Death Knows My Name (Memory Keepers) (17 page)

I put my arm around my sister in a loose hug. Thank God it wasn’t Anya’s parents. If I lost my sister, I would storm hell and demand that I be taken, too. I couldn’t lose another person. That was a lie. I would lose another person, and lose them soon. That was the point. That was my job. It was the reason Eric had come, to claim someone. Another life for me to remember, to be added among the others I already mourn. I let out a resigned breath just as Aurora bounded down the stairs and propelled herself at me to be caught in my arms.

“Auntie Mayne!” The youngest of my nieces squealed, snuggling her face into my hair. “I mizzed you.” She sniffled.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be around a lot more now, I promise. Are you sick, too, Rora?”

She nodded as she laid her head on my shoulder. Great, now I would probably get sick too.

Yet, that still wasn’t enough to make me put her down. I wanted to hold her close for a little while longer.

“Anya said I had cooties and I gave them to her. She said it was my fault she couldn’t go on her field trip today,” she said through her stuffed nose.

Well, thank God for cooties! I am positive they were responsible for saving Anya’s life. I whispered a prayer thanking God that she wasn’t the soul I was to keep.

“Where’s your sister?” Becca asked her youngest.

“She is laying down in her
ruum
with Daddy.” She lifted her head up briefly to look at her mom while she spoke, but as soon as she was done, she quickly snuggled it back down and curled a little fist around a loop of my hair.

“M-state, I’m going to go peek in on them. It’s about time for a snack can you get Aurora something to eat in the kitchen, please?”

I glared at her. Aurora was the most difficult person to feed in the entire world. She never liked anything two days in a row. Becca knew I couldn’t say no with Aurora right there.
Bitch
, I mouthed to her, and she grinned back slyly.

Becca reached out and caressed Aurora’s soft red hair. “I’ll be back in a second, baby, to give you more medicine.”

“Come on, Rora, let’s go find us something to eat.”

After going through every piece of food in the entire kitchen, I finally convinced Aurora to eat lettuce, tuna salad, and Swiss cheese wrapped in a tortilla. She had to eat something! I offered to make her grilled cheese but she told me that was for babies, so I told her what real big girls ate:
a la
tortilla tuna wraps.

Becca came into the kitchen and eyed me funny. “Mayne, what are you feeding my baby?”

I took a bite of the tortilla tuna wrap that I was forced to eat because I was a big girl, too. I also searched Becca’s face because she had called me by my real name. She called me M-state or any other city or state that started with M since we had met. She thought Mayne was the silliest name ever. She always asked,
Why Mayne?
I really had no answer. I tried to guilt her into not dissing my name by telling her that my parents had died before I could ask, but that never worked on her.

“Hey, she’s eating it and liking it. Besides, it isn’t half-bad. You want a bite?”

“No, I’m going to pass.” She turned to Aurora. “Hurry and finish, so you can take your medicine and take a nap.”

“All right, Mommy,” Aurora’s sweet voice replied as Luke made his entrance into the kitchen.

“What’s up, cupcake?” he asked, kissing Aurora on the top of her red head. “How was your trip, Mayne?”

“It was all right. Not too bad.”

After Aurora was done with her lunch, Becca took her upstairs for her nap. Luke had to get back to work so I decided to go check up on Anya, finally. I opened her door and peeked my head in. She was curled up on her bed with her eyes closed tight and fast asleep. She seemed so small lying there. Also very fragile, completely breakable. I crossed the room on tiptoes. The floor was carpeted so that helped me not to make much of a sound.

I eased down on the edge of her bed and reached my hand out to gently brush her dark brown hair away from her face. A small smile danced on her lips and I wondered what she dreamed. She stirred and her eyes fluttered open a slit as she peered at me through long brown lashes. Her smile grew wider. My heart clenched. The small impish grin held a hint of mischief and its grip on my heart tightened, feeling more familiar than it should.

“Auntie Mayne.” She pushed up and crawled into my arms. Last time I was here, I made her promise that she would never outgrow sitting in my lap. The months since my last visit had made Anya’s limbs lanky, but she still curled herself on me and I was grateful.

“Hey, sweetie, how are you doing?”

She frowned, but only slightly. “I think I’m okay. I’m just so shocked, scared and . . .  and I feel so guilty. I feel like I escaped something.”

I squeezed her tightly. “There is a reason for everything. So if you were meant to be on that bus, you would have been. If you were meant to die, you would be dead. The roof would have collapsed or any number of things would have happened. Death has its ways. You are meant to be here, alive. I have learned that recently.”

“That feels right.” She nodded in agreement. “Do you want to hear something weird, Auntie?”

She rested her head against my chest as she whispered the words. “Right before mom woke me up to tell me the news of what happened to my classmates I was dreaming about them and all games we use to play when we first met. I haven’t thought about those things in forever. At least not this school year. But today I did. It felt like I was there again. I keep having other dreams like that, too. I keep sleeping and I get to see my friends again because I know I won’t be able to ever see them again, but I can see them when I fall asleep because it feels that real. Isn’t that just plain weird?”

My back straightened at her words. Had she just said what I think she said? Okay, it couldn’t be what I thought it was. I wanted to shut my eyes tightly and yell. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs. Not her! Not my sweet, beautiful, and brilliant niece, Anastasia. But I didn’t scream. I forced a small smile to my lips and nodded.

“That is a good way to look at it. I am very sorry about your friends, Anya. I am sorry that you have to go through this. But you are a tough cookie so I know you will pull through.”

That was all I could say. I wanted to storm the gates of Heaven or Hell, which ever would do the trick. Maybe I was just assuming things. It could all just be a coincidence. I wouldn’t know for sure until I could talk to Eric. For now, I had to be supportive and comfort Anya.

