Destiny's Wrath (Destiny Series - Book 3) (22 page)

I broke his gaze to look back at the lonely cabin, “I like this place. Have you ever been inside the cabin before?”

Max shook his head, “I’ve lived here my whole life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Maybe when I was really young or something. It feels familiar, but I didn’t even know it was here.”

“
Let’s go take a look. Maybe we can do some repairs and make it a rustic weekend getaway or something.”

He nodded his agreement. As we stepped through the threshold, it was as if we’d been transported back in time. The lonely, deserted cabin had a familiarity about it. It was covered in dust and dirt, and looked to have been vacant for decades, maybe longer.

Max’s eyes opened wide as he took the place in. He steadied himself on me, as if his legs were ready to buckle. I wasn’t sure if he had seen a ghost or what, but I could feel eerie vibrations. I asked, “Are you okay? Do you want to leave?”

Max reached for me, pulled me close in his arms, so tight that it was hard to breath. Then it was there, that electric shock. I used to feel it every time he touched me. The shock coursed through my veins; the desire for him welled up within me until I thought it would overflow.

He choked out, “You know where we are, don’t you? Do you know what this place is?”

“
It’s a cabin that no one will find us in, ever. Make sure you don’t fall through any of the floor boards.”

“
Lauren! This place, you don’t feel it?”

“
Feel what? Dirt mites and dust spores?”

Max shook his head. We were just two steps inside the doorway, “Let me refresh your memory. There’s a bedroom off to the right. Inside was a hand-made four poster bed, cut from trees right outside in the grove. There was an armoire along the wall by the window, cut from the same area. To the right of the bed is a shallow cellar. The latch sticks out from the floor, and if you’re walking around barefoot, it’ll slice your foot.”

I got a creepy feeling, not sure how Max knew this place. I immediately took a step back as if I needed to plan an escape route. “Max, I don’t know this place. I’ve never been here before.”

“
Yes, you have.” He faced me and took both my hands in his. “I built it with my own two hands, every timber, every stone. I dug the cellar out by hand. I built this place for you, Lauren.”

Before confusion could get her grip on me, a flashback overtook me. I saw Max, not present day Max, but one from a lifetime ago, maybe several lifetimes ago, with a pick axe and a shovel. He was sending buckets of dirt up to the floor as he crouched below the floor boards. I saw me, wearing an ankle length skirt and a bonnet, dumping the bucket of dirt on a cart and lowering the empty bucket back to him.

I drove the cart full of earth through the door and dumped it along the tree line away from the cabin. I watched the scene play out in my mind, and a wave of familiarity swept over me. Images, happy images of this place erupted in my mind.

The flashback released me as I walked into the bedroom, and it looked as though the place hadn’t been touched since the occupants left it. The roof had caved in, but the furniture Max had described stood, as if waiting for us to come home. I pivoted around looking at every detail, knowing Max was right. This was our home, so long ago. We were happy here. We spent our days working in the fields and our nights wrapped up together near the fireplace. This was our own slice of heaven.

I reached for the top drawer of the armoire, struggled against the long forgotten piece of history and wrestled it open. Wrapped in several sets of linen coverings, tied up with a length of twine was a quilt of bright colors. It had nearly disintegrated over the years, but small pieces of the cloth still shown through the linen. The quilt had been hand-stitched by me. I felt what was left of the material, lovingly made of bright vibrant colors.

Max walked behind me and slipped his arms around me. “This place waited for us to return. Two people more in love than any other two in the world. No one else could live here, no other couple loved each other enough for this to be their home. All these years, through the wind and the rain, it waited.”

A series of flashbacks hit me quickly. A picture of Max with his arms outstretched to me, love pouring from his eyes, as I looked down at myself with a swollen belly. A roaring fire was in the fireplace. I had been pregnant - really pregnant. We were starting a family. I could feel the emotion of the moment in the flashback, and it nearly brought me to my knees. I was unsure how many years ago this had taken place, but I knew, without a doubt I was seeing a part of our history. Ours. This image faded out and another faded in.

