Nearly the entire time his sister had lived in Portland after moving from LA, Finley had been living with Aidan and previously Teegan on the corner of eighth and A street, north of the University of California Davis campus where he’d been attending college for the last three years. Aidan, for the last two and a half, was close to getting his Bachelor’s of Arts in Cognitive Sciences and had been determined from the moment Finley had met him to become a social worker. Finley was less motivated, and had chosen to remain undeclared until year two of using his grants to take general education requirements. Now at year three, he’d been forced to buckle down behind Mathematical and Scientific Computation; mathematics, being the one subject that had ever really made practical sense to Finley while still managing to challenge him. Teegan hadn’t really been interested in college. She’d grown up in a home not entirely unlike Finley’s, with a less abusive father and more abusive mother. Determined to never be helpless again, she’d honed her body like a fine-tuned weapon, learning and teaching martial arts. By the time of her death, she held black belts in more disciplines than he knew existed. While Teegan focused on body mechanics, Aidan focused on the mechanics of people, and Finley focused on the mechanics of reality.

Finley paused as he pulled into the split house before turning off the ignition. RJ had been chain-smoking cigarettes the entire time, and he couldn’t fault her when every part of his body screamed at him to ask her for one. He opened the door and stepped out to take a deep breath of the Californian air, and silently lamented his decision to quit smoking a month ago.

“Are we going in?” Jeri wondered, still buckled in. “I’m thirsty.” He didn’t answer because his mind, no matter how he tried to redirect it, kept wandering back to the golden-eyed man in the back seat who hadn’t even flinched when he’d trained his unloaded .44 special on him. While Jeri unbuckled, Fin grabbed the bags, she circled around back to grab her red pleather sticker-studded guitar case, and they headed inside in rare contemplative silence.

Fumbling with the keys for a moment, Finley pulled on the forest-colored door of his two-bedroom condo and stumbled inside with Jeri’s bags and his own piled over his shoulder. He nearly bumped into the key stand when Jeri barreled in behind him, and let out a grunt when the front of her beaten red guitar case hit him in the gut. “Oof—ugh, why!” He groaned in pain.

“Sorry, I just want to get in and raid the fridge,” his sister shot unapologetically. He glared at her and stepped further into the entryway, clutching his stomach with one arm and dropping the bags on the ground with a huff all in one. She maneuvered more carefully behind him and placed the guitar lovingly on the couch as she made her way into the abode. Though she’d only been there a handful of times before, she had no trouble making herself at home and flung her leather jacket over the nearest black love-seat to cross into the kitchen. From behind the bar he could see her dive into the refrigerator and emerge with a howling whoop of victory as her hands grasped on the neck of a pineapple-flavored IPA Aidan had probably bought.

“AIDAAAAAAN,” Finley called out from the main room. He heard a vague affirmation from the direction of Aidan’s bedroom, and paid it no mind. “WE’RE RAIDING THE BEER,” he announced and went right for the IPAs.

“Oh, you too,” RJ commented as he ripped off the top of a beer with the edge of a spoon torn from a drawer.

“Hush,” he commanded and downed half the bottle in two steady gulps.

“Christ on skates,” was all she could add. He finished the drink and burped in her face. She had no real way to refute this, so all Jeri did was laugh it off and nurse her beer more carefully.

Finley was sitting on the counter and already opening another by the time Aidan meandered into the kitchen barefoot but for jeans and loose tee-shirt.

It wasn’t often that Fin found himself speechless in the presence of others. In fact, he prided himself on his ready wit. Aidan had that rare effect on him of occasionally rendering Finley speechless with the power of his existence. Blessed with tousled short waves of dark blond hair, olive skin, hazel eyes, and a six-foot frame, Aidan was generally the prettiest person that Finley had ever had the good fortune to meet, inside and out. Aidan’s quick and sharp tongue were what had drawn Fin to befriending him at first, but Aidan’s kindness and empathy were what he’d come to love. Hell, I’ve had a crush on him since I met him. Fin took a swig and tried his best to stifle those urges. Focusing on drinking helped, but did nothing to repress the warm goo that had become his stomach when Aidan smiled tellingly at him, as if he were the one who could read Fin’s mind. Down that mental route lies only danger. I’ve gotta find a better coping mechanism, though. This one isn’t working anymore.

“Where’s the party, what’s happening, is my Jeep okay?” Were Aidan’s first questions, ticked off of his fingers.

“Your Jeep is still fine, having this beer, party’s right here,” Finley assured him in reverse order. “Want one?”

“It’s almost eleven PM,” Aidan answered dubiously, “so . . . I guess, yeah. Gimme one before you drink them all.”

“You got any whiskey?” Jeri asked from the dining room table.

Fin cracked open a bottle and handed it to his best friend and roommate. “No liquor, just beer,” Aidan told her and made a sympathetic noise. “I’m a broke ass college student - this isn’t a bar.”

“Not even whiskey?” Jeri couldn’t seem to believe him. “Not even bourbon? What about cooking sherry?”

“Not even cooking wine.” Aidan’s tone was amused, but unsympathetic. He parked himself in the chair across from Jeri on their little circular dining table, and cleared the table of papers and bills that had naturally accumulated there in Finley’s absence. “I know, you’re so disappointed in me.”

Jeri scoffed. “It’s fine, I still have a flask of vodka and this beer. I’ll survive. Some-fucking-how.”

Aidan held the neck of the bottle and took a cursory sip, ignoring Finley in favor of his sister who was sullenly drinking her beer like someone had pissed in it. “Why the long face? You just got out of prison,” Aidan pointed out.

“Because I’m drinking too much!” She raged, slamming down the half-finished bottle. “And now I’m seeing shit!”

“We’re both seeing shit, so we’re drinking to stop that shit,” Finley half-explained, half-complained around his own drink.

Aidan’s concerned gaze bored a hole right into Finley’s chest, and it ached. For a real moment during the eye contact, he allowed himself to slip away into Aidan’s feelings and knew suddenly and intimately just how worried Aidan really was about him and his behavior. It shamed him enough to put the drink down for a moment and concentrate on putting up his walls again. “I know this funeral—” Aidan began, but Jeri cut him off before he could finish saying anything.

RJ was livid - at what, who could say. “Fuck the fucking funeral!” She spat. “Now we got fucking, ghosty motherfuckers all up in your gay Jeep telling me I’m doomed! I mean that you’re gay, not that the Jeep is gay, although who buys Jeeps anymore? And how did he even know our names?! I didn’t introduce myself! He’s some kind of magic teleporting telepathic motherfucker!” Her ramble only half-made sense to Finley, who was actually present for the incident. It made even less sense to Aidan, whom to his credit let the ‘gay’ thing slide.

Neither of them had really processed what happened when the strange man had shown up in the car. Finley was still unsure of what he’d heard and seen and he had trouble remembering it clearly, but knowing their names without asking first was one of the things that had bothered him intensely about it. “Good question,” he agreed. “Better question: who the fuck was that guy, and how the fuck did he get in the Jeep?”

Aidan’s head whipped between the two in confusion, and he sipped at the beer as if he believed it would help. “Did you pick up a hitch hiker?” He wondered.

Finley shook his head and jumped off of the gray counter. His second IPA finished, he rinsed it, tossed it into the recyclables, and opened the next. “I don’t know what happened,” Fin answered honestly as he ripped the top off. “I was there, and I don’t know what happened. One second we were parked and getting gas, and the next there was a guy in the car. He dropped some—some shit—some portents, those were his actual words—he was delivering portents—and then he poofed.”

Aidan took a sip and processed this dubiously. “Poofed?” He repeated.

“Vanished,” Finley clarified. “Like he got beamed out by Scotty. One second he was there, the next split-second he was gone.”

“Huh. What did he look like?” Aidan’s curiosity was as genuine as his concern.

“Oh, I don’t know—” Finley was about to answer because he was starting to convince himself it was all an elaborate shared hallucination he’d gotten from accidentally picking up on his sister’s brainwaves (that was the best explanation he could come up with), but then Jeri cut him off with a vivid description: “Weird gold eyes, Asian, dressed like he walked out of the Logan’s Run cast member’s only party, and then stepped into a time machine.”

“Yes! Exactly like that,” Fin agreed easily.

“Huh,” was all Aidan could say. “So . . . What happened?”

“Tell him how your gun wasn’t even loaded,” Jeri snickered into her bottle as she tipped it up for a guzzle.

“Your put your gun in my car?” Aidan sounded more amused than shocked. “And you didn’t even load it?”

“Why would I load it?” Fin shot back, getting frustrated. He went to the seat situated between Jeri and Aidan, and pushed the papers forward toward the center to make room for him and his beverage. “It’s not like I expected fucking Doctor Who to show up while I was pumping gas!”

“Are you sure he wasn’t a magician asking for money?” Aidan criticized.

“I know the difference between a Time Lord and a homeless magician,” Fin defended.

“Okay,” Aidan agreed easily enough and turned to Jeri for the sake of arbitration, “on a scale of one to a shitload, how much acid did you give him?”

Jeri snorted derisively again. “Pfft —I wish I was high. Look, trust me, I’m a psychonaut and I’ve done a lot of psychedelics, and you don’t see that kind of shit on acid. Not even on mushrooms or MDMA, maybe dex if you’re the right kind of dissociative asshole. Or dimethyltriptamine. That’s the shit that makes you feel like an Apollo astronaut. But that only lasts ten minutes tops, and it wasn’t like that! There were no drugs! Everything was totally normal until this weirdo showed up. I just smoked a joint is all and I hadn’t even lit my next one, and Fin was totally sober because he was driving, and he saw the whole thing too!”

He wished for once that Jeri was wrong, that it had all been a figment of his tired imagination (or hers), and that they hadn’t been on the road stewing in silence over the strange encounter ever since leaving that gas station. Part of him felt relieved they were talking about it now, but another part of him was only frustrated that he didn’t have more answers. He thought back to all the times he’d done acid with Jeri, and only once - the first time - had she not warned him what the dosage he was taking would do. After the vomiting and falling out between them that followed that incident, she’d never done anything like that again and had been true to her word. He, in turn, refused to try to keep up with her. Her description matched his experiences, and he couldn’t find any reason to deny it.

Something inexplicable had happened to them.

When Aidan looked to him for clarification, all Fin could do was shrug. “I don’t know. I saw it, and I don’t know. I know I’m not high, even if I’m a little buzzed right now. I don’t know at all what happened. It didn’t make any goddamn sense. He rambled about Prodigal Sons and portents and literally vanished.”

“It was some Biblical bullshit,” Jeri agreed vehemently.

There was a moment of complete calm that stretched across the table like a trampoline, before bouncing back with Aidan’s mood. He took a swig and then brushed everything off like it was dust off of a mantelpiece. “Well, nothing we can do about that right now,” he decided for them. “Should we talk about the funeral instead?”

“No,” Jeri grumbled, while Fin said, “please, yes anything else,” and buried his head in his arms.

Aidan put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed for a moment, ever so gently. “It’ll be alright,” he assured with all the certainty Finley didn’t have. “Watch - it’ll be a nice funeral, and not a single fist fight will break out. Sal will be so disappointed when you tell him all about it. Or, is he coming?”

“No,” Jeri grumbled again. “I tried getting a hold of him but it’s emails only for the moment. I haven’t heard back. He doesn’t even know I got out yet because he’s still in Vladivostok. Though he should be back on base soon.”

“Dangerous place to be,” Aidan commented. “Why?”

“Probably to kill some guys,” she dismissed, “who knows with him?”

“He’s a soldier, not a hit-man,” Aidan corrected.

Her cold blues narrowed at Aidan. “What’s the fucking difference? He’s a sniper. He gets paid to kill people.”

“There’s a mountain of differences socially between the two concepts,” Aidan explained.

She groaned. “Whatever, tell that to Sal. Can we not talk about Mara? That shit sucks.”

