Believe it or not, that single day was a pretty good example of how the next three weeks went. Yeah, three whole weeks with barely any real excitement outside of training and various planned scenarios. Just about the most dangerous thing that happened was when a few people threw a surprise party for Vanessa and Tristan (their birthday had been the 29th) and didn’t happen to inform Theia of what was going on. She was with them when the surprise was sprung and, well… yeah, they needed to get a new cake. But at least they didn’t have to get a new Jazz, and it was a pretty close call on that point. Luckily, she had good reflexes.
So yeah, everyone made a mental note not to startle Theia. Which honestly probably should’ve been underlined and bolded in all of our mental notebooks anyway, long before that. But all was well that ended well, and that day ended well indeed.
All the days did, actually. Three weeks, and I didn’t have any truly horrifying moments, no life and death decisions, no abductions, no crying in terror. I just… lived. I spent time with my girls, my friends, my family (including my mother), and the people who were just my classmates.
And Persephone. I spent some time with her too, throughout those days. She didn’t demand anything, of course. I had a feeling she was one of the most patient people I would ever meet. Which made sense, given her age and everything. Still, I made a point of spending time with her now and then. Sometimes it was all in a group setting, other times I sat alone and just talked, shared things about myself and asked about her in return. She had a lot of interesting stories. Not to mention incredibly amusing ones, terrifying ones, just… a lot of stories worth hearing.
I spent all that time with the woman, listened to her, talked with her about myself, showed her the things I was interested in, introduced her to a lot of human concepts, and basically just opened up to her a fair bit. And over those weeks, I grew to like her. Well, I’d already liked her before, just from how helpful she had been, not to mention the stuff we’d learned about where she came from. But now, after hanging out with her off and on over those intervening weeks, I definitely liked her as a person. She was cool. She was fun, exciting, different…
And I absolutely, positively, did not like her the way I liked–loved Avalon and Shiori.
Yeah, it wasn’t happening. Not like that. Again, I liked her. But it was more the way I liked Sands and Sarah, or Columbus, or Sean. I wanted to protect her, help her, even make her happy. I cared about what happened to her. But I didn’t feel anything like that for her. Three weeks of spending time together, and the more I knew her the more clear it was that I just… wasn’t going to have those feelings. There was literally no sense of romance, at least as far as I was concerned. I was afraid to ask how she was feeling, especially before I would know for certain that she understood how she was feeling.
That was my plan as far as that went. I wanted to help Persephone figure out on her own that she would be happier with someone other than me, with someone she actually enjoyed because of who they were rather than what power they had. I wasn’t sure how that would go, but yeah. My fingers were crossed. And I was thinking about adding toes, just in case.
Now it was Friday, December 21st. Four days until Christmas. We’d already had Hanukkah from December 2nd to the 10th, and Kwanzaa would start on the 26th. Plus there were a few other holidays mixed in there I didn’t even know much about. Apparently December was a big time for that sort of thing no matter where you came from. Or maybe holidays on other worlds tended to migrate to December because that was the general holiday time.
The fact that it was four days before Christmas was what had led to my current life or death quest: shopping for presents. On Earth.
“Can we please, please shoot out the speakers so those fucking Christmas songs shut up?” Koren pleaded with me while walking backwards through the mall so she could stare my way. “I promise there won’t be any collateral damage. Just the music. I will buy every single one of the presents you’re getting for everyone if you let me destroy every speaker in this mall so they can never torture anyone again. We’re supposed to stop monsters, right? What are the people who play this goddamn music on a constant loop if not monsters? My logic is impeccable and you should be nodding right now.”
Walking beside me, Rebecca noted, “I don’t think shooting out the speakers and destroying the mall’s ability to make music really fits with the whole… blending in and not attracting attention thing. I’m just saying, people might notice something like that.”
“Ilikethesongs,” December cheerfully announced while doing a little spin as she and Tabbris walked ahead of us. “Andthedecorationsandeverythingelse. Everyone’sreallyhappyabout…itbeingDecemberand…it’sliketheylikeme.”
