‘Here.’ She loops it around my neck. ‘This is for you.’
I stare at her for a moment and then run my fingers over the soft wool. Almost cry at her thoughtfulness. Shit, I’m a mess. Again. ‘It’s beautiful, Mags.’
I go to the window while she changes from ballet flats into boots. I put my hands in my pockets to steady them. Outside, the pigeon has gone. Far below, the street keeps moving under the murky sky: traffic jostles, lights change, people stream across the intersection.
Rafa looks down at the city, our rucksacks ready at his feet.
‘You all right?’
I nod. ‘It’s just…’
He searches my face. ‘Yeah, I know.’
And he does. I see it in his eyes. We’re close to finding Jude, but only one of us can have the version of him we remember.
‘Gaby, I promise you, it’s going to be okay.’
A few minutes later we shift into a dark, dusty room in an old church. Maggie recovers quickly and we walk the three blocks to Hobart’s main dock, past centuries-old buildings and noisy cafes. The sky is heavy with low, dark clouds and the wind is cold. I pull on my hoodie, tighten my new scarf and brace myself against the gale coming up the wide Derwent River.
The dock is crowded with yachts, fishing trawlers and million-dollar pleasure cruisers. Everything smells like salt water and fish. We know Jude’s not on a fishing boat, but a charter could mean a yacht or a cruiser—we didn’t think to ask. So we have to check them all. We split up.
My eyes sting as I jog past trawlers stacked with crab pots, raising a few eyebrows from the weary fishermen on deck. I peer into the cabin of a small yacht. No sign of life. I move on to the next one. Then the next, heading further out into the harbour. What if we’ve missed him? What if he’s out on a week-long charter? What if he got bored and moved on? Maybe he’s hanging out with mates or he went fishing. Or maybe whoever beat us to the hospital beat us here too.
Rafa catches up with me. ‘It’s only been ten minutes.’ Gulls circle above, crying out to each other. ‘Hey.’ He pulls me to a stop. ‘Jude’s lived here a year. This isn’t a big place—we’ll ask around, find out where he is and when he’ll be back. Someone will know.’
I don’t want to wait. I want to see him now. I can’t separate hope from fear any more: it’s a single raging storm under my ribs. Maggie and Jason are halfway along a parallel pier, their blond heads together.
Rafa and I start down the next row. A large yacht motors in, its sails tied down. A group of women in pink spray jackets are clustered on the deck, laughing and shrugging on backpacks. Their voices whip away in the wind. We’re still a dozen berths away when a deckhand jumps onto the pier and ties up the boat.
Onboard, a shock of dark hair appears out of a cabin.
The pink jackets are off the yacht, walking down the pier, blocking our view. We step around them, picking up snatches of conversation.
‘—best hen’s party
ever.’
‘How freaking cold was it last night?’
‘How hot was the skipper?’
The guy onboard moves across the deck, his back still to us. Rafa and I stop dead.
That hair. That build. The way he rolls his shoulders. I can’t take my eyes off him, not even to check Rafa’s reaction.
He bends over to pick something up and when he straightens I get a good look at his profile.
It’s him.
Everything else fades: the sky, the water, the boats. Rafa. Even Rafa. There is nothing but the figure on that boat. He’s winding ropes, talking to the deckhand. His hair is longer than I remember.
And then Jude looks around.
He sees me.
His arms fall to his sides. Rope hits the deck. His lips form my name but he’s too far away for me to hear it. I’m moving again, in the cold wind. He steps off the boat, walks towards me, dazed. Then he stops, uncertain.
‘Are you real?’
My throat closes over; my heart is too big for my chest. I reach him in three steps, throw myself at him. We nearly stumble off the side of the dock. His arms clamp around me, his face presses into my hair. We collapse to our knees and I don’t let go, even when splinters stab through my jeans. He crushes me to him.
He smells of the sea.
Time stops. I have no idea how long we stay like that. My bad knee complains. I ignore it. I can’t breathe properly. I don’t care.
Eventually, his grip loosens a little. He strokes my hair. Mumbles something I don’t catch. He draws back enough to look at me, his chest rising and falling, eyes searching. ‘Are you real?’ he says again.
I touch his face. ‘Are you?’
He drags me back into a hug.
Please let this be real. I’ll do anything, just let this be real.
Rafa is sitting on the pier, his back against a pylon, arms folded. Eyes shining, face streaked.
