in here all the time.”

“I don’t need a panic on my hands. We’ve already got some rather nasty homicides. And if I’m right, this guy has enough blood in his belly to fill a small child, which means if this gets out, you’ll see vampire shit splashed all over the front pages of The Chronicle, The Bee, and every other little piss ant rag from here to San Diego.”

“You know the news, Detective. No one believes them anymore. It’s like watching Jerry Springer, or Maury Povich, but at six, seven and eight o’clock at night.”

“Regardless, the news is still a brand and a service, and they have ratings to hold, which means sensationalism first and retractions later. Listen, I’ve got to go. Cool this turkey if you will. Get me those other two autopsies, please. It’s been forever.”

“If you weren’t here flapping your gums, Mr. Lawman…” she said, teasing, almost like she liked the man.

He laughed, then the morgue got quiet again. After they left, he had another six hours to try to heal before he was put into the cold chamber and left to chill at a frigid thirty-nine point two degrees Fahrenheit.

That six hours came and went, and just like that, he went from the table to the fridge. Now that the internal heat of healing was gone, the perpetual freeze was on.

For awhile, Aloysius’s body was able to produce enough heat from the rapid internal healing that he could stay relatively warm—well, warm enough—but the cold prevailed and he was once again dragged down into crippling state of near death.

The next day, a young woman pulled him from the cold chamber, stopped, mumbled something to herself about this being the wrong body, then put him back. After a half an hour, he came back out again and from a distance, Aloysius heard two women speaking about this incident.

He was laid on the table, left to thaw. His internal healing (courtesy of Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum) resumed, heating his body from the inside out before continuing to repair the damage caused by corpse blood, the mass internal deterioration that followed and now the cold.

“This man didn’t look like this when we brought him in,” a girl’s voice said. “He looked, I don’t know, like an unwrapped mummy. Now he looks younger, almost fresh. How does that happen? This just doesn’t happen. This is the wrong body.”

“I thought that, too, but it’s tagged right.”

“Someone’s messing with you,” the girl in charge said. “Someone’s messing with both of us.”

They drew the sheet back over him and from the other side of the fabric, he heard one girl say to the other, “We’ve got five fresh ones coming in.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Nope, not even close. They’ll be here within the hour. Mass shooting at an adult book store I heard.”

The women left the room. When the five bodies arrived later that day, Aloysius had sufficiently thawed and he was continuing to heal unmolested.

He needed blood though. He was damn near desperate for it.

When the bodies were un-bagged, tagged and ready for paperwork, the attendees left the room once more.

Drawing from his stores of energy, he managed to move a leg, an arm, his mouth enough to bare his teeth. He slowly slid his legs around, the sheet falling away from him. After a long bout of concentration, and with a terrific effort, he sat up, opened his eyes and looked around.

The heat of the healing left him mobile and capable, but still he was shivering. Which was something for a vampire. It was coming up on the dinner hour, so he imagined the place wouldn’t be terribly busy.

Should he wait?

No.

He needed blood in him. Even if it was from the five bodies who’d come in an hour ago. Aloysius managed to stand on shaky legs, wobbling like an old man with hand holds on whatever was in reach. Finally he stood there on his own, naked with his bones and his nutrient-starved hair and his protruding hips doing their part to keep him from taking a header into the tile floor.

If Father Time were resuscitated then put on his feet too fast, he would look the same. To say it wasn’t his finest hour would be a laughable understatement.

He hobbled over to the first body, a woman with a gunshot wound to her head, and he sunk his teeth in her neck, but he was not strong enough to puncture her skin.

With a mighty effort that nearly sapped his energy completely, he produced the tips of the Wolverine-like bone spurs from his knuckles, pressed the two jagged spurs into her neck and leaned on them. The skin finally broke and a little blood started to leak out.

The smell was wrong, but right enough.

He just needed a little boost.

What was the start of a necessary feeding became an all-night bender. He knew he ended up in the morgue because he fed off the dead, but right then he was too ravenous to care. If any of the blood was worthwhile, then his efforts weren’t in vain.

When the first attendee walked in that next morning, Aloysius was sitting on the floor naked among the corpses, the five new bodies so torn apart and eaten the woman couldn’t even scream.

Blood was everywhere, his face, hands and upper chest covered in it.

He hit her with his eyes fast, pulling her into a hypnotic trance. She stood there, slightly pudgy with bad hair but a pretty face and glasses far too big for her features. He struggled to his feet, staggered over to her, feeling sick but in need of a live body.

Not once did he break eye contact.

When he stood before her, it was with downcast eyes, holding her body, her soul, her very will to run. She was shivering with either fear or anticipation. Sometimes they felt the same. Inside of him was a roiling madness that felt like insanity, mania—it was that thing that sharpened all his finer edges, making him not only sloppy, but violent and downright homicidal.

He reached for the collar of her shirt, grabbed it, and with an explosion of force, he ripped it down, all the seams tearing as her body jolted downward with the force.

“Stand up straight,” he said, his voice like broken glass. She stood, her skin pale white with moles, skin tags and a bad tattoo of a poodle over her sagging right breast. The torn fabric hung around her waist like a bib, her big breasts covered in a mostly sheer bra, her neck perfectly exposed.

His spurs punched through his skin. A grin cut his face in two.

Not blinking, making only spare movements, he sliced open the corners of his mouth, making it impossibly large and bloody. She didn’t scream, even though he saw the hysteria building behind those eyes. She also felt an untenable lust, that conflicting need to let him have her, take her, make her his slave for now and all eternity.

He punched her in the neck, tore open his impossibly wide mouth, showed her two rows of what looked like shark’s teeth. She let out an exulted sigh. He took to her like a ravenous dog, latching on to her, emptying her out gulp after furious gulp. He was finally getting some live blood, and though he still didn’t feel right, the youthfulness of his body was swiftly returning.

He fed until he could drink no more. He then shoved her aside, fell to his knees and vomited the excess blood. He knew what blood he’d kept inside him: the alive girl’s blood. With each cruel expulsion, he purged himself of the old blood, the blood of the dead.

Two more people came down to the morgue and before long, he’d torn through them and half of the staff as well on his way out.

Upstairs, he pulled the clothes off a dead man, put them on, then walked out of there barefoot wearing slacks and a white button up (spattered red, tails hanging out, one side longer than the other because he’d put it on in haste and hadn’t lined the buttons up right). Half his face was smeared red and grotesque looking, like some horror show put on in NY by GQ where the models all looked amazing, and wildly insane.

He took a car from the lot, thought about driving back to Palo Alto, but realized it was closer to Savannah’s school and it would be best to just head there. He’d driven most of the way to the school, getting as far as the Newcastle exit, when everything changed.

On the two-lane country road leading to the school, a man stepped into the road in front of him, held up a hand for him to stop. Aloysius slammed on the brakes, the car pitching forward and sliding slightly off center as it screeched to a stop.

“What the hell?” he growled.

When he managed to clear his eyes enough, he found himself looking at a man looking very much like himself, but not exactly. By now the sun was falling and the low light of dusk cast an eerie shadow over everything. The doppelgänger walked to the side of the car. Aloysius rolled the window down.

“You look like shit.”

“I’ve been through it,” Aloysius said to his almost twin. “What are you doing here? I thought the last time you visited this universe was a one time trip.”

“This is an emergency,” his multiverse self said.

“Do tell,” he said.

Right then, stopped in the middle of a Newcastle backroad, his multiverse doppelgänger told him where Savannah was headed, which took him by surprise.

“What am I supposed to do with this information then?” he said, exhausted.

His almost twin then handed him a rather large time travel device and said, “I can’t go back that far. But if she can, you can. You need to put a stop to this once and for all.”

“She’s not like you described,” Aloysius said.

“I told you she was not only strong but cunning. Did I not tell you that?”

“You said the version of her in your universe was, but you said this version of her would be easier to kill. For the record, I think you’re wrong about that.”

“I don’t want her meeting her other self,” he said. “It’s how they hook up in the future. It’s how they ruin everything.”

“Amanda,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Twice,” Aloysius said, his deadpan stare locked in on his slightly stronger looking self. “That’s two times that she’s killed me.”

“I’m painfully aware of that.”

Ticking off his fingers, Aloysius said, “First she collapsed the building on me in Argentina, then she pushed me in front of a car on the highway. I died in the morgue when I was turned into a popsicle and now you want me to do this? Because this dying shit is getting old.”

“You sound like a whiny bitch,” he said, breaking the gaze with his disgust.

“Twice,” he said, holding up the two fingers.

“Don’t let there be a third time,” his doppelgänger said, ignoring his fingers.

“Or else what?” he asked, weary, exhausted, starting to get pissed off.

“Or she might just end you permanently.”

“I can’t be ended permanently.”

A pair of lights shined in the distance, rounded the turn and swerved to avoid them. Neither man paid the nearly out of control car any mind.

Aloysius’s counterpart looked at him though and in a most serious voice, he said, “If you think we can’t be killed permanently, then you are an arrogant fool.”

“I hope you’re not confusing confidence for arrogance.”

“I told you how to end her.”

“Yes, you did. Eat her, digest her, evacuate her.”

“In that order,” he said, his dry stab at humor unappreciated.

“You need to take her head though,” his better self said. “Eat as much of her body as you can, but leave her head back in that timeline.”

“Give me the coordinates and the time,” he said. His multiverse self obliged him. Aloysius managed to choke down the gigantic time travel device, then he said, “You might want to stand back for this one.”

“Kill her and I’m done in this universe,” his doppelgänger said, moving away from the side of the car. “I’ll have no reason to come back here ever again.”

When Aloysius was swallowed into the giant wormhole, the second it closed, instead of the car exploding out, it imploded inward, sucking all the glass and metal towards the driver’s seat in fractions of a second.

The Aloysius from another universe simply closed his eyes, concentrated for one second, then popped out of this timeline, off to another world with struggles of his own, struggles that would be made easier with a dead Savannah Swann. He was entirely too busy with Amanda and her little mob to deal with Savannah, too.

Chapter Nineteen

I hang around for a few days, but then three days later, at lunch, the girls break their silence about all things Savannah and ask me about time travel. They want to know if I can go anywhere I want.

“As far as I know, yes.”

“So, like, you can take a vacation to anywhere you want in any time you want?” Tempest asks.

“I guess,” I reply, “but my life isn’t exactly a vacation.”

“Sure, yeah…we get it, but if you could go, where would you go?” Georgia asks. “Who would you meet?”

My mind draws a blank. I’ve never thought of it like this before. This makes me think that I’ve got nothing to do, no one to fight, no one after me as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s time to do something good with this gift of mine!

“I don’t know,” I say, but inside my head, I’m thinking I’ve survived something that never had an end. I stopped Hitler. I stopped a damn nuclear war.

I saved the world.

“For me these days, a good eight hours sleep feels like a vacation,” I say.

Over the last few days, I finally yielded to my body and slept. I also spent the better part of my days in meditation, trying to see if there was a way to open up other parallel universes. I wanted to do it on my own rather than use Draco, but so far I was only having luck in feeling better. And I did feel better. I do. It’s been a few hours since I reached out to find Aloysius. For two days I’ve come up with nothing.

I’m sure he’s gone. But what about Hitler? I killed the 2021 Argentina version of him, so does that mean he’s still alive in this time? I guess I don’t bother too much worrying about Hitler because…who cares? He didn’t do squat until after 2021, so as far as I’m concerned he’s a non-issue that’s been dealt with already. So back to the two part question: where would I go and who would I love to meet?

“Hello, Savannah,” Cicely says, snapping her fingers in front of my face.

My eyes clear and I smile.

“I’m still thinking.”

“Of?”

“Who I’d like to meet. I was thinking I’d like to see someone who would make me a better person. I’ve had time to reflect on my past—on who I am and what I’ve done—and the truth is, I’m not a good person. My heart is in the right place, but I might need some help steering myself in a better direction.”

“You do what you have to do,” Tempest says.

“I’m no Mother Theresa as much as I’m a vigilante,” I say, eating a scoop of mashed potatoes with turkey gravy. “But I don’t always have to be that person. I have to believe I can be better than this. That I can be good.”

Right then it occurs to me: I know what I have to do. I know this like I know I’m going to take my next breath. But can I?

Oh my God, I have to!

What I’m thinking…I can’t tell anyone. No way. Not with where I’m going. Not with what I’m thinking about doing. I don’t know how people would take it in today’s screwy climate. I barely even want you to know this. What will you think of me?

Well, in all honesty, I have to say: this isn’t your life, so whatever judgements you might have of me when I do what I do, honestly, please don’t be too harsh!

Shit.

Reality comes rushing in.

There’s no way I can keep this to myself. I have to tell August, at least. I need to see him, actually. Before I travel, I have to talk to him.

And I have to have him.

Chapter Twenty

After dinner, as I’m meditating, I give up on trying to travel to other universes and just focus on August. I want to see him, but I really don’t want to take a flight back out there. When you’ve traveled through time the way I have, the thought of public transportation seems so, I don’t know, unappealing. Sitting next to strangers, smelling them, trying not to talk to them, eating toffee peanuts and drinking Sprite…no thanks.

So as I shut down my senses, close out the sounds and smells of everything around me, and I focus in on the street leading to August’s place in Texas. I focus on it so intently that I start to feel the asphalt beneath my feet, the cool air on my cheek and the smell of the earth and grasses around me. Then I imagine ripping a hole open in California as well as one in Texas. I connect the two locations, and then I imagine shoving myself into a portal and launching myself from here to there.

It doesn’t work.

Discouraged, I get up, go pee, then come back and close my eyes, going deeper than ever. Instead of making a connection with Texas, I make a connection with the universe, begin to feel my body as part of it the same way an oxygen molecule is a perfect part of air. I am of no body. I am of no mind. I am not my clothes, my shoes, my hair, my skin or my organs.

I’m nothing; I’m part of everything.

A lightness pervades my body and I feel lighter, almost dizzy drunk, but in a good way. I go deeper still, release my body to this universe, which makes me feel even lighter, so light I almost feel myself disappearing. Within a few minutes, I open the holes in California and Texas, see myself slipping into a portal between them.

And then I feel myself sliding apart, becoming nothing. It’s not the same as time travel where you’re pulled apart and put back together over and over again. It’s like moving through cool water and in seconds I am standing on a Texas road, the asphalt beneath my feet, the evening air upon my cheeks and arms, the wet smell of earth and grasses suffusing the night.

Holy crap! Did I just do this?!?!

I start laughing slowly at first, then I’m jumping up and down in the dark, and then I’m dancing around like I just won the lottery! And then I calm back down, try to lock into memory what I did and how I did it so I have a way back.

The night is dark, the air cool, the landscape not at all my dorm room at Astor Academy. I am fully here, I reassure myself. I’m here!

But I’m not alone…

I smell an amatory smell, chocolate infused with cinnamon and a clear, more crystalline earth smell. I turn and find myself looking at Draco. I stagger backwards a couple of steps, taken off guard. Okay…unexpected.

He is looking at me in human form, smiling. “When I heard you did this,” he says, “I just had to see it for myself.”

I can’t stop the smile that’s right back on my face. Not only am I thrilled with what I’ve done, I’m even more excited that it impressed my reptilian friend.

“You are finally ready for what I have to give you,” he says.

“Which is?”

“The next level of your evolution.”

“How long will it take?” I ask. “Because I came here to see August and I’m pretty much dying to get with him, if you catch my drift.”

“It won’t take long.”

“Will it hurt?”

“No more than you’re used to,” he says. “You just have to ask me for it.”

“Wait, you’re going to do it right here? On the side of the street, just like that?”

“Do you want your next gift?”

“I do.”

“Then ask.”

“Can I have my next gift, pretty please?”

A small bubble wraps us and we’re sucked slightly off center to the world, casting a distant white haze over everything.

“Whoa, what is this?” I ask.

“We are just outside the world, not far enough to disconnect from everything around me, but far enough that we are here, but not here. It’s like a foggy, whitewashed version of the world.”

“Okay…”

“Are you ready?” he asks.

This is all so overwhelming, but I’m a trooper, so what the hell.

“Yes.”

He moves forward, uncurls those fingers and starts for my head.

“Relax,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, reeling slightly. Then: “When you reach for me and say relax, it just makes me more on edge. Say relax first, then reach for me…”

“Close your eyes,” he tells me.

I do. That’s when I feel it. His finger against my forehead, then in it. The pain is instantaneous, like having an exposed wire touched to your fillings. Then it’s gone. All I feel is a feather light touch moving over sections of my brain. Then there is a sucking-out feeling and the release of everything.

