Chapter 6

Chapter Six:
In the morning when I woke up, Reba was sitting awake on the couch while Kennedy still danced in dreams with Batman. Reba was sipping a mug of coffee stolen from my kitchen, but I didn't begrudge it of her. She was probably feeling a lot of strange things right now. Looking at her, I tried to see things from her point of view. There had to be plenty of fear, confusion, anger... and of course, wondering if it had even been real.
Then I remembered the cut on my foot. With a wrenching feeling in my gut, I pulled my foot up to look at it. I cringed at the blood stained bandage wrapped around it, then tried to pull the edge aside to check on the cut. But I never found the cut. I had pulled the entire bandage off before I realized that the cut wasn't there.
“What's that from?” Reba asked, taking another sip of her coffee.
“I... uh... cut my foot on a piece of glass last night,” I answered, running my fingers along the smooth, perfectly healed skin.
“Really? When did you do that?”
“When I was looking for you,” I said, twisting to look up at her from the floor. She answered me with a puzzled expression.
“You... don't know what I'm talking about?” There was a moment of silence when understanding flashed in her eyes, but she looked hesitant to believe it. “Last night when you wandered off to the house, I followed you. Then Dante and Gabriel showed up, and Gabriel brought you back to the house.”
Reba froze for a long moment, staring at me. The mug sagged between her hands and I wondered briefly if she was going to drop it, but she kept her grip. “That never happened. I had a dream that I went to that house, but that was it. Just a dream.”
“Yeah? Well, let me guess a little bit of what it looked like, then. Big foyer up front, with two staircases coming down from a bridge that connects the second floor. Big empty room behind the bridge where you can't really see anything because it's always dark. Doorway to the left in front of the staircase. Umm... lots of old stuff from different eras. Dried flowers in the vases. Different aged pictures-”
“Alright, stop,” she said, holding out a hand and then bringing it up to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I don't remember it that well. I was only there a minute or two before they found me.”
“And then you passed out.”
“I didn't pass out. They did something...” She froze suddenly and looked up, as if abruptly remembering more. “It was the one with the... the wings. He did something.”
I searched everything that I knew about the house and the men that lived there so far, but I didn't recall anything with wings. “What do you mean? What one with the wings?”
“There were three men that just looked like normal people. Weird people, but people. And then there was a fourth one... he had gray hair and these big black wings. You know, like angel wings, but they were black.”
I remembered the figure I had seen at the top of the stairs. Human, but misshapen somehow. That had to have been him. The lumpiness of his body hadn't been a defect, it had been wings.
“Give me some of that coffee,” I said, reaching out.
Reba recoiled, refusing me any of the java goodness. “Get your own damn coffee,” she replied, the hint of a smile tugging at her face.
At least she could take it lightly. I smiled, feeling a bit of relief, then headed into the kitchen to throw away the old bandage and pour myself a mug of coffee. The storm that had blown in the night before was starting to pick up. The droplets of rain were small, but the wind was still strong and threw the water around in torrents.
“Don't you people believe in breakfast?” Kennedy shuffled in from the living room, staring at me as I watched the rain with my coffee.
“Not really,” I answered. “But make yourself at home. I'd love some if you wanna cook.” I gestured to the kitchen. “It's all yours.”
Kennedy heaved a sigh, looked around, then sighed again. “Just because I'm really hungry,” she said as she took a pan down from the hanger and lit the stove. “Eggs?”
I went to the refrigerator and got her some eggs, along with cheese, bacon, and instant biscuits.
“Mmm, breakfast,” Reba said as she joined us in the kitchen. “Kens, you're the best.”
“I know,” she answered, picking at the eggs with the spatula.
