Page 40 of Brought to Light
I texted Jesse’s burner phone on the way, a phone that stayed turned off and out of sight until something like this came up.
By the time I’d stolen a nondescript sedan, Jesse had responded, his coded message the right match to mine. We did a couple more back-and-forths, and then my stolen phone rang right as I pulled out of town and onto the little two-lane highway. I poked the speaker button.
“Where the fuck are you?” Jesse sounded like he’d hit the end of his patience a long way back and kept on going full-speed. “I tried your burner. Tried all the usual—you dropped off the face of the earth.”
Jesse cursed at me as I laughed, helplessly, unable to hold it back no matter how hard I tried. “Sorry,” I choked. “Sorry. Really, really fucking crazy few days, and you have no idea how you hit the nail on the head there. I’m in California. What’s the sitrep? Because I really have been off the grid. You seriously have no idea.”
“You’re going to be giving me an idea,” Jesse growled. Jesus, he was usually the soft-spoken one in our little duo. He’d really been worried. I knew I gave a fuck about him, but sometimes I’d wondered if the opposite held true. “I’ve had a couple of my old contacts checking up on things. It looks like we might be in the clear, as of this morning. I’m waiting for confirmation. In the meantime, head for Idaho.”
The line went dead.
I stopped for coffee and gas, and then more coffee, and I hit the Idaho border twelve hours later, just as the sun started to slant down behind me.
Another call, and Jesse confirmed we weren’t on the run anymore, as far as he knew. And he gave me a location about another two hours away.
I stopped for more coffee at another gas station, even though the coffee sucked, because I couldn’t fucking handle ordering from some guy in a coffee shop. Every contact I had with another human being felt disjointed, off, like I’d left some part of myself I couldn’t function without in the other realm. How could less than a week make my own world feel so alien? How could I care enough about someone I’d only known…I shoved that thought aside with extreme prejudice. Introspection never led anywhere good.
I finally pulled up in front of a cabin outside a tiny little nowhere town as the sun set.
Jesse stood on the porch waiting for me, and the sight of his sandy mop of hair and broad grin nearly did me in. He waved with his prosthetic arm and flipped me off with his real hand.
I had to sit in the car for a second to get my shit together. Fucking Christ, I’d turned into a sap.
Half an hour later, we sat at the cabin’s ancient Formica kitchen table, both with a neat bourbon. A third neat bourbon in my case, because I’d known I’d need a few to tell him my side of the story.
Jesse glared at me, hazel eyes narrowed. “They drugged you,” he said. “Callum, whatever you were on, there might be traces of it left. A full work-up—”
“I wasn’t drugged.” Even though that’d been my first thought too, a few days slash ten years ago. “I’m sane. As sane as I was before, asshole, don’t say a fucking word.”
Jesse chuckled and took a swig of his drink. “I didn’t need to. But come on. Fairyland?”
“It wasn’t like you’re making it sound, no glittery wings or wands or any bullshit like that. But it wasn’t the normal world. Wherever we were, the moon and the stars were different. It couldn’t have been normal Earth.”
He drained the rest of his glass and set it down with a loud clink. “You were drugged.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but…what the fuck did it matter if he believed me, in the end? I didn’t have any proof. It hadn’t crossed my mind to try to bring any back with me. I’d assumed, stupidly, that Jesse would take my word for it, because—I guess because he was the only person in the world I gave a fuck about, and that’s what you did for people you maybe liked, right? You trusted them.
If Jesse had told me the same story, I’d have poured him another drink, just as Jesse was doing for me now, and told him he’d been drugged.
The only problem was, now I’d been to two worlds.
And there were people I gave a fuck about in the other one.
“Sure,” I said at last, after a long, long couple of minutes of staring down into my bourbon, watching the light of the single bare bulb on the ceiling glimmer in the liquor in little streaks of white reflection. “I probably was.”
A long, heavy sigh was my only answer. I drank up. And then drank up again.
At some point, I drained the last few drops, looked at the bottle, found it empty, and pushed my chair back from the table. I hadn’t eaten in a while. Was I hungry? No, not really.
I felt empty, but it wasn’t food I needed.
“I’m sacking out,” I told Jesse, who frowned at me worriedly, and I went into the cabin’s small living room to collapse on the couch. The place only had one bedroom, and he’d gotten there first.
I lay with my arm over my eyes and tracked his movements by the sounds, first hitting the kitchen light switch, and then checking the door and windows, and then finally walking by on his way to bed.
The last light turned off, and I didn’t have anything else to focus on.
I should never have come back. I’d been shoving the thought away through the whole drive across the width of California and Nevada.
