Page 101 of Inception

Good thing I already had the running thing down pat.

“Do you really think he’ll do something to me?” I asked, bouncing glances between the two of them. “I mean, he had his chance to make a move and he didn’t. He seemed a lot more interested in getting even with the two of you...”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Tessa, her raspy voice low and forlorn. “The only way he can hurt me is by hurting the people I love. He’s done it before. You don’t know him. You don’t know the things he’s capable of doing, even to his own family.”

“I do know! I know what he did to Gabriel.” I wanted her to know that I wasn’t that naive. That I had picked up a few details along the way and was still standing on my own two feet.More or less.

“You told her?” I couldn’t tell if her glare was rooted in anger or just shock that he had the audacity to flout her.

“Not everything. I told her how I turned. I had no choice, she needed to know the truth about Dominic.” His voice was surprisingly firm on the point. “I left you out of it. I thought she should hear that part from you.”

“Well, then.” She turned back to me, steely eyed. “It looks like you don’t even know the half of it.”

And that’s exactly what I was afraid of.

30. BEDTIME STORIES

The rain gathered traction as it batted down over Hollow Hills and all of its collared inhabitants without the slightest regard for our well-being. I sat on the couch, face to face with my sister, waiting for her to fill in the holes to a story that has been chock-full of them since the very beginning. Outside, the wind howled viciously, loud as an army of disembodied ghosts convening on the other side of the glass, crying out to us for sanctuary, for reprieve.

“I’m not perfect,” started Tessa. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, mistakes that I’m still paying for today, and I accept that.” She lifted her chin as if to illustrate her valor. “Even still, I always hoped I’d never have to have this conversation with you. That you’d never be in a position where youneededto know any of it, but I guess that’s not possible anymore. I don’t know how else to keep you safe now.”

She hadn’t even revealed anything and already I had the overbearing urge to run for the door.

“Two years ago, I made a decision to do something I knew was wrong in order to help a friend.” Her eyes bore into me with a grounding intensity. “To help my Keeper.”

“Are we talking about Linley Macarthur?” I turned to Gabriel as the house lights flickered aggressively. “Was she the Keeper from the future?” The one from his story.

Gabriel nodded.

“I knew it.” It came out smug.

“She was more than just my Keeper—she was a sister to me.”

I was surprised to hear so much emotion in Tessa’s voice, a voice that had always been so cool, calm, and collected under even the most intense fires. Sometimes irritatingly so.

“It all started senior year, the night we went to Easton’s Fall Festival. Linley thought it would be fun to get a tarot reading from some Gypsy hack running one of those fortune-telling booths,” she said with a dismissive hand gesture. “Turned out she wasn’t a hack after all. Probably had some Seer blood in her,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

A riotous round of thunder rang out around us, jolting me with its reverberations.

“She read Linley, told her things about her family that no one else knew. Things about who she was. That she was gifted—different from the others. Everything she said was spot on and Linley was loving every second of it. We both were.” Tessa’s eyes slid over to Gabriel before boomeranging back. “That is, up until she drew the Death card.”

“TheDeathcard?” I spoke in whispers, frightened to my core at the prospect of such a thing existing. I didn’t want to know, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from digging deeper. “What is that? What does it mean?”

“It means she prophesized Linley’s death. She knew something was coming, something horrible and unnatural.” Tessa’s distant eyes traveled over my shoulder, imaging it, reliving the scene in her mind. “The next day, Linley went to see the Council and told them about what happened. She demanded one of the Elders read her to disprove the prediction. She demanded it even though deep down she knew it was true.”

“And did they?” I swallowed hard. “Confirm it, I mean.”

She gave a morose nod. “Nothing was ever the same after that night. Over the next few months, Linley became completely obsessed with it—with her future—with changing it.”

“But I thought you couldn’t stop Death? I thought it was like, ordained?” I didn’t mean for it to ring out so lax.

“It is. Death is the one appointment we all have to keep no matter who you are or where you come from. Linley knew that better than anyone, but she also wasn’t the type of girl to give up on what she wanted—even if it went against the very laws of nature—and what she wanted more than anything else at that moment was to find a way to come back.”

“What do you mean come back?” I blurted out, somewhat taken back by this. I was under the impression she wanted to stop her death, not return from it. “So Linley wanted to be a Revenant?”

“No.”

“Then what? I didn’t know there was another option.”

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