Griffon’s face shows concern as he studies me. “Everything okay?”
I push the memory of Connor down as far as I can and try to erase the heaviness that’s sitting on my chest. Whatever our relationship was in the past, Connor doesn’t have anything to do with my life now. Griffon and I have been through so much in such a short time, I’m sure we’re meant to be together. We’re destined for each other.
I stand on my tiptoes to give Griffon a quick kiss. “Better than okay,” I answer. “It’s fate that we’re here, in this lifetime, together again.” A chill runs up my spine as I feel traces of the passion and desire that Connor’s green eyes stirred in me. In the sixteenth-century English me. “And you can’t mess with fate, right?”
Two
Maybe you can’t change your fate. But you can change your mind.
“I can’t do this. We need to go back,” I say through gritted teeth, my hands in a tight grip on the bridge’s metal railing—the only thing separating me from certain death.
“I thought you were finally getting over your fear of heights,” Janine says. “After pulling Griffon back onto the roof of a three-story building, I figured walking across the Golden Gate Bridge would be a snap.”
“You’d think that,” I say. My stomach is churning as I stare straight out at the horizon, past the skyscrapers of San Francisco on one side and the hills of Marin on the other, to the point where the dark green ocean meets the edge of the world. “But then I had adrenaline going for me, what with Veronique pointing a gun at the two of us.”
“Come on, Cole. Just look down,” Janine says, bending over the railing toward the water hundreds of feet below like it’s no big deal.
“That’s what I’m trying to avoid. You know how much I hate this.” Watching my best friend fall from a rooftop a century ago makes me uncomfortable standing on a ladder; forget about being a few hundred feet above the waves of the bay.
“Which is exactly why I thought the bridge would be the perfect spot for our empath lesson.” The beads on the ends of her long braids make a clacking sound as she pulls away from the railing and looks at all the other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Name a place in the city that contains more emotion.” She leans in toward me. “Think about it: you have the giddy tourists snapping photos on their phones to send to the folks back home, and the commuters driving their cars over the bridge, worrying about the errors in the latest spreadsheet.” Janine pauses. “And then you have the people who are so afraid they’re going to fall that they can barely move.”
I allow myself one quick look down, and it just confirms my worst fears. My hands start to sweat and I panic, sure that I’m going to lose my grip on the railing. “It’s not so much that I think I’ll fall,” I confess to her as a bike rider whizzes past us on the sidewalk. “It’s that I’m afraid that for one split second I’ll allow the crazy part of me to take over and I’ll jump. Because I know I’ll regret it in the first millisecond after my feet leave the concrete.”
“Most people do,” she says, watching the whitecaps on the water below us. “I know an Akhet who died this way in his last lifetime. Said the same thing—regretted it all the way down until he hit the water. Splat.” She takes one last look over the edge and I know we’re both counting the seconds it would take for a body to fly through the air and land with the smallest splash down below. “Come on, let’s walk.”
“I don’t think I can,” I say. We had only made it a few hundred feet away from where the water hits the rocks on shore—not even to the middle of the bridge—before I had to stop.
“You can,” she says. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
I let go of the railing with one hand. “On one condition. I get to walk closest to the road.”
“Okay,” she says, starting off without me. “But you know you have a much greater chance of being hit by a car crossing the bridge than you do of accidentally flinging yourself off the side.”
“I’ll risk it,” I say, already feeling a little better now that I’m a few feet away from the edge.
Janine gives me a smile that looks just like Griffon’s. Although her skin is darker than his, certain gestures or expressions remind me that, despite the fact they’re both Akhet, Janine is definitely his mother in this lifetime. I wonder if it’s weird for her that I’m with him.
I look around at the people on the bridge. Even though it’s unusually bright and sunny for a San Francisco summer day, the wind up here is fierce, and most everyone pulls their jackets tightly around them. “So are we really going to do a lesson outside? In front of all these people?”
“It’ll be fine,” she says. “Maybe things will go even better in the fresh air.” Which is a nice way of saying they haven’t been going so well the last few weeks cooped up in her office at the university. If the past few training sessions are any indication, my empath skills may be as developed as they’re ever going to get.
“If you say so.”
“I say so,” she says. “Haven’t you heard it takes ten thousand hours of practice to master anything? I’m sure you put at least that into the cello over your lifetimes.”
Janine glances at the scar that runs down my left arm. The shattered window has been fixed for months, but the physical damage to my hand seems to be permanent. In a split second and with a single shard of glass, Veronique managed to change the course of my life forever. Instead of touring the world playing cello, I can barely hold a bow, much less manage the complicated fingerings that an orchestra demands. “Look,” she says. “The cello brought you a long way in this lifetime. And from what you’re remembering, it sounds like it took you a long way in the past too. But maybe that phase is over now.”
As much as I know she’s right, I wince at hearing the words out loud. They seem so final. “Mom and Dad don’t want to admit it’s over,” I say. It’s so much easier to push my anxieties off onto them. “They think this is all just a temporary setback, that I’ll be back to playing in no time despite what all the doctors say.”
“And what do you think?”
I take a deep breath and risk a glance back down at the water through the slats in the railing. “I don’t believe in miracles.”
Janine looks at me. “Sometimes a miracle is just a lot of luck and sweat in disguise.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. I don’t know what I think anymore. One minute I know my cello career is over even before it began, and I’m okay with that. The next minute, the thought of never playing in front of an audience again feels like a punch in the stomach.
“Maybe you won’t be able to play at the same level anymore,” Janine says. “But maybe there are ways you can utilize your other skills to make the greatest difference.”
“But my empath skills suck so far.”
“They don’t suck,” Janine says, and I can’t help smiling. She never swears, and even that word sounds funny coming out of her mouth. “You’ve done it before; you were able to harness those skills when you needed them most. You just need more practice to be able to do it on command.” We walk a little way in silence and I look up at the tall orange metal towers that hold up the cables on the bridge.
“Even though you were gifted with the cello as a child,” she continues, “your parents still got you lessons, didn’t they? This is the same thing. Taking an innate skill and honing it until you’re a master. And since a true empath is rare, these skills are more important than ever.”