The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (12 page)

A hot blast of breath hit my neck and back, the force blew my hair out and sent a shiver dancing across my skull. The creature was standing right over me now. Any second, in one quick bite, my arms and head would be gone.

Something cold and wet pressed against my face while a loud sound, like a snuffling dog, blasted into my ear. The thing shoved at my head, then at my neck and arms until it had wormed its nose into the space near my chest and was able to roll me onto my back. Lying there, staring up into demonic eyes, waiting for the agony of piercing flesh, I whispered, “Please, please no,” while my head rolled from side to side.

It was rough, like wet sand at the edge of an ocean, and it traveled from my shoulder all the way up the side of my head, sweeping my hair up over my face and sticking it there—an unwanted animal bath.
 

Ray’s laughter was soft, like voices in a chorus, it sounded like joy.
 

He was laughing at me.

Anger surged from my brain and filled my chest. It swelled, like an ugly canker, radiated down my arms. If the animal hovering over me with its stupid, soft expression wasn’t quite so large, quite so capable of ingesting me, I would have shoved it—hard.

I felt like hitting it. Hurting it. If it was smaller…

Ray stopped laughing. “What’s wrong?” his voice suddenly serious.
 

“Nothing! Nothing at all!”
 

His brows furrowed into tight ridges, “It doesn’t seem like nothing.”
 

I crawled backwards, out from under the thing still standing over me. “Forget it,” I snapped. “Who doesn’t love to be laughed at? Especially when they’re terrified—right?” I stood up and pulled wet, sticking strands of hair from my face. “I mean, that’s funny. That’s hilarious.” I wanted to kick something, throw something.
 

I wanted something to hurt as much as I did.

“You’re angry.” His voice was calm, factual.
 

“I AM NOT ANGRY!”
 

“Of course you aren’t,” he turned, reached up around the pup’s neck, and hoisted himself onto its back between the folded wings. “Ready when you are.”
 

“Ready for what?”

He pointed a finger straight up in the air and a strange sadness moved over his expression,
 
a cloud blocking out all his happiness that had been there only moments before. “To take you to The Balancer. To make your account.”
 

I looked from him to the beast before me. I was supposed to ride this creature to the top of the mountain. The thought of floating high above the ground on the back of a bat made the protection of my anger slide back into fear. “How am I supposed to get on it?”
 

By the time we landed in the center of a giant, cobblestone courtyard, my hands had cramped into tight fights unwilling to release the gray fur at my pup’s neck. Ray slid easily from the back of his ride, landing confidently on both feet before he turned and waited for me to join him.
 

I wanted off, after a terror filled flight up thousands of vertical feet, I really wanted to get off the back of this beast. But I couldn’t move.
 

Ray smirked and walked over, raising his arms like he was coaxing a child from a too high slide. “Come on, I’ll catch you.”

My fingers uncurled, slowly, unwilling—they were so stiff the act hurt. Ray moved closer and I tried to drag my leg furthest from him over the pup’s back. Awkward and off balance, my foot caught behind the bony ridge of a wing and my body pitched sideways. Headfirst I began an uncontrolled slide down the round of the animal’s middle. Helpless to stop myself, the cobblestone below rushed towards me with the promise to break my face.
 

Suddenly snatched up, Ray plucked me from emergency and held me cradled in his arms for the briefest of seconds before placing my still unsteady feet on the uneven ground.
 

“Thank you,” I breathed.

He nodded his head and a worrisome expression pulled at his mouth. He stepped away from me and turned towards the forbidding structure in front of us. Two enormous iron doors guarded the entrance to a castle made from metal shards that stretched high into the dark sky above us. I stared, uncertain, my heart beating hard against some instinctual danger.
 

Ray stared as well. “Ready?” he whispered without looking at me.

“I guess so.”

When he took a step, I followed, closely, suddenly wishing he would take my hand again like he had in the forest. Ray was strong and quick and as we moved closer with every step, I wanted to curl up inside the surety of his protection.
 

