Whatever happened, she would hold onto that small victory. Her name was Marina and she was once again royally fucked.
She shivered, covering her arms with her hands to try to rub in some heat.
"This must be how Christophe feels all the time." Her fellow Outsider always got thrown into places and had to figure out where he was and why he'd been sent there.
The room where she stood was dark, light from the drafty, broken windows, illuminated the place some. She turned around.
The place seemed…familiar. Marina walked slowly, her shoes causing a small echo as she moved to get a better look at her location. Outside, an owl hooted but otherwise she heard no other sound.
Just her own breath coming in and out.
"Drew."
She called out. He'd hear her. They shared a soul mate connection now, they'd cemented their love. He should hear her wherever she went.
"I'm coming to you."
His answer moved over her like a warm bath to her tired soul. She took a deep breath. If Drew was coming, then all would be well. Somehow.
Wind chimes sounded in the distance and time stood still. She wasn't a grown woman with a life and death mission she had to complete with seventeen others. No, she was a child of three. Barely old enough to remember anything and yet how could she forgot.
Every day she'd awoken in the room where she stood only it hadn't been empty. No, it had been filled with other children. All of them hungry, most of them crying when they had the energy. The smell of sickness permeating her every waking breath, the knowledge that she didn't belong there. She had a family—a destiny—she'd been four when she left and yet she never got over the orphanage. Not really.
"Boy, come and save me."
She begged Drew. He hadn't been able to perform feats of heroics yet. She hadn't cared. Even then she had needed him.
Marina sank to her knees. How and why was she back here? When Veli had scooped her into his arms and carried Marina out, she'd promised herself she never would be alone again, not like she had been. Eventually, she'd repaid Veli by helping Leonardo kill him. A necessary evil she'd not been able to reconcile when she let herself think about.
The others hated him for his so-called abuse. They hadn't ever lived in a world where they had to wonder if they were going to be fed.
Orphanages in Russia before the world had taken notice of the abhorrent conditions had been akin to living in hell. Marina considered herself lucky she'd grown up at all.
"Hey." Drew rubbed her back. "It's okay. I'm sorry this happened."
His rubbed circles on the outside of her shirt, tracing patterns she could barely feel yet reminding her he had arrived. She'd not noticed his presence in the room, which told her volumes as to how out of it she must be.
He spoke again, his natural woodsy scent replacing the dust, mold, and memories that consumed her mind. The baby next to her had died in her sleep. They'd been two. What had it been? Measles? Marina hadn't caught it and the woman working there at the time had called her a witch. Three-year-old Marina didn't know what that meant yet she understood even then it had been a bad accusation.
"I'd pull you in my arms except I'm letting you breathe. You get ten more seconds before I can't stand it anymore."
She smiled before she looked over at him. It took her a second to reconcile what she saw. Drew's hair had changed. A lone white strip fell into his eyes, different from the dark locks she was used to seeing. He wore it slightly longer than when last she saw him.
"Drew." She could barely speak past the lump in her throat. "How much time have I lost?"
"Nothing." He shook his head. "The last thing you remember is all that's happened for you."
Something about the way he answered didn't sit well. "Not possible. You weren't sporting the white hair when I went to bed, which is the last thing I remember."
Drew stroked his thumb over her bottom lip. "I've missed you."
"If no time has passed then I went to sleep and woke up here. You can't have been longing for me for very long." A thought dawned on her. "But that's not what you said, is it? You said no time had passed for me. How much has for you?"
He took a deep breath and steeled his shoulders. "Years."
The word, the sheer sense of time his answer created, shook her to her very core. It hung between them until she could digest what he said enough for her to speak. "Explain."
"We went to bed. Well you did. I couldn't sleep. It felt immensely important to me I have words with Leonardo." He shook his head. "Stupid now, but whatever. We were all killed. In a ball of flame. Only I wasn't. Hard to explain how or why. Really had nothing to do with me. Our ancestors—the chanters—they sent me back in time. Only not this timeline. The first one. It took some time to get back, to work the kind of magic where I could undo that one moment in time."
His words banged around in her head until she could barely function from the pain they caused. "How? You don't have that kind of power? Unless…do you have Isabelle's? Is it a function of hers?"
"I don't believe it had anything to do with me at all." He stroked his white piece of hair. "This came out two days after I got there. Like a punishment for what happened to me. A visible indication that some of my life had been taken from me for the trip." He paused. "Don't you remember?"
"No. Why would I? Sounds like I wasn't there."
He took a step back from her, separating his legs, shoulder-width apart, until he faced her, as though he thought he needed to get ready for battle. Her heart rate kicked back up.
"With your other skills, sweetheart. The ones I used to prefer you didn't use. Try it. Can't you see me? Where I went? You were there. Only, not you. Not my Marina."
Drew must mean everyone's past lives. The ones that threatened to overwhelm her when she let them. She'd barely managed to contain the mass onslaught of memories the last time she'd let them in.
"You can do it." Drew seemed to read her mind. "Every day you live with the power you get stronger with it. Remember."
"And you know this because of the incredible amount of time you spent with past me? What exactly did you do with her?" Visions of Drew holding another, having feelings for someone else because they were technically the same person made her skin itch. She wanted to crawl out of herself and go pound on what would technically be herself.
"Marina." A muscle ticked in his jaw. "Remember, please."
She closed her eyes and searched through millions of years and thousands of dimensions. The process should have been more daunting than it was. Her brain seemed to have the ability to filter through images and when she finally stumbled on Drew's face the two and a half years he spent in her past life's presence came quickly.
After a moment, she could take a deep breath. Nothing inappropriate had happened. Not in the least. If anything, he hadn't seemed to care for the first version of her at all. The magic needed to send him back was complicated. To move him through time and alter what happened in her reality took a concerted effort by a group that had been partially decimated during their battle with the demon.