“Funerals are never any fun,” his roommate agreed.

It struck Fin for a moment, with his head buried in his arms so far on the table that his forehead was striking wood, that he had endured entirely enough loss in his short life. The last funeral he’d attended had been his fiancée’s where they’d had to bury an empty casket, because the government had confiscated her body for reasons ill-explained by the police. The drama that had followed this lasted for well over the following year, and there were still hurt feelings and blame placed upon him by her family for not protecting her. Thoughts of Teegan even now, over a year later, were too painful to endure for longer than a fleeting moment. His mind latched onto other losses; his mother before he even knew her, his childhood friend Taro, even his cat Petey growing up who had been ‘reclaimed’ by his father as punishment. And then, finally there was Anton . . .

He pushed the thoughts away with a valiant effort and drank more to cement it. ‘Drink ‘til it’s gone and wash it all down,’ Jeri used to say, back when Tee was alive. Perhaps there’s something to the Jericho-Rose-Method, as she puts it. Pardoning himself from the table, he ignored Aidan’s concerned gaze that followed him and went to the bathroom to have a quiet piss and think.

Or at least, that was what it was supposed to be. Five minutes later after staring at himself in the mirror and getting into an argument with himself in his own head, Finley suddenly realized that he was pulling his own bloodied fist out of the bathroom’s dry wall. He had no memory of punching the wall or even of making the decision to punch anything, but his hand was nonetheless stuck and in pain. “FUCK!” He shouted, and yanked it out in one effort by bracing his foot against the wall. Bits of bloodied dry wall and blue paint crumbled away onto the rug below.

He wanted to cry, but for the most part he’d been completely unable to cry since Teegan’s death. He’d refused to go to therapy despite Aidan’s pleading, and so Aidan had been there to pull him up out of that hole, just as he was there to pull Finley back up after the wall-redecorating. Aidan picked him up and took his good hand, and sat him down on the toilet to examine the other hand. He winced sympathetically.

“Fuck you doing there, buddy?” Aidan wondered with a playful smirk.

“That needed to happen,” Finley explained without really explaining anything. “Uh, sorry. I’ll fix it.” He stared at the new hole in the wall and cursed a silent storm.

“Oh no, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Aidan rushed. “I thought you accidentally punched the wall - I’m glad there was a real purpose behind it. Drama queen,” he muttered the last bit under his breath as he opened the medicine cabinet and grabbed an unopened packet of rolled up gauze. He motioned for Finley to sit down on the closed toilet when Fin tried to stand up to help himself.

Finley’s reply was cut off by Jeri appearing in the bathroom doorway, laughing her head off at the hole in the wall and at Finley for making it. “Hahahaha, he pegged you!” She chortled.

“No, that was the Tee-tree,” Aidan quipped, inadvertently sending Finley down another unwanted, embarrassing, and inordinately depressing memory. “Well, except that one time,” he self-corrected, and pulled Finley up to wash the hand in the sink with soap.

Fin was unable to suppress the blush that spread across his features. “That isn’t why I punched the wall,” he defended and took over the wound-dressing himself, examining it for bits of dry wall before wrapping the offering of gauze carefully around his partially skinned knuckles.

Jeri propped herself up on the wall next to the new hole he’d made. The bathroom had suddenly become crowded with her addition. “Because your girlfriend used to peg you?” She shot, “or because Aidan fu—”

Finley cut her off immediately as he had no desire to do more drunken trips down memory lane that day. “No, fuck-face, I was trying to distract myself, alright?” He didn’t actually know why he’d punched the wall, only that it had happened reflexively, and it seemed like a decent explanation. Whatever shuts her up the fastest.

“Finley,” Aidan spoke up from behind him, and stepped around Fin toward RJ out of the bathroom to regard him carefully. “You’re the smartest, dumbest person I know,” his roommate assessed with confidence. “There are better ways to distract yourself - ways that don’t involve home repair and potentially broken knuckles. You really should go to a clinic for that in the morning, to make sure you didn’t fracture something in your hand.”

“Yeah,” RJ agreed, surprising both of them, “like how I drink and do drugs to distract myself from my crippling existential dread. If I do it right, I barely think about it at all in my day-to-day!” The fact that she was able to say this with a straight face was astounding.

Finley walked back to the kitchen toward his drink without even regarding her. “Yes, we know,” Aidan told her behind him as they both followed Finley back to the dining table.

“I’ll fix it,” he promised Aidan as he sat back down and stared down at his knuckles. The throbbing pain had just started to kick in, due to his shock, and he found that he didn’t mind it. Consistent pain was a useful distraction from his own present thoughts.

“I enjoy your enthusiasm,” Aidan carefully replied as he parked down next to Finley once more, “but we both know you won’t do that.”

RJ continued speaking as her thoughts had continued chugging along despite the pause in conversation: “—or like how Sal got a job where he gets to legally kill people for a living because he’s a sociopath who can’t live without a programmed purpose.”

Finley had nothing but stony silence to respond with. “I have . . . No response to that,” Aidan said.

“I wouldn’t—” Finley began, but cut himself off with a head shake and took a drink. “I don’t even know where to start. Don’t start. Please,” he begged of her.

Jeri grinned and scooted over in her chair to be closer to him. He didn’t like the unnatural glee that came off of her in an emotional wave. “That’s okay, I’ll start!” She chirped. “You remember that dog next door that used to chase you and bite you? And then we had to take you to the hospital by ourselves because we didn’t want Dad to know, and then we promised you, Sal and I, we were like, hey, don’t worry, you’ll never have to see him again, because that dog is totally gone?”

Finley thought back, and recalled only a faint memory of being afraid of dogs for a while after a neighbor’s big black hound had bit him on the hand when he was walking to school one day. Sal had kicked the dog off of him and Finley had tried really hard not to cry. He’d managed to clean himself up before he got home, and Dad hadn’t even said anything about it. “Vaguely,” he answered.

RJ gave him a pointed stare. “You remember ever seeing that dog again?”

“Finley,” there was a warning in Aidan’s tone, “please, please spare us from another of her screwed up childhood stories that make way too much sense.”

Fin wasn’t sure but he didn’t like where the story was going and tried his best to stop it from being told. “Uh, I don’t think I did, so let me stop you because I don’t really like where this is—”

The effort was fruitless. “Yeah,” she went on, “we went out there while you were all shacked up and crying and played with the dog for the whole day while that Fester-lookin’, creepy old man who owned him was gone, and then we took him outside and shot him deep in the woods. The dog, I mean. Well, I shot him, with dad’s .32. And think about it - you never saw that old man after that either, didja?” She added with a sinister smirk.

Finley paled and considered these implications. “What are you saying?” He demanded very carefully.

Oh, how Rose of Jericho laughed. “No we didn’t murder him, he got moved to a retirement home you goof!”

Aidan’s head nearly hit the table in relief. “For shit’s sake!” He gushed toward the ceiling.

Finley breathed deeply. “So you were joking about the dog?”

Her expression had never gone from amused to serious so quickly. She took a swig of her drink, and something in her eyes assured him that for once, she wasn’t kidding. “No. We buried him under the tire swing.”

The tire swing had been where he’d spent most of his summers. Underneath that tree in their backyard was the only spot of peace in the entire neighborhood where he didn’t have to hear anyone’s thoughts but his own. Trees had always been forgivingly silent. “I used to swing on that thing every day . . .” He trailed off, remembering countless hours of being pushed by Salvador and Jeri in that swing when he was too little to remember clearly anything else.

RJ’s ensuing laugh was cynical, and cryptic. “Riiiiiiiiight on top of a rotting dog corpse,” she drawled. “Trips you out, huh?” He wasn’t sure if he was horrified by the thought, or morbidly enticed.

Aidan took a deep swig from his drink, and finished it in the ensuing quiet. “And wow, look at all the puzzle pieces about your life and tendencies that just fell into place,” he concluded cheerily. “It’s like Tetris for mental illness.”

Finley didn’t know how to deal with this. He stared down at his throbbing hand and tried to remember why, why he’d punched the wall. “I-I can’t deal with this,” he decided.

Aidan laughed. “Classic Finley.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” Jeri ridiculed, “we played with that mutt for the whole day before we humanely put him down. For all Sal and I knew, he had rabies. I mean it turns out he didn’t, but he could’ve! Plus that old man used to beat on that dog all the time, and he was a grumpy old shit who molested his granddaughter - you remember the one who used to visit in the summer? Sal and I were gonna hit him, we had it planned out, but he got moved to a nursing home by his daughter before we could pull it off.” She talked about her murder plans as casually as she did the songs she wrote, as if it was an everyday thought that crossed her mind that she once intensely planned out the assassination of a dirty old neighbor man.

“Augh!” Finley let out a disgusted noise. “What the fuck was wrong with our neighborhood?”

“I know, right?” She seemed just as disgusted as he was. “It’s like it was a hive of abuse and creepy incest shit. Anyway, I heard he died years ago and some family moved in and flipped his house, so the place looks super nice now. But really, that was nothing com—”

“Stop!” Aidan commanded, interrupting. “Stop right now! I can’t take this, now I need a drink.” He wandered over to the fridge and pulled out another beer for himself, opening it up with a fridge magnet.

Finley cradled his hand and noted that the blood had leaked through to the outside of the gauze. “I’m sorry for punching the wall, Aidan,” he offered uselessly. “I didn’t realize this would be the result. I swear, I’ll fix it.”

Aidan sighed after a mouthful of IPA. “No, you won’t,” he doubted, “and don’t worry about the wall either. After listening to her, I’m past caring.”

RJ laughed without a care in the world. “I have that effect on people,” she admitted.

As he sat back down next to Finley, a little closer this time, Aidan asked, “hey Fin, remember me talking to you about violent culture in developmental psych? The whole, detachment, loss of systemic support?”

Finley grumbled out, “yes, and I see your point.” It had been a long and tiring discussion one evening after Aidan got tired of Finley not dealing with things, until Fin sat him down and explained to him the how and why in its entirety of his childhood. Or, at least the parts Finley could clearly remember. There were entire holes of time missing where Fin wasn’t entirely sure what happened. RJ remembered more of it than he did, but rarely if ever spoke of it except in a joking manner. Humor was the only mechanism either of them really had for what they’d endured as children. Nothing had changed dynamically between Aidan and Finley since they’d had that talk, but Aidan did seem to have a better understanding now of Finley than Fin did of himself.

“Any more beer?” Jeri queried, holding up her empty bottoms-up.

“No,” Aidan told her, fully amused. “None for you, dog-killer.”

She seemed genuinely butt-hurt. “B-but—” she stuttered out.

Aidan laughed at her misery. “I’m kidding, help yourself,” he offered.

“You’re such a bitch,” she decided and got up to stretch and tackle whatever was in the fridge.

“And you’re an animal-murdering psycho,” Aidan replied, and beat her to the refrigerator to hand her the next brew. “Here. You’ve earned it, skipper.” She grinned and proposed a toast to him.

Jeri was soon bemoaning her fathomless hunger, so much so that Aidan got tired of hearing it and finally scraped together a sandwich just to get her to shut up. Within minutes of her eating the sandwich, she barged into Finley’s bedroom and collapsed on his made bed with a sleepy sigh and was out like a light. Fin wasn’t sure how exactly it happened, but he ended up in Aidan’s bed curled around his best friend in the morning with no unpleasant memories or dreams plaguing his sleeping mind.

Before he was aware, Aidan snaked away and the smell of coffee sent Fin’s brain into high alert. Stumbling out of bed, he crashed toward his own room and noted Jeri still sprawled out in the same position as before across his full green coverlet, snoring up a storm. He kicked her in the boot, but she didn’t stir, so he unzipped her boots and tickled her feet until she woke up with a startle.

“AHH!” She shrieked, suddenly wide awake and kicking at him. He dodged. “What the actual fuck, Finley!?”

