Lilah didn’t dare approach the thicket of huckleberry bushes as a dozen uniformed men, including her father, began unearthing the frozen, compacted soil that was interlaced with dried roots and wriggling earthworms. Instead, she crouched beneath a nearby fir tree, its feathery branches providing a temporary safe haven from the unsettling scene. As brave as she had tried to be when she was speaking to the frightened girl that had once been her mother, both courage and adrenaline were gone now, leaving nothing but fear and heartache in their absence. She never had the chance to get to know either her adopted mother or her biological one, and while her mission to find Willow had been a brief one, it had instilled in her a fleeting sense of hope – hope that she would eventually find the woman who gave birth to her.
Now, as several of the men began shouting and gesturing – for there were indeed human remains precisely where Lilah had said they would be – her last glimmer of hope was replaced by grief. It wasn’t that she doubted that Willow’s bones would be found there; but somewhere deep down, she couldn’t help but pray that she had been wrong.
Jace was the first to jog over to her, using the back of his hand to wipe fresh dirt and sweat from his brow.
“You were right,” he said. “Not that I ever doubted you, but… I’m so sorry.”
Lilah gave him a tight smile. “Thanks.”
“They’re going to start combing the surrounding forest to try and find… well, anything else. And the forensics team is being called in to gather DNA evidence.” He knelt to put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“As okay as can be expected, I guess. It’s a lot to process. But, um… would you stay here with me?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied, settling down beside her. “What’s going through your mind right now?”
“I’m just thinking about everything that’s happened,” Lilah replied. “And what happens next.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well… Sheriff Reid offered me a job.”
Jace looked surprised. “He did?”
“Yeah. Do you, uh, want to take a walk?” she asked, eyeing the men with shovels. Even though the sky was blue and free of clouds, and sunlight was pouring in between the branches above, there was a growing chill in the air. An officer had begun to wrap yellow tape around the surrounding area while the two county sheriffs huddled together, directing various aspects of the exhumation. Stanley was standing off to the side, speaking into a walkie-talkie.
“Absolutely.” Jace stood to his feet and extended a hand to Lilah, which she took gratefully. Her legs were trembling. They walked in silence for a short while, until the sound of shovels clanking against frozen earth was far behind them.
Lilah shoved her hands in her pockets, glad to be moving her legs. “I rode with Sheriff Reid on the way here. He told me that he has an entire file drawer of cold cases. Crimes with no leads and no hope of being cracked… not without my help, according to him. He said that I could work as many or as few hours as I wanted, and he’d move whatever funds he had to in order to get me on the payroll.”
Jace let out a low whistle. “That’s a hell of an offer. But I thought you wanted to keep your superpowers a secret?”
She shrugged. “He promised that it would stay between him and me… Well, and my dad, of course.”
“So, you said yes, right?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
“Really?” he blinked in surprise. “What’s holding you back?”
“I don’t know. It’s a little frightening, you know? Dealing with the remnants of all those poor people. On top of that, it just seems… wrong somehow.”
She had stopped walking, and Jace followed suit. “Wrong?” he asked. “How so?”
Lilah knelt down to pick up a pinecone, peeling the layers of bark away as she spoke. “After a lot of tears, Willow eventually understood what I was trying to tell her – that she had died, and I was talking to her from the future. She probably only believed me because she had those experiences with me as a baby. But… I don’t know. If I help the sheriff, there will be others like her, but they’ll be strangers. Strangers who are long-dead. Strangers who will be lost and confused and frightened. It seems almost cruel to disturb them, you know? To tell them something so awful and still not be able to help them.”
Jace was quiet for a long moment, thinking about what she had said. As he stood there ruminating, Lilah unearthed a tiny evergreen sapling from the soil and was making it grow and shrink with age. Only a few inches at a time, just in case anyone else happened to walk over to them, but Jace was mesmerized. No matter how many times she did things like that, he didn’t think he would ever get used to it.
“When I was talking to my mother in the cemetery a couple weeks ago – Marie, that is – she asked a really interesting question. I didn’t understand the answer until just the other day.”
“What’s that?” Jace asked.
“She said, ‘I wonder if I’ll remember this moment in my previous timeline? Or are you just conjuring up a copy of me from my ashes?’”
“To be honest, I was wondering the same thing about Willow,” Jace said, looking across the clearing, where more uniformed officers had just arrived at the scene. “You managed to bring her back during her last moments on earth. But sixteen years ago, did she remember speaking to you before she died? Or was it like it never happened? And then that brought up another question in my mind. At the concert, when you said I was flickering between younger and older versions of myself, I didn’t even realize it was happening. I knew where I was, who you were, and so on, even when I reverted to a little kid. Your father said the same thing the other night.”
Lilah was nodding as she watched the tuft of pine needles beneath her palm multiply and grow.
“I guess what I’m trying to say – or rather ask – is, why did your dad and I keep all of our past and present memories inside the bubble but Willow and Marie only had limited ones? Why didn’t they remember dying?”
