The man cocked his head at them and moaned. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but it appeared as though the bough of a pine tree had punctured right through his body, all the way from his left hip and up through his right shoulder. Like a gruesome scarecrow, the man’s bare feet dangled a few inches above the ground.
But how? Jace wondered, sickness creeping into his stomach as he gazed up at the rest of the tree which continued up into the sky and out of sight.
“M-Mike?” Lilah whispered, clutching her head. “Is that you?”
The young man opened his mouth to answer, but no words came. Instead, he let out a strangled gurgle as dark liquid spilled from his lips. A moment later, his head dropped limply to his side.
“Mike!” Lilah screamed. “Mike!”
Jace threw his arms around her instinctively, pulling her tight against his chest. “It’s gonna be okay,” he whispered into her hair. Whether that was the truth or not was an entirely different matter; at that moment, all he knew was that he needed to keep her from falling apart – not a simple feat when he himself was shaking like a leaf. He tried clamping his eyes shut, but it didn’t help; the image of the lifeless Shaman would be burned into his memory forever.
Tucked beneath his chin, Lilah whimpered softly.
“It’s okay. Just take a d-deep breath.” Jace tried to heed his own advice, taking in deep gulps of the cool nighttime air to compose himself. It was beginning to work – he could feel his heartbeat slowing; Lilah’s as well. Her ragged breathing continued, but after a long moment, he could feel her tensed muscles begin to relax.
“I have to bring us back,” she muttered against his shoulder. “I have to make this right.”
“Okay. H-How do we do that?”
“I just have to concentrate… focus on the way things were before.” With that, she became very quiet. And perfectly still.
At first, nothing happened. But then the crickets abruptly fell silent. Jace took in one last deep breath, preparing himself for whatever might happen next. But as his lungs took in what was supposed to be fresh mountain air – now pungent and acrid with fragranced smoke – he erupted into a coughing fit. His eyes shot open; they were back in the cabin. Daylight poured through the windows, streaks of hazy sun dancing inside a swirling cloud of incense.
“Mike,” Lilah whispered. She let go of Jace’s hand and took a tentative step forward. The shaman’s body was crumpled on the floor beside the couch. A few inches away, his empty tea cup lay in fragments once more.
“Lilah, be careful,” Jace wheezed as she knelt to the ground beside the shaman.
“Mike?” she whispered again, prodding his shoulder. He didn’t move. “Mike – are you okay?” She started to gently roll him from his shoulder onto his back.
“Lilah—” Jace started.
Mike’s body rolled over with a thud. His silver-streaked hair fell across his face, which was once again creased with age. But his eyes didn’t open. Lilah tentatively reached for his wrist, as she had seen in countless movies, to feel for a pulse. Slowly, very slowly, she leaned her ear beside his slightly open mouth, listening for breath.
Nothing.
“He’s dead,” she whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Jace’s face blanched. “I don’t understand,” he murmured, sinking into the couch. “We’re back – everything is the same. The cup, the chair…” His eyes scanned the floor beneath the shaman’s body. There was no trace of blood. His clothes, which moments ago had been tattered and bloody, were now entirely blood-free and intact. Gingerly, Jace reached forward to lift the edge of Mike’s t-shirt, preparing himself for the worst. But the pale skin of his stomach was completely undamaged, without so much as a scratch. There was no sign of the tree trunk that had protruded from his torso mere moments ago. Jace scratched his head anxiously, raking his weary mind for answers. Lilah’s soft voice snapped Jace from his reverie.
“I killed him.”
“No.” He shook his head, trying to clear the gruesome image from the forest. “No… You didn’t do this,” he said, coming to kneel beside her.
“I did,” she sobbed, putting her face in her hands. “My father told me this would happen. He warned me not to stop taking my medicine. I wasn’t even supposed to be here today.”
Oh God. Jace swallowed, feeling the panic rising in his chest. “Maybe we can still fix this. I mean, you can alter time, right? Can’t you just – I don’t know. Go backwards in time, before all of this happened? Before we even decided to come inside?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I just affect the things around me. But they always come back.” She considered what had happened earlier that morning. The moth returned when it had been nothing but dust. So why hasn’t Mike?
Suddenly, her head shot up. “What was that noise?”
Jace’s eyes widened as the sound of a woman’s laugh floated through the nearby window. “The second set of visitors,” he murmured. Maybe this guy wasn’t a total quack after all. His eyes trailed from the window to Lilah’s pale, stricken face to Mike’s unmoving body. With that, he leapt to his feet, reaching down to help pull Lilah to hers.
“We have to go,” he said. “Now.”
With one final, tearful look at the shaman, Lilah stuffed his notebook into her backpack and followed Jace to the door. They carefully shut it behind them and made their way into the trees, praying that the thick forest would hide them from the second set of visitors that Mike had already seen coming. As they quietly trudged back down the snowy path, Lilah’s heart was pounding in her ears.
“The truck is just ahead,” Jace whispered. “We’re almost there.”
But Lilah didn’t hear him. She was occupied by the castigating accusations that swarmed in her head: The shaman was right. I was the malignant one.
Chapter 21
Of Moths and Men
Back inside the safety of the truck, Jace and Lilah drove in silence for a long time, each of them consumed by their own unsettling thoughts as they passed by endless frost-kissed forest. Jace was still trying to piece together what exactly had happened, while Lilah was revisiting Mike’s untimely death in her head over and over again, trying to figure out why the moth had come back to life but he hadn’t. After a half hour of ruminating in vain, she blew out a frustrated sigh, wiping angry tears from her eyes as she did.
“Are you alright?” Jace asked, casting her a quick sideways glance. She was sitting cross-legged in her seat, slumped over her knees with her head in her hands.
“No,” came the muffled response.
Jace glanced down at the dashboard. The fuel gauge was back to full after he had made the world’s fastest stop at the run-down gas station beside the highway onramp, but the tachometer was still creeping farther and farther to the right, teetering on the red zone. He eased his foot off the gas, letting the needle settle back to a reasonable seventy miles per hour.
He let out a deep breath. “Yeah… Me neither. I feel horrible about leaving him. I keep thinking that we should have called 9-1-1 but every time I imagine doing that, it always ends up with us being thrown into prison. Or an insane asylum.”