Dying Breath Read online

  “I could have done more,” I say.

  He grins. “At least I know where you get your stubbornness from.” His eyes fall to Jesse. “Shall we get her out of the sun? You too. You’re quite red and it’s not your color, love.”

  He takes a step back, his eyes on Jesse.

  “Freeze!”

  I whirl and see the police.

  Of course, they came. With the helicopters, with the guns and fires and chaos, why wouldn’t they respond?

  “It’s the girl!” A female cop with blond hair like mine recognizes me. My face was all over the news. But she only spares me a glance. “And she’s wounded!”

  She won’t take her eyes off Gideon.

  “Drop your weapon!”

  “Now wait a minute,” Gideon says, showing an empty palm. He doesn’t drop the gun.

  I know what she’s going to do the moment before she does it. I can see it in her eyes. I’ve seen that look a thousand times on my parents’ faces when they decided to kill someone.

  “No!” I step between Gideon and the cop a heartbeat before her gun goes off.

  The bullet punches a hole through my chest.

  And the ground rushes up to meet me.

  Chapter 35

  Jesse

  I’m on the beach of my dreams. Gray-white sand stretches left, only ending when the mouth of a forest swallows it. It extends right until it disappears behind a large lighthouse. The top of the lighthouse is barely visible in the ghostly fog.

  Behind me, the beach slopes up to a house. An A-frame, its front propped up on stilts. Enormous windows of black glass reflect the water and the clouds rolling through its dark frame.

  I bend and dig a rock out of the damp, compacted sand.

  It’s a rose-colored stone, smooth and wet like a tortoise shell between my fingers.

  “It’s real,” I say. I crane my neck from where I crouch and smile at the angel beside me.

  His black wings are out, stretched behind him. The breeze ruffles the soft downy tips near his ears. The longer, sleeker feathers near the tips trail in the sand. The tide is out.

  “So is that it?” I ask. “I’m dead, right?”

  I look at the dark horizon in the distance. Thick storm clouds are forming. A flash of lightning glows inside the smoke-gray bodies.

  Gabriel doesn’t say anything. His hands rest in his pockets with only the white cuffs showing at the edge of the black sleeves. His hair whips around his head in the ocean breeze. Maisie says she sees Chicago and Lake Michigan in her special place.

  But this is the ocean. The salty brine stings my nose as I pick at the white granules in the sand.

  “I have all the powers except for Maisie’s, and here I am at the beach house again.” I frown at him. As peaceful as this place is, uneasiness cramps my guts. My lower abdomen squirms and his silence is only making it worse.

  “I’m not going to kill her,” I tell him. “You know that, right? You say Caldwell murdering Chaplain started all this and we should see it through, but I’m not going to murder her. She’s a kid. A good kid.”

  “That is not a problem,” he says.

  “She can be saved?” I practically squeal with delight. “Tell me how.” He finally looks at me. Like a thousand times before, goosebumps rise on my arms the moment those bright green eyes meet mine.

  They’re so bright. I’ve never seen a person with eyes that bright. And there’s something feline about the shape. But it’s the sense I’m looking at an illusion that scares me.

  I’m being tricked.

  Deep down, I know he’s something else, only pretending to be insubstantial. In a way, I can detect his gaze moving, his body softening and reforming as I look at him.

  The wind pulls tears from my eyes and I’m forced to look away.

  He turns back to the horizon, concerned about the storm building in the distance. “Your choice must be conscious and informed.”

  I frown. “I’ll get the rape whistle ready then. One wrong move and you better believe—”

  He cuts me off. So like a dude. Look. They’re coming.

  With his voice in my head for the first time, I realize I can’t read his mind the way I was listening to the others. No aimless prattle. I can only hear what he wants me to hear. Not sure how I feel about that.

  I turn back to the storm as another brilliant flash of lightning cracks open the sky.

