Page 167 of Cherish

“You know, Flint,” Eden starts out preemptively, “I’m actually good right now. There’s some really cool stuff happening in South Africa with poaching resolutions and the dedication of a huge museum. I’ve got this. Maybe you should go check on Heather, see if she’s doing okay.”

“Are you kidding me?” Flint sits down at the desk next to her and kicks up his feet. “There are hundreds of TVs on your wall alone. How are you going to watch them all?”

“I’ve been doing fine so far,” she mutters. I can’t look at her expression to gauge her mood, because there’s been a heroic rescue from a train derailment in Portugal, but she sounds unimpressed.

“Fine isn’t good enough,” Flint retorts. “Together, we’ll do the best recording the Curator has ever seen.”

“Ooooooor you can check out Jaxon over there,” Macy suggests, still scribbling away. “He seems unusually quiet. He must be struggling.”

“Nah. Jaxon likes to always go it alone,” Flint says with a huge grin.

None of us are touching that—except Jaxon, whose pen only pauses for half a second before continuing to move across his page.

“You don’t have to sound so disappointed,” Jaxon says mildly.

“Why would I be disappointed?” Flint asks, his grin slipping. “Just because you don’t need me doesn’t mean someone else won’t.”

And just that easily, Flint makes me feel like a total jerk. From the minute he got into this room, he’s been trying to make things easier for us. Is he succeeding? Maybe, maybe not. But he’s still trying, despite his own pain, and that counts for a lot.

“You can help me, Flint. I have too many TVs to keep up,” I tell him, noticing that Jaxon starts scribbling even more furiously. I point to a bank of TVs on my left. “Grab a notebook, and you can do that row right there.”

“On it!” he says, racing to the closet to get one of the Curator’s special journals.

Once Flint has a dedicated set of TVs, things go much more smoothly. It’s still exhausting work, though. I can’t imagine how the Curator does it almost completely by herself—god or no god. Not to mention the fact that she’s been doing it pretty much forever, if the closet filled with journals is any testament, without so much as a day off.

It’s unimaginable.

Sometime after six, Heather comes back to relieve a couple of us. And then we spend the rest of the night trading off.

When it’s Hudson’s and my turn for a break around five a.m., we stumble upstairs and fall into bed for a couple of hours of rest. But once I’m away from all those incessant TV screens, I can’t sleep—even after I wrap an arm around his waist and cuddle up against him.

But when I close my eyes, all I can see is everything happening in the world—good and bad. I know that’s life, know that shit happens in the world every day, even more so after spending the last twelve hours being bombarded with so much of everything.

Everything bad. Everything good. Everything…everything.

I thought I was keeping it together, keeping the job in perspective. But now that I’m closing my eyes, all I can see are the images coming at me like that over and over and over again.

It’s a lot. Maybe too much.

Everyone else seems to be handling it—even Heather, after she returned from her break—but everyone else isn’t a gargoyle.

My whole life, my parents told me I was too empathetic, that I had to learn to let some things go. But I’ve never been any good at that—even before discovering I was a gargoyle. I know some people can move on when bad things are happening, and I don’t judge them for it. After all, most of the time it’s just how they survive.

But I can’t do it. The gargoyle in me wants to right every wrong. It wants to protect people who can’t protect themselves and balance the scales of justice for every single person in the world who needs it.

Just the idea is impossible—and if I could, doing so would end up throwing off the balance of the world in other ways. I get that. I do. But it’s impossible to pretend it isn’t happening, either, especially after spending all those hours sitting in that room, recording so much bad stuff—and not recording even more.

It’s definitely been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

Despite the warmth flowing in from the balcony doors, I’m chilled to the bone as I cuddle even closer to Hudson. He’s half asleep, but he must feel me shivering, because he rolls over and pulls me closer, until my head is pillowed on his biceps and I’m half curled up on his chest.

His heart is beating slow and steady beneath my ear, his chest rising and falling in a slow, hypnotic rhythm that finally cuts through all the pain and horror and allows me finally—finally—to sleep.

For a little while, at least. Because I haven’t been dozing long when all of a sudden, I become aware that something is wrong. I don’t know what it is—I’m too asleep to figure it out—but something definitely is.

I sit up slowly, rubbing my eyes as I try to banish the sleepiness weighing me down like an anchor. I look around, trying to figure out what’s wrong. But nothing stands out.

The room is still dimly lit, the sky outside the balcony still dark. My phone doesn’t have any new texts or calls on it, and Hudson is sleeping peacefully beside me. Finally, I lay down, determined to go back to sleep. And that’s when—out of nowhere—Hudson cries out and jerks against me, hard.

---