“They’re all December holidays!” Tabbris giggled, nudging the other girl. “Out on the lawn there arose such a clatter. December was here, now just let me at her. Away to the window I flew with a flash.”
December was grinning broadly as she put in, “ButDecemberwasmovingand… wemetwithacrash!”
With that, the two of them jumped into each other, stumbling backward while laughing so hard they almost fell over. Quickly, they began to make up more lyrics amongst themselves.
“Well, at least they’re having fun.” Shaking my head, I looked at Koren (who was still walking backward, expertly avoiding everything that might have been in her way without looking). “Sorry, but Rebecca’s right. I really don’t want to give your mom any reason to hold off on sending me down here again. Not with my visits coming up.”
“When’s the first one?” Rebecca asked. “And how many?”
“Tomorrow night,” I replied, “and ahhh, about fifteen in the first batch. They’re all pretty close together. They’re from a umm, neighborhood that Fossor went through about ten years ago.”
Tomorrow night would be when I officially started releasing some of these ghosts. It could’ve been earlier, but I’d discussed it with all of them and they decided to go closer to Christmas. There was a larger chance of their families being around. For those who weren’t stopped by the Bystander Effect, they could actually say goodbye in person. For those who were, the ghosts could at least see them one last time. It wasn’t much, especially after everything they had been through. But it was something that I could do for them. And I definitely didn’t want to screw that up by giving Abigail any reason to see sending me to Earth as a bad idea. Not that I honestly thought she’d put a stop to the plan or anything, but still. Better safe than sorry. Besides, I didn’t want to be hit with one of her disappointed looks.
“He killed fifteen people in one neighborhood that he just happened to pass through?” Rebecca’s voice shook a little bit as she stared at me, the small girl adding, “Where was it?”
“He killed a lot more than that in that neighborhood,” I replied in a tight voice. Thinking about it only made me more upset. “Fifteen were all that he bothered to reanimate and use. It’s a place in Cary, North Carolina. He was looking for something that was buried around that area, and there was this neighborhood watch group that sort of… vaguely annoyed him by showing up with flashlights when he was trying to di–sorry, when he was trying to have some zombies dig for him. It started a whole commotion and he ended up killing a bunch of them and putting those fifteen to work as ghosts to keep everyone else away for the entire week he needed to find the thing he was looking for. He turned that whole neighborhood into a horror movie, made the dead people haunt their loved ones to torture all of them to give himself privacy, and for fun.” My voice was a little hollow as I explained that. I could still remember how disgusted and angry I felt when the ghosts in question had told me their story. What made it worse, of course, was the knowledge that theirs was hardly unique. All these ghosts that I was now connected to, all the spirits I had inherited from Fossor, had deeply traumatic, horrifying stories of their own. All of them thanks to that piece of shit. The only bad thing about him being dead was that we couldn’t kill him again.
Sounding like she was having very similar thoughts, Rebecca asked, “What was he looking for out there that was so important?”
A heavy sigh escaped me, as I watched Tabbris and December chattering happily back and forth in front of a store window ahead of us. “Who knows? The thing they helped him dig up was some little wooden chest, about a foot wide and maybe a little under a foot tall? They don’t know what he did with it, or if he even used whatever was inside. Maybe it’s sitting somewhere waiting for him. Maybe he never did anything with it at all. Maybe he already used it. Maybe…” My head shook. “A lot of maybes. The point is, he killed them and the people in that neighborhood never got any sort of closure about what happened. We can’t really give them that, not really. But we can… sort of try. We can give his victims something.” It wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough. But it could be something.
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Pushing those thoughts away, I made myself shrug while trying to sound casual. Not that it worked that well. “But hey, he’s gone forever now, and that’s what actually matters. That and cleaning up after all the trauma he left behind. And I get to take another step on that long journey tomorrow night. It was going to be Sunday instead of Saturday, but, well, you know.”
