Breathless (3 page)

A pantry. I think I’m in a pantry.

I don’t care where I am.

I lock the door and slide my back down it.

When I hit the floor, I pull my legs up to my chest and rest my forehead on my knees. My body, the body I haven’t been inside for over one hundred years, shakes as I hold my hand over my mouth to keep the sobs from being audible. I don’t know how long I stay there. I don’t care. I can’t make the feelings stop.

I can’t turn them off.

I can’t do anything but cry.

And feel.

I feel everything.

It’s all my fault.

I have to save Gracen.

I owe her that.

I owe them all.

I don’t know when it happened. One minute I’m in his strange farmhouse, and the next, I’m home. My home. The wind is kicking up. I’m outside next to the pond, beside the old dead tree. Mother is yelling at me from the porch. Gracen is beside me. Holding my hand.

She smiles.

All is right with the world again.

Except when I look into her eyes, her big beautiful green eyes, they are white, pure white. Abomination white.

“You did this,” she says before she turns to walk away.

I grab for her hand, but I’m too late. She’s out of my reach.

Lightning strikes behind me, and I turn.

Bodies.

So many bodies.

Piled up as far as I can see.

Their eyes are open.

They are staring at me.

Dead.

They are all dead.

Even Lucien, who is slumped against the tree. His eyes are wide. His mouth open. He’s looking right at me. Blood is oozing from his stomach just like when I shot him.

I did this.

I have to stop it.

I have to stop her.

In my dream, I fall to my knees as the weight of what I have to do crashes on my shoulders. I can’t do it. I can’t hurt her. I can’t stop her.

A hand pats my shoulder, and I look up to see Gracen smiling down at me. She’s herself again. Her eyes are green. She’s human. She’s mine.

“Stay with me,” she says before she kneels down beside me, places her hand gently on my cheek, and leans in to kiss me.

I wake up before her lips touch mine.

CHAPTER SIX

Hart

I
’VE BEEN IN THE PANTRY SO
long the sun is coming up.

Except the sun isn’t coming up.

I don’t have a watch or anything. Actually, I do. I used to have an old pocket watch my father gave me before I left for the war. It was gold and beautiful. I think it was his father’s. I’m not sure. It’s not like I listened to that part of the story. I was too filled with guilt over Colleen, too much grief over my fragile relationship with my brother and too much anger about my mother’s death. Not even writing it all down in that damn journal helped. I wrote. I tried to get my feelings out and nothing. It did nothing but leave a book lying around that anyone could have gotten their hands on if they’d bothered to look. If they read it, they’d know everything about Colleen—the truth, what really happened. I promised her aunt I’d never tell another living soul. Guess I kept my promise.

Oh screw it. I didn’t listen to my father because he was weak. He was probably the weakest man I’d ever met in my life. He let my crazy mother run all over him, and I hated him for it. She loved Lucien more. Whatever, but my father never should have let her treat me like she did.

Not that I’m still bitter or anything.

I’m not.

I’m perfectly fine.

I’m…

I’m hiding in a pantry with the door locked, crying because I can’t tell my brother I’m sorry. I have so much to be sorry for. Much more than Lucien ever knows. If he ever knew the truth about Colleen’s death and the actual role I played in it…

I’m as weak as my father.

I’m worse than he ever was.

One thing my father could always do was say he was sorry. Lord knows I heard him tell our mother many times. He was sorry this was her life. He was sorry he wasn’t Caleb—whoever Caleb was. He was sorry he’d burdened her with two sons, to which she enthusiastically replied it was only one of her sons he should apologize for.

Bitch.

So, I feel like the sun should be up, but it’s not because there has been an eclipse, a real one, not one I put in Gracen’s mind, ever since I woke up in the field where I was buried.

Nothing about that makes any sort of sense.

“Are you going to mope in there all day, or are you going to come out here and be productive?” I hear Seth yelling from behind the door.

Oh good.

“Leave him alone. He needs some time to process everything.” I hear my brother say, and it breaks my heart.

Even after all of this, after everything I’ve done, he still sticks up for me.

He needs to stop.