“All done,” he says.

I get my bearings, feel stability reenter my body, then glance up at him. He is looking down at me, proud, but having a hard time holding his form.

“Take me back,” I say knowing it will ease his struggle. We reenter the world, that slight haze gone. His human form solidifies. “I feel different.”

“How so?” he asks.

“I feel connected, but not just to here. Everywhere. It’s more intense than I’m used to. It’s like…I feel light and airy, like if I just thought my location, I’d be there.”

“Play with that feeling,” he says. “It will get easier. And then it will be like nothing at all for you to travel.”

“Travel in time?”

“Teleport, time travel, hop universes.”

A chill starts in me, then wraps me like a warm tingling sensation that won’t quit and I say, “Are you for real?”

He smiles, then says, “You did good, Savannah. But you need to be careful for what’s next.”

“You know where I’m going?”

“After August, yes.”

I slowly nod my head as I think about what I’m going to do, but then he knows what’s next so maybe he knows something I don’t know.

Before I can ask, he’s gone.

Starting up the street, I’m feeling my body, feeling how everything has changed. I stop walking. The James’ house is a hundred yards up the street. I look at the door step, see the porch light, imagine myself there. A second later, I blink and I’m there, and this starts a giggling in me that becomes a soft cry that I don’t understand.

What the f*ck am I becoming? Because even though what I just did was about the coolest thing ever (second only to traveling through time, or meeting my eight hundred year old self), it makes me wonder if I’ve totally lost myself to this.

I want to turn and walk away from August’s home. I can’t do this. There’s no way I can be me, but then I reign it all in and say, “Get your shit together.”

The damaged front door opens and it’s August’s dad, Lloyd.

“Savannah?” he asks, startling me.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What was that sound?”

“What sound?” I ask. Did I make a sound teleporting?

“Like a popping sound,” he said, his eyes looking around the street behind me, “like maybe a tire blowing or something.”

“That was me knocking on the door,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

He shakes his head, not buying it.

“How’d you get here?”

“Um…is August here?”

“Is he expecting you?” he asks. “Because he didn’t say anything about you coming. Not that it’s a problem. It’s not.”

August is suddenly at the front door, seeing me, and then pushing past his father with a disapproving frown. He pulls me into a hug, asks me if I’m okay. It’s in this very moment that my emotions surge and I completely lose it.

He ushers me in past his father, scowling at him for making me stand outside while he subjects me to a small interrogation. He walks me past Lenore to the bedroom and then he closes the door. His room is gorgeous, but all I want to do is lay on the bed and let these ill-timed and unwelcome emotions run their course.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” he finally asks, brushing my hair out of my eyes. He leans down, kisses me just above my eye.

“I just left,” I tell him, looking up, desperate for those gorgeous eyes of his.

“Just now? What do you mean?”

I nod my head, the last of my tears coming. A cold wash of dread pours over me as I think about what the hell I let Draco do to me. It felt sharp at first, beyond painful, but then what he did was like magical—God, I hate that damn word right now, but that’s the best descriptor—and it felt safe, invigorating.

I can travel through time and space, but now I can teleport, and supposedly slip in and out of universes, too? How the hell am I supposed to process any of this?

“I…uh…I can teleport now.”

He sits up, takes a deep breath. There’s an expression I don’t like. No. Am I losing him? If I say the consternation in his face is at first concerning, that’s me being optimistic. He looks down at me, his eyes locked on my eyes, almost like he’s looking so deep inside me he wants to see past my body and into my soul.

Is he trying to decide if I’m a good person? I want to know, but I won’t invade his thoughts, not when he’s struggling with me as much as I’m struggling with me.

“How am I supposed to be with you when I can’t tell anyone what you do, what you can do, or how you do it? I mean, trying to explain to my dad about how you slammed that door hands free without telling him what you are”—he says, shaking his head in dismay—“is like being a total moron trying to explain physics to anyone.”

Right then I feel like a total crap. He’s still got that bomb in his brain and I’ve forgotten! How could I forget something like that?

“If you want me to come clean to your parents, I can.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they can’t handle it. Lenore is already convinced the wind pulled the door shut. Not because she really believes that, but because she can’t believe in the alternative.”

My hands come to his face, not because it is the best looking face I’ve ever seen, but because his pain is apparent, and moving, and I haven’t even dipped inside him for a second. It is just that clear.

“Kiss me, August,” I say.

His eyes clear and he sits up with a huff.

“Kiss me, and let’s pretend I’m Abby and you’re Brayden before all this.”

He leans forward, his lips finding mine. The door is slightly open, so I use my mind to quietly close it, not missing a beat. He pulls away, turns and sees the lock on his door slowly turning.

“Really?” he asks.

My eyes are dry now, my emotions settled, and for now all I want is August’s love because it’s what I’m going to hang on to when I go…where I have to go, where I’ve chosen to go. It won’t be easy. It’ll probably break me. But given the chance to go anywhere in the world at any time and see whomever I want, my choice is clear.

It’s not long before we tear each other’s clothes off and we’re crawling all over each other, our lust unrestrained, our need to be as close as possible to each other a mutual desire. I swear, this is the best place ever. Me in his arms. There is no safer, warmer place. Even though my time with Chloe was sensual and erotic and like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, being with August is right.

No, it’s perfect.

When we’re done, as we’re laying there catching our breaths and smiling at each other, he says, “I don’t know how I can make this work with you, but this is what I want.”

“I know.”

He lets out a knowing grin.

“Is that because you saw the future?”

“The future is a malleable thing, August, subject to change by the second. You are about to ask why that is and I will tell you. We influence the future. You, me, seven billion other people. Our thoughts, our intentions, the things we do on purpose and by accident, it all adds to the organic mixture that is our future.”

“Meaning?”

“What I did, what I’m going to do, it may have an impact on how this world plays out, what kind of future it leads us to, but I will tell you this, I will be with you because I am in love with you.”

“Would you have been in love with me as Brayden?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “I fell in love with Brayden. You are the skin of someone else, but you are the heart, the spirit and the soul of Brayden James and that’s the boy I love.”

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Positive.”

“So what is it you are going to do and why will this have an impact on the future?”

I tell him what I have in mind and he sits back on the heels of his hands, his face three shades lighter. He can’t speak. I dip into his head and it’s pure chaos. He wants this for me, but he wants it for himself as well. And he’s scared. How will I feel? What will this do to me? What am I hoping to accomplish?

“If I can do this,” I tell him, “I may glean from him some sense of humanity.”

“You think you are a God here, don’t you?” he asks. It’s an honest question, a real question, and one I’ve been wrestling with for awhile now.

“Yes.”

He is quiet again. Struggling. Clearly conflicted.

There’s a knock on the door.

We’re naked.

“Yes?” August says.

“Dinner in five,” his father says.

“Okay, thanks,” August replies. He looks at me and I’ve got my eyebrows raised. When it’s clear August’s father has gone, he says, “So when you first brought me here, you gave my father bad news, broke his door and fled. Now he finds you crying at that same front door, and without explanation, you sneak off into the back room and get sexually dominated by his son. Is there even the slightest possibility you can do a normal dinner with the parentals?”

“I can,” I say, getting up and getting dressed. “Let’s be clear, though, you got dominated by me.”

“My God,” he says, his eye teeming with lust, “I love looking at you naked.”

I look at him, then dip my eyes down to his privates and move the covers off him until he’s clearly exposed.

“Ditto, baby.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The thing that keeps me normal at dinner is not that I’m on my best behavior, it’s that I’m thinking about the logistics of taking the bomb out of August’s head. More than anything, I expect my vacation to be upsetting—even more so than I’m prepared for—and I don’t want to “operate” on August with an unsettled mind. The truth is, some things you just have to do because they need doing.

Suffice it to say, dinner is delicious and civilized, and it’s very clear to me that August’s step-mother, Lenore, is having a hard time being around August. She’s physically committed to her husband, but lately she’s been an emotional cheater. Everyone feels it. She can’t even hide it anymore.

When dinner is over, I help with clean up, then we retire to the back patio where the four of us sit around a fire pit talking about life in Texas. When the conversation dies down and the evening chill sets in, August asks if I’d like to go lay down, and I said, “Yeah, I’m beat. The trip over took a toll.”

August’s parents smile at me and Lloyd says, “Feel free to stay as long as you’d like,” which is his way of gauging my time here.

“I’m actually going to leave early in the morning, so this might be good-bye, if that’s alright?”

“It is,” Lenore says too quickly.

“I’ll be heading out, too,” August says, looking at his father.

We all stand and give the Hollywood consolation hugs before turning in to for the night. When we get to August’s room, I shut the door and say, “I’m taking the bomb out of your head tonight, if that’s cool.”

“Is it going to hurt?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You have the Fountain of Youth serum?” he asks.

“I didn’t bring it with me.”

“I could die then?”

“If it comes to that,” I say in my most reassuring voice, “I can save you.”

I watch his next breath come from high in his chest. His features are pinched ever so slightly with trepidation.

“Relax,” I say. “I brought fake Abby back to life when she died.”

“But not Cameron?”

“I could have if she wanted to come back—”

“But she didn’t want that?”

“No,” I say, regretfully.

I abused her beyond repair, her famous father’s sexual indiscretion pushed her over the edge and she stabbed herself in the neck with a pair of her scissors. When it came time for me to usher her soul back into her body, she chose to move on.

This was her choice and I don’t blame her, even though it still bothers me immensely.

“Do you want to die?” I ask him.

“No way,” he says.

“Then you’ll have to trust me.”

He thinks about it for a second, takes a deep breath then says, “Okay, let’s do this.”

He lays down on the bed and it takes awhile for me to get in tune with his body, but when I do, I say, “Got it.”

“What is it? I mean, how big is it?”

“It’s up against your brainstem and it’s a low yield IED. It’s basically the size of a lima bean.”

“Is it going to blow my head off if you do it wrong?”

“You mean like Running Man?” I ask with an inappropriate giggle.

“This shit isn’t funny, Savannah. I just got this head and body. I just got you.”

“No, it’s low yield, so your head won’t be a blown apart cantaloupe. Hopefully it won’t go off before I can swallow it and detonate it.”

Now he’s looking at me like I’ve completely lost my marbles.

“It’s the only way,” I say. “Turn over.”

“You’re crazy,” he says, rolling over on his belly. “Freaking certifiable.”

“Probably,” I admit. “Now be quiet. Let me work.”

“Be quiet for how long?”

“Until I explode the device,” I tell him, my insides turning at the thought of using my body as a detonation chamber.

“Okay then, silence it is. And if this doesn’t work, I love you.”

Smiling, touched, I say, “I love you, too, baby. Now be quiet and let me concentrate.”

It takes me awhile to make the frequency of my body match the frequency of his. The way the body comes apart in time travel allows the physical form to all but unmake itself, this is the way I make our bodies match. It’s the same way I teleported here. I all but unmake my thumb and forefinger while unmaking the flesh and bone around the bomb, and then—just like Draco first did with my body in Dulce—I reach into his flesh, remake my thumb and forefinger and get a hold of the small IED.

I’m paraphrasing, of course. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it takes an incredible amount of focus. More to the point, I’m wired into August and he is in an incredible amount of pain as the device pulls out, but he’s gritting down and taking it like a man. Slowly, carefully, I try to part his flesh as I remove the device, and just as it is coming out of his neck, it explodes, knocking me back on my ass.

Blinking fast, there’s a sudden, sharp pain in my face and right eye. My ears are ringing, my equilibrium off. Pain is tearing through my right hand and my arm is completely numb to the shoulder.

Logically I know the device wasn’t packed with C4, but holy balls this f*cking hurts! Looking down at August, there’s a ragged, fist-sized crater on his neck. It’s a bloody mess, not pretty at all. Through the fog of detonation, on the other side of the wicked ringing in my ears, I hear him moaning.

The bedroom door starts rattling, and then it’s kicked in, wood splintering everywhere.

I put my hand up (a few of my fingers just torn meat and hanging, obliterated bone) and Lloyd stops, unable to move against the force I have holding him. He sees my ruined hand and bloody face and the crater in his son’s neck and he starts to freak out.

Unembellished pain is surging through the entire right side of my body. The stinging, stabbing pains in my eye intensify, and my ringing ear feels so incredibly hot, yet somehow I gather enough focus to close Lloyd’s eyes, mentally gluing them shut.

I reach out, find Lenore, who is sitting on the couch paralyzed with fear. I secure her to the couch for her own good.

Focusing past the pain, realizing I’ve been here before, I center my thoughts, narrow my attention to August’s neck. I lay my good hand on his neck and realize he’s got some problems with his nerve functions, and possibly his spinal chord.

Oh, God. What have I done?

In my head, I shriek out a distress call, then turn and check on Lloyd. He’s in the same place, still frozen with his eyes shut. He can’t see this. I can’t let him. A second later, Draco appears causing the room to flex at first, then settle.

“Did I not tell you to be careful?” he mutters forcefully, moving me aside. Looking at my face and demolished hand he says, “Fix yourself while I work on him.”

He moves quickly, unfurling his fingers, then sliding them into August’s head. When he pulls them out, he turns to me and says, “You made a mess of him,” to which I reply, “Can you fix him or not?”

“I can, but first you need to heal yourself.”

“Already on it,” I say through gritted teeth, though my face, hand and arm might as well be dipped in lava for the way it hurts.

“Did you turn his eyes off?” he asks, looking over at August’s father.

“Yes,” I say. “Mouth is shut, too.”

Draco immediately switches to his full, four-armed reptilian form, then turns sideways and presses his two left hands to my arm and face. The burn intensifies so badly I can’t even scream, much less breathe. Then it stops and I stand there wobbly, but better.

“What the hell?”

“Wonder twin powers activate,” he says.

Holy cow, Batman…did he just make a joke? “You know timing is everything if you intend to have a sense of humor.”

“We need to do the same for him,” he says, ignoring the barb.

When I move next to Draco, who is working on a face-down August, I brace myself as I see he is nearly wrist deep in August’s head. I place my hand on the side of August’s head where the bulk of the impact hit him and see my fingers are healed, but zig zagging this way and that, totally crooked because the bones were never set right.

“What the balls?” I mutter.

Without looking, he says, “We’ll fix them later. Right now he’s dying.”

Resting my misshapen hand on August’s head, I pull out of my body and into the ethers where his soul sits there like a distant star, observing. I open a connection to the light and feel him. Not August…Brayden.

I’m not going to let you die, I communicate with him.

I don’t want to die.

I brought the Doctor, he’ll help you.

What is he?

Our best chance at healing you, I answer.

If you’re here, then who is in charge of your body?

I am in both places, here and there. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t accidentally move on.

I won’t. Just don’t make me.

With that, I slide fully back into my body and feel Draco in full lizard form at work on my future husband and BFF.

“If you are not in my mind, knowing what I’m knowing, seeing what I’m seeing and reading my thoughts for both reasoning and technique, then you are wasting my time,” he snarls, telepathically.

“Do you have instant replay?” I ask.

A searing heat stings the back of my eye, followed by a wave of hot, foul energy. I reel back, blinking fast and offended. Did he just throw a mini-tantrum on me?

“I get it already, jeez.”

I slide into his head and it’s like a tunnel leading only to his current thoughts. Everything else is blocked off from me. I’m not sure whether to thank him or be upset that he doesn’t trust me.

In the end, I imagine I’ll thank him.

As for now, I’m fully aware of what he’s doing, which is working microscopically to reattach several spinal nerve bundles through the fleshy dura mater and the thin layer below: the arachnoid mater. Under that, Draco’s mind is thinking, the nerve bundle attaches to the pia mater in the subdural space.

Okay, so all of this means almost nothing to me in terms of biology or anatomy or whatever, but I know plenty because I’m essentially riding Draco’s thoughts, grasping his body of knowledge as if it is my body of knowledge. I feel how steady his hand is, how he uses microscopic tentacles in his finger tips to send enough heat and light to fuse the organic matter together.

It takes awhile and it is exhaustive, but when he’s done, he bucks me out of his head and I gasp for air as my soul slams back into my body. I hadn’t realized how far out of my own body I’d gone to be in his.

Using all four hands, Draco lays them across the back of August’s neck, presses an incredible amount of energy into the affected flesh and then shivers almost non-stop until he’s done.

When he pulls back, he says, “Give me your hand.”

I give it to him. Finger by finger, he breaks the bones where they’ve healed wrong until there are exactly seven clean breaks. If I told you I’m in tears and damn near clenching my teeth to death, would you think less of me?