  It’s begun to rain. I watch droplets fall from fat clouds to the water. From this distance, it looks like static between the cloud and the surface below.

  Look closer.

  I squint.

  It’s not rain.

  A thousand wings flap. A swarm converging above the blue-gray waters.

  My gaze sweeps across the horizon. Angels. Or creatures that look like angels. Part human. Part bird.

  And they’re headed this way, with a torrential storm at their backs.

  “What the fuck?” I ask.

  This is the last gate. Once they reach it, if it is not closed, they shall pass.

  “Then let’s close the freaking gate!”

  You must make an informed decision.

  I gesture at the approaching swarm. “Then hurry up and inform me!”

  Give me permission, Gabriel says. He pulls me up from the sand and laces his fingers with mine. Rough granules scrape my palm, trapped between my hand and his.

  He pulls me against him. He pins me against his body with one arm pushing into the middle of my back, forcing me to arch against him. It’s a very possessive gesture.

  Give me permission, he says again and I realize he’s repeating himself because I’m just standing here doe-eyed and drooling.

  “Permission to do what?” I ask, aware that his thighs are pressing against mine.

  To inform you.

  “Is this a sex metaphor?” I try to pull back but I don’t even manage an inch.

  You must know the consequences. He slips one hand under my hair, clasping it against the back of my neck. I’ve never been so trapped in my life. Okay, well, I was buried alive that one time. And locked in a gas chamber before that. But this is a new kind of trapped. And I don’t have time to figure out how I feel about it either. Not with the angel swarm halfway here.

  I look up into big green eyes. “Okay. Show me. Let me know the consequences of saving the world.”

  His wings extend around me, pulling me even tighter against his body. He takes flight, my stomach dropping as the scenery shifts.

  When he unfolds his wings, we stand in the middle of a meadow. Tall grasses stretch as far as the eye can see.

  Your species views time as linear. I will show you time as such for clarity.

  “You have no faith in my brain, do you?”

  His gaze narrows.

  “Is now a bad time for sarcasm?” I pout. In my opinion, every time is a good time.

  Let’s begin at the beginning.

  “Good place to start,” I say, despite the unfriendly gaze.

  The meadow is replaced by dust. A thick cloud whips in all directions like a dervish. It doesn’t last, this massive dust storm. It settles into hard rock and a sky, which becomes water, then softer earth, and then a meadow full of tall grass. It fast forwards like this, animals coming and going at a speed I’m unable to process. At best, I catch a scaly whip-like tail here and downy white feathers there.

  I point at the fleeting wisp. “Aww, was that you? Was that baby Gabriel? Rewind that.”

  We disagree.

  “I didn’t say it was you. I was just asking.”

  My…people.

  He stumbles on the word people. Is it because they aren’t people? I mean, obviously. Look at him.

  We are your creation. We exist because you exist. You dreamed us into this existence. Mankind believes God existed first. That creation begins at point A and flows until point Z and all that occurs between is the act of creation. But this is not true. Time is not linear. God is your descendent and all things were dreamed into lif
e from a consciousness that evolved naturally, true. But we affect the continuum. We reinforce its existence by stretching our hands back down the line. Once the consciousness is fully formed, we go back. We alter the present reality. You are the dreamer as much as the dream.

  If I could put all the sense that made into one hand, I wouldn’t even be able to buy a bus ticket across town. I blink at the meadow, which isn’t much of a meadow anymore because it has become a small village and then a bigger town, a bigger city.

  “There must come a time when the creator no longer controls the creation, but becomes as much a myth as the object itself. A symbiotic relationship that must continue in tandem with one another. Our existence depends upon yours. But we disagree on what form of our creator should take, as you disagree on what form your creation should take. Some believe your kind can be recreated. Improved. They believe our imperfections are the result of your imperfections. If we perfect you, we perfect ourselves.”

  I snort. “Don’t tell the humans. They have a pretty high opinion of themselves already.”