“Process… we’ve all had to process everything, Lucien. Have you forgotten Heaven already? You were an angel. One of the Heavenly Hosts. Then you went to Hell and became a thing. Now, look at you… a human. She made you human!”

“I’d rather be human than anything having to do with you.”

Ouch. I can imagine Seth’s face scrunching up in that way his face tends to do.

“Good thing.” His voice is low, his words are drawn out in a way that it makes even me nervous. “Because you have demon blood in you now, Lucien. Or have you forgotten.”

“I’ve not forgotten.”

“And that, my friend, means that you can never enter Heaven again. So even if you die at a ripe old age of one hundred and are a saint in every sense of the word, you’ll still go straight to Hell. Do not pass go. All because you tried to save your no good brother.”

At the Hell gate, Lucien mixed his blood with mine. He jumped. He died. He went to Hell. He was tortured. He turned into this thing with big black eyes that was just, frankly, terrifying.

He… he can never go back to Heaven.

He doesn’t deserve this.

Seth deserves an afterlife in Hell. That’s what he wanted after all. Hell on Earth.

So why does my brother have to suffer for it? Why does he keep having to pay the price?

“I’d do it again,” Lucien says before I can’t take it anymore and open the door.

They, somehow, found gas lanterns and have them set up all around the kitchen. I can see Lucien and Seth. Part of me wishes I couldn’t. I’m still in my wet clothes, but they’ve changed into dry ones. Seth has on a pair of jeans and a white button up shirt, which seems out of place for him. And Lucien has on a pair of black pants and a black shirt. He sure doesn’t look like a Union soldier now.

I still look very much the Confederate. An old, wet, formerly dead Confederate. Happy days.

Both Seth and Lucien look at me when I walk out of my pity pit. They are standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table, Seth slightly taller than Lucien, who has his fists balled up like he wants to punch Seth in the nose. I’m not opposed to that. #TeamLucien

“Gentlemen,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster. I pray my eyes aren’t red and that they’ve not heard my little major mental breakdown because that would just be awful. And embarrassing and all kinds of things I don’t want to dwell on. Ugh. “Talking about me?”

“Ah, good. You’ve finally emerged from your cocoon.” Seth smirks. I hate that angel.

“Shut up.” Lucien beats me to it. “He’s been through enough without you having to add insult to injury. If you don’t have anything productive to say, shut your damn mouth.”

Wow, I’m actually pretty impressed by my big brother. He’s always been the least likely to cause a confrontation, even when a confrontation needed to be caused. He was always the pacifist. I suppose that’s why he went to the Pearly Gates and I went to… not the Pearly Gates. “Yeah… just shut your damn mouth.”

I eyeball Seth before looking at my brother and giving him the fist of camaraderie. In response, my brother rolls his eyes at me.

Good. We’re back to normal then.

“I’ll shut my damn mouth when one of you has a better idea.” Seth can’t seem to just shut up.

“Better idea about what?” I have a feeling while I had my mental break these two weren’t just in here talking fashion and braiding each other’s hair.

Seth looks at Lucien. Lucien looks at Seth.

I don’t think I have to be told what they’ve been talking about, but dang if they would just say it. “Gracen. You are talking about Gracen.”

“No,” Seth says much too quickly. “We are talking about the Abomination. The thing you allowed to live and the thing that will destroy the world.”

“Me?” Of all the… “She’s
your
daughter.”

“And she was
your
charge.” Seth’s eyes narrow. “You had one job, Jessup Blackwell, and you screwed it up royally. Everything that happens from now on is your fault. Yours alone.”

“First of all, my name is Hart. Not Jessup. Jessup died a long time ago, so stop calling me that.” Why had everyone decided
now
was the time to go back to that? It wasn’t even the best name in the 1800s. “And second… you’re right.”

I surprise myself when I say it. I know I surprised Seth because he blinks a few times. Lucien, for his part, tilts his head to the side like he’s trying to figure out if I have some ulterior motive going on.

I don’t.

“You’re right, Seth. Whatever Gracen does, whatever she doesn’t do, it’s on me. You are her father and you made her, but when the time came, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her like she wanted me to…”

“She wanted you to kill her?” Lucien asks. He sounds shocked. I don’t know why. He knows what kind of person Gracen is… was. He had spent time with her. Had he expected anything else?

