Protect Her: Part 10 (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO –
PAIGE

It was a surprising request. Ever since Riley appeared, I had been trying my best not to let him in. I walled off all of those emotions. If I let him in, I would have to tell him what I had done. I had already given myself over to Eva and negotiated a deal that gave me three more years on the mortal plane. Now that those three years had passed, she was ready to claim her end of the bargain.

I wasn’t all that surprised that I would have done something like that. The Paige of old wasn’t the kind of person that I was proud to remember. She was manipulative, dark and broken. But she had been a survivor. She would claw her way out of any situation and twist it to her advantage to give her a way to escape. I was nothing like her anymore, but her choices seemed to come back to haunt me no matter what I did.

There was a part of me that was ready to tell Riley to go away. I couldn’t handle looking into those beautiful green eyes knowing that everything I thought we had ahead of us was gone. Just like that, my future ceased to exist. But I knew I needed to find a way to tell him goodbye.

The worst part was I had a feeling once he found out, my dark angel would end up in a black place of his own. I acted like an anchor for him just as he did for me. But this ship had set sail. I couldn’t believe my dumb luck. I found the man of my dreams and barely had any time with him before I would cease to exist. I guess I should be grateful to have had him at all, but that was where the old Paige reared her ugly head.

I should be willing to fight for him, right? I should kick up my heels and do everything I could to try to stop the inevitable, but I worried what Eva would do to him. Riley was an angel now, but he was a newborn in their terms. He still had no idea of the extent of his abilities. Eva had been around for lifetimes before her banishment and had a thousand years to stew on what to do next. All of that centered on me. Riley would be nothing but collateral damage in her game. I couldn’t let that happen if I could help it.

I wasn’t sure how much time I had, but I found that I wanted to share this part of myself with Riley. It would be a strange way to say goodbye, but I could offer him some insight into who I had been before the darkness found its way into my life. It had always hovered there out of sight, but this time in my life had been innocent and pure. I wanted him to see that. I had been good once.

“Okay,” I said with a small nod. I had to fortify the walls around my emotions. I so badly wanted to throw myself into his arms and ask him to protect me from Eva, but that would be selfish and wrong. I had gotten myself into this predicament, and these were my lumps to pay, not his. Riley had sacrificed enough for me. How much more could I possibly ask of him?

“Lead the way,” he said, sweeping his arm out toward the field.

His hand still weighed in mine, and I began to draw him through the grass toward the commune. I didn’t want to spend this time talking about Eva. So I decided to talk about something else, something benign. “Did I tell you that I skipped two grades in school?”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. He stuck his other hand into his pocket as we walked. Although he was trying to appear casual, I knew he was wound up tight. He looked around the field. “Is this somewhere in Iowa?”

“Kansas,” I replied. I took a deep breath and let the smell of the air fill my nostrils. I always loved the way it smelled after a hard summer storm. “My parents moved around to five different communes from the time I was born until I was twelve. We never stayed in any one place for too long.”

“That must have been difficult,” Riley said. “I lived in the same house for my entire life until my mom sent me to live with Alice.”

“I guess I got used to it,” I said. “My mom was a schoolteacher before she met my dad, so she homeschooled me through second grade. Then when I finally was sent to public school, I was so far advanced that I got moved up. I think that was probably good for me later on, but it wasn’t the easiest thing constantly being the new girl and then being two years younger than everyone else in class.”

“Sounds lonely,” Riley said. “That I get. I had a lot of friends until I turned thirteen. For some reason, telling people that I was seeing ghosts didn’t help me keep them long after that.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I gave him a sidelong glance. “You and I had very different childhoods, but it feels like it was the same too.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Being part of the paranormal world puts a natural barrier between you and the rest of the normal people out there. They get to go about their lives with no knowledge of what else exists on the other side, and sometimes even right in their backyard. I spent a big part of my teenage years being jealous as hell of them, and then trying to be just like them. Except I never was.”

By this time, we had reached a small rutted path in the field. It was just as I remembered it. We turned onto it as I thought about what he said.

“I was different, but nobody ever told me why. I think that’s why my parents ended up moving so often too. I think about it now, and there were little clues that would start popping up. People would stare at me in the street, and kids from the commune would whisper and laugh at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. I didn’t find out until after my parents were murdered what all the secrecy was about. I didn’t know when they figured out that I had been marked as Eva’s vessel, but it had to be really early on judging by the way we moved around.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through all of that, Paige. At least in my case, I knew what I was dealing with right after it all started to happen. My family wasn’t big on keeping secrets.” He snorted and rolled his eyes. “At least not about that.”

We moved further down the path, and as we crested a hill the buildings of the commune appeared. Riley wasn’t pressing me for more details yet, and I was glad. There was so much tied up in my past that I didn’t like thinking about it all that much. It made me angry and sad. But I was willing to go there and show Riley. He brought out something in me that made me want to be vulnerable with him. I wanted to share all of my secrets with him. He made me feel safe. He was the first man to ever make me feel like that.

Even my friendship with Christopher, or the archangel Benjamin as I know him now, had been one that still had boundaries around it. The boundaries were necessary. I might have had amnesia, but I was still a woman with eyes. I knew Benjamin carried romantic feelings for me that I didn’t share. He was the solidarity in my new life though, so I hadn’t wanted to lose him. I let him get close, but never too close.

I didn’t have to do that with Riley. He had proved to me again and again that he wanted nothing but what was best for me. He would sacrifice for me if I asked him to, but I wouldn’t do that to him. I loved him too much for that. That made this stroll down memory lane with him all that more bittersweet.

