The Space Beyond (The Book of Phoenix) (27 page)

“I made choices,” she said. “I chose to move in with him when I really didn’t know him all that well. I chose to ignore any signs that things were off with him. I—”

“Did his business card say Doctor and Cowardly Woman Beating Asshole, and you chose to be with him anyway? Did he hand you a police record that you chose to ignore? Even if you’d known about what he did at the hospital or his past, he would have found a way to explain it away. He’s that kind of person. You didn’t
choose
any of this, Bex.”

“But I shoulda—”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda … We all have those. If you go down that road, I should have known about the asshole who dated my sister—and beat her. I’d known him since we were six years old. If nobody saw the signs in him for over eight years, no way could you have known about Mason.”

Her head turned slightly toward me. “Your sister?”

I swallowed, my throat dry. Until Leni, I hadn’t talked about this with anyone since it happened. But if anyone needed to hear the story, Bex did.

“Yeah. The guy she dated in high school—the damn quarterback football star who everyone loved—he abused her. Repeatedly. I hadn’t known for months, until she finally told me. She died on the side of the highway when I was trying to get her away from him.” My white knuckles caught my eye, and I loosened my grip on the steering wheel.

“I’m so sorry,” Bex whispered.

“And I’m sorry you had to go through this, too. Bex, these fuckers …” I shook my head and rolled my shoulder. “They know how to pretend like they’re the greatest people you could ever meet. That’s how they do it. Otherwise, they’d never reel anyone in. So don’t blame yourself.
Please
don’t blame yourself. Nobody deserves this, and that includes you.”

She turned to look out the window again and fell silent for another mile or so. “I’m done with men. They’re no good for me.”

“Hey, we’re not all assholes.” Although, I basically had been before I met Leni.

“Yeah, well, I must be a magnet for the ones who are.” She sighed. “I’d only wanted true love. Like what you and Leni have.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. What Leni and I had was way beyond true love or anything comprehensible. There may have been thousands or millions of Twin Flames on Earth, but only a handful of us—those in the Phoenix Guardians—actually knew what we had. Nobody else could possibly understand the timeless and penetrating connection we shared, especially after being One soul, ripped apart, and finding each other again.

“As they say, that usually happens when you’re least expecting it,” I finally said as I pulled onto the exit ramp. “Or even wanting it.”

“Great,” she muttered. “I definitely don’t want it now. I think I’ll get me some cats and grow old with them. Sit in my rocker on the front porch when I’m old and gray with nothing but cats to keep me company. At least you know from the start that they’re assholes.”

I chuckled, glad to hear she kept her sense of humor. Probably a defense mechanism, but the best one anyone could have.

“Do you want me to call Ty?” I asked. He probably wouldn’t answer, but maybe a voicemail about Bex being hurt would be the kind he’d finally respond to.

She sniffed and closed her eyes before shaking her head. “Nah. That could only go one of two ways—either he doesn’t care, or he’d drive down to Orlando in a fury and end up getting arrested himself. I don’t think I can deal with either right now.”

Leni stopped at her camper and met us over at Bex’s trailer a few minutes later. I was still pulling the bags out of the back of the truck when she drove up. Sissy reached for the sheets and blankets Leni had retrieved from her place—Bex apparently hadn’t left any when she moved out—and Leni took the bags from me. The girls all went inside while I stayed out and kept watch. The Dark feeling of the Lakari wasn’t too far off, but not directly overhead. They were probably scattering for the shadows as the sun rose.

The sky was a light gray by the time Leni came out. She grabbed the Book from Bex’s car, and we walked home, leaving her truck where it was for now. We both sank into bed, exhausted.

“You
dropped
the Book, huh?” I asked Leni later that afternoon as we sat outside, drinking our coffee. Said Book sat on the picnic table between us. “The one special thing that could have all of our answers just fell out of your purse?”

Her lips quirked. “I may have helped it along.”

“And why the hell would you do that?” I demanded.

“Following my instinct, Jeric. I thought maybe her memory needed a little jogging.”

I stared at her, not understanding.

“The trip to Alaska confirmed everything I’d felt in my gut about my parents and the relationships we didn’t really have. Confirmed my
instinct
. So I decided I needed to trust that same instinct that told me Bex was Rebethannah. And I figured if she is, maybe she’d see something in the Book that would remind her.”

“Except she wouldn’t be able to open it.”

Her smile grew. “That’s why I left it open.”

I let out a growl. She was pleased with herself. I was anything but. “And what if she’s not Rebethannah and read everything in there? What if the Book fell into the wrong hands, like the Lakari’s? You know how big of a risk that was for us
and
Bex?”

Leni waved me off. “If she’s not a Guardian, and if she actually read it, she’d think it was a made-up story and some drawings.”

I stared at her with disbelief. “Well? Did she look at it? Did she remember anything?
Is
she Rebethannah?”

