Page 6

CHAPTER 6

If We Were Vampires

I should have died next to my twin. Should be lying in a grave in the church cemetery where we’d watched the town at night and drunk boxed wine. It should have been her standing at the podium of my funeral, surrounded by soft stares and the reek of lilies, fumbling over a eulogy. Except she wouldn’t have fumbled, and she wouldn’t have broken down into hiccupping sobs that had people looking away and my parents’ lips thinning with what we both knew was true.

But it wasn’t me who died that day.

This time, when the phosphorescent forest came into focus, I didn’t fight it. I was too exhausted, too broken, too tired with myself and every decision I’d never made. Maybe that’s what this place was: some purple purgatory, the sky painted like someone had spilled a bucket of glow-in-the-dark indigo.

A memory, James had said. Another world. Another land. But no place like this could exist in the universe, because no forest could have grown to such wild, wicked ruin.

Forest .

I almost laughed—couldn’t, because I had no control of the dream. Not my breath, languid and long; not my eyes, zooming like I wore binoculars; not my neck tilting too far to the side.

So I could only watch as my feet— claws —tiptoed through not sand or dirt, but white, jelly-like pearls. They oozed between my toes, and even that felt different, because my skin was not only silver, but thicker and taut.

And the colors . What did I even call that one? A new primary color, it had to be. Neither blue nor red nor yellow nor anything in between, and from it grew a new flood of mixtures.

The plants glowed in mesmerizing lavenders, phthalo blues, and glittering emeralds. Rocks grew in clusters of crystals. Dew floated up in tiny, sparkling diamonds. Purple light oozed between mammoth leaves, dripping over the long-haired trunks that I wouldn’t be able to fit my arms around, pooling like water.

Somewhere deep inside me, in the place that was still Roe , horror and wonder melded into a sticky mix. But I couldn’t feel that here.

My eyeballs didn’t obey what should have turned them left or right, and my arms felt heavier and longer, like my entire nervous system had been rewired and plugged into all the wrong sockets. It was like I was inside one of those giant team mascots at baseball games, strolling around a forest in a remote-control suit. Except I glided more than walked, my silver arm stretching out to brush aside a furred polka-dotted tree with swaying feathers.

A path stretched ahead, just a dent in the pearly ground like a bowling alley’s gutter, but I followed it while a new sense tingled my eardrums.

Music—but not played by instruments. Instead, it was like the land itself was singing. I heard the air whistling through holes in a tree trunk, the pearls shifting under my feet in a soft wave, the crackling bass note of some distant animal. And every few minutes, it would all stop. Then deafening silence would replace it, and the forest floor would rise a few feet, until, with an exhale, the music resumed.

As if the world were alive.

When a hanging green tentacle blocked my path, I jumped over it with more dexterity than I knew I possessed. I took another step forward, feeling the warmth ooze between my toes—

Something grabbed me from behind.

The force yanked me back, slapping me against a wall of solid heat. It was so startling, I jiggled in the dream for a moment before my vision cleared and my senses returned.

A sound like wood chimes escaped my throat. But not a sound I’d chosen to make.

I glanced down and nearly screamed at the thing wrapped around my waist. Burnt tattoos covered a male’s golden forearm, one with muscles that made Tye’s look like a young boy’s. Claws replaced fingernails. Pulsing veins pumped with dark bronze blood.

A demon.

Breath whispered over my neck, sending shivers down a spine I still thankfully had.

The hold around me tightened, so much that I felt his muscles tense against my back, his deep inhale dragging me closer.

We waited like that, suspended as the world moved around us—leaves the size of small cars swaying, purple light like tiny beads floating down, flowers opening and closing their teeth.

What was that?

I tilted my head—no, no, she tilted her head—and a low rumble filled my ear, something that might be played on the lower notes of a piano. Was it him? Was he speaking?

Before I could react, could prepare myself, it—he— jumped .

Oh god.

Wings the color of storm clouds shot out around me, pushing at air thicker than water. Leaves blurred, furry branches cracked, bubbly dew burst against my face. Trees shuddered out of the way as the squid-like vegetation thinned to blinding violet. The demon braced a hand over my head—blocking the worst of it, I would realize later.

