I Will Come for You

Prologue

Ten months before. . .

They wanted her to trek back into the woods. The thought brought with it shadow, a bone-deep chill. She looked up at the sky, but the sun still shone brightly, no clouds. Back into the woods. She’d run all the way out. Six miles, maybe more. Keeping to the path, though she’d wanted to run wild into the brush. Looking over her shoulder, tripping on exposed roots, crashing through tender growth, Natalie Forrester had run scared through woods she’d been exploring since childhood. She didn’t want to go back there. Not ever. She shook her head, looked at the officer and said, “No.”

“You won’t be alone, Miss Forrester,” the deputy promised.

But he was wrong. In the woods, you were always alone.

“I’m not going back,” she told him. She’d give them directions, again, more detailed, describe the trees at each turn more individually. The wildflowers at the entrance to Jackman Trail were the only red in bloom. She’d turned west there, followed an unmarked but well-worn path. She’d draw a map.

“Miss Forrester.” The deputy’s voice was stretched into patience. “Several deputies will accompany you. They’ll take you
in, mark the site, and bring you right back out.”

She didn’t want to see it again. Him, she corrected. He’d been a person. A man. She’d recognized his gender by the shape of his body, the strong line of his jaw, where skin was opened
by man or animal and bone exposed. Someone’s brother, husband, father. For a moment, as she’d stood before him, she saw him animated. His face grim, he was holding a gun, his arms outstretched. He fired and a white-winged bird lifted from the barrel of the gun and settled on the shoulder of another man. Natalie’s throat had closed. She’d struggled for breath. And for a moment she was convinced she was dying. And then the image broke, shattered, and she was again in the woods with a dead man.

She’d noticed that he’d been shot. A small hole, off-center and burned black at the edges of the torn skin, had been blown above his eyebrow. His shirt hung loosely from his shoulders. The wind, full of the salt air rising from the Pacific, lifted the shirt tails like ribbons on a windsock. She refused to remember anything more.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done all I can.”

“Not
too far ahead.”

Natalie heard her father’s voice, but she listened to the music in it and not the words. Her father had a voice that lifted like a question mark. Her mother said he spoke like he was always asking a question because he was a professor and that’s what professor’s did, ask questions. Natalie liked it
because it seemed to her that he was interested in what she was thinking.

She ran on, around a bend in the path, and then another. It
was the first day of spring and though the air was cool, they’d come out to celebrate the opening of flowers and butterfly wings. She was six, in the first grade, and he’d excused her from school for the day.

“Nat. Nat,” her father called through the tall grass. His voice barely reached her ears. The poppies swayed, covering the hillsides, and caught her attention. She left the path and
started toward them. She touched each bloom gently, stroking their ashy petals, wading further into the rolling meadow with the intention of touching every one of them. And she’d gotten lost.

She remembered when she first noticed the absence of her father. He was no longer
calling her name. Natalie spun around in the field of wildflowers looking for her father’s slender body, his bright head of blonde hair. She was alone. She heard herself whimper, told herself to stop that, she’d be found. She did what she often did when she became separated from her parents in a store, she started calling for her father, wandering, looking for him. Stars came out before the sky was fully dark and Natalie consoled herself with the thought that it wouldn’t get truly dark. Not the blackness of a cave or beneath her bed. She talked herself to sleep and woke in the morning, stiff from the cold, hollow inside, her blood full of the fear of being lost. And then a woman stepped out of the woods and into the meadow and said to Natalie, as calmly as if she’d been lost only a few minutes, “There you are.”

Not a month later, her father taught Natalie to walk the woods alone. To read the trees, recognize patterns in the brush. He didn’t want her to live with a fear of the woods, to never again enjoy their beauty. He gave her a compass, stood her at the edge of the woods, with civilization comfortingly at her back, and taught her to work direction. If she headed north going in, then out was south. After that, he walked her into the woods, first a quarter mile, then a half mile, eventually more than five miles in, and left her. “I’ll see you back at the car, Nat.”

She taught herself not to think of it as a battle, not to fight her way out of the trees, not to jump at the crack and hiss of the woods. She talked herself into believing she could do it. She learned that the woods were a constant. Familiar, if you knew what to look for, and deadly if you didn’t.

The
hike back in was longer. She didn’t anticipate the  signs of spring; she didn’t allow her eyes to catch on the colors and shapes; she didn’t listen to the chatter of birds and squirrels. Behind Natalie, seven deputies crowded the trail, some with little respect for nature. They whipped at the tall grass with their arms, plucked and tossed the season’s last blooms.

When she picked up the scent of the ocean, fear began to bunch in her stomach.
She curled her hands into fists and walked on. She used her body and its sense of space, remembered space, and stopped just short of where she’d come upon him. The deputies piled to a stop behind her.

“I’m not going any further,” she said. “He’s around there.” She pointed to a bend in the path.
“Right side. An alder tree.”

They moved around her, stomping on fern and wild oat. There was poison ivy mixed in the greenery; at least one of them would catch the spores on their skin.

