The Temptation (Kindred) (7 page)

W
ithout realizing exactly what I was doing,
I turned in a rush of terror and sprinted back to the Land Rover, overcome with fear and anxiety, fueled by instinct and adrenaline. Travis was dead?

Panic-stricken, I jumped into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and engaged the door locks. Fumbling to press the keyless ignition button, I tried to start the car, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. It was completely still, and quiet. I wondered if my keys had fallen out, but realized that even so, the car would have given me the light to indicate the key was not in range. It didn’t even do that. It did nothing. My panic escalated. Buddy began to whine.

Then, unfathomably, there was Travis, standing just a few feet in front of the car, wearing his jeans and his woolen jacket, boots, and hat. He smiled and waved at me as though nothing were out of the ordinary, and I felt a surge of terrified excitement. Dead or not, he was still by far the most handsome boy I had ever laid eyes on. Part of me wanted to touch him again, kiss him; the other part of me wanted to flee this place and never return.

Travis began to walk toward me, and once at the passenger-side window, he knocked on the glass for me to let him in. I stared straight ahead, nervous that if I looked into his eyes, I would weaken. He was dead, and I shouldn’t be here.

“Shane!” he called out, through the window. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head.

“Shane!” he called, knocking some more and sounding worried now. “Can I please talk to you?”

“Go away!” I yelled back, still staring straight ahead. “I can’t hang out with dead people!”

It sounded ridiculously stupid as I said it, and I felt bad. I sneaked a tentative look at him now. Travis cocked his head, his brow bunched up in puzzlement as he processed what I’d just told him. He shook his head, exasperated with me, glanced at the
descansos
, seemed to take a deep breath, closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, and then, to my astonishment, the passenger-door lock spontaneously disengaged. I looked about me hysterically, and frantically pressed the lock button on the door. My efforts were met with a hollow click. The master lock button didn’t work anymore. I was trapped. With a dead guy.

“No!” I shrieked. “Go away! Get away from me!”

Calmly, Travis opened the passenger door and climbed in.

I tried to open my door, thinking that if he was going to be in here, then I should be out there. But it, unlike the rest of the car, it was locked. To my dismay, Buddy greeted Travis with a wagging tail, licking his hand subserviently, as though he were just the nicest and most normal person in the world.

“I can’t open my door!” I shrieked.

Travis settled into the passenger seat, and shut the door behind him. I was instantly aware of the scent of warm sunshine on earth that always seemed to accompany him, and the toasty change in temperature in the car. He was like a human furnace. Or nonhuman, as the case may be. I looked at him, and instantly felt soothed and hypnotized by his incredible eyes; they radiated serenity and tranquility. The fear I’d felt began to dissolve.

“Sorry about this,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you not to be afraid. It’s all okay.”

“What do you want from me?” I said in a hoarse whisper.

“I want you to listen to what I have to say. I don’t want you to be scared, or to worry, either.”

“You aren’t going to eat my soul?” I asked, a bit meekly, now that I felt his peace.

Travis took a deliberate, deep breath, and blew it slowly out of his delicious-looking mouth. I should not have been noticing his perfect pink lips at a moment like this, or his brilliantly formed eyebrows and long dark eyelashes, or his exceptionally comprehending eyes, but I was under some sort of spell.

He looked directly at me and said, “Let me be clear. I. Am. Not”—he said this part haltingly and deliberately—“going to ‘eat your soul.’ Okay? We clear on that?”

“I saw it once on a documentary. . . ,” I offered.

Travis shook his head and looked at me with pity. “You can’t believe everything you see on TV. You know that. I mean, c’mon.”

I looked at him for a moment, and he seemed to be telling the truth. Everything about him seemed completely genuine. His eyes, his facial expression, his body language. I was a good reader of people, usually, and there was nothing to make me think he was lying.

“So, what are you, exactly? An angel or something?” I asked.

“No, not an angel.”

“Magical healer?”

“Nope. Not that, either.”

“Then . . . what?”

“I’m dead, Shane,” he said plainly. “Just like you saw on the cross. I had a bad car accident near here last year, and me and my brother died in it. I’m a revenant. Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head.

