“Just a couple of hours.”
That’s it?
Even if that was true, something about me just felt radically different. What I had experienced in that dream, that vision, whatever you wanted to call it, it felt like it had truly fundamentally altered me. I just felt…
At peace, I guess you could say.
Like I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. Not Lane. Not the Reapers. Not even myself.
I could just... I could just be. I could just do what I wanted. I didn’t need to live up to anyone’s ideal of me. I didn’t need to fear the judgment or wrath of others.
I could just be Cole Carter.
But even more than that, even beyond my name, even beyond my identity, even beyond whatever you wanted to say that described me... I just was.
I lacked the words to appropriately describe it, and maybe my smoke-filled mind had created a hell of a hallucination. Maybe the afterlife wasn’t real, and maybe all I had experienced was a massive coincidence. Maybe I was just tripping some serious balls right now.
But to be frank, I didn’t care. I just wanted to implement what I had learned.
“Crazy,” I said. “But how did you—”
“I got concerned when you weren’t answering your phone,” Lane said.
“You always answered your phone,” Phoenix said. “At least, whenever I called. I knew if you weren’t answering when I called, something was up.”
“At first, man, I just said let them be,” Patriot admitted. “But Lane knew you best. He said after everything that had happened yesterday, he feared losing you again.”
He feared losing me?
“It’s true,” Lane said. “I might have been ‘happy,’ if you could say such a thing, the first time you left, but Cole, I need you in this battle against Lucius. So, yeah, we decided to send a group down to get you, to make sure you were OK. Turns out, we got there right at the same time the Fallen Saints did.”
“How the fuck did they know where I lived…”
Lilly?
No, no way. It couldn’t be. We were close... and besides, she’s probably somewhere in a train in Arizona right now. No reason she would have said anything to her father.
“Honestly, Cole, I think they know where we all live,” Lane said. “We know where Lucius lives. We’ve just been avoiding escalating to this point... until now.”
“Because I had his daughter.”
Lane nodded.
“I need you to answer this honestly, because it’s going to affect what we can expect from Lucius,” Lane said. “Were you intimate with her?”
I bit my lip.
“We didn’t go that far, but we were close. Definitely romantic.”
I said the truth before I could debate it. But strangely, that feeling of “oh shit, here comes the blowback” never came. I just felt at ease with having spoken the truth. Whatever happened, happened. It helped, of course, finding that center in me.
And sure enough, there was no blowback. Lane just nodded.
“She is kind of hot,” Lane said with a chuckle. “And there’s no better way to piss Lucius off than to make him think a Carter banged his daughter.”
Some laughter filled the room. Even I chuckled at that.
“I get what you mean,” I said. “So what now?”
