Pieces of Hope (30 page)

“You’re
safe now!” Charlotte
cried, giving me a too-tight hug.

“That
was too close for comfort,”
Rin
panted. “I thought
we’d lost her for—”
   

“Charlotte, what did you
do?” I shouted over
Rin
. “Did you reverse time?” It
was the miracle I was seeking. My mother! Could she bring back my mother?

Charlotte shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Hope. I can’t do that. There are some things that are impossible .
. . even here.”

“Well, technically
she could,”
Rin
cut in, but I distinctly heard
Creesie’s
unspoken warning, and
Rin
broke off.

“You
could, but you
won’t
?” I snarled,
surprised at the heat of my anger.

“It’s
not that simple,” Charlotte
said in a defeated voice. “For one, too much time has passed. I’ve never
reversed it more than a second or two . . .”

“And for
two?” I snapped. “If you’re going to deny me something this important, at least
tell me there’s a two!” My voice was shrill with something close to hatred.

“Calm
down, Hope!”
Rin
shouted. “There’s a two. In the
living realm, virtually any chain of events could occur. Charlotte could reverse time and when it sped
forward again, it might slide into a different order. Someone else might die,
someone in your family,
you
might
die,” she emphasized, thinking this might faze me. It didn’t. “When it comes to
the living realm, anything goes. Time reversal isn’t all it’s cracked up to
be.”

“We have
different rules here, but I was willing to risk it . . .” Charlotte looked up at me from under her
eyelashes, now wet with tears. “. . . To save you.”
 
The anger drained out of me quickly, leaving
me slightly dizzy. In a moment of clarity, I embraced Charlotte.

“Thank
you,” I mumbled as I hugged her, certain I was losing my mind. “I’m sorry. I
don’t what came over me . . .” I got the impression that everyone was staring
in Daniel’s direction, as if he had something to do with my tumultuous
emotional state, but by the time I let go of Charlotte, everyone was looking
off blankly in different directions.
 

“We
should probably be getting back to the Station.” Mac’s smile looked pasted-on,
and he, like everyone else, seemed to be busy ignoring Daniel’s presence.

Their
rudeness was infuriating. It made me twitchy all over again. Strangely, I
fought back a low growl. Cat took Mac’s arm. The rest followed in pairs. Daniel
and I were the last to get on. The elevator was still black and grimy, and the
horrific grinding noise started up the instant we thought of the Station. If
possible, it smelled worse than it had the first time. My aggravation
intensified.

I
glanced first at Daniel, then my eyes zipped around at the each of them. Almost
imperceptibly, they appeared to be pushing themselves as close as possible to
the moldy walls without touching them—and
away
from Daniel.
   

Another
wave of irritation pulsed through me. My eyes narrowed, capturing their every
move at once. Charlotte’s
nervous hair flicking. Cat’s defiant stare.
Rin’s
clenched jaw. Mac’s too-straight posture, his chest puffed. And Gus and
Creesie
, unbothered, cool on the surface. I couldn’t hear
their thoughts. Any of them. This irritated me further, but I made myself
breathe through it and eventually it lessened.

“So,
Mac,” I forced myself to sound normal. “Tell me about these safety features you
mentioned earlier.”

Rin
answered for him. “It’s like those rides at the
amusement park, you know, the ones that say ‘You must be this tall to get on .
. .’”

Mac
chuckled nervously, flipped his hat around so the small bill was facing front.

“Yeah,
something like that,” he began, still pressing himself centimeters from the
icky walls. “With
Creesie
holding the elevator . . .
none of these, uh, folks”—he slipped a sideways glance at Daniel—“could board.”
He shrugged, but in his haste, it came off more like a nervous tick. “Like I
said, safety feature.” Nervously, he chuckled again.

Puzzled,
I looked at Daniel. He was leaning nonchalantly into the blackened wall, gazing
ever-so-casually at the elevator doors as though their comments and actions
didn’t trouble him the slightest bit.

“Then
how did Daniel escape?” I hesitated. Wasn’t that Daniel’s Station?
       

