Chapter NINETEEN
Jamison was getting loopy. He'd think something had been slipped into his water bottle if he hadn't opened it himself.
Was he really buying the idea that Skye was an angel? Did he even believe in God? Of course he’d caught himself praying all the time, just in case, but did he buy it?
When he'd laid his head on his granddad's bed that day, the old man had said it. “She's an angel.” Had she confessed? Had she told Granddad she was there to answer his prayer?
He was positive he didn't want to ask what that prayer was. What if he'd prayed for death? She’d been around for three years. What if he'd been depressed and asked to join Grandma, to get out of a world in which his own daughter returned his unopened letters and treated him like...a monster?
“Skye?”
“Yeah?”
“I'm sorry I called you a monster, before.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“So, tell me. Where are these friends I can’t remember seeing since I came back to Flat Springs?”
She leaned forward and looked him in the eye and willed him to believe her.
“They're getting help. They'll be back.”
“Help?”
“Rehab.”
“Or are their memories getting adjusted?”
“That, too. But they are in rehab.”
“Better than dead, I guess.”
She laughed and leaned back against the wall again. “That's probably a good slogan for any rehab—Better than dead.”
“And Marcus? What happened to him?”
“His assignment was over. He went back. He'll get another assignment.” She was careful to keep her tone unemotional.
“And the explosion?”
“That was just our version of a dust to dust bit. His, um—”
“Body?”
“More like...container—it wasn't needed anymore. We can't just leave them lying around or bury them for someone to dig up and dissect decades from now.”
“Oh. Right.” He eyed her clothes. “What about all the Somerled farms. Why farms?”
“We may as well be productive. There are Somerleds in cities, too. They're just productive in other ways.”
“So, Somerled means the Final Host guys?”
“Well, no. It means ‘called of God,’ actually.”
“But you guys all know each other.”
“Not really, but it wouldn’t be hard to find each other, like if one of us needed help.”
He looked at the power bar on the floor. “You don't eat?”
“Just for show, baby.” She smiled, but he only glanced at her when she answered, like he was judging her honesty, then he’d stare at the floor until he had another question.
“So you don't need the food you produce.”
“Right. We send it all over the place. Disaster zones, that kind of thing. You have no idea how much food gets prayed for.”
“Well, that's cool, then.”
“It's always cool. It's not as if we'd be answering prayers for bad things. Like when someone prays someone else would die or something.”
“Well, if someone's praying for that, they probably don't expect to get what they prayed for.”
“Right.”
He was eyeing her funny again. She couldn't read his mind. How had he so quickly learned how to block her?
“So, how old are you?” He blushed, a darker shade of shadow in the eerie candle light. “I mean, I was kissing you, and you're probably... Oh, man. I don't know.”
“Old like a vampire? Hah! Get real.”
“So old you don't like to admit your age, then.” He looked like he was going to be sick.
He looked around until he found a bucket sitting in the corner, though he didn’t go get it. What a relief. She hated seeing people retch, although it always made her appreciate the fact she’d never need to purge herself that way.
“Age. Right. Well, I don't have a body, so I don't age. All souls are immortal, so there is no accounting.”
“So, how many assignments have you had?”
“Oh, well, that's a better question. Let's see.” She looked into the candle for a minute, counting. “Fourteen.”
“Fourteen lives? You're kidding.” He glanced at the bucket again. She wanted to put it over his head and pound on it.
“Fourteen assignments, not lives. I’m not a cat. Some assignments take more than a year. This assignment’s lasted three. And some took less than a week. So if you ask how long I've been around, I really can't say how many days, total, I've been in this state.”
“This state. You mean, in a container.”
“Yes. Contained.”
“Do you look the same every time?”
She wished. She also wished she didn’t have to answer the question, but she did.
“No.”
Stupid boy. He looked intrigued. Maybe he wasn’t too bright; he was buying her story without any proof. She could be an alien, or a vampire, or any kind of monster a boy his age could imagine.
Jamison looked her over pretty shamelessly. He went to his knees in front of her, running his hands down her arms. Poking her just below her collar bone. Pulling down her cheek to peer into her eye. He even opened her mouth and shined his small blue flashlight down her throat.
She rolled her eyes through it all, but he didn’t seem to care. Then she remembered that she was no longer real to him.
Her cracking teenage heart wasn’t real to either of them, and yet she could almost hear it fracturing, like ice being dowsed with warm water.
“Why do you feel normal?” He sounded like a chatty seven-year-old.
“I have surface tension. Like drops of water drawn together, the stuff I'm made of struggles to stay together. The rest of it is illusion.”
“And what does a Host look like without the container?” There was nothing seven-year-old about his question. He’d tried to make it sound like an innocent question, but he failed; his voice cracked slightly, and he blushed all the way to his blond roots.
“Nothing.” She hoped her firm tone might discourage him.
“Nothing? Invisible?”
“Kind of. We are, but we aren't. It's hard to explain.”
His brows went up. “You took your clothes off before. Why?”
She had hoped he’d have forgotten that detail after being handed all her secrets on a silver platter, but apparently the thought of a naked girl standing behind him wasn’t an easy thing for a seventeen-year-old to forget.
