Somewhere Over the Freaking Rainbow (A Young Adult Paranormal Romance) (The Secrets of Somerled) (25 page)

He could feel her, probing his memories but there were no old girlfriends to find. A few random kisses, but he couldn’t remember faces or names. She probably thought he was pathetic.

She beamed.

“Great, now I’m a pity case.”

“Pity for the rest of them.” She leaned forward and kissed him with all the emotion he would have expected from a mortal girlfriend. When she pulled back, though, she was upset. “I would have loved to have felt that.”

He was such an idiot! Here she was, deaf, dumb and blind to everything he could enjoy and he was trying to keep her here, keep her in the prison of no sensation.

His shoulders slumped. “What do we do, sweeting?”

She smiled at him through eyes that could not weep. “Kenneth called me sweeting.”

“Should I call you something else?”

“No. I like it. Makes you sound Scottish.”

“Aye, that it does, sweeting.”

She pulled at his hair, smoothed it off his brow, messed it up again. He could have sat like that all night, but that would only leave him alone in the morning.

“I’m serious, Skye. What do we do? Either I go with you, or we find a way to make you...breakable.”

She laughed.

“Why is it you can laugh, but not cry?”

“Camouflage. A person who can’t laugh draws more attention. Mortals are taught not to cry in public; it’s not necessary, not in my repertoire.” She struggled, tried to get up, but he held her tight. “You see? I’m like a robot. And you want to spend the rest of your life with me.” She rolled her eyes.

He grabbed her chin with one hand and made her look at him.

“There you are. See? There, inside the robot. Take away the robot and I’d still want you with me. Forever.”

“Take away the robot? You don’t know what you’re talking about. This isn’t just a set of clothes. It’s what ties me to the ground. This container is my gravity. No container and I go up. Up.”

His grip tightened on his precious helium balloon. The idea that she could be taken from him so easily, like a string slipping through his fingers, made him freaking insane.

“Listen. Skye. Listen.”

She responded to his desperation and touched his face, trying to smooth the fear that would not smooth away. “What is it? What did I say?”

“Skye. Please. You don’t understand. You can’t leave me. You can’t. I lied. I won’t be able to go on without you. I won’t. It’s not a choice. I have no choice.”

He pulled her face until their foreheads met. He wanted to jump into those eyes, go where she was. He needed to be closer to make her understand.

“I know it, deep down. I know I’m not capable of living through it.”

She sat up then. “Jamie, you don’t know what you’re saying. You must live through it. You are the one who doesn’t understand.”

She hugged his hand to her heart and closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. She was about to stab him in the heart. He knew it. He tried to brace himself, numb himself for bad news. How else would he survive it?

“Jamie, please, listen to me very carefully. I do have choices. Two choices, but only two. Staying is not one of them.” He tried to pull his hand back, but she held on. “I can put it off a couple more days at most, but by Friday, it’s over. I know what you’re thinking, but where I go you can’t follow.”

“What if I were dead?” The words just jumped out. He hadn’t thought them. Or had he?

“Jamison! Dead or alive, you cannot come.”

He pushed her aside and ran to the bathroom where he puked his brains out. If his mother heard, he didn’t know it. In fact, she could have been standing outside the bathroom, chatting with Skye and he wouldn’t have heard a thing. The bowl was his world. The simplicity of it made him smile as the next wave came up.

A little while later, puffy-faced and feeling green, he laid his head on a pillow made of Granddad’s plaid and shut his swollen, burning eyes. He heard Skye moving around the room. She covered him with a soft and heavy quilt, messed with the wood-burning stove and sat in the old man’s rocking chair. The rhythmic squeaks lulled him toward sleep but he wouldn’t say goodnight.

He was exhausted, too tired think, let alone ask if she would be there in the morning.

Jamison woke to the sounds of someone stirring in the kitchen. For a split second, he wondered which grandparent was putting on the coffee. So many times when he’d awakened on that couch with the busy fabric and firm cushions, he’d been roused by the odd plop and hiss of the old percolator. He’d find Granddad reading the paper and Grandma digging eggs and things out of the fridge.

