“Pray over it?” I tuck my head back a notch. “I vote for destruction.” I kick up a loose board with my shoe, same damn board I’ve spent the last six years nailing down with tacks, and with a hulkish cry I pour every ounce of Celestra strength I have into uprooting it from its home of forty years. Forty years ago, my father had this monument to shoe disinfectant erected, and forty years later, his lesser, far less greater son insists on dismantling it. I couldn’t bring this place back to its former glory. I couldn’t restore what Skyla and I had without destroying it either. I am nothing. A sheer disgrace to those who bore me, who came before me in my Nephilim lineage. Almost pure. That’s what I was. Chloe, Skyla, and I—the three that could thrive. One is dead, one is evil, and one demands to cling to a Fem. We are a wily bunch, aren’twe?
The board finally gives with a creaking groan, and the universe I was attempting to uproot in my hands lifts with ease as I come up triumphant. It’s from the same lane Skyla and I shared so much history, and I’m keeping the damn thing—heck, I might even frameit.
Skyla and Gage stare over at me, wild-eyed, on alert should I go feral on them. I suppose the dead should be forever categorized as unpredictable. We don’t have a hell of a lot tolose.
“Don’t hog it all, man.” Gage comes close to winking, a stunt he pulls off when he’s having very real reservations about something. He bends over, and with a thunderous roar, in half the time, evicts the lane from its restingplace.
Skyla jumps back, waving the dust from her face while coughing. “You boys have fun with that. There’s something I’m hoping is still here, and if it is, it’s coming home with me tonight.” She trots off to the rack of balls in the back, scurrying from one end to the other, checking out the meagerselection.
“No, no, no!” Skyla tiptoes to each and every ball receptacle between the lanes in a panic. “Ohno!”
My heart warms because I know exactly what she’s lookingfor.
“Oh well.” Her hands slap to her thighs. “I guess it’s gone.” She buries her face in her hands a moment before coming up for air. “And so is mysanity.”
Gage takes her into his arms and lands a tender kiss to her temple. “Don’t worry. Logan will have this place restocked with the latest and greatest as soon as the bowling alley is up and running again. And it will be.” He scolds me with that lastpart.
“It was my favorite ball.” She tosses a guilty glance my way. I know the one she’s lamenting. A marbled blue and white beauty. “It was so pretty.” Her lids hang heavy in my direction. “I remember thinking it was as though you shrunk down the earth and the sky for me in that little heavenlysphere.”
A smile twitches on my lips, but I’m too somber to give it. I would shrink the earth and the sky for her if I could. I think everyone in the room knows that. The ball, however, is safe, sitting in a glass encasement, waiting for her in the butterfly room at Whitehorse. I think I’ll let her stumble upon that surpriseherself.
“Hey”—I tick my head to the very first lane, the one that I guess you could say started it all—“I’ve got a complete set of pins. How about I kick both your asses in one lastgame?”
“Ha!” Gage gives a howl of a laugh. “Youwish.”
Skyla clicks her tongue as she makes her way over. “You’re both going down. The gloves are coming off. It’s a take-no-prisoners kind of anight.”
Gage lends those baby blues my way. I recognize that determined look, smug and far too self-approving. “You are going down, Logan. I am winning, and there is not a thing you can do about it.” His smile is the last to arrive to the party as he joins his wife in picking out aball.
But my stomach is tight as a wire. Something about that look, those words, equals a far from empty threat. If I didn’t know better, I would say it was Gage’s best premonition todate.
Skyla, Gage, and I play game after game—and game after game, Gage beats the hell out of us. He bowls strike after strike. He sends the ball sailing down the lane in a sublime pin-straight line that only Gage is known to do. He proves himself a force to be reckoned with even if it were the last thing in the world he wanted to prove. Gage loves us, and yet he is primed, he is destined to destroy the core of what we standfor.
He knocks the pins down one last time with a dynamic force that sends them detonating into the four corners of theearth.
“Yes!” he howls, beating his left hand over his chest. “There’s no stoppingme!”
And that, my friends, is exactly what I’m afraidof.
Skyla and Gage take off, but I lie down in that very lane with my face to the ceiling, a heart full of sorrow, and fall into an unsettlingslumber.
That night I dream of my father—of my mother, roaming these haunted halls. The bowling alley is rundown, half the roof missing, the evergreens dipping in with their branches as if claiming its architectural victim. I’ve never believed Paragon wanted people here with their homes and roads and smog-riddled cars. She wanted to be left alone, cloaked in the fog, the mystery that surrounds those rocky crags at the base of Devil’s Peak. In my dream, there is no wrecking ball dismantling all my father worked so hard to build. It is the island. Paragon reaches in with her evergreen talons and lifts the floorboards up one by one until all that is left is matchsticks. She is the victor. By the time my lids flutter to life like a couple of sparrows, I’m convinced this island could dismantle anyone if ittried.
Even GageOliver.
* * *
There aresome days you wait for, pray for, love, hate, wish you could avoid. For me this day is all of those combined intoone.
Barron stops by in the morning on his way to work, and we cross the street from Whitehorse to stand in the parking lot together one last time before the wrecking ballhits.
“It’s coming back greater than ever,” I marvel at the old dilapidated building. Had I ever noticed what shabby condition it was in before? There is something inherently sad about it, something very much like Gage, and for that alone I want to weep because I would never take a wrecking ball to my nephew. Especially not after what I promised Skyla last night. I guess you could say I officially became Gage Oliver’s guardian angel, even if I don’t quite qualify for the job—even if there’s a force of darkness out there whose sole purpose in life is to make sure I don’tsucceed.
Barron lands his arm over my shoulders, and I take in the weight of my brother. Barron has always been a source of comfort, a refuge in the eye of the storm. He gave me the best life. He also gave me another brother,Gage.
“You know, son”—my heart warms when he calls me that—“it’s rare for anything that has the ability to regenerate itself to come back in its former glory when its future glory is what it was destined for all along. There is little value to looking back with the exception to avoiding the pitfalls you couldn’t dodge the first time. There is new purpose, new pleasures to be had, new victories, new alliances, and lastly, new discoveries for it to make about itself. I suppose that’s the wild card. What will it become ultimately? Something to be venerated? Regretted? Something to be treasured and cared for, resented and discarded? The lens of a future world is not ours to peer through. Time will tell.” He offers an abrupt pat to the back. “And I predict it will turn outwell.”
We stare off at the building, but those words Barron just spoke might as well have been a benediction to his one true son. Every word could be strained through Gage Oliver’s lineage. If you could write a poem with his DNA, Barron just pennedit.
