Chapter 224
I sat stoic, staring at a spot on the carpet a few feet in front of me. I felt Brandon shift so that his arm was around me, but I didn’t look up. I didn’t know what to think or feel. The number four popped into my head. Four people dead now. Four people gone. I supposed that number would just keep growing.
“Well, that is… shocking,” Mom muttered, as she handed the letter to Dad, who had tears in his eyes. I could see them twinkling when I finally pulled my eyes off the carpet long enough to look at him. I dropped my eyes again. My dad didn’t cry often, but I couldn’t blame him for shedding some tears over his own mother.
“I know it’s all very surreal. I am having a little trouble accepting it myself.” Cadence said, sniffling. I glanced over at her, wondering what it had been like to walk into Grandma’s house. I still didn’t know where Cadence had been before that, when she’d met up with Aaron, anything about her secret mission. I reclaimed the spot on the floor.
“Did you want to see it, Cass?” I looked up to see Dad extending the letter to me, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand.
I didn’t know what to say. Would seeing it make it real? Probably not. I shrugged and Brandon stood to get the letter for me. I took it, trying to keep my hand from trembling as he wrapped his arm around my shoulders again.
The handwriting was very familiar. My grandma is one of those people who still likes to write letters and cards. I didn’t read it word for word; I couldn’t. But my eyes traced along the lines, and I thought of her sitting at her desk, writing this out for our family, for me. Tears began to sting my eyes. I folded it up and handed it to Cadence, who passed it along to Aaron. He put it back in an envelope and slid it into his jacket pocket. I took some deep breaths and tried to imagine Grandma and Grandpa dancing on top of the clouds, looking the same as they did in the wedding picture I’d seen in the family album, the one where Grandma looked like she was just a little older than Cadence was now.
“When did you learn about this portal of the blue moon?” Mom asked, and under any other circumstances, I probably would’ve laughed at her awkward phrasing.
I thought I heard a giggle catch in my sister’s throat as well as she said, “Grandma told me about it last week. I had no idea that she was intending to use it. In fact, I didn’t even know that you could go through it that way.”
Brandon shifted, and I realized he was probably thinking the same thing I was. Leaning around me, he looked at Cadence and asked, “What do you mean by ‘that way’?”
Cadence cleared her throat again and seemed to choose her words carefully. “Well, we knew that once, a long time ago, a Guardian had used the portal to come back after death, but there were huge ramifications from that, and it hasn’t been used in over two hundred years.”
I stared at her for what seemed like a very long time, but she was looking at Brandon.
“I know that Grandma is in a better place, that she chose to go there so that she could be with Grandpa. I have no doubt this is what she wanted. It’s just… hard to imagine being without her.” I was hardly listening, though. I turned and looked at Brandon whose eyes were wide.
“It’s a portal,” I said only to him. “A portal to the other side.”
“I know.”
He was thinking what I was thinking.
“Well, it’s definitely a shock,” my dad was saying, pulling my eyes to him. “But I do think it is best if we try to focus on the positive. I suppose I’ll need to drive over and let my sister and her family know. We’ll need to make… arrangements.”
“She already bought an urn,” Cadence offered. “I’m not exactly sure how the portal works when a living person goes through, but we found her urn next to Grandpa’s in the back yard.”
Dad’s eyes showed more disbelief now than when Cadence had initially told us of Grandma’s decision to go. “So, she’s essentially cremated?” he asked. I was having a hard time imagining what that would be like.
“Something like that,” Aaron said. “She set up a video camera, but we haven’t watched it yet. It appears as if she had a better understanding of how the portal works than we do. She just stepped out of this world and into that one.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever be prepared to watch a video of my mother disappearing,” my dad said, combing his hand through what was left of his brown hair.
Cadence opened her mouth, but before she could say more, Brandon went back to the other point—the more important one, in my opinion. “This portal… you said it had been used in the past for a Guardian to come back from death?”
“Yes…” Aaron began.
I cut him off. Anger was beginning to build inside of me. “Why are we just hearing about this?” I did my best to control my emotions, but I turned to stare at my sister and her fiancé, not sure how much longer I could stay calm.
Cadence turned her head and looked at Aaron, and I wondered if they were debating how to answer my question. Of course, he was the one to speak, the better of the two at keeping me calm. “There are a lot of adverse effects to using the portal. When the Guardian Cadence was referring to came through, something evil came through as well, and it took us a very long time to defeat this particular Vampire. Additionally, we’ve discovered that, once a Guardian comes through, he or she can never ever go back. So we’ve essentially decided not to use it anymore. For anything. Ever. Until this week, I had no idea that your grandmother had been using it.”
I crossed my arms, seething in a sort of rage I hadn’t felt in a very long time. “That’s stupid,” I blurted out.
“Cassidy!” my mom admonished, but I didn’t turn my attention to her as I continued to glare at the two Leaders in front of me.
“If we know that we can use this portal to bring someone back, then we should do that. I don’t care if Satan himself comes out. I’ll send him back quickly enough.” I know I probably sounded like an ignorant teenager, but at the moment, the idea that they could bring a Guardian back from the dead, that we had gone without Elliott for the last nearly eight months because Aaron was scared of some boogie man coming out, had me livid.
Behind me, Brandon said quietly, “Cassidy, I’m sure the reasoning is legitimate.” I turned to look at him in shock and wondered how he could say something like that. Was he just scared? Scared of meeting his dad? Scared that the portal wouldn’t work? Scared that Elliott wouldn’t want to come back?
I decided to go with their reasoning for a moment. Turning back to face Cadence, I asked, “So did something evil come through when Grandma left?”
Cadence turned so quickly to look at Aaron, I thought perhaps they hadn’t thought about that. It made sense, though, didn’t it? If something evil comes back when something good goes through, then it had to work that way regardless of which way the portal was being utilized, didn’t it?
“Honestly,” he began, running his hand through his hair, something I noticed he tended to do when he wasn’t sure of himself, “I have no idea. I would think, yes, that each time the portal opens, there’s a very good possibility that something bad will come through, but last time it took us decades to establish what had happened, and by then, we were fighting the most prolific monster we’d ever encountered.”
“Dracula,” Cadence said, looking at me and then Brandon, her face stone cold serious. “Dracula came through last time.”
I couldn’t really believe my ears. In spite of all the craziness I’d endured the last year or so, I had to ask. “The Dracula?”
“No, Phil Dracula, a great tailor known for his impeccable seams.” I turned to look at Brandon, unable to believe he could joke at a time like this. He nudged me playfully, and I realized he was trying to lighten the mood. “Yes, they mean the Dracula.”
“Well, I didn’t know…” I nudged him back, maybe a little harder than I should’ve, and he winced. “It just sounded a little crazy!”
“Said the Vampire-Hybrid,” he shot back, winking at me.
“This happens all day long,” my mom shouted, and I turned to look at her incredulously. Did Brandon and I really bicker that much? If so, I hadn’t noticed. I turned back to face him, and he smiled at me. I realized he’d successfully brought my level of rage at my sister and Aaron from a ten to a mild four, which was progress, and I’m sure that’s what he had intended to do in the first place. Distraction was a deadly weapon. “So you’re saying it wouldn’t be safe to bring anyone back from the other side, Aaron?” my mother asked, and once again, my head swiveled around to look at her, a curse word on the tip of my tongue.
Aaron’s answer was firm. “Yes, that is absolutely my stance.”