Finley cackled and ran out toward the kitchen, satisfied with his revenge.

“Coffee’s ready,” Aidan called mildly. He was in a plain white shirt and pajama bottoms, while Finley felt self conscious in the same jeans and sweater he’d been wearing the day before.

“Mmm,” was all Finley could offer as he poured himself a cup of black bean juice by the sink. “Thank you,” he mumbled as he guzzled some down.

“Was that Jeri I heard shrieking?” Aidan wondered mildly.

Finley only shrugged and took his cup with him on the way to the bathroom, knowing down to his core that he deeply needed a shower. He glanced down at his hand that had bled and dried brown through the gauze, and winced. “Hey, did the shop call?” He asked his friend, pausing in the hallway.

“While you were gone? Yeah,” Aidan reported easily. “Darwin will be ready for pickup.” Darwin was the name of Finley’s old Lincoln, given because it had survived and somehow still kept kicking over two different breakdowns. This was the third time, and it was also due for a complete break change. He’d wanted to scrap the car entirely and sell it for parts, but the mechanic had convinced him that due to its age it wouldn’t sell for more than it would cost to repair. That coupled with all the memories he had of smoking out that car with his sister and Teegan kept him from simply abandoning the beast.

Fin nodded and hummed to himself in contentment with the coffee and news as he ran a much-needed shower. He heard Jeri grumbling from the hallway behind him and instinctively shut and locked the door to avoid her barging in and making a nuisance of herself in the throes of vengeance. Carefully, he downed half of the coffee in his mug, put it on the counter and unwrapped the gauze from his hand while the water heated.

The knuckles looked raw and angry, and he winced at the pull of his skin around the edges. Aidan was right, as usual. I should go to a clinic to get this cleaned . . . Frustrated with himself and his tendencies, he stepped into the hot water and let it wash away his worries.

He picked up the tendrils of concern and plotting from Aidan’s mind from all the way in the bathroom, but that wasn’t unusual for Finley. Aidan’s mind was relaxing background noise to the cacophony of being in public for Finley, and it was always nice to comfortably let his guard down around the man. He couldn’t ever let it down all the way, however, or he’d pick up on the neighboring students’ ruminations and make them his own. Years of necessity had grown the habit of forming his mental walls, which rarely ever came down except in moments of extreme depression or stress - moments that used to be few and far between when he, Teegan, and Aidan had been the only ones living there.

Thinking of it while under the stream of hot water that hammered against his skinned knuckles wasn’t as painful as he thought it might be. Thoughts of Teegan were always worse when they came under the influence of alcohol, unbidden. Willing thoughts were easier to deal with.

He could remember standing there in the stream, showering with her. Watching her dress, moving through her morning exercises, pressuring him to do them with her. He could remember the scent of her citrus shampoo lingering in her hair. He could almost hear her voice from the kitchen calling, ‘pancakes!’ in delight whenever Aidan deigned to make breakfast for them. She hadn’t been a student, not of the university. Just a childhood friend of Aidan’s, who’d moved out to California after leaving home behind just like he had. He’d first met her at the pier when Aidan had introduced them. She’d studied martial arts exclusively her entire life and taught others to defend themselves—and thinking about it now, how could anything have killed her? She was too fierce, too sure, too righteous to ever fall. She stood upright in a world of moral grays and failing innocence, somehow retaining that light that everyone lost despite everything she’d endured. She’d grown up with a mother that had hated her, the same as he had, in a broken home. How a broken home could have produced someone so bright was beyond him; but she’d often marveled at the same quality in him. Teegan so very often told him that she loved him for his faults, that she saw herself in his broken pieces, that she didn’t see him as shattered but a shining whole—

And before he knew it, Finley was crying.

It was easy to in the water, which washed away all the evidence of his grief. It was easy to huddle there in that quiet morning and remember her, in the place that was once her home too. Jeri had once told Finley that the dead never really leave - that they usually linger after when they can’t process their own death. He’d struggled to feel her - to find Teegan - but her presence wasn’t anywhere that he looked. Even in the home they shared, she was gone.

So, he wept. It didn’t hurt to cry. That surprised Finley. Normally the tears never stopped until he choked on them, and he had to struggle to keep them constantly at bay whenever they threatened. There in the shower though, they poured out of him like a sieve easily and effortlessly washed away down the drain. Aidan had promised him, before the funeral, that the tears would eventually stop hurting. That one day, the tears would come and they would heal and not hurt. For the first time since the funeral a year ago, Finley was able to grieve for his love, if only for a moment. For the first time, the tears didn’t hurt when they emerged.

He did eventually stop, if only because he felt himself getting pruned and knew he had to go and face reality. Once he turned off the water and stepped out, he could hear Aidan’s thoughts from the kitchen in a tizzy of confusion and alarm as he no doubt was interacting with RJ - a quality she seemed to inherently evoke. Everyone who interacted with her simultaneously didn’t know what to think, and usually wanted to think about anything else.

Finley popped his head out of the shower and crept over to his bedroom and ransacked it for clothes. He eventually found jeans and a black button-up, knowing he’d probably be sweating in it later under the California fall sun, but not really minding it either. He spotted an old black leather cuff on his dresser that he’d worn for years pressed with his initials - a gift from his sister when he was a teenager that he hadn’t realized was missing. He slapped it on his left wrist where it belonged. Then he mussed his hair and combed it back with his fingers, rubbed the red from his eyes, and stepped out of his room finally ready to face the world and whatever new craziness it had to offer that day.

In the kitchen, Aidan and RJ were engaged in a discussion. “I can scoot us around til maybe three-thirty,” Aidan offered, “but then I have a class, one at four and one at five-thirty.”

“I hate bumming rides,” Jeri said around a mouthful of coffee. Her face squinted in disgust as she swallowed. “Ugh. You got any milk? This shit is too black.”

“That’s what she said,” Finley greeted and refilled his cup from the pot.

She barely glanced at him in refute. “I can’t believe you still use that. It’s archaic.”

“I use it when it works,” Fin defended.

“That’s what she said,” Aidan jested and chuckled by himself. “Oh come on, that was funny.”

“A little,” Jeri agreed doubtfully. “Anyway, I’m still wondering about breakfast. Whatchu got up in this bitch?”

“A lot of nada,” Aidan offered generously. “I do happen to know a great breakfast joint though. Just let me get dressed and we’ll go.”

“Crepes at Dee-of-Vee?” Finley perked up at the memory of the nice little diner, with the bottomless coffee and the most delicious blueberry crepes of all time.

“None other! But I gotta put on pants, hang on.” He put down his coffee and retreated to his bedroom at the end of the hall.

Jeri glanced up at Finley as she perused the fridge looking for something to put in her coffee. She sniffed experimentally at a carton before wrinkling her nose, putting it away, and pouring a dash from her boot-flask into the cup. Finley winced, but said nothing. “So, you two slept together,” she began slyly, but he cut her off.

“And slept well I did, because you passed out in my bed.”

Jeri frowned. “Oh, you’re no fun at all. You’re like, the killer of all funzies.”

He frowned back. “I have fun. In small quantities. You have entirely too much fun.”

“Said the buzzkill.”

“Said the buzzed. It’s barely nine AM, what the fuck are you even doing?”

She sat down at the table and deliberately poured out more of her flask into her coffee. “Having an Irish coffee. What’s your excuse? I saw that unopened bottle of Maker’s in your room.”

He paused to regard her and sat down across the table. He was counting the seconds until Aidan returned. “I’m surprised you didn’t drink it,” he commented.

“I didn’t touch it,” she confirmed to his amazement, “because I’m not that desperate. How long has that thing even been there?”

Fin struggled to recall when he’d bought that bottle. He’d stuffed it under his bed for ‘emergencies’ but now that he thought about it, he didn’t really have an excuse. So, he just shrugged and laughed honestly in the kind of way he could only do with family, who understood his own vices better than he did. “Who even knows. I barely recall most of this last year.”

Jeri laughed with him and drank her Irish coffee with a smile. “You’re a fucked up cookie, Finley.”

“Our whole family is fucked up,” he replied. “It’s gonna be a fucked up family funeral.”

“You know—” she didn’t get to complete her thought, as Aidan thankfully returned at that very moment.

“Good morning again, kittens,” his best friend greeted cheerily. His black-rimmed glasses were perched over his nose, and he looked refreshed in a blue shirt, Bahama shorts, and sandals. “Who’s ready for breakfast?”

Jeri’s hand shot in the air along with the rest of her body. “I heard mention of crepes!” She crowed, and grabbed her guitar case and practically ran for the door whooping for food like a child. Amused, Finley followed her at a much more sedate pace, first stopping to dump out their coffee mugs in the sink and then pushing on his untied combat boots near the door.

“You both look like you’re about to attend Billy Joe Armstrong’s wedding,” Aidan remarked with amusement, looking him up and down.

Finley rolled his eyes. Black was about the only color of clothing he’d ever owned - it was stain-resistant and practical for all occasions. Though a small, squished down part of him felt flattered at any attention at all that Aidan gave him. “I’m in mourning for my aunt, and my sanity,” he defended.

“Of course,” Aidan conceded, “this isn’t at all about how you just realized right now that your entire wardrobe is uni-color.”

“Which one of us was the telepath, again? I forget.”

Rose of Jericho was almost twenty-six years old. She had nearly eight years left on Earth. Time crept by like a worm through the ground as it burrowed into the eye sockets of the dead in its hunger, robbing the living of life and the dead of their slumber. The dead screamed and clamored to haunt the minds of the living, but they only ever really haunted hers.

If it wasn’t the dead keeping her up at night, it would be the thread count of the sheets and the weaving of the tireless hands that wove them; the carpenter that made the bed would appear, hammering away at her headboard in dedication; the half-stoned painters that slathered white rolls onto the walls and their paint, smelling of a manufacturing plant that no one else could scent, but stuck in her nostrils wherever she went that was inside. Even when she went outside, she could feel the cracking of the shell of the seed of every tree that sheltered her, every blade of grass she stepped upon, and every weed that struggled toward sunlight through the cracks of pavement. Every animal and person and thing and rock and tree was alive because it had a memory, and that memory played behind her eyelids with every touch.

The torch of inevitability welded her eyelids shut and eventually forced her to sleep after the road trip to Sacramento, mostly thanks to the contents of her emergency boot flask. Alcohol always had that loveliest effect of drowning out all the voices of reality into that deep, dark radio-silent space where only she alone could be. Rose of Jericho suspected, deep down, that Finley tried to keep up with her in vain, even though he could tell she was far gone and out of reach. She always had been. She always would be. There, in the smallest of her inner spaces whilst sleeping, she could be momentarily free in dreamless darkness.

Morning broke and she was still Rose of Jericho. She was still twenty-five-point-nine years old. She still had eight-point one years left to live. The stopwatch had been ticking along in her mind since the tender age of sixteen, since the moment she decided to run away from her loving and oppressively Catholic Tía toward Los Angeles to chase her destiny. That destiny had pulled at her bones and called to her blood the way her mother’s had, and could not be oppressed. It was the siren pull of music itself that drove her aching and tired feed onward to her end, as the sole marvel in all of creation that made a lick of sense to her.

She watched, after waking, the ridiculous dancing distance between Finley and Aidan and discovered that she actually missed her music and her friends. She knew Fin and Aidan would dance forever, but only her friends danced to her music. It left an ache in her chest to think of them, and how little they must have missed her while she was in rehab. Except Jen, she thought, the only ray of sunshine down here in Hell. She missed her band. She missed Jen, Alex, and Timmy most of all - hell, even Tino and Lo, despite their falling out when she went to jail. Beautiful souls, all of them.

But strangely, for a moment, she realized that she missed Samantha the most.

