Dawn (11 page)

I looked down at my mother's body slumped over against the glass so alone and vulnerable. I heard movement behind me and turned to see Jace pick up one of the small, black leather office chairs in the room.

“Be ready to catch her,” Jace said to me, and I instantly knew what he meant to do.

I walked over to the side of the tube my mother was leaning against and knelt down so she would fall into my arms once released.

With one swing of the chair, Jace broke the glass tube. It shattered into a million little pieces, shining like small diamonds against the light in the room as they flew through the air. My mother fell into my arms and I caught her wet cold body, holding her like she had held me so many times as a child, close to my heart.

My father came to kneel on the other side of her. With a trembling hand, he gently pulled the wet strands of hair away from her face, allowing us to gaze upon my mother’s beauty one last time. Her body convulsed violently as her lungs expelled the last of the liquid oxygen they contained. One last whisper of breath slipped between her lips as her body went completely limp in my arms.

That's when I saw it.

Her soul left her body like a white wisp of light floating in the air. I watched as she floated first towards my father then slowly made her way to me, hovering right in front of my eyes as if she knew I could see her.

My mother's soul floated so close to me I could physically feel the purity of her love for me. The love only a mother can have her child. My heart swelled with the love she shared, her last gift to me.

“I love you too,” I said to her. “Be free.”

Slowly, her soul ascended into the air, as if reluctant to leave me.

“Go,” I begged her.

Her soul shot up through the ceiling and disappeared.

I broke from the loss, unable to hold back the pain and began to sob.

I laid my mother’s body down on the floor, knowing she wasn’t truly there anymore. I felt Jace kneel behind me, encircling me in the safe comfort of his arms and holding me as my heart released its unbearable grief. I thought I had made my peace with my mother’s death years ago when Ash and I escaped the breeding camp. But, seeing her trapped as a helpless pawn in the queen’s quest for immortality was more than I could bear. I wept uncontrollably as the pain of her loss seemed to consume every fiber of my being.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I was faintly aware of Jace lifting me up and cradling me in his arms. I cried against his shoulder, not completely aware of where he was taking me and not really caring where we ended up. He laid me down on the softness of a bed and continued to hold me as my heart wept. I’m not sure how long I lay there crying against his chest, but eventually I had no more tears left to shed. My eyes felt puffy and red and all I could concentrate on was simply trying to breathe.

Eventually, I fell asleep, a dreamless sleep where the nightmare of my mother’s death couldn’t touch me.

When I woke up, Jace wasn’t in the bed anymore. I heard the gurgle of a baby and immediately sat up.

Jace was sitting in a chair beside the bed letting Rose play with his little finger. He looked up at me, concern over my welfare written on his face.

“How are you feeling?” He asked.

“Horrible,” I confessed. “I feel like someone rubbed my eyes down with sandpaper.”

“You needed that cry,” he told me. “I think you’ve been holding it in for a while now. It was time you let it out.”

Jace stood and brought Rose over to me. I held out my arms to take her and felt complete as I cradled her in my arms. Her bright blue eyes found me and she smiled.

“She knows who we are you know,” I told Jace. “She was the one who time jumped us back to you. I told her to take us to daddy, and she teleported us straight to you.”

Jace sat down on the side of the bed, a look of pride on his face.

“I guess I’m doing something right then,” he said, gazing down at our daughter.

“I’ll do better,” I promised Rose. “I’ll be the mother you deserve. The one Zoe wanted you to have.”  I looked up at Jace. “We need to go get our son.”

“Your father sent a helicopter to my father's camp. I hope he has some idea of where Lucena would try to hide out. As soon as we know where she is, we’ll go get Simon.”

“You can’t come.”

Jace’s eyes narrowed on me. “I
am
coming.”

“No,” I said more adamantly. “It’s too risky. She might find a way to capture you both, and I can’t go through that torture again, Jace. I can’t count on Ash swooping in and saving us a second time. I need to know you're safe.”

“I’m not staying behind,” Jace said, a firm set to his jaw steeling himself for a fight with me. “He’s my son too. It’s not like I can’t fight, Skye. I don’t need to be protected by you. And, if you’ll remember, it didn’t exactly work the way you hoped the last time you left me behind.”

