“Aim for the pads,” Sam told me, holding them up to his chest so I could practice my jabs, my cross, and my hook, like Caleb taught me at the beginning of the summer.
“You have to follow them ladybug, the enemy won’t stay still for you.” He brought his arms out to the side and above my head, so high that I couldn’t reach.
“I’m not tall enough,” I argued, jumping as high as I could, but not touching him. Not even close.
“Find something to help you then. You won’t always be evenly matched, and I can’t be there to help you.”
Of course not. You died. The thought came into my mind, but I pushed it away. Sam wasn’t dead, he was right in front of me, training me like they should have my whole life, to prepare me for what we were up against. “There’s nothing here,” I said instead. We were in a field with tall grass. It was the perfect summer day, with not a cloud in the sky…but there wasn’t any sun either. The light was white and artificial.
It felt like he kept getting taller and taller, so his head was further and further away from me. I looked around again, but couldn’t see anything I could use to get higher, until Beth showed up out of nowhere.
“Beth!” I exclaimed. “Do you have a spell or something I can use? Maybe a ladder?” I asked, showing her how tall Sam was.
“You have everything you need,” she said with a smile and a wink before walking over to me and crouching down, so I could get on her shoulders.
“Are you sure?” I asked, knowing I must be pretty heavy.
“I’ve got you,” she said with confidence.
I climbed on and let her straighten up, which gave me a few extra feet, but it wasn’t enough. I looked down, about to tell her we needed more height, but I recognized Cassandra walking over and crouching down, like Beth had. I was sure I couldn’t stay on, that there was no way the three of us could stand on top of each other without toppling over, but we did. I was almost there, so I tried extending my arms, but I couldn’t reach.
By now I was expecting it when Rosalind ran over and crouched down. I wasn’t even surprised when Annabelle came and managed to carry us all on her shoulders, making me at least four heads taller than Sam, who smiled.
“You figured it out.”
“I had help,” I argued, bringing my gloves to his pads, as he slowly regressed to his normal size.
The world was beautiful from up so high, and I felt like I could do anything, but as ‘our enemy’ grew smaller, the girls relieved their charges, one by one. Once I was on solid ground, back to my own height, my ancestors smiled at me and walked off into the field they came from.
“Wait!” I called after them, but only Annabelle looked back at me and smiled, none of them even slowing down.
“They did what they needed to,” Sam shrugged, taking off the pads.
“Will they come back?”
“I guess if you need them to.”
“I need all the help I can get right now.”
“You’re living the adventure we dreamed about.”
“Not like this,” I argued. “It was supposed to be scary and thrilling, with magical creatures and pirates and happy endings.”
“You can’t tell if the ending is happy until you reach it,” he reminded me.
“When did you start talking like this?” I asked instead of telling him that the ending couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t there.
“When I became a grown-up,” he ruffled my hair.
“I miss how easy it was when the manor was my playground and I was cute, so you followed me around and played all my games. Your mom made us cookies and ice cream, both if I was sad…”
“You were an annoying little monster,” he was clearly lying and couldn’t keep a straight face.
“You loved me.”
“Still do,” he assured me, as the clouds moved overhead. I looked up to see if the sun was still there, but when I came back down, we were in the parking lot at the motel.
“Sam, we need to go.” I felt a chill and knew in my bones that something terrible was about to happen. I looked around in fear for Donovan and his followers to pounce on us. “Sam!” I turned and his throat was slit, with blood pouring out of it.
“Lucy,” he struggled. “What did you do?”
“No, I didn’t want this to happen, I tried to…”
“How could you?” he asked, clutching at his throat before falling to the ground.
“Everyone you love dies,” Donovan came out of nowhere and spat, less than an inch from my face.
I screamed and woke up in a room I didn’t recognize, with sweat pouring off me. I pulled the covers up to my chin and tried to breathe, reminding myself I was in Embry’s house in New Orleans and it was just a nightmare. My breathing came back to normal as Gabriel rushed in, but the pain in my heart remained. The part that made the dream a nightmare was the part that really happened.
“Do you hear that?” I asked as Embry ran into the room, holding a baseball bat. I saw that Gabriel had discarded a fire poker when he saw I was alone in the room.
“It was just a nightmare,” Embry said, sitting on the bed with me.
“I know. I’m sorry I woke you, but…that’s my name.” I wasn’t sure at first, but I could hear it as clearly as Embry’s words. Someone outside the window was calling my name.
“Is Charlie’s…” Gabriel sounded like he was ready to have some very unpleasant words with Eric if he was the cause of my nocturnal turmoil.
“No, it sounds like…” I stopped myself. It didn’t make any sense. They would think I was crazy.
“It sounds like what?” Embry asked, but the sound was already growing faint. With the lights on and the guys there, I could almost convince myself I imagined it.
“It sounded like Sam calling me,” I admitted, hating the look they exchanged, full of pity and concern.
“You don’t hear it anymore?” Gabriel asked gently.
“Not as clearly.”
“What was the nightmare?” Embry asked, his hand still on mine to help me calm down.
“It was just a weird dream with Sam.” I knew how it sounded. “But then he died, and it was my fault, and he was so hurt.”
“Sam knows it wasn’t your fault and doesn’t blame you,” Embry told me.
“No, the real Sam doesn’t know or feel anything, because he’s dead.” I knew he was trying to help, but this wasn’t something I wanted to feel better about.
“Pancakes?” Gabriel asked, making Embry and I both look at him like he was crazy. “Unless you would rather go back to sleep, but it’s 4 a.m., I’m up and I’m hungry.”