“You’re a lot tougher in battle,” he says, trying to retake his human form, but failing. When the bones are in place, I feel my body automatically working to repair them. With my good hand, I press it to Draco’s plated chest, shove what energy I have left into him to help him on his way.

He seems stunned, his slitted eyes taking all of me in.

“What?” I ask.

“No one…no one has ever done that for me.”

“Really?”

He reaches forward and smothers me in a gentle hug that involves all four of his arms and honest to God, if you’ve got to be hugged by a walking snake with arms, Draco is the best reptoid ever.

When he lets go, he pops out of existence and I release my grip on August’s father, his body sagging against the invisible restraints. He staggers forward, opens his eyes, can’t find the words. He sees me, sees his son. August is now moving back into his body, which is shifting in response.

There is blood all over the floors and the bed sheets, but we are okay. Well, my hand is almost okay and I’m positively drained.

“But I saw…” his father starts to say. Then he turns to me and says, “What did you do to him?!”

“Took a bomb out of his head.”

“Is that what exploded?” he asks, looking at the red spatter all over my face but seeing no wounds to justify this.

“Yes.”

“Your hand,” he says, looking down. It’s definitely bloody, but it’s straight again and working, albeit with a little clicking and popping that should be resolved in a few minutes.

August turns over, feels his neck hesitantly, then looks up at me.

“Is that thing gone?” he asks, delirious.

“Yes.”

“What thing?” his father asks. “The bomb?”

We both say, “The Doctor,” at the same time, then look at each other. In the other room, I release the bonds I put on Lenore, who decides to stay sitting down because she doesn’t know what just happened to her. I put into her head that she experienced a brief bought of paralysis. I lay into her the suggestion that it was probably just a fluke in nature and wouldn’t happen again.

Looking right at August’s father, I say, “There are things in this world that you cannot know. You have an idea of what life should be like and these things I do stand in direct contradiction to them, which will most assuredly upset you.”

“You mean like how a bomb can blow off your hand and half your face while killing my son?”

“Yes.”

“And seconds later there is only the blood residue of what just happened and you’re both fine?”

“It hasn’t been seconds.”

He checks his watch, mutters an expletive, then looks up at me and says, “An hour and a half? Ninety damn minutes?”

“Do you trust me?” I ask, softly.

“No,” he says, no hesitation at all, his eyes stamped down on me.

“You will learn to,” I say.

“I hope so.”

When all the hoopla clears and Lloyd is sure August is okay, we both shower and clean up, and then we retire to bed, not imagining how either of us will sleep the entire night through. By some miracle alone, I manage. He’s not so lucky. When I wake the next morning, he’s finally just managed to fall asleep. In the kitchen, I eat for two, then return to the bedroom with August, shut the door as best as I can for it being broken, and sit on the bed next to him.

“I have to go,” I whisper to him, my fingers on his head, gently rubbing the incoming stubble of hair. I lean down, begin kissing his cheek, then turn his chin towards me and kiss him on the mouth.

Half awake, half bogged down by sleep, he kisses me back, then says, “When I was dead, I felt an incredible amount of peace.”

“It’s like that,” I say, kissing him again. He barely manages to crack his eyes open, he’s that tired.

“What if I don’t want to live forever?” he asks.

“Then you cannot share this life with me, because if you are always at risk of a real death, then I am always weak for having you in my life.”

“I’ll learn to fight,” he says, his eyes too heavy to keep open.

“How are you going to defend yourself against a bomb? Or something like The Operator if it comes back? Because almost everyone in my dojo is dead and my sensei—a man who could kill you inside of seconds even if you trained with him for years—was nearly beaten to death in minutes. He’d still be in casts if I hadn’t healed him.”

“So then you can heal me,” he says, slightly defiant. “You or the snake man.”

“No deal.”

He turns away from me, shutting me out. It’s time for me to go.

I jump into his mind for a moment, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. What I find doesn’t concern me, but it does shed some light on what he’s thinking. He’s toying with the idea of going back to Astor Academy registered as August, rather than Brayden.

That’s what kept him up last night. That and the explosion.

Logistically, he’s been thinking about how he can hack the school’s system and make the necessary adjustments. He’ll need to provide the school with hard copies of his records, and that this will involve him doing some illegal things, but these are things he doesn’t want to do on his father’s computer.

There is also that part of him that isn’t even sure he needs school because he’s a hacker and he can hack a bank as easy as he can hack Astor Academy.

He’s basically torn and trying to decide: live forever in my world, or spend eighty years in the real world not dealing with superpowers and assassins and time travel and bipedal lizards who show up to bring near dead kids back to life.

“Just kiss me before I go,” I say.

He rolls over, gives me a good one. Then surprisingly he smiles and says, “Whatever I decide, I want to thank you for getting that bomb out of my head. I know it wasn’t your decision for me to change, that it was mine, so I know this wasn’t your problem as much as it was mine.”

“I love you, dumbass,” I tell him, pulling him close. “That means all of your problems are also all of my problems.”

“And that’s why I love you,” he says, wrapping his arms around me.

“If you love me, then be with me forever.”

“I’ll think about it on the flight back,” he tells me. And then I take another slight bump off his thoughts, enough for me to realize he’s being honest, that he wants this.

He’s just scared. Terrified actually.

I close my eyes, start my meditation. Within seconds, I realize the frequency for travel I could not reach before has now been unlocked, courtesy of Draco. I open my eyes back up, look at August. He’s staring at me, waiting.

“I’m going to take a quick peek,” I say. “I think I can do that.”

“So are you going or not?”

“I’m not sure?” I say. He gives me a funny look because my answer is a question. “This is sort of new to me.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Opening the portals on this side and at my destination’s side is easy. Envisioning myself traveling this wormhole sets everything in motion. Within moments, my conscience is rushing more than two-thousand years back in time to this little place called Jerusalem.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The moment I close my eyes I feel the pull inside me, like a gentle towing at my soul. It’s like time itself is beckoning me, tugging ever so lightly at me to come, to witness, to understand. Is this what it’s like to possess Draco’s gift? Is all of time known to me the moment I want to know it? Am I a part of everything simply by focusing my will toward it?

I feel myself searching throughout all of time for a certain energy, a specific soul, a person. Him. The moment I find him, the emotion crashes into me like a tidal wave, and I am there. Where my consciousness goes, there is delight, torment, an inordinate amount of pain and steep, steep suffering. And I haven’t even left August’s room yet.

How is this possible? I wonder. How can I feel all of this from so far away?

Instantly, I know what’s happening. This is the flagellation of Christ. I feel half of me in that time and half anchored to this time. It’s as if I’ve sheared myself in two to be in both places at once, each half reaching for the other, each wanting unity over separation.

But I am here and there.

Two parts of me.

Enough.

I feel my ethereal self in that room with Jesus and his aggressors, disembodied, seeing with spiritual eyes, knowing everything happening, feeling. Pontius Pilate is a prefect serving under Emperor Tiberius, and a cold, vengeful man. This is the man responsible for sentencing Jesus to death. A man I immediately detest with such enthusiasm I’m overcome with the need to rip him limb from gosh damn limb.

The cretin sits nearby—smiling as if he’s watching a play, or a lovely woman bathe—while two of his men vigorously flog Jesus.

Bare backed, dressed only in loincloth, the rampant abuse showing on his beaten body, Jesus takes the violence heaped upon him without mercy. The prefect’s men torment him with both weapon and tongue, speaking foul names upon him, cursing him with vicious, grunting effort.

It is as if they are trying to break his skin and his bones, but only after they first break his mind, body and soul.

Each and every strike against the man is a lashing, tearing pain that I feel here as well as there. It’s as though I’m connected to both him and my own body in this time.

As Jesus suffers the onslaught of flogging, his skin trenching open, he takes it with the will of a servant for the people he loves.

My soul suddenly knows so many things in this moment. One of which is feeling. Something I only know to be possible because when I was dead, even while trapped in another realm, I bore feeling and emotion, too.

I felt sadness for what happened to me, and I wanted to live.

Jesus is no different.

In his heart, he does not hate those abusing him. Even shackled and bound to a whipping post, he asks his father for their forgiveness.

How is this possible?

As his skin opens and weeps red, as his pale body becomes the landscape of monumental abuse, my sheared soul moves beside him, my brain in this time thinking two things: I can stop this; I can kill them all.

And just then, Jesus turns to the place my soul resides and he looks right into what would be my eyes, taking three or four vehement gashes before hanging his blood soaked head down into his cuffed hands. As I stand there invisible, spiritual eyes on the blood and sweat trickling down his face, into his beard where it collects, I watch it drip, drip, drip onto heavy iron shackles and think, this has to stop.

I feel everything.

I feel his knees pounded raw and pressed into the ground, the weariness of his bones, the quiet cries in his mind for God to let them see the light where their souls are not damaged and vengeful but clean and pure.

A woman comes into the room and gives Pontius Pilate a drink, sneaking a glance at the flogging underway.

Blanching, she leaves quickly and without word.

My soul roars upon the man as he sips his wine and watches the show. My invisible, divided soul goes face to face with this abominable creature and it screams with such force the coward withers quite suddenly and immediately, his drink nearly spilling, his hand clutching his chest.

And then a voice in my head booms: “No!”

With that thunderous roar, my soul flees that time and slams reckless into my body in this time. My eyes shoot open and August is sitting up and staring at me, not sure what’s happening. All the emotion of that moment hits me with tsunami force, a force so great not even this body can contain it.

I am instantly in tears. Instantly sobbing.

August is pulling me into him, cradling me as I lay sideways in a fetal position, not knowing how I can feel so much love and so much hate at the same time.

The door to August’s room opens and Lenore is there. I feel her, my eyes seeing her, seeing everything.

“Bray—I mean, August, is she okay?” she asks.

The beautiful woman’s face is genuine concern. She is not a sympathetic woman by nature, but she is not beyond empathy either. This much is now clear.

“Yes,” he says.

“Why is she crying like that?” she asks. Looking me, she says, “Savannah?”

I put into her head that I am okay, just overwhelmed with emotion. I tell her I’m an empath and feeling too much right now.

She stops, wondering why she has an answer in her head, wondering how she just suddenly knows this while not having heard a word from my mouth.

“Are…I mean…are you an empath?” she says, almost like she’s embarrassed to ask, but unwilling to keep quiet, too. She needs to know if she’s imagining this or if this is real.

“Yes,” I say, my eyes so big with tears, and so red.

She comes to my side, starts to rub my back, but then she pulls her hand back, almost like she’s been bitten. Her hand is splotched with red. She stares at it, then looks over my side to the spots where blood has seeped through my shirt.

I didn’t know I was bleeding.

“What is this?” she asks, holding her hand out as if it does not belong to her.

“Do you know what the stigmata is?” I ask her.

“People mysteriously bleeding from their hands and feet where Jesus was supposedly nailed to keep him on the cross,” she answers.

“He was flogged with metal tipped whips,” I hear myself say. She is aghast. “Sometimes, when I feel too much, when I’m in a situation I don’t understand, I feel too much and it translates to my physical body.”

“We need to get you looked at,” Lenore says.

“She heals,” August says.

Lenore looks at him with a thousand burning questions in her eyes. August simply looks back at her, his eyes saying so many things, the loudest of which is this: do not ask.

“So…?”

“I’m okay, Lenore,” I say, sitting up and wiping my eyes. “I just needed all of that emotion out of me.”

“What…what are you…feeling?” she asks.

“Something far worse than I expected. I know what this is about though. I’m okay. I just need a few minutes to collect myself, if that’s okay.”

She nods hesitantly, then stands and says, “So no Band-Aids?”

I shake my head, smile and thank her. When she is gone, August says, “What the hell, Savannah?”

“I was there, August,” I hear myself say.

“Where?”

“At Jesus’s flogging. I wanted to kill the prefect who put him there. I lost control and went after him, but someone bigger than all of us kicked my soul back here. I…I think it was…oh fuck, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think it was God.”

“You got evicted by God?” he asks in utter disbelief.

“Is that so incredulous? I mean, if someone like me is possible, then isn’t someone like Him possible, too?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks after a moment.

There is such a tenderness in his eyes, so much love and concern for me it makes me not want to do this. But now I have to. If God wants me out, then it’s that important that I maintain control. If I go back once more, it will be to watch and feel, but not to intervene.

Looking up at August, I say, “It’s time. I’ll be okay. You need to trust me and let go.”

Reluctantly, he does.

I lean in and give him the best, hardest kiss of my life. I kiss him like I’ll never see him again, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be back together in no time.

He doesn’t know that.

I don’t either.

This time I’m about to jump to is not lost on me. This is why I chose it. This event. Never has there been such a moment in history that I believe will touch me more than this: a man willing to lose everything for people who love him and hate him, for people who want him dead, for billions of people who will never know him.

If ever there was a bright and shining example to follow and to influence, history says it would be Jesus Christ.

I’ve never been religious, but I’m not opposed to taking a peek at this part of history. Besides, Jesus and I just might have a few things in common.

Although I have never been a martyr, I certainly understand sacrifice for those who don’t know you and who eventually hate you and want you dead.

That was my life as Raven. The life I killed myself for so I wouldn’t end up back here eight hundred years later beaten and in pieces.

Now that I think of it, though, maybe Jesus and I don’t have much more than that in common. Still, for whatever reason, I feel that I need to be there, to be near Jesus in his last hours, to understand.

I know Jesus was never portrayed as being perfect, for he was a disrupter of man’s obsession with false idols and power, but I do believe he was pure, that he was love. I am not perfect by any stretch of any imagination. I am not purely love or easily capable of forgiveness. And though I am passionate, I do not understand moderation and I have no balance.

These are the things I don’t tell August. The things Draco knows about me. But Draco trusts me, right? Enough to give me this power? So somewhere along the way, I believe he knows that I will find my answers, that I will bring light and love to this world and not just violent reprisal.

Still, I feel vengeful and muddled. My heart is half love and life while there is a darkness I am compelled to yield to, if only to destroy those who look to harm others.

Yes, I am an addict. A justice junkie through and through. Yet somehow this doesn’t feel like enough for me to live this life fully.

I hope to find my answers here. The truth is, I feel inspired.

Closing my eyes, I feel my soul open a portal to a time after the flogging but before his crucifixion. I do not connect with Jesus this time. Instead I seek out a bright light, an overwhelming sadness, a broken hearted, wildly desperate soul: Jesus’s mother, Mary.

When I connect with her, I sense the pull as an instantaneous force that draws me swiftly out of this world and into the palace of Caiaphas. The moment I appear in that time, it is before a servant woman who all but faints the moment I appear. I am wearing jeans, one of August’s t-shirts and his black and white converse shoes. Not exactly the paragon of this time’s fashion.

Meaning I need to change clothes…

The woman passed out before me, the one laying on the floor surrounded by a dropped basket of garments, is not much taller than me. She’ll work. As I’m undressing her, as I’m undressing myself, I realize I’m woefully unprepared for this both physically and emotionally.

It will be okay though, right?

Chapter Twenty-Three

One minute August was sitting beside her, watching her, hurting for what he knew she was about to do, and the next minute Lenore was opening his bedroom door. August had a moment of panic.

He looked at Savannah, then at his step-mother.

Uh oh…

The instant Savannah disappeared, Lenore walked in, seeing her there one moment then gone the next. Her eyes shot open, her jaw loosening.

He could see it right then, all the blood draining from her face.

“August, what the hell was that?” she asked, her voice sitting too high in her throat, like she was about to have a mental breakdown.

He was so torn in that moment. This must have been what it was like for Savannah to come out to her parents. Savannah was not a girl. He knew that now. She was a God of this earth—not evil, or good, just…lost, trying to find her way. How do you crystalize that for someone who barely knew changing DNA and bodies was possible?

You don’t.

“She left,” is all he could say.

“Where…where did she go?” Lenore asked, her voice still too high, her hands now trembling at her sides.

“Um…”

They just sat there looking at each other until Lenore’s eyes started to flood and she turned and walked away.

Damn.

A moment later, his father came in with a troubled look on his face. The great Lloyd James was officially rattled. He was a man who knew that he was so far out of his depth he didn’t know which step was solid ground or which one would drop out beneath him.

On one hand, he had a wife who he was sure was telling him a tall tale; on the other hand his son had changed his DNA and told him his girlfriend was both telepathic and telekinetic. But this wasn’t the big enchilada. All this sat second chair to the fact that he’d seen both of them damn near eviscerated with a bomb, a bomb that had them nearly dead in one second, then healed perfectly in the next. If he hadn’t seen these things with his own eyes, Lloyd James wouldn’t have believed it. But he did. He does. And now shit was getting weirder by the second.

