Chapter 1: Jennifer

“Jennifer...”

I’d been rubbing my temples and staring at the table when I heard Finn. I realized he had been speaking for a few minutes and looked up to meet his eyes. He glanced over my shoulder and raised his eyebrows. Turning, I saw Cynthia at the entrance to the kitchen. I sniffled, took a deep breath, and turned to her.

“Sorry, did you say something, honey?”

She nodded. “Are you okay?”

Not knowing what to say, I remained silent, which in and of itself probably told her too much. “We got some bad news this morning. Some people that we help, well, they were hurt last night. We’re trying to figure out what to do about it.”

When I turned to Finn in a silent request for help, he shrugged. “We don’t talk about it often, but it’s no secret that we have money. Your aunt, the one you’re named after, she left us wealthy. Very wealthy. Your mom and I made some decisions after that happened. We decided to not let that money change us or turn you and your brother into people that ... well, sometimes people who grew up wealthy have issues, and we didn’t want you to be burdened with that.

“We still live in the same house I bought before we had the money and before I met your mom. We don’t have maids or cleaning people. Both your mom and I still have regular jobs, and we try to use the money to help other people.”

She was old enough to know at least a piece of what was going on. I continued where Finn left off. “You know that we give money to the clinic, right? Well, we do the same with an organization that runs women’s shelters. Do you know what that is?”

Cynthia shook her head.

“If a woman is in danger or she’s afraid, it’s a place where she can go, and they’ll give her a safe place to stay and food and whatever other help they can. Does that make sense?”

She rolled her eyes. “Mom, I’m thirteen, not five. Of course it makes sense.”

It broke my heart that I had to talk to my daughter about something like this. As much as she protested, she was still my baby. “Okay. So, this organization has five different homes where women can go to. It’s anonymous. We respect the privacy of everyone who needs help. The women can bring their children, and, and, it’s not just women we try to help. It’s not, I don’t know, discriminatory. If some man needs help, of course we’ll try to help him. Just not involving the shelter.”

“All right, but what’s going on? Why were you crying?”

Closing my eyes, I took another deep breath before continuing. “Someone attacked one of the homes last night. People got hurt. I ... I should’ve done a better job making sure that they had whatever protection they needed. We’re trying to figure out what to do next.”

Before Cynthia could speak, Finn interrupted. “That’s bullshit. Complete bullshit. They had top-quality security. Jen, you gave them absolutely everything that they asked for. This isn’t on you.”

I looked away from my husband, my love, and stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to suppress the sobs while in front of my daughter. True to who she was, her next question would have destroyed me if I wasn’t already broken.

“How can I help?”

I wiped the tears away and turned to her. “Just be who you are, honey. I may be a little out of it for the next couple of days. Your Aunt Siobhan is coming over and Yekong is flying in. We’ll figure this out.”

Cynthia nodded. “Be myself. I can do that.”

There was something odd about how she looked at me. Her gaze was fierce and reminded me of what I sometimes saw when I stared into the mirror. I shivered. That wasn’t a part of me that I was fond of. I’d known that there was something inside of me that scared those that I loved. It was a cold, dark and inflexible determination that nothing and no one would ever harm or threaten those close to me.

I didn’t know if it would be termed a mental illness or not. Mostly because I didn’t care. I never bothered to speak to a therapist about it, but if someone hurt my husband or one of my children, I would burn down the world to light my way as I hunted down the offender.

If I was seeing a reflection of that in Cynthia, I’d have to re-examine everything. I didn’t want her to be like me, I wanted her to be like Finn.

Shiv showed up, and she had brought her daughters. Cynthia loved her cousins and the three of them immediately went off to her room to do whatever girls do in this day and age. If it had been 1962, I would’ve had a pretty reasonable idea of what they were up to, but so much had changed since I was their age that I often just shrugged my shoulders and rested my hopes on that we were raising our children to be good people.

Finn and I explained to his sister what had happened. “Seven women dead. Three children left without their mother. One man killed on the street while he was walking his dog. That last one seems to be a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m guessing that one of the women in one of our homes had been fleeing a psychopath who had friends. Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing. Our security was circumvented, the cameras were cut off and the only evidence we have is a single photo from one of the women’s phones.”

Siobhan’s voice was cold and measured. “Any luck with the photo?”

I nodded. “Finn’s resources dwarf that of the police department. The man in the photo works for someone who runs a criminal cartel out of Queens, or maybe Great Neck. We’ve done some research, and it turns out he has a