A SEARCH for vital clothing pieces such as underwear and a bra goes a lot harder when you’re doing it through tears, but I find some relatively clean undergarments, a pair of filthy jeans with just a few holes, and a T-shirt that isn’t so worn as to be see-through. Despite the heat, I also grab a jean jacket to cover my makeshift bandaging job. Then I stumble into the setting sun of the early evening and wait for Chris out front of the Sunrise Suites.
It’s a little awkward when he arrives, like meeting an old friend after a long time apart, even though in my head I just left him forty-five minutes ago at the Village Pub… “left” being a relative term in my world, apparently. I climb into his sedan without a word, facing forward out the front windshield, but I feel his eyes on me.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks.
“Festivity. I want to see Genesis.”
In my peripheral vision, his shoulders stiffen.
I hate doing this to him, but I have to. I have to make sense of all this. I have to know. “She is buried there, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Chris says, voice tight. “You were there, Flynn.”
“Right.”
Dead and buried. So why isn’t her spirit here? If there’s one ghost I wouldn’t mind seeing, it’s hers. And I should be able to see it. I’m closer to her than anyone else in my life.
We drive in silence.
My old place is only about fifteen minutes from Festivity. We pull into the parking lot of the nondenominational church in town, a small, neatly kept graveyard beside it, flowers on almost every grave. Gen is… was… Wiccan. Not a lot of Wiccan churches around. Guess this was as close as they could get.
My legs tremble as I get out of the car. Chris politely makes no comment, but he takes my arm to steady me. A minute later, I’m standing over her grave.
Her.
Grave.
It’s nothing showy or ostentatious, just a simple marker, but it’s so covered in flowers that I have to crouch and shift some of them aside to read it.
Here lies Genesis McTalish
Loving Sister
1996-2019
Fuck.
Damn good thing I’m already close to the ground, because I pretty much fall over right there. Chris seats himself on the grass next to me, draping a cautious arm around my shoulders. Tears stream down both our faces, and for a long time, we say nothing, just lean on each other for support.
Finally I accept the tissue Chris offers me, blow my nose, wipe my eyes, and get my shit together. “When? How?” I ask, knowing the reaction I’ll get.
I’m not disappointed. He stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “You doing drugs with the alcohol, Flynn?” he asks softly. “I know you were in a bad way last time we talked on the phone. Really wish you’d taken me up on the job offer and the spare bedroom.”
He’d offered me a job and a place to crash? Even without Gen to connect us? I remember he’d inherited his apartment from his deceased parents. It had a second bedroom he’d turned into an office.
Putting it back to a bedroom would have been a major undertaking, but he would have done it for me. I couldn’t ask for a better brother-in-law.
I stop myself. Not brother-in-law. Not anymore.
“No drugs,” I say, clearing my throat. None that I know of, but I hadn’t seen any paraphernalia in my hotel room. How do I make myself sound less crazy? “I’ve had a sort of… mental break.” Okay, that’s probably not the best choice, but it’s all I’ve got. “I can’t remember some things, and I need to. I need the details.”
He gives a humorless laugh. “I’ve wished I could forget every day since July first, and you want that nightmare back.”
July first. Oh holy hell.
That date is emblazoned in my mind. It’s the day I dove into Dead Man’s Pond to save that waitress, what’s-her-name, from drowning in her sinking car. The same day I earlier almost got sucked into the pond myself. The same day Kat managed to leave a remnant of her spirit in me, which Genesis ended up having to exorcise with Leo VanDean’s help.
But if Gen died that day…?
I do a quick internal search, using my power to seek out anything foreign so I can push it from me, but there’s nothing. Either I figured out on my own how to remove Kat during the last four and a half months or that never happened in this timeline.
I press a hand to my forehead, fighting off a mother of a headache. “Details, Chris. I need the details.”
“You aren’t making this easy on me.”
No, I suppose I’m not. “I’m sorry.” I take his hand and hold it.
He blows out a breath. “Okay. Well, I’ll give you what I know. There’s not much. No one’s exactly sure what happened that night.” He hesitates, staring at the gravestone for a long moment. “You’d gone to your place to pack up your stuff. You were moving in with her for good.”
I remember that much. But instead of going straight to her place, I went out to the cursed pond. Really, I’d been drawn there by whatever evil forces were attached to the charm sunk at its center, but I didn’t know that then.
“Genesis came down to the pub wondering if anyone had seen you. It was getting kinda late, and she had a tendency to worry about you, especially after the odd… experiences you’d had not long before then.”
