Without question, the portal was closing quickly now. The dancing blue lights began to knit together to form a solid fabric. Elliott said something else, but Cadence couldn’t understand him anymore, and as the blue lights began to fade and flicker, Cadence collapsed on the ground, overcome by her grief. She had thought that seeing her friend again would bring her closure, that at least having the chance to say the things to him she’d meant to say before he died would get rid of all of the regrets. But instead, all it had done was open fresh wounds. The fact that Elliott was happy made her feel slightly better, but it did very little to stop the throbbing pain in her heart. Aaron was right; she never should have done this. She should have let the healing process continue. She should have left well enough alone.
The wind whipped up again, this time in reverse, as if everything was being pushed out of the portal instead of being sucked in, and though she didn’t look up to see what was happening, her whole body heaving with each sob, she was certain that meant the portal was closed now, and Elliott was gone. Again. She broke into a fresh round of tears, the pain she felt inside of her every bit as raw as it had been that night in Sierraville when the unthinkable had unfolded around her and she’d seen him lying lifeless in a pool of his own blood.
“You know, I’m really not sure what all the fuss is about. It’s not like you could even stand me most of the time anyway.”
Unable to trust what she was hearing, Cadence peeked up through splayed fingers, and then nearly fell over backward. There he was, sitting next to her on the ground, dressed in the outfit he’d been wearing at Sierraville, solid, real, alive.
“Elliott!” she screamed, launching herself at him, knocking him backward onto the desert floor. “Oh, my God! You’re here. You’re real! You came through!”
“Ouch. Yep, blows to the head still hurt,” he said, rubbing the back of his head as she lay sprawled on top of him.
“Sorry,” Cadence said as she rolled off of him and helped him up. “I just… I didn’t think you were going to come through. I thought you were gone.”
“I wasn’t,” he admitted with a shrug, dusting the sand off the back of his black leather jacket the best he could.
Cadence helped brush the rest of his back off and then wrapped her arms around his neck, careful not to knock him over this time. He crossed his legs and pulled her into his lap. “What made you change your mind?” she asked, her head cradled against his shoulder.
“Couldn’t stand to see you cry,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Also, I knew you were lying about Cass. Something happened, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “She’s okay, though. I’ll explain everything to you, I promise.”
“Damn,” he muttered. “Okay. Where are we anyway?”
“Forty Mile Desert. Nevada.”
“Nevada? You know, the last time I made a trip to Nevada, things didn’t go so well, right?”
“Oh, I recall,” she assured him. “But I needed to make sure the sky would be clear.”
He nodded his head, his curly dark mop of hair flopping around as he did so. She couldn’t help but reach up and straighten it. “So what’s the plan now, kid?”
“Do you have your IAC?” she asked. She’d have no way of knowing whether or not that would come back with him.
“Nope. Only voices I hear in my head are my own.”
She giggled. “Okay, well, I guess we head back to Reno for the night, and I’ll contact Aaron and let him know you’re back.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he replied. Then, glancing back behind her, he asked, “Is that a KFC bucket?”
She grinned at him sheepishly, “I needed something to keep the plastic bag of your ashes from falling over.” She noticed the bag was completely empty now.
He was shaking his head at her the way he did when he couldn’t believe her antics. “You know, this whole time, I just assumed you’d put me in an urn like a regular person. Glad I came back so I didn’t have to spend eternity hanging out with Colonel Sanders.”
Cadence broke into another fit of laughter. “You were in an urn, silly. I had to leave the urn when I brought you here because I had to trick Aaron. It’s complicated.”
“If you say so,” Elliott replied, shaking his head again. “So you think Aaron’s gonna be pissed?”
Cadence considered the question. “He’ll be happy to see you. He’ll be pissed that I tricked him and that I didn’t do what he said. And he’ll definitely be pissed if he was right and the portal allowed something else to come through, too.”
“Well, nothing came through here,” Elliott reminded her, glancing around as if to emphasize that point.
“Oh, I know,” she replied, “but he said it could be anywhere in the world.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will have spawned in the middle of a silver mine.”
Cadence couldn’t help but laugh out loud again as she pulled herself up off of him and clambered to her feet. “I doubt we’d get that lucky.” She offered him a hand and pulled him up beside her. “I just hope that, if something came through, it’s not nearly as powerful as Aaron said it would be.”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure we can take it,” Elliott assured her.
Cadence nodded, but in the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but feel as if something had shifted, like the world was beginning to slide askew. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, and she hoped it was just the remnants of those dancing lights in the atmosphere, but her gut was telling her that this veil was not the only one torn asunder.
