Be especially careful near hospitals or refugee centers—any location where people regularly die will present souls queued and impatient with their body’s slow deterioration. With the added presence of a Fenestra, the soul can force its body to release it.
Melynda Laine
February 14, 1918
Tens threw his head around and thrashed his legs as if wrestling with an imaginary assassin. An all-or-nothing battle. For what? I didn’t know.
I grabbed his forearm to rouse him. I was afraid he’d hurt himself. Instead, his strength merely jerked me into the action and I flew, with the motion of his arm, across the bed.
“Tens!” My umph! as my head hit the pillow broke through his nightmare.
“Merry?” Sleep and fear roughened his voice. With every labored breath, his sweat-drenched shirt heaved.
I crawled back over to him. “Are you awake now?”
“Yeah.” He sat up, rubbing his face. He tucked his legs under him to sit, back against the headboard. “Hurt you?”
“No, I’m fine.” I scrambled to turn on the light. He reached for me, his touch surging with energy. With me straddling his hips, he embraced me like a teddy bear. He hung on, tight, like I was a life raft in the middle of a stormy ocean. “What was that?” I whispered.
“Mom.” Anguish colored his tone a deep indigo.
His mom? He never talks about her. Never. I waited. I’d learned not to push too hard. He needed to open up at his own pace. In his own time. Even if it killed me.
Tens exhaled words with his breath. “And my grandfather and a man—a boy, maybe, more like a boy. Your age, younger than me.” He shivered as the sweat cooled and his heart rate normalized.
My skin stuck against his. I’d waited for weeks to learn more about his family. “You seemed scared? Angry?”
His arms flexed around me. “Yeah, the dream morphed into Perimo and more Nocti, but it started out with my mom by my side. We watched this young couple in a diner share an ice cream sundae. Happy. So much joy. They were entranced, in love with each other.” He smiled down at me, his eyes intense. “This huge bowl.” He chuckled. “Enough ice cream for an entire state, with sprinkles and sauces and huge amounts of whipped cream. And two spoons. They were so into each other, they radiated. They didn’t need words. No words and all smiles.”
“And your mom was there too?” Tens didn’t talk about his family. I never knew if it was because it hurt too much or because he didn’t want me to know. More likely he didn’t think any of it was applicable to today and tomorrow. To us.
He shifted against me. “Yeah, watching with me. She held my hand. I’d forgotten what her hands felt like. So fragile I felt each bone. But strong. So completely capable. And she smelled like jasmine in the late afternoon.”
I warmed with the love in his voice. I nodded, hoping he’d continue.
“Then Grandfather arrived at the diner and the whole scene changed. He limped into the building with his walking stick and everything grew dark. The spoon clattered to the table, the ice cream melted instantly. The couple stilled, frightened, and Mom’s hand tightened in mine. Grandfather didn’t say a word, simply grabbed the girl, and then Perimo was there and the Nocti swarmed in.”
He rushed his words together, with pain and anguish. I gripped his waist for support, leaning more fully against him. “But no one else noticed the Nocti tearing down the building. Someone grabbed Mom and pulled her hand from my grasp. I couldn’t hold on.” He thrust me away to stand. His breathing grew ragged and hurried. Again. Sweat plastered his hair to his head in odd angles.
“Just a dream. It was just a dream.” Tens let go of me completely and staggered over to the kitchen sink, gulping down water from the running tap. He drank like a man who needed more than water.
I shivered. Bad dream or not, the mention of Perimo’s name made my stomach twist into knots. The Nocti, short for Aternocti, were the balance to the Fenestra. While we helped souls achieve peace and find an afterlife of joy, they caused chaos and destruction to suck souls to the lightless place. Hell, to use a popular term, but it was more than a Heaven-versus-Hell thing, more than just Light versus Dark, or Good versus Evil.
I glanced at the clock and saw that dawn was not far away.
Tens came back to bed and brushed my hair from my face. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
“I’m okay. Are you?” I didn’t mind the role reversal, I just wished I knew what to say or do to make him feel better.
He tugged on ragged running shoes from his army surplus duffel bag. No socks. “Go back to sleep. I’m going to go for a run, get rid of this adrenaline.” He kissed me, preoccupied as he tugged a clean shirt over his head, then a sweatshirt. “It was only a dream.”
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I hoped he was right, but what if my seeing Auntie and him seeing his mom and grandfather were connected? What if we need to find out more about his past before we have a future? What if these aren’t dreams, but visions?
I threw on dry clothes, turned on the laptop, and started Googling local churches, looking for any Father Anthonys in the state of Indiana.