Now she finally frowned. “I don’t know. She didn’t seem too impressed with the Book when she gave it back to me. I know she’d just been through a lot, but I’d hoped for some indication …”

She pulled the Book closer and swiped her finger over the lock to open it. She thumbed through the pages. No evidence that Bex had even looked at it.

“Whoa. This wasn’t here before,” Leni said when she reached the last page of the drawings I’d done of Nathayden.

This sketch had been weird, because the vision of his face had come to me, but neither of us remembered when he’d looked like that. We still knew it was him, though, in the same way we knew the others were. And now, scrawled to the side of the drawing were the words: “I feel you close, my love. Please come back to me.”

Leni and I looked at each other. She flipped through the rest of the pages, but no other messages showed up. She slammed the Book shut.

“That has to mean she’s Rebethannah and Nathayden’s communicating with her.”

I cocked my head. “We don’t know that. It could mean all kinds of things. We could be wrong that the picture is even him.”

She shook her head adamantly. “I denied my instinct this whole time, thinking we were wrong. Maybe if I had listened to it and tried harder with Bex, she wouldn’t be all beat up right now.”

I rubbed my hand over her back. “Babe, you can’t blame yourself for that. That was nobody’s fault but the asshole who did it.”

“I know,” she muttered, “but the point is, we didn’t follow my instinct and that’s what we’re supposed to do. I have to stop denying what I feel deep inside, and so do you.”

I kissed the side of her head. “Bex is safe now. We don’t have to rush into anything until we know more. Maybe figure out that damn Book.”

She folded her arms on the table and leaned her forehead against them, then started mumbling to herself about instincts and believing and bullshit clues. I went inside for something to eat, and Leni’s phone rattled on the counter. I glanced at the screen. A text message notification. I carried the phone outside to her, along with a box of crackers. Ghost ran up to me as I handed her the phone, and we shared some crackers while Leni read the text.

“No fucking way,” she said, jumping to her feet. “And I just now got this?”

She climbed away from the picnic table, tossed the phone at me and ran inside. “Call Brock and Asia. We need to go!”

I read the message from Sissy’s phone: “This is Bex. I didn’t want you to worry. We had to go to Orlando to take care of funeral and other stuff. Since Mason’s still in the slammer, we’re going back to get as much of my stuff as we can while we’re down there. We checked. He’s still there. We’ll be fine.”

The message showed as being sent over an hour ago. Which meant they had a big head start on us.

My own phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out. I hadn’t had a chance to call Brock, but he’d sent me a text: “They found Ty’s truck at a dead-end road in the swamps, over by the springs of the actual Lake Haven. Doesn’t look good.”

Fuck. I blew out a breath. “Leni?”

She came flying out of the camper, but froze on the step.

“What the hell?” she gasped.

I followed her gaze to the Book on the table.

Smoke seeped out between the leaves of paper. I threw the Book open. The pages flipped by themselves as a plume of dark smoke curled upwards, then cleared when the pages fell still. A new message had burned into several of them:

“You KNOW, Jacquelena! SAVE HER!”

Chapter 24

Get it done. Get it over with. Move on
.

The words started playing on repeat in my mind the moment Sissy and I got in the car.

“I can’t believe what an ass he is,” she said for the sixteenth time as she drove us to Orlando. Maybe not that many or maybe more. I wasn’t really paying attention. “
Good riddance.
That’s what Uncle Troy says about his own baby sister’s death.”

I wasn’t so surprised. He’d said before if Mama were on fire, he wouldn’t walk across the street to piss on her. He’d written her off long ago. Maybe if I’d had been a stubborn mule like him, I wouldn’t feel like I’d been hit by a truck right now. A truck with
Mason
on the grill instead of
Mack
.

“And then to say we had to be out of our own home in three days because he’d rented it?” Sissy carried on.

I tuned her out, tears stinging my eyes as I stared at the passing green landscape. I was so sick of crying. They hadn’t stopped all night. Or morning, I should say. I hadn’t managed a wink of sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about where I’d made the wrong turn.

The morning after the pork chop fight? Had I been stupid to believe the accident bit and forgive him? Was I an idiot for going back to him then? It sure seemed like it now, but at the time, I don’t think I could have known. He’d been so sweet, so caring and giving before then. I’d had no reason to believe anything like that would happen again.

Besides, I’d already been neck-deep in debt to him by then. He would have said the same shit he did last night, getting a damn hard-on for trapping me so completely. I had no idea what I would do if he came after me for the money for Mama’s medical bills. No way in hell could I pull all of that together, and I couldn’t afford two minutes with a lawyer, so I couldn’t fight it. But I could never stay with him and pretend to love him either.

My stomach clenched at the thought, and a shudder ran down my spine.

What choice do you have?
A small voice whispered in my head. And that’s what brought me to tears every time. Because I didn’t know if I really had much choice. If I did, I couldn’t see it now. I could only hope he stayed in jail long enough for me to figure something out.