His hands stayed by his sides.
 

The massive doors moved closer and loomed higher, they seemed built for giants. Standing in front of them, I had to tilt my head back in order to take in the full height of them. Large bolts bigger than my head punctuated the iron and gave the impression of a prison door, designed to keep us out—or something in. “You’d need a fleet of trucks to open these. How are we supposed—”

My words fell away at the sound, gears and teeth turning and clicking, heavy metal shifting, and then the silence, smooth and clean, without even a breath, the doors cracked open.
 

“We don’t have to,” Ray replied. “She already knows we’re here.”

“The Balancer,” I said more than asked while trying to peer past the ever widening glean of bright white light that was erupting before us.
 

“Yes.” His voice was quiet, sad. He hadn’t even looked at me since helping me down from the pup’s back.
 

When the entrance before us was wide enough to step through, and my eyes had adjusted to the blinding contrast of brilliant light streaming into the dark gray world of The Between, I stared into the crystal white palace before us. There, in the center of iridescent space, a small ash colored boy in his once bright red shirt stood waiting for his sister to come and save him.
 

“Daniel,” I breathed and rushed into room.
 

I stopped short, my arm caught, I fell back beside Ray and realized he had grabbed me. Annoyed, I pulled my arm from his fingers. “What?”

“Look at me.”

I turned and faced him, stared into his eyes, waited for him to speak. “What?”

Ray looked at Daniel, then back at me, his chest filled and exhaled, he hesitated.
 

“What?” my impatience getting the better of me. I looked up at the moon sliding towards the horizon and raised my eyebrows, a silent reminder to him that it wasn’t like we had all day.
 

He nodded his head, “I know…time. We always run out of time,” he said, speaking more to himself than to me. “When we go in, and you meet The Balancer, and you make your account…things will move quickly after that.”

“What do you mean?” I hadn’t thought about what would happen after the account. I had assumed that I would have to travel with Ray back through The Between to the gates. But what if that was just it—poof. I made the account and everything was solved. What if I fixed everything, Daniel evaporated into heaven, and I just woke up in my own bed back at Graciana’s house wondering if any of this ever really happened or was nothing more than a crazy dream?
 

I waited for his answer, stared into his very worried eyes, and then I knew.
 

“I won’t get the chance to say goodbye…will I? Once I give the account, Daniel will be saved and gone. And so will you.”

He looked away from me then and for once seemed unable to speak. What was Ray anyway? What was he to me? He was connected to me, somehow, some force or law that I didn’t know or understand…but I felt it. Ray was
my
guide, but what did that mean for him. “What am I to you?”
 

He didn’t speak at first, and when he did, the words shifted the existence around us. “You are, to put it simply, Everything. You are every thing for me. There is nothing else in my existence that is not you.”
 

I stared at him, into him, somehow what he was saying felt right even though I didn’t know why or how.
 

 
He took my hand in his and turned my palm face up, ran both his thumbs over the sensitive flesh. “I wanted to say it, out loud, to make sure you knew before,” his eyes rose back to mine. “So that after, maybe there would be a chance of you remembering. Of hanging on to the fact that the totality of my existence…it is for you.” He closed his eyes, “And if you can remember that, then maybe this life you have…maybe the loneliness won’t seem so unbearable.”

“Will I remember this?” I asked. “Will I know it was real, that you were real, that I experienced all this—or will I think it was only a dream?”

Ray didn’t answer me right away and I realized that, again, there was something he wasn’t explaining. It felt like something he knew, but would not tell me.
 

“What are you keeping from me?”

He sighed and kept his eyes on the ground, “Only everything that you have not yet discovered for yourself.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Will I remember this? Will it feel like nothing more than a dream.”

“You never do,” he whispered and before I could respond, Ray took my hand into his, and for the first time, I realized my hand belonged there. I belonged with him even if I didn’t know what that meant for when I went back to my world. He turned towards the crystal white room where Daniel still stood, still waiting, and led me inside.
 