I sighed, realizing Jace was right. My plan to keep him and the babies safe by sending them to Michael’s new camp had been an epic failure. If I had just taken him and the babies with me to find my father in the Southern Kingdom, Lucena wouldn’t have been able to get her hands on all of them at one time.

“Ok,” I relented, knowing I couldn't come up with a good enough argument, “you can come, but we leave Rose here.”

“Agreed,” Jace said, leaning in and giving me a kiss on the lips. “And thank you.”

“What are you thanking me for?”

“For not fighting me on this,” he said, giving me a lopsided grin. “You’re so stubborn sometimes it makes me crazy. It’s nice to know you’ll listen to me on occasion.”

“I always listen to you,” I replied, not wanting Jace to think my mind was closed to the things he said. “I just worry. I worry about what the queen might try to do to us next. She’s crazy Jace and I’m not being facetious when I say that. She’s completely insane.”

Jace grinned. “Yes, I know that.”

“What if…” I wasn’t sure I could finish what I was thinking but needed to share my thoughts with him. “What if I end up like her?  What if something happens that sends me off the deep end and I become just like she is?”

“Now you listen to me,” Jace said in that no nonsense voice of his. “You are nothing like her. You will never be anything like her. You are the strongest person I know, and there is nothing in this world that would make you into the monster she is. Do you understand me?”

“But I was a monster,” I reminded him. “I did things as a Harvester I never thought I would do to other people. What if….what if she finds a way to make me like that again?”

“It won’t happen,” Jace said with a fierce certainty. “I won’t let that happen.”

I sat there looking at him, wondering if I should tell him my plan. I didn’t like keeping secrets from Jace and my request to Doc Riley was a major one.

“I’ve asked Doc Riley to find a way to remove the Harvester chip,” I told him.

Jace’s brow furrowed. “I thought that was impossible to do without killing you?”

“She said she would look into it for me.”

“You won’t become her, Skye,” Jace said adamantly. “It’s not worth risking your life over something that will never happen.”

“It is to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t live the rest of my life fearing I will become like that again. It’s killing me, Jace. It might not be a quick death, but I feel like this giant shadow is following me around just waiting for its chance to pounce and take control of me again. I can’t live like that. I won’t if I don’t have to. You and the kids deserve to have all of me, and I can’t really give any of you that until the chip is removed. I need to know I’m my own person again and not on the brink of becoming what she made me into.”

“What did Doc Riley say when you asked her about it?  Does she think it’s possible?”

“She told me not to get my hopes up. She said she wouldn’t do anything unless she thought I would be completely safe.”

“Good. At least we agree on that.”

“If she does find a way, safe or not, I have to do it, Jace. I have to.”

Jace sighed heavily. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. It will take her some time to research what needs to be done. Right now, let’s concentrate on getting our son back.”

I nodded. Getting Simon back was our first priority.

But removing the Harvester chip inside my head was a close second.

We held the funeral for my mother within one of the cemeteries in the city. She was buried in a coffin with a spray of artificial flowers covering the top, something one of my father's soldiers found in the abandoned funeral home on the property. Underneath a bare oak tree, facing the distant mountain range, my mother's body finally found the rest it so richly deserved. Beneath six feet of dirt, she would find safety from the queen's greedy clutches.

I held onto one of Jace’s hands as a preacher who traveled with my father's group from the Southern Kingdom gave some flowery speech about God and Heaven over my mother's grave. I knew he was trying to bring us comfort in our time of grief, but his words were falling on deaf ears as far as I was concerned. All I could think about was how much I wanted to make the queen pay for what she had done to my mother. I wanted to rip out her organs just like she had Emma Blackwell's. She didn't deserve anything less.

I tried to temper these thoughts as much as I could because I knew how close I was to the edge, the edge of thinking like a Harvester again.

Kirk, Teegan, Kale, and Lux didn’t attend the funeral. I put them in charge of taking care of Rose back at the mansion. It had been so natural to welcome my friends back into my world. I knew we would all be lifelong friends if future Simon's words held true. He and Rose would come to think of Kirk and Teegan as their aunt and uncle. Two more people in their lives they could trust besides just me and Jace. I hoped that in the future we were trying to build that my children would have a host of people in their lives they could love and who loved them back. Love was so important. I guess I didn't realize just how important until Hope shared hers with me. If love could change one person, perhaps it could change a world of them.