At last,
Creesie
broke her silence. She sound cold and
distant, not the
Creesie
I’d gotten to know. But
there was something else. I could feel it . . . If I dug a little beneath the
icy surface, she seemed . . . conflicted?

“A
selfless act enabled him to get on board,”
Creesie
murmured, still avoiding eye contact with Daniel. But I barely noticed, let
alone cared why. This was incredible news! My head clearing a little, I flashed
a huge smile at Daniel.

Of
course! His willingness to risk his soul for mine. A selfless act! That single
act had given Daniel the ability to change Stations. Even so, had it not been
for the six souls around us, Daniel would have surely spent all of eternity in
that dismal, wretched place. And to think how I had doubted them!

Unspent
tears pooled in my eyes. “I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you.”

“There
there . . .” Mac said, pulling a freshly starched hanky from his pocket. As I
blew my nose, he patted my head. “It’s nearly over now, doll.”

The
elevator, which had shot forward this time, screeched to a halt. Unlike the
last time, my legs held me steady. I felt rejuvenated, or maybe just more in
sync with my new form than I was before. I did notice that the elevator was
still covered in gunk, though not as much as there had been earlier. And some
part of me observed that the rows of figures carved in the massive doors looked
a little less downtrodden. But something was distracting me. As I looked down,
I saw that Daniel was holding my hand? Or . . .

Was I
holding his?

It felt
all wrong and all right. After all, hadn’t I loved him once? And hadn’t he been
willing to risk his neck, his
soul,
to save me? I suspected some part of my logic had a flaw, but it was easily
dismissed. We were together again! How could this be wrong?

The
elevator stopped. With our hands still entwined, Daniel took one step toward the
massive doors and I moved effortlessly with him. Not consciously, but easily.
Several pairs of hands grabbed me, preventing my escape.

Boiling
with irritation, I turned and snarled at them.

In the
sweetest tone imaginable, as though she feared my wrath,
Creesie
uttered, “I believe this is Daniel’s stop,” and I knew she meant that he should
go alone.

“Unfortunately,”
Gus added, though I sniffed more than a hint of insincerity.

I looked
pleadingly at Daniel, distraught at the thought of leaving him. At least, it
seemed so. I felt disoriented. In certain moments, my emotions seemed to belong
only to me; in others, not so much. As I fretted, Daniel flashed me one of his
classic smiles—the one that insisted he was part angel, part
your-worst-nightmare, the one that made any girl from eight to eighty wobble
slightly on their feet. He slipped an arm around my waist, his eyes locked on
mine. His body, a surfer’s build, felt taut and familiar, but his sandy locks
were longer than I remembered. As I lifted a hand to brush a curl from his
face, he smiled bigger. That’s when I had the most intense longing for a
thunderstorm—a crazy one.

“It’s
okay, love.” Daniel said easily, as if no time had passed and we were back in
the ninth grade, and madly in love. “They’re right. This is my stop.” He
glanced briefly at each of them. “Thank you.” He managed to sound polite but
indifferent. Returning to me, he said, “And most especially, my love, might I
thank you?”

My
stomach was churning. Storm clouds seemed to roil around me. Unable to tear my
eyes from his, I stared at him in wonder. There was such an innocence about
Daniel, a sensitivity that made me want to protect him. But, in this moment,
protecting him was the last thing on my mind.

His
first kiss brushed the side of my mouth, but the very next one held the promise
of that storm I had longed for. There passed a moment when I had the vaguest
sensation that I wasn’t quite myself, but I didn’t seem to care enough to think
this through. At some point, there were various sounds of disgust inside my
head, followed by a frenzied tugging on my arms and legs. Only then did Daniel
release me.

“No
worries, love. No distance could keep me from you now.” He blew me a kiss. I
felt it land on my cheek. I was still fighting them, holding out my arms to him
as he backed out of the elevator.

16
Returning

The
instant Daniel passed through the doors the elevator sped forward again. As the
stupor lifted from my head, I felt an unwavering sense of shame. I was also
sick to my stomach, and at an absolute loss to explain my bad behavior. It
wasn’t only what I had done, which was bad enough, but that I had felt so good
doing it. What was Ethan going to say if, or rather
when
, he found out? What on earth had possessed me?