Embry looked at me to assess how I was feeling, so I shrugged, “I’m not getting back to sleep any time soon.”
“I’ll get them started.”
There was one other time Gabriel made me pancakes in the middle of the night, although if memory served, they were actually crepes. Clara had this freak fever and I can’t remember where Embry was, but Sam wanted someone to stay with me at the plantation so I wouldn’t catch it, and Gabriel was the one who showed up. I was not happy and wanted nothing more than to be back with Sam and Deanna, helping them take care of Clara. I would sing to her until she fell asleep, and hold her hand, so I spent the night on the couch, convinced they were going to call for me. When Gabriel realized I wasn’t sleeping, he made crepes and we had one of those rare times where it’s the middle of the night and he talks to me.
Part of me expected Embry to go back to bed so it would be like last time, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen when I was this upset.
It was hot in the house because Embry didn’t believe in air conditioning unless it was so hot there was a chance we would melt. Still, I felt a chill, so I brought the quilt from the bed down with me.
“Do you want to take out the toppings?” Gabriel asked me while he worked the griddle.
“I’ll set the table,” Embry volunteered.
I took out peanut butter, Nutella, cinnamon, sugar, bananas, strawberries, lemon, cheese, and apples, then got chopping and slicing.
“What kind of toppings are these?” Embry asked once the table was set.
“It’s the middle of the night so I didn’t know if dessert pancakes or apple-cheese pancakes were more appropriate,” I explained.
“You’re adorable.” Embry shook his head and started chopping the strawberries for me.
Soon enough we had a pile of crepes and a table covered with possible toppings.
“Delicious,” I said once I bit into my apple-cheddar crepe. I coaxed Gabriel into letting me put the toppings on while it was still in the pan, so my cheese was all melty.
“I thought you were starting with your savory one?” Embry asked when I put maple syrup on it.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” I warned.
“Why are you wasting your time being smart when you could be a chef?” Gabriel had copied me, and clearly approved.
“You’re both crazy,” Embry stuck to lemon and sugar. He sometimes splurged on a strawberry Nutella one, because he knew how good it was, but he was a traditionalist.
“Speaking of weird dreams…” Gabriel brought it back to what had us all awake at this ungodly hour.
“We weren’t,” I argued.
“Is that the first one?” Embry ganged up with him against me.
“I haven’t had that particular dream before.”
“But…” Gabriel caught on.
“But the ending is what I see all the time. Sometimes it plays over and over again and I can’t make it stop,” I admitted, using all my will to keep the tears in my eyes without letting them fall. I tried to sound like it was a minor annoyance, rather than something that kept me from sleeping most nights.
“You’re right that we can’t speak for Sam…” Embry said delicately, like they did every time they used his name around me. “But both of us would gladly give our final lives to keep you safe, without blaming anyone but the asshole who did it.”
“My brain knows that. But he didn’t give his life to save mine. He gave it because I chose not to go with Donovan. His death didn’t change anything. They still kidnapped me and then I got away. Maybe if I had gone willingly, I still would have escaped, but I wasn’t brave enough to take that chance.”
“You had no way of knowing what would happen. The potential consequences of giving Donovan what he wants are much greater,” Gabriel insisted.
“And now that I have this magic thing that came out of nowhere...maybe I could have saved him. Instead of being selfish and scared for my own life, I could have tried to protect his. Instead of killing a woman to save myself, I could have evaporated Donovan to save Sam.”
“This is why you don’t sleep at night?” Gabriel was full of empathy, which somehow made it worse.
“I sleep,” I argued. “Just not easily and not well.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be feeling this bad over it for me,” Embry tried to reassure me with more things Sam could no longer do.
“Even if you had a wife and a daughter who didn’t get to say goodbye, who would never see you again?” I admitted what weighed on me the most. My brain understood that Sam knew what would happen and still told me to go for it, but Deanna didn’t expect to lose her husband for me. I was the reason Clara would grow up without her father.
“Sam didn’t die because of you, Lucy, he died because of the kind of person he was. The kind who insisted on being your guardian and refused to let us take you, even when we told him all of the dangers it entailed,” Embry said with such conviction that I nearly believed him.
“That’s another thing that scares me. I might not get the chance to have them yell at me and hate me, because they could be the next targets the Big Bad decides to use against me.” I was failing to keep the tears from falling, but I fervently wiped them away as if that would prevent anyone from knowing they were there.
“They’re safe,” Gabriel assured me.
“Just because we know they’re at the Beach House doesn’t mean they’re safe,” I argued.
“I don’t just know where they are, Luce. We have codes and signs to keep in touch. There’s something Deanna can do that would alert people we trust if something was wrong. Help would be there within minutes of her doing it. We have people watching the house, watching the town. And she checks in every three days to let us know they’re okay.”
“Every three days?” I asked.
“Without fail,” he agreed. “It’s not like a phone call where we talk and ask questions, but the last one was yesterday, and everything was good.”
“And you know for sure that it was her, not someone trying to keep up appearances?”
“I do.”
“Have you read the book Ingrid left you?” Embry asked me, completely changing the subject.
“The first few pages,” I played along.
“If it’s the book I think it is, that’s the one that tells you how to track essences, rather than a location on the map. You could see what they’re doing rather than where they are.”
“The one you said was dangerous?” I asked Gabriel.
“For Donovan, yes, but we can work on it today for people you care about,” Embry took the lead.