“Yeah, that was some weird shit,” I say to let him know I’m listening, even if I’m not sure exactly what he’s referring to. Me seeing Kat’s ghost out at the lake? Her coming to visit me in Gen’s apartment, trying to take over my body? I shudder. Chris grips my hand more tightly.
“When no one knew anything, she went out back to look for my car that you’d borrowed. Then she just froze, standing there, like she was listening to someone. I watched her from the kitchen entrance, but I didn’t interrupt. I figured she was having a spirit contact. It happened that way, sometimes.”
Spirit contact. Yeah. And I could just bet exactly which spirit had contacted her.
Granfeld.
“She took off running, practically tore the door off the Charger, and peeled out of that parking lot like demons were chasing her. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t have my car.”
No, I had it.
“So it took me some time to borrow one from one of the waitstaff. Then I couldn’t find her.” His voice breaks. I give him a minute to compose himself. “I must have driven up and down every street in Festivity, searching. She wouldn’t answer her cell. It kept going to voicemail. And you weren’t answering either.”
I’d dunked my phone when the lake drew me in, but it had dried out and worked fine later. It’s the same one I used to call him. I look at Chris, his eyes haunted by memory.
“When I finally drove past Dead Man’s Pond, I saw the hole in the sign wall and I knew. I just knew. My car was parked there, so I knew you were around, and pieces of the Charger led into the lake….”
Wait. Genesis went into Dead Man’s Pond? Not the waitress I’d saved?
“I dialed 911 and searched for you, finally spotted you way out in the water, coming up for air before you went back under again. You must have done that three or four more times while I dove in and tried to swim to you. But when I reached the center, you weren’t coming up anymore. Neither of you came back up.”
He’s crying again and not trying to hide it. I rest my head on his shoulder. Shivers pass through me, despite the heat of the evening. He lets go of my hand and wraps both arms around me. I can’t stop shaking. I don’t have the memories he’s describing, but I can imagine….
Diving down, finding her in her sinking car, unable to open the door or work her free of the seat belt she always wore, or whatever it was that prevented me from saving her. Maybe she was awake, pounding on the inside of the glass, begging me to help while the water slowly seeped in. Or maybe she’d lost consciousness and all I could do was watch her die as I dove again and again and my arms and legs and lungs tired….
Chris’s voice jolts me from the nightmarish images. “The paramedics and fire rescue showed up. They got to me first. I fought them, but they dragged me from the lake before I could do anything, and went after the two of you. When they pulled the both of you out, you responded to CPR. Gen… didn’t.”
I lived. She died. She died because Granfeld must have told her I was in trouble, and the lake’s curse drew her and her car in.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Chris shakes his head. “Not your fault. It was never your fault. You damn near died yourself trying to save her, were dead until they revived you. When they hauled out the car, it was full of water, windows down, airbags deployed. The seat belt had jammed, they said. They’d had to cut it off her to get her out. And the crash had knocked her unconscious. X-rays showed head trauma. She never had a chance. No way you could have gotten to her before she drowned.”
But I’m betting the me of this timeline never saw it that way. Judging from my current state, I blamed myself and kept right on doing it… until I finally decided to end the pain and guilt with a razor blade.
Either that or I just didn’t want to live without her. The impulse to walk in front of an oncoming bus is pretty intense right now.
I roll up my jacket sleeve and stare at the gauze-wrapped slice. All those times I wondered where I’d be without my Genesis, well, now I know.
Chris follows my gaze. “Aw, Flynn, no.”
“I stopped myself,” I tell him. Because there’s still something I can do. Doubt the me from this timeline would have stopped, though, if I hadn’t shifted into this body.
“She would never have wanted you to get like this,” he says, taking my arm and gently tugging the sleeve back down. “She loved you. Told me she wanted to make a life with you. And I know you loved her. I remember the engagement ring you showed me at the funeral.”
My gaze flicks to my own hand, the ring I never take off gone from my finger. “Yeah, I loved her. Still do.” And there’s no way in hell I’m letting it end this way.
Now that I have specifics, I can go back to July first, stop Granfeld from interfering….
No, I can’t. I can’t beat Granfeld. Not while she’s in spirit form. Not without help I no longer have. Even knowing an exact place and time where I can find her, I don’t have Genesis. Even with her, we only managed to run the fight to a stalemate.
I dig my hands into the earth covering Gen’s grave. Somewhere six feet beneath me lies her lifeless body. Any guilt I might once have had over eliminating Granfeld before she’d harmed anyone has vanished.
I can follow through on the original plan. Find Granfeld alive, before she became this monster.
And kill her.