Reapers -- The First Familiar (Reapers Chronicles Book II)

19 - Dreams and Memories

That night, I dreamt of mom. We were walking on a shore like we used to when I was little. Back then, we lived in South Beach and the skies were always bright and the weather, always hot.

Roughly.

Every weekend, Mom and I would spend our afternoons making sand castles, reading stories and poetry under the shade of palm trees, collecting seashells or whatever interesting we could find. When I was a kid, I thought that was all there is to life. Even if it was simple, I was contented.

But now, we were just walking along the beach. Mom was in that fancy one-shoulder lilac dress she only wore during special occasions. In fact, I think it was the only dress she owned.

Something told me that we didn’t go there to collect shells.

“Mom?” I paused to face her. “What are we going to do today?”

Wordlessly, she kept walking barefooted. I watched her from behind, wanting very much to run to her. Surprisingly, my feet wouldn’t move so I just tried to memorize how her short ginger hair swayed with the wind, how she smiled when she turned back to me.

“It’s time to go home, Aramis,” she said, her voice sounding sort of far-away.

“W-where?”

She held her arms out, beckoning to me. At last, my feet started toward her. With every step, memories of us together—happy and sad—flooded in, making me remember how much I missed her. How much I wanted to embrace her. Tell her everything that had happened for the past ten years. Or better yet, the last nine months of my life. But as I did, I saw a familiar figure sitting on a rock not too far away from us.

It was Vincent. He wasn’t moving or anything. He was just… watching. Or waiting. I couldn’t really tell.

Mom dropped her arms, joining her hands behind her. Her grayish-blue eyes shifted to Vincent’s direction, then to me before saying, “Let’s go home.”

Home. I kept repeating the word in my head. Where is that?

It couldn’t be the house in South Beach where I grew up. That was long gone. Dad had sold it to pay for Mom’s hospital bills. And eventually, the burial. For ten years, Dad and I moved from one town to another. Home had never been a familiar concept to me since then. Mom was making me choose and I knew it.

Lost in thought, I stopped halfway to her. I smiled at my mother, shaking my head gently when I discovered the right answer.

“I’m already home, Mom.”

The smile on my mother’s face suddenly brightened. She nodded back in understanding. Without another word, she faced the horizon and headed toward it, her feet barely touching the water as she walked over it. In a little while, all I could see was her billowing silk dress before it disappeared. And so did she.

Since Mom died, I thought what I wanted was an escape. From Dad. From the constant moving. From the rest of the world. As it turned out, I was wrong.

That’s right. “I’m home,” I whispered.

With a smile on my lips, I opened my eyes. The first thing that registered to me was his face. Vincent’s face. And it was just a couple of inches away from mine. His right arm lay on my waist while the other was under my head like a pillow.

My ears were pounding. I was panicking but I could not move a single muscle. I did not know what to do. And there was this weird feeling in my stomach again, like when you’ve eaten too much chili then washed it down with soda.

I couldn’t breathe. But I was quite positive it didn’t have anything to do with my asthma.

Come to think of it, he looked so incredibly peaceful when he was asleep it was almost out-of-this-world. The way his mouth was slightly open made him look childlike. As if he would not be able to hurt a fly even if it landed on his eye. Which I knew would definitely not be the case.