And brown eggs. He remembered brown eggs.

No one was cooking that morning, however. There was a lot of sack rustling and bottle shuffling, but nothing sizzled or hissed. Nothing smelled but the cold ashes in the stove.

His belly felt full of them.

His mom’s head had appeared around the corner, but then disappeared again. “Oh, good, I didn’t have to wake you.”

“Oh, you woke me all right.” He felt around his face expecting the whole thing to be swollen. There wasn’t so much as a crust in the corner of his eye.

Wait a minute.

He’d woken up like that before, not many days before, and had a cheerful breakfast with a mother who was never freaking cheerful in the morning.

God, please don’t let my memories be gone!

“Mom?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Where’s Skye?”

The wait time between the question and the answer was going to kill him.

“Mom!”

She came around the corner, a power bar in her mouth. “Mwah?”

“Where’s Skye?”

Mom held up a finger and chewed. He was going to kill her. She walked over and sat on the edge of the couch, facing him. Serious talk time. Not good. Not good.

“If you don’t spit it out I’m going to scream.”

Her eyes rolled. “She’s going to be here in about twenty minutes. She told me about the fight you two had last night.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. It’s not like I couldn’t hear you arguing, you know.”

He sat up straight and grabbed her arm.

“Relax. I didn’t listen. I was exhausted and at the back of the house. Besides, if you were arguing, you wouldn’t be, uh, doing, uh, other things.” She beamed, proud of her reasoning.

“Unless we then made up.”

Mom frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That you’re having trouble with her family accepting you, of course. Although Lucas and Jonathan seemed to be all right about you two kissing at Daddy’s viewing.” She put her hand against his cheek. “I’m so sorry, honey. She said you two are going to talk to the rest of her family, today, huh?”

“Yeah.” He had no idea what Skye was up to.

“And you’ve agreed to live by what they decide?”

“I have?”

“She said you have. Uh oh. She thinks you’ve agreed. Maybe that fight isn’t over after all.”

“No. I mean yeah, but, I’m not completely awake yet, you know?”

“Jamie, honey. She says that if her family can’t accept you, that you’ll be coming back without her. I’m so sorry.”

The torment he’d been feeling the night before came back full force.

Where
I
go,
you
can
’
t
follow
.

Oh, it was going to be a long day with all the bawling he had planned. He’d better steal a box of tissue from storage. And maybe a towel.

“I’m fixing enough food for a couple of days, just in case they make you sleep in a barn and won’t feed you.” Mom gave him a hug and headed back to the kitchen.

“A barn?” If they were going off to spend her last days together, where had his mom gotten the impression there would be a barn?

“Yeah, weren’t there barns at that ranch?”

Lanny’s! Hell. If he only had two days left with Skye, at the most, that’s the last place he wanted to go, where they’d be separated and he’d be put to work. His back had just barely recovered.

“Oh, and I forgot to tell you.” Mom came back with a warped pop-tart held with a dirty oven mitt. Yum. “She said you should wear the white clothes they gave you.”

***

Skye wished Lori could come along for the ride, just so Jamison would have to keep his foul mood to himself. If he got too upset, he wouldn’t be able to drive, and there was no way she could. She may not have the adrenaline running through her body to make it shake, but her own mind was in the middle of a freak storm and she could barely walk a straight line, let alone drive in one.

For a farewell treat, though, she should let the sheriff pull her over once more.

That morning, for the second time, she’d said her farewells to the others. She didn’t tell them all where she was going, but Lucas and Jonathan knew. The rest understood only that she wasn’t coming back.

“Where are your bags, honey?” Lori peaked in the back of the car as her son was lifting a large blue cooler into the trunk.

“We live pretty simply. I have clothes at the other place too.”

“Oh. Okay. You drive carefully, Jamison.” His mom kissed him on the cheek and gave him a big squeeze. “You’ve promised to come back, either way. Don’t make me come after you. And call me if you need me,” she whispered into his ear.

