Earthbound (28 page)

I have the potential to do the same thing.

But I have to
do something
. And not just
anything
—the most important something in the world.

It will unlock my abilities … . if only I can remember what it is.

My body starts to shake again. That kind of power makes everything more dangerous, more dire. Maybe I can harness it, but if I can’t, it could destroy us all.

“I don’t understand,” Benson says, and his voice is unsteady. “Like, a past life?”

“Yes. And not just one. A hundred. A thousand. At first I saw Rebecca, the same way I’ve always seen Quinn. But then, it’s like my—my soul, I guess, came out of me and I was
inside
Rebecca, looking out of her eyes and feeling everything that she felt on the night they tried to kill her.”

Benson is silent, but his brow wrinkles in obvious thought.

“And it was … familiar. I knew I’d been in that body before.”
It was like coming home
, I think. But I don’t say it.

“So, do you … remember things now?”

“Sort of. Flashes. It’s not much,” I admit. “But she … I was so afraid. They’re after her, Benson.”

“Who?”

“The Reduciata.” Just saying the word makes a storm of fear roil in my chest.

He swallows hard.

“And that’s why they’re after me. Because she
is
me. I can’t let them catch me. They’ll—they’ll—” I don’t know how to end that sentence. But the terror that twists my insides in knots is enough to let me know that I would rather die than be in Reduciata
custody.

Again.

Again?

“You can’t even imagine what they’ll do,” I finally say, my voice soft. I shake off the awful memories.

Not even memories—shadows, hints of memories.

“We can’t go to the Curatoria
either. I have to do this on my own.” Panic quivers inside me and I spin back to Benson. “Not
alone
,” I emphasize when I see the despairing expression on his face. “Please help me?”

He reaches for my shoulder, then changes his mind and lets his hands drop. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need—”

The necklace.
Rebecca’s voice, I think. It sounds so much like my own.

“The necklace,” I obediently parrot. “The one Quinn wrote about in his journal—then I’ll remember.” I don’t want to give Rebecca more access to my head—to my heart—but somehow I know that getting the necklace will give me more power, not less. I
have
to have that power.

“Do you think it’s in the dugout place?” he asks.

“It’s got to be.”

“Let’s go back to the car.” He helps me to my feet, but my fingers and toes are numb and I stagger.

“Easy,” Benson says as he curls his arm around me and leads me away from the ruins of the house I lived in, lifetimes ago. I lean my head against his shoulder and wish we could forget about all this for a few hours and just go back to the hotel. Any hotel. The farther away the better.

But I can’t. I have to remember and then get the hell out of here before they catch up with me. I can protect myself, protect Benson, but only if I remember.

Remember.

A few drops of melted snow from the trees drip onto my face as a gust of wind finds the towering boughs above us. The sudden cold pricks on my skin and I’m myself again. Completely now. Even though I know—know as surely as I know the sky is blue and grass green—that I was Rebecca Fielding in another life.

“I’ll drive,” Benson says. “We shouldn’t stay in one place very long while people are following you—especially around that house. What used to be the house. If they know about Quinn, they might know about this place already.”

“Just a sec,” I say, reaching past him into the passenger seat. “It might be in the stuff you grabbed.” I open Benson’s messenger bag and sort through the contents.

A ring, a small pouch still mostly full of gold, and a lumpy bundle wrapped in a handkerchief.

That’s it.

An energy only I can sense pulses through it and I know what’s inside even as my fingers reach for it, pulling at the sparse stitches that hold the yellowed handkerchief closed.

The necklace.

It’s here.

It’s mine.

My hands are shaking too hard to undo the strings. “Benson? Can you please?”

He takes the delicate fabric and holds it in his hand for a few seconds before untying the thin strings to reveals a heavy pendant that glints silver and red.

It’s the one from my vision.

He looks down at the necklace with a tight expression. “So this will bring everything back?”

“I think so.”

He tries to speak, but his voice cracks and he stays silent for another few seconds. “And then what?” he finally asks, not looking up to meet my eyes.

I step forward and he draws the necklace closer, as though to keep it from me, but I’m not reaching for it. I run my hands up and down his arms the way he so often has with me.