“Where is Savannah?” he all but belted out.

“Gone.”

“Where did she go?” he barked. “And don’t lie to me.”

“It’s better that I do,” August calmly replied.

“Honestly, son, I’ve been patient with all this horse crap and now I’ve got Lenore as upset as I’ve ever seen her. She’s talking about stigmata and…and…and some bullshit about a…disappearing act? Like right before her eyes?”

“Yeah…”

“So? Where is she?”

“Like I said,” August said, his tone tempered, “it’s better that I lie.”

“Why?” he asked, some of his anger burning off, but some of it still sitting hot inside him. He was clearly at odds with himself and reality, and though he sounded irate, August knew he was just trying to be rational, if not understanding.

“Because the truth will haunt you.”

“I can deal with it.”

“She left the same way she got here,” he said, measuring his words very carefully. “By teleportation.”

His father slammed his eyes shut, rubbed the heels of his hands over his temples, set his jaw so hard his cheeks started flicking. August wasn’t looking forward to what was next.

“I told you I should have lied,” he said.

“So, where the hell did she teleport to? Back home? To the airport?”

“She doesn’t need the airport anymore.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Jerusalem.”

Now his eyes flashed open and he looked at August like his head was going to pop. “Why would she go there?”

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, in one tempered exhale. “To be with Jesus at his crucifixion.”

And there it was. That was the point he’d gotten to in his life. That was what he was about to go through with Savannah if he decided to take the Fountain of Youth serum. The girl would surely travel through time, she would fight, she would tear apart family relationships not because she wanted to, but because by virtue of who she was, she wouldn’t be able to help it.

“Are you fucking with me?” his father snapped.

“I told you there are things you can’t possibly know because your mind cannot fathom them. It’s like me trying to explain the internet to pilgrims. It is possible—the internet—but it wasn’t possible then. Think of Savannah as the internet and you as the pilgrim.”

“How did she get like this?” he asked, his mind now realizing anger wasn’t helping him understand anything.

“I’m drawing the line here, Dad. I have to do this or you will neither accept me nor her. Just know that she is good, that she is necessary, and that I love her.”

“You already told me that.”

“Well now I suppose this will test your promise,” he said.

“Are you…are you like that?” his father asked with grave hesitation. “Are you like her?”

“No. I’m just changed.”

He watched the old man sag with relief. Lloyd knew he’d lost his son’s physical appearance, but if August was normal everywhere else, he could manage that. What he could not get past, however, would be August being like Savannah. Well, not at first. If he knew what August was contemplating—immortality—he might very well break. At least, right now. In time though, maybe he’d be okay. As for now, his father looked like he couldn’t handle one more thing.

“This is insane,” he said, blowing out an exasperated sigh.

“Tell me about it,” August replied.

Until now, Lloyd James was the biggest thing in Lloyd James’s life. He could handle his son casting a tall shadow, but he couldn’t handle him blocking out all his daylight with news like this.

“So…is there any possibility you’re going to become like her?”

“There is no one like her out there, Dad. Her genetics were altered, mixed, and then activated by things I barely understand. She did not want this. She never asked for any of this, and she certainly didn’t ask for the kind of suffering she’s endured. For her, she knows her life will be about suffering and no one understood suffering more while standing in a place of love and forgiveness than Jesus did.”

“So that’s where she’s going?”

“She’s not going there, Dad. She’s already there.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

After his multiverse self told Aloysius where to find Savannah and that he wouldn’t be coming back to this universe, Aloysius swallowed his time travel device and prepared for lots and lots of pain.

Being sucked into the wormhole for as long as he was made for one horrific reentry. He was spit out in Jerusalem more than two thousand years in the past feeling flat out maniacal. Sweating, frenzied, he felt his bones and they felt like they were not lined up quite right. Fortunately the healing capabilities of his body were correcting these errors. He opened his eyes, took a breath. Aloysius realized he was laying in a fetal position in the dirt and there were three sets of dirty feet in sandals standing next to him.

He glanced up, shielded his eyes from the sun.

He was in a tight alley, one of the many in old Jerusalem. Three men looked down on him—big black beards, unkempt hair, sun beaten skin, long robes. Their eyes were huge, their bodies paralyzed with fear. They must have seen him materialize here from no where.

One of the men, breathless, his hands shaking ever so lightly with trepidation, spoke to him in soft, scared tones.

Aloysius had no idea what this gibberish was so he didn’t bother trying to communicate. Instead, he sat up, pushed up off the heels of his hands and got to his feet, his body hot and working overtime to heal itself.

Aloysius towered over the men by a good six to eight inches, their chins tilted back to watch him. All three of them looked amazed by his white skin, it seemed, and how good looking he was.

To these men, he must be a God.

At the end of the narrow alley, in wider streets, was a gathering of people with their backs to him. He appraised their clothes, then his. Looking up at the three not-so-wise-men around him, he made a decision. In a flash, he tore their throats out and sloppily guzzled down a few pints of their blood before tossing them aside.

This served to hasten his body’s repair.

Up the street he heard the pandemonium of the crowd. They were getting louder. Dressing in confiscated robes, Aloysius caught a glimpse of a beaten man with a huge wooden cross on his back staggering down the street.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself, making his way to the street.

This was Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering: Jesus’s long and brutal walk from Galilee to Mount Calvary where he would die on the cross. Aloysius knew the stories of Christ, for sure, but to be here—to see him pass like that—even to a beast like him, this was surreal.

A woman and child appeared at the other end of the alleyway, the woman gasping. She and her son were trying to catch up with the procession, both of them clearly distraught.

He’d turned to the sound of her surprise.

She was staring at the three dead men. When she looked up and saw his short hair and his handsome face, she seemed to fall instantly still. Only twenty feet separated them from each other, but it might as well have been five.

He smelled them, wanted to devour them. Crouched forward, hands like claws at his side, he hissed at her, his teeth sharp, the lower half of his face and his hands clearly bloodstained.

The two of them turned and fled, and though his animal instincts had him aching to take chase, he felt it best to keep any hunger he might have, for he was going to need it when he drained Savannah.

Pushing past the rubberneckers, he joined the procession.

Aloysius was just as intrigued by Jesus bearing the cross as he was the task at hand: ending this diminutive female pestilence, Savannah.

When he finally worked his way to the front of the crowd, he’d traveled a few blocks down the long dirt road heading toward the gates of the city. He was ten feet from Jesus, watching the man take the jeering and taunting, listening to the hateful, spitting sounds of people shouting him down. The hate for this man who would become the savior of billions was startling, even to him.

Kids threw rocks at him, until one of them hit a soldier.

The soldier hustled around and found the offending boy, beating him then shoving him into the dirt where he lay sobbing in pain.

Aloysius snickered as he walked by the boy, spitting a bloody loogie on the child as his mother tried to console him. The mother looked up at him and with a sneer, Aloysius said, “The little puke deserved it.”

If something like Jesus’s death could touch the heart of a monster like him, but not a stupid little kid like the one he’d just spit on, what did that say about these people?

Savages, he thought.

The beatings continued and Jesus took one step after another, the burden on his body and mind made more troublesome by the delight these people took in his anguish.

The Roman soldiers continued to whip him, to yell at him, almost like they were trying to break him before he could even reach his destination. Aloysius knew cruelty, but theirs seemed instinctual rather than manufactured.

Trumpets blew, startling him. He could see the rabble of people running beside them all, trying to see the criminal dragging his own cross to his death.

Aloysius drew closer still.

Sweat and blood leaked down Jesus’s battered body. The gashes were open and weeping, the tangle of thorns wrapping his head a sick sight to behold. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man.

Aloysius bore his own burden. As a mutant with the vampiric thirst, only Holland’s advanced genetics and his serum would stave off most of the sun’s effects. He still bore some of the curse of sunlight. Meaning he was still overly sensitive to the sun. It was hot needles stabbing every inch of his skin. It was perspiration draining down his face, out of his hairline and down his temples. The itchy, nasty robe, kept his body from directly absorbing the light, but for all this, his body still continued to sweat in the most uncomfortable places.

One of the Roman soldiers leading the mob turned and looked first at the women sobbing behind Jesus, and then directly at Aloysius.

The vampire hybrid stood a head higher than everyone else. Aloysius held the soldier’s eye, but his gaze dipped to Aloysius’s chin, growing wide at the sight of it.

Aloysius knew what he was looking at: the blood all over his chin.

He swiped a robed arm over his face, using the sweat and force to get most of the blood off. The soldier finally looked away.

Aloysius’s gaze shifted past the hardened soldier, to a large palace where he saw a weeping woman standing beside a man consoling her. The woman under the gateway was remarkable only in her pale features and her sorrow, in her swollen eyes and her sniffling, in the extraordinary pain that so clearly beset her.

As she stood there trembling and juddering, wrapped from head to foot in a bluish-green mantle, her agony lay naked before the hateful, jeering crowds, uncontrollable, uninterrupted.

Aloysius zeroed in on her eyes and there he saw something profound and unmistakable. He didn’t know how he felt in that moment. Hatred for her? Envious? He didn’t know his own mother, so he would never see that look he was seeing now: a blindingly intense love and longing by a mother for her child.

He knew right then that he was looking at the Blessed Virgin, at the Mother Mary.

His heart was struck with a sudden turmoil when he spotted the girl just behind her, the girl with the lazily shrouded head, the girl he longed to eviscerate.

Savannah Swann.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Inside the room with the spilled garments, I dress myself as best as I can, finally wrapping a cloth over my head. I look like someone who needed forty-five minutes to get ready but took only five instead.

This will have to do, I tell myself.

I hear voices out in the hallway. I step outside the room, leaving the fallen woman behind. There I see a man reverently ushering a woman through the palace. I know these people. A wave of dizziness shoots through me and I vacillate for a second, slightly off balance.

I knew I’d see these people, but I never expected to feel this. Moving past me is the Baptist John and Jesus’s mother, Mary. Following them are several woman and a young man, one of Joseph’s nephews, I think. Behind them, looking extra nervous, is the caretaker of the property who let them pass through here to see Jesus.

I still my restless heart for a moment, not sure I can do this. But I must. This is why I’m here! Why I’ve come!

It wasn’t just to watch the final walk of a martyr heading to his death. I’m here to witness a man making the ultimate sacrifice for the love of his people because he is beholden to a higher power.

Outside, the sounds of blowing horns and a noisy crowd intensifies. As I make my way out of the palace, it’s to get to the street—a hard packed dirt pathway between buildings. Moments later I find myself under a gateway standing behind Mary and John’s entourage.

I open my mind, let myself know and feel everything.

Mary’s thoughts burn brighter than most, her emotions pulling me into their gravitational pull. Her heart aches so fiercely for her son I feel the pain afflicting my own heart. She’s scared of what she’s about to see.

Slipping down ever so lightly into her memories, I see her walking with John only moments ago, strangled by her emotions, helpless to do anything to stop this flood of pain, and unsure of her own ability to handle seeing her son like this.

My eyes are her eyes in this memory and I’m seeing her looking down at the dirt, seeing the pathway marked by a long, consistent line of her son’s dripping blood. This alone threatens to break her. She tells herself to press on knowing her heart won’t be able to handle what her eyes are about to see.

He was her son, though; she was his mother.

Blinking quickly, I pull out of her memories, focus on the boy in front of me. He turns and his eyes widen, like he’s seeing an angel. My eyes clear and I fully detach from Mary. This boy is enthralled by my beauty, but then he sees the state of my garments and his eyes settle.

No angel would dress like this.

He says something to me in a language I don’t understand. I gather from his feelings of intense curiosity that he’s asking me who I am. He’s also wondering if I’m real. I lift my forefinger to my lips and quietly shush him. His eyes narrow as his brows pull together in a frown, his mouth moving like it wants to say something, but no words coming forth.

Our attention is drawn to a converging horde up the street, a flood of people no more than eighty paces away. The crowd is getting more rambunctious by the second. I slink around the boy, past a few women in this small entourage, and take a place just behind Mary.

She is wringing her hands, her heart clearly conflicted. I am once more drawn back into the wake of her emotions.

She turns and speaks to the man beside her, John. I don’t understand what she is saying with my ears, but I understand what she means from where I am inside her mind.

“Should I stay for this, or should I leave right now?” she asks John in her language, her eyes desperate, pleading. The torment on her face is evidence of the crushing sorrow she’s barely holding at bay. “Oh, how will I be able to endure it?”

John turns with soft, sympathetic eyes and a reassuring hand and he says, “If you don’t stay, it will always serve as a cruel regret.”

Defenseless and lost, she nods while dabbing her nose and eyes, and then she steps out from the gateway and moves toward the street. Ahead she sees her bloodstained son dragging the backbreaking cross forward amidst the whipping taunts of the soldiers and the riotous, belligerent crowd behind him.

I have to pull out of Mary’s head because the crashing emotions hit me so hard they threaten to imprison me. I do not realize this until I’m out of her, but tears skip down my cheeks, my eyes a constant flood.

Nearby, people are turning to look at Mary in her weakest, most vulnerable state and now I’m looking at them because they do not share this woman’s pain. They are there to see the criminal punished.

For them, this is a show.

One of the gawkers asks his sidekick who this bellowing woman is and the sidekick looks at Mary, smirks, and says in his own language, “That is the criminal’s mother.”

Both scoundrels turn and begin laughing at her, first quietly, and then uproariously while pointing at her and slinging insults. This is where I draw the line. Moving behind Mary and John, cutting through Mary’s teary-eyed entourage, I make a beeline for this scourge.

The uglier of the two cretins must sense something in my eyes because he stops right away, looks me up and down and then he makes like he’s going to spit in my face.

I seal his mouth shut then start to heat his eyes. Not enough to burn them, but enough for him to know to shut the F up right well and now.

I feel my cheek twitching with rage, not just for him, but for all of this. I should not be here. Not with my triggers: injustice and bullying. This is tasteless and revolting. The menace’s eyes are watering but I psychically hold his lids open, let him see the hatred I feel sliding through my eyes. When I let go of him, I mentally hit him with a psychic punch in the chest, knocking him back a good foot. He turns, stumbles, then runs from me like I’m the devil herself.

I hear the sobbing behind me, but I cannot turn around because my world is cast into shades of grey and I know my eyes are shot through with black. When I turn to the crowds, when my eyes set on Jesus, my heart cracks wide open and I feel everything.

I feel the whips on my back as he suffers them, the thorns buried in my head the way they are buried into his; inside, a great chasm of sadness tears me open. This is the most painful thing I’ve ever had to watch.

I ache to lighten his load, to heal his body, wipe the map clean of these f*ckers and let him walk the world, but I’ve been told “no” by someone far greater than me. So in spite of my instincts to protect those who cannot protect themselves, I will not interrupt this torturous event.

When Jesus gets near, Mary rushes out into the street before him, overflowing with the forcefulness of her love, battered by his mistreatment, tormented by his state. She falls to her knees before him, her hands upon him, around him. She weeps furiously, unconcerned by Jesus’s persecutors, by the hissing and hollering masses.

“My son!” she wails.

Looking down, his burden stayed for the moment, his face breaks and he whispers, “My mother.”

I cannot stop these tears. They will not stop. My feet take me forward, delivering me into the masses.

The executioners behind Jesus mutter insult and mock him. My hands ball to fists in the street and the ground quivers at my feet. Not seeing me, one of the men shouts at Mary. I don’t know what he is saying, but I know what he feels.

“Woman, what do you want here?” he shouts, like she’s a pestilence. His eyes are cruel judgment, his demeanor wild with the conviction of his ways. “If you had raised him better, he would not be in our hands now!”

Oh how I’d love to tear this man’s tongue clean from his mouth! Just rip it loose and make him look at it before he falls down dead before these swine!

“No!” roars the voice in my head.

Crippled by the force of the word, my hands relax and I slowly move back. Looking upon these fools with the harshest of judgment and a howl of pain in the back of my throat, I see that this act of defiant love by Mary touches more than a few of them.

Standing paralyzed before this, my heart trembling, the world blurred at the edges with tears that will not be restrained, I now understand how one can stand in the midst of so much hate and injustice and still move forward.

A few people come forward from the crowd and oblige Mary to move, to let the procession through. Jesus’s eyes lift off her, settle on the road ahead. The strain of the cross on his back is becoming too much.