Rose of Jericho had lost count of the people she had lost, because the dead always outnumbered the living. Watching Fin and Aidan move between and around one another reminded her only of the things she had lost; Sam, her first real girlfriend at age fifteen, her first fan and first band mate - first everything - had died in a car crash she’d predicted and hoped against hope wouldn’t occur. She’d asked Sam not to take that fatal ride home, told her that she would die in a car, had told her not to go - and still she had went, and died a deaf and defiant punk to the end. It was Cassandra’s curse from the spurned Apollo, to know the future and be helpless to prevent it.

Whenever anyone had asked her about the future, RJ had told them only what she wanted them to hear. Except for her brothers. Whenever they had asked, she always told them unadulterated truth, even if Salvador was the only one who ever really believed in and trusted her. Finley never trusted me, she realized as she watched him that morning. He never trusted anyone, except Aidan and Teegan. It hurt her to think of how that had went down. She didn’t like hurting, so Rose of Jericho put the thought back where it belonged with a drink.

When Aidan had asked her over the phone while Fin was passed out on that park bench in Portland, she found herself unable to lie. She liked Aidan, so she told him a lesser version of the truth - told him to just watch out for colon cancer. The truth is often cruel, and rarely kind; he would die comfortably at eighty-nine after a brief dance with death. He shined like a twinkling star, not so bright that it hurt her to look at him but close enough that it sometimes set her on edge. Some people were just too good for their own good; that was Aidan’s entire problem. It was her Tía’s problem too, though that also still hurt to much to think about.

It hurt her to look at Finley too, sometimes - but for the opposite reason. His light was far too clouded to be of any good to anyone. She knew what she had to do about it, but she was afraid. Sometimes Fin was so angry that it shook the world, and he didn’t know. He couldn’t. The eye can’t see its own optic nerve; he didn’t see the Earth trembling with him in his grief. The weight of his destiny was enough to drown even the ocean. It was her duty now to pull him out of it, for the sake of everyone and everything around him. That wasn’t going to stop her from giving him a little shit now and then, though.

Her hand shot into the air as soon as she heard Aidan mention breakfast. “I heard mention of crepes!” She blurted, trying her hardest to remain on the right mental-track this time. Her stomach growled angrily at her so she ran for the door, barely thinking to grab her guitar case along with her since she never left it behind. Not since she had first stolen it. That guitar was as much a part of her identity as her fingernails and tattoos.

Finley elected to drive them in the Jeep while she clambered into the back seat, guitar-first. While she settled in, nearly forgetting her seatbelt, “So, why blond?” Aidan asked from the front seat, meeting her eyes through the rear-view window. He seemed amused. “Were you jealous of my hair?”

“You wish,” she teased and fluffed her short mess of a brassy shag. She’d only had it for a day, but she already loved it. “You’re just jealous of my hair because your hair looks like a bowl of limp noodles. My hair is art.” He laughed, at least - taking her humor in stride as he always had done. He was too precious. “Honestly, I just never been blond before. Seemed fun. Blonds have all the fun, right?” She shrugged. She hadn’t put too much thought into it when she’d told the hairstylist what to do for those few hours back in Portland while Fin was passed out, since she’d known the moment she walked in what she was going to look like when she left. There was rarely any agency in her choices. They were simply predetermined inevitabilities. Hairstyles were just another way for her to keep track of where and when she was.

The ride passed in relative silence, with Finley and Aidan quietly discussing classes in the front and her staving off boredom in the back by tapping a drum beat into her legs. She itched for her cigarettes, but remembered she was in someone else’s car and her suffering-from-disuse-social-skills told her that it was rude to smoke in someone else’s car when they were right in front of you. “Where are we going?” She asked, feeling impatient after only one minute.

“You’ll see,” is all Finley would say.

It was south down the road and a minute east, altogether only five minutes away from the condo. A little diner curiously called Delta of Venus with rust-orange walls plastered with local, psychedelic art. It was the size of a small house and sheltered by low-hanging trees with bohemian lights on strings ensconcing a small outdoor theater, where a three-female band consisting of a long-haired guitarist, a suited accordionist, and skirted ukulele player were peacefully jamming in the sun-dappled Californian breeze. Locals and tourists alike mingled, drawn in by the music and the smell of delicious victuals. Looking at it was a pleasant and simultaneously nauseous experience for RJ as she suddenly saw it open for the first time and close; once twenty years ago, and once into the future when it would barely resemble a shadow of its current incarnation and finally be bought out by a larger corporation. Designed for locals by locals, it was a pleasant enough joint if not for the nauseating effect it seemed to have on her vision of being split in two different locations in spacetime.

Physically, it didn’t make sense. She could walk right through both construction crews in their separate times and shared space the way light passed through glass - they’d only ever feel a minor distortion, and confuse it with excuses of indigestion or vertigo. The reality of the world was too insane to process for most human minds. RJ had the misfortune of being privy to it, and she’d long ago accepted that she’d gone insane as a consequence of having her third eye pried permanently open one fateful birth day.

While Aidan and Fin filtered out of the Jeep, she bent down and took a swig from her boot flask as she watched the construction crews put up and pull down the place. It helped with the double-vision, and let her focus on the now. She left her guitar locked safely in the Jeep and pulled her sunglasses over her eyes from her forehead before stepping out, ignoring Finley’s daggered gaze as she lit a smoke and blew it in his face. “Hey, I didn’t make you quit,” she reminded him snidely, just aching to push his buttons.He rarely bit back. Finley, ever superior, rolled his eyes up to the sky and ignored it. It always surprised her when he did, since it was a rare sign of maturity. That, or he got used to putting up with my shit. “I’ll follow in a bit,” she told Aidan who gave her a questioning gaze, then nodded.

“We’ll be on the patio,” her fellow blond told her and flip-flopped his way into the little house-sized cafe. Fin followed at a more glum, sedate pace, but seemed hesitant to leave her behind. He gave her a cursory glance before following the pull on his feet . . . and sidled up next to her. He placed one hand palm-up, and she deposited her waiting, upside-down lucky cigarette into his palm.

“The lucky? I’m honored,” he said with surprise and took her zippo from her other hand. Without hesitating, he lit up and took a deep drag. “I shouldn’t have done this,” he blurted after exhaling a small cloud.

She laughed unkindly, but could admit that she felt a little more grounded with him at her side. He didn’t need to know how badly she needed him near in that moment, just as a healthy reminder of what was actually happening and when. “You picked a hell of a time to quit,” she told him. “Face it, if we can’t be drunk for this funeral, we at least need smokables. We both got too many problems with funerals.”

Finley gave her a considering, deep gaze before letting his eyes fall to his shoes. “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “I can’t really give you shit, I guess. It’s been a thing for me for a while.”

“It keeps it quiet, though, right?” She guessed, accurately. Though she was more guilty by far, they’d both had a fair share of trouble with dependence on chemicals. Sanity was cheap when you knew where to buy it, but even if she wasn’t psychic she would be able to guess from observation where Finley’s troubles lay.

Finley bent down to tie his untied combat boots, keeping the cigarette squarely in the corner of his mouth. “Yes and no,” he explained through half-grit teeth. “Drinking mutes it, but not completely. Hangovers make it worse. Meditation has been helping a lot more.”

“You meditate?” She scoffed, inwardly impressed that he was at least attempting to take care of himself, but unwilling to voice that opinion on principle since it was her job to corrupt him, as his older sister.

Finley started on the other shoe after taking another toke of smoke. “I try to,” he said with a down-turned smile. “It helps me control what I pick up on. Sometimes, I don’t want to hear everyone’s brains screaming at me. When that doesn’t work, alcohol sometimes does. I don’t know. I know it’s not healthy, but it’s all I’ve got.” He flicked out the end of the cigarette and tucked it behind his ear. Turning to her, he asked, “you coming? We can still smoke on the patio.”

She did the same to hers and put it back in her pack, smiled toothily, and followed her little brother inside the cafe. Her fingers brushed the dark ochre walls, unable to resist touching the edge of an artist’s abstract rendition of the emergent Venus and briefly felt the paint lovingly slide over the canvas like it was her own skin - before quickly taking a turn inside and stepping through to the outdoor eating area. A few groups of people milled about in bright summer clothes, still in denial about impending autumn. Aidan was easy to spot, in his fluorescent shorts seated at a small table in a private alcove, staring down at his phone screen in trepidation.

“What’s got yer goat?” She chirped, plopping down beside him and propping up her head on her elbows.

“I’m mad at my Neuroscience mid-term,” he offered without looking away from his device. “No feedback? Multiple choice? What is this, Soviet Russia? Why you no give me feedback? How am I supposed to improve unless I learn why I was wrong?” Frustrated, Aidan put the phone down just as Finley sidled into the seat next to him on the opposite side. Aidan’s careful eye noted the cigarette behind his ear before everything else. “Well that didn’t last very long,” he commented lightly with a laugh.

“Hey, hey, he needs a token vice for his aesthetic,” RJ interjected on her brother’s surprised behalf. “If he doesn’t have his black peacoats and his brooding, what does he have?”

“I . . . Would only have an addiction to nicotine?” Finley finished in a questioning tone, and pulled the half-finished smoke from behind his ear. She tossed over her zippo lighter to him over Aidan’s head, and he caught it in one hand.

“Not the worst time to start up again,” Aidan remarked, and moved around to the other side of Finley to avoid the cloud of smoke between the two of them. “All things considered.” RJ stole his warm seat with a grin, happily sandwiched between them.

The band on the little stage began a new song, and Jeri swiftly became absorbed. It was a minimalist number, upbeat with a simplistic chord progression, but the allure of it was enough to drown out the simultaneous construction crews across time and space banging away on the house that only she could see. Before she knew it, someone was at their table asking them for an order and dropping a number on a stand. What she’d ordered she wouldn’t be able repeat to anyone, but she hoped it was blueberry crepes. She distinctly saw those in her future. It all became a blur and passed by before her eyes; she was used to the feeling, and paid it no mind.

She closed her eyes and breathed, lighting up the smoke in her pack. She was Rose of Jericho. Twenty five point nine. Eight point one years left. Time was slowly edging her to that end, but it wouldn’t be today, and it wouldn’t be tomorrow. She could breathe, in and out, and be in one place at one time. She tried, she did, to concentrate on the smoke and the music and let the sounds wash over her idly.

When the song ended, the construction crews were back. One group was arguing over her shoulder about where to put the dry-wall while Aidan and Fin chatted pleasantly too quietly for her to hear, and she couldn’t follow simultaneous conversations at once. So, she claimed she had to go pee and ran inside to the bathroom, hoping she wouldn’t lose track of all time and space again while in there.

In the mirror, she saw her reflection and studied it for the first time since she’d gotten her haircut. She wasn’t terribly vain, or didn’t think of herself as that way, as her numerous tattoos and piercings were less about show and more to help remind her of who and when she was. Every few years or so she’d get a new piece to remind her of when and where she was, but she was slowly running out of space on her body and so had started collecting piercings and changing her hair accordingly. It was part of the rocker mystique, so she told people. She almost didn’t recognize herself as a blond, but there were pieces of RJ still there in the eyes and chin. Her father’s eyes stared back at her from her mother’s face with a quirk of a crooked bridge that belonged solely to Jeri; a past breakup with one of her exes that ended with the ex on the ground and her oblivious to the blood pouring from her own nostrils, too high on adrenaline to feel the pain of the broken nose.

Sal had been the one to bandage that wound. She touched the bridge of her nose gently in fond remembrance of her absent oldest brother, and made a mental note to call him that she prayed to whatever deity was listening that she would remember. He was usually better at checking in on her than she was on him.

When she came back to the table, crepes were waiting in a cosmic coincidence. “Who ordered this?” She gushed and dove right in.

“Those are actually mine,” Aidan corrected gently, “but since I’m gracious and suspect you forgot what you ordered, you may have them.”

“Dank oo,” she mouthed around a mouthful of blueberry crepe, washed down with an ice-cold mimosa that dropped in front of her a few moments later. On some subconscious level she knew that it was going to be there, but it was still a surprise when it happened.