“Auntie, how did you heal when Uncle Dante died?”

I gulped. I couldn’t say what I would say to anyone else, that I hadn’t. But that was no longer true, was it? I had healed. Eric helped me. How do I say this to a 10-year-old?

“Well,” I started, “it took me a while, but only because I’m not as smart as you. I finally healed when I understood death and its meaning. It was explained to me but I had to figure it out on my own.”

“How was it explained to you?”

“Um, it was just explained that death is part of God’s plan. Everything has a system. Something about the Grand Design. Oh, and also, without death nobody would live. Like, truly live. Without death, there would be no need for birth. Love wouldn’t exist. There was more and it was more evolved than that but I can’t really remember. The guy telling me this was hot!”

Anya giggled and squealed. “Auntie!”

“What? He really is hot.”

We giggled over silly little things until Becca came in to see what all the laughter was about.

I excused myself, retreated down to the guess room, and closed myself in for privacy.

Whispering, I called out. “Eric. I need to see you.” I sat down on the bed and waited. When he didn’t come after five minutes, I called out to him again. “Babe? I really wish I could ask you something. Besides, I miss you.” I realized that it was true. I hadn’t seen him since brunch and it was now past dinnertime. I was getting up when I felt him. I turned around on the bed and there he was, standing at my side slightly in front of me.

He looked damn tired even though he stood tall. “Mayne.” My name sounded terse and tight.

“Are you okay?” I asked, concern. “You sound weird.”

With a stern nod, he replied, “All is well.”

“Okay, Eric, what the hell gives? ‘All is well?’ Don’t talk to me like that. You sound like you have a stick up your ass.” I realized how tired I was. My temper got shorter the more tired I was. I relented. “Sorry,” I mumbled and dropped my eyes.

“No, I am sorry. You were right. It has been just a long and tiring—”

“Day?” I interjected helpfully.

He shook his head in disagreement. “Life.”

Tell me about it.
“Eric, is my niece?” I paused and took a breath, not wanting to know the answer. “A Memory Keeper?” I braced myself for what I already knew.

“Yes. It’s the reason I went to see Lucifer to try and open up a renegotiation of the truce.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sat down on the bed, but he didn’t sit as closely as I thought he should and he still wouldn’t look at me.

“I saw her name. It was on my list and I remembered what you said about when your parents died. It was your first keep, right? I thought it was going to be your sister! Either way I didn’t want you to hurt again and Anastasia to have to live through what you had to. That would hurt you. But her first keep is so much worse than I thought.” He looked at me finally and the pain in his eyes made my breath catch inside my throat.

“I knew it was going to be bad. It’s why I came back at lunch. All those little pulls. It was children, and a lot of them. I didn’t want to go, but I made that mistake once. The longer I waited the more they’d suffer and if I waited too long then Valience and his Swarm would have to call them. That would be worse, right?” I placed a hand on his knee, trying to offer comfort. He continued. “So I called them. One by one, I took each one into my arms and carried them to Michael. Every single one. They held on tightly and I whispered in their ear. I told them ‘Do not fear. The worst is over.” They were all so scared. Some cried and all I could do was hold their tiny souls in my arms, their broken bodies dying as I carried them to Heaven.”

He looked at me with tortured eyes. “You do not understand the worst part. In all, sixteen children died today. They all had the same keeper.”

It suddenly dawned on me what he was trying to tell me. “Anya.”

“Yes, Anya. Her first keep is for sixteen children. All those memories. All those people only to be added to for the rest of her life. Imagine, she is only 10 years old and her duty has only just begun.”

Dear God. My thoughts and my heart raced. Sixteen, that was almost my total amount of losses and I was 27 years old! Anya had a lot more years ahead of her. This was not fair. I couldn’t stand by and let this happen, not to her and not to others who had no fucking clue what was going on. The thoughts in my head screamed at me and I couldn’t concentrate. All I heard were a thousand different demands and commands.
Fix it. Help them. Stop this, stop this, stop this
now!
I wanted to let out a frustrated scream but Eric would think I was insane, so I just screamed out in my mind until it was all I heard, drowning out every other thought.
Ahhhhhhh!

“Mayne.” Eric’s voice was careful. “Stop. It will be okay.”

Crap. Having a boyfriend who can read my thoughts was going to take getting used to, and in the meantime, it was humiliating.

“I am not crazy,” I told him.

“You are, but not for this reason. I am screaming too, only you cannot hear mine.”

I looked at him and believed him. I closed the space between us as I moved to stand in front of him. He seemed so broken, I gathered him into my arms in a tight hug. I’d hold all his broken pieces until he could put them back together.

I couldn’t imagine how he or Anya felt. I had never lost a child and they had lost sixteen of them. Eric carried them each to heaven after I had painfully described what each loss does to a Memory Keeper. I should have left him clueless, but I hadn’t. Maybe it was a good thing I told him because their truce left us clueless and look where that left us. I had been broken too, before Eric.

Eric’s head was against my stomach as he wrapped his arms around my waist and I held him against me tightly. I knew what I had to do. I only needed to know one thing.

“Eric, I need to know if you trust me enough that if I do something, whatever it is, you will support me?”

“It has nothing to do with trust. I don’t care if you are completely wrong. I’d dare anyone to go against you. Whatever you want to do, I will make sure it is done.”

“Ooh, I love it when you get all dark and alpha on me,” I teased.

“I’m serious, I will support you even when you are wrong and more when you are right, because you are never wrong in my eyes.”

That was good to know. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew that something had to be done, and I also knew that I was the luckiest freaking girl in the entire world.

I had Eric, I loved him, and more importantly, he loved me.