Miranda [Watty Awards 2013]

Chapter 19

I wish that I could say I took his confession well, but that would be a lie.

            It was not at all what I expected. The apology--maybe. But that? Never. I just couldn’t see it. It was impossible. Wasn’t it?

            Of course not. I hardly knew what was real anymore.

            It made a bit more sense, now that I think about it. How he’d taken my story so calmly, how he hadn’t asked the obvious questions, how he had trusted me with saving his father’s life—and didn’t even react when I murdered three people in the process.

            No. If he were normal, he would not be here.

            But why wouldn’t he have told me this by now? That’s what gets me. After all that we had been through, after the horrible experiences we shared--I spilled my guts out to this boy, and he didn’t tell me something that important? The betrayal only ran deeper.

            And to add to the mystery--what does this mean?

            Jack couldn’t be like me. That couldn’t’ be it. Was he the child of another reaper’s daughter? A half-breed? Or was he just born lucky, born with the rarest sort of curse?

            He wouldn’t know, but I needed to. I would have to find out myself, even if he wasn’t telling the truth. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was the thought that a simple human was suffering from a world like mine.

We were exhausted by the time we finally arrived in Newark? Where it was reaching midnight in London, it was merely six here in New Jersey. We were five hours behind, and the jet lag was beginning to take its effect.

            I’m sad to say that I had enough experiences with flying on my own that I knew exactly what to do to get us to a hotel. Jack was walking like a zombie, leaving me to balance a sleeping Lacy on my hip. I would’ve taken his hand to lead him, to speed him up, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not yet.

            I ordered him to sit down, gently passing off the child to him with strict orders to not wake her. He nodded wearily, dark circles under his eyes. If he hadn’t had a normal sleep schedule in London, I could only image the jet lag he was feeling now.

            Off to the line I went, at least tenth in line, and for an airport this busy that was pretty lucky. I waited and waited, tapping my foot, scratching my head, flexing my fingers. The anxiety was building; I could feel it. I was not inching forward fast enough.

            The emotions, all of them. I’d never felt anything this intense in my life. I suppose I had a right to be this stressed--who knew what the hell was going to happen next? What if I couldn’t handle it? What if I couldn’t protect them?

            What if I failed?

            I try not to think like this. Before I met Jack, I would’ve simply been able to push my feelings to the side, lock them up until they dissolved away, move onto the next job and perform to Grim’s standards. But that was the problem: I had no more Grim.

            There were no more jobs to do, no more list of people to watch die, no more being the cause of other peoples’ tragedies. There was no more having to be careful. There was no more having to push my feelings aside to assist death once again. I could do what I wanted. I was free.

            But this isn’t what freedom is supposed to feel like. I didn’t need experience to know this.

            It was a miracle that I didn’t break down and lose it right there in the middle of the airport. It was true that I’d been given everything that I’d ever wanted, in the form of Jack and Lacy. But what about the things I needed, the things that were necessary for me to truly live? My innocence, my purity, my morals, my hope. They were gone. And they weren’t coming back.