She stands on her own, not a finger laid upon her, and is whisked off by John. She returns to the gateway, reaching for a green veined stone to hold her body as it gives out on her one last time. She sinks to her knees, paralyzed with a grief I can’t even touch for fear of always carrying pieces of it with me.

Before I leave, I send a flood of love into the woman, hoping it will offer her heart a moment’s reprieve. It is all I can do. Fortunately I am not stopped by the booming, otherworldly voice.

Apparently love will not be turned away as my earlier reprisals have been.

The executioners jab their sharp lances into Jesus, getting him moving. The crowd stirs, their joy a lake of contemptuous darkness that leaves me feeling helpless before all of this…madness.

I’ve never spoken to God before, except to curse Him for what He has let happen to me throughout my life, but now I want that open channel. As I make my way ahead of the procession (because I don’t trust myself to walk with them without slowly ending each and every one of their lives), I ask God to let me help, to let me at least temper Jesus’s load.

Right then Jesus stumbles, going to a knee. The whips and lances fail to raise him for his body is weary, too weak to stand. The soldiers point to a man who reluctantly gets underneath the cross and lifts it off Jesus’s back. The broken man tries to stand, but is stopped as a rope is curled and fastened around his neck. Another section of rope binds his wrists. While the cross is managed by another man, Jesus is violently dragged forward, stumbling and falling on knees and his side until he can somehow stagger to his feet and keep up.

All of this is happening and I’m cursing God for being complicit in this. Jesus’s load is lightened though, so perhaps He listened to me. I curse Him nevertheless, slinging judgment and anger His way.

At the gates of the city Jesus is allowed a moment of absolution, a brief reprieve. Taking that time, he turns to the woman who have followed him so loyally, enduring the abusive chants, the barrage of violence heaped up on him, and in his language he says, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

I will remember these words well into the future as I turn them over in my mind gleaning from them a thousand truths.

For now, I watch in sorrow, filling Jesus with my love, pressing upon him my gratitude for everything he is doing for us now, and for how it will impact the masses for thousands of years to come.

I know what happens next. Rather I have a crude idea of what is to come. History under the broad brush paints a certain picture, but the minor details and the timing of certain events have been slightly jumbled due to limited reporting and speculation. Much of what has been written about Jesus’s walk of sorrow isn’t one hundred percent accurate, which I expected because history that happened two thousand years ago is never accurate to the detail. I expect Jesus to fall a third and final time before making it to Calvary on will power alone. When this happens I am in Jesus’s head, whispering to him a hundred grateful things.

I’m telling him that his sacrifice will unburden the restless souls of millions in the two thousand years to come. I tell him I am no angel, but that today I will be his angel. I tell him that if he cannot handle it—if he doubts the value of this quest—to at least know that I am here with him, and that I represent billions of people he will never know in his life.

At the top of the hill, as the trunk of the cross is laid down and he is laid upon it, I stand close enough to look into his eyes, whispering my love for him. He turns and finds me, almost like he knows. I blink back the tears, hold his soul swallowing gaze and into his mind, I say, “Yes, I am here.”

The first spike is driven into him and it’s pure, unadulterated violence upon my soul. This is a pain so sharp and crippling I stagger backwards, holding my arm, struck with the same force as him. My body is gouged open up in the same place as his, but my wounds close quickly as I pull my arm toward my body.

A voice, low and hypnotic, whispers into my mind, “These are his wounds, his pain. He bears this burden willingly, little one.”

The next spike is driven into him and I share this pain too, letting my body open once more—the same as Jesus’s body. I yelp and stagger backwards, falling to a knee. I am not alone. The women of Jerusalem are dying their separate, public deaths as well.

The voice again: “This is not your pain.”

When they cross his feet and drive a final spike through them, I deny the pain in my body. Jesus is tempering the pain himself, grinding down on something I cannot imagine—surrender, it would seem, or perhaps a pain that drags at him, pulling at him, breaking him to the core.

Moving back, unable to look anymore because an anger is welling inside of me like I’ve never known before, I feel the upsurge of the emotions of everyone present. My thoughts and emotions, however, begin to crystalize into something dangerous. I am the voice against injustice, and this is unjust! I am the voice against martyrdom and this is both hateful and wrong!

As they stand Jesus on the cross (next to the crosses of the two thieves), this darkness in me gathers so much strength it awakens The Operator. The beast is now screaming and shaking his cage like he just needs to see what’s to come. There is a rising insanity inside me that calls out to him, beckons him, fills him with a sort of frenzied delight.

It’s noon when they stand the cross up, but the sun suddenly dims with my rage. As I see Jesus now raised up before the Romans, my eyes drown with an impossible darkness. The hate in me suddenly blows out into the world like a billion demons spilling forth with their black, flapping wings.

Tears of blood leak from my eyes and nose; even my fingernails seep with red. The expulsion exhausts me though, and when I open my eyes, the world has fallen to shade, a long shadow cast so dark over the lands of Calgary that I look to the sun thinking there must be a full eclipse. But there is no eclipse.

Is this me?

Am I the darkness cast upon these lands?

There is nothing stirring inside of me, though. Not all the deep seeded fury that spun itself around my soul so tightly that I’ve been led to believe that I am darkness incarnate. What a lie I’ve let myself believe! I am not evil, for this darkness inside has finally left me.

Sitting back on my heels, breathing a sigh of relief for this burden released, I let myself cry not for what is being lost in this crucifixion, but for what is being gained. My sorrow is tempered though as my eyes hone in on Jesus. And suddenly, the dim light of a sun struggling to pierce this veil of darkness slides behind a body standing before me.

The shadow cast upon me snares my attention. I walk my eyes up the legs and waist of this man before me. When I get to his chin, his nose and then his eyes, all I say is, “Hello f*ckface,” because I realize the magnitude of the mistake I’ve just made.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Aloysius pulls me into a shadow of this world, one where I can see the crucifixion and the people here, but I am displaced from it. Almost like my spirit has been pulled from my body and brought into a separate construct.

“Look at you, all broken up for a guy you didn’t know who walked to his own death.”

“You wouldn’t understand the reasons for it,” I say, standing up before him. “I would think a blood sucking maggot like you would prefer to stand in the crowd and cheer for his demise rather than talk to someone like me.”

“A guy who walks to his own death does nothing to impress me,” he replies. “Besides, I didn’t come here for him. I came here for you.”

And with that, his attack on me comes so swiftly and with such force, that the wind is literally knocked out of me.

It barely even registers that I’ve been hit.

By the time I flop down on the ground, I’m wondering what just happened. But as I’m wondering that, I’m being hauled up by the throat and launched into the closest cross where one of the thieves hangs. My hip crashes into the wood and I’m spun around and slammed into a small rock wall.

Before I can even think to recover, Aloysius lifts me up by my hair, pulls me face to face with him.

“You threw me into traffic,” he hisses.

Despite the monumental pain I’m feeling, I start laughing because I know this, above everything else, pisses him off the most.

He grabs me by the throat, let’s go of my hair.

I almost don’t care that Aloysius is here, or that he’s holding me up to the point where I feel myself gasping, choking. A quick glance over his shoulder shows me the mourners for Jesus and how they are totally unaffected by what is happening here. They aren’t looking at us.

How is this happening? I find myself wondering. They’re not even seeing us!

With my mind, I retaliate, squeezing his throat closed. His eyes bulge with both surprise and pressure.

“Feels good, right?” I gurgle, hoarse, my airway all but shut.

Two ragged ivory-colored bones punch out of his knuckles, ribbons of blood spreading over the ridges. My eyes and my curiosity are drawn to them, but in that moment, moving so fast he’s a blur, he drives these two bones into my neck, startling me, catching me completely off guard.

With these same bones, he slices open his mouth at the edges.

Before he can open this gaping maw and show me all his teeth, I slam him with an energy wave so abrupt and so fueled by rage he’s pitched sideways off of me. I hit the ground hard. For a second, I try to catch a breath. Instinctually, my hand goes to my punctured neck where I’m losing blood fast.

Before I look up, before I can even get that first big breath, he’s got that split second advantage over me.

A clawed hand jams into the soft flesh beneath my floating rib, razor sharp fingers digging in me. The fingers are needy and rude, wiggling and scraping and cramming itself up inside me.

The pain hits my eyes as I cough out a sharp gasp. Looking up, however, I find his eyes and I am stilled.

In those eyes, there is a peacefulness that seems to temper all the madness. When that grotesque mouth of his opens into a gigantic, razor toothed hole, I am so enthralled by the beauty and tranquility of his gaze that I fail to feel even an ounce of fear.

His face latches onto my neck and I feel an immense sucking that honestly feels like the best feeling ever. The fight leaves me like it was never there in the first place.

I let him have me. I want him to have me.

The euphoria washing over me right now is sexual, spiritual, otherworldly. My hands slide up his arms, my fingers slipping into his hair; my foot touches his thigh, inches up to his privates, rubbing over his groin gently, suggestively.

I am going to die here at Jesus’s crucifixion and honestly, I’m ready for it. I want it. This way is the best way—no pain, no struggle; death in the midst of a loin-stirring rapture too intense for words.

In that moment, the moment of my greatest surrender, a hand grabs Aloysius by the back of his neck and rips him off me, throwing his big body backwards with such animalistic force he hits the ground and skips sideways over the sloping side of the hill.

Standing before me, looking similar to me (but a little taller and way more badass), is a girl whom I know right away to be Amanda—my multiverse equivalent.

She helps me up and honestly, I’m a bit star struck. There’s a steely look in her eyes I wish I had.

Why did I get rid of the darkness in me so soon? Did Aloysius know this? Is that why he attacked me?

Behind Amanda is a fiery redhead, a gorgeous girl who looks almost exactly like Georgia. I briefly graze her mind, knowing she’s not my Georgia. This multiverse Georgia is holding the hand of a small girl with black hair hanging over one eye. A multiverse Alice. The half-pint demon child stands there like she’s waiting for a toy, or a PB&J with the crusts cut off. Between the ginger and the firestarter, the two of them could scorch this earth bare.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“You know why.”

“I feel loopy,” I hear myself say. At this point, I don’t know how this half-existence works. The mourners cannot see us. We are standing before them, yet we are invisible to them. Looking at Amanda, who has amethyst eyes and better skin, I ask, “What is this place?”

“The in-between. A thin construct we have in our world to handle our affairs out of the public eye. Think of it as the blurred edge of reality where people like you and I can do the most damage without being seen.”

“Looks like this version of you is a giant pussy,” Alice says.

WTF?

I need healing.

“Amanda,” the redhead says, a warning. Glancing over at her, she’s seeing what we’re not.

Aloysius is stalking up the side of the rocky, sloping hill with his hands at his sides and the most sinister rage in his eyes, eyes now shot through with black from corner to corner. He’s shaking his arms, stamping his feet. With every jarring movement, his bones look like they’re breaking, lengthening and remaking themselves. Right before our eyes, as he stalks us down, he gets taller, bigger, more…hard looking. His skin is changing its color and texture, growing plate-like.

Alice turns and becomes a human flamethrower, washing this nightmare down with fire. He moves through it unabated, his body now more than seven and a half feet tall. Just then, Amanda puts her hand on my chest and hits me with a blast of energy so powerful my mouth opens in a startled huff that never makes it anywhere because she’s that ferocious.

When she lets go, I feel supercharged.

Whoa.

The redhead shakes her hands and two fiery whips spring forth. Holy shit! She races toward the Aloysius thing and begins whipping this fire at him, striking his face, his arms, the front of his chest. Alice lets off the fire, takes a deep breath, looks at the blackened vampire-hybrid as he reaches nearly eight feet tall. I hit him with the psychic punch of all punches—a MOAB (mother of all bombs).

The impact catches him right in the baby-maker; he buckles fast but recovers faster. Okay, I’m officially scared. They haven’t seen the blur. They haven’t seen how fast he can move.

Sensei would tell me to buck up and dig in. He’d say, “If you’re going to die, take as many of them down with you as you can.”

There is just one.

He must die.

My mind becomes a blade, splitting his skin open inside his thighs, at his kidneys, across the carotid artery. Amanda slams him with a burst of power as well. The attack both knocks him backwards and shakes the char off him. His skin is mottled grey, his eyes like black fire. His hands are claws a foot long and razor sharp, his mouth gnashing with indignation.

The blur takes us all by surprise, causing both fire starters to fall, and Amanda’s throat to gash wide open.

Blood geysers out of her throat as she spins around and staggers sideways.

I catch him before he hits me, wrap him in invisible chains and levitate him into the air. He’s a hissing, spitting beast, thrashing in the air above me. I call the darkness of the sky back into my body, wake The Operator and drag him out of his cage, sitting him into the driver’s seat beside me.

Amanda is coming around, but right now there is a blistering heat that has just gone nuclear inside me (The Operator) and I’m slamming Aloysius’s levitated body into the ground. He squirms beneath my might but I’m a bomb going off inside him.

I’m motherfreaking Hiroshima on steroids.

Then Amanda is with me shoving violence and hysteria inside him. We’re swirling this energy in opposite directions while inside my head The Operator is going berserk with delight.

The Alice equivalent stumbles forward, her stomach slashed open and bleeding, but her little hand fires out and she shoves molten lava into his insides. The beast’s ripped-open mouth is screaming, those mammoth claws ripping and tearing at his chest and abdominals trying to release this blistering hot fire.

The ginger, who had fallen, is now turning over, her face wrought with agony. She unfurls her fingers and Aloysius’s body erupts into flames.

This time he cannot shed our fire for it is burning beneath his skin, scorching the armor from underneath. When he finally lets go and gives himself over to the flames, the four of us draw back our power.

Amanda hurries over to the redhead while I tend to mini-G (mini-Georgia, a.k.a., Firestarter Jr.). Her eyes are black, but waning, her hand over her stomach, which is red and wet. I close my eyes, lay my hand over her injury and feel her flesh with my mind. She moans a bit, the sounds of a child rather than the howls of a psychotic murderer.

I envision her skin coming together. The edges reach for each other, the rush of new blood coming with all of its healing properties. I speed the process, bringing forth an abundance of her white blood cells. The netting starts, the blood thickening and clotting. I brush off the scabs, keeping the fresh skin beneath, drawing together each and every layer until my body is sweating and weak. I take my hand off her, let out a long held breath and sit back. Alice just looks at me like I’m the black unicorn no one has ever heard of before.

“I can’t do that,” Amanda says.

The Georgia lookalike is beside her, blood stained and weak.

“Sit down,” I tell the redhead and she does, unable to mask her pain. With the last of my energy I do for her what I did for mini-G. She smiles, but does not thank me. Amanda has a perpetual frown.

What the hell?

“Where did you learn that?” Amanda asks.

“Draco.”

“What’s a Draco?” mini-G asks.

I look at her, then at Amanda. “You don’t know him?” She shakes her head. “Well then I understand why they want to kill me.”

“They want to kill you because you won’t let them do to your world what they’re trying to do to mine.”

“They?”

Just then the air gives a little burp and I haul myself up to my feet. I’m looking at him in the eyes (first mistake) and he’s looking right back at me.

Why am I not charmed?

This new traveler glances down at Aloysius and shakes his head. The two of them could be twins.

“He was all show and no go,” the Aloysius twin says. “I don’t know how many times I had to tell him size doesn’t matter to those with telekinesis, but he was sure he could take you.”

Every last ounce of fight in me dies. I can’t stop this man.

Looking at the girls, he says, “Looks like you stacked the deck in her favor.”

“We did,” Amanda replies.

He draws a deep breath through his nostrils, tilting his chin up but keeping angry eyes upon them. Still speaking to Amanda, he says, “We have enough to deal with in our own world, why must you pollute their world with your presence?”

“I don’t know who you are,” I say, having heard enough, “but why don’t you just piss off to wherever you came from?”

“That’s a great idea,” he says. He says this with his eyes digging into me, his hand on my soul. Then, turning to the others, he says, “You three coming?”

Amanda looks at me and says, “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“Thank you,” I tell her.

Something slips into my head, a series of numbers and coordinates, but then some other symbols, too. Things I don’t understand that might make sense later, when I talk to Draco.

And then they’re all gone.

By now, Aloysius is just ash and I’m standing before him, not in the construct but out in the open with the mourners who suddenly seem to realize I am here. Their eyes go to the pile of ashes at the feet of Jesus and the two thieves.

I don’t know how much time has passed, but the darkness is back inside me, The Operator fueled and looking for more chaos. Using that same darkness, that same harnessed power, I separate and bind the ashes of Aloysius’s body so they cannot rejoin each other. No reason leaving him here only to have him somehow come back to life and hunt me down later.