They both nodded. They did know. Sunday night, December 23rd, would be when the anti-possession spell went into effect. Everything was prepared, and everyone had spent the past few weeks donating power to the spell. It had taken all that time, the months since we actually saved it from the vault, for the real experts to finish the adjustments for the spell and add in all the particular details that we were looking for. They had finally come back with every (excruciatingly precise) measurement and all the special materials that have been required. Then all they needed was raw power, and they received a lot of it from everyone living on the station, and a lot more beyond that. The spell itself had been drawn within one of the rooms on the station, and that was an absolutely incredibly protected place. Even I couldn’t get in there. Almost no one who wasn’t very high up or part of the actual spell team was allowed inside. But from what Avalon (who was allowed in because it was literally her ancestor’s spell) had said, the whole place was like one of those elaborate clean rooms, complete with an airlock entrance and special suits you had to wear to avoid messing anything up by breathing on it wrong or carrying in something that might disturb it. And even the suits weren’t enough. You also stood in the airlock area and let several different scanners run over you to make sure nothing bad went in with you. Beyond that, they had these special force fields covering the floor, walls, and ceiling where the runes were drawn, and more shields surrounding the artifacts that had been added into it. Everything was precisely laid out down to the millimeter. Every tiny, microscopic adjustment had to be agreed on by all the people working on the spell, and they used these special, incredibly precise instruments to make those adjustments.
So yeah, it was a big deal. They’d been working on it for so long, no one wanted them to have to start over. So there were always guards stationed by the room, and enough spells around the place to ensure no one could get inside without alerting people. In that room was the result of centuries of searching, months of careful preparation and research, millions of dollars-worth of ancient artifacts, and the combined magical energies from what had to be thousands of people.
It was a big deal, and rightfully so given everything it would accomplish. So now that the spell was finally going to be put into place, we were going to have a party. A real party, across not only the station, but down in the Atherby camp and in Wonderland. Yeah, it was a big thing. That was why I couldn’t do the ghost thing Sunday night. I was going to be rather busy.
Smiling a bit to myself at the thought, I focused on Koren. “You gonna get something good for your mom?”
She, in turn, made a face at me. “Don’t think you can weasel your way into finding out what I’m getting her just because you can’t think of anything. In fact, why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking of so I know you haven’t already copied me?”
The two of us stared at one another for a few long seconds before I raised an eyebrow. “You got nothing, huh?”
Deflating, the other girl lamented, “I got nothing. And I really thought it’d be easier to shop for Mom by now! Especially with everything going on, all her new responsibilities, the–all of it! But I still don’t know what to get her. I’m not going with a gift card again. That seems extra lame now.”
Yeah, she was probably overthinking it. But then again, I had no room to talk on that front, considering how much I was overthinking what I was going to get for my own mother. Seriously, what Christmas present could I possibly give her that would come anywhere near saying how I felt about the fact that she was finally home with us? Suddenly, I understood why Wyatt had felt the need to give multiple years-worth of missed presents. The whole concept was really overwhelming.
With that in mind, I swallowed hard before quietly telling Koren that we would help each other find a good present. Hopefully, something good enough to even register on the scale of what I owed my mother would be sitting in one of these stores. Though somehow I doubted Hot Topic or the Gap had anything that could give her a decade of her life back, and take away all the bad shit that had happened to her.
Rebecca shook her head while shifting the backpack on her shoulders. “You guys are overthinking this whole thing. It’s not about giving them some amazing, perfect present. It’s about the fact that they get to be there so you can give it to them in the first place. Well, that and putting thought into it. Come on, what they want are gifts that show you were thinking about them. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be from you. And something that means they were on your minds, that they matter to you.”
Thinking about that for a moment, I offered the girl a small smile. “You’re pretty smart about this stuff.”
She, in turn, blushed and ran a hand over her face. “Yeah, well, that was mostly Grandma talking. She figured you guys would be acting crazy about this whole thing and wanted to give some advice.”
She visibly blanched then, and I knew why. Both of her parents were still with the loyalists. They weren’t listening to her or to Lillian. And they had made it very clear that they wanted Rebecca back with them.