“Yeah, she wanted to die so she wouldn’t hurt anybody. And me, being selfish, couldn’t. I thought… I thought if I could just keep her from killing her mother that she’d be fine. That everything would be fine.”

“Because you love her.” Seth doesn’t sound snarky at all. He’s simply stating a fact: like blood is red and the sky is scary at the moment.

“Because I love her.” I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud. It feels strange because I have no right to love her, but I do. “And I never thought she’d love me back.”

“Apparently some part of her did.” Seth is still serious. I don’t like Seth serious. It makes everything seem worse when Seth is serious.

I shift on my feet, trying to rationalize the unrationalizeable. “Some part of her loved Sam, yeah. And some part of her loved Willow. But not me.”

“You were those people.” Seth helpfully adds.

“Not really.”

“To her you were…”

“Just stop!” I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to talk about my feelings for Gracen or whatever feelings she might have for me. I don’t want her gone. I want to fix her.

I want to save her.

How do I save her?

“What’s your plan?” I bite my lip and try to keep my leg from shaking from the nerves that are traveling through me.

By the way Seth looks at Lucien, I don’t think I want to know.

“What? What is it?”

It’s Lucien who starts to talk first, but it’s Seth who beats Lucien to the punch line. “There is no way to stop Gracen. Gracen, the one you know, is gone. Her soul is gone.”

“Gone where?” I stand up straighter.

“No idea. That’s not the point, though. The point is that the Abomination is nearly unstoppable. I warned you about that from the beginning, but there might be a way to keep her locked up. Keep her from destroying everything.”

“You said that was impossible.” He did. That was the whole prophecy thing. If she turned, the world died. Bam. Easy. Simple.

“I didn’t say we had a good plan. But we can’t sit here and do nothing. We need the book.”

“The book you used at the gates? The one that had everything Abomination related in it?”

Seth frowns at me. “Hart, what other book could I possibly be talking about right now?”

What other book indeed? “Well, I don’t know. Doesn’t God have some sort of other books that can deal with what’s going on? Have you talked to Him? Asked Him for His help?”

“He doesn’t help,” Seth says with a tone that lets me know we ain’t heading down
that
conversation road. “Anyway, we need the book. Like I said, we can’t destroy her, but we might be able to stop her.”

“Stop her how?” I ask when Seth has nearly left the room. He’s not going anywhere without me knowing the details. He’s not hurting her. I don’t care how evil she is. She loved me when I was the most evil thing she’d ever known. I’m not giving up on her. I’m not.

“Stop her in the only way that matters,” Seth says. He turns and holds up his finger toward me. “And if you even think of getting in our way… I’ll send you back to Hell myself.”

“Our?” I ask before Seth disappears. Stupid angel parlor trick.

I walk up behind Lucien. “Our? Our what?”

He doesn’t look at me, so I do the only thing I know to do—I turn him around. “Our what, Lucien? Please, you have to tell me the plan. He can’t hurt her. I won’t let him hurt her.”

“Because Seth was right. You love her.” Lucien’s voice is low, and he’s not looking at me.

“Yes. Because I love her.”

It still doesn’t feel natural to say.

Lucien nods and turns slightly away. I feel the pain before I know what’s going on. I stagger back and put my hand to my bleeding jaw. My blood is on Lucien’s knuckles, and he’s breathing so heavy I think he wants to punch me again.

“I may not be on Seth’s side, but I sure as hell am not on yours.”

With that he walks out, leaving me alone and bloody on a kitchen table that isn’t even mine, in a house in the middle of nowhere.

I should’ve probably said I was sorry.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hart

L
UCIEN IS SITTING OUTSIDE ON THE
porch, watching the rain or thinking or something. I don’t know what he’s doing. I know what I’m doing, and that’s going up these stairs and getting out of these clothes. I never liked the gray before, and I don’t like it now. I honestly can’t believe I’m in my uniform again. It seems weird, heavy and muddy and awful, and… weird.

My father hated that Lucien joined the north. He hated that I joined the south. He hated that we joined period.