As I stood in my living room, staring at the three unopened boxes stacked beside the fireplace, my hands ached from shoveling with Nathan all afternoon. Unlike my cabin at Elle’s, it felt more like I was squatting here. I hadn’t really taken the time to move in fully, but then, I didn’t have much to begin with—a fact that hadn’t bothered me until now. I was angry with Ross for reasons that made no sense, worried about his second chances when I hadn’t done much to embrace my own. The last thing I wanted was for a year to go by and to still be living out of boxes, like he was.
I thought about what Sophie had said, about the serum giving me a reason to truly start fresh; she was right. If three boxes of crap, and my clothes haphazardly placed in the bedroom closet, were all I had to show for the past three years, it was pretty pathetic.
Maybe I hadn’t had the time to unpack, or maybe I just lacked the motivation to settle in fully, but I had both now. I needed to keep my mind busy, so I wouldn’t waste another minute worrying about everyone else. Between the funeral tomorrow, Puck, and the barricades; there were plenty of things to keep my mind preoccupied while I figured my own shit out and let Ross deal with his.
Now, it was finally time to unpack, and the tightness in my chest told me I needed to brace myself for it. Everything I had was mine—my things in my house. If I allowed myself to settle here, actually settle some place for the first time in my life, it might be the first step to truly starting over.
I peered around the small, two-bedroom cabin. It was furnished with a coffee table and two mismatched side tables; a mahogany leather couch with a folded flannel blanket on the back; a worn, overstuffed recliner beside the fire; and a kitchen table with three high-backed chairs that looked like something an old hunter had made himself, with gnarled wood and unfinished edges. A shriveled welcome bouquet of fireweed and wild dandelions sat in the center of the table, surrounded by fallen, withered flower petals. Marianne, a former dispatcher and our resident green thumb, was on the cleaning and welcome committee for new members. I’d have to thank her when I saw her next for getting the place straightened up for me. And the flowers were a sweet touch, even if I wasn’t home enough to enjoy them.
This house was all I needed for now; a blank slate to start my own life, whatever that meant or looked like. I didn’t want to be a burden on Elle and Jackson anymore, and if I was honest, being around Elle all the time made it difficult to move on. Not because she looked like JJ, but because everything had changed when JJ and I finally met up at Elle’s place. JJ’s health and our relationship had gone from not that great to even worse in a matter of days, and I needed to close that chapter of my life for good. It was over; JJ was gone. She’d chosen death over life, and there was nothing I could’ve done about it. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
Pulling my knife from my pocket, I sliced open the box on the top of the stack and folded the flaps open, instantly smiling. The drawing Thea had sketched a couple of years ago, of me on top of Puck, was creased a bit and lying right on the top.
Good, artwork. I needed a little something to liven the place up. Bending back the folded edges, I walked the drawing over to the refrigerator and used a Terminix magnet to hold the drawing in place. I made a mental note to scrounge up some new magnets one of these days, and walked back over to my things.
Everything inside of the box smelled like my old cabin at the farm—smoke from the wood-burning stove, and cinnamon from my lotion. Cracked hands, from the dry cold, weren’t something I had ever acclimated to, even after all the years I’d been in Juneau and Anchorage. Fleetingly, I wondered if my life before the military and the General had been someplace warm.
I pulled out my sketchpad and skimmed through the pages of notes and names of people I’d heard about during the months I’d spent searching for a cure. Some of the writing was legible, some of it wasn’t. There were water stains from the nights I’d stayed up, silently crying and pleading for a way to make it all better. All the while, I had been the answer I was looking for the whole time.
I’d heard rumors of Re-gens while I was stationed in Juneau, but that’s all they’d ever been to me—horror stories that soldiers only whispered about when they’d had too much to drink and had loose tongues. I’d never met one, let alone did I know how they were created. Or that I’d inadvertently create one myself.
The day I brought JJ back to life had been accidental in every sense. She was dying—dead, even—and I was a despondent heap of nothing, willing her to come back with every fiber in me. I feared life without her, after the years we’d spent together; I feared who I might become, and I feared the unknown as the world crumbled around me. More than anything, I was terrified of myself and of the missing pieces I’d have to face alone.
