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“I can’t speak for that Jacob but I know the details,” Jay says. “He never made her burn anything.”
“No, you can only manipulate the young and put suggestions in their head.” I pause, studying him. “Is that what you’re trying to do to me right now?”
Jay starts walking around me, hands clasped behind his back making his massive shoulders pop. “The Jacobs are the liaison between the afterlife, the underworld, the Veil and the land of the living. I don’t like to call it the ‘real world’ because all the worlds are quite real. But we don’t always have the same roles. Essentially we are beings who are immortal, can live forever, though every time we are assigned to someone, we begin again. That is, we don’t remember who we were before and we never remember the human that we once were. Sometimes bits and pieces come through, enough to color us like any past life would.”
“And how long have you been around the block?”
His eyes drift off, a darkness coming over them. “Honestly, this is my first time.”
“What?” I exclaim. “Your first time?”
How fucking fitting that the first time I need guidance with the afterlife that I get assigned a goddamned rookie.
He glares at me. “We all start somewhere. I was alive, someone else, and then I wasn’t. I don’t know how the process works and I don’t care to know but the next thing I knew I was talking to Jacob and I understanding some very deep and real part of me. Whatever makes one of us, well, one of us, it happens at an innate level. We don’t go to school. We just begin. On pure instinct.”
I have hard time taking all of this in. “And Jacob, was he one too? I mean, is that why he didn’t die like people say he did?”
“Actually, Jacob went rogue. Just as your friend Maximus did. It means they gave up their immortality and role to live a normal life. To die a normal death.”
“Like having a crypt of bones collapse on you is a normal death,” I mutter, kicking away a pebble with my bare toe. It hops across the road but doesn’t make a sound.
“But your friend Maximus also went back in and saved him. Pulled Jacob right out of Hell. Jacob died sacrificing his life to save Dawn. When a Jacob does that, after they’ve gone rogue, it doesn’t mean the end for them. They can come back. But there are consequences.”
“What kind of consequences?”
“It’s not relevant to you,” he says, putting his hands in his pockets and taking a step close, his icy eyes spearing mine. “Ada, I’m here because I have to teach you the ways of the Thin Veil. To protect yourself and others from the dangers. Dex had Maximus to show him, Perry had her Jacob, Pippa, your grandmother, had another. Jacob himself had a different role, he managed a contract between the Devil and Sage Knightly. We all have different ways of handling those who we are assigned to. But I can promise you I have your best interests at heart. I always have.”
“Always have?” I pause, licking my lips. “I had dreams about you. In them you told me you’d been watching me for a long time.”
He nods, not breaking his hypnotic stare. “I have been.”
I wonder how much he knows, how much he’s seen. If he knows me at all or if he’s basing everything on assumptions. “And my dreams, were those real or not?”
“They were dreams,” he says. “Real dreams. In the dream state, I can take you places, to far deeper levels than this, to where the real threats are. I can take you there unseen. It’s an invisible entry. Only your spirit, your mind, travels through while your body stays behind. Just like in a dream, you can’t change anything or do anything.”
“I did in my dreams,” I tell him.
“And we all know there are people who are lucid dreamers too. It doesn’t mean things are actually happening. You may talk to and interact with people in the dream at your will but it doesn’t mean you are. You could kill someone in your dream but in reality they will go on like nothing happened.”
“This is so Inception,” I say under my breath. “And it’s leaving me equally as confused. Too bad you’re not Tom Hardy.”
Jay looks puzzled briefly and I wonder if he has any clue about the movie or about pop culture and real life in general.
He goes on. “Then there are the portals. Your whole body passes through and if I accompany you through a permanent portal, no one will know you’re there. It’s the safest way. The only way.”
“You say no one . . . like other people?”
“Like demons. You know the threats and consequences of visiting the deeper levels of the Veil. When you go in, you weaken the walls. If you can come in, demons and the undead can come out. You’re created a door for them. And when you’re in there, they can see you. They can hunt you. Kill you, and that’s where your soul will forever stay. And, more than that, they can hitch a ride back. You can be possessed by them, or they can piggy-back onto anyone else you love.” He pauses, scrutinizing me. “That’s if you go in on your own, of course, or create a portal where there shouldn’t be one.”
