Thunder crackled in the distance as the rain storm finally reached us. I huddled closer to the man on my right, though the umbrella over our heads was insufficient to keep all three of us dry. Within moments, my left arm was drenched. The water ran down my exposed skin in rivulets, playing with the quickly developing goosebumps. My mother's words echoed in my ears, her calls for me to bring a jacket, despite the warm weather we had started the day with.

  I stared down at the stone in front of us. It was a familiar sight, something that we had seen often enough these past five years. Once a week at first, though Mom had gone more often than that. Then once a month, sometimes less. Ever since my father died. Ever since his funeral. There was an open spot next to his grave, set aside for Mom to join him one day. But even before the events of the past couple of months, it was looking less and less likely that she would have chosen such a fate.

  The stone got darker around the name that was carved into its side as the rainwater covered its surface. As the clouds grew darker overhead and the day seemed to turn into night with the heavy storm. My father's name screamed up at me. Jared San Lucas. The day of his death, almost five years prior, just below it. He had been thirty-five when he died; far too young for someone so healthy.

  I glanced over to the left, towards a similar spot on another hill. Mrs. Azalea's gravestone was just visible in the distance. The two funerals had been within weeks of each other, though their deaths had been completely different. And yet, I had seen both of them recently.

  As I stared at that distant hill, I saw a shadow play across the stones over there. I tried to ignore it, to look back at Dad's grave in front of us. The shadow was nothing new, just my imagination playing with me. Getting revenge on me after I had abused it for so many years. My demons coming to haunt me once more. I shuddered at that thought, that reminder. But with Dad close at my side, I hid the movement, trying to feign that it was from the weather.

  "Well, it's a nice place at least," Dad said. "If I were to chose where I'd be laid to rest, this would be it."

  I looked up at the man next to me, automatically turning towards him as I tried to get further under the umbrella he was holding. The man looked little like the father that I remembered. Easily over seventy, if not eighty. His long beard was gray, much like the wizards of old in all the books he had once given me. Back before he died. Back when he was my father. It was only his eyes, the same as mine, that spoke of the man that I had once known. The man that he once was, before he died. Before he went to Desparia.

  "Not me," Heather said.

  I glanced over at the blond on the other side of my father. Unlike me, she was standing out in the middle of the rain, letting the water wash over her. Her hair was turning dark, almost as dark as the first time that I had seen her, when she had wept for my father's death. When she knelt before a crumbled tower, destroyed under her own power. To me, it had been the day of my father's funeral. To her, it had been four years ago.

  To Dad, it had been a month ago.

  "I like your world's practice of cremation. Spreading the person's ashes somewhere. I'd want my ashes spread over Mondark's tower, back on Desparia. If we ever manage to get back there."

  "I'm not surprised," I mumbled. Heather always was a firebug. Cremation seemed appropriate for her.

  "Neither of you girls are dying anytime soon," Dad said. He tucked the umbrella awkwardly under his chin, freeing up his hands to reach out to either side. As he hugged both of us close, pulling us into him, the umbrella threatened to tip over. Even in those few seconds before he reached up to recover it, I managed to get the rest of me completely soaked through with the rain.

  I shivered as the cold rain got to me. It wasn't often that I felt that kind of cold. The wet kind that soaked me to the bone. Water used to invigorate me. It was a balm, a salve, protection from the world around me. Even the frequent rain of Oregon did little to affect me. And yet, as I stared down at my father's grave, standing beside my elderly father and his second daughter, I couldn't help but feel the cold. It was like all the cold of the past five years was all settling into my skin, all at once.

  Dad shook out his long billowing robes. Mage robes. The same robes he had worn for the decades that he had been on Desparia. Even since returning to Earth, he had insisted on wearing them. Much as Heather had stuck with her white dress. I knew that both of them had been enspelled, the enchantments worked into the fabric itself. Though there on Earth, where magic didn't exist, they did little more than protect them from the cold. And no more than any wool attire would.

  "I think it's pretty safe to say that I'll be the next to die among the three of us," Dad said. "I've certainly had enough practice at it." He laughed a little at his own joke, even pointing down at his gravestone as he did so.

  "Yes, please don't," Heather said, emphasizing the first word. The full form of the word that was much more common on Desparia. Where she and the rest of my friends were from. "I've lost enough parents in my lifetime without losing another one."

