Escaping Fate (10 page)

My shadow guards seemed to be keeping a
silent watch until it was their time to collect their newest
sacrifice. I closed my eyes to the shadows, but found no comfort.
Pulling the thin blanket over my head in a childish effort to put
the shadows out of my mind, I sobbed into my pillow. I quietly fell
asleep amid free flowing tears, free of dreams for the rest of the
night, but not free of fear.

Chapter Twelve

I tried to sleep late into the morning.
I tried to focus on the warm sun that settled over me. It should
have been comforting, but it reminded me instead of the hot Aztecan
sun. Pushing the image away, I tried to reassure myself that I was
momentarily safe in my own time, not high atop a temple mesa. It
worked a little. Although, however comforting that realization was
it could do nothing to hold all that I had learned at
bay.

Fears slowly seeped into my mind,
leaving little room for anything else. Climbing off my mattress, I
made my way to the bathroom. I did my best to push the disturbing
thoughts out of my mind as I stood under the hot shower. The heat
and water only reminded me of the dream girl sitting in a steaming
tub of water being scrubbed by attendants in preparation for the
sacrifice. I finished my shower quickly.

Dressing with much less care than
usual, I considered the things my grandpa had told me the day
before. He had surprised me with what he had revealed, but I felt
that he had kept back even more. It was scary to admit that,
because if he had kept anything back it was because it must have
been even more horrifying than what he had already told
me.

He had warned me that the mystery went
deeper than I realized, and he was right. I had found out about the
other girls, dead and forgotten. Perhaps if I showed my grandpa how
serious I was about finding the truth, he would tell me the rest of
what he knew. Remembering how his body had crumpled and sagged at
the mention of his beloved sister and daughter, I did not relish
the idea of asking him to relive those memories again.

Bringing that much pain to my grandpa
again scared me more than I wanted to admit, but turning away from
the truth was not an option anymore. Despite my despair the night
before, I woke up still holding onto a tenuous belief that there
might be a chance to change my fate if only I could find the truth.
That slim hope took hold of me and refused to let go. I was on my
way to my grandpa’s house with my new information before either of
my parents had woken up. This time I did remembered to leave a
note.

When my grandpa opened the door, I was
not greeted with the same enthusiasm as I had been the day before.
Studying my demeanor carefully, he welcomed me into his home. He
knew exactly why I had come back.

“Come in Arrabella,” he said. “I
thought you might be back today. Come in and tell me what you’ve
found.”

I walked through the door and listened
to my footsteps gently tap along the old wood floors. Glancing at
the wall that enclosed the hallway I saw the rows of hanging
pictures. Katie and Maera dominated the faces. At least he hadn’t
forgotten, I though. Stepping into the kitchen with my photos and
records, I was ready to find out the rest of what my grandpa knew.
We sat down at the little round table and I told him everything I
had discovered.

He patiently listened to me with a
frown that deepened as the conversation continued. When I finished
my explanation I looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell
what he knew as well. Staring down at the table, the silence grew
thicker.

“Well,” I asked, “what do you
think?”

“Arra, I told you that you would find
out all of this,” he said. I just stared at him. Surely he did not
expect me to accept that as an answer. I opened my mouth to argue,
but he continued first. “Are you sure you want to go forward with
this? There won’t be any going back if you do. The knowledge will
change things too much for that.” His gaze met my eyes, studying me
intently.

“I need to know, Grandpa. I can’t live
with this fear and not try to understand it,” I said, hoping I
sounded brave enough.

He nodded. He must have expected that
to be my answer. “I do know what is happening, Arra. I had truly
hoped that it would never come to this, but it has. No matter what
ideas I have, they could never be tested, until now.”

Pausing, he took a deep breath before
moving on. “Well, now you know that Katie’s and Maera’s deaths
weren’t just coincidence. You can’t change any of it,
unfortunately. I told you to find the other names just so you would
realize how old this is, how deep the trouble goes. No one else has
ever been able to stop it, but I refuse to accept that no one ever
will. Knowing doesn’t help the fear, but maybe it can help in other
ways.”

“We can’t know for sure that nothing
will stop it. I have to try, Grandpa. If this thing is going to
come after me too, I won’t sit around and just wait for it to claim
me. I will not give up that easily,” I said.

“Good, Arra. You will need to be strong
for this,” he said, almost to himself.

I rubbed her arms absently, trying to
get rid of the prickling feeling spreading over my skin. I could
not rid myself of the bizarre sensation, though. Looking back at my
grandpa, I wondered how long he had been preparing for this. “I
want you to tell me what else you know, Grandpa. I can tell that
you’re keeping something from me. I have to know everything. Please
tell me.”

“I know that when you hear this, you’ll
think I’ve lost what little sanity I have left, but please just
listen,” he said, patting my knee. “I will tell you everything. You
deserve to hear the truth. You need to hear it if you want to
succeed.” Leaning forward in his chair, he brought his face closer
to mine.

“Katie didn’t actually die instantly
like I made it sound yesterday. Your father was able to reach her
while she was still alive. Her head was bleeding from the fall, but
not badly enough that your father thought she was going to
die.

“She was coherent at first, but the
longer he was with her the more unreasonable she became. Your
father tried to ask her what had happened, but she wasn’t sure
herself. She told him that someone was after her, but there was
nobody else around. She was hysterical, begging your father not to
let them take her. He asked her who was coming, but she couldn’t
give him a clear answer.

“The more he tried to talk to her the
more frantic she became. By the end she was screaming at him to
save her. He tried everything he could think of to calm her down,
but nothing worked. Your father stood up and starting yelling,
hoping somebody would hear him. He was only a few steps away from
her.

“He told me later that the most
terrifying part of the whole thing was that she had been screaming
for help and suddenly just stopped, for no apparent reason. At
first he thought she had lost consciousness. But when he checked
for her pulse, he realized that she was already dead.

