“There was something else too,” I said, trying to act nonchalant as I looked away.
“More about how hot I am?” she said, giving a slow and unimpressed blink.
“Do you not want to hear the story?” I asked with a faked sharpness. She snapped her mouth shut, lifting her eyebrows innocently.
“That’s better,” I said, pulling my knees up. “So, after I got the newspaper article, I actually sneaked it back home with me. Because I have a wall, see…”
How was I going to explain my Great Work? It was impossible to boil it down into a few words.
“Well, I take pictures,” I tried. “See, I can read emotions through people’s eyes.”
She looked at me strangely. I guess I’d forgotten to explain that part. I stumbled on my words again.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But keep up with me. I can read people’s emotions and mental reactions through their eyes, especially in photographs: I call it the Glimpse. So I just take pictures of people all the time, and then I put their faces on my wall. And… and…”
You’re going downhill, Michael. You’re boring her. Pull up before you crash…
“Anyway,” I said, “so I had your picture. And on my wall there are different places for different emotions I’ve found Glimpses of, like love and anger and sadness and stuff. But I couldn’t figure out where you were supposed to go on my wall.”
“Did I not look happy enough for happy?” she said. I shook my head.
“It didn’t fit there, there was something stronger,” I said. “I had to pick the strongest one out of a million, and I couldn’t figure you out. But I think I just did.”
I held up a finger. “You belonged on the Love wall, up on the ceiling. I got confused because you weren’t exactly in love with a person; you were just in love with your life.”
I heard a long and deep breath go in and out of her, difficult but not painful… just lamenting. Remembering. I’d stepped onto dangerous ground, bringing up her old life. It could have been the right thing to say but I found it tough to gauge her thoughts. Maybe I’d dug too deep.
“That’s really sweet of you,” she said. Then her head bent over and fell onto my shoulder.
I froze into ice. The top of her head was now pressed into the side of my neck, the dark strands of her hair against my ear and flattened around my cheek. She had leaned over the four-or-five-inch ravine, her warm shoulder against the side of my arm.
Had she done it on purpose? Was she just using me as a prop? What was she doing? Why did she just do that?
She was bent against me, her arms still around her knees. I’d never gotten that close to her before. I’d never smelled her before.
Could she tell that I had turned into a statue? She had to hear my heartbeat because I could feel it pumping through my neck so close to where her ear was.
What’s wrong with you? What’s going on? Michael? Are you functioning? My brain was resetting its internal computer, trying in vain to compensate. I wanted everything to stop because I was too confused to figure out what was happening, but I didn’t want it to stop—no, don’t stop. Don’t move. I had to keep my shoulder as still as I possibly could so she wouldn’t leave.
She jumped, as if realizing what she’d done. Her head jerked back up as she sat straight.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said, even though I hadn’t done anything. Then I saw what was probably what I wanted to see the least at that moment: tears, falling out of Callista’s eyes. She wiped them away quickly but was unable to hide them in time.
“We can’t do this, Michael,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, eyes filled with guilt.
“I understand, you’re just…tired,” I said, trying to brush it off. I still didn’t know what’d happened.
“No,” she said, shaking her head, wiping her eyes with her sleeve in a vain attempt to dry them. She looked wrecked. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I’d done something, and I didn’t know what… maybe I shouldn’t have even stepped out of my room at all.
Callista shook her head again as if she could flick out whatever painful thought was in it.
“I lied to you,” she said.
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier,” she replied, sniffing again, face full of even deeper remorse “I didn’t…I didn’t actually lie. But I didn’t say something when I should have. A long time ago.”
She cleared her throat. “I knew that we’d lived before and had other lives. I just didn’t say anything.”
All along? Had I missed so many clues that she’d put it together long before me? Confusion hit and a barrel of questions broke open in front of me.
“How?” I asked. She scratched the back of her head, ruffling her hair nervously before pulling it back behind her shoulders.
“I—I had different dreams than you,” she admitted.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I felt lost. I couldn’t think of any reason why she’d have withheld that. It wasn’t like I’d have been angry with her. It just might have helped me to figure things out much faster.
She shook her head. “It’s not what you think, Michael. It was about us. You and me.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant and her voice refused to give me any indication. She gathered her courage and pressed on.
“I think I had more dreams than you,” she said. “Maybe Thad did as well; I haven’t asked. I didn’t just dream of finding you and then getting killed. I dreamed of other things.”
She nodded, voice going melancholy. “You and I and Thad, in some other life. In my dreams, I called you Daniel but I didn’t see him, I saw you, just like you are now.”
She waved her hand at me. I remembered how my dreams had also shown her and Thad as they were, not who they’d been in the other lives. I guessed it’d been a part of our connection—something that’d linked us in this real life.
“We were outside, in a garden,” she continued. “It was giant like a courtyard, with all red flowers hanging from the trees and the ground just…littered with them. Like that was the ground, these bloody-looking red flowers all over the place. And I just stood there with Thad next to me, there was nobody else but us and you.”
She lifted her right hand. “Thad was whispering something to me and showed me his silver ring. It only had one mark on it then. He said that every Guardian has two rings for picking their Chosens: two humans that a Guardian trusts more than anyone else, and wants to keep for eternity. It was almost like he was reciting something from a ceremony.”
“Then you started talking,” Callista went on. “You told me I could still leave if I wanted. If I wasn’t absolutely sure of what I was doing, that I shouldn’t go ahead, and you wouldn’t hate me.”
She shook her head. “But I wasn’t going to hear any of that. I didn’t have any control over myself, but I knew that I wanted it, back then. And when you finally got your hand up and put the ring on my finger, everything just went black, and I woke up.”
Here she reached over her shoulder, massaging the back of her own neck just like I’d wished I could have done minutes before. I held my hands as she eased her own pain out.
“Then all the other dreams kept going. Can you imagine what that did to me?” she said. “This real-life ring started growing from my finger and I was still dreaming about you night after night. My parents already had me going to a psychiatrist for the nightmares. I think that’s how the Guardians found me—all my wild stories in my medical records about claws and Chosens and someone named Daniel Rothfeld…it had to have sent up a flag to them somehow.”
She was fighting back tears. “Then they found me, and…you know. But the dreams kept going until the scales appeared while I was lying in their cell. I kept seeing you at night, watching you die in your lives, watching Thad die…watching me die.”