Someplace green

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 too 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 over fifty 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 quiet 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, she thought, knowing Finley could probably pick up on it and smirked. "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-haired person 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. Her style. 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. 

Salvador 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 moments later. On a 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 and generous dosage of sparkling wine. "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 server 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.

Finley shrugged, lips down-turning around the cigarette as he lit it into a contemplative frown. He folded his arms on the table. "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. When she'd looked into Teegan's future once, she'd only seen the darkness of space, an endless long journey without a destination. It had disturbed Teegan to hear that, so Jeri hadn't spoken of it more than the once and had never bothered to see as far as Teegan's death - for it had been too far off for her to see. Jeri at the time attributed this anomaly to alcohol, but now she was unsure.

"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 how dangerous his feelings were. Sometimes he got so angry that it shook the world. And she couldn't figure out how to 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. I kinda find myself missing it at odd moments," she added, feeling a little sheepish.

"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 shamelessly, "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 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-hued 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. You're like, smarter than me in every way, but 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 break his leg on a curb." That mental image filled RJ with such delight that she reflexively laughed.

"Has he tried to call you?" She wondered. Their dad usually called her, crying and stinking drunk, about once a year - on Christmas - and occasionally asked for money. She usually answered, because it was therapeutic to yell at him.

"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 a 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 about the past at such a distance was tricky. But, if she thought hard enough about it and concentrated, and let herself drift away a bit, 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!" He chirped.

"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 kitchen bitch. 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 Sal'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 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."

Sal 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 several 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."

"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 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. A 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 specter 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 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 a 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 whine 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 minute 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 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 actually 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 pretty. 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 haunted the minds of the living, but only certain minds sensitive enough to see them. 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.