After JJ had taken her final breath, on that stretcher in the back of an unmarked van outside the Whitely apartment complex, something both horrifying and miraculous happened. From some deep, despairing part of me, I wished her back to life. I hadn’t realized what I was feeling at first—only my determination, and an electrical charge that hummed through my tendons and out my fingertips. It made my skin tingle, and my tongue burn like I was touching it to the tip of a charged battery.
And as the thick, stormy air pulsed in the evening sky, I could feel the electricity in the air, sparking around me until a flash, so bright it almost blinded me, struck down between us, pushing us apart.
Dazed in the beginning, I panicked, uncertain what had happened. It felt like Zeus himself had struck me from the sky. I still felt the muted itch of it inside me sometimes. When I saw my handprints burned into JJ’s chest and realized her heart was beating, I froze, horrified. Like Frankenstein’s monster, JJ was suddenly alive—unconscious, but alive.
And while it was the most miraculous day of my life, I knew the moment she woke—with gray, clouded eyes, uncertain who I was—that somehow, I’d done something terrible. JJ lived and breathed, but she was different, and with each memory she reclaimed and each use of her Ability, she weakened. How could I ever want that for someone again?
Pulling the framed photo of us from the box, I rose to my feet. It was still hard to reconcile how little she remembered of our relationship, or that she didn’t fight to be with me. I understood it in a way, the utter exhaustion of living, but I still felt the sting of not being enough, even if I’d learned to move past it.
I placed the frame on the left side of the fireplace mantel, grateful all over again that Elle had given it to me. But there was another photo I wanted to find, one that, strangely, meant even more to me.
Going back to the box, I shuffled through a few books; one romance novel Elle insisted I read, His Untamed Desire, though I hadn’t bothered to crack it open yet; and a couple of first aid and engineering books I referenced frequently, specifically when it came to working on projects with Bert.
Then, I saw it. The intricate metal, framing the photo of the entire crew the day we’d left for the first summit. My gaze skimmed over Elle and JJ standing at the end, a forced smile on JJ’s face, but a smile identical to Elle’s nonetheless. Bert wasn’t looking at the camera, and Jackson looked like he might actually be chuckling, probably at something Woody had said, based on Woody’s dopey grin. I glanced at Phil and Sophie, and a small-smiled Alex, before my eyes landed on buzzed-haired, blue-eyed Ross, squinting into the sun with a full smile beside Beau.
When I’d first met Ross, he was an overbearing and distrusting dark cloud, while all I’d wanted was for JJ to be happy. It wasn’t until months later that I realized what kind of man Ross really was. Stronger than he needed to be, fiercely protective of his friends and family, and he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Ross was still a killjoy some of the time, but I was beginning to think I liked that about him, it was an austere shell of self-preservation, and I could relate to that.
I jumped at the clanking sound of my garbage can out back. “Damn it, Bear,” I muttered. I never thought I’d have to scold a grizzly bear before. Rising to my feet, I set the picture frame in the center of the mantel and headed to the back door with my hand on my gun, just in case. Flicking on the porch light, I peered into the backyard, seeing only the deck, and my garbage knocked over and rolling in the breeze.
A storm was coming, I could feel it alive on my skin, and I had a feeling that Bear could sense it too. He’d only been out of torpor a few weeks, and after being confined for the cold months of winter, any animal, including me, would be restless.
I opened the sliding door. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance, and I gripped the hilt of my pistol as I made my way outside, peering around for a giant grizzly. “Aria better get you under control, or I swear—”
I stopped in my tracks, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me as I drew my pistol. The outline of a teenager flashed a few feet or so in front of me, then disappeared. Before I could process it, something hard and heavy hit my temple.
I fell to the ground as the world spun, and the back of my head throbbed. “Jesus . . .” I blinked as my vision began to blur, and just before my eyelids flitted shut, a young boy flickered into existence above me again. Then, another boy stepped into view, and together they peered down at me, smiling, before everything faded to black.