  I bristled at the comment, at her calling my father her parent. While Dad had been acting like her father that past month, ever since arriving on our doorstep, I was pretty sure that he wasn't. That the woman on his other side, who was at least a year older than me, was not related to me by blood.

  Once the... excitement, for lack of a better word, of the confrontation with the emperor had ended, the two of them had explained how they had met. But that was just their story. I wasn't too sure how much of it I believed. The math of the whole mess kept nagging at me that past month. The fact that Dad had been gone for almost fifty years, in the five since he had died. It was one of the many issues that I was working through.

  I shuddered as another flash ran through me. It was short, fleeting. I pulled my arms around me chest, trying to protect myself from the cold. Trying to shake off the fears that still plagued me. Dad didn't seem to notice anything but the cold.

  "Maybe we should head back to the car," he said. "We don't really need to be here for this part. And the rain really is coming down."

  "I want to see it," Heather said. "Your world really does fascinate me so. To think that such a creature could exist. Could dig a grave open so quickly and easily. And without so much as an ounce of magic to it."

  She pointed across to the other side of the grave from us. To the large machine that stood dormant, waiting for the driver to return. While the machine was familiar to me, easily recognizable, I didn't know the name of it any more than Heather did.

  I could see the driver in the distance, rushing back towards up along the path. He was holding something white over his head, which looked like a stack of papers, long since destroyed by the rain. If I had to guess, it was the form that he had wanted a signature on. The thing that had held up the work that we were there to see done.

  "Well, we should probably move away, at least," Dad said. "This is where he'll be digging. This is where... I am buried."

  "You're not buried," Heather said. "You're standing right next to us."

  "And yet..." I started.

  I couldn't help but look down at our feet. At the ground already soaked through. The soft mud would easily yield to the strong machine, allowing it to tear through to the coffin below us. Another scene flashed through my mind. But this one wasn't from Hell. This one wasn't from my time on Desparia. No, this was from Earth. From the time where living there first became unbearable. From when I had first gone to Desparia to escape the nightmare that my life had become.

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  "And yet, I saw them bury him," I managed to get out, past the three tears that came down at the memory.

  "But did you actually see him, Maya?" Heather asked. "Or did you just see the coffin."

  I tried to think back. Tried to remember that time. That most difficult of times. It was not a period that I liked thinking about. Even then, even with Dad standing next to me, I couldn't bear to think of losing him. Of him dying on Mom and me. I just shook my head, not in answer to Heather. Just in a refusal to think about it.

  The machine across from us started up again, the motor only just audible over the rain. Another thunderclap hit, the storm's own answer to the sound, as Dad pulled us away from the grave, giving the machine a free path to do its job. My eyes stayed locked on the machine, on the grave in front of us, as we retreated back towards the protection of the car. As another flash of lightning lit up the sky, the light blinded me for a moment, breaking my staring match with that gravestone. With that lie. With that secret that had been nagging at me that past month. Only then, only once I could break that hold it had over me, could I turn back towards the car behind us.

  Heather stayed outside, leaning against the hood of the car with Dad's umbrella, as Dad and I retreated to the drier interior of the car. I climbed into the back, rather than going around to the other side, while Dad climbed into the driver's seat. Seeing the wizen old wizard sitting behind the wheel seemed odd in so many ways. But as he turned on the engine, quickly cranking the heat for both of our sakes, I was reminded that he had been back on Earth for a month. That he had plenty of practice behind the wheel. That he never once showed any sign that he wasn't completely proficient with the car.

  Of course, he had died behind the wheel of a car just like it.

  "You alright back there?" Dad asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror next to him.

  That was a complicated question, one I wasn't entirely sure the answer to. One that I had been trying to figure out for weeks. I knew the quick and easy answer. The one that most people expected from me. The one that I used to give without thought. A shrug and a grunt of ascent. But I knew my father. Or, at least, I knew the man that was once my father. Or the man that my father once was. He wasn't looking for the easy answer.

  "It's... a bit much," I said. It was the best answer I could come up with.

  "Yea, I'll say," Dad said, as he looked out at Heather.