The three of us were relatively quiet over breakfast. We were all recovering from the party we'd had the night before, and Reba and I were trying to digest the events at the house. Every once in a while I had flashes of memory where I saw her lying on the floor and recalled bruises that had long since healed, but I pushed the thoughts away as they came. After breakfast, Reba and Kennedy decided to go home, Kennedy so that she could sleep some more and Reba because she needed some alone time, so I bid them goodbye. After they were gone, I cleaned up our entire mess- an uncommon ritual for me- and did some extra tidying up elsewhere. It was eleven o'clock, an hour later, when I found myself sick of cleaning, so I sat on the couch and watched the rain through the sliding glass door for a while. At some point during that time I came to a resolution, and had I thought about it for any length of time I would have immediately decided it was a stupid idea. However, I didn't want to let that happen, so I set about getting dressed before I could change my mind. It was a mechanical, unthinking process. I went through the motions and poured my concentration into them. I forced myself not to think, because I knew what it would do.
* * * * *
“You did not,” I protested disbelievingly. I was nine. I was at my home in Seattle, sitting at my piano with Amelia. We had decided that we were going to be the next sensational worldwide rock stars, but we had gotten distracted from our song writing by stories of bungee jumping.
“I did,” she answered smugly. “It was a one time thing, you know, the fair was only in town for a couple of days. So I wanted to do it while I had the chance.”
“What was it like?”
She grinned. “Totally terrifying. We got up there and I was second in line. I kept looking down and thinking that I was going to die. But the boy in front of me was a kid from school that picked on me all the time, and I couldn't let myself get scared out of it if he could do it.”
“So you just jumped? That's it?”
She shrugged. “Yeah. It got to me in line, and the longer I stood there the more I realized how scared I was. Then they started counting to three, and I kept thinking, 'Just jump, just jump, just jump'. It's one of those things that you have to do without letting your head get in the way, or else you won't be able to.”
“Wow. I don't know if I'll ever be able to do anything like that.”
* * * * *
As I got dressed that morning, the memory of the two of us at the piano kept playing through my mind. I was trying so hard not to think about what I was doing, so instead I focused on what she had told me. “Just jump,” I said to myself as I looked in the mirror. There was a moment where I felt fear curl up in the pit of my stomach, but I forced it away and reaffirmed my resolve. I didn't have the motivation to pick out a complicated outfit, so I went with a plain black shirt and jeans. It looked too plain, so I added a bright red plastic heart pendant, some red jelly bracelets, and a red headband. Yes, I was distracted and worried, but I couldn't let myself walk outside without being satisfied with what I was wearing. It was a habit that had been burned into me through my years of being a fashionista on the top of the high school food chain. Or, what all the other girls considered to be the top of the high school food chain.
Once I was done I stared into the mirror at my reflection, trying to see myself through their eyes. What was I to them? A pest? Some awkward teenage wannabe that just kept getting in trouble? If I was the girl I had been two years ago, some of that might have been true. But I had changed. Moving away from Seattle I had tried to cleanse myself of the life I had known there. Sometimes it really hurt missing what I had left behind, but I kept working at it. All I knew was that since leaving that place I had been so much happier. For the first time since I was a kid, I felt free. In Seattle it had been difficult for me to sleep without nightmares, unless Amelia was with me. She could make them go away. Now that I was here in Salt Lake, away from all the demons that had haunted me in that life, I hardly ever had those dreams.
I grabbed my bag and left my room, heading for the front door. When I reached the portal to the outside world, I once again stood in uneasy contemplation. Watching the rain usually did that to me. But this time, rather than worrying about what the others thought and falling back to my past, I found myself wondering about the future. What was going to happen now? Who were these people, and what were they going to do? I had a brief vision of myself sitting and laughing with all my friends in the house with the inhabitants there. It felt like a beautiful thing, and for a moment my heart wrenched with desire. But at the same time, I couldn't see it ever becoming a reality. Besides, in the scene I had pictured Amelia had been there, and I knew that wasn't ever going to happen.
Looking out at the rain that now fell in steady, heavy drops, I knew that something was going to happen. I could feel it coming like fate reaching out and placing its cold fingers on my spine. The sensation scared me a little, but I knew that I couldn't avoid it forever. There was no use being afraid of the future, because how could it be worse than the past? I wasn't that girl anymore, and as long as I didn't box myself into a trap, the present and future would be whatever I made it to be.
With this resolution firm in mind, I stepped out into the rain.