Hours later, when I stepped out onto the path heading toward Helios’s kitchen door, Tens was clearing ivy from the trees and the stepping stones. He’d come back from the run, showered, and headed out to work on the grounds without speaking. He waved to me, frowning absently. I’d learned not to take his frowns personally. Not always. He shuttered his face, and his emotions, like he was forever prepared to ride out level-five emotional hurricanes alone. He let me behind his walls chink by chink. It wasn’t that I had to earn his love or his protection—those were given—but we were still working on friendship and communication. He wanted me to be vulnerable and open to him, but didn’t understand I needed the same thing in return.
The scent of ginger and lemon billowed off fluffy scones cooling on the counter. “Good morning. Are you hungry?” Joi turned from the oven with a smile and friendly eyes.
In the not-so-big-but-notable-changes column, I’d been eating breakfast and enjoying it for several weeks. Surprise, surprise. “No, the coffee cake was wonderful. Thank you for—”
She cut me off. “McClamroch family recipe. Best there is with a cup of strong black tea. Are you ready to work, or do you need another day to get your bearings?”
I fairly buzzed with pent-up energy. “I’m ready.” Ready to do something, anything to keep my hands busy while my mind wanders through the maze that is my life.
“Good, that’s what I like to hear. We do a lot of the baking now, but I’ve got that covered. The servers arrive at ten-thirty to help prep the dining room. I know it’s not glamorous, but I need you to dust all the shelves—that means moving the inventory off them and putting it back exactly so. And clean the mirrors, the glass cases. Can you do all that?”
I nodded. “Seems like a good way to get familiar with the products too, right?”
She beamed like I’d passed a crucial test. “Exactly. That way you’ll be able to help customers find things. The upstairs rooms need it the worst—they’re where we store the out-of-season holiday merchandise. Right now they’re more storage than anything else, but customers insist on going up there even if it’s a mess. We’ll need to bring down all the Valentine’s Day goodies and display those later today, plus add the inventory arriving this week. Start with the dusting. When we begin serving, I’ll need you in the kitchen trying to stay on top of the dishes. But best to start—”
“With the dusting?” I said. Clearly, she was blessed with a battery that never lost juice. I envied her multitasking. The entire time she instructed and trained me, she flew around the kitchen, both hands blurring in busyness.
“And if you see anything you’d like, we’ll run a tab and take it off your paycheck later.” She smiled.
I headed up the stairs armed with feather dusters, paper towels, and Windex. The rote work gave me time to consider our next steps. Father Anthony, Custos, a girl and a cat. My suspicion that Custos was more than a wolf was worth exploring. Is she Divine? Part of the Creators’ help Mom wrote about?
Seeing the chaos, I huffed out a breath and surveyed the disaster around me. Strewn together in piles like they’d been brought up and deposited hurriedly were stockings jumbled among gift wrap, stuffed bears wearing quintessential holiday sweaters, and artificial trees full of sparkling ornaments crammed under the eaves. The rest was stacked on shelves and rocking chairs and piled into decorative baskets of red and green. Overwhelmed for a second, I found the irony in getting exactly what I wished for. Busy hands. Busy mind.
I cleared off a tiny section of the floor and began the cleaning in small increments. I couldn’t imagine shoppers pawing through for long. I turned inside myself, toward the big questions that weighed so heavily on my heart. Why did Auntie have the woman with her each time I saw her? Could Father Anthony tell us who she was or where to find the girl? Why couldn’t Auntie be like OnStar and give us step-by-step directions to the goal? Why all the subterfuge?
Joi called me down to meet the servers when they arrived, showed me the reservation book, and taught me how to answer the phone. Once the sign was turned to Open, the door had barely banged shut after the first customer before other regulars glided through. Friends and families came to browse, to eat, to catch up.
“Joi, can I organize the scrapbook section, too?” I pointed up at the ceiling.
“It needs it, doesn’t it?” She sighed.
I nodded, not wanting to overstep.
“Of course—make pages too if you’d like. It’s addictive!”
“Thanks.” I got back to work, careful to clean first, arrange second.
As I put the scrapbooking room in order, I found myself picking out stickers and doodads, brads and paper cutouts. I arranged them on a page of parchment, paying no attention, until I heard footsteps on the stairs. Then I folded the paper and stuffed it into my waistband for later. Customers browsed, chattering like finches as they shuffled around my newly arranged area. I got out of their way as quickly as I could. With the dining room full, the kitchen needed me more than the dust bunnies did.
When Tens bustled into the kitchen to eat lunch, I showed him the page I’d made. “I think maybe I’ve found my thing.” I knew the excitement in my voice might be difficult for him to understand, but these feelings were hard to articulate.