Chapter 29: Chapter Twenty-Nine--Life & Death Are Both Absolute

I swallowed. The haziness turned black, sticky as tar as it approached the bottom step of the porch. So wrong. What am I forgetting? I glanced at the only family I had left.

Grandma’s serenity had faltered. Her skin took on a pasty pallor, her beautiful hazel eyes dulled.

I almost had it. What I was missing. I was torn between the man at my feet, and the woman beside me. A pivotal moment. A desperate choice.

“You must choose,” Grandma whispered hoarsely. “And it must be the right one. Both are permanent, in ways you cannot imagine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Life and death, in absolutes,” Kalvyn said sadly. “You must choose between us.”

“Why? You are both here,” I shrieked.

“Yes, we are. But, Katrina,” he said. The darkness paused at the top of the stairs, swallowing up the yard, the sky, the sun. Looming over us. “You are not. You hang in the brink, between two paths. Both are final. You must choose. Time is almost up.”

Memories crashed. Startled, I grabbed grandma’s papery skinned hand. Skeletal. I whimpered. “You’re dead.”

She smiled, I think. I couldn’t tell. “Yes, darling. I have been for quite some time. But I am always here. I never left you. I am in every sunrise, every breeze that caresses your cheek. Know that, when you come to your decision.”

“What decision?”

Kalvyn hugged my legs. “My love, you have yearned for death for so long,” he choked. God, was he on the verge of crying. “I didn’t know you existed. I couldn’t save you before the world turned on you. And I can never apologize enough. I cannot blame you if you still want to die.”

“Die?”

“Yes,” grandma said, much weaker now. “If you chose to come with me, into the darkness.” She motioned at the shadowy murk. “Then your torment will end. You will never be physically hurt again. But you will not know the happiness that is in store for you. You will lose Kalvyn.”

The past three days hit me like a truck. Meeting the man of my dreams, him caring for me in a way no one else ever had.

“If you chose me,” Kalvyn said. “Then you chose life, and everything I have to offer you. But before you do, know that I am as permanent as death. We would be never-ending. Death will never welcome you into peaceful arms.”

The murk came faster now. Tears poured down my cheeks. Grandma squeezed my hand. “You’re out of time, Katrina.”

I looked back and forth between them. That murk terrified me on a soul deep level. Selfish, I know.

“I choose Kalvyn. I chose life,” I found myself saying.

Grandma smiled again, and this time, it was stunning, filled with warmth and love. “Good choice. A strong choice. But I expected nothing less than the girl of my blood. Now wake, Katrina, and face the next obstacle in your life.”

My eyes snapped open. Soaked, stringy caramel and espresso strands plastered to my face.

My small chunk of the Earth blazed. If agony had a color, the sensation would be bright, blood red. Anger, a dark, dripping crimson. I had both in great supply.

My grandma’s face etched into my thoughts, though I couldn’t figure out how she fit into this. I lay on cold, slick wood, in a puddle of lake water. My head beat a nauseating rhythm. Lights flashed whenever I slammed my eyelids shut. The sticky, metallic scent of blood hung heavy on the breeze.

Between the strands of hair, I saw two sets of legs stalked back and forth on the deck of a boat. That’s right. The one that had an intimate encounter with my head.

Voices answered the first, then another. I counted three arguing. Yet, I sensed a fourth, close, malevolent. That one was to be feared.

My “rescuers” hadn’t noticed I’d awoken. Fortunately, for me. Every second that passed, their conversation chilled my blood that slid down my forehead, cheek, mingling with the puddle of water around my body, turning it red.

“Just throw her overboard,” the Gruff Man—as I’d come to call him—said.

“We can’t! She’s just a kid,” the Whiny Woman said.

“Clara,” Gruff Man said, with the briefest touch of an order.

My chest ached at that name. A name I hadn’t heard in so many damned years.

“Don’t say my name,” she hissed.

Yes, please, don’t say her name.

“Hey,” Hero Boy—this is the third time he’d come between them—said, “Just calm down. Look at the beach. We are not alone. Those people flocked the moment she went under, and you can’t tell me they didn’t see what happened. We’ll take her to shore and leave her with them. Then, if she dies, it isn’t our problem. No one can argue that she wasn’t an idiot in the first place. She came out of nowhere.” No one said anything. “Regardless, we can’t throw her out, like a bad catch. That is murder of a human. Makes us no better than the others.”

Murder of a human. As if they’re not. The others. As if they knew. Weren’t the Colbanes the only non-humans in Hell’s Gate?

“We must track the jaguars. They’re here somewhere. No way they left as we thought they had. The sightings say otherwise,” Whiny woman said. Something about her voice aggravated me, as if I’d heard her in my dreams or something.

“Yeah, I get it,” Hero boy snapped.

“If the three of you stand there arguing, we’ll lose all trace of them,” the four, the one I’d sensed, finally piped up. I decided to call him Mr. Quiet. “And those boys look about ready for murder themselves.”

No way he was talking about Kalvyn, Quinn or Syber. If anyone embodied intimidating men, it was them. And they'd slaughter these amateurs.