As they were pulling away, Skye was kind of glad it was almost over; soon she wouldn’t be wishing for sensations or worrying about the consequences of getting them. She’d never be a Gabriella. It was only phantom emotion currently breaking her non-existent heart.

“Okay. Let’s have it.” Jamison barely glanced her direction before gluing his eyes on the road.

“I’m a coward, okay? I’m taking you to Lanny, so she can explain everything to you.”

“So she can tell me why you can’t stay.”

“So she can tell you what my choices are.”

“And neither one is to stay.”

“Please don’t be angry. It won’t change anything.”

He veered off the road and stopped the car. They hadn’t yet gone far. The tree arch was still visible in the side mirror.

“I’m angry, because you told me we have a couple of days together, tops, and you want to spend it at the It’s-not-okay Corral! I want to go somewhere where I can hold you. For two days straight, until someone comes and pries my fingers away, I want to hold you.”

Oh, neither one of them was going to be able to drive!

“Okay. I’ll make you a deal. You come to Lanny’s and we’ll leave there before dark, find a hotel, and you can hold me until I...until it’s over.”

“And if she doesn’t let us leave?”

“She will.”

“She didn’t before.”

“I know. She had a message she had to deliver before she could let me go.”

“What message? You didn’t tell me about a message. From who?”

“The Father.”

Jamison looked sick. “You got a message...from God?”

She laughed. “If it helps any, it was an old message.”

He tried to smile, but failed. He was shaking in his boots. “Can you tell me what the message was? No, wait. I don’t think I should even ask. I mean, it wasn’t meant for me, right?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

Jamison relaxed in his seat. “That’s fine.”

“Lanny is.”

***

Skye had to drive the whole way to the ranch.

This time there were no suggestions in the air about turning around and going back. When they bought gas, the attendant paid no attention to two Somerleds travelling together. As the miles flew behind them and the canyon appeared, Jamison got paler, as if he thought he was headed for an appointment with God himself.

“The Father won’t be there, you know.”

His head jerked her way, as if he’d forgotten she was in the car with him for the last two hours, even though he’d held her hand in a death grip the entire time. He looked down at his hand and tried to open it. No go. He started pealing his fingers away from her, wincing as his blood began to flow again.

“Sorry.”

“I’m sorry for you. You’re the only one feeling it.”

He winced again, but not in pain.

“I’m sorry, Jamie. I don’t say it to make you feel bad.”

He gave her a little smile, then looked out his window.

Poor guy. He really was afraid of what he was going to hear. She’d already heard it, of course, and knew just how hopeless it was. He’d have to hear it from someone besides her or he’d never believe her. Understanding would help him get over it. It was the whole point in coming.

Jamison was intelligent. He’d see reason. Surely.

“What in Heaven’s name could you be thinking?!”

Jamison rather thought God Himself might be a kinder, gentler type than Lanny. He was beginning to consider using one of his three wishes, so to speak, to get The Guy Upstairs to save them from her temper. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d read their intent from the freeway and had been working herself into a lather while she waited for them to drive up the long canyon.

They didn’t even get a chance to get out of the car before Lanny was leaning in Skye’s window hissing at her.

“The Somerleds here? My own people? None of them have been told, and you want me to tell
him
? A mortal
child
?” Lanny pointed past Skye’s nose at the abomination sitting next to her, which was him. He lifted both arms and flipped down the sun-visor mirror. Still there. Still human-looking. Okay, so she wasn’t Medusa.

“Medusa?!”

Oh, way bad.
My
bad.
I
’
m
sorry.
Sorry,
sorry,
sorry
.

He didn’t know if he was apologizing out loud or just really clearly in his head. Either way she’d read it loud and clear and hadn’t been impressed.

He thought about pulling on the steering wheel and snaking his foot over to punch the gas pedal. Half a donut and they’d be headed back onto the road.

“You make one mark on my grass, sonny, and you’ll be planted under it.”

Blank paper. Blank paper. Nothing. Blank paper.

Surely those thoughts wouldn’t get him in trouble.

Lanny snorted.

Good snort, bad snort? Didn’t matter.
Blank
paper.
Blank
paper.