Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1) (14 page)

I tried to scream, to cry out. But it was like in those dreams where you rant and rave with every cell of your being and all that comes out is a squeak. My little whisper didn’t begin to contain all the rage, passion, and love I wanted to express. “But you
are
my other half, Mahalia Warrior!” I thought I yelled.

She didn’t hear me. She kept on in that singsong voice. “You’ll be reunited with your other half, your guardian angel if that’s what you want to call it. You’ve been haunted by your memory of an idyllic past, back when you and your angel were one. That’s why you’ve been so unhappy. That’s why I’ve been so unhappy. Now you’ll be reunited.”

“But won’t that mean I’m
dead
?” I tried to yell. But again, just a squeak, and now I was being sucked up into a muddy, pulsing place. It was like I’d slipped into a quagmire and could hear the earth’s heartbeat. It’s hard to describe in words, but “I” still knew who “I” was. I knew I was Gideon, yet I wasn’t—I had moved past that. Like Mahalia’s voice had said, I was going to be reunited with my guardian angel, or my other half, and “I” knew this meant I was dying, down below on earth.

I wasn’t as freaked as you might think. Dying is the definitive act we commit in our earthly bodies, yet when it came, I barely blinked an eye. I wasn’t aware of having a body. I was just this consciousness floating in this dark, muddy space with deep burgundy roots running down, down, down into pulsing caverns. I was floating in this preternatural womb that was somewhere between the earth and heaven—like a holding area for people who were too traumatized to move on.

Gradually I heard chanting and roaring, just an absolute caterwaul of demonic beings, and I knew I had to get the fuck out of that place. My complacency was replaced with panic now, and I looked for an exit. Yes, yes, off to one side—if there were sides in there!—a glowing spiderweb of spun gold appeared. I willed my being to follow it, as I mentally went hand over hand up the web. Once I realized I was climbing to see my angel, bam, just like that, I was hovering over this exquisite land.

It was what I’d pictured the Garden of Eden to look like when I was a kid. Rolling emerald green hills were bisected by gurgling creeks. I kid you the fuck not,
butterflies
flitted so closely past my face I could feel their wings. Fucking butterflies. I half-expected a unicorn to appear, so when an old man materialized next to me, sitting Indian style like some guru, I nearly rolled my eyes.

“Just typical,” I said, or something like that—there weren’t really words in this place.

“You were expecting Saint Peter?” Again, this is just an approximation of what he said. He didn’t really move his mouth per se. It was like his thoughts were channeled into my mind, like some kind of Vulcan mind-meld. The old guy—my angel—also didn’t wear clothes per se. He was just sort of…there. Maybe that’s where the idea of white robes comes from.

“You’re my guardian angel?”

“If you want to call it that. I’ve been helping you out at your mine.”

“Oh, that’s rich. You’re an old miner?”

“In a way. I want to tell you to look on the Streaked Wall Bench alongside the west wall. You will find gold at two parts per million.”

“So this means I’m going back?” Then a more important question occurred to me. “So angels really give get-rich-quick tips?”

It seems that then we were plunged into some intense, death-defying conversation way out in space. I remember floating for an endless amount of time. Later, looking back, I think this was when my fever was the highest. When I returned to earth, I couldn’t begin to recall the tiniest shred of anything we’d discussed. It was all so highfalutin—Einstein type stuff. I don’t think my human brain could grasp it, or filters fell in place once I was back in my wracked body. It would be too much for humans to handle, to be given this sort of quantum physics type stuff. I knew it was far too much for my feverish brain to deal with.

And some people might say I had the dream
because
I was feverish. How will I ever know? Finding gold—a
lot
of gold—later on exactly where the angel had told me I would, to some people that didn’t prove a thing. To Dingo it didn’t. He thought I had projected myself into the future, talked to my future self who had already discovered the gold, then catapulted back into the present time.

Yeah. As if
that
made more sense.