He took my hand, the electricity coming from him into my body again with exquisite pleasure, and explained calmly, “A revenant is a ghost in human form. Sometimes I’m in human form, I should say. In this dimension, during the daylight hours.”

I could think of nothing to say to this. I just sat there, feeling his warmth and incredible energy. I watched him, mesmerized.

“The day we died, me and my brother did something pretty bad. Something really bad, actually.”

“What did you do?” A chill shook me.

He sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, if that’s okay with you.”

I felt even more afraid. He seemed to sense this, and the energy flow from him increased, soothing me back down again before he said, “When you do something bad, and you die, one of two things happens. All of us have what’s called a judgment when we die. It’s decided where the soul goes next, basically. We have souls, all of us, every living thing, and they’re really a form of energy. Anyway, if you’ve done something bad like we did, you usually end up in the Underworld when you die.”

“Hell?” I asked.

“Something like that. There are lots of different names for it. We just call it the Underworld, because that’s what it is.”

“Who’s we? You said ‘we call it’ that.”

“Spirits. The ones I know, anyway. I don’t know everything about it. I’m pretty new to this stuff, relatively.”

“So is that your world, the world you told me about the other day?” My blood ran cold. “You’re from hell?”

He shook his head vehemently and I was relieved. “No! Not at all. There’s another option when you did something bad. If they think there’s hope for your soul, you can go to the Vortex instead, and work to prove yourself, and maybe move on to the Afterworld eventually. That’s my world. The Vortex.”

I looked at him with confusion.

“Some people call it purgatory,” he said. “It’s when you did something bad, but you have good in you. You get a second chance. I’m working for that now.”

“That still doesn’t explain why I can touch you.”

“Because I’m a revenant,” he said. “As long as I’m in the Vortex I can come back here to visit, either as a revenant or as a spirit. During the day, I take human form, but at night I can only visit here in spirit form. I can go back and forth pretty much whenever I want, as long as no one who knew me in life sees me when I’m a revenant.”

“So, when you’re not a revenant, you’re like a ghost?” I asked in shock.

He grinned at my naïveté. “Not like one; I pretty much am one.”

I shivered and tried to reconcile all of the fearful things I had thought about ghosts, up until then, with the kind, peaceful boy sitting here with me now.

He continued, “I have kind of like an assignment. Everyone in the Vortex gets one. I’m supposed to stick close to this road where I died, and help out, do good things for people, animals, and the land, to earn back whatever good energy I lost in the bad thing I did. It’s a lot easier to help out when I’m in human form. Basically I go around all day helping rabbits that got hit by cars, things like that.”

“That’s why you helped me?”

He nodded. “I would have done it anyway, though.”

“So basically, you haunt this road?”

“I guess you could look at it that way. I think of it more like I’m a volunteer search and rescue guy.” He grinned, and looked for all the world like the most normal guy ever.

“This is hard to believe,” I said.

“But you know I helped you, right?”

I nodded.

“I bet you’ve heard of revenants before. Around here they talk a lot about La Llorona, the woman who goes around crying on riverbanks for her dead babies. You know about her, right? She’s a revenant, too. In life, she actually did kill her kids, drowned them like a crazy woman, but she had really bad postpartum depression, so they cut her some slack.”

“Who are ‘they’?” I asked, suddenly afraid again.

“The being or beings who make the judgments,” he said. “God, the universe, whatever you want to call it. We call it the Maker of All Things. The Maker for short. Energy.”

My eyes widened, and I got chills as I understood the enormity of what he’d just told me. “Have you met this being? The Maker?”

“Not directly, even though I feel him all the time. We all do, even you, if you pay attention. We’re all a part of the Maker. He has helpers who tell us what’s going on—I guess you’d think of them as angels in your world. Lots and lots of them. It’s pretty well-organized, but not perfect. There are lots of mistakes. That’s one thing I find weird. We’re raised to think the Maker is perfect, but mistakes are built into every system. Can’t explain it exactly. Anyway. We all have a purpose.”