We went to the crematorium first, signed the last of the papers, and said goodbye to Mama for good. She’d wanted to be cremated, and we had no problem with that. It was the cheapest option, and when we told the man we had absolutely no money and no reason for a service or a plot, he really cheapened it down. Probably put her in a cardboard box and pushed it into the fire right after we left. How sad to go like that, when not even your own kids care. She was my mama, but she’d been the one to put us all where we were in the first place. Broke in the bank. Broke in the heart. Broke in the soul.

If it weren’t for her, I’d have never met Mason Hayes.

If it weren’t for her, I’d have never been born. At the moment, I really wished I never had been.

But I couldn’t blame Mama for what Mason did. She’d fallen for him like everyone else had. And it wasn’t like she’d intentionally set me up with him. Like Jeric said this morning, I couldn’t blame anyone but the asshole himself.

“Are you sure you wanna do this?” Sissy asked when we parked in front of the condo building.

I looked up at the third floor door, squinting through the growing darkness of twilight. I couldn’t see the yellow police tape that had been there last night, and no cop stood duty anymore. With a hard swallow to wet my desert mouth and throat, I nodded.

Get it done. Get it over with. Move on
.

“Clothes and photo albums. I’m not gonna worry about anything else,” I said. There wasn’t much else to worry about. Mason had made me put most of our belongings in some storage unit I didn’t have the key to because he didn’t want it cluttering up his home.

We both climbed out of the car and made our way toward the stairs.

“What about your angels?” Sissy asked.

I snorted. “Sissy, don’t you know by now? There ain’t no such thing as angels.”

When we reached the top of the stairs and stood in front of the navy blue door to Mason’s condo, I froze. I didn’t want to return to the scene. I didn’t want to remember it all again. It had replayed on the backs of my eyelids all morning when I was supposed to be sleeping.

Get it done. Get it over with. Move on
.

But I couldn’t make my arm raise the key to the hole. Sissy eventually took the keys out of my hand and unlocked the door. As soon as she twisted the knob, panic set in.

Don’t go in. Don’t go in. Please, for the love of us, don’t go in.

I blinked and shook my head to clear it. I couldn’t listen to that voice, although the sound of it had been shocking. It hadn’t been mine. It had almost sounded like a man’s. Regardless, I had to be strong. I could do this. I
had
to do it.

Sissy pushed the door open. My heart raced in my chest. Darkness loomed in front of us. With only a little bit of fumbling, Sissy found the switch and flipped it up. Light flooded the hallway and into the kitchen and dining area, barely touching the living room. I wiped my damp hands on the back of my jean shorts, stepped inside and reached behind me to close the door as Sissy went farther in and turned on all the lamps in the living room.

“Ohmagosh,” she gasped.

The place smelled like bleach and lemons and something sweeter. I took a few more steps down the hall, the sound of my flip-flops on the tile echoing, and realized why. The condo had been cleaned. A business card for a cleaning service lay on the table in the entryway, now standing upright. All the glass and mess had been cleaned up. And the sweet smell? Dozens of bouquets of flowers sat on every flat surface in the kitchen, dining area, and living room. Roses, tulips, carnations, and other flowers I didn’t know the names for, all pink or white or both.

“Forgive me,” Sissy read from one of the cards stuck in a bouquet. She picked another out randomly and another, reading from them. “I’m sorry. I love you. Forever mine.”

Every bouquet had a delivery card from a florist. They must have arrived while the cleaning service was here.

“They all say the same—whoa.” She paused at a bouquet of roses and held one stem out for me to see better. Something sparkly dangled from it. “A diamond bracelet. You think it’s real?”

“No doubt it is,” I muttered as my eyes swept over all the flowers. Several of them included presents that Sissy inspected—other jewelry, hot pink and black lacey lingerie, even gift certificates for spa days and massages and clothing stores. Did he really think I was so shallow? That I could be bought like this?

Of course, he did. That’s what he’d been doing all along, wasn’t it?

I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat. “The photo albums are in the guest room closet. I’ll get my clothes packed.”

“It’s kind of a shame to let all this go to waste,” Sissy said. “Maybe we should pack it up, too. We could sell a lot of it.”

“Don’t touch any of it, Sissy,” I said through clenched teeth.

She sighed as she headed for the guest room. With a deep inhale and then exhale, I opened the master bedroom door, flipped on the light and walked several steps inside.

And my heart shot through the roof.

“Ohmagosh!” I gasped.

I clapped my hand to my chest, trying to stop the galloping of my heart. It hadn’t really shot through the roof, after all, but I thought it might fly out of my chest now as I stared at the man sitting in the corner chair, one leg crossed over the other.

“What are you doing here?” I said with barely any force as I tried to catch my breath. I shuffled a step backward.

“Precious Bex, you didn’t really think I’d give up so easily, did you? You’re mine. Forever.”