“You know we could wipe the map of this filth,” The Operator whispers in my head, hypnotic and bold.

“This was a treat. Be a good boy and go back to your cage and perhaps I’ll let you out to play more often. Fight me on this and I will never let you out again.”

He slides low inside me, down to the depths where his cage door is wide open. Once he’s in, I close his door, engage the locks and leave the grinning sociopath in the depths of my own internal construct.

Now I am fully back and the darkness is out of the sky, back inside me where I don’t want it. I waver against the sounds of sobbing. How much time has passed? It feels like no time at all; it feels like hours. I stand before Jesus, fall to my knees before him, open my mind to him so that he knows he is not alone.

“I am thirst,” he says, delirious.

Someone speaks and another comes forward with a sponge, pointing to a small barrel of either sour wine or vinegar. A woman dips the sponge and wets a hyssop, which she then places on the tip of a long reed. She hurries back to the cross, lifts the reed and wets his lips with the hyssop.

Jesus looks down, sees me and the connection between us opens fully. A mighty flood of emotion roars in to me once more. This time I’m ready for it. I place a hand on his foot, level him with my love.

His thirst still a burning thing, his throat sticky and raw, he is suddenly in my head, wondering if God sent me to be with him.

“No,” I whisper using telepathy.

“Then why are you here? Are you my angel?”

“Yes.”

I feel a great relief wash over him. He has been here in pain, feeling abandoned by his apostles, betrayed by Judas, forsaken by his father. He is ready to die, but dying is different than merely pledging your life for something. Giving it had been the burden he’d borne, the burden he now prays will reach its conclusion.

“You do not know how important you will become in the future,” I tell him in his own language, which is strange to me because I don’t speak Aramaic, or whatever language this is, “but this selfless act, your death, will be the salvation of billions. You are an example to men and women who—devoid of faith—will become different people.”

“Are you one of those people?” he asks in my head.

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

He waits, feels me, and then in this place of in between, he says, “Ah, now I see. You are a mix of light and dark, but without the discernment to decide which you must become. The savior or the saint.”

I close my eyes, tap into the construct I was brought into with Draco, the same construct I was brought into by Aloysius. It takes a moment and then I feel the shift. There is a soft haze over everything. Using my mind, I rise up before Jesus, levitating so that I can look him in the eye. His head is lolled to the side, his face a bloody, ragged mess. The thorns are stuck into his scalp, driven in there by abuse, held in place by the sharp, green barbs.

“I want to be the savior not the saint,” I tell him, “but I have seen where this goes.”

“You end up like me.”

“Yes.”

“This is the burden we must bare.”

“I am not sure I can do it.”

“You are enough,” he says. He tries to lift his head to look at me. The struggle takes most of the energy he has left. “You are who you are supposed to be.”

“Let me ease your pain,” I tell him.

“Let me ease yours,” another voice says, surprising me. This is the voice in my head earlier, the booming one telling me “no.”

“Okay…”

“I am going to show you who you are,” this commanding, yet warm voice says, “but only if your true desire is to see this.”

“You know it is,” I say.

And with that, this presence spiritually peels back the skin of my face, separating my cranium like it is a puzzle most easily undone. The way this force peels away my head, it’s like He’s removing a set of clothes rather than the physical components of me.

“This is your brain, right?” He asks, showing me my brain. Feeling nothing, no pain, I say it is and He says, “This is you, but it is not you at all.”

And then He peels open the folds of my brain where there is a brilliant, whitish-yellow light. This light, however, is not a light as much as it is a portal not just to somewhere, but to everywhere.

A flood of energy washes over me with the revelation.

This presence begins to undress this light—this grapefruit-sized portal to everywhere—slowly drawing back the skin and bones and blood of my entire body. This hidden body of mine is light and the light is a portal—not solid, but open. Once the body is removed completely from this incredible light, it begins to bleed outward, growing incredibly bright. When the body itself is gone, all that remains is the shape of a human and a light so bright it seems to emanate from everywhere, pushing though the portal and expanding.

The voice says, “You are so much bigger than you think, little one.”

The presence that was inside me continues to drive outward, moving far and wide, like trillions of little fingers of light becoming one with the air, with everything. And then there is that gigantic voice, the voice who commanded me not to intervene when what I wanted was to slaughter everyone.

“This is you,” He says. The voice is warmth; it is a love I cannot describe, a love I’ve never had, a love I never thought I deserved.

I am no mouth, no wet eyes, no skin to tingle at this new revelation, but I feel it. I feel Him. I feel everyone. I feel everything.

“God?” I ask.

“You are God,” He says. “You are the air, the wind, the water and the earth. You are everything and nothing, you are your lovers and your enemies, you are my son, his mother. You are me and I am you.”

“But…”

“You were given this body to contain you, but inside what you call a mind, you keep even more darkness close at hand. This has dimmed the light inside you. You’ve imprisoned this carrier of sin inside you. You will gather and contain so much darkness, little one, that it will erode you, and eventually stamp out the last of your light. But you know this, don’t you?”

He means The Operator, and all the other souls I stole as Raven.

“I do,” I say.

“This is you, Savannah. All this light and love. Feel it. Feel me, us. You are not alone. You have never been alone, not at your birth and not the whole of your years. We are always around you, always with you, for you are us and we are infinite. We are you.”

Words cannot describe this incredible freedom.

“Take stock of your life, child. You have always wanted love, and now you’ve surrounded yourself with it: your parents, your friends, Rebecca, August, Chloe. But you have always been loved. You only need to be the conduit to it, for there is more than enough for you. There is so much love you will drown in it if only you will ask, if only you will shine your light so bright that not a speck of darkness can edge its way into the essence that is you.”

“How do I get rid of the darkness when there is so much of it to go around?”

“The darkness of the world will be there whether you fight it or not. To engage it is to fight, and to fight is to lose, even if you win. Be bigger than the darkness. End it by virtue of being so bright that there is no fight because there is no enemy. With so much light, darkness cannot exist.”

He lets me sit with this for I don’t know how long.

Eventually it takes hold.

I understand.

“Now go back into your body and purge yourself of this darkness. Let it all out. Purge it for your sisters, Elizabeth and Raven. Purge it for all the lifetimes of you, for all the versions of you, for this body. Empty it out here and now, little one.”

With that I am slamming into my body, a body bent on two knees before Jesus on the cross, both my hands upon his feet. Blood and sweat, the iron of the spike. I look up and my heart breaks for him, but he knew this was coming. He knew this and he was prepared.

I turn to the sounds of men coming. Using my spiritual hands, I reach up inside Jesus and cradle his heart with my hands. I don’t ease his pain; I just let him know that he is not alone. With his heart in my hands, I fill him not just with the love of me, but with the love I draw from everything and everyone else I am connected to.

Beside me, the guards are using massive hammers to break the legs of the thieves to hasten their deaths.

Right then, Jesus opens his eyes, and in an agonized voice, he says, “It is finished.”

In those moments, as I hold his heart, I take everything I felt in his mother—all the love, the longing, the pride and fear—and I give it the largest place in his heart. He jumps from an expected sob.

He knows what I’m doing for him.

Then the voice in my head—the booming one that continued to tell me no, this voice I can only assume is God’s—it says, “Love is the way, child. Be love.”

As I’m processing this, I feel Jesus letting go. Then in a ragged voice torn apart by grief and torment, he says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

And then he’s gone and my heart shatters with him.

The Roman soldier is telling one of the men not to break Jesus’s legs because he is gone. My body is reduced to small fits of agony. One of the soldiers kicks me aside, my body rendered to the ground. I get to my feet, unconcerned with these fools. But then one man tosses his spear to another and tells him to stick Jesus in the side to be sure.

I don’t know if I can take it, but I must.

When the soldier lances Jesus in the side, blood and water sprays out in spectacular display causing the darkness in me to rise once more.

This is the darkness I must purge from me. I draw it up from deep within me, calling it forth. Malevolent energy channels into me, fortifies me, strengthens me. I stalk over to the soldier who is pawing at the blood on his face, rip the spear from his hand and hit him open-palmed in the chest so hard and with so much force his ribcage literally crushes around my hand.

He drops dead on the spot and I tell myself this is me changing history. But I also know this is me getting the darkness out.

But this darkness…

It is too big for this, too big for me. I turn with an indignant stare, lay eyes on each and every man that would dare challenge me.

None steps forward.

With the spear in hand, unable to speak their language, I cast judgment upon them with my gaze, pummeling their hearts with fear. True to their cowardice, they mumble to themselves as they scurry off, slowly at first, and then breaking into a run. I turn to Jesus, see his dead body, know there is so much emotion still swirling in me.

If I laid waste to all these men, the darkness would still be there. It would still gather like a storm inside me, lying in wait. I cannot go on killing people.

It solves nothing.

The foul energy wants out, though. The darkness in me is dying for escape. I feel it rattling up through me, my rage coming to a boil, ready for escape. I draw in all the pain of the mourners, all the pain of those who love Jesus, the pain of Mary, and I let it become the bomb inside me.

The grounds beneath my feet begin to quake with all this darkness. Rocks vibrate all around me; entire boulders split in two. And then this force inside avalanches out of me, exploding forth like a nuclear bomb. The scream that leaves my mouth is a lion’s roar behind the world’s largest bullhorn. The trembling of earth and stone scares everyone, even me.

And then it stops.

I stop.

As I stand here shaking all over, the chords in my neck strained from the force, something is different. No, everything is different. I feel suffused with peace. And then I sense him: Jesus’s spirit. He’s here just like my spirit was here when I hovered over my shot body for what felt like forever. Just like fake-Abby’s was when she hung herself. Just like Cameron’s was right before she died.

“I knew I would find you,” I say into the ethers, my body drained, my spirit weary but blessed.

“You found yourself, too,” he says into my head.

The brightness, the warmth, the compassion he bestows upon me heals me, turns me around, lets me know that this two year struggle for me to find out who I am has finally come to a close. I am me. I am perfect just the way I am.

“Thank you,” I say to him.

“Young angel, you have brought me peace. Now return to your time with the knowledge that might begets might, but love can quiet entire armies before even one boot steps into the fields of war.”

Smiling, touched, blessed with the wisdom of a man I could not fathom ever meeting, I come out of the ethers and find myself standing beneath his body. I don’t remember standing so close as to be directly under him, but here I am nevertheless.

I look up just in time for a drop of blood from his beard to strike my face on the inside corner of my eye. I refuse to blink as it seeps inside me.

“My blood is now your blood,” he says. “With this blessing, your sins are paid for in full, and you need not sacrifice yourself any further to God, for you are absolved of your past. Go now into your future, little lamb, and purge yourself of that which will surely lead you to wars of your own making, and then live.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

August flies into SF International where I pick him up in the Audi and tell him he’s coming home with me. He doesn’t object. At least the endless parade of kisses he lays on my says he’s with me all the way.

I call my father who answers on the last possible ring. He and Orianna are out to lunch together.

“Hey sweetie!” he says. “Savannah, right?”

“The one and only,” I tell him.

“I’m on my way home from the airport and I just wanted to see if I could make a play date with August.”

“I’m good with that.”

“What about a sleepover?” I say.

“Are you really asking me that?” he asks in a jovial tone.

“I just want to be respectful with it being your house and all,” I tell him, looking at August. He frowns. Then: “How do you feel about an extended playdate with multiple sleepovers?”

“You going to start paying me rent?”

“If I need to,” I say with soft laughter in my voice.

“No rent, I’m good on the sleepovers,” he says. “Are you two a thing now?”

“We will be for years to come.”

“You sound sure,” he says, “which makes me happy.”

“I am. Sort of saw it already.”

“In the future?”

“Yep.”

“Well alrighty then,” he says. “Listen, me and your mom…”

“Are at Don Pisto’s, I know. Enjoy your lunch, the Mexican Sashimi is amazing.”

“That’s what I’m having,” he says, delighted.

“I know, Dad, that’s why I said it. Tell Orianna I love her and miss her.”

“Didn’t you just see her?”

“To her, yes, but to me, no. I’ve been…gone for a little bit. A lot has happened.”

“Like?”

“It’s a long story I just might tell you one day.”

“Okay, well tell Brayden we’re happy he’s going to come live with us,” her father says.

“August, Dad.”

“I know,” he says. “Same thing.”

Now my eyes go wide, just as wide as August’s, and I’m like, “I love you, Dad. Too much for words right now.”

“I know, sweetie.”

“See you shortly, and thank you!”

When we get home, there is no one there. I look at him and he looks at me and from there it’s on like Donkey Kong. I don’t want to bore you with the details of more mind blowing sex, but here’s a few: yummy, yummy, YUMMY!

And that’s only the first time; the second time was better.

As I lay there in bed, naked, breathing heavy and completely satiated, I say, “I have to tell you something and I think you’re going to like it, but you might not.”

He rolls over, levels me with those eyes and says, “Yes?”

“Before you,” I say, tip toeing up to the edge of this cliff, “there was someone else.”

“There were a few by my understanding,” he says. “Same with me. But that doesn’t matter now.”

“Well, it kinda does.”

Now he looks worried. I don’t blame him. I’m a little worried myself!

I put my hand to his cheek and say, “You never need to worry about me, babe. And I’ll always be honest.”

“So who is he?”

“Um…it isn’t a he.”

Now the worry becomes a smile and he says, “If you’re going to tell me you’ve been with a girl, I think I’ll be ready for a third time.”

“Really?” I ask, astounded. “Because I can give you the deets.”

“So it’s true?”

“You remember Chloe?”

“Holy shit, Netty’s girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“The nerdy hot one?”

“She’s not a nerd anymore.”

“So…”

“I like her. Not like I like you. I love you. But she’s got this thing for me, and one of the things about me is that I can ride a wave of someone’s need almost like tweakers can ride a high.”

“Let me understand,” he says now propping himself up on an elbow. “She wants you and you use that ‘want’ to get high?”

“Sort of.”

“But you like her, too.”

“I do.”

“And you want to know if it’s okay that you maybe see her one more time? Maybe two?”

“Just one. But yeah, maybe two.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he says, a cheesy grin all over his face. “Two times tops, but if it’s more than that, then I’m in the mix. Meaning you have to be okay with me being there, and she has to be okay with me sharing her with you.”

“You’re just saying that because you know she’s a lesbian.”

“Yes.”

“She’s had the D before.”

“Okay,” he says, revising himself, “then one more time is fine, but if it’s two, then she has to take the D again and you have to be okay with me giving it to her.”

Slowly I nod my head.

He’s being fair.

“And if it’s just one more time, and you don’t see her again, I get all the details whenever I want. Deal?”

“You get the deets, yeah…deal.”

This grin he has stretches halfway across his face and he says, “That’s so hot.”

“I heard you were okay with it,” I say.

“From who?” he asks.

“Future me.”

“So you cared enough to check in?”

“If I knew you didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have been with her. I like her, but I love you. There is a world of difference for me.”

“I love you, too, which is why I want the details now so I can go a third time.” That’s when I remove the blankets, and say, “She kissed me here, and here…”

And then I point out all the ways she pleased me and in that moment, we each rode the other’s high and the third time was by far the best time.

* * *

My parents and Rebecca come home that night and we all have dinner together like a big happy family. Orianna is looking around, so happy with all of us, and not because of the way we look, but because the table is literally overflowing with love between us.

All this sappy shit isn’t something I’d normally talk about, but honest to God, there’s something to it. Besides, if Jesus himself tells you love can stop an army, then it’s best to do exactly what he says!

There is still a few things for me to do, though, things I need to do alone.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The drive up to Auburn is not long because I’ve got some great music and my psychic radar is telling me there are no cops ahead. I don’t go over a hundred, but ninety is a given. The phone rings as I’m passing through Vacaville. I pick up and it’s Elizabeth.

“Hey girl!” I say.

“What’s up sister,” she says back.

“You know we could have talked telepathically,” I say.

“I’m a sucker for tradition,” she jokes with a bit of laughter, which warms me. “I just wanted to call and tell you, holy BALLS, we’re bad ass!”

We both break into a giggle because she’s me and I’m her, but we’re now both doing different things. The other line rings over and it’s Raven.

“Hang on,” I say.

I three way us in and Raven is like, “Yeah, what she said!”

“I mean, JC of all people?” Elizabeth says. “You know if anyone finds out we traveled back in time to hang with Jesus they’re going to be like, ‘Oh my God, you talked to Jesus?! That’s BLASPHEMOUS!’”