All seven deputies moved up the trail, leaving Natalie alone.

           
Chapter One

Sunday, 1:20 am

The mist is heavy and presses a layer of fog against the blacktop. This late at night, in the northwest corner of the island, the freeway is seldom traveled. Isaac walks along the shoulder, keeps the solid white line as a compass, and listens for a break in the silence.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Not exactly. Or at least not the form in which he’ll find it.

The dying.

He comes upon them in the final moments of their lives. He hears their last words: sometimes confessions; sometimes the horror they endured; sometimes a favorite memory. Only a few are surprised to find Isaac beside them; surprised by his age and the certainty of his task. Isaac is twelve years old. He’s been drawn to the dying for almost a year now. Long enough he no longer doubts his role or his sanity, long enough he knows that some people need companionship, a little encouragement to let go, and that’s what he gives.

He can’t walk away from them. He tried, in the beginning, when fear of death and his sudden part in it caught in his throat, choked off his breath, pumped through his legs, carried him nowhere. He has a job to do. And the longer he takes to make the connection, the longer they linger in this world, suspended between the living and the dead.

He believes there are others like him, though he’s never asked around about it.
This ability is not of the natural world. And if they don’t have it, or something like it, for sure people are going to think Isaac is crazy. It’s bad enough half the town thinks he’s traumatized, a member of the walking wounded.

Their perception is the result of his being the product of a marriage made in hell.
Of having a mother who is either unstable-happy or unstable-vicious. Of having a father who is a minor celebrity, distracted by the demands of a job where the good he does is talked about as much as his regrets. Isaac is pretty much left on his own most of the time.

He’s not an angel on earth. He makes enough mistakes, thinks enough bad thoughts he knows that’s not possible. Instead, he believes he was chosen for this job, as a veterinarian is chosen to work with animals or a teacher is called to the classroom. He believes it’s a talent etched on his DNA and present prior to his birth. That every day brought him closer to
who he’s become. He believes that his mother’s chronic leaving, his father’s distance, even his uncle’s death are all a part of making him into this boy who lifts spirits from the dead.

What he can’t explain is how he arrives or departs the scene of death. He looked into it and learned a lot about physics. Scientists absolutely believe that an object can be in two places at one time. It has something to do with electrons and the way they behave, sometimes taking on the qualities of a stone, which Isaac understands to mean unmoving, and sometimes a wave. Isaac can visualize this, the way a wave reaches out from the sea, washes up on shore, but always returns to the greater body of water and never really ceases to be a part of it. He likes to think that’s what happens to him, that he is anchored in real time even while he moves toward the waiting.

Time does pass while he’s gone, but as far as he’s able to tell, it can be measured in minutes. He has never been missed nor has he been observed moving in or out of his present.

He calls it transitioning. His only warning is a feeling he thinks is like the
vibration of a pulled wishbone, a strumming on his ribs. His heart lifts a full octave before it settles into a steady, elevated rhythm and he knows then, that if he’s with other people, if he’s in school or sitting at the dinner table with his father, that he has to leave. He usually excuses himself to the bathroom and locks the door. When he’s alone the atmosphere around him ripples like he’s standing in a heat wave, and then he’s somewhere else. Some places he recognizes, others he doesn’t. He always lands on his feet, even if he left his reality sitting down. Even if he left sound asleep. He is awake, alert, walking toward the needy. And so tonight is no different.

He’s wearing a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt, having learned long ago that if he wears pajamas to bed he’ll wear them to the scene of a car wreck. He doesn’t like being outside in his pajamas, not that everyone can see him, or that the cold air can penetrate the flannel. He just feels exposed. When the transition takes place, if he is barefoot he stays barefoot.
Like tonight. But the gravel doesn’t press into his feet. The chill in the air doesn’t reach his bones. The mist doesn’t even collect on his skin. It’s as if he’s walking inside a bubble. And no one can see him. No one except the waiting. Isaac has been surrounded by the injured on occasion, held the hand of the dying while around him the bleeding and broken bodies of survivors scattered, tottered, wailed into the night, completely oblivious to him.

He feels the wind pick up, the mist thicken to rain. It moves through his hair but leaves no evidence of its passing. It’s one part of the experience not explained by science, how he can touch and be touched by objects in this time that leave no lasting impression. Physics doesn’t explain it. He’s read enough to understand that anything is possible. He’s seen enough to know this is true.

He follows the road around a bend and spots a set of headlights, pointed at an awkward angle, about fifty yards down a ravine. He feels the tension in his chest ease a little. The last death he ministered to, just hours before, was a murder. Miss Iverson. She taught at Isaac’s school. Always the deaths have been natural, or accidental. Miss Iverson was murdered and the killer was still in the house, rummaging through the drawers in her bedroom. Isaac knelt beside her in the living room, held her hand, streaming with her blood, and when he returned home it was still there, between his fingers, on the cuff of his sweatshirt. That never happened before.