My puckering skin continues along my body as I slowly melt out from under the blankets and my feet stretch on the carpet. The air is unusually thick as I guardedly walk toward the door. I’ve never experienced this . . . I think.
For a moment I hesitate in the darkness, yet something strange happens like the energy in the room swells, even the walls creak from the pressure. My head swings around, checking every corner, but I know, even though the room is empty there is something there with me. My temperature rises and my heart races.
“What’s happening?” I whisper to the room, hoping that it won’t talk back. My mother’s influence on me is obviously strong.
That’s when the door to the room, despite its weight and size, opens just an inch. The urge to run the opposite direction and bid this unexpected ghost good-bye is intense, yet the power behind me pushes my bare feet along the ground until I must lift them or risk rug burn. Slowly and carefully I open the door and peer into the hall.
No one is there.
Still the supernatural rubs their hand along my skin until the bumps stay permanently. Just as I am about to turn back, something at the end of the hall catches my eye. Clean but bruised and cut fingers slowly emerge around the wall. Paralyzed and catching my breath, like a sailor before an ominous sky, I wait.
Despite the light above flickering and the smell of newly shampooed carpet wafting through the hall, nothing can afford my attention more than the large figure in clean jeans and a black T-shirt, scraping the wall to stay upright. I step forward, waiting for him to look at me; my knuckles are white with tension.
Slowly, Arek’s sick green eyes look up as sweat drips down his forehead, his face the color of the Swiss Alps in winter.
“Arek!” I rush forward, wrapping my arms around him, but it is then that he gives up the fight. His body drops to the ground, and that is when I see the blood seeping through his clean shirt.
“Kilon!” I yell. Beneath Arek’s shirt is a body riddled with bullets, some seeping and some fighting to heal.
Kilon bursts out of his room just next to mine with his gun ready and pointed.
“Kilon! It’s Arek!” I yell.
It takes just seconds before Kilon slides across the ground on his knees, ending just at Arek’s side.
“How did he find us?” I ask Kilon.
“Our group has a tracker for things like this—one that no one else can connect to,” Kilon explains as he rips open Arek’s shirt to reveal multiple gunshot wounds.
Soon, everyone is there, and the men carry Arek into a dark hotel room as Sassi calls for a Velieri doctor. He is lifeless as they lay him on a bed.
“Why hasn’t he healed?!” I ask over my father’s shoulder.
Geo doesn’t look at me but speaks while he pulls off Arek’s clothing. “It doesn’t work like that. The bullets will continue to kill unless they’re removed. It might be too far already. Any Epheme would have been dead immediately.”
It takes ten minutes for the doctor to arrive. With my back up against the wall, I watch as they pull the bullets from deep holes or cut into him to remove those that lie within the swollen and deteriorating tissues. For three hours his naked body doesn’t move as the doctor works. He doesn’t groan and his arm hangs lifeless off the bed.
“He has one in his head. I don’t know what it has done,” the doctor says, quiet and controlled. Just then the heart monitors start to alarm, causing everyone to rush. Geo jumps on the bed and starts compressions until they must pull Arek to the floor for a harder surface.
“What’s happening?!” I call out.
Yet Beckah grabs my arm and pulls me from the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When I was a child, my mom took me on one of her business trips where we stayed at a hotel that was the nicest I had ever been to. Every morning, we woke early and would walk the empty halls, take the elevator, and end up in the restaurant downstairs to devour breakfast. There is something about hotels when no one is up—not even the sun—that gives me a peaceful feeling . . . hopeful for what is to come. My mother’s short-lived job had provided us a memory to cherish. The lower light of the early dawn cast a calm glow on everything, and holding her hand as I walked through the halls was all the comfort I needed in the world.
Now, in the early hours as I stare out the window of the Velieri Hotel to the quiet street below, this memory runs through my mind, yet it seems slightly tainted. Had we known the truth, or what would become of my mother, or what would become of this life, would she have treated me differently? What is now abundantly clear is that I never truly belonged to her. Obviously, there is so much more to the universe than I can ever claim to understand. My mother’s beautiful face smiling at my reaction to the elevator, the grandness, or the moment to be alone with just her, flashes in my mind and there is no doubt . . . it happened. She and I had done this.
The safety of her nurturing sits within my soul like the most valuable memory of my life, since it is real. The memories that have come back to me are deep enough to see and touch, yet somehow it still all feels like a dream.
When will Remy’s memories and mine become one?
The only ounce of comfort has come from a man I didn’t know just a month before. His room is just steps away. The metal lock of his hotel room door is propped open and my fingertips pulse as they push the heavy door to peer inside.
The cold air smells like eucalyptus and lavender from a steamer at the other end of the room. Blue shadows tell of his body lying on his side in the clean, fresh sheets. There are no more signs of the traumatic events that have taken place. Slowly, so as not to wake him, my feet pad the carpet while my white baggy shirt falls off one shoulder and I gently crawl onto the bed behind him. All I can see are his large shoulders on top of each other, outlining the strength of his frame.
I can’t explain why being near him feels easy and comfortable. After the trauma, to feel his chest rise is like the earth takes breath once again and the natural order has come back to life. Moving carefully, just an inch at a time, closer and closer to the cliff that sits between his back and the mattress—I want desperately to just fall inside. When my nose is close enough to his shoulder blades to smell his clean skin, my hand hesitantly hovers over his arm until finally my fingers drop onto his warm skin and my body molds to his.
I am grateful to absorb the movement of his chest rising and falling with each breath. My body sinks, heavy and tired, as I close my eyes, letting my cheek rest against his back. Nothing is more peaceful.
Unexpectedly, his fingers run gently down my arm, then weave one at a time until our hands are one and he pulls me closer; my body spoons his.
After a few minutes, he slowly turns as though no damage has been done, yet the remnants are in his shaved head and pink spots along his skin.
In the darkness he reaches out and pulls me closer. “It’s been so long,” he whispers.
“I’m sorry,” is all that I know to say. For a moment it seems he is about to pull his hands away from me, but I take them in mine and return them to where they had just been. “Don’t,” I beg.
He relents.
“How are you feeling?” I whisper, as my fingers trace along the healing pink skin.
“Like I’m ready to put an end to all of this.”
“You need to recover first,” I say. “You knew we were here . . . at this hotel?”
He grins as though he knows something that I don’t. “I always know where you are.”