“He couldn’t understand what had
happened. No one could, really. The fall wasn’t bad enough to have
killed her. Like I said, the coroner couldn’t actually tell us what
had happened to her. He told us that she must have died from shock,
but the look in his eyes said he didn’t believe it
either.”

“Do you know what really happened to
her, Grandpa?” I asked quietly. I knew there was more to tell and I
found I was willing to push him into unpleasant places to get it.
“Do you know who ‘they’ were? Do you know who was chasing Katie? Do
you know who will come after me?”

“Yes, Arra, I know. At least, some of
it I know,” he said. He turned to me and said, “It was the same
thing that killed Maera. I was sure of that after Katie
died.”

“Tell me what happened to her, Grandpa.
Please,” I said, my fingernails digging into my palms.

His eyes closed tightly and he drew a
deep breath. Seeing his pausing as a refusal to answer, I stood up
to leave. “I can’t believe this,” I said angrily. “I did what you
said. I found the others, and still you won’t talk to me?” He
grabbed my arm and pulled me back to my chair. He took a deep
breath, rubbed his wrinkled forehead, and looked me straight in the
eye.

“Wait, Arra. I will tell you
everything. I just needed a minute to prepare myself. I hoped that
I would never have to do this, but I know that I must. I’m sorry.
This isn’t easy for me. Sit down, please,” he said gently. “Katie
didn’t die because of the fall or from shock. At first I thought
that she had, or I wanted to believe she had, to be perfectly
honest. I wanted to believe that it had nothing to do with Maera.
But when the coroner couldn’t explain her death to us, and your
father told me what Katie had said, I knew her death had everything
to do with Maera’s.

“There has always been a story passed
down in our family about a woman named Kivera. She was an Aztec
woman who lived many generations ago when Aztec society still
flourished. She was chosen to be a sacrifice when she was a young
woman. She was so terrified that she pleaded with the priest to let
her go. Nobody knew exactly what happened, but some kind of deal
was struck over the sacrificial altar. Kivera walked away, but
obviously that wasn’t the end of it,” he said.

Aztec sacrifice and deals made over an
altar? I scoffed, pretty sure my grandpa was trying to feed me a
bedtime story instead of telling me the truth. I guess I had come
here expecting some fantastic reason for mystery of the dead girls,
but still. My lips parted to object, to demand he stop treating me
like a child, but he waved my words away and continued.

“I know that you don’t believe in
stories like that, Arra,” he said, “and I didn’t either at first. I
had heard the story before Maera died and wondered if the fabled
curse had been what claimed her. Eventually I forgot about it. When
Katie died I considered the curse again because of the strange
circumstances. That’s when I found out everything you’ve found out.
I know that the curse is real, Arra. I know it sounds crazy, but
you believe it too, don’t you?”

I sat quietly wondering at my grandpa.
I didn’t know what I had been expecting to hear, but an ancient
Aztec curse sounded insane. I was sure he must be joking, but the
devastated looked on his face stopped me cold. He looked as though
he had just signed my death warrant himself, as if sharing his
secret finally made it all too real.

His revelation was so far away from
anything I had been expecting that I could not say anything in
response. Wanting to laugh and cry at the same time, I bit the
inside of my cheek hard to stave off doing either. I sat very still
and considered everything I knew. There was no such thing as
curses, that was certainly true, right? This was all crazy, wasn’t
it? But all those girls had been taken by something. No coincidence
could possibly reach that far. In the end I could not deny the
possibility that it was not just a silly story.

If all I had to go on were the pictures
and genealogy, I might have been able to convince herself that none
of this was true if I tried hard enough, but my dreams rushed to
the front of my mind in a crashing wave. The cleansing and
painting, the slow march up the tower, the oily black blade
assaulted me. The dreams were so powerful that I woke each night
dreading falling asleep again. It was all too much for me to pass
off as fantasy. My grandpa disturbed my dizzying thoughts by
putting his rough hand on my arm. It was only the slightest
pressure but the physical contact brought me back to the
present.

“Arra, why don’t you tell me what else
you know? You haven’t told me everything either, have you?” he
asked me.

Without looking up at my grandpa’s face
I shared my secret as well. “I’ve dreamed of her. At least I think
it’s her, Kivera. For nearly a week I have dreamed about her, about
what happened to her. I saw her taken from her home, dressed in
ceremonial clothes and paint, and paraded up to an altar. She was
terrified. She was crying the whole way.”

The remembered terror of the dreams
made me pause as I tried to push away the all too familiar tears. I
looked up at my grandpa’s patient face and tried to continue. “She
looked just like me. I thought it was me at first, but I know now
it must be her. The fear is so real that they can’t be just
dreams,” I said. “It’s her. She’s trying to warn me, to tell me
what happened to her and what is going to happen to me.”

My grandpa put his arm around my
shoulders and hugged me to his chest. I thought this dream would be
a revelation to him, but the calmness in his eyes said it was not.
“You’ve heard this before?”

“Yes, I have,” he said. “Being Twins,
Maera and I were very close. The week leading up to her death she
had started acting very strangely. Normally she was a happy,
excitable person, but suddenly she started staying mostly to
herself. I tried to ask her what was wrong, but she brushed me off.
All she would say was that she had been having bad dreams at
night.

“After Katie died I was packing up her
room and I came across her diary.” He smiled warmly. “I probably
shouldn’t have opened it, but I just wanted to know what she had
been feeling and thinking before she died. I wanted to feel close
to her. I was shocked to read about the dreams she was having, how
they scared her and kept her awake at nights. They sound like the
same dreams you just described. I wish she had told me about the
dreams then. Maybe it would have made a difference. Who can know?
She didn’t even tell your father.”