The floor beneath our feet was a solid, unbroken piece of crystal, smooth, polished, it illuminated light from within—after several steps, I realized that our shoes made no sound despite the hard surface. The ceiling above us stretched high, until the four walls around us angled their sloping forms into a single point that looked miles above our heads. The room was built like the inside of a giant pyramid of light and at its center, little Daniel stood waiting beside a giant open book supported on a glass pedestal.
 

“Depending on your account—it might feel like a dream,” Ray stared ahead. “Or a nightmare.” His feet kept moving, kept advancing us forward while his head turned to me. “And if you find you are unable to wake up…try like hell to hang on to me.”
 

Daniel didn’t run. He stood and stared at me, his once bright blond hair an ashy gray, it was a reminder that he was running out of time in this place, running out of the energy needed to keep existing. Ray and I moved closer, the giant emptiness of the great white space swallowing us down with every step. I looked over my shoulder, back towards the crack in the door and the gray world we had just left, and watched the enormous slabs of iron move on a slow and silent swing until they shut. I stopped and Ray stopped beside me. I was unable to see where the doors had been, from the inside they looked like the rest of the solid white walls all around us.

My body rushed with the panic pounding from my heart—were we trapped in here? The gnawing dread of fear pulled at my mind. “What’s happening?”

Ray didn’t answer, his hand guided me to keep walking, keep moving. When I looked forward again, I could see we were only a few steps from Daniel now and his ghostly presence suddenly terrified me. When I looked into his faded eyes, I sensed something I hadn’t seen before. As he stood still, not running, not coaxing, I had the very strong sensation that it had all been a game. Hide and seek. Run and hide. Chase and follow me until I get you here, here in this strange place, here in this vast white room—trapped behind invisible iron doors.
 

A chill ran up my arms and across my back that made me shiver. Ray tightened his hand on mine.

“Welcome,” a girl’s voice announced. It was not loud, but clear and crisp, like the sound of ice cracking in a cold drink.
 

I looked around for the owner, but no one else was here. I looked to Ray, but his head hung low and his eyes remained on the ground in front of him.
 

“Hello?” I called out. “Someone is here?”

A gentle laugh rolled though the air and then stopped immediately, “Someone!” Her voice was louder, angrier.
 

Beside me, Ray closed his eyes, as if in prayer.

“Some…one,” she spat. “Someone has done a poor job at his duties if you don’t know who I am, girl.”

“The Balancer,” I said.

“The GREAT BALANCER!” her voice radiated from every direction and made me want to crouch low and cover my head and ears. I could feel Ray’s hand shaking in mine.

When the sound stopped reverberating off the hard crystal walls, I corrected myself, “The Great Balancer, of course.” Instinctively, I bowed my head like Ray while my eyes scanned the blank room around us trying to find the source. “Please accept my apology.”

For a long while, there was no response, only the sound of my heart wildly pumping blood and adrenaline from my head to my toes, urging me to run. But run where?

“Why have you come?” she finally asked.
 

I swallowed, forced my voice to rise in my throat. “For my brother,” my eyes met Daniel’s. “To help my brother…to help him leave here.”

“Leave here?” she questioned, her tone was incredulous. “We do not like them to leave. We like them rung dry,” hysterical laughter rained down on our heads and then stopped. “And this one especially, so much potential energy, and so very close to expiration.” Silence filled the room, like a deep breath of waiting until her voice again cried out, “I WILL BE GREATLY VEXED IF I CAN NOT HAVE HIM!”

Her words alone terrified me. I stood frozen, too scared to even breath. After all of this, was she not going to allow me to help Daniel?
 

“It is the commandment,” Ray said, his head still bowed low. “She has the right to try, on this one day every year, the mortals have the right to…”

“SNAKE!” she shouted. “YOU DARE LECTURE ME ON THE COMMANDMENTS!”