Please don’t drop me, please don’t…

We flew faster, harder, wings beating the air in a thunderous drumming, my legs dangling uselessly, his arms pinning me to his chest.

Then we burst through, and I saw the sky.

Oh, oh god. It was real.

Gears hung from the stars.

I wanted to weep, I wanted to pray, I wanted to beg a god I thought I didn’t believe in.

This was impossible.

They glittered in the atmosphere—a beautiful, mechanical forest of slowly turning gears. Some were the size of Ferris wheels, others no bigger than a clock. They all spun as one, the sound like icebergs colliding underwater—low, deep, a baritone that promised something impossible.

But the dream looked away, tearing my watering eyes from the horrifying beauty floating in the sky.

I was still mourning the loss when the demon banked left, gliding us over glow-in-the-dark trees that lit up the gears. Flying.

God, I was flying, with the cold wind stirring the tips of my ears—higher up than they should be, but I didn’t care. Not now, not here, not with the world tumbling below me, with this wild exhilaration filling my belly.

I threw out my arms, the glide of crisp freedom sliding between my fingertips. Tears blurred my eyes from the sting of the wind, but as quickly as they came, they were wiped away by a golden fingertip— his .

I’d never been so free. So weightless. So impossibly infinite.

And that’s when I felt a tug on my hand.

My hand. Not this body I inhabited, but me . Like even lost here among the whirling gears, someone remembered who I was. But maybe I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to be what waited as only a distant memory.

In this vision, this world, this dream, I heard James’s low chuckle. Then a soft tugging on my hands as though he still held them in the clearing, telling me to let go. Let go and follow him out.

The firm grip tightened, and my world blackened bit by bit. Music dissolved. Scents disintegrated in my nostrils.

The demon evaporated.

No, no, no.

Then there was nothing but darkness. Cold brushed my naked skin, but I couldn’t see myself.

“James?” I whispered, breath rising on a curling fog.

The last notes of the song disappeared into the darkness, until only an echoing hollowness remained. Until I was nothing.

But I felt that tug on my hand again—gentle, kind, a mother guiding a child on their first bike ride. This time, I let him lead me out, tiptoeing through the cool waters, through the darkness where light was a myth.

I could smell him already, as warm and comforting as my mother’s kitchen on a Sunday morning. Before she’d thrown me out. Before my sister had died. Before everything.

And then James lifted me up.

“ J ames, James. ”

His name became an embarrassing, burbling fountain on my lips. I lost all sense of dignity, forgot that he’d dragged me up here, forgot that only minutes—hours? Days?—ago, he’d pressed me against a glass cabinet and demanded I read the Ledger .

But James didn’t hesitate, simply wrapped his arms around me and held. It took everything I had not to dissolve into a puddle against him.

“It’s not me,” I cried. “It’s not me. It’s not me .”

“Of course it is. ’Tis just another version,” he cooed, stroking my hair. “I’ve got ye now.”

I squeezed him tighter, grasping for that solidness of the here and now, the warmth that only another person could offer.

I missed it. The dream. That world. Something in my chest was breaking like it had when my twin died. Because god, what if I never saw it again?

A terrifying part of me wanted to believe , wanted to know that every piece of that dream had somehow been real. To believe that there was more to this world, to everything I’d known, that everything James had told me had been dipped in some bit of truth, even if it wasn’t my truth.

The sun dropped into the ocean, the moon winked into a fading sky, the birds lowered their chirping to soft whispers, but still, James held on.

Then other smells returned slowly. Not the rich honey of that dream, but diesel, socks, the vague burning that drifted from farmers’ chimneys, the crisp, salty air.

I’d seen another world. I’d lived it as a three-fingered creature. I’d watched a dream come to life while my own reality crumbled like the Japanese knotweed eating through Naruka’s foundation.

Up was down. Down was a portal in Naruka. Naruka was a gate to another world.

I pulled back from James, my eyes burning like they’d been scrubbed raw with sandpaper.

“Ye want to talk about it?” he asked, peering at me from under girly eyelashes.

I wiped my nose on my shoulder. “I don’t know.” And that was the goddamn truth—because I’d seen something meant for someone else, meant for Willow, and worse, I’d wanted it.