  Others believe that you must be allowed to evolve imperfectly. You must wrong if you are to right.

  I want to reach out and touch the tall grass around me, smell its grassy scent, feel the breeze. But there is something purely visual about this landscape. My body isn’t experiencing this place as much as my mind is.

  I frown at Gabriel. “You’re the second group. You don’t believe we’ll become better if we just destroy everything and start over.”

  “No,” Gabriel says, his lips pursed. It isn’t until now that I realize he’s switched to speech. “Growth is life. Life is growth. All you need is time.”

  Time.

  “So you chose me because you thought I would shield the Earth, that I would protect it from being destroyed. Because what we need is time.”

  He turns away, watches a bridge spring up across a river in the distance.

  “But you said before that you chose the partis because at some point in their life they wanted to die. If you want to find someone who’ll shield Earth, it seems stupid to choose from a bunch of suicidal people!”

  Gabriel smiles. You wanted to die, but you also wanted to live. Both desires must be present.

  I sense the turn in the conversation.

  “What’s the bad news?” I ask him. “I have a feeling that informing me is another way of telling me the bad news. What did you tell the other three partis before me, the people who chose to blow up and become stars—what did you tell them that was so horrible they decided not to protect Earth?

  “Darkness lies ahead.” He steps toward me and I don’t know why but I step back. I step back like he’s a boiling pot of water and I don’t want to put my hand in it. He grabs onto me anyway.

  Everything in me says, No. Don’t look. Turn away while you can.

  “Growth is not without pain,” Gabriel says. He’s pressing himself against me again, thigh to thigh, hand in the middle of the back. “Growth is not without setbacks.”

  Black wings engulf me.

  In the blackness, it’s like a cinema. Images assail me. First, at a pace slow enough that I can process what I’m seeing.

  The earth begins to die. Life is unsustainable under the strain of overpopulation and depleting resources. Wars begin over scarcity. Millions flee. Bodies float in the ocean, bodies of those who didn’t reach the other shore. Borders close out of fear.

  Children are bought and sold. Slavery swells.

  Even the wealthy nations struggle to sustain their populations. The poor starve. They revolt against the rich. War spreads into the wealthier nations as they fight over what is left.

  Diseases spring up in the changing climates and populations are confronted with viral strains they have no immunity for. More death. Our health weakens as our ecosystem weakens.

  Destruction of beautiful cities. More disappear underwater, masterpieces lost forever in a toxic sea.

  Cruelty on every level imaginable.

  And the truth is I could prevent it. I could take us back to the beginning. I could make it so that we start again, in a simpler time. I could erase all the horrible things we’ve done to each other in the past. All the genocide. All the rape. All the fear and anger and heartbreak. I can undo it. I can make sure the worst never comes.

  Because the worst is coming.

  In one blast, I can blow this universe apart. Erase all our fuckups past and future. Somehow, my body would become the entry point for an enormous influx of power. It’s already started. Somehow that angel storm I saw on the horizon blows through me and another—Bam! Big bang again.

  A fresh start.

  And a chance to be better than we were.

  Hope.

  Choose, Gabriel whispers to me through the dark. Heat washes over me. I feel the air in my chest a moment before I break the surface.

  I’m alive.

  Gabriel lifts me out of the darkness.

  Choose wisely. Choose for us all.

  Chapter 36

  Jesse

  Maisie is on her knees in front of me, blood pouring out of her chest.

  “Thank god,” Gideon says as soon as my eyes open. He’s got her by the shoulders, propping her up. Two officers lay dead on the ground several feet away. I’m able to piece from his memories—because my telepathy is back in full swing—that Maisie protected Gideon from the gunshot before he was forced to shoot the cop himself.

  Regret wafts off him.

  “Save her.” His voice is too high. “Come on. What are you bloody waiting for?”

  I take Maisie into my arms, cradle her like a baby.