Then I drifted for another day or so. Mahalia later told me I was muttering shit like “revelations,” “happiness,” and, frighteningly enough, “atonement.” I’d never been a church-going kid, not even growing up in Bullhead City. My father was a belligerent alcoholic, my mother someone who—well, let’s say when she needed spare change, she’d go find it from other men. I didn’t grow up in the holiest, most well-to-do neighborhood, so I knew nothing about the things Allred Lee Chiles spouted. He said that some sins required blood atonement. Brigham Young even said that for particular sins, you could shed your own blood and obtain forgiveness. How the hell did
that
work? I wanted to spill the blood of others for
their
fucking sins, and so I had.

I had killed my own brother. In self-defense, to be sure. But once the club found out, I’d have to stand a sort of trial at the chapel table. Mahalia and maybe even Allred and Parley, wherever he’d been, might have to stand witness. Allred himself encouraged his people to spill the blood of others who had committed serious crimes against him or Cornucopia. In that, our organizations shared similar credos. But that was about where the comparison ended.

I must’ve still been talking with my angel about Dingo’s beloved quantum physics while muttering the shit that Mahalia heard. The first thing I definitively heard Mahalia say to me as she sat at my bedside was,

“Lots of revelations come through dreams.”

What? Had I said something aloud? I looked around, grabbing a hand full of the sheet in my claw. It was a blindingly sunny day, although the drapes were closed. I was in some large bedroom with very little furniture, and Mahalia sat in a chair, wearing that red dress, her hair all done up like a crown on top of her head.

I tested it out. Aloud I said, “Why do you never cut your hair?”

She clapped her hands to her mouth. Her beautiful face was a blur, and I later realized I’d been crying with joy to see her again. “
Gideon
! You talked!”

I struggled to sit upright, and she helped me by eagerly fluffing pillows behind my head. I had a bandage wrapped clear around my middle, snug and tight and covering my pecs, soaked through with blood. “Tell me. Why don’t you Morbots cut your hair?”

“Oh! Because we need our long hair to wash Christ’s feet during the second coming.”

That made sense to my addled mind. All I wanted to do was hold her cool hand, smooth as a cup of milk. “I want to take it down.”

I could see her blush. Her free hand went to feel her hair. “Oh, I don’t…
Gideon!
We thought you had passed to the other side for a while there.”

Not letting go of her hand, I looked around. An IV was dripping something clear into my arm. I tried wiggling my toes, lifting my legs off the mattress. Everything worked. “I had a dream. Many dreams.”

“Oh! Do tell. I’m so fascinated with life on the other side. I used to think the happiness I sought lay there, and I just wanted to die again. How can I remember happiness and seek to return, unless I’ve experienced it before?”

“Don’t say that.” I squeezed her hand harder. “Don’t ever say that, Mahalia. I don’t want you to return to any happiness other than my own. Have you been here the whole time?”

“Well, the only happy moments I can figure were before my birth…Yes, I’ve been here the whole time. You were shot Thursday. It’s now Monday.”

She told me everything. I had passed out in the truck on the way to the urgent care place. Blood was fucking everywhere—only she didn’t say “fucking,” of course. The people were ill-prepared to handle me, but they knew I was an associate of Allred’s, so they had no choice. The doctor, who was really a family practice guy, had to take the bullet out of my liver while his panic-stricken nurse, Mahalia, and a Morbot named Drakelle stood by. I was gushing so much blood Drakelle, who had been an RN on the outside, stepped in and finished the job, sewing me up in record time.

Drakelle had to remove some lacerated tissue and, and that was the reason I’d slipped into a coma. Some arteries and bile ducts were apparently involved. It was just too big of a trauma to my body, so my body had gone into shutdown mode.

“It was like a MASH unit,” said Mahalia. “There was blood everywhere. You would’ve been impressed, Gideon.”

“Why did you stay? You’re not a nurse. Doesn’t that much blood bother you?”