No one was more surprised than Aidan. “Wait, they serve alcohol here?” He marveled, staring at the drink like it was a wonder of the world.

RJ shrugged. She had no memory of ordering the alcohol, but it definitely seemed like something she would do, and Finley didn’t react with any alarm - having him around was incredibly useful since he was like a wary watchdog that kept track of everything that happened around them. When he didn’t stiffen in alarm, she took that as a good omen and took a careful sip of the mango puree blend. It was laced with a strong shot of straight vodka. “Ooo, that’s smooth,” she admired and took a longer, less careful sip.

“I always imagined this is how you started every day,” said Aidan almost admiringly.

“Just the really awesome days,” she told him. “Most other days start puke-first, to be honest.”

“That sounds awful,” he bluntly assessed.

“It kind of is, yeah,” she could carefully admit.

Finley, meanwhile, locked eyes with a server across the room and summoned them to the table. She eyed the server up and down suspiciously, knowing there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that Finley had actually ‘summoned’ him with the Jedi mind-trick. Still, service was service, and the waitress smiled in an appeasing way and asked them what they’d like. Aidan ordered a new plate of crepes while her brother just asked for more coffee and lit up the smoke behind his ear again as soon as she walked away.

“I yoo nah eeding?” She asked of her brother, shooting the question at him mentally as well as verbally so he wouldn’t ask her to annoyingly repeat herself with a mouthful of food.

He shrugged. “Just not hungry. I don’t know. I’m not as big a fan of this place as I used to be. Teegan really liked it here.”

It was strange to talk about and even stranger to hear her name come out of Finley’s mouth. He’d never really mentioned Teegan much to her since the girl’s funeral - really, nothing at all. All his grief he’d spent in privacy, and drowned in silence. He’d gone out of his way to avoid the subject, and now the casual mention of her name felt wrong. It was a name reserved for memory alone, and left a tangy taste in the mouth whenever she said it, as if it were forbidden for her tongue to shape. Teegan. She’d never seen death in Teegan’s future. It had been a strange anomaly on RJ’s radar, for everyone and everything died.

“Yeah, but you can’t avoid places because they remind you of her,” Aidan threw in, perennially finding the upside to everything. “You’d have moved away if that was a real problem for you.”

“I’m glad we came, it’s still a nice place,” Fin corrected, ashing his smoke into the provided tray in the center of their little round table. “It’s just, now that I’m here, I’m not really hungry. It . . . Feels weird to eat here without her.”

RJ paused for a moment mid-bite to gape at her brother. She swallowed and blurted out, “Finley, are you having a feeling? I didn’t know you had those!”

He kicked her in the booted shin with his steel toe underneath the table, earning a loud wince and garbled vow of revenge. Then, he cackled. “Bring it.”

“Not until I’ve eaten, please,” Aidan politely interjected just as the server came back with another plate of blueberry crepes.

“I’m allowed to have feelings,” Fin said after RJ had calmed down and stopped whining about her shin, and returned to eating. “At least, one feeling.”

She at least swallowed this time before trying to speak. “Yeah, it’s just weird hearing you talk about them. Aren’t you supposed to bury that shit?”

Aidan’s fork scraped over his plate and he gave her a half-amused, half-concerned stare. “Sometimes I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”

She wasn’t, but she smiled to give him the impression that she was, and he chuckled.

Part of her, internally, was terrified at Finley’s admission. He didn’t understand. Sometimes he’s so angry, it shakes the world. And she couldn’t tell him, so she told him instead, “whatever. Gross, keep your one feeling to yourself,” like he expected her to, and he rolled his eyes at her and that was the end of it.

She devoted the entirety of her attention after that to the mimosa, which finally drowned out all the spacetime construction and dulled the noise to a minimum. It had the (un)intended consequence of rendering her tipsy, but she was good at concealing it and made a point to tip their (possibly) mind-warped serving wench a hefty bonus. The mimosa dulled the rest of the next hour of her life to a bare minimum of her attention span, which helped her kill time while she went with Finley and Aidan to pick up his car from the shop. It was a local dive and she was toasted by the time she got there, and for once didn’t absorb anything about the place from behind her sunglasses.

Without thinking about it, she stayed behind in the mechanic’s office to pay Finley’s bill when he stepped out to examine his rust-bucket and endured his ensuing pout when he found out. Finley despised the idea of owing anyone, and it tickled her to poke at him for the same reason she’d been poking at him since they were kids - just to get a childish reaction. It rarely worked anymore, but it was still fun when it did.

Still, he was completely calm and tame up until the point where she demanded that he take her to a bar in exchange. “No,” he insisted and finally put his foot down. Literally, actually put his foot down. “See this? This is the proverbial foot, that I will put up your ass.” Fin gestured down to the steel-toed boot on his left foot.

She raised an eyebrow at him and leaned on the mechanic’s counter. “This is your line? In the sand? This?”

He reconsidered for all of a second. “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, yes, that’s the line. But no, because there’s no good bars anywhere,” he corrected. “There’s de Vere’s but that place is . . .”

“Kind of a shithole,” Aidan finished for him. “Even for an Irish pub. I mean, there are worse places. There’s nowhere nearby that’s any good. Honestly your best bet is hitting the liquor store.”

“Are you enabling me?” Finley was pleasantly amused.

Aidan smiled, and his inner light brightened so much that RJ put on her sunglasses and closed her eyes and looked away, because it hurt. “She did just get out of prison,” he reminded Finley gently. “And I’ve heard that it really changes a man.”

“Nah, I was in the loony bin,” she amended. “I just ate a fuck ton of Lithium, got strapped down to a bed when I had night terrors, and spent most of my time playing cards or entertaining everyone with stories. Honestly it was pretty chill, considering what I was doing time for.”

“What were the official charges, anyway?” Aidan wondered as he clambered into his vehicle, about to leave for his class. She had followed him to say goodbye as Finley fired up the old brown Lincoln Continental.

“Involuntary manslaughter. I beat up a guy in a fight and later he died in the hospital. Shame, too,” she confessed, “Anton was my best drug dealer.”

Aidan started his car and leaned out of his window to regard her. There was a small smile playing on his features. “You and Finley have the same tell when you’re lying,” he informed her. “Your bottom lip flexes and you sometimes squint. You ever play poker, you should watch out for that.”

He was still too bright to look at directly, but she took the challenge and let herself drown in his soul’s brilliance for a moment. “I know why he loves you,” she began slowly, arresting Aidan’s attention which manifested as clenched knuckles on his steering wheel. “And why he hurts to say it. But, he does.”

“We can talk about it later,” Aidan decided, his smile tightening. He pulled out of the mechanic’s parking lot with a wave, and Finley’s old brown beater pulled up behind her in the same spot.

From the driver’s side of the Continental, Finley leaned over in his seat and propped open the door. “So, we going to de Vere’s? Or what?” He asked with a grin.

She slid into the passenger’s seat and her eyes sought out the guitar in the back still in its red case out of habitual reassurance. “Irish dive pub, sounds fun,” she uttered numbly and turned back around in her seat to stare out the front window. Out of habit, her hand reached into her leather jacket’s pocket for her smokes. Finley passed her lighter back to her without a word.

Truthfully, she’d preferred the cannabis smokes, but those had run out on the road down from Oregon after the appearance of the weird guy. Cigarettes were Finley’s first choice and her second, but also more out of habit than intention she passed one over to him. The motion was fluid; he rolled down the windows, she lit them up, and they drove on. When she was sixteen she was in the driver’s seat, but that was the only difference between then and now that she could feel. Before Teegan had kicked it, there was hardly a weekend that went by that one of them wasn’t driving up or down to see the other. It was a ritual that was immemorial by that point in their lives, ingrained so deeply that even the musty smell of the town car felt like home.

For a moment, she swam in memories of Finley’s happiness. She could almost see Teegan in the rear view mirror with her head half-out the window, shouting into the wind as it tousled her tight curls when she flung her mocha head out like a dog. How many road trips had they endured in that car? Back then, RJ had stuck to traveling by motorcycle; she had no need for passengers or extra baggage. She’d been free in a way she’d never be again. There was a notion that was slowly seeping into Jericho’s mind since she’d gotten out of the asylum and heard about her aunt’s death - that nothing in her life would ever be carefree again.

She looked away from the mirror and took another grounding drag. It wouldn’t do to dwell on that shadow.

“I missed this piece of shit,” she admitted to him as he pulled them out of the parking lot and into traffic. The vehicle lurched forward at a sickening speed, earning a wince out of her. “Though it’s still a piece of shit.”

“New brakes,” Fin explained, “so it’s an upgraded pee-oh-ess, thank you. Still wish you hadn’t paid for it.”

She sighed, mentally buckled down, and gave him the truth for once. “Finley, paying for shit is about the only thing I can do for you. I have the money, and I want to spend it. Just let me.”

He didn’t respond, which she supposed to mean that she won. De Vere’s wasn’t far, nor was it ideally located in a mass of outlet malls and rambling complexes. A steady rhythm of alt rock poured out of the doors, which was promising to her senses, before she recognized the song as one she’d heard forty thousand times in the center and it immediately put her into a rotten mood.

“They better have Irish car bombs,” she grumbled and sidled up at a stone bar counter where two attendants were busily taking and making everyone’s orders.

“It’s four-thirty,” he reminded her. “Maybe start with Guinness, then we can upgrade to car bombs during the funeral,” he added. It wasn’t the worst suggestion she’d ever heard, and hell, it actually made a lot of sense.

“A real Irish-Catholic funeral,” she joked. “Do you think anyone from Dad’s side will show up?”

He snorted back a laugh at that thought. “Only if they’re fixin’ for a fistfight. If Dad shows up, I’ll personally kick his ass.”

“Has he tried to call?”

“No, thank Christ.”

“Too bad Sal can’t come,” she lamented, sparing a thought for her personal hero.

“He’d hate it,” Finley promised her. “He’s always hated funerals.”

“If he were here, we could crash it together, all three of us. Or just skip it and go to a better bar instead.” She tried flagging down the bartender, but no one seemed to see them at the end. Frustrated, she turned to Finley who fixed his eyes on one of the attendants and immediately a man that had been drying a glass put down his task and walked over to them with a dazed smile on his face.

“What can I do for you?” The bartender asked officiously.

Finley’s clever eyes scanned down the patrons at the bar, and fixed on one young man whose wrist was exposed and displayed an expensive looking watch, whose back was turned to them. “See that guy right there? He’s our friend and bought us both some Guinness,” he instructed the bartender, who nodded firmly and immediately set about pouring two fresh glasses.

“That’s just creepy,” RJ admitted.

“It’s free,” he defended.

She turned to stare up at him and wondered a bit at the thoughtfulness on his face. It was rare that he was so liberal with his abilities in her experience - especially after what happened the last time she’d seen him extensively use them. She recognized that in some small way, he was demonstrating his independence; the memory of the incident that put her in prison at once amused her and chilled her to the bone. Shaking off the thoughts was simply a matter of changing the subject, with Fin. “I have a question for you,” she prompted. His eyebrow quirked up in curiosity. “Does this place remind you of Teegan?”

The shadow that had engulfed his light shifted a bit by her reckoning, and a tiny radiant sliver of her brother shined out for a split second as Finley smiled. “No, not really. She was more into the dance scene, and this place doesn’t have the floor for it. Aidan and I went here once and got shit service, so I don’t really feel bad tricking them.”

Grinning, she asked, “then, do you wanna play a game?”