Slowly.

Calmly.

Somehow I have to help Benson deal with all this. Help him see I still need him—need the guy who has seen me through absolute hell the last week. He didn’t ask for this, wouldn’t have had anything to do with this if I hadn’t walked into his life. Come to the library for help.

Help.
If only he knew then what he was getting into.

My hands freeze, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Benson, if you could go back in time to the day we met, and you knew everything that was going to happen, would you opt out?”

He looks down at me, and his eyes are hollow.

And he thinks.

Really
thinks
.

A prickle of annoyance threatens at his hesitance, but I stamp it down. It’s an important question and not one to be taken lightly.

“No,” he finally whispers.

“Me either. And this,” I say, pointing at his fist, still clenched around the necklace, the thin chain spilling out like sand, “isn’t going to change things. I don’t care what Rebecca thinks she wants, Benson.
I
want you. All this is going to do is give us answers.”

“You don’t understand,” he whispers. “You won’t feel the same.”

“Benson Ryder, put that necklace down!” I snap.

He drops the necklace on the trunk of the car with a thud, wary and confused. As soon as it’s out of his hand, I push my arms inside his jacket, just under his shirt. He shudders when my fingers touch his bare skin.

“Benson?” My heart beats wildly.

He just looks at me, and I could drown in the pain in his eyes.

“I love you.
You.
” I kiss his bottom lip, more of a gentle brush of skin than a kiss. Tingles spread through my body and I suppress a smile.

I said it.

I meant it.

I stand on tiptoe and kiss the scrapes on his face, then his nose, his cheeks. I let my hands slide up his neck and pull him down to me, kissing him gently, coaxing him with my mouth. “She can’t change how I feel,” I murmur against his lips.

“You don’t know that,” he whispers, and his voice is filled with an agony I’m desperate to heal.

I entwine our fingers and hold them against my heart. “I
do
. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I think you’ve more than proved the lengths you’ll go to for me.” I kiss his knuckles, one at a time, avoiding the reddened, broken skin on his right hand. “Now it’s my turn to prove it to
you
.”

I look up at him, and his entire face is tight with an emotion I can’t quite read. He draws in a ragged gasp and pulls his hand away. He turns halfway and picks up the necklace. “Shall I?” he whispers with near reverence.

“P-please,” I stutter.

He lifts the necklace, and rubies sparkle in a beam of sunlight. The chain is long, and Benson holds it up and gestures for me to turn around. Then the pendant hangs in front of my face, still suspended from Benson’s fingers. He hesitates, and I feel his breath close to my ear—in and out in a loud hiss.

“No matter what happens next,” he whispers, “I love you too.”

He drops the necklace over my head.

T
he instant the metal touches my skin, I’m in a whirlwind of light and color that flashes before my eyes, brilliant, excruciating, blinding in its radiance. My fingertips dig into Benson’s arm as I try to find something to grasp onto to keep from being carried away.

But the storm rages only in my mind, and soon I have to close my eyes to the world and try to force the turmoil inside me to calm, to hush to a reasonable volume. As the pain builds, I grasp for respite.
Rebecca has done this before; she knows how to manage it.
Desperate, I surrender my mind to her and somehow she
takes
the invading burst of memories from me.

They solidify, somehow, though it’s still like watching a movie in fast-forward. Scenes in a montage that flash before my eyes for only the briefest of instants before they’re gone—long before I can make sense of them. But soon they grow bright again, wild; Rebecca can’t handle them either.

“Benson, I can’t stop it!”

The pressure is still rising inside my head and I clutch at my temples, willing it to slow, to just give me a moment of rest. An instant to catch my breath. I can feel Rebecca trying to do the same thing, but nothing is working and the pressure is building, pushing out against my skull until I’m afraid my cranial bones are going to literally burst.

She’s no good to us if her brain is destroyed.
The words skitter through my mind and now I understand what they were worried about.

Someone’s screaming and I think it’s me.

Hands are on me, arms wrapped around me, and even though my eyes are open again, I see only blackness. Images race, and just as I’m ready to give up, I see a flash of gold in the smeared scenes.

