Telor 24
The reality that I could lose her was tearing my heart out. I was about to tell her the truth about me, and if she were sane, she would take off out those doors and never look back. I wouldn’t blame her for that. But there wasn’t a thing I would change; I’d do it over in a heartbeat.
“Do you want to take any guesses before I begin?” I asked, stalling. “I’m dying to hear what’s going on inside that pretty head of yours.”
“Are you an angel?” She trembled in my arms.
“Close,” I answered.
“Ghost?” she countered.
“Closer, it’s a mixture of the two,” I said. “Think of us like us like Hermes, escorting souls from this world to the next.”
“Us?” she asked, her head still resting against my chest.
“I’m a Guide. There are many of us,” I said. “When you die, your Guide escorts you to a ‘review’ where you watch your life back and see your mistakes, so you have a chance to not make the same ones in the next life. Once you complete that, you are assigned a job until you cycle back through. You serve in that job for the length of your life. I was twenty-four when I died, so I’ll serve twenty-four years as a Guide. There are six main jobs: Courier, Weaver, Spinner, Aligner, Meddler, or Guide. We work for Destiny, Luck, Life, Chaos, Order, or Death. I work for Death, or Tori, as she prefers to be called.”
“Are you here to kill me?” Again, no fear, just curiosity. If I thought I loved her before, I knew I did now.
“On the contrary, Cariad.” I knew I should tell her about the other Guides who were hanging around, but I couldn’t bring myself to put any of this burden on her shoulders just yet. “Do you remember when you fell on the stairs?”
“Vaguely,” she said. “I remember falling and my head hitting the stone stairs, then it was as if I were detached from my body, like I was floating above it, watching the scene like a bystander. There was blood seeping out so quickly. It’s ironic, that the one time I thought myself to be beautiful was when I was dying.” She laughed once without humor and kept talking. “Then you came, and I was sucked back into my body.
“You were singing to me, and then you saw me staring at you. I heard everything you were saying, but I couldn’t answer. You looked so panicked when you saw me looking at you. Then you left and it was…I can’t explain it, not right at least. It felt like some intrinsic part of me fought against the confines of my body. Like you awoke it and it wanted to follow you. I blacked out after that, when I couldn’t see you anymore.”
It was incredibly hard to listen to her retell the story. It made me question my choices that night. Not saving her, I’d do that over again, but leaving her. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Or perhaps the mistake was now, coming here and complicating her life.
“I was at your bedside every night you were in the hospital. I checked on you after you went home, and I—”
“Made me forget everything?”
“Yes,” I said, apologetically. “I thought it would be best for you not to remember me. Coming here was not my original plan. Every time I came to see you, I promised myself it would be the last. Obviously, it never was.”
“Do you know what it’s like to miss someone you think you’ve never met before?” she asked. “To want them and question your sanity for wanting them? To feel like your own mind was betraying you? To feel like something was trying to beat its way out of you?”
“No.” What else could I say?
“It’s hell,” she whispered. “Complete and utter hell.”
“I’m sorry, Catalina,” I whispered into her hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why were you such an asshole to me?”
“I knew I needed to stay away from you. But I had to be around you. My mind was against it, but no matter how hard I tried to stay away, I always found myself drawn to you. I could see that you did also. I hoped that by being unlikable, you would stop.”
You are poison to her. I couldn’t shake that feeling. I’d never felt as alive as I did with her. I’ve never felt this much in general. Alive or dead. But did this come at a cost to her? The only thing I’d succeeded in doing was drawing a giant target on her back and complicating her life. Tori wasn’t going to lie down and let this go. She might not act immediately—she was too smart to rush headfirst into anything—but she would make a move at some point, and when she did, I was powerless to stop her.
“Telor—” Catalina paused and then, as if just putting something together in her head, asked, “Telor, if you were sent to get me that night, why am I not dead?”