If she guessed a detail about a patron’s thoughts, life, or habits that Finley could verify, and she was wrong - she’d drink. If she guessed right, he’d drink. Right or wrong, either way they’d both win. She’d invented the simple game in their high school cafeteria, back before she had dropped out and Fin was just a pimply freshman still being bullied. It’d been the only way she could think of in the moment to normalize his abilities - to give him some kind of normalcy to cling to, so he could practice his gift rather than shun it. For her part, she had an uncanny knack for guessing people’s backgrounds - just a side effect of being clairvoyant, but one of the fun side effects that she could pass off as a party game in a pinch.

Finley grinned. “Alright, who’s the first victim?”

RJ scanned the loud crowd of patrons before she spotted a lone woman in her thirties staring down at her phone while sipping a margarita, in a floral shirt and white pants. “Girl with the dyke haircut at the end,” she decided. “I’m gonna guess . . . Travel agent?” Finley shook his head, so she took a sip. “Office?”

He perked up. “What kind of office?”

“Dental!”

“Drink.”

“Fuck! Is it a clinical setting?”

“You’re on the right track.”

She blew out air between her lips in thought. Without touching the girl, there was no surefire way for RJ to know where she’d come from - getting information at such a distance was tricky. She could tell from that the woman would bump into the doorknob and get a bruise from it when she went to the bathroom later, and would leave shortly thereafter and get into a harmless fender bender on her way home . . . That she had a cat waiting for her at home who was hungry, who’d leave her pet bird in her shoe that night because the cat would’ve figured how to knock over the cage in her absence . . . In a burst of inspiration she guessed, “vet’s office!”

Fin downed half his glass. “That felt like a shot in the dark for you,” he criticized, “but you got it.”

“You pick next,” she suggested.

He chose a victim from a group of students on the other side of the pub - one blond girl in a crowd of them in the shortest shorts she’d ever seen. “She’s a barista,” RJ guessed, “and I’m going to guess Sociology Major because it seems to be a field dominated by Californian blonds.”

“Right about the coffee, wrong about the major, so drink anyway,” Fin instructed, and she did.

After a long drink she guessed again, “Design? Arts? One of the humanities, gotta be,” she insisted. Fin kept shaking his head.

Her entire Guinness was finished before she gave up, and didn’t believe Finley when he told her the girl was in the applied physics program. “Her name’s Celeste, I actually know her from my Advanced Calc,” he revealed with a sly grin. “Joke’s on you.”

“Boo!” She jeered. “Drink! No picking people we know!”

“Oh fuck off,” he said but drank anyway.

They continued with a few other victims that Finley would scan and she would guess until boredom eventually settled in. At half past six, they were too hungry to care about the game anymore and decided that de Vere’s was a bust, and headed back to the condo. It was a hop and skip away down the crowded evening roads. She deposited her guitar case on the dining table just as a lovely smell wafted by her nose from Finley’s kitchen.

Aidan was home by the time they got there, already in the middle of cooking something delicious-smelling and colorful over the stove. “What heavenly shit is that?” RJ wondered, peering over Aidan’s shoulder at the mess in the pan.

“Some Mediterranean shit I’m throwing together, mostly vegetables,” replied Aidan in a dismissive tone.

“You cook?” She couldn’t believe him. “Do you clean, too?”

“I do all the things!”

“I do some of the things,” Finley piped in from the other side of the bar.

“Some of them,” Aidan conceded and stirred at the concoction with a flat wooden spoon.

Jeri hugged Aidan around the waist unexpectedly, earning a surprised yelp from him. “I’m keeping him forever,” she decided. “You can’t have him back, Finley. He’s too perfect for you. You’ll ruin him with your dirty fingers.”

“Okay,” was all Finley had to say to that as he disappeared into his bedroom.

“Like, as an employee, or a slave?” Aidan queried, and patted the top of her head at his waist.

She deliberated on this whilst still mid-hug. “A cooking slave but with benefits. You want money, you can just have mine.”

“Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, not gonna lie, but I have to at least finish my major before I settle on a career path.”

“Don’t be stupid. College is for losers. Come and be my slave. I’ll take care of you.”

“As much as my resume needs beefing up, I’m gonna have to pass. Now sit your butt down at the table and let me cook before I get hot olive oil on you.”

RJ scrambled away from the irate chef and settled down at the dining table. She took a deep breath.

She heard Teegan’s crackling laughter in her ear, and knew no one else could see or hear it. Feeling herself start to sober up, she swiftly took a swig from her boot flask and excused herself to the bathroom as soon as Finely re-emerged from it with new bandages on his knuckles. He offered a greeting but she rebuffed him, feeling uncomfortable in the condo for the first time as the past started to merge with the present and became one.

Sighing, she sat down on the toilet and pulled out her much-abused and cracked cell. It’d impossibly survived her antics over the last two years; she was simply too lazy to pick up another one. It had stayed in her house when she was in the asylum, and she was surprised that she’d remembered to grab it before they left Oregon. Fin had let her charge it in the Jeep. She hesitated over her list of contacts before calling Salvador’s base, hoping he was available and they’d agree to patch him through. Last time, he’d been gone and had sent a short email explaining why - some sort of supposedly routine scouting mission, unless he’d been lying to her. She didn’t know what time it was in Vladivostok, but knew he had to be lurking about somewhere. If luck was on her side - and it usually was - these were his off-hours. “Fucking Russia,” she mumbled under her breath as the dial tone took for what felt to her like forever until someone picked up.

Some girl from the base picked up and it took a good couple of minutes, but someone promised her along the way that they’d find Salvador Ravara and get him to the phone. There was no cell service out there on base, but she’d phoned in with a ‘family emergency’ so she was hoping that even if he was busy, an exception would be made. It was a full ten minutes before he picked up, but she was desperate and didn’t want to hang up on the off-chance that he didn’t remember the number to call her back on - so she just let Aidan and Finley think she was constipated on the toilet while waiting for him to pick up.

Eventually, her older brother’s brash tenor answered, “Hello? What’s going on, Jeri?”

Her breath caught as Jeri realized she didn’t have a prepared answer on hand. “Uh—hey,” she rasped out, “Sal. What’s up?”

He let out a short, raspy chuckle. “Uh, not much. Was in the middle of drills. Not a lot to do out here, so I’ve been pretty bored. What’s this emergency? Or was that just an excuse to talk to me? Either way I’m cool with it. I was bored outta my skull.”

“Uh. Yeah, actually it is kind of an emergency. M-Mara’s dead.”

There was a beat of silence. “What?” His tone suggested disbelief. “Really? Since when?”

“Since . . . About three days ago.” And then it all spilled out in a mess of elocution the likes of which were normally reserved for political conventions - the kind of blurted out garble that only half-made sense on its way out despite whatever sense it might have made in the head beforehand. “I had this dream a few nights ago when I got out of the treatment center - uh I made it out, Fin picked me up and we’ve been - and it’s been weird because Félix called and told us his ma was dead, but I already knew because I had this dream that Tía Mara answered the door and these teenagers came in trying to sell magazines, and she gave them cookies but then they just started stabbing her with this knives and she was screaming - it was fucking awful - and I don’t know, now there’s this funeral coming up but there’s no body because they said something fucked up happened to it, and then, then last night while Fin and I were driving to his place here in Sacramento, a guy just appeared out of thin fucking air and dropped some portents about - fuck, I don’t even remember what he was going on about, he just appeared and Fin pointed a gun at him but it wasn’t loaded because Finley’s a damn idiot, and then the dude just disappeared after telling us we had to find something called a Prodigal Son.”

Salvador was magically able to sift through to discern the meaning with that strange ability of his to find the core of everything and hit it with an armor-piercing round. It was what made him such an excellent sniper. “Prodigal Son?” he repeated slowly. “Is that some Jesus shit? Was he a religious fundamentalist?”

“Probably,” she rushed, “but I think the disappearing trick was more neat.”

“Yeah. Whoa. That’s a lot.”

“Yeah. Understatement of the year, Sal.”

“I can apply for leave if you need me to,” he offered generously after a few seconds of silence. “I mean it’s an emergency—”

“No,” she bit out, “no it’s not an emergency. I don’t think. I don’t know. I just wanted someone to talk to about it.”

“Well yeah, I’m here for ya. So did Finley see this guy too? Or was it—”

She cut him off with an explanation. “I wish it had been a hallucination, but Finny saw him too. Clear as day. We weren’t high, although I was a little baked.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s fucking weird. You sure you don’t need me there?”

“You only have another year left,” she went on tiredly, “so no. Just . . . Do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Have you, um, thought about what you wanted to do after you’re out? I have some thoughts on that front. You know my place is open.”

This was a subject Sal had a little more enthusiasm for. “Yeah, there’ s a lot actually - and I’m definitely visiting you first - but this isn’t really such a good time for me to talk about travel plans. I’m more concerned about the upcoming funeral. When is it?”

“A few days, I don’t know. I know how you feel about funerals. We’re going because of Félix, but no one’s expecting you to come.”

There was a little bit of an awkward silence. “Yeah, that’d probably be . . . Best. Fuck. I hate funerals. This is sad. Should I be sad? I feel like I barely knew her.”

“We knew her better, but yeah, it is sad,” she agreed.

“I had a dream too,” he admitted quietly. “A few nights back - not about Mara, but about this weird house that sorta looked like the old one, and there were like - chains from the ceiling that held up all these people. And you were there, but I couldn’t get you down.”

“I was chained up?”

“Well in the dream you were. Just that mention of the Prodigal - who was this guy? That appeared - what did he look like? Because some guy in the dream - it’s hard to remember now, but I wrote it down later that he mentioned specifically the ‘Prodigal Son.’ I remember thinking that was some Biblical shit, so I wrote it down. And I can’t stop thinking about it now that you’ve mentioned it.”

This made her blood run cold. “Tell me everything about this dream.”

It wasn’t often that Salvador was plagued with prophecy. She seemed to have gotten the bulk of that genetic deficiency - and Finley had received the bulk of the abilities of whatever weirdness was in their family tree, but Sal had always had his own kind of gifts. He was neither burdened nor bound by any of his abilities, but did have the unique ability of sensing future danger. Sometimes, whenever he could be asked to remember them, his dreams indicated a future event or near-death experience. In the field, it had made him appear to be incredibly lucky - as if blessed by some fortune to survive things that were unsurvivable. To hear Sal describe it, it was just really uncanny déjà vu. In his SEAL unit he’d been seen as a guardian angel, pulling people out of the line of fire in the nick of time. As a sniper, it made him a preternaturally gifted shooter. To his friends he was a gift, but to RJ he was just her big brother looking out for her as he’d always done. Part of her wanted to cry.

“There’s not much else to it,” he explained hurriedly, “at least not that I can remember off-hand. But uh, call me around this time tomorrow and I’ll go back through my journal, see what else I wrote down. Okay?”

She nodded, but then realized he couldn’t see her and laughed. “Uh yeah, alright. I may give the phone over to Fin then too, if that’s alright. How long’s it been since you guys talked anyway?”

“Pfft, at least four months or so. I don’t know, sometimes he can be a little shit.”

“Preach it.”

“It’ll be good to hear from him though. How’s he been?”

Jeri considered the best way to answer this. “Honestly he’s been doing better. Teegan . . . That hit him harder than I’ve ever seen something hit someone before. I’m not sure how he’s dealing with it, or if he is at all, but he talked about her a little bit today and Aidan’s not dancing around the subject anymore, so that’s something. We both kinda took Tía’s death the same way. He’s drinking less. More now that I’m here, but that’ll pass. So, yeah, I’d say he’s doing better.”

“Good to hear. Give Aidan a hug for me for putting up with that little bastard. I’ve gotta go though. Talk to you tomorrow?”

“For sure. Bye.”

Click.

Feeling renewed and somehow even more terrified than before, she stepped out of the bathroom with a bone-deep sigh. No one said a word as she sat down at the table and buried her head in her arms to avoid eye contact. When food was placed in front of her, she picked at it absently and discovered suddenly that she wasn’t exactly hungry. Her mind kept unwillingly drifting back to her conversation with Sal, and Mara’s death, and no matter how hard she tried to mentally distract herself.