That was what this whole conflict was doing to a lot of people. My family may have been brought back together, but a lot of them were being torn apart. It was a fact that had been made even more apparent over these holidays.
Even as I was trying to find the right words to say to the girl, she physically shook it off before asking, “Anyway, are we ready to get to the actual shopping part? I mean, I kind of need to buy something super-good for Grandma to pay her back for that advice about how you don’t have to get super-nice presents to show you love people.”
Koren and I exchanged looks briefly before I snorted. “Yeah, sure. Let’s get going then. Besides, if we take much longer to move on, December and Tabbris might physically drag us after them.”
As if agreeing with that, Tabbris called, “We have to find something good for Grandma and Grandpa! They’ll be here any day!”
Yeah, she was pretty excited to meet our grandparents officially and physically. We’d talked a bit more to them over the past few weeks, but Tabbris couldn’t wait to actually see them in person in her own body and all. She was incredibly nervous about it, even though they had made it clear that they were excited to meet her as well. It was a whole thing. I was pretty sure she wasn’t exactly afraid they would reject her. Not anymore. But still, she wanted to make a good first official impression, and had been sort-of agonizing over that for awhile now.
“You know you can call them Popser and Grandmaria, Tabs,” I reminded her.
She, in turn, squirmed a bit on her feet, with December bouncing behind her. “I know, it’s just… I don’t wanna take your thing.”
My head shook, as I walked up that way and put both hands on her shoulders. “They’re your grandparents too. He’s your Popser and she’s your Grandmaria, just like they’re mine.” After briefly embracing her, I straightened. “Now come on. Let’s go find the perfect presents for everyone.”
So, we walked onward. For the next couple hours, the five of us strolled through the mall and shopped. I picked up things for the others, including my girls, and we eventually stopped at the food court for something to eat. I sat there, watching people around us go about their own holiday shopping. It felt so surreal, seeing all those people with completely ordinary lives. Not that their lives weren’t important. They were. The point was just… they had no idea what was really going on in the world. The Fomorians, the Seosten, the monster under the ocean, things like Kwur and the other Gehenna prisoners, and so on.
Would I prefer to be like that? Would I like it better if I could live an ordinary life with my family? Just to be completely fair, assume I could keep everyone I loved and cared about with me. My family and my friends. If I could keep them, would I want to go back to a normal life, one without all the pressure and responsibility? Would I prefer to live a completely free life, with an ordinary job as a reporter/writer, and not have to deal with any of that?
No. No, I wouldn’t. I had a chance to ride multiple spaceships. I’d been to other worlds. I had incredible powers. I knew magic. I’d met amazing people, other beings who weren’t anything close to being human. There was a lot of pressure, sure. There was so much danger. But there was so much more than that. I’d been able to be part of so many incredible, amazing things in just the past year-and-a-half. I couldn’t imagine ever giving that up. Not for anything.
Tabbris chose that moment to poke me in the chin with a pretzel. “Whatcha got serious face for? What’s wrong?”
Smirking a bit despite myself, I poked her with my own pretzel before dipping it in cheese to take a bite. Then I smiled at her and the others as they stared at me as well. “Nothing, really. Everything’s pretty good right–”
I was interrupted by the buzzing of the phone in my pocket. Opening and shutting my mouth a couple times, I exhaled before pulling it out. “If this is something bad, you can all hit me.” Checking the phone, I saw that the call was from my mother. So, I clicked the button to connect and answered with, “Please don’t make me look like I just jinxed everything.”
“Felicity,” Mom started immediately. “I need you to… I need you to come back and go with me.”
Oh boy. Hearing the tone in her voice, I immediately pushed myself up. “We’re coming back. What’s wrong? What happened? Is Dad–”
“Dad’s fine, we’re all fine,” she assured me. “I need you to come with me, we have to find her.”
“Find who?” I shook my head, confused. The others had all risen around me, as we started moving together.
“It’s Denise, Felicity,” Mom informed me. “She… she’s gone.
“She disappeared and no one knows where she is.”