The cold and the wind and the smell of the pier rush back in. Underneath us, the river slaps at the timber. My knee’s had enough. I have to stand up. Jude steadies me as we get to our feet. His dark brown eyes—my dark brown eyes—search my face again.
‘Princess, what the fuck?’ Jude wipes his face, not taking his eyes from me. ‘I saw you die.’
LONG STORY SHORT
‘I saw
you
die,’ I say. ‘We were arguing over music—’
‘—I lost control of the car and we rolled—’
‘And you…’ I swallow. He’s standing right here, so I can say the words. ‘You were decapitated by a guidepost.’
He stares at me, hands still on my shoulders. ‘No.
You
were.’
My knees almost give out again. It’s impossible: this is
my
Jude. I point to both of our heads, still attached to our necks. ‘Obviously not.’
‘But—’
‘It’s a long story.’ Rafa climbs to his feet, wipes his cheek against his shoulder.
Jude studies him, momentarily distracted. ‘I know you.’
‘You remember me?’ There’s no hiding the hope in those three words.
‘Not really.’ A pause. ‘You’ve kind of been in my dreams.’ Jude holds up his palms. ‘Not in a gay way.’
Rafa half-smiles. ‘Glad to hear it.’
‘In that dream, are you fighting hell-beasts in a nightclub?’ I ask.
Jude frowns. ‘How could you know that?’
‘I’ve been having the same dream for a year.’
Jude narrows one eye like I’m messing with him. How do I explain this?
‘That’s Rafa,’ I say as a place to start.
Jude steps forward and offers his hand. ‘Jude.’
Rafa falters, and then he slaps Jude’s palm and drags him into a man-hug. When he lets go, Rafa makes a point of taking two steps back. Jude steps back as well, looks awkward. I laugh. Or cry. I can’t tell the difference right now.
The deckhand is hovering by the yacht. ‘Everything okay, skip?’
‘Cody, man…I have no idea.’
Cody scratches the tip of his nose. A gust of wind blows his long fringe into his eyes. He waits for an explanation. Doesn’t get one.
Jude gestures to the boat. ‘We can finish up later. Take off if you want.’
Cody doesn’t have to be told twice.
‘Come aboard, sit down,’ Jude says.
I look around for Maggie and Jason. They’re hurrying up the pier towards us, almost running. They get a curious glance from Cody as he passes them.
‘Hang on,’ I say to Jude. ‘These two are with us.’
Maggie is looking from me to Jude and back again.
‘Wow, you two are so alike,’ she says when she’s close.
‘Jude, this is my friend Maggie, and that’s—’ I pause. Too hard. ‘That’s Jason.’
Maggie is straight in for a hug. Jude looks at me over her shoulder, careful where he puts his hands. She steps back, sees he’s a little startled. ‘Sorry,’ she says and smiles. ‘You’re so much like Gaby I feel I already know you.’
Jude nods. Frowns. Offers a hand to Jason more out of habit than presence of mind.
Jason shakes it—old school style—but doesn’t speak. He keeps blinking and swallowing, occasionally nodding even though nobody’s talking.
We follow Jude onboard. The yacht is huge—the kind that races from Sydney to Hobart. The mast towers above us. We go down into the galley, lush with wall-to-wall gleaming timber and dark green leather. Empty champagne bottles sit in a neat row on the sink and the place smells of pancakes and maple syrup. I wonder if Jude cooked breakfast for the girls. We squeeze around an oval table and Rafa drops our rucksacks at his feet. He’s acting like he’s okay with the fact Jude doesn’t remember being Rephaite. Maybe for the moment he is: maybe Rafa’s happy to have any version of his best friend, as long as he’s alive.
I can’t stop staring at Jude. He studies each of us, his attention settling back on me. I look to Rafa. He nods for me to start.
Great.
‘Right…well.’ I roll up the linen placemat in front of me. Even on the calm water of the dock the yacht still rocks gently. More than ever, I understand why Daisy and Rafa were in no hurry to attempt to explain the Rephaim to me. I miss Daisy. I wonder how she’d react if she was here now, sitting across from Jude? How she would tell him that life as he knows it is a lie?
Maggie gives me an encouraging smile. ‘Start with what you remember.’
It’s good advice. So I tell him about waking up in hospital, learning he was dead. And then how our ‘parents’ came to Melbourne and took his ashes without visiting me.
Jude listens, nods. ‘I got the same message about you. Some woman and her kid came to the ward—’ He glances at Jason. ‘What?’