I was lying on the bed with Max kneeling beside me. With worry on his face, his hands shook and tears stained his cheeks. This one was vivid, and I could hear his pleas, “Don’t leave. Stay with me. Please, honey, you can’t leave me.” I reached for his hand; I could feel his calluses and his weather-beaten hand grip mine hard. It was childbirth, and I could feel my own weakness. In this moment, I knew my body had given out. I could feel myself leaving the body, floating over the scene, hearing his frantic pleas turn to wails. “Don’t leave me!”

I floated over the bed for several minutes; he was distraught, this
Max
from long ago. Wrapped up in a blanket next to my lifeless body was a baby. I had died after childbirth.

Max’s arms had been around me when the first of the flashbacks took me over. Looking at present day Max, I could tell that somehow he had seen them, too. Max tightened his arms around me, as if the emotion I had just felt hadn’t happened a lifetime ago, as if it were still happening. I was sure I knew the answer, but asked anyway, “Did you see that?”

Max nodded, leaned over and kissed the top of my head, and whispered, “Lauren, I don’t know what kind of new powers you got this time, but I could see it and feel everything. I could feel my heart breaking, the emptiness when I knew you were gone.”

We stood there for a long time, Max’s steel arms wrapped around me, my face tucked into his chest. Neither of us knew what to say. It was painful to watch, and excruciating to have lived through, twice.

Just as Max began to loosen his hold on me, I felt another flashback, this one, one of Max’s. A grave marker outside the cabin, near the fence, bore the name, “Catherine Meyer, Beloved Wife and Mother, Born 1861, Died 1882.” Max knelt beside the grave, holding the baby as tears streamed down his face. “I miss you, Catherine. Joseph is healthy. He’s beautiful. He has your eyes. I’ll tell him about you every day for the rest of his life. If he didn’t need me, I would have already left this place to be with you. Wait for me, Catherine. I know you can hear me. I can still feel you here. I’ll find you again. We’ll be together, I know it. I promise you, I will find you again.” I knew this promise, that Max made to me over a hundred years ago, was the reason he found me in my dreams this lifetime.

That image faded out as one from years later took its place. Max was talking to a tall, handsome teenage boy, at least sixteen years old, as they both sat on the front porch of the cabin. “Joseph, pretty soon this is all going to be yours. You’re man enough to take care of yourself, and I’m not going to be around much longer. You have to promise me, no matter what, never sell this land. You understand? You can move away from it. I know most boys your age are moving to the city. You go chase your dreams. You find your wife and live a long healthy life together. But, no matter what, promise me you won’t sell this land.”

Joseph nodded, “Where are you going?”

A wide smile stretched across his face, “The doc says I’m going to be with your mother soon.”

Joseph’s eyes took on a glassy look as he struggled to hold back the tears. “No!”

Max smiled a warm, fatherly smile at Joseph, “It’s what I want. Promise me, Joseph.”

Joseph, still holding back tears, choked out, “I promise. I won’t sell.” I watched the emotion in Joseph’s eyes.

“
You know, I built this place for your mother. It’s the only place . . . it still feels like . . . like she’s here. I can’t help but think when I pass on, the two of us will be together, here.”

I watched as Joseph won his fight to hold back his tears. His jaw set, “How much time do you have left?”

“
Days, weeks maybe. It doesn’t matter. I’ve done my part. You are the only reason I kept going when I lost your mother. You were the reason I knew I couldn’t join her sooner. But you’re a man now. You don’t need me anymore. You’ve got a life to live and dreams of your own to follow. Go to it, son.”

“
But I don’t want to lose you.”

“
I know, son. If you ever need me, I’ll be right here. But never sell this land. When your son and your grandson are of age, you tell them the same. This land stays in the Meyers family. Never take this cabin down. Your mother and I will be here, I just know it.”