The question didn’t appear to catch Lilah off-guard. After all, she had been pondering the same subject ever since her conversation with Willow. She’d sat awake almost all of last night contemplating it, and when the sun rose that morning, she was still thinking about it. It was all she and her father had spoken about until they walked into the sheriff’s office earlier that day.
“I think it’s because they were just… remnants of their past selves. Unlike you and my father, Willow had been long dead when her past self reappeared. Her spirit or ‘soul’ or whatever you want to call it had already left her body, many years ago. So, in a way, when I brought her back, I was just talking to a husk. A photocopy of her former self.”
“Like a clone?”
She nodded. “Sort of. That’s why the memories she had were limited to the moment I resurrected her. Willow’s higher consciousness was gone, so talking to that version of her was like talking to a recording – like when we played back Mike’s cassette tape…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I wish I could explain it better than that.”
“No… it actually makes some sense,” Jace said, frowning slightly. “But then, what about Mike? How do we explain what happened to him?”
Lilah stood up, wiping the mud from the knees of her jeans. “My dad has a theory. He thinks that organisms who pass through time vortexes undergo a huge amount of physical stress, since every cell in their body is being affected by the distortion. He told me that his whole body ached after coming out of the time bubble the other night. He’d never actually been physically affected by it before, since he was always holding onto me when it happened in the past.”
“I wasn’t going to mention it, but the next day was pretty lousy for me too,” Jace admitted. “I woke up feeling like I’d just run a marathon. Except my arms hurt too. My ears even hurt. I felt that way after the concert too, but I just assumed it was from, you know, falling off a balcony.”
Lilah winced. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Then don’t try,” Jace winked. “Anyway, go on. I’m listening.”
She fiddled with the gold watch on her wrist self-consciously. “Well… Dad thinks that when you actually die in a vortex, it’s even harder on the body. The energy needed for trillions and trillions of dead cells to revert back to living cells has to put an enormous strain on a person, right? So, if you’re a relatively healthy person, you’ll probably come out of it feeling like you were hit by a bus. But if you’re a twenty-year-old cat or a middle-aged man who recently poisoned himself with mushrooms, you probably won’t make it out of the distortion in one piece.” She shuddered, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. “Anyway, that’s just Dad’s working theory. But he did sneak a peek at the autopsy on Sheriff Reid’s desk and it said that Mike’s official cause of death was ‘amatoxin-induced organ failure.’ Based on the amount of mushroom tea they found in his system, Dad says he would have been dead by sundown whether or not I dragged him through a time vortex.” She sighed. “Of course, my dad’s been known to say whatever he can to make me feel better, but… I think I believe him.”
“I believe him too,” Jace said, putting an arm around her shoulder. “But going back to your new job offer, if you’re just conjuring up copies of people from their ashes, I don’t think you need to feel bad about disturbing anyone. When the bubble disappears, nothing will have changed, and no time will have passed. But you’ll have answers that no one else would have been able to get,” he said, pointing to the old gold watch she was still wearing on her wrist, “and I for one think that’s pretty incredible.”
Lilah rested her head on his shoulder. “Thank you.”
Jace wrapped both arms around her. “Thank you, Lilah Quinn.”
“For what?” she asked, gazing up into his ocean-colored irises. A shiver ran down her back as he brushed his cool lips against her flushed forehead.
“For giving me something to care about.”
To Lilah’s dismay, the sound of distant voices was growing louder. She looked over her shoulder to see Sheriff Reid and her father making their way across the clearing. Jace cleared his throat as he took a narrow side-step away from her. But he kept his hand on the small of her back, which further excited the butterflies in Lilah’s stomach. Strangely, Stanley didn’t seem to mind when he saw the two of them standing like that.
“You did a great thing today, kid,” he said, clasping her shoulder with a gloved hand. “But I think it’s better if you don’t stick around for the next part. Why don’t you two get out of here? Go see a movie or something?” To Lilah’s immense surprise, he flashed Jace a quick wink.
“It goes without saying, but this never could have happened without you, little lady,” Sheriff Reid said, removing his hat. “Thank you for that. I promise you, I won’t rest until we find the guy who did this. I already have Pam searching the archives for anyone who might fit the description you gave me.”
Lilah tried to force a smile onto her face. “That’s good to hear.”
The sheriff gave her a wan smile in return. “I’m sorry for your loss. I know this can’t be easy for you. But I hope you’ll consider my offer. There are a lot of families out there who are hurting like you. And they’ve given up on ever getting answers. But you – you could give them the gift of closure.”
“Jesus, Dave,” Stanley muttered over his shoulder. “She doesn’t need that kind of pressure right now.”
“Actually, I’d like to help,” Lilah said, giving her father’s hand a grateful squeeze. “Mom told me that my gift would make the world a better place. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’d like to at least give it a try.”
“Come by the station anytime, Detective Quinn,” the sheriff replied. “I’d be honored to have you.”
“Go on now, kid,” Stanley said, ruffling her hair. “Get out of here.”
With one last look across the clearing, Lilah turned to leave. Despite everything, she somehow felt lighter. Willow’s story would finally have an ending. And while she no longer felt the girl’s sad, gray eyes following close behind her, something told Lilah that wherever Willow was, she was finally, truly at peace.