Page 6 of Forever Frenzy
“I have none.”
I found that hard to believe.
“I will live where I can keep in contact with my son, and with you if you prefer it. I won’t interfere in your lives unless you ask me to, but if you let me, I can help Seth contain his power. It’s getting stronger and he needs to learn how to control it before he makes a mistake and someone learns about it. But I can begin to work with him now before anything happens with Saul. I don’t have to return to Earth;thatI want to make perfectly clear. I will only step foot on your soil if you ask me to. Otherwise, I’ll forfeit my ownership on this place and give it to Saul, should he want it.”
“He’ll want to talk to you.”
I was numb as I tried to absorb all the information. I looked at him seriously and asked, “Are you sure it’s cancer?”
Tage’s eyes said it all; the warm honey-tones cooling with sadness. “Seth is very good at discerning illnesses, Porschia, and he loves his Dad very much. He wouldn’t say it unless he was one-hundred percent sure.”
“Seeing you is hard,” I admitted. I’d let him go once, and now with this macabre twist of fate he might be back in our lives. Literally back from the grave. Saul was dying. Seth was crumbling under the weight of his unchecked power. The Infected were falling apart around us.
“I’ve been watching you since I left,” he said softly. “I’ve watched over you all. Close, but never close enough.That’sbeenhard.”
My heart was aching for so many conflicting reasons. I wanted to yell at him, I wanted to pull him into my arms, I wanted him to go to the Underworld, and I wanted him to live again.
“I have to go,” I whispered. It was a mistake to come here. I don’t know what I expected him to be like, but it wasn’t like this. I thought he’d be different, harder, but he was just Tage. And I hated and loved it at the same time.
Mostly I felt that by seeing him, stepping into The Sand and speaking with him, I’d somehow betrayed Saul.
With a heavy heart, I stepped back through the slash of early morning light and into reality once again.
What had I done?
Seth was acting weird. He wouldn’t make eye contact, and coming to work late wasn’t normal for him, either. I guessed he wanted to talk to his mom about the dizzy spell I had, but I was fine. We’d been working really hard to fix up some of the buildings in the city. A lot of the formerly Infected had moved there, and they needed better living conditions than the crumbling buildings that fell apart a little more each season. We’d burnt several down and were working like dogs to haul off the leftover debris to clear room for new structures, but more was needed. Especially now that people could move freelythrough the country.
Hammering a nail into the wooden frame of a new wall, I turned to my son. “You’ve been awfully quiet today.”
“Just concentrating on not losing any digits,” he smarted, focusing on the handsaw he pushed through a piece of rough wood.
It was just me and him here today. The others were spread throughout the city. “You could always reattach them. I wouldn’t worry too much.”
That got his attention. He stopped moving the saw and stared at me.
“What is wrong?” I enunciated.
“I don’t want to get into it here.”
“Oh, no? Then where? Where is better, Seth? Because whatever is eating at you, we need to hash it out.”
“No, we don’t,” he argued.
“Yes, we do.”
“You’re not gonna stop, are you?” He cursed under his breath. His mom hated it, but I let him if he needed it and in that moment, he did.
“Talk to me. We can’t fix it if we don’t know what the problem is.”
He threw the saw on the table. “That’s just it! Iknowwhat’s wrong and I still can’t fix it.”
“Well, what is it?”
He swallowed hard and looked away from me.
I stepped over the crisscrossing pieces of wood and made my way to him. “Is something wrong with me?”
His golden eyes flashed in warning.
