“I don’t understand. Everything just stops?”
“Everything. There isn’t another word anywhere about what happens after. It’s as though—”
“As though they couldn’t see any further,” I said, filling in the pieces. A soft shock wave rippled through me. “Like the world ends and there’s nothing left to see.” I looked up at him.
“Sweetheart, they all say the same thing. They all say you’ll stop this.”
“Granddad,” I began, but stopped before my voice broke, trying for once in my miserable life to quell my fear, to hold it at bay and not start crying like a schoolgirl who spilled her Kool-Aid on her new dress. I felt Jared’s reassuring caress at my shoulder. “Granddad, you don’t understand. I saw how the world ends.” I scrubbed my face with my fingers before continuing. “I don’t stop anything. My own visions have proved that.”
Every time I thought of all those visions, of all those deaths, I started down the dark and lonely path known as hyperventilation. Panic tightened my chest.
Grandma took my hand to draw me back to her. “Pix, you were destined to stop this the moment you were born.” Her eyes shimmered with emotion in the low light. “You will succeed. We know it. We just … we don’t know how. And we don’t know what comes next.” When she looked up at Cameron, her eyes were filled with tears. I was clearly missing something.
“What are you trying to say, exactly? What could be worse than all this?”
Cameron stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets and kicked the floor at his feet before speaking. “They’re saying there’s no more. It all ends.”
“Yes,” I said, growing annoyed. “I got that part.”
Jared spoke then. “They’re saying, there are no more prophecies. And since you are the last prophet, they’re saying they don’t know if you survive.”
Their meaning dawned and I nodded slowly. “So, you’re worried I’ll die trying to stop this war.”
Grandma bowed her head. “We just— We’re not sure how to take the fact that there are no more visions. How to interpret it.”
“A grain of salt,” Granddad said. Still kneeling before me, he rubbed my knee reassuringly. “We have to take everything with a grain of salt.”
I could try to do that. I really liked salt.
“After all of our searching in the archives, we found something in your father’s belongings.”
They pulled out an old journal. I’d been through the box before and didn’t notice it, but at the time I’d been looking for official documents like birth and death certificates, anything on my paternal grandfather.
“Was it Dad’s?” I asked.
They glanced at each other uncertainly.
“We aren’t sure how your father came across this book,” Granddad said, “but he had it among some other things that belonged to your grandpa Mac. And Sheriff Villanueva confirmed that there’s blood on it.”
“Blood?” I asked as I took it from them, noting the brown stains that must have been the dark red color of blood at one time. My fingers tingled when they touched the leather cover, and a wave of electricity started at the tips and traveled up my hands. It was not a comfortable feeling. Brooke leaned over for a better view.
Before I could ask any more questions, someone called out from overhead. “Is anyone down there?”
We turned to a deep male voice and watched as a man descended the stairs, his heavy footsteps against the wooden slats causing dust to puff around him and fall over the sides.
“We’re here,” Granddad said, his brows drawn in curiosity.
“They told me where to find you.” The man ducked past the cement ceiling, a huge smile on his face. “I’ve come to join the fight. Where do I sign up?”
“Mac?” I asked, my voice soft with astonishment. “Grandpa Mac?”
He stepped off the last stair and waited, let me absorb the impossibility of his presence. We all stood. My grandparents seemed just as astonished as I was.
“What are you—? How did you get out?”
The last time I’d left Mac, he was sitting on the other side of a glass partition and we were speaking to each other through the intercom system at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas. We’d pressed our hands to the glass and he let me see what happened to him. To his wife, too. My paternal grandmother. She’d died the day I was born, protecting me. And he went after the men who tortured and killed her, took every single one of them out before finding her lifeless body tied to a chair. Though he was only trying to get his wife back, he’d taken the law into his own hands and killed people in the process. But the prison sentence he received because of it did nothing to evoke remorse. He would’ve done it again if he could have, would have killed them all again, he hated the monsters that much. But he did it out of love. An extreme devotion to the woman who stole his heart at a sock hop in ’53. They’d taken her from him, and that was not an easy thing to forget.
His teeth flashed a movie star smile. “I broke out,” he said, pleased with himself. “Told you, I came to join the fight.” Mac was tall but thick, his build solid. He had graying red hair with about a week’s worth of scruff on his chin. It made him look rugged and kind at the same time, but that smile was straight from Hollywood.
My utter amazement, my absolute astonishment took a backseat to the relief that flooded my entire body. I didn’t know why, but his presence was as welcome as rain after a seven-year drought. As a direct descendant of Arabeth, he knew things that my maternal grandparents didn’t. He’d grown up with the prophecies, had studied them from the time he was a child. He even had a touch of the gift himself, though supposedly the visions were passed on only to the females in the line.