  She seemed no less deterred by the rain coming down around her. As the machine quickly did its work on the grave next to us, her eyes never left it. Her stare never broke from the task that seemed so commonplace for Dad and me. And yet, for her, coming from a world of magic and wonders, such a simple thing as having a machine dig open a grave was what drew her attention. If only the machine were on fire, she would be in paradise.

  "It's not every day you're sitting around waiting for your grave to be opened up," Dad said.

  It was then that I realized that he wasn't looking out at Heather. His attention was just as locked as hers was, but for a very different reason. He was just as eager as I was to see what was in that grave. To see what we had buried in his stead. As more of that day, more of that time, came back to me, I realized that I hadn't seen anything of what his body had looked like back then. All I knew was that it wasn't pretty. That the pileup of cars on the highway had left little of him to be identified. But they had checked back then. They knew it was him. Didn't they?

  Did they?

  "What are you expecting to find in there?" I asked. "I may not have seen inside, but I know the coffin wasn't empty."

  "I'm... I'm not sure," Dad said. "I'm not even sure I could begin to guess. Paige assured me that they buried me. But... Well, I never died. Not that I know of. You know better than I do that Desparia isn't the afterlife."

  "Right," I said, nodding my head, as an other flash of the afterlife came to me.

  I lost track of time as my demons haunted me. Both literal and figurative. My hands clenched at my side, my fingernails digging into the flesh there. The car never faded around me, never disappeared. But that wasn't enough to keep me safe. That wasn't enough to keep me from them.

  "Hey, I think they're done," Dad said.

  His voice came to me down a long, dark tunnel, calling me back from Hell. I stayed where I was in the back seat, looking out through the rain-covered window as Dad rushed out of the car. Heather stayed at his side, the two of them running up the hill. Dad slipped twice in the mud, but Heather's hand kept him steady. Kept him moving forward. Only after the two of them made it to the grave did I manage to escape. But by then, I no longer cared about what was inside.

  I just sat there, staring out at them. At the father and daughter. The father that was no longer mine. The daughter that wasn't me. Wasn't my sister. I tried to remember that Heather was my friend. That she wasn't trying to steal my father from me. That she hadn't even known me when she filled my place in my father's heart.

  When I saw the coffin being raised above their heads, my hand automatically went to the door handle, against my better wishes. The rain hit me once again like a sledgehammer, a slap across the face, as I rushed up the hill towards Dad and Heather. And yet, my feet were steady, never slipping on the slick surface. Even as a dam broke and a puddle near the grave turned into a waterfall around me, my feet stayed steady. They stayed planted as the worn tread of my old sneakers brought me closer to the knowledge that was kept from me all those years. The one thing that I had been avoiding. The truth that had been nagging at all of us since Dad returned.

  Dad automatically reached his hand out to take mine as I came up next to him. He didn't look back, didn't break his death stare with his own coffin before us. The engine on the machine across from us quickly died as the coffin settled down into the mud, sinking a good inch or two into it. As the driver climbed down from the cab, I looked to my left, towards the absent space next to me where Mom should have been.

  It should have been all three of us there. All six, if we included Heather and the Azaleas. No, it should have just been us three. The real family. The original family. The San Lucas's. The family that we were before everything happened. The family we should have been all along.

  The driver rushed over to the coffin, that same sheet of paper once again held over his head. It did little to protect him from the torrential downpour covering all four of us. When he got to the side of the coffin, he pulled it down in front of him, staring at it several times as he looked between it and the coffin at his side. After what felt like minutes of us just standing there in the rain, he nodded to himself before reaching down to the lid of the coffin.

  "Are you sure you want your daughters seeing this?" the man asked, as he looked over to Dad. Clearly, the closeness between Heather and Dad were as clear to see to this stranger as anyone else. And yet, with the age difference, Dad was just as often confused as our grandfather. Perhaps there was something on the paper he was holding to indicate the relationship.

  "Yes," Dad said, nodding, as he continued to stare down at the lid.

  The man nodded once more before pulling the lid open. The hinges let out an odd squeak, something long and ominous that belonged in a horror movie. Not something one often hears in reality. But the lid lifted easily, unperturbed by its time underground. Once it got past its zenith, the driver let it go, letting gravity take it the rest of the way. Letting the three of us look down at what was left of the man that we had buried.

  "I don't understand," Dad said, as we all stared into the box at our feet. "That's... me."