“My house was over there,” I said, pointing toward a small, tan house with a slightly weather beaten look about it. “It wasn’t much. My mom didn’t work after I was born, and my father was a kind of handyman jack-of-all-trades. We never had a lot of money, but I never noticed. My mom was good at stretching how far a dollar would go, and people in the commune were always generous with their extras. I think that was part of the reason they were originally drawn to this life.”

“Usually there is some kind of shared religious belief that bring this kind of community together,” Riley said. I understood that he was being gentle about not bringing up the reality of the situation.

“I didn’t know anything about Eva,” I said. I didn’t see the need to beat around the bush. “My parents obviously fell into the Eva crowd at some point, but it wasn’t something they ever discussed with me. The adults would gather on Monday evenings in the town hall for weekly worship, but the children weren’t allowed. You were initiated into the adult community when you were fourteen. Until then, I guess they just figured it was okay to let the kids be kids.”

“I’m surprised that the commune’s children went to public schools,” Riley said. “That is…unusual.”

“I think the Disciples of Eva were a tiny fraction of people in the world. When it came to things like teachers, they were in short supply. My mom taught the younger kids wherever we went, but there was never more than four or five. So when we reached a certain age, they’d bus us to the local school. But those classes were tiny too, maybe fifty kids total in the whole school? I think the commune leaders spent a pretty penny paying off the local school district to keep quiet and leave us alone.”

“Guess that makes sense,” Riley said. “Show me your house.”

I tugged on his hand. Strangely, I felt eager to remember and show him this place. As we approached the house, I had a vision of my mom standing there on the steps with her hands on her hips and a disapproving frown. I was never fooled though. The moment I hit the steps, she would sweep me into a tight hug and ask me about my adventures. She always had time to stop and listen to my childhood prattle. I loved that about her.

“We would take walks after dinner every night,” I said. “My dad would tell my mom about his day, and my mom would tell him about my latest antics. It was peaceful. We’d run into friends and neighbors on our walks, and I remember how my parents would laugh and joke with them. They were very social people. I think it was hard for them to be constantly moving away from their friends.”

“They sound nice,” Riley said. “I would have liked to have met them.”

“I think they would have liked you,” I said with a soft smile. We stepped up onto the porch. I turned and looked around me. “Even though this was my favorite of the communes we lived in, we were here the shortest amount of time. It was less than a year.”

“What happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I woke up one night and heard my parents arguing. That was strange in and of itself because my parents never argued. From everything I remember, they were a perfect match.”

I stepped to the window to look inside, and I gasped. Riley quickly moved beside me, but I put my hand up to stop him from interrupting the scene that I saw in front of me. Inside the house, I saw my parents.

My mom laughed as she moved around the small kitchen. She was making dinner. My dad sat at the small table with the checkered tablecloth facing away from us. I could see the small glass of whiskey on the table in front of him. Drinking was generally frowned upon in the commune, but my dad still allowed himself a nightly drink with dinner. Every time my mother mom passed him, my dad reached out and touched her. A swat on the butt or an attempt to pull her into his arms. I could hear her admonishing him, but I knew she was delighted at the same time. The way that she glowed told me that she thoroughly enjoyed the attention.

I felt tears well in my eyes. This was the point in their lives where they weren’t that much older than me. My dad was just turning thirty. My mom was only a year younger than him.

“Where did your parents meet?” Riley asked in a hushed tone.

“They told me at school, but I don’t think that was the truth,” I whispered back. “I don’t know how, but they both believed in Eva. I think it must have been through mutual friends of the Disciples that brought them together.”

Riley drew me backward, and I found that I wanted to rush forward and press my face against the glass and watch them. It had been too long since I had seen their faces. Those pictures in my head had dimmed throughout the years. Although I wasn’t as happy about having the ‘old Paige’ as part of my memories again, being able to remember where I came from was a relief.

“Show me something else,” he said. He pushed a stray piece of hair out of my eyes. “You were happy here. These are your memories. We can go anywhere you want. Show me something else.”

I wasn’t sure how to do what he asked, but I knew that he was right. We were inside my head. I closed my eyes and thought hard about my favorite memories. I heard Riley’s gasp, and then he chuckled.

I opened my eyes and smiled as I took in the sight in front of me. A lanky blond girl stood up on stage with a bright smile on her face. She held a bouquet of daisies and waved at the crowd who were on their feet clapping for her.

“I starred in the school play in seventh grade,” I said. “We moved to this town just a few days before school started, and I was going through what my mom called my ‘dramatic’ phase. She told me that I ought to channel all of that angst into acting, so that’s what I did.”

Riley started to clap for the girl on the stage too, and I grinned at him. Then he flopped into one of the empty theater seats next to us and patted its neighbor encouraging me to sit with him. I had a sense that our time together was growing short. But still I sat down

“Tell me more about this budding acting career,” he said. “What was the play?”

“Annie Get Your Gun,” I said. “You mean you can’t tell by the cowgirl attire and braids?”

“That was going to be my first guess,” Riley said with a serious expression. “Based on the crowd’s reaction, I see an Academy Award in your future.”

My smile fell from my face. He immediately reached for me. “What’d I say?”

It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know the whole story. I could lie and cover it up. That was what old Paige would have done. I was different now though. I decided to tell him the truth. It was going to eat me up otherwise being this close to him knowing that these precious few moments were going to be our last ones together.