I suppose the preacher ran out of pontifications about a person he knew nothing about because his eulogy was short and sweet. As they were preparing to lower my mother's coffin into her grave, I let my gaze drift to Jace as he stood steadfast by my side.

I squeezed his hand causing him to look down at me. The sorrow he held for me in his eyes seemed to be a mirror of my own pain, further proof of just how much he loved me. As I continued to look at him, I felt the hate in my heart for the queen become overshadowed by the love I felt for the man at my side. I knew without a shadow of a doubt I would always be able to count on Jace to have my back no matter what might happen to us in the near future.

“I love you,” I whispered to him.

Jace looked a little surprised by my declaration, but I knew why. Those three little words hadn't crossed my lips since the first time I said them to him that night by the barrier. I’m not sure why I held myself back from saying them for so long. I wasn’t even sure it was a conscious decision. I suppose I just took for granted he knew how I felt about him. But, sometimes you need to say the words. You need to tell the people in your life just how much they mean to you so they will never doubt your feelings for them and always remember.

Jace grinned and nodded, silently telling me he knew how much I loved him even if I hadn’t said as much in the past few months. He tightened his grip on my hand. I drew strength from his touch as I watched my mother’s coffin be lowered into the ground.

As we were walking away from the funeral and back to the car we came to the cemetery in, I felt like I was being watched. I stopped walking to turn and look behind me. Ash was standing off to the left of where we buried my mother, staring at me.

“Ash is here,” I said to Jace. “I should go talk to him.”

Jace kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

I made my way back through the cemetery.

“I’m sorry I left you like that in the past,” Ash said. “How did you make it back?  Did one of my future selves come get you?”

“No. Rose brought us back.”

“Rose?” Ash asked in surprise. “But she’s just a baby.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter. She was able to make a shield to protect us when we ran into trouble, and she time jumped us back to our present.”

“But how?  I just assumed her power would be like mine. That she would only be able to travel between the people she loved.”

“Her power
is
like that,” I said, not sure if I should tell Ash the whole truth but seeing no reason to keep it a secret either. “She brought us back to Jace.”

“Jace?” Ash asked, looking confused.

“To her, even as young as she is, she thinks of him as her father.”

Ash shook his head in disbelief and ran an agitated hand through his hair.

“So he gets everything and I get nothing,” he said, bitterness in his voice. “He gets to have you and he gets to be a father to my children. How is that fair, Skye?”

“It’s not fair to you,” I told him. “But this is the way our lives are. You need to accept it, Ash. The sooner you do the easier it will be on Rose and Simon. The easier it will be on you too.”

“And what if I can't accept it?” Ash asked, his expression angry. “What if I refuse?”

“Then you can't be a part of our lives anymore,” I told him bluntly. “You need to think about what's best for Rose and Simon and not yourself. Ash,” I said as I took a step forward and touched him on an arm, “please, you're better than this.”

Ash looked away from me.

“I don't think I am,” he confessed. “I don't know if I can be the better person here, Skye. I don't know if I can just suck it up and take it.”

“You'll do what's right. You always have.” I squeezed his arm. “Please, Ash. You can't let this make you bitter. You'll never find happiness if you let it eat you up like this.”

“Maybe I can help,” a familiar voice said.

Both Ash and I looked off to the far right of us. Standing a few yards away was the older Ash who placed Zoe, Simon, and Rose in stasis after they combined their powers to make the shield.

I heard Ash gasp as he took two steps back from himself. I suddenly realized this was the first time my Ash had met one of his future selves. His breathing became labored, and I worried he might start to hyperventilate.

“Let me show you our future,” older Ash said, standing completely still as if he knew moving might send his young counterpart off the deep end. “I think you might find it interesting.”

“Show me?” Ash asked. “Show me what exactly?”

“How you can be happy again,” older Ash said. “We will find happiness if you have the patience to wait for it to happen.”

Ash was silent as if he were thoroughly thinking through older Ash's offer.

“Then show me,” Ash said. “Because right now I don't feel like I have anything.”

Older Ash smiled at me as he walked over to us.

“Told you I would be a complete ass to you,” he joked.

I laughed a little. “Yeah, thanks for that warning by the way.”

Older Ash looked at his younger self. “Ready?”

I saw Ash's Adam's apple bob up and down as he swallowed hard.