“Okay,” Aidan announced, and clapped his hands in front of her to arrest her attention. RJ stared up at him with bleary eyes. “What’s up your butt? I can’t handle all the frowning at this table without anyone saying something.”

Part of her wanted to tell the truth and let it all spill out there on the table in the form of word-vomit, and let Aidan sort through her worries in the same way he did Finley’s. Jeri looked over at Fin and noticed the equal amount of concern in his eyes, and felt herself balking from the truth. No one needs to know. No one needs to see. They didn’t need to hear about how she’d known Mara was dead before the phone call. How she’d dreamed of her aunt being stabbed to death the night it had happened, how she’d felt it happen in the dream like it was happening to her. How she’d woken up in a cold sweat and convinced herself that just this once, just this one time, it was just a dream. No one needed to know how she’d doubted her own abilities for a moment, and how that had cost Mara her life.

“Fuckin’ nothing, fool,” she blurted out. “Just kidding, I found one of your dildos in the bathroom.”

Aidan sighed and rolled his eyes for the ump-teenth time that day. “Okay.”

Finley, who had the amazing ability to read people’s minds and yet not be able to tell when she was joking or not, looked disturbed. “Really?” He uttered around a mouthful of eggplant and bell pepper.

“No!” She shot back. “Look, I was talking to Sal while I was in there, because of the whole Mara thing, and I’m . . . I’m just dealing with some shit.” Not waiting for another comment, she shoved a massive mouthful of spiced vegetables into her mouth and wished to God that there was more beer in the fridge. An whim suddenly spawned in her mind as if a muse had dumped a bucket of cold water onto her head. “Are there any good parks with swings nearby? I haven’t been to a park in forever. I want beer and a swing set.”

Fin’s mouth quirked in consideration. “There’s one up the road with swings, and a nice dog park . . . We can probably walk there.”

Aidan looked to him. “Rainbow City? Sure. They close soon though, so you should hurry.” RJ pouted at him. “Okay, fine, I’ll drive us,” Aidan generously offered.

She cheered and shoveled the rest of the food into her mouth as fast as it would go. Aidan refused to stop for forties, which was unfortunate, but Jeri filled up her flask with some of Finley’s Maker’s Mark that he had left unopened in his room, so she was content in the hope that if she stayed drunk enough, the visions wouldn’t be bothering her for most of the night.

They caught the park at sunset, just as families were packing up in their cars with their children and dogs and to head back to their respective homes. Some distance away was a fenced-in portion of the community park that was reserved for skaters, and it was still very much alive and sparsely populated with young adults practicing their art. The playground was vast with climbing ropes, green slides, and made of carved brown-painted wood. It was replete with tall false towers and pointed gables, it appeared to be a small castle for children. A bright rainbow-colored sign with the park’s name greeted them as they entered the playground area.

Jeri was the only one of them really excited and made a beeline right for the swings, having not being to a park in far longer than she could remember. Have I ever felt carefree enough in one of these? She’d attended public school and gone to recess, same as all the other kids, but she’d stuck to tether-ball and never bothered with the swing-sets. Her parents had certainly never taken her to a park, and the only swing set they’d had had been the tire swing, which she’d always pushed Finley on rather than ridden herself when they were small. Confronted now with the too-small-for-her-rear swing set, she hesitated only a moment before clambering onto the creaking monstrosity and gave herself a kick off the ground to start moving.

Fin laughed from behind her. “You are seriously too big for that thing.”

She stuck out her tongue at his shadow in the fading light, and kicked herself up even higher. “Bite me.”

“I know where you’ve been, no thank you.” He climbed into the seat next to her and pushed himself with his feet a little slower. It became a race between them to see which one of them could get the highest - which Fin won only because Aidan started cheating and pushing him. They carried on until the sun finally dipped completely below the horizon, staining the sky orange with purple, fluffy clouds.

There was a distant figure in white approaching. RJ couldn’t see clearly while she was still swinging, so she hit her feet on the ground repeatedly to skid to a stop and leapt off the rest of the way. She craned her neck up to get a better look, and was horrified to see her aunt’s blood-stained, white-night-gowned figure approaching her on slow, unsteady feet. “Guys!” She shouted, and heard a scramble behind her. Then, she self-reprimanded as it hit her drunken brain that there was no way they’d be able to see the apparition. She was dead, after all.

“Fuck this,” Jeri decided and stood up to brush herself off. She turned away from her aunt’s spectre and stalked back to the Jeep, muttering under her breath. She pulled out her flask and took a large swig along the way, and held up a finger to Fin’s objecting form as she sauntered past him toward the parking lot.

Everything happened so quickly that all that really occurred to Jeri was that the world was suddenly sideways, and she was still traveling across it. The only thing that seemed abnormal initially was that the car was getting further away. “Hey!” She shouted as a sudden sliver of awareness spliced into her consciousness as she realized a few seconds too late that something - or someone - had grabbed her and was pulling her away. “Hey, whoa!”

She struggled. Something had grabbed her leg and prevented her from walking. The other leg managed to kick free and flailed wildly, hitting something that felt like ham and let out a human-sounding grunt. A wash of darkness came over her vision as something thick and heavy slipped over her head, and RJ began to panic. Suddenly, she started to wildly curse and scream, as some hidden instinct told her that whatever happened in the next few seconds would change the outcome. “FUCK YOU CUNTS I’LL KILL YOU SONS OF BITCHES GET YOUR CUNT HANDS OFF OF ME—” a litany of vows and curses poured out as she writhed and flailed with all of her strength against her kidnappers.

“JERI!” She heard Finley shout from somewhere behind her. The world that had tilted sideways suddenly began to fall with gravity to the ground, and she hit the asphalt with a thud and skidding of leather.

She started to roll, toward what she wasn’t sure but now that her hands were free it was all she could do to simultaneously crawl away from the noise of all the scuffling and pull the black canvas bag that they’d slipped over her head. Once she did, she was able to turn around and caught a glance of three men in all black with anoraks and Halloween-style face-masks. One of them rushed toward her, and she screamed at the top of her lungs.

He was intercepted by Finley. In a move she’d never seen from her wry, spry brother, her kidnapper was tackled to the ground and proceeded to get the living daylights punched out of him with Finley’s one good hand, and a few even from the bad hand still wrapped in gauze. The other two started to try and pull Finley off of their fellow, but something . . . Shifted.

It was a visible vibration in the air that she’d seen only once before in her life, right before Anton’s brain started hemorrhaging on the ground. They hadn’t known that was what was happening in the moment, neither of them being trained medical professionals, but her lawyer had explained the COD after during her trial prep. That had been what had actually killed Anton - not the beating, but the main artery in his brain bursting from strain.

The air itself vibrated with a high-pitched wine and the three men reeled away as if struck. Fin suddenly backed off, looking frightened for all of a second before steeling himself and making a straight line toward RJ to pull her up and bring her away. “Car,” was all he said as he grabbed her hand and yanked her along.

She stared at the men as they came to, right when the vibration stopped just seconds after Finley had grabbed her hand. They scrambled and together grabbed their fallen comrade, and ran for what seemed to be a pretty stereotypical kidnapper van colored in plain white with California plates. She didn’t even register the number as they picked up and drove off in a hurry while the few people still in the park lingered, some with cell phones out video-ing what was going on, and some like Aidan already on their phones talking to the police.

“Get Aidan,” she told Finley just as he opened the Jeep door for her, “and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He seemed like he was about to protest, but took in the seriousness of her expression and obeyed out of instinct. Aidan swiftly shuffled into the driver’s seat and started to pull out. “The police are on their way,” he mentioned as he backed up and spared a worried glance at Jeri.

It had all happened so quickly that it took her more than a few seconds to process what Aidan had just said. “Uh, no,” she finally managed out, “I’m not talking to the fucking police. I just got out of prison.”

“Someone just tried to abduct you—” Fin tried to interject, but Jeri was adamantly firm.

“I’m aware of what just happened,” she spat through gritted teeth. “What I need is silence, and a stiff drink. You people can talk to the police. Leave me out of it.”

“Is this because you work in LA?” Aidan had to wonder with some amusement. “You just innately don’t trust the blue badge?”

“I’m a metal guitarist who just got out of prison, I don’t need this kind of publicity right now,” she informed him as she pulled out her boot-flask. Her hand was shaking as she brought it to her lips. “Last fucking thing I need,” she muttered under her breath and kept drinking until it was empty. Thankfully, no one said anything to her on the subject, and they were quiet the entire way back to the condo.

She sat down in the same spot at the table she’d been in earlier. The silence alone was deafening. Fin and Aidan sat on either side of the round table from her, facing each other but doing everything to avoid looking at her. Aidan’s posture was thoughtful but tense, and more habit than necessity drove him to obsessively clean his glasses with a cloth he kept in his pocket. Fin began to fiddle with his leather cuff, clasping and un-clasping it, and sighing every few seconds as some errant thought of RJ’s most likely slipped under her guard toward him.

She didn’t want it. She didn’t want any of it. She didn’t want to be gifted, or to be targeted. The only thing she’d ever wanted was to play music. To her growing horror, tears began to well up in Jeri’s eyes and threatened to spill forth . . . Until something sent a shot of adrenaline spiking into her brain and her heart palpitating. Frozen in terror, she could do nothing but stare as every alarm bell went off simultaneously in her brain. The air coalesced in front of her and across the table, right before her eyes, a person materialized soundlessly out of ether seated right across from her.

It was the same Asian fellow as before, wearing similar garb but a pure and blinding white in color that wrapped around his form in some kind of science fiction toga that simultaneously made him look like a Jedi, and a dork. His solid golden eyes burned into RJ’s own, and she paled as she looked into them and beheld something incredible. Stars, nebulae, galaxies, worlds swirled in eddies as torrents of lifelines ripped across her mind. She saw what he saw when he looked at her, and beheld the first time the weight of her own destiny. It made her want to scream in rage, and agony, and desperation, but she held her tongue and remained still. Staring. Trapped. Helpless.

Aidan jumped up instinctively and blurted out, “what the fuckity fuck?! Where the hell did you come from?!” It was such an intrinsically human thing for him to do in the face of something so inhuman and improbable that it unexpectedly made RJ start laughing.

“Oh, it’s you again,” Fin mumbled in a decidedly unimpressed manner. “Aidan, this is the homeless magician we were going on about. You remember, right?”

At this assessment, the golden-eyed man blinked and turned to look at Finley. Whatever Finley saw in the man’s countenance shut him up. “You are no stranger to magic,” the stranger said.

“You know, it’s rude to pop up in people’s homes without introducing yourself,” Aidan suddenly shot in, drawing the man’s attention away from the siblings. He had leapt some distance away and somehow, inexplicably, had a pen and paper in his hand that he’d pulled from his schoolwork that was piled on the coffee table. “I promise there won’t be any more guns pointed at you if you introduce yourself and uh, explain how you did that little air-appearing trick.”

“It is a trick?” The man seemed confused. There was a beat of silence before he spoke again and said, “Ah, my name. I forget the mortal art of naming. I am called Ramiel.”

“Ramiel, is that with an AE or IE?” Aidan was writing down the name on the paper. She and Fin shared a mutually expressive look that at once demonstrated their exasperation with their circumstances, and their appreciation for Aidan.

“It does not matter,” Ramiel admitted, and turned his gaze back to the siblings. “I have come to you today to deliver you—”

“Portents,” Fin finished for him in exhaustion, “yes, we know. Just deliver them already so we can get on with whatever this is.”

Ramiel paused for a moment to look at Finley with an inscrutable expression, before turning back to Aidan and RJ - Aidan who was busily scrawling notes down and RJ who was just wishing that she hadn’t finished off the rest of the Maker’s in her flask in the car. “I have come to you today to deliver you a prophecy,” Ramiel explained quite reasonably, in the tone one might use to discuss what unseasonable weather we might be having. “It is as follows:—”

“Hang on,” Jeri held up a hand to interrupt him and turned to Aidan. “Ay, you writing all this down? And like, you can still see him, yeah?”