“I thought I could get out the door without you seeing me. But you locked it. I wouldn't have taken off my clothes if I thought you might lock me in with you.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, take your clothes off again.” He blushed, but managed to look her in the eye.
“You know? I'm going to pass.”
“Oh, come on. You can't really expect me to believe all this stuff about the Final Host if you can't prove it.”
“I read your mind.”
“Not good enough. Aliens can do that. Probably Vampires too.”
All right. So he wasn’t completely gullible. But apparently she was, since she found herself stripping for him—after she’d made him turn around, of course.
***
Jamison tried not to get too excited about Skye taking off her clothes. She wasn’t a real girl so it wasn’t the same. She might be fifty years old. She might be a hundred...or seven. Either way, it was nothing to get excited about. He was only making sure he wasn’t out of his mind, believing his neighbors were a bunch of harmless angels and not a cult of murderers, when everything he’d seen thus far leaned toward the cult thing. Turning his back on her might not even be a good idea.
“Okay, you can look now.” She sounded embarrassed.
He reconsidered for about a hundredth of a second, then turned.
Holy crap, she was gone.
He took a couple of deep breaths and realized he was the only one breathing, so he tried not to breathe so loud. She wasn’t in any of the corners and not under the Indian blanket, since it was puddled on the box. His only company was the heater in the middle of the floor, making crackling noises as it kicked on again.
When you were alone, in a room lit by a candle and a dinky flashlight, and the shadows start moving, it made you sincerely wish someone was there with you.
“Skye?” His whisper sounded silly, but what else could he do? Speak reasonably to an empty room?
“Yeah?” She sounded close.
“Where are you?”
“Right here. In front of you.”
He reached out, but his wrist was caught by an invisible hand. There really was nothing there. His skin was a little bunched up where she held him. That was all.
Wow.
“Keep your hands to yourself, Jamison.”
“I can't see anything. I just want to know what the real you feels like.”
“Can’t you feel my hand?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah but nothing. I feel the same as I did when you could see me. The container is still here. I just reflect what you expect to see.”
“But I expected to see you.”
“I meant, if you didn’t know I was here. You see what you’d see anyway. But that reminds me; what did you think you saw, up in the trees, when Sheriff Cooke pulled you over?” She released his hand and he could sense her moving out of reach.
“What do you mean?” He put his hands in his pockets, for his own sake, as much as hers. When there was someone invisible standing in front of you, you just couldn’t help wanting to reach out and...define them.
“It looked like you could see me, that’s all. I was sitting up in the branches that connect over the road, and when I laughed, you looked up, like you could see me. But that was impossible.”
Jamison looked at the floor and shrugged. How could he tell her how often he thought about that laugh and not sound stupid? How could he tell her how it had made him feel that first time, in the school parking lot, when it had felt like...music? Like...bliss? His mom talked about bliss all the time; chocolate was bliss, a hot bubble bath was bliss, rocking him to sleep when he’d been small—bliss.
That’s what Skye’s laugh had felt like to him, bubbling up his spine, spreading chills into his head. It was like the way he felt when he drove under that arch of branches. If he heard her laugh that day, he probably just looked to the other source of those feelings—the gateway to home.
How could he tell her any of it and still keep her prisoner?
Then something else occurred to him.
“What do you mean, you laughed?” He would have stared her down, if he could tell where she was. “You were up in the trees doing what? Watching me?”
“Yes, well, I, um, I felt you getting nearer, thought you were coming home, but then you just stopped and I wanted to find out why. So I slipped off my clothes and went out to look.”
He pushed aside the image of her stripping before she headed out the door to look for him and tried to keep his mind on his own question.
“So you saw that I’d been pulled over, and you laughed.”
“No. I was laughing at what I saw in Dwain Cooke’s memories, about how many times he’d been pulled over when he was young. I was trying to dredge up those memories so he’d have a little pity on you, that’s all.”
Yeah, that wasn’t good. It was kinda cool and all that she could feel him coming closer—okay, if they’d have been a real couple, that would have been way cool—but the idea that she could dredge up memories, and make someone relive them, made him want to run very far away.
“Do you suppose you could make me a promise, and never break that promise?” He looked at the boarded up window, imagining the field beyond.
“Do you suppose you could trust me to keep that promise?”
He shrugged. “Promise me you won’t do that to me. Promise you won’t ever use my memories against me like that.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
A chill ran up his back and he wondered if it was because of the whisper, or because it had come from an unexpected direction. It was as if she had stretched up and given her solemn promise right next to his ear.
Then he felt her behind him. Her unseen arms wrapped around his middle and she hugged him, gently but firmly.
“I promise,” she repeated.
He placed his arms over hers and held her there.
“What about my prayers, Skye? Can they not be answered now? Now that I know?”
“I don't know. Maybe not. I mean, if you've figured out that you can sometimes get what you pray for, you might end up using prayers more like wishes, only you'll never know which will be granted. Still, it’s not quite fair. Once you know the truth, it’s not like acting on faith.”
“And what if I wished you were just a normal girl and the tree house had never been here?”
“I'd say, be careful what you wish for.”