And I have to believe that I can save my brother in the end, because serva me, servabo te. Save me and I’ll save you, Finn.
Destroy the ring.
How does one go about destroying a ring?
Dare and I sneak away into the forest, and burn the journal before anyone can see, before anyone even realizes we’re gone. They can’t see his words, they can’t see our story.
If they do, we’ll never get out of here.
We’ll never be free.
And we have to.
We have to live free.
“I can’t live without Finn,” I tell Dare on the way back in.
He holds my hand and looks at me, and smiles a sad sad smile.
“I know.”
We walk and walk, and Dare turns to me.
“I love you more than life, and I’ve been doing some research. Salome married her brother, and she became a necromancer. She wanted to live forever, but Phillip didn’t. Phillip has been trying for centuries to end the curse, while Salome wants it to continue. They’ve been at odds, and that has been born into twins in your family for generations. That has to be it.”
I’m dubious, but intrigued.
“Are we related?” I ask, and it’s a question I’ve been afraid to ask, afraid to know the answer.
Dare stares at me with his black black eyes. “I don’t know. But you can undo anything. Perhaps the answer is not to destroy the ring, but to change things so that it was never created in the first place. If you can do that… you can prevent everything from happening. You won’t have to change it. Surely that will end the cycle.”
“But what if it ends us?” I ask and I’m afraid. “If I prevent events from happening, maybe we’ll never be born.”
Dare shakes his head. “I don’t believe that. I believe in Fate, and we’re fated, Calla. We’re fated. I feel it.”
“But I won’t remember,” I tell him. “When I change things and I wake up, I never remember. What if I forget you?”
“Then I’ll find you, Calla-Lily. I’ll always find you.”
Hope leaps into my heart and his eyes are so sincere, so true.
“Do you promise?” I ask, and he smiles at me, and I’m afraid to hope.
“I do,” Dare says as he puts the ring in his pocket. “We’ll get this sorted.”
“What a British thing to say,” I say.
“That’s the meanest thing you’ve said all day.”
As we laugh, I feel like we’ve been here before, in this time and place and with these same words. But I’m getting used to that feeling. Because by night we are free, and things change, because we change them, and déjà vu is real, and we’re stuck in it.
Because of that, we’ll change things again, because time is fluid and malleable and it never stays the same. We’ll save my brother. I feel it I feel it I feel in my bones, in my hollow reed bones.
“Nocte liber sum,” I whisper to Dare.
He nods. “Keep dreaming, Calla Lily. And one day, we’ll be free.”
I squeeze his hand because I know.
After lights out, after the nurses have made the last rounds and given us all our medicine, I sneak from my room and into Dare’s.
“You can do this,” Dare whispers into my hair. “Think back to the beginning. Imagine it, imagine what happened. Let Salome die without creating the ring, without creating the curse. Let Phillip be her uncle, not her brother. Let them die without re-living over and over. Keep your mother from being with her brother, keep us from being related. You can do it. You can.”
His words empower me, and I believe him. I can do it, and I imagine what he says and I snuggle into his chest because his arms are home, and I close my eyes, knowing that I’ll dream.
And when I dream, I change things.
I sleep
And sleep
And sleep.
And when I open my eyes, it’s a beautiful Oregon morning, and my brother wants to go to group therapy.
I stretch and yawn and grouse, but he’s right. We should go. I roll out of my bed, get dressed.
“Drive safe!” my father calls out needlessly when we leave. Because of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father doesn’t even like to see us in a car, but he knows it’s a necessity of life.
Even still, he doesn’t want to watch it.
It’s ok. We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable.
I drop into the passenger seat of our car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.
“How’d you sleep?”
Because he doesn’t usually.
He’s an insufferable insomniac. His mind is naturally more active at night than the average person’s. He can’t figure out how to shut it down. And when he does sleep, he has vivid nightmares so he gets up and crawls into my bed.
Because I’m the one he comes to when he’s afraid.
It’s a twin thing. Although, the kids that used to tease us for being weird would love to know that little tid-bit, I’m sure. Calla and Finn sleep in the same bed sometimes, isn’t that sick?? They’d never understand how we draw comfort just from being near each other. Not that it matters what they think, not anymore. We’ll probably never see any of those assholes again.
“I slept like shit. You?”
“Same,” I murmur. Because it’s true. I’m not an insomniac, but I do have nightmares. Vivid ones, of my mother screaming, and broken glass, and of her cellphone in her hand. In every dream, I can hear my own voice, calling out her name, and in every dream, she never answers.
You could say I’m a bit tortured by that.
Finn and I fall into silence, so I press my forehead to the glass and stare out the window as he drives, staring at the scenery that I’ve been surrounded with since I was born.
Despite my internal torment, I have to admit that our mountain is beautiful.
We’re surrounded by all things green and alive, by pine trees and bracken and lush forest greenery. The vibrant green stretches across the vast lawns, through the flowered gardens, and lasts right up until you get to the cliffs, where it finally and abruptly turns reddish and clay.
I guess that’s pretty good symbolism, actually. Green means alive and red means dangerous. Red is jagged cliffs, warning lights, splattered blood. But green… green is trees and apples and clover.
“How do you say green in Latin?” I ask absentmindedly.
“Viridem,” he answers. “Why?”
“No reason.” I glance into the side-mirror at the house, which fades into the distance behind us.
Huge and Victorian, it stands proudly on the top of this mountain, perched on the edge of the cliffs with its spires poking through the clouds. It’s beautiful and graceful, at the same time as it is gothic and dark. It’s a funeral home, after all, at the end of a road on a mountain. It’s a horror movie waiting to happen.
Last Funeral Home on the Left.
Dad will need a miracle to rent the tiny Carriage House out, and I feel a slight pang of guilt. Maybe he really does need the money, and I’ve been pressuring him to give it to Finn or me.
I turn my gaze away from the house, away from my guilt, and out to the ocean. Vast and gray, the water punishes the rocks on the shore, pounding into them over and over. Mist rises from the water, forming fog along the beach. It’s beautiful and eerie, haunting and peaceful.
We arrive at the hospital early, so we decide to get coffee and breakfast in the cafeteria while we wait.
I grab my cup and head to the back, slumping into a booth, while Finn buries his nose in a Latin book.
I close my eyes to rest for a minute longer because the perpetual rain in Astoria makes me sleepy.
The sounds of the hospital fade into a buzzing backdrop, and I ignore the shrill, multi-pitched yells that drift down the hallways. Because honestly, I don’t want to know what they’re screaming about.
I stay suspended in my sleepy dark world for God knows how long, until I feel someone staring at me.
When I say feel, I literally feel it, just like someone is reaching out and touching my face with their fingers.
Opening my eyes, I suck my breath in when I find dark eyes connected to mine, eyes so dark they’re almost black, and the energy in them is enough to freeze me in place.