“It
wasn’t your fault, Hope. Your will wasn’t entirely your own. Those were, I’m
sorry to say, the depraved.”
Creesie
was sounding
more like herself, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn’t quite
there. “If we’d arrived much later, I don’t . . .” There was a fading away of
her sentence that found its way into my thoughts.

I
winced.

As if
she were wiping away a disturbing thought,
Creesie
rubbed a hand over her forehead. “Sadly, it appears that many rumors we’ve
heard are true. Such a waste. They’re far too clever for their own good . . .”

“The
depraved?”
Rin
sounded impressed. “Never in a
million—”

“Never
in
another
million years,” Cat
growled as the elevator whirred soundlessly along, her foul mood now aimed at
Rin
. I inched closer to Mac, but
Rin
looked unfazed.
  

Music
was returning now. Something by Air Supply? The sound system here was fabulous.
Though the music was low, it sounded like the band was in the elevator with us.

“One of
my mother’s favorites,” Charlotte
whispered in my ear, implying she was the reason it was playing. Like the
jukebox at the Station, it ran on sheer thought. Though I was usually more of a
rocker, the music matched my sappy mood. I ignored the fact that Charlotte had selected,
“I’m All Out Of Love.”

Something
close to awe sparkled in
Rin’s
black velvet eyes.
“Did you see the way the depraved manipulated Hope? One had her convinced that
she was staring back into her own dead eyes, another that she was dancing with
Ethan . . .” I heard her whistle under her breath. “And all the while they were
busy stealing her soul!”

“I hate
to cut in on your pleasant retelling of my horror,” I snapped at
Rin
. “But how do you know what happened? I haven’t even
thought about it myself.”

“
Creesie
showed us while you were distracted by Daniel,” Charlotte answered in a
quiet voice. “But only the necessary parts. So we wouldn’t worry,” she added in
a rush.

Absent
his usual grin, I could see the worry on Mac’s face. “We were scared out of our
skulls while it was happening! After I lost sight of you, I—I—” He balled his
hand into a fist, shook it in the air. “Thank heaven, and Charlotte, of course, that you’re all right!”

“Of
course she’s all right!” Cat echoed. “You are all right, aren’t you, Hope?”

Their
concern was touching, but unnecessary. “I’m fine,” I said evenly, avoiding
thinking too hard about what they had prevented from happening—
an insignificant speck lost in a massive
black hole.
“Tell me more about these, um . . . depraved.”

“We’ve
heard enough stories about them—amoral individuals, liars, thieves, all sorts of
corrupt and perverse beings—and those are the good ones!”
Rin
sounded too enthusiastic for my tastes. Mac attempted to silence her with an
internal grumble, but it didn’t help. She was excited the way some people are
when they pass a car wreck and pray they see a dead body. “Yep . . . all your
standard and nonstandard varieties of evil inhabit that Station!”
 

I
attempted to let those words sink into my brain—powerful as they were—unable to
discern how Daniel had gotten himself stuck there, how I had narrowly avoided
getting my soul sucked away, and second-guessing what might have occurred if
Charlotte hadn’t been able to find me. Would I have ceased to exist? No more
Hope Valenti . . . ever? And what of Daniel? Would he have met a similar fate? He
was, like me, still alive, after all. If anything had altered . . . if Charlotte hadn’t reversed
time, if Daniel hadn’t risked his own eternity, if the six of them hadn’t been
there . . . Would our souls still be intact? And they were, weren’t they—intact?

“How did
. . .” I tried to form a question, but several others jumped in front to take
its place. “I mean, what would have happened if . . .” They were both about
Daniel. I was afraid to ask and desperate to know all in the same breath.
 

“The
depraved,” Gus went on, “have a reputation at our Station, a rather notorious
one, I admit. Do you recall my unique bird-squeezing ability?”

In a
moment of levity, I arched an eyebrow.
How
could I forget
?