  She coughs blood and I wipe it away with my thumb, smearing it across her cheek like some slutty rouge. She coughs again, and I realize she’s trying to speak.

  Don’t, I tell her. You’ll only make it worse.

  I tried. I tried to be brave like you.

  You’re way braver than me, kid.

  You can have it. I never wanted this power anyway.

  She’s shot in the right lung. That whistling sound is air trying to get through a hole filling with blood.

  Kiss Winnie Pug for me. Tell Gideon—

  But whatever she wanted me to tell Gideon dies with her.

  Hold on, kid.

  I reach deep down inside myself and call on a power that I haven’t used in a long time. It’s always been mine. I used it before I knew what it was and calling on it now is no great feat.

  My vision changes, and with it the knowledge that despite everything that’s happened, I’m what I’ve always been.

  A death replacement agent.

  And death is the transformation of energy. When someone is about to die, a tiny black hole is created inside them. Like a black hole in space, it looks like an empty swirling vortex. This vortex sucks all the warm, living colors out of a person, leaving nothing behind that can survive.

  I see Maisie’s little flame flicker, threatening to go out at any second. And here I am, a bright brilliant blue flame beside her. A sparkly blue. Electric blue so harsh it hurts to look at it.

  A familiar hot-cold chill settles into the muscles in my back and coils around my navel like an invisible snake.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell the dying girl in my arms. “There’s no other way. We have to finish what we started.”

  Gideon screams. “No, you can’t.”

  But he’s beating only air. I’ve erected the shield around me and Maisie. He can thrash and wail and scream all he wants, but I’m not stopping now.

  I saw our future and our horrible past. There’s only one way to fix all that.

  Maisie’s heart stops.

  In the darkness, Gabriel showed me a trick. A death replacement agent can’t replace someone with NRD. But if I use her breath—her power to rekindle life in the same way I perform a replacement, that might work. If Maisie willingly gave up her power, her body wouldn’t incinerate.

  And I have to try.

  Not yet, I tell her.
I take all her blue fire into my body and kindle it against my own. Then I bend down and blow air into her nose. My throat burns. My nose burns, but I do it again. And again.

  Three times and Maisie’s heart kick starts. All the flame that was hers is mine now, but she’s breathing.

  She’s alive.

  I lay her down and look at Gideon. He’s stopped pounding on my shield long enough to wipe his tears.

  “Take care of her,” I say, before collapsing into the darkness one more time.

  I don’t have a body.

  I’m floating through time and space, unbound.

  A tirade of sins flicker against the black screen of my unconsciousness. Babies dead in their mothers’ arms. Soldiers murdering a woman’s children, and then raping her as their bodies grow cold on the floor. More souls in the bottoms of boats, drowning when they capsize, and the terror that overtakes them as their lips slip beneath the water.

  In a field, a boy, gay, and surrounded is beaten to death by his friends from school. Blood dries on a baseball bat.

  A police officer luring a little girl into a car.

  The final moments of a 14-year-old who never comes home.

  A cripple in the street, kicked by a passerby, because he dares beg for his next meal.

  The people living in squalid camps on foreign shores. The natives who burn these makeshift homes to the ground.

  I’m not imagining this. These evils are not the product of my imagination. They’re happening across the globe in this very moment.

  And it isn’t only human consciousness I’m riding—because that’s what I’m doing somehow. In this bodiless state between life and death, I’m jumping from mind to mind. For that moment, I’m in their mind, I can taste their fear, raw and burning, in the back of my throat. I feel the tremors in their bodies. I’m rolled by the crushing wave of loss, fear, uncertainty, and betrayal.

  It isn’t the countless cruelties I witness from the perspectives of the victims. It’s the hate and fear in the minds of the perpetrators. The relief a man feels when the back of his hand connects with his wife’s face. The utter ecstasy that rolls along his spine when another pulls the trigger. The excitement tightening a man’s guts as he threatens a young girl, sees her fear, knows he has power over her.