We all laugh together because we know how offended people can get over every little thing these days.

“I actually thought of that,” I say, “which is why we will tell NO ONE.”

“It’s made us a better person though,” Raven says. “I already feel way more calm. Don’t you guys?”

“Totally,” I say.

“And it’s going to be even better for us when you’re done doing what you’re about to do,” Elizabeth says.

“I hope so.”

“We know so,” Raven says.

“Chloe is about to call,” Elizabeth says. “Gosh damn she’s sexy!”

“I know,” I tell her with a knowing grin.

I can feel it.

“We can all feel it,” Raven says, our minds synched perfectly. “That was so hot by the way.”

“Right?!” I say.

I get off the line with the girls as the phone beeps over. Clicking over, I say, “You must be reading my mind because I’ve been thinking about you all morning.”

“Really?” she says. “It’s Chloe, by the way.”

Not missing a beat, I say, “I know it’s you. That’s why I said it.”

We talk for awhile before I finally get the nerve up to say what I’ve been wanting to say. By now I’m making the final climb up highway 80 into Auburn and getting close to my destination.

“So I have something I want to tell you,” I say. “It’s what I’ve been thinking about. I told my boyfriend about you and I—”

“You told him?” she all but spat out.

“Yeah, last night.”

Breathless, worried, she says, “And?”

“He thought it was hot. He also said I could be with you again if I wanted. But only on one condition.”

“And that is?” she says, reserved but sounding less scared.

“I can be with you this next time one on one, but if we want more, you have to share, and I have to share. Meaning there’s going to be a triangle with me and August as the anchor.”

“So I can play, but if anyone is out, it’s me.”

“More or less.”

“Send me a picture of your boo.”

I pull over, send her a couple of pics of August, and wait for it. Then: “Holy shit, Savannah.”

“So are you in?”

“Yeah. I’m in. If he’s in, I mean, then I’m totally in.”

“If you fall in love,” I warn her, “I want you to understand—”

“That I’m the third wheel,” she says. “I already said I can live with that.”

“Good,” I say.

“So when can I see you?” she asks.

“Soon,” I tell her. “I’ll be in touch with you soon, okay?”

“Don’t make me wait long,” she says, and there’s a pleading in her voice that honest to God, I simply adore.

More love, right? Isn’t that what God said? I’m just trying to follow His word. It’s not debauchery; I like to think of it as me stalling entire armies…

I meander into the Auburn cemetery just as darkness is falling. I feel completely alone here. Mine is the only car. Then I spot a ground’s keeper at work across the field. He sees me, then he sees my car and he looks on with appreciation.

Can you really blame him?

I climb out of the Audi, stroll over to Kaitlyn Whitaker’s grave—Damien’s once missing step-sister—drop my tethers into the earth, feel inside the coffin.

I feel him: musty, dying, rotting and remaking and rotting again. Dr. Aribert Heim. This creep has the slightest spark of life still inside him, just as I knew he would.

It’s not lost on me that this is beyond cruel. He is darkness incarnate, though. I mean, the man burned people from the inside out in Nazi Germany. He sort of deserves it.

I use my mind to peel back the lawn over the grave. I roll it back, the roots of it tearing out of the soil. When that’s done, I feel a small wind starting up over the grave. The dirt starts to circle, faster and faster—yet contained—and then it begins to lift into the air.

The soil over Heim’s casket slowly but assuredly starts to lift. It looks like a small dirt tornado stretching six, then seven, and then eight feet high. A part of me has my mind tethered to the ground’s keeper. He sees what’s going on from a distance, then scratches his head and blinks twice to make sure he’s seeing what he’s seeing. He is. He knows he is. The man hurries away, scared, which is fine by me.

Sometimes a girl needs her privacy when she’s talking to the dead.

When enough of the earth is swirling high above me, I use my mind to drag this coffin out of the hole before me. The fancy box hovers at eye level. I open the top half and see him. He’s a nasty skull with wispy hair and grey tinged skin that’s pulled so tight against his head he looks like something out of a horror film. The eyes squeeze shut against the sight of me, each one producing a single tear.

“Don’t get too excited to see me f*ckface,” I say, “you’re staying in the box.”

That’s when I feel the ground’s keeper. He’s scurrying forward like a rat, hiding behind trees and headstones, his eyes on me, completely transfixed. He’s got his cell phone camera out and he’s about to press the RECORD icon when my right hand shoots out and makes a fist. The phone crumbles in his hand, startling him.

He sits there for a second, and then he turns and runs for his life.

That’s when the stink hits me, and I mean, it REALLY hits me. Heim has been lying in his own waste this whole time, and even though he cannot die, he is all but dead, his bones weak, his organs trying desperately to fail. The rot of him is all wrong, but so is he.

“You deserve this, you sorry shit stain,” I grumble.

The smell of fecal decay and bad breath damn near buckles my knees. His eyes ease open and look at me.

“There he is,” I say.

A moan escapes his very thin, very chapped lips.

“You’re looking a bit wan, Aribert.”

His mouth starts to open, the skin splitting, his teeth looking like old Indian corn, but he can’t summon the energy to speak.

“I brought you company,” I say.

I place a hand to Heim’s leathery looking head while I drag The Operator up out of me. He knows what’s going on. What I’m doing. The Operator starts to throw an absolute fit as I prepare to evacuate his soul from me into Heim.

Wrestling with him and wrangling him, I manage to pull him out of me and shove him kicking and screaming into Heim. When he’s there, I construct a box in the former Nazi’s feeble, broken mind and lock The Operator down. Where before I buried this menace deep inside me so he could not bother me, I now leave him front and center with Heim.

These two malevolent turd burglars will now be cellmates forever. It will not be fun, they will not like each other, death will always be just in reach, yet never close enough to enjoy.

But the darkness…it’s finally out of me!

Slamming the coffin lid shut, I drive the box down into the earth where it sits cockeyed but far enough down. Standing back, I let the cyclone of dirt fall back into the hole. There is a slight mound when I’m done. I level it out, scraping the extra soil away with my mind, flinging it everywhere. Still in perfect control, I roll out the grass and press it in place.

All this with perfect ease.

Marvelous…

As I’m walking back to the Audi, I honestly feel so much lighter. A smile creeps on my face as I think about everything I’ve been through. A warmth permeates this body, this mind, this soul, and then the presence of God suddenly feels near.

“Are you here?” I ask.

I feel a smile in the ethers and I know.

“Thank you,” I say, and then the presence is gone, but never gone.

You are not alone. You’ve never been alone, little one.

But I’m not done yet.

I head to Astor Academy, let myself into Holland’s office, take the elevator down to the lab, then study the nearly dozen canisters. Inside four of them are bodies: a boy and three young women.

Closing my eyes, I slip into each of them, realize they are soulless. Four clones. At least Holland kept his word on that.

Summoning the memories of the dojo, how The Operator tore open a hole into the ethers, into some sort of dark in-between, I try to do the same thing. It takes me some time and some focus, but I slowly rip open the fabric of this universe only to find a vast chasm of emptiness on the other side.

Using the moment and my momentum, I psychically start shoving everything in the lab into that hole. Machines, trays, tools, blood samples, empty canisters and finally the four filled glass canisters flow into this hole, falling away into the nothingness.

Everything that would be of use to Holland, everything that allows him to do what he would continue to do to corrupt the world, I disappear it.

When I’m done, I have to say, I already feel worlds better.

Pleased with my work, I sit down in the center of the lab, close my eyes and see Holland’s San Francisco lab. I feel time wanting to suck me into the portal I open. I’m suddenly pulled into the hole, shoved through, and dumped into the San Francisco lab. With my fatigue comes less ladylike arrivals. Even though I’m becoming mentally tested, I tear open another hole and force everything from the San Francisco lab into that similar cosmic emptiness.

When I’m done, I teleport back to Astor, landing hard on my side.

Laid out in the nearly bare space, I catch my breath, then close my eyes once more and reach my tethers out into the world. I find him quickly. Holland is down the hill in Roseville, an upscale city twenty miles east of Sacramento, which is about a ten minute drive from here. I see he’s with Sabrina, who looks exactly like Arabelle before she died.

It’s just after nine o’clock and they’re nearly finished with dinner. I open a portal with my mind, envision myself moving into it, through it, and coming out in the restaurant, P.F. Chang’s. I enter the bathroom stall extra rough. The stall door blows open from a poor entry, scaring a girl at the sink checking her makeup. I have that look like I fell off the toilet. Shit, I actually did fall off the toilet!

“Sorry,” I say, getting up and feeling sheepish. “The Ma Pa Tofu makes me nuclear.”

After that, I swear, I don’t know what to say next.

She hurries out of the ladies room and I get off the toilet and check my hair in the mirror. Satisfied, I strut out into the front of the restaurant, smile at the hostesses, then walk past a gorgeous circular bar and find Holland and Sabrina at a quiet booth with a window view. They look like they’re really enjoying themselves.

It’s almost refreshing.

Holland sees me and that easy smile falls from his face. Not Sabrina’s though. I can tell she’s happy to see me. That’s a nice change from the cat fight we last had. Of course, I did kill her brother, Tavares.

“Here you are,” he says, hands out and cupped, “the perpetual fly in my ointment.”

“Can you not be a dick for like five minutes?” I ask.

“Arabelle here will tell you that is entirely possible,” he says, turning to her, “won’t you my dear?”

“You’re calling her Arabelle?” I ask, astounded.

“I like it,” Sabrina says. Well, Sabrina who is now Arabelle. Arabelle 2.0…

“Why are you here?” Holland asks.

“To tell you that your labs are gone, both of them, and that your work in genetics is done.”

There are still dozens of people eating, and half a dozen servers moving with expedience to take care of their patrons.

I feel him starting to heat up, but I am getting good at keeping people dosed, which is what I call it. I drop his level ten rage to a level four.

“I gave you Sabrina, now Arabelle, and that is enough. That’s more than enough.”

“I know,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Your mother was full of shit. Love is not poison. Go experience it, Josef. Go be in love. Love is good.”

“I have multiple projects in play,” he says, his face and body fighting against my invisible restraints.

“As the head of your oversight committee, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have anything working anymore.”

“Ah, but I do,” he says with hostile eyes.

“You have nothing in play. And if you don’t do what I ask, I’ll destroy all your cold samples, too. The ones you keep off site.”

His backup DNA.

“Just when I think you can’t get worse than you already are, you go and out do yourself.”

“Look at her,” I say.

We both look at Arabelle 2.0 and she looks incredibly gorgeous. Every bit the beauty the first version of her was.

“Now she is all that matters. She needs you. Be hers. Fall in love, have some kids, be in the PTA.”

“Fuck the PTA,” Arabelle 2.0 says, making me burst into laughter.

The tone lightens.

Just then their waitress arrives, looking concerned with her eyes glued to Holland who is looking very pinched tight at the moment.

“Sir, are you okay?” she asks.

“Diarrhea,” I tell her, “but he’ll be okay. He just took a pill. It’s supposed to turn water to mud and mud to clay. Can you see it? It’s working right now.”

She’s taken aback.

Arabelle 2.0 is stifling a laugh, but Holland’s having none of it.

“I mean, look at him. Those red, angry eyes, that set jaw…see how his hands are like fists? That’s the pill taking affect.”

“Sir, if you need to go to the restroom,” she says.

“If he moves,” I say, “he’ll poop his pants.”

Arabelle snorts, which startles the waitress and further enrages Holland.

“That’s why we must be vewy, vewy quiet,” I say, doing my best Elmer Fudd accent from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

This puts Arabelle 2.0 over the edge. She falls into fits of laughter that actually sound dreamy coming from her mouth. Holland’s anger, however, is rising to a level eight rage. I’m keeping him contained even though he’s pressing against me with all his might. It’s a bad look on him. He really has that constipated air about him, like he’s actually having water turned to mud and then turned to bricks.

The waitress, not sure what to do, says, “Well if I can be of any help—”

“It’ll pass,” I say, “but thanks.”

She heads off and I start laughing with Arabelle. I slowly dial Holland back to a level two and let go of his invisible restraints.

He shifts in his seat, frowning, and he says, “That wasn’t funny.”

“It was totally funny,” Arabelle says.

“Yeah, hilarious.”

“Can’t you give me a moment’s peace?” he asks, wiping a bit of slobber from his face and spreading his linen napkin back over his knee.

“Give her what she wants is all I’m saying,” I tell him. “Be who you have not been thus far. Be a steady boyfriend, a husband, a father. She’s your boo, bro.”

He slowly nods his head, then he looks up at me, the question in his eyes.

“Really?” I ask. “You really want to say, ‘or what?’ God, you’re a dumbass sometimes.”

He looks at me, serious.

“Or I’ll kill you and wipe every trace of your shitty existence from this world and the next. That’s my ‘or what.’”

“I can live with that,” he finally says.

“Damn straight you can.”

Moving forward while holding him in place, I lean in and put an extra wet kiss on Holland’s right eye, which he closes quick. It’s so unexpected coming from me, Arabelle starts laughing again, this side of her so beautiful.

I let go and he’s wiping his eye, looking at me like he wants to be pissed, but unable to stop feeling this airiness he feels, almost like his struggle is over. The son of a biscuit actually cracks a smile!

I then lean in and kiss Arabelle on the cheek and she thanks me. I reach inside her, just to feel how she feels and she is madly in love with Holland, who is madly in love with her. Holland is not a good person, but maybe this new woman will bring out of him what he has denied himself for so long. But if it doesn’t catch, if he goes back to his old self, then maybe I’ll track him down and punch his ticket once and for all.

Strangely, I hope I don’t have to do this. A light bump off him tells me he’s really done being Josef, and that he likes being Enzo Holland best.

I head back to the bathroom, pick a stall, shut the door and open a portal. Seconds later I’m practically landing on my face on the floor back in the lab in Astor Academy. My arrival is so bad, I just sort of lay there laughing to myself. Finally I get up and brush myself off. Taking one last look around, I lock up, head out, then get into the Audi and make good time to the city.

Instead of going straight home, I head over to Netty’s house. I knock on the door and a second later Netty answers, looking at me, then looking back at Raven on the couch.

“Savannah,” I say, hugging her.

She hugs me back and says, “Yeah, so this is weird.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Raven says from the couch. To me, she says, “Nice touch, with the labs and the wet eyeball smooch.”

We both start laughing but then stop because we don’t want Netty left outside of our inside joke. “Sorry to just pop in, but I wanted to see you.”

“Me?” Netty asks.

Stepping inside, I say, “Yes you, ding-dong.” Then to Raven, I say, “Whaddup bitch.” She smiles, knuckle bumps me, then says, “Are we going back home to get the D again?”

“Something like that,” I say with humor in my voice. Then telepathically I say, Or perhaps the V.

She smiles with her eyes and shoves a burst of love into me.

“So we’re good,” she says, because she knows the agreement I struck up with August and with Chloe.

“Yeah, total agreement.”

For the next hour, we sit and talk about Netty, her mother, the baby, her father and Sensei.

“We’re going to help Sensei open the dojo again,” Raven says. “Netty’s using Chloe’s service to start advertising. We’ll be up and running again and hopefully Sensei can find a way to move on from this.”

“That’s awesome,” I say mostly to Netty because I already knew this. Unfortunately she doesn’t know that whatever Raven thinks and knows, I think and know. And Elizabeth thinks and knows. But we can’t be friends with Netty like this—on a telepathic level. She’s not like us. We have to be extra good to her. She knows we will be, because she’s got not just one best friend now, but three.

“It might not look like it,” Raven is saying to Netty about Sensei, “but he’s a deeply emotional person.”

“He hides it well,” Netty says.

“I see it, too,” I say.

“You heard from Lizzy?” I ask.

“God she hates it when you call her that,” Raven says, smiling.

“I know,” I say. “I totally love it.”

“She’s in love,” Raven says. “Like head over heels in love.”

“I can feel it.”

“Me, too,” she says. “It feels good.”

And just like that, the cat’s out of the bag about us.

“You guys can feel each other’s feelings?” Netty says.

Raven and I look at each other. Then Raven says, “If we want to, yes.”

“When are you going to contribute to the love pot?” I ask Raven, changing subjects. “Because it looks like me and Lizzy are the only two getting the D here.”

“As soon as things get sorted out here,” she says.

Netty’s face goes white. “If you can feel each other’s feelings, then when you and your boyfriends…”

Raven and I share a knowing grin.

“Yeah, we feel that, too, if we want.”