“Then I’ll explain it to ye,” he said calmly, handing me a cup. “Have some of this first. ’Tis hot whiskey and lemon and will help with the nerves. Now, I’ll start with the easy thing. Ye know something of Bryn. ’Twas supposed to be him who showed ye the Gate, that’s why I wanted him back. He’s a special connection with the Gate that would have made this easier. But he’s having none of me anymore, not since we forced him out.”

I lowered the cup, the whiskey already numbing me. “Why did you? What’s the truth ?”

Guilt, or something very like it, flickered over James’s pretty face. “Some can get lost in that world, ye know?”

I stared at the cup clasped in my hands, at the ripples forming from the rain dripping off the leaves. Yes, yes, I could understand perfectly how someone could get lost in that dream. Hadn’t I done the same? I’d wanted to stay in those skies, flying above the glittering trees. I’d never have come back if James hadn’t insisted.

“I felt you,” I said softly, “in the—the dream, calling me back.”

James took the empty cup from my shaking fingers. “And so I did. We always need someone to be here to anchor us.”

“Because we might not want to come back?”

James dug in his knapsack. “No, because ye can’t. There’s no way to lift yerself from that world without someone here calling ye. Here ye are, now,” he said, sliding a fingerless glove over my left hand, then the right. “Ye were only in for a few minutes, but yer cold from the shock of it.”

I flexed my fingers. The last person to take care of me like this had been Willow. “Minutes? It felt longer.”

“Time moves a wee bit different,” James explained, sitting back on his haunches with his arms draped over his knees. Dew sparkled in the blackness of his hair, and a wet piece of it clung to the hollow of his left cheek.

“Who are you?” I murmured.

A slow grin spread from ear to ear, lighting up James’s features. “’Tis true this is me hotel, but ’tis not a place for humans. I took over Naruka from me mammy after her aneurysm, and all the responsibility that comes with it.”

But only one word registered. “I didn’t know your mother died from an aneurysm .” Like Willow.

His eyes flickered. “Aye, she did. Now, ‘tis my duty to guard the Ledger , to find those listed, to bring them here to show them exactly what I just did. So they can remember. So they can dream.”

I let his words wash over me, a wave that flowed into one ear, circling and cooling around and around in my brain, until I could almost believe that someone had wanted Willow to see this.

“James, what is it, exactly? The—the dream.”

He grasped the hand I’d been trailing through dirt, rubbed it between his. A gesture of utter and complete comfort.

“’Tis Ruhaven,” James answered, voice solemn and low, and he continued with a little less of his accent. “It’s the land we’re from before our souls are reborn here. Up here in this wee meadow above Naruka, it’s the place me mammy’s ancestors once found the Ledger . They learned that those listed in its pages can return where the Ledger was and witness the life they once had. But ’tis only a memory, Roe, a memory of that other life.” He tugged a box of cigarettes from his front pocket, and there was a touch of sadness when he said, “Now yer seeing that life replaying, like a movie.”

He squeezed a smoke between his lips, then stuck another between mine.

“Ye feel what she feels, ye go where she goes. Yer memory, I mean. But ye can’t change or control it. Yer just watching.” He paused to crank his hands like we were playing charades. “But there’s no pausing, and it keeps playing whether yer in the Gate or not.”

Like a movie playing in another room, and I just stepped in to watch small bits of it.

I swallowed my doubt, my common sense, everything that kept me grounded. All of it lodged in my throat until it was a struggle to form words. “So it’s a replay of my—my—my—”

“Past life,” James finished.

“And it’s playing—”

“Has played. It’s already happened so, about eight hundred years ago. Yer memory’s dead now. She was reborn here as yerself when she died.”

I inhaled deeply on the smoke. It mixed with the whiskey to form a sticky coating in my gut. Ireland moved around me, from the distant ferry gliding toward Capolinn’s port, to the sheep strolling in an overgrown field, to our deranged cow whose belching I could hear even from this height.

“If the memory is playing,” I began, “then where does it start? When does it end? Has it been playing for eight hundred years and I’m just sneaking in now?” Like some latecomer at a movie. Pardon me, there’s my seat .

“Naw, it took about that long for yer soul to pass from Tallah—that’s the realm we’re originally from—to here.”

“ Realm ?”