“It was
you
, Gideon. That’s why I stayed. Believe you me, Kimball was out in the waiting room practically puking from the trauma. But I stayed and held your hand, even though you looked like a patient in those medical shows we’re not supposed to watch.”

I felt self-conscious. “How did I get naked? Where’s my cut?”

She placed her milky hand on my forehead. “It was most expedient for us to cut your clothes off. It wasn’t easy getting you out of those skin-tight jeans. And don’t worry about your cut. It’s hanging in the closet right here. We cleaned off as much blood as possible, but the bullet put a hole right through it.”

“But Allred let you bring me back here?” More and more questions were popping up. “Where’s Dingo?”

Mahalia sighed. The wide smile never left her face. “Okay. Let me explain…”

MAHALIA

We thought we
lost him.

I ranted and raved against God. Why was he putting me through this? What was the purpose? If it meant I’d become a better, more experienced and wise person in the afterlife, then
fuck it!
I would rather writhe around in the murky pits of hell than go through what this month had brought me.

My daughter being shuttled off to some old pervert’s house. The man I loved, shot in the fucking gut trying to protect me.

Yes, I realized I loved him. How was that possible when we’d known each other only a short amount of time? But it was a true, deep, and honest love. Yes, I lusted after his sinewy, tight body. Every time he turned his torso, I snuck a peek at his hardened nipple poking the ribbed cotton of his nearly-transparent T-shirt. Every time he looked over his shoulder, I reveled in the sight of his packed crotch, the forbidden pole and full testicles nestled there against his thigh. A few times, it’d even seemed as though he’d caught me looking.

It ran deeper than that. Gideon was an old soul, and he’d taken up his earthly home in the exactly right place—next to me. His birth certificate indicated he’d been born in the exactly right place at the exactly right time, all the planets perfectly in alignment, so he could make his destined way to me. He existed before his birth, as he existed now, though his body was sleeping.

Then there was hope. Drakelle put an antibiotic IV into his arm and told me he was stable. Allred allowed me to put him in the guest house. The more we told him that Gideon had taken a bullet for him, the more Allred puffed up with pride. Of course his life was so valuable someone else would risk theirs for him. How could he
not
install Gideon into this cottage? It spoke to Allred’s fame that he’d house the man who gave his life for his exalted existence. He knew people would whisper, ask who was in the cottage, remark upon how generous Allred was for allowing me to nurse this outsider.

Being born is just a way of going to sleep, forgetting all that went before. I was convinced that as Gideon lay there, his spirit was back in the arms of heaven. I could tell by the slight smile at the corners of his mouth. I washed his face and chest, his arms with a cool, wet washcloth. There was no air conditioning in the cottage, so I kept his hands cool with cloths filled with ice. Watching him sleep, I longed for my true, old home. He was there now, I told myself and others who came by to see him. Knowing he could hear me, I started telling him stories, reading him poems.

Dingo came by, using that old Reed Smoot password at the gate. I told him Reed Smoot had been murdered and placed into a mass grave over at the Altar of Sacrifice Mine. My husband Field wasn’t there because they’d made his death look like a construction accident, so he was buried in a regular grave in Provo. But every time a man rose to power inside Cornucopia’s gates, he seemed to vanish, to “go to Texas,” as the saying had come to be known. I had concluded what I’d long suspected when recently Decken Sudweeks, a high priest who was a definite rising star, was said to “be transferred to Texas.” I heard Parley and Allred in his office talking about “interring Sudweeks in the Streaked Wall out at the mine.”

“Oh, yes, that’s one of the walls on one of the benches,” said Dingo. “Sometimes I hang out with Gideon in the trailer at the mine. It’s fascinating.”

“Well,” I said skeptically, “don’t be surprised if you’re given Decken Sudweeks’ name to use as a password soon. Has Gideon done any digging there?”

“No mining there at all. It is said to be played out.”