“So let me understand,” she says. “When one of you has sex, it’s like all of you are having sex.” We each nod, our grins getting huge. “So you’re one girl who gets to have sex with three hot guys?”

“Only two guys until Raven here gets back in the game,” I grumble playfully.

“Speaking of boyfriends,” Raven says, “Netty’s got some good news.”

She smiles wide now and says, “I’m getting the D now too, bitches…”

My heart opens up so wide hearing this. Giddy, I listen to her tell us all about Charles and their blooming love affair.

I’m beyond happy for Netty, for the life she’s about to have.

Looking at Raven, in my mind, I say, “Charles is the one,” and she’s like, “I’m so happy for her, for them both.”

“We’re thrilled for you, Netty,” I say and then it’s like one big group hug before I head back home. It’s too late to go to Chloe’s so I’ll return to the homestead and tell August we’re a two plus one if he wants. He’ll want to see Chloe’s picture, and he’ll say yes and then our little love triangle will be complete.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Six months later...

August, Chloe and I get ready for the non-triplets’ graduation then get our picture taken by my parents, who have come to accept that the three of us are a thing. They are proud, strange as it seems. We send the picture to August’s father who has also come to accept us for who we are. Before we go, though, August says, “I need to talk to you a second.”

To Chloe I say, “You want to drive?”

She gives me a sly grin and says, “Are you guys going to do it without me?”

“No,” August says.

She takes the keys, heads out to the Audi and gets it going.

When we get into the room, August closes the bedroom door and says, “I want to do it, right now before I change my mind.”

I start to undress and tell him, “We only have a few minutes.”

“Not that,” he says. “I want the shot.”

My breath hitches in my throat and I feel a shine come over my eyes. “Are you serious?” I hear myself say as he’s nodding his head.

This isn’t a decision he’s come lightly to. We talked about it for awhile, but since then we haven’t broached the subject. Now it’s here.

He’s saying yes!

I start to button up my shirt again, then head to my nightstand drawer open it up and take out the Fountain of Youth serum.

“You sure?” I ask.

“I love you too much to not spend eternity with you, as sappy as that sounds.”

“It’s sounds totally sappy,” I say, wiping my eyes. “It sounds so sappy you’re going to ruin my makeup.”

I give him the shot and it may as well have been a marriage proposal. We can’t exactly do papers because we’re not into state sanctioned anything if we’re going to be immortal together. Still, I’m thinking of getting us rings.

“Will we ever tell Chloe?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him, seeing far into the future, which has become pretty easy for me. Almost second nature. “But in about twenty years.”

He runs a hand over his freshly buzzed head then says, “That’s a long ass time to keep a secret.”

“If you want us to keep her around, she’ll have to be so deeply in love with us she won’t leave even when it scares her, which it will.”

“Are you really okay with all of us being together?” he asks.

“We’re literally going to have centuries together, August. When you can have everything, it’s important to partake. And if you ever want it to be just you and I, all you need to do is say so. You’re my man, my one and only, the love of my life.”

“I feel the same way,” he says, a bit of a shine making his eyes sparkle. “We should go, before she gets suspicious.”

“Did the shot hurt?”

“Mostly yes,” he says. “But at least I’m feeling a bit weird now.”

When we get to the car, Chloe says, “You two ready?

“Let’s get this bitch on the road,” August says, climbing in back. In the game of Who’s Driving Miss Daisy, August doesn’t mind taking one for the team. He’s Miss Daisy in the back seat and we’re two hot chicks in the front seats of a very fast, very sexy car.

Every man’s dream…

When we arrive, we pull in to Astor Academy’s parking lot, park next to Raven’s Audi TTRS and Elizabeth’s RS5 (this one a matte grey with gunmetal grey rims and electric blue brake calipers).

“Oh my God,” I say, running my hands along the RS5’s paint. “I feel totally wet right now.”

“Me, too,” August says, joking. “Let’s go before we’re late.”

The walk through campus is pure nostalgia, but then we get inside and there are three seats saved for us. Raven is sitting beside Netty who is talking with Elizabeth who is sitting next to Sebastian who is now seeing the three of us together for the first time and trying to take it all in.

I head over, give Sebastian a hug and say, “I’m so glad you’re with her.”

“With you.”

“Yes.”

“It’s so weird,” he says.

“That day on the beach, when you first approached me, did you ever in your wildest dreams think it would be like this?”

“I’m still trying to understand it,” he says, so happy.

“Don’t worry. If you stick with us, you’ll have plenty of time to work it out.”

Elizabeth turns and hugs me and says, “You look good, woman.”

“So do you, baby doll.”

“Thanks for letting me have him,” she says, intertwining her fingers with Sebastian’s as she takes his hand.

“I’ve got August, so it’s not exactly like I’m slumming.”

I introduce August to everyone, including Netty. She doesn’t know he’s Brayden, nor will she ever, but now she’s like, “Good God, if this group gets any prettier…”

We all sort of laugh at the silliness of it all. Just then a young girl in a flower blue dress with a paper itinerary for the graduation ceremony squashed in her little hand stops and says, “Hey are you guys like, triplets?”

“Actually, no,” I say, looking at my other selves.

“But you guys look exactly alike?” she says, her little features pinched together.

“We’re more like…non-triplets,” Raven says, and we all smile, knowing the significance of this statement.

“Well I think you’re the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen.”

“I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” Raven says, touching her nose.

When the ceremony starts, I look at everything we’ve become, what we’ve accomplished and this moment makes me so proud I can’t help but start crying. On one side of me, August takes my hand; on the other side, Chloe takes my other hand. I lay my head on her shoulder and tell her I’m so happy she’s in our life.

Chloe thinks we’re triplets. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell her we’re all just me. The three of us have so much love for each other. We’re our own brilliant light. All of us. Like God told us that day in Jerusalem, we are so much bigger than we thought.

For the first time in my life, I have hope for the future. It can take so many different paths, but these are all paths leading toward the light.

As we watch Tempest, Cicely and Georgia take their high school degrees on the stage, we all smile, cheer, clap and whistle. Julie then crosses the stage looking very pregnant, and her little group claps for her. I look back, see Emery, Constance and her parents. Their looks are restrained. Julie’s parents are embarrassed that she’s going to be pregnant in her high school graduation photos. They think she’s a slut, when that’s not the case at all. More than that, they’re pissed off that she won’t tell them who the father is, even though he’s sitting right next to them.

I feel bad for her for the first time in, well…forever.

The original non-triplets wave to us as they cross the stage, and though they’re still getting used to having three of me, I keep telling them more is better, right? I excuse myself as the ceremony draws to a close, and head to the bathroom. As I’m coming out, I see Julie hobbling to the bathroom and something in me springs to life.

“Julie?” I ask, stopping her. She smiles, stops and looks at me. I fill her mind with the notion that even though she’s seen me before, I’m a good, kind person.

“Yes?” she says, the pain of being overdue and on her feet obvious.

“I know you have to go to the bathroom, but when you’re done, I want to talk to you.”

“But I don’t know you,” she says.

“Actually, you do.”

She makes a face, but then she does her thing, washes her hands and comes out where I’m waiting for her.

“I’m Savannah Swann, by the way. We’ve never formally met.” I reach out and she shakes my hand with a little laugh. “What?”

“It’s just funny. I knew a Savannah once.”

“That is funny,” I say, getting the significance she isn’t getting. “I wanted to talk to you about Emery. And Constance.”

Her upbeat expression becomes very serious, like she’s got one foot out the door on this conversation if things start to go South.

“I’m with a boy named August,” I tell her, then: “and a girl named Chloe.”

“You’re all together?” she asks, astounded. I nod my head. “How…how does that work? I mean, with your parents and all?”

“They’re good now.”

“How do you know about Constance and Emery?” she asks. I can feel the gears shifting in her head.

“I went to school here,” I confess. “We know each other.”

“I don’t think so.”

“See, I know that’s Emery’s baby you’re carrying,” I say, watching the instant reaction, but grateful she’s not leaving, “and I know he wants you to keep it as your own. I also know Constance wants you to keep it, and that she’s alright with the four of you becoming this happy little family, complicated as it will be.”

“Did…did she tell you that?”

I turn my head to the side, pop my neck, then smile and say, “You’ve changed. I didn’t think that was possible, especially after how we met. But I can see you starting to peek out of that once cold exterior and it’s really nice.”

“Who are you?”

“When I first got here, I was an ugly duckling, so scared of all these beautiful people. Bridget, Victoria and Georgia took me under their wing and kept me from totally losing it.”

“Holy shit,” she says, “Savannah? You’re Savannah Van Duyn?”

I smile and it’s like she’s seeing an old friend rather than an old enemy. She looks at me, mesmerized, taken aback, and then I do what neither of us did before everything spiraled out of control. I step forward and give her a hug. Slowly she hugs me back.

In my ear, she says, “What is this?”

“It’s a truce,” I say, stepping back, smiling.

“We saw you change though,” she says, “and then you disappeared.”

“I changed but then I fell apart. I came back as Abby Swann, the first semester version, not the slutty second semester version.”

“That was you?!” she says, shocked.

“For the first semester, yes. But the second semester of Abby was not me. When I came back that semester I was Raven.”

“Who was Abby?”

“A girl named Janice. She was a stand in, but not a very good me.”

“I’ll say!”

Now she steps back, still reeling. She remembers me using my mind to slam her down in her seat when she was with Brayden.

“Well isn’t this some Scooby Doo shit,” she says with genuine bemusement.

“I don’t recommend it,” I say.

“You have some sort of…something. Like, special powers or something.”

I bring a soft breeze through her hair, run a little wisp across her cheek. Then I smile not just with my mouth, but with my eyes.

“What the…?” she says, looking at her hair. “Is that you?”

I only smile wider.

She has no idea how to take me, which is fine so long as she’s not leaving.

“Why are you being nice to me?” she finally asks.

“Because I have this thing called ‘sight.’ It allows me to see in the future, if I want.”

“No way,” she says, her guard down.

“Yep.”

“So…what do you see for me?”

“You’re going to be a really good mother,” I say, causing her eyes to tear up. “You need to stop pushing Emery away, though. You love him, right?”

She nods her head, dabbing her eyes.

“And you love Constance?”

She tries to shake her head no, but it sort of comes out odd at first, then it becomes a yes because she knows I’m with Chloe, which is why I said that in the first place.

“So you need to get that apartment with them after school. And you need to tell your parents.”

“I don’t want them to split up.”

“They won’t. It will just be weird at holidays, and maybe three hundred other days of the year for a few years. The baby will change them, though.”

“Oh, that’s all?” she says, laughing, half crying. “A few years?”

“You need love in your life, Julie. You deserve it.”

“I don’t think I do,” she admits, looking away because these tears are getting away from her now and she’s worried about her makeup.

“You do,” I say. I lean forward, give her a kiss next to her mouth and say, “You live a very, very good life, Julie. It’s not only possible. I see it. You do it and you do it well, and all this shit around here, it’s such a non-issue it’s not even funny.”

With that, she shakes her head, unable to swallow, and then she says, “Thank you, Savannah. And I’m sorry for being…me, to you.”

“I just put my number in your phone, so call me if you need anything, okay? Anything at all.”

“You put your…what?”

“You have my number in your phone now,” I say. “Don’t be afraid to use it if you need a friend, or just someone to lean on.”

And with that we say a strange good-bye and I rejoin my friends feeling like I’ve come full circle here.

After the graduation ceremony is over, our entourage as well as Cicely, Tempest and Georgia’s families, head down the hill to Sacramento where we all sit down at a gigantic table in Buca di Beppo, an Italian-American restaurant big enough to handle our party. With August on my right and Chloe on my left and all my friends near, I have to say, this is just about perfect.

“So seriously, how come all your friends are like, ridiculously hot?” Chloe finally asks. I felt the question coming like two hours ago.

“That’s how they make them at Astor Academy,” I say with a smile. She laughs it off, accepts the answer the same way she accepts the few other answers she knows it’s best not knowing.

“Well, you seriously have the hottest friends ever,” she says.

Looking at her I say, “It’s true, right?”

Just then I’m given a slight nudge inside, one that makes me sit up straight.

“Can you two excuse me for a moment?” I say to August and Chloe, who are getting along famously, as they have from the very start.

I head outside the restaurant, look left and see the white Audi S5 Sportback with the license plate that says WTUNCRN. I laugh. White Unicorn.

Only in California…

I walk to the passenger side of the car, hear the locks disengage, then slide inside.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” I say back. This is weird.

“It’s really strange seeing you in my car,” she admits to me. “I don’t have any other versions of me in my universe.”

“Yet instinctually you knew to steal an Audi? Something subtle no less?”

“Too much?” Amanda, my multiverse counterpart says.

“No, it’s just right,” I reply.

“So, are you ready?” Amanda asks.

“Not yet.”

“You don’t have to go, you know.”

“I know.”

“But you want to come try out my universe, right?” she asks.

I think about it, then say, “I kinda do, but I kind of want to wait for a bit. I mean, I just got everything squared away over here. And I’m head over heels right now.”

“My universe isn’t much different than yours,” she says. “It’s mostly like yours, but there are more…exceptions to the rule over there.”

“Such as?”

“What is paranormal to you is normal to us.”

“So you have magicians, sorcerers, vampires, shifters and mages? Things like that?”

“We do,” she says.

“How?”

“Holland helped advance you here,” she says. “But we have ten Hollands all advancing all kinds of different species where I’m from.”

“Sort of like multiculturalism,” I say, “but with creatures rather than races, religions and ideologies.”

“Something like that, whatever the hell that is.”

“It means Fae have an understanding and a tolerance for things like werewolves, goblins, sorcerers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, hell no. We don’t have that at all. But we do have some measures of civility.”

As I’m looking at my multiverse self, I’m thinking about her life, what it must be like, how her world is similar to mine but so very different, and suddenly I’m not ready.

“How do I get in contact with you?” I ask.

She pulls my hand to her forehead, leans forward and projects something of herself into me. I understand. It’s like scenting. Once I have the essence of her, I can reach across universes to find her.

“Now you know,” she says. “Go enjoy your friends and your man. You’ve earned it.”

Smiling, I say, “I have.”

Leaning forward, she hugs me tight and says, “You did good, girl. You did really, really good.”

We say good-bye and she takes off as I’m walking back inside.

We wrap a wonderful evening, promise to stay in touch with each other, and then I say good-bye to my sisters, Sebastian and Netty.

On the drive home, I say, “I didn’t expect our lives to turn out like this,” to no one in general.

“Different is good,” Chloe says. She’s playing Miss Daisy right now; August is up front with me in the driver’s seat. He reaches out and takes my hand, looking at me with so much love in his heart, his soul is nothing but flat out gorgeous.

We take Chloe home because it’s late, kiss her good-bye, then head home ourselves. August is tired, so am I, but not so tired that we can’t partake in the pleasures of each other. I went so long without meaningful sex before him I’ve felt it prudent to catch up.

He doesn’t mind.

When we’re sweating and spent and wrapped in this blissful, euphoric haze, August starts to doze off. I roll over, kiss him and tell him I’m going to jump in the shower. When I’m done, he’s asleep. With the towel wrapped around my waist, I walk to the large closet.

Moving my clothes aside, I stare at the spear I took from Mount Calvary. The one that pierced Jesus’s side.

They call it the Spear of Destiny, and according to legend, he—or in this case, she—who holds the spear holds the power to control the destiny of the world for either good or evil purposes. Or if D.C. comics is right, I will now have the power to reshape reality.

I reach out, touch the lance, run a finger down its bloody metal tip. Memories of that day still haunt and move me, for being with Christ when he died was beyond traumatizing. But the spear is now with the right person. Me.

How can I say that?

For starters, I have all the power I need. And now I have the actual blood of Christ in me. I didn’t need his blood from the spear, and it doesn’t feel like a talisman with mystical power. Thinking about it, maybe the power I now yield is not the power to destroy, but the power of patience, of forgiveness, or kindness and love. Perhaps the spear is just a spear.

Maybe I’m the true Spear of Destiny.

When I think of what I got in my time with Jesus, with God, I realize I should be the example of that which I wish to see more of, and what I want is more peace, more love, more moments like these.

Yes, the spear is with the right person.

Changing into a fresh pair of underwear and a tank top, I head to bed, crawling under the covers and snuggling up against my man. While I lay there, drifting off, I think about who I am, about what I am, and I know: I’m just me, and me is all I’ll ever need to be.

Me is perfect.

THE END BOOK IX

Afterword

IF YOU ENJOYED CRUCIFIED, YOUR VOICE MATTERS…

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