“Yera, it sure didn’t look like Earth, did it?” He chuckled to himself. “There’s two countries on Tallah—Ruhaven and Drachaut. We’re all from Ruhaven, and when yer reborn here, the memories start playing. So ye’ve missed twenty-seven years of them.”

Just how many had James witnessed? How long did it take before someone forced you from Naruka like he did Bryn?

“Were you there now?” I asked. “Did you enter…” The memories? Your past life? The reason I’d be insane within a week?

“The Gate,” James said helpfully and with no small amount of humor. “And no, I didn’t go with ye, as I had to pull ye out.”

Needing to move, I rose and walked toward the opening in the trees.

Magic—that’s what we were talking about—and the child in me wanted to think it was possible that Ruhaven could exist, and the dream was some memory. But that girl had died with my twin. Long before, if I was being honest, back when I’d dropped out of music college, back when I’d started working a real job at my dad’s shop. And in that world, there was no magic.

James came to stand beside me and gazed out at the smoky sea. Maybe something in the misty hills of Ireland made it easier to believe. It didn’t seem so foolish up here, with the light flickering off the dewy leaves and the brilliant greens lit up, that something more might exist.

“What are ye thinking, Roe?”

I blew out smoke. “I’m thinking about how I can possibility rationalize magic.”

This earned me a coughing laugh of mostly smoke. “Magic?” James cried. “Magic is just the name for questions we’re not yet able to answer, and ye’ll find I have quite a few explanations for just what allows us to witness these memories.”

What did explanations matter when I knew that if I lay in that shadowy patch again, I’d see just what had awaited me before—the spinning gears, the world that was as much a dream as alive? Even now, I felt the invisible pull of it, as if the swaying stalks of the meadow were daring me to return. Maybe I wanted to. Maybe that’s why I was willing to throw every ounce of reasonable precaution to the wind, every piece of grounding reality I’d clung to, and just dream. Even if the dream wasn’t mine.

I shoved the cigarette back in my mouth. “Let’s start with this,” I said around it. “Why am I in the Ledger ?”

“Because yer one of the few who made the crossing. Not all Ruhavens are reborn here, but our souls escaped the natural way of things, and so I have to believe someone wanted us to be found. The time between births in the Ledger tells us how close ye were to crossing together.”

“And the ones that don’t make it to the Ledger ?”

Something came and went in his smoky eyes. “They died in Ruhaven, having never made the crossing here.” After a heartbeat, James finished the smoke.

“How is it possible, though?”

“Being reborn? Simple. In Ruhaven our souls are energy, and the first rule of the conservation of energy is—”

“It can’t be created or destroyed,” I finished.

“Exactly—barring entropy, it’s conserved. So ye see, our souls are preserved like any other energy, except ours were sent here. Why? That’s another question, one I’m trying to figure out.”

We stood there like that, shoulder to shoulder, him answering my questions, until most of the daylight gathered on the horizon like the lid of a smoking pot. By the time I finished the second glass of whiskey James handed me, magic didn’t seem quite so insane.

“There was this, um, demon thing,” I said, “in the—the Gate, as you called it. Could he be you? You said others are witnessing their memories, so I wondered…”

James’s eyes flickered. “Demon? Had he purple skin?”

My eyebrows flew up. “Gold.”

“Then no, as I’ve purple meself. But aye, he could be. There’s a good chance we knew those who made the crossing, especially for those born close together.”

I handed him the smoke when he gestured for it. “James,” I said quietly, “what is it you really want from me?”

“Want?” He inhaled until the end sparked red. “That’s up to yerself. Ye can leave today if ye like, but I’d miss ye, as yer fierce handy to have around Naruka.” When I looked over, he was grinning again.

“But why stay here? Why witness these memories? Why live like this ?”

The grin floated away. “Why? Roe, if ye can’t answer that, maybe ‘tis best ye don’t stay after all.”

He turned away from me, the sunlight flickering off the suspenders of his corduroy pants, and repacked the bag he’d brought for us.

As I watched him—something I found oddly comforting—I inhaled a long drag, needing the burn of it in my lungs. The last time I’d smoked like this, I’d been sitting on a sidewalk in L’Ardoise, the sun baking me in its heat while my parents inspected waxy coffins in the funeral home.