The sands would run out for her soon—perhaps even within the day. Possibly within the hour…
That had to be a difficult truth to digest, so perhaps I was giving myself too much credit in thinking her uncharacteristic pensiveness could be owed to anythingIhad said.
Whatever the reason for her contemplativeness, I still didn’t want her to feel alone, even though in so many ways… she was.
Death was like that. I was there when it happened, yeah. But when the lights went out, it was still just you and yourself. At least, it was as far as I knew.
And this walk with me back to her world—how could it not, for her, feel like a trek to the gallows?
Then there was the matter of our impending reconnection.
Despite the heaviness of this pilgrimage, the anticipation for that delicious rejoining of our spirits buzzed in me—though it shouldn’t have.
Wasshedreading it?
“Then once you’re through the portal,” she said, speaking up at last, “in this world or the other, mine, you just… swirly twirl wherever you want to go?”
I did a double take her way. Because…swirly twirl?
That wasn’t how I would have referred to my preferred methodof travel, but Helena had her intrinsic view of things, and who was I to not let her have it? Aside from that, I wasn’t about to correct her by saying I “smoke-shifted” or “mist-moved”—both of which struck me as equally stupid sounding.
“More or less,” I muttered.
Helena kept her gaze downcast on the trail, and she took care to sidestep the knobby knees of tree roots that jutted up in her path.
“And you feel a tug,” she said, “when it’s… time for someone to die? You said before that… you didn’t come to find me right away because you didn’t feel the pull to get my soul.”
I slowed my walk as we neared the portal, which loomed ahead, an open mouth back to Helena’s realm, back to her life—which had no room in it for me.
“For the Fated,” I said, “the pull comes shortly before death. For all other souls, I feel the pull after.”
“Hmm,” she mused. “That’s interesting, don’t you think? That you’re called to the Fated justbeforedeath. I wonder why that is. Probably it’s got something to do with there being some kind of… schedule. Like, the Fated Souls have somewhere to be?”
I didn’t know for sure, but that had always been my assumption.
“Makes me feel important in a way,” Helena added, her chattiness revived. “Like a VIFS. As in a Very Important Fated S—”
“This time, it might be uncomfortable for you,” I blurted out. “Moreuncomfortable…”
Arriving at the open archway embedded in a freestanding stone wall, a seeming entrance to a missing castle courtyard, I stopped. Though the doorway framed more mist-shrouded trees, promising a continuation of our path, the facade was just that.
“?‘It might,’ you said. What do you mean by ‘it’?”
What did she mean what did I mean? Whatelsecould I be talking about?
“My… influence,” I clarified, since she was apparently going to make me say it out loud.
She touched her heart. “You mean… when you reached into me like that. Like the claw on one of those teddy-picker arcade games. I’m pretty good at those, by the way. It’s all in the timing.”
She made her hand into a claw before she mimed snagging my heart. “You just line ’em up and then yoink!”
I just stared at her. Sometimes I couldn’t think of what to say back when I was with her.
She perplexed me. The way a searching bumblebee must perplex a drab and colorless mushroom.
“Also,” she said, “what you did. It wasn’t uncomfortable. At all.”
I turned toward her. Becausewhat?
