Chapter 3 Alive

Aurora's POV

I woke up gasping, with both my hands on my arm.

I checked my arm, it was whole. No bite, no blood, no scar. I turned it over in the morning sun and pressed my thumb where the teeth had gone in. I felt only warm skin and my own pulse.

'I died.'

I remembered all of it. The gym. The black wolf. Ivy's hands on my face while darkness closed in. I had felt my heart stop.

So why could I feel it beating?

I looked around, it was my bedroom. My crooked bookshelf, my gray curtains, a half empty glass of water next to a pile of journals. I had not seen this room since before the city fell.

My phone was on the nightstand. I read the date and then read it again. It said months before the end. But a screen could be wrong, and a dying mind could dream anything.

'It's a trick.' 

I did not know what to think or believe. I only knew I had to move.

I went to the mirror above the dresser. My face looked tired, and my eyes looked normal. Whatever had happened in that gym, nothing showed.

“Mom?” A small voice came from the hall. “You said we’d have pancakes.”

I got to the door in two steps. Ivy, stood there in her pajamas with her hair flat on one side and her yellow coat hanging on the hook behind her.

I dropped to my knees to hug her.

I could still see her face in the gym, when she looked at me and saw a monster. For one second I was afraid to touch her.

“Mom, I can’t breathe,” she said, because I had pulled her in anyway.

“Sorry.” I loosened my arms. My voice shook. “Sorry, baby.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“Yes.”

“The monster one?”

I went still. “What monster one?”

“The one I get sometimes.” She shrugged. “Can we go make pancakes now?”

“of course, baby.”

*****

I would not let Ivy out of my sight. I needed to know what what really going on, and why I suddenly seem fine.

I called her school and said she had a cough. She frowned at me and said she wasn't sick, and I told her I knew, and that was all I said.

Damian's coat was gone from the hook by the door. His coffee cup in the sink was still warm. His side of the bed had been made so neatly that it looked like he wanted me to notice.

'He left early,' I told myself. 'That's all.'

In the kitchen, a news anchor in a blue jacket was smiling at the camera.

“…and in health news, several hospitals report a small group of unexplained fever cases. Officials say there is no cause for alarm.”

I knew this report. I knew every sentence before the anchor said it, down to the pause before “no cause for alarm.” I had watched it once with a cup of tea going cold in my hand, and I had not thought about it again.

A dream could give me a date. It could not give me her exact words. I was really back, six months in the past.

Ivy swung her feet on the stool. “Mom, you're staring.”

“I know sweetie. Eat your pancake.”

When she went to draw in the living room, I sat at the table with a pen and a pad of paper.

First I needed the date of the outbreak. I thought back to Ivy's birthday. The city had shut down on that day, and we never cut her cake. I counted the months on the calendar, and I counted again, and the number came out the same each time.

182 days.

I wrote it at the top of the page and drew a box around it.

Under it I wrote everything I could remember. Which hospitals would close first. Which roads would fail. Which streets would burn. I wrote fast, because I was afraid I would forget something.

Then I wrote my family’s name. My father Richard, my mom Margaret, and my sister Gloria. I could not write what had happened to them. I stared at the page until the names blurred.

I turned the paper over and started a new list.

Keep Ivy safe.

2. Find out why Damian left.

3. Stop the virus before it spreads.

Under it I wrote a short list of things I did not understand. The wolves, the metal bands with a number and three rings.  And the way they bowed to Caden Blackwood.

He was out there somewhere. He had held me while I died, and now he did not know me. I did not know how to find him without sounding mad, or why I wanted to.

At noon I called Damian's office. I only wanted to hear someone say he was there.

“He's on leave this week,” a woman told me. “Since Monday. Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I must have mixed up the dates.”

I hung up and sat very still.

Damian had left the house early without finishing his coffee. He had gone somewhere, and it was not his office.

The afternoon went by slowly. I made soup, watched Ivy draw a purple horse with five legs and told her it was the best horse I had ever seen. I checked the locks twice. Each time I passed Ivy, I touched her hair, just to be sure she was real.

Damian came home after dark.

He hung up his coat and picked Ivy up and spun her once, and she laughed out loud. That was the hardest part. He was a good father. Then he kissed my cheek. He smelled like cold air and something sharp I could not name.

“Long day at the office,” he said, and smiled.

I had known that smile for twelve years. It was easy and warm, and it looked exactly the same as the truth.

“Was it?” I asked.

“Yes. Why?”

I looked at his face. He did not blink.

“No reason.”

His phone buzzed on the table. The screen lit up, and I saw it before he could reach for it.

B; Bring the signed form tomorrow.

He turned the phone face down. “Just work.”

In my first life, he had left two months before everything and never come back. That was about five months away. I had thought I had time to find out why.

But he was already leaving, one lie at a time.