“Quinn, help me,” I whisper through clenched teeth that rattle as I speak.

And then his eyes are there, still and green amid a sickly sea of memories. I focus on those eyes and the crazed turbulence ebbs the tiniest bit.

But it’s enough.

I grasp for control and it’s like swimming through tar toward the dimmest of lights. But it’s there. Quinn’s eyes sustain my equilibrium and Rebecca’s mind and mine meld—we are one, we are
us
—and I know what to do. Together, our thoughts reach out like a net to bridle the energy that’s been poured into me and somehow, I hold it. It fills every inch of me until I swear my skin must be stretched to bursting, but this time I can contain it.

My breath slows and when I blink again, a fuzzy green greets me. It takes a while longer before I can see the sun-imbued leaves clearly, but eventually my focus returns. My head is on Benson’s lap and I’m lying on the sparse grass just behind the Honda. I try to move and everything hurts. After a few seconds I give up and just turn my eyes to Benson.

The forest is a glade of silence until Benson breaks it with a deafening whisper. “Are you okay?”

I nod. I ache like I’ve been struck by lightning, but I’m okay. I’m more than okay.

I’m
full
.

But I don’t have words to express that; not ones that he would understand. I wouldn’t have understood before either. It’s beyond normal human comprehension.

I
must be beyond human comprehension.

I am something else.
My head aches and I close my eyes—the sunlight overwhelms my senses. But I know what I am now.

“Does it still hurt?”

I don’t try to deny it. “Not as bad as before.” And even speaking makes me want to whimper. “It’s like an entire library just got poured into my brain and there’s no room,” I choke out.

“Is that why you screamed?”

I look up at him and for the first time since touching the necklace I see him clearly, with my Tavia eyes. He’s pale and a sheen of sweat dots his brow.
What have I done?
“I’m so sorry, Benson.” Though I don’t know exactly what I’m sorry for. Scaring him? Putting him in this position at all?

Everything?

“You screamed and screamed,” he whispers, and his voice quavers and he won’t meet my eyes. “I thought you were going to break inside and die. I really did.”

“So did I,” I say, reaching for his hand.

He moves his arm, runs his fingers through his hair, a flash of hardness shining in his eyes.

But I don’t have the capacity to analyze it.

I lie with my head on his lap, my knees curled against my chest, for minutes that feel like hours as the pain recedes, slowly, so slowly, like the tide going out. Staring at the green leaves, the crumbly brown earth, straggly grass blades, distracts me enough to let my mind carefully make room for everything I’ve learned.

Everything I am.

“I’m exactly what they said,” I whisper, loosing my confession into reality.

“They?” Benson asks, his shaky words the barest hush on the wind.

“Elizabeth. Jay. They weren’t lying. I’m an Earthbound—I’m a goddess.” The word passes my lips for the first time and it’s not quite as frightening as I feared. But almost.

“Like … God, capital
G
?”

“No. Something else. Something different.” Ideas are whizzing through my head, making it hard to think in words. “I’m a creating goddess. But … cursed. I did … I did something wrong. A long time ago.”

Benson stays silent, but I have to talk. I discover my knowledge as it falls from my lips, and somehow it relieves the pressure in my head.

“I make things, from nothing. I’m a Creator, like Quinn. We’re Creators together. Lifetimes and lifetimes together. I can make anything. Anything,” I say with wonder.

“A goddess,” Benson says, and his voice is so quiet I’m not sure I would have heard him if my ear weren’t pressed against his belly.

I feel a little giggle build up in my throat. “Like a tree,” I say through a hysterical laugh. “Or a mountain. Or a building. Just
poof!
Anything.”

“Like a pyramid,” Benson says, following my manic thoughts.

I nod. “I was an Earthmaker. There were lots of us. We created the landscape of the whole world. It was—it was ours. Gifted to us by … I don’t know. Someone bigger. Someone stronger. But we got greedy.” Wringing out specific memories is like trying to squeeze a brick of steel with my bare hands, and my body begins to tremble from the effort. “We created humans. To—to be our servants. We overstepped. We were cursed.”