I sat for a moment with the knowledge that there really were souls, and an afterlife, and a Maker, and angels. And a purpose. It was disconcerting, but also very comforting.

“But none of that explains how you healed me,” I said after a moment. “I know I was almost dead.”

Travis grinned like a little boy, adorably. “Souls in the Vortex get a bunch of cool skills to help them complete their tasks. Sometimes I feel like a superhero, like I dreamed of being when I was little. It’s pretty awesome. Watch.”

He pointed at the ignition button, and the car started.

“Ta-da!” he said excitedly. Then he stared at the stereo for a moment, and it turned on.

I looked at him quizzically.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Electricity. I just think about it happening, in a certain way, and it happens.”

“How do you get back to the Vortex?”

“It’s just dimensions, traveling between them. I know of at least four. I guess you could think of them almost as parallel universes.”

“Hang on,” I interrupted. “Parallel universes?”

Travis nodded. “Yeah. Worlds like this world, but in a different part of space.”

“That’s so weird,” I said. “I have this physics teacher, Mr. Hedges. He’s getting a doctorate degree in quantum physics at UNM, and all he ever talks about is parallel universes. Everyone at school thinks he’s crazy. He says he found a way to access other dimensions and universes.”

Travis smiled patiently. “So did I,” he joked. “With a lot less school.”

I smiled, but felt my heart racing. Was it a coincidence that Mr. Hedges was my teacher? I was starting to wonder if anything was a coincidence at all anymore.

“How many are there?” I asked. “Parallel universes, I mean?”

Travis shrugged. “Lots, I think. I only know about the Vortex, the Afterworld, your world, and then there’s the Underworld.” He seemed to shudder at the mention of this last one.

“And you’ve been to them all?”

“No. I can see into them, sort of, but I’m only allowed in the Vortex and your world right now.”

I thought about all of this for a moment. “Was I dead when you found me?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No way. I’m not supposed to bring people back from the dead. But if I have to, I use this.”

Travis pulled a small, almost glowingly white stone from his pocket and showed it to me. “It’s called a life stone, but no one uses it. At least no one I know in the Vortex, because you don’t stay in the Vortex if you use it. Bringing a soul back means the Maker has to reset the clockwork of the universe, basically. It has severe consequences.”

“Why would they even give you that rock if you’re not supposed to use it?”

Travis looked at the stone thoughtfully. “Best I figure is it’s some kind of a test. The Maker’s real big on tests. We get tested a lot, on your side and on mine, and a lot of us, I’m sorry to say, fail. I’ve met souls in the Vortex who just disappear one day, because they failed a test. One idiot tried to use the life stone to bring himself back from the dead. Never heard from him again.”

“Would I have died if you hadn’t found me?”

“I’m no doctor, but I’d say probably so.”

“So you did save my life.”

He looked into my eyes with a small nod, and seemed quite modest, considering.

“How did you find me, anyway?” I asked.

“I get a sense of things, and I go where I’m needed,” he said. “I have different ways of moving through time and space than you do.”

“Well, however you did it, thank you. I should have said that before.”

Tears welled in my eyes as I considered how suspicious I’d been of him earlier, how afraid I’d been, when he was heroic and kind and had saved me. Seeing my tears, he reached out across the center console to hug me, and my locket warmed on my chest at his touch. I felt completely and entirely at home in his arms; that was the only way I could describe it. I buried my face in his warm, solid chest, and breathed in his scent of sunshine and earth. I didn’t want to let go, but he pulled back after a while. When we came out of the incredible, intoxicating embrace, I had a driving need to kiss him; it was more urgent than anything else in my life ever had been. It was overpowering. I looked at his lips, and moved closer, pulled by a force larger than myself directly toward him. Travis looked at me like he wanted to kiss me, too, but pulled away suddenly, almost angrily.

“Don’t,” he said.

It hurt my feelings terribly.

“Why not?”

“Rules,” he sighed. He looked as frustrated as I was. “I want to, Shane. Trust me, I do. But I’m not supposed to have any kind of intimate contact with a living human in your world while I’m in revenant form. It’s strictly forbidden.”