“Oh I see him,” Aidan confirmed and kept scrawling. “And yes, I’ve got it. Please continue, er, Ramiel.”

Ramiel didn’t seem to mind the interruption, and continued as if he hadn’t been. “Asmodeus, high priest of Ba’el Moloch, shall bring about his master’s rise into this world by germination. When the Prodigal Son returns to the fold, the daughter of Mary will give the Ba’el her flesh, and through the Son’s blood he will rise to conquer the world. I have been charged to deliver this message unto you, so you may prevent this from happening, for this consummation will result in the destruction of all life on this world. So I have been charged, and so I have spoken.” He turned his impassive golden gaze onto Finley, who seemed to be growing increasingly irritated with all the portents that were being dropped. “It is up to you, son of Mary, to protect your sister, and together end this cycle.”

Finley was about to open his mouth to speak, but Aidan beat him to it. “Hang on,” Aidan interrupted with a finger held up as he stared down at his notes. “Ba’al with an AL or EL?” He asked.

“It does not matter,” Ramiel repeated, and with that last remark, as quickly as he had appeared in the first place, he disappeared by dispersing into a cloud of particles into the air.

RJ let out a deep breath that she had held in, and leaned forward abruptly to bang her head against the table. “WHAT. IS. HAPPENING. TO. MY. LIFE?!” She bemoaned into the wood.

“Yeah, now it’s spilling into my life,” Finley grumbled, and leaned his head on his propped up elbow thoughtfully. “So did you really get all that down?” He addressed this question to Aidan over RJ’s prone head.

“Most of it, yeah,” Aidan confirmed and put aside the paper he’d written on. “Seemed like the best thing to do in the moment.”

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me to take notes, so thank you,” Finley said sincerely. “Also, thanks for not calling us crazy.”

“No one’s crazy,” Aidan scoffed. “People see things all the time that they can’t quantify. Crazy is an outdated term for something our ancestors poorly understood as mental phenomena. If I saw it, and so did she, we’re either all sharing the same delusion or it really happened. My conclusion is that it happened, and it was significant.”

RJ began to laugh hysterically. “Significant how?”

Finley’s tone was thoughtful in his reply. “He warned us about a danger the first time he appeared,” he realized. “Now we have a name, and even more portents to sift through. So, maybe—”

“Underwood!” Aidan suddenly cried out and stood from the table with a wobbly ‘bang’ as he hit his knee. “Ow!” he cried out, cradling it.

“Are you okay?” Finley asked, laughing. RJ turned in her sulking to smirk at Aidan’s pain.

“Yeah, fuck, I’m fine, just—fuck! Agh!” Aidan pulled off his glasses and sat back down, placing them on his notepaper. “Sorry, I was just thinking - I can set up a meeting with the head of occult studies. Eden Underwood - I took a class or two from her back as a freshman, she tried to convince me to switch majors, but I was kind of bored by the idea of studying comparative mythology for the rest of my life. I’m not a scholar. Uh, anyway, it seems like this guy is into witchcraft and knows something about your circumstances and maybe - if you cooperate with the police by, you know, talking to them,” he addressed this pointedly at RJ who glared at him defiantly, “maybe, just maybe we can figure out why this guy appeared, what the fuck he was talking about, and why people are trying to kidnap you.”

It all sounded like such a reasonable plan. There was only one flaw that RJ could detect. “Fuck the police,” she decided, and stood up. “Fuck this. Fuck my life. I need a smoke.”

No one stopped her as she grabbed her guitar and went outside. As a courtesy she left the main door open but kept the screen door shut, knowing that one of them were likely to want to keep an eye on her. She wasn’t really angry at the police, or the golden-eyed Ramiel, or even her life. What she was angry at was harder to determine, if she were going to be honest with herself. When have I ever been honest with myself?

Rose of Jericho was twenty-five-point-nine. She had eight-point-one years left on Earth. Time crept on by. She lit a smoke, and let the minutes tick by while Aidan and Finley discussed important matters inside that she would rather be left out of. She tuned her guitar with her MARY hand and strummed with the LIES, and tried to remember why she’d gotten the tattoo. She still couldn’t clearly remember.

She sat outside playing the first guitar she had ever received, stolen from her very first boyfriend who didn’t know how to treat it right. When she held it, she recalled the luthier was from Wisconsin and had poured his sweat and accidental blood from a ripped thumbnail into its design. The dark staining disguised the blotch of blood under everything but a black light. He’d tested it himself before lovingly shipping it in a box to a music shop for a fraction of its real worth. It had wound up in Kaleb’s hands by way of his older brother, who saw it collecting dust and knew he had to have it. It was black and covered in stickers by the time Kaleb showed it to his punk girlfriend, who fell in love with it at first sight. Kaleb called her “Rosie.” She’d hated that name. That was a name only her mother had been allowed to call her, and her mother was dead. She’d hated it and punished him - or so she told herself - by breaking up with him and taking his instrument.

She’d took it when she was fourteen. She stole it, and Dana had known somehow. Dana hit her until she admitted it, and Dana tried to throw it away. Rose of Jericho had hit her step-mother over the head to get her to stop, and then Sal had to step in with a booming voice and threats to get Dana to stop from killing his sister. Her father had intervened that night for the first and last time and said, ‘enough.’ He gave her back the guitar. Her father told her then that her mother used to play all the time, and was brilliant at it. It was the first of two entire times that her father, Patrick, hadn’t been a complete ass hat. The second time was when, the following night, he had asked his only daughter to drink with him and Salvador by the fire. It was the first time they had felt like a real family, and not bitter enemies forced to live with each other.

Rose of Jericho looked down at her empty boot-flask on the ground, and felt comfortable now admitting Patrick Ravara was her real father. They had entirely too much in common to be anything but closely related. They shared the same eyes, the same chin, and the same addictions.

So did Finley. He didn’t know it, but he had their father’s boundless temper. Occasionally when it manifested, it made her want to slap him senseless. Punching the wall to get rid of internal frustration was how Patrick had started before upgrading to punching his sons. Dana had not needed such an excuse. RJ supposed it was fair considering she’d accidentally slapped Fin back in Portland earlier for no reason other than prying into unwanted brain space, which was more of a reflex than deliberate attempt at hurting him; still, she could at least admit to sharing a gene pool with their dad. There wasn’t any shame in it. Finley, by contrast, was bitter even thinking of it.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t help himself. She couldn’t either. They were slaves to their tendencies. So, Rose of Jericho brooded and sat outside Finley and Aidan’s condo on the sidewalk feeling everything and nothing, and strummed Kaleb’s old guitar. She was Rose of Jericho, nearly twenty-six. Her birthday was only a week or so after her aunt’s funeral.

Her deft fingers ceased strumming absently for a moment when Mara appeared before her.

“Buenos noches, Tía Mara,” she greeted formally. After seeing her in the park, RJ knew there was no stopping this shade. Her Tía said nothing, but her wide brown eyes widened further with fear. “I can see you,” RJ assured. “Just don’t go spreadin’ that around.”

Mara was suddenly weeping uncontrollably, stooping in soundless pain the street. She knelt before her niece and bent to Jericho’s level, and her warm round face was wracked with desperation. A steady stream of blood leaked from a deep slit in her throat, preventing her from audibly expressing her pain. RJ looked at the wound quite calmly that gaped from her maternal aunt’s neck, and clinically clucked. “That’s a severed artery,” she assessed, “and some psychological trauma from your death that’s keeping you from speaking. That’s okay, we don’t need to talk. I can play for you, if you like.”

Tía Mara’s bloody-tear-stained visage in her white nightgown did eventually stop weeping. The desperation fled from her eyes gradually as the still-fresh shade listened to the music that poured from Rose of Jericho’s guitar. Jericho put out her cigarette and played her favorite tune, Debussy’s ode to the moonlight, and felt every part of her body and brain calm down. “It ain’t all bad,” Jeri assured the dead woman. “One day you’ll . . . Wake up someplace green. But for now, you should sleep. It’s a long ride ahead of us.”

Where Mara had stood was not even her shadow on the ground. Shades, Mara had called them in her life - her own word for the ghosts that permeated the world. She had seen them everywhere, in everything. The huddled masses of the dead had always plagued Mara’s dreams, as well as Jeri’s. It was a gift that Mara had described to her - a gift that led her straddle two worlds rather than live exclusively in one. RJ didn’t see it as such, and preferred seeing it as a curse that wouldn’t leave her. The shades were the nuclear shadows of people that their feelings left behind in the world. Rose of Jericho had been medicated until the age of sixteen for ‘hallucinations,’ when she had finally been told by her aunt when she moved into that house in Virginia that the shades she had always seen were real. That the dead did haunt the minds of the living, but only certain minds sensitive enough to see them. Real people. Mara saw them, Sal caught glimpses, hell - apparently RJ’s own mother had seen them too. The only ones who didn’t see them were everyone else.

Still, Rose of Jericho would rather never see them at all. It didn’t improve her life to have to console her weeping dead Tía; it didn’t make anything better or easier for her when she saw and heard the restless dead as she was sleeping off a binge or trying to perform on stage. In some ways it had perfected her concentration, as she’d had to adjust her entire life around the dead screaming for her attention on a near-constant basis. Alcohol tended to block it out most times, as did other drugs, hence her vices. Drugs deadened a lot of things, like the voice of Kaleb when she held the guitar.

“Hey.”

RJ turned to face her little brother, back-lit by the porch lights with his spiky hair. Still looks douchey, she thought. Finley knelt down to her level and sat down beside her. “What do you want to do?” He asked her after he struggled vividly to come up with the right question.

She ceased in her playing for a moment to address him. “It’s my life on the line, right?” It wasn’t really a question, so she didn’t wait for him to answer. “Then I want to keep moving. I’m going to LA to get in touch with my label after the funeral. I figure that poofter will show up sooner or later to tell us what we’re doing wrong, since he’s so invested.”

Finley was disturbed. She wanted to laugh at his concern. “I don’t know that we should be out in the open. The police are investigating—”

She cut him off before he could finish his self-serving rant. “The police can’t help shit, Finny. I’m fine, I’m—” Twenty-five-point-nine and doomed to die at thirty-three, she wanted to say. “I’m not going to die yet,” she struggled to explain. “It’s not . . . It’s not the right time. I don’t think they want me dead.”

He scoffed. “If they don’t want you dead, what do you think they want you for?” He asked, turning the Socratic method on.

She wanted to punch his smug ass so badly that she very nearly did and pulled back for the blow. She chuckled when he ducked away. “Some weird shit, I’m sure. Look, we’ll fly out for the funeral, and in the meantime I have to live my damn life.”

“You’re not going alone then,” Fin decided. It would have been a surprise if she hadn’t already bought his ticket - and Aidan’s - to LA from Virginia, last night when she knew they’d both insist on accompanying one another.

“I already bought yours and Aidan’s tickets to LA,” she told him with a smile and aligned her guitar back in her hands to play. “Timmy’s picking us up in a little under a week.”

“Haven’t seen him in forever,” Fin reflected as he stood up from the sidewalk with a joint-cracking stretch. “That’ll be nice. I assume you talked about it with Aidan over my head again?”

“You’re not his dad,” she criticized, “and no. That one’s on you. You’ll have to convince him. Try blow jobs, I hear those are very persuasive.”

Finley muttered curses at her in their parting, which made her happy. She continued on the curb playing until it got cold past midnight, and started to drizzle a faint sprinkle of rain. Then, she went inside and crashed on the couch. She fell asleep with one hand still curled around the neck of Kaleb’s guitar.

She was still twenty-five when she woke up to Aidan talking to Finley. She was still RJ. Time still crept on by.