Their version of Isabelle had no longer had her version of Kal. It had been a giant mess getting her to help. Marina shuddered and opened her eyes.
"Why didn't I remember it before?" She stroked her hand down the side of her face and he yanked her against him. She closed her eyes and breathed him in. "When all the first memories came to me those didn't."
"Magic doesn't make mistakes. You saw when you were supposed to."
She pulled back to look at him. "That doesn't sound like you."
He snorted, before he kissed the top of her head. "It does now. Listen, I can't tell you how much I missed you. I'll never be able to adequately express how I felt."
"Drew…"
He didn't let her interrupt. "I wasn't sure I was getting back and that version of you didn't know if she'd ever see her version of me again. And finally it worked. One shot. One time. We get blown up again? I don't think our ancestors can make that happen a second time. I don't think I could survive the separation if they did."
"We've been apart before." She smoothed her hands over his chest. He felt harder. Distantly, she remembered how he'd worked out all the time in his past life. Drew's life had basically been study and exercise.
"There's a difference between us having oceans between us and all of time and space. For every moment I lived there, I thought of you as dead. Temporarily, I told myself. But you were still dead. Burned."
She shook her head. "I'm solid. I'm breathing."
"I can see that." He breathed in her ear and it made shivers go up and down her body. "And I need you. But not here. You were sent back to this place for a reason. Everyone was. To where we each started. I arrived back to this world in the living room where I grew up. Terrified the shit out of the people living there now." He shook his head. "And I had a bad moment. I thought maybe the powers that be had sent me to the wrong time; that I was somehow going to be stuck too far in the past."
She shuddered at the thought. "I don't think I could do the orphanage time again."
"You could. I believe you can do anything, Marina. That being said, I'm glad you didn't have to. Anyway, as I stood there stumbling through an explanation as to why I was there—don't even ask me what I said—I couldn't help but remember what the other version of you kept saying over and over."
"Magic doesn't make mistakes." She whispered the words. They didn't feel correct to her.
He nodded. "We've gone through our existence here believing there was a mistake made right in the beginning. Abraxas's spell sending us to Veli didn't work. It separated us. So few Outsiders raised with any knowledge of their true selves. Made us weak, frightened, beatable. Only I don't think so anymore."
"Because magic doesn't make mistakes."
She couldn't speak the words so she sent them instead. Marina knew he'd heard them when he nodded.
"I was sent so close to the others yet not quite with them. Abusive dad. Soft, useless mother, at least for me. I don't even know why they kept me. When I appeared in their life why didn't they call the police? But it made me hard, taught me to be on my own. I live knowing I'll always be separate from the others even if I care about them—except from you. I'm the only one who could have survived the years sent away. For any of the others, it would have been too much."
She supposed he was right. Kal and Isabelle, Gabriel and Loraine, Charma and Jason, Samuel and Eden, Christophe and Ruby—none of them could bear the separation. Even she, left without him, couldn't handle the pain. But he had. Because he was Drew. And he knew how to endure.
"You're saying we were all sent where we needed to be. Kal, Leonardo, Charma to Veli. Gabriel and Alexa, who I still haven't met, to New Orleans where the demon was."
He nodded. "All over the world, Marina. And just where we had to land. Magic doesn't make mistakes."
"But our parents screwed up their spells. It's why this happened. We weren't supposed to be here like this."
"Except, we were. Do you understand?" He motioned to the room. "Why were you sent here?"
"Because the fates were cruel and they hated me?" She really didn't want to deal with this.
The orphanage couldn't have meaning for her. It had been a place from which she felt glad to have escaped, nothing more. The brief period of hell before her life had really started. Why did he want her to dwell on those years? She'd been nothing but a young, confused child.
When she would have pushed him away from her, he held her tighter. "I get this is annoying. We need to see this; all of us do, as a chance to reevaluate. The universe sent us back to the beginning. Why? I have my own guess but only you can tell me, only you really know."
"You've had way too much time on your hands." Why couldn't he leave it be?
If it had been years since he'd seen her, why was this the first thing he wanted to talk about?
"Yes." His agreeing did nothing to fix her mood or her opinion about this conversation.
"You aren't going to let this go until I do what you want, are you?"
"Marina." Her name sounded as a prayer on his lips and it was then she saw the sadness in his eyes.
Drew had memories she didn't hold, where they all died. He'd endured years away to try to fix this. She wasn't in danger, even if she hated where she stood. The least she could do was try.
He responded again. "You already know the answer. You just don't want to say it."
"Why do I have to?" She shook her head. "Never mind. Don't answer that. I don't run from things. I…" Marina took a deep breath. "I ended up here and you ended up where you did because we had to get used to it from the very beginning." Goosebumps broke out all over skin. "Being apart, understanding this time would be different from the others, in this lifetime when I face my part of the battle—win or lose—I do it without you."
"All of us have always been alone. We don't win as a group. It's impossible. The place where I was, they were so cohesive. But we can't pretend we'll ever be that. From moment one, our destinies were different. Being here made you stronger."
Marina nodded. "This whole time we've only been fooling ourselves. It's time we take control of our lives, Drew. I think I've always known. I wanted a family. I…let myself believe."
"I'm your family, Rina. I'll always be. Whatever happens."
Yeah…because that didn't sound daunting or anything. Marina closed her eyes. If Drew could survive in another time and dimension for years, she could face some hard truths.
* * * *
Drew looked at his watch. If the calculations the first Outsiders had done were correct—and as far as he could tell they were almost always right on—he had an hour still to finish collecting the Outsiders from where they had all been resent, get back, stop the demon from blowing them up, and take the sadness out of Marina's eyes.