‘We’ll get to that,’ I say. ‘Long story.’
I tell him about the violent nightclub dream and posting the short story about it online. How Rafa turned up at Pan Beach, followed by Taya and Malachi. And then Rafa’s bombshell about the Fallen and the Rephaim. I explain it the way he told me. Jude takes it all in. He doesn’t ask questions or interrupt. He’s always been quick to get his head around new concepts, but this is a tad more complicated than understanding the government structure of a European country we’re about to land in.
‘Are you doing okay?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘Keep going.’
I tell him about Patmos, the photo of us in Istanbul. I rush through Maggie’s kidnapping and my experience at the Sanctuary—minus my time in the cage. By the time I’ve told him about the fight up the mountain and meeting Nathaniel, his eyes are distant.
He’s overloaded. He sits back and stares up at the wood-panelled ceiling. ‘Bloody hell.’ His fingers go to his neck. ‘I thought this was a birth mark.’
I check under his hair and find raised skin in the shape of crescent moon; a scar through the middle of it. Someone tried to take his head too but with a little more finesse. I take off my scarf and show him my matching scar. His breath comes out in a hiss.
‘What the fuck—’ He pushes the neckline of my hoodie aside, more interested in the hellion bite. ‘What is that?’
I pause. ‘You know that monster you kill in your dream? I ended up in a cage with one when I was in Italy.’
‘She cut off its head,’ Rafa says, as if that’s the most important part of the story, ‘but not before the pricks let it drink from her.’
Jude stares at him. He’s trying hard to absorb this, but he’s struggling. ‘The people who did this—they’re the ones you’re saying I walked away from?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you’re telling me I left Gaby with those arseholes?’
‘In fairness, they only turned on her after you two disappeared last year. Actually, they only turned on her when they thought she’d changed sides. They found her with me last week, put two and two together and got seven.’
Jude’s breathing is controlled, his face like stone.
Rafa pulls two books out of the rucksack, slides them across the table. I’m not sure now’s the time for show and tell, but it’s too late, Jude’s already reaching for them. He can’t help himself.
The first is leather-bound and embossed. Jude runs his palm over the cover. He flicks through a few pages and then stops when he sees his handwriting scrawled in the margins. He traces a fingertip over the blue ink. I open the second book and hold out the tattered photo of us in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Jude peers at it, looks from it to me, and back again.
‘Bloody hell,’ he says again, forcing a smile. ‘What’s with your hair?’
I touch the edge of the old photo, fight the emotion tugging at me.
‘You’re taking this better than she did,’ Rafa says.
‘I’m faking it.’ Jude rubs his eyes.
‘That’s your laptop too,’ I say. ‘There’s not much on there but you should take a look when you’re ready.’
Jude studies Rafa. ‘We trained and fought together? You used to have my back?’
‘Through the good, the bad and the ugly—and I’m not just talking about the women.’
Jude’s smile is wry. It takes some of the tension from his jaw. Then, to Jason: ‘Am I supposed to know you too?’
‘We’re related.’ Jason explains how. Slowly, patiently. He tells Jude about Dani. When he’s done, Jude sits back from the table and runs both hands through his hair. We’ve been at this for nearly two hours.
‘So, just to check I’m understanding all this: there are two groups of half-angel bastards at war with each other, a horde of demons after both sides, and a missing kid who has visions? And Gaby and I might know where two hundred fallen angels are hiding out?’
Yeah, he’s the smart one of the family all right.
‘The Rephaim aren’t really at war with each other,’ I say, trying to flatten out the placemat I’ve been strangling. ‘But the demons—that’s a whole other matter.’
We haven’t mentioned Iowa yet.
‘You can accept all that?’ Jason asks.
Jude gives him a measured look. ‘My sister is sitting next to me. The only way that’s possible is if the rest of it’s true. If that’s the price for getting her back, I’ll pay it.’
My eyes burn with fresh tears. I wipe them away.
A seagull cries out on the pier, then another yacht glides past and we rock back and forth in its wake. Jude splays his fingers on the polished tabletop. I don’t remember his knuckles being so scarred.
‘I’ve been told I’m a soulless prick by a few women in the past year,’ he says. ‘Turns out they were right.’
‘Hey, we’re not—’
‘And we didn’t talk for a decade? No fucking way. Who told you that?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. He climbs out from the table and pushes past Rafa. ‘I need air.’