Max’s flashback faded away. I was speechless.

Max nodded. “Now I get it. When my parents died, just a day or two after their funeral, Gramps sat me down and told me I could never sell this place. Gramps told me his grandfather had made him make the same promise. He said I was the sixth generation to own the land; that a trust had been set up by him to pay the taxes on it for the next hundred years, that no matter what I did with my life, this land stayed in the family. At the time I thought he was talking about my parents’ house. I told him I couldn’t live there, so he offered to let me stay with him until I figured out where I wanted to live. But he made me promise that day never to sell this land. It was mine now, but to never sell.”

I had to say it out loud, “Gramps was our great grandson. Fate is a strange thing.”

I thought back to when I first met Joe. “When I met Gramps at the nursing home, I had an instant draw to him. After you came back in my life, I assumed that subconsciously I’d seen something of you, in him. That was why I’d befriended him, that somehow, deep down, I had just known that he was a part of you. I never dreamed that he was a part of both of us.”

We stood a long time in our embrace, knowing that we had found our way to our souls’ home. Through the Council, the Cabinet, Samael, threats from police – no matter what was thrown our way, we never wavered, our love for each other never diminished. This cabin was a beacon to us, bringing us home.

The words rolled from me, “It waited for us because I love you more deeply than one lifetime will allow.”

He began nuzzling my neck, stroking my hair, and setting my skin on fire with his touch. I became euphoric as I thought of all the times we lay here on rainy afternoons, enjoying the seclusion, wrapping ourselves up with each other. “Max, we’ve done it. That dream I had of you for so many years, you told me we would achieve Empathy, Trust, Virtue and Passion. We did it. It’s all over.”

Max questioned me with his eyes but didn’t speak. I started rattling them all off, “Courage was what brought us together. Stepping in front of the gun to protect the little kid was how I earned Courage.”

“
I felt Passion leaking out of every pore of my body the day you returned from Afghanistan. Not the passion of a new love, but the passion of one lost then found when hope of doing so was a long shot.”

“
When we found out Bert was being held hostage by Samael, you Empathized for him, we both did. We knew what he was going through, and, worse yet, we knew what would happen as soon as the Council found out about him. I think in that moment, we must have achieved Empathy and didn’t even realize.”

“
When Samael refused to leave Bert, we wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. We invited Samael back into our lives – refusing to let him hurt Bert. We both knew it might have meant sharing the rest of our lives with him. That was the right decision for the world, even though it could have meant certain death for you. So, Virtue was the pillar that Renny knew we’d achieved; she didn’t even notice that we got Empathy at the same time.”

“
Once I killed Samael, I believed we’d get Trust by just trusting that he was gone forever, that we’d destroyed him. But Trust really came when both the Council and the Cabinet came together and gave their trust to us. They trusted that we would not use these new found superpowers to damage the universe or individuals’ destinies. Max – we did it.”

“
So everything we had to accomplish is done?” I could feel a sadness wash over him. I could see it. It was as if the universe had finally revealed all of its secrets. I knew that the Council and Cabinet had always been, I knew that in the past there had been many like Samael – he and the rest of his kind were really gone for good.

“
Don’t you see? We’re free. All the challenges we faced – we did it. Do you remember when we lived here before? That was the lifetime that we accomplished nothing, that we just basked in each other, enjoyed each other. Do you see why we’ve returned?”

Max raised his hand to my face and gently brushed his knuckles on my cheek. He looked in my eyes, deep and long, as if he hadn’t seen them in a long time. “If this is our last lifetime together, I think we should make the most of it.”

He eased his arms around me, resting his palms on the small of my back. I could feel his gentle caress on my skin, as he rested his chin on the top of my head. “How do we make time stand still?”

“
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. You’re just considering human life. When this one’s over, we won’t lose another twenty years in the next lifetime trying to find each other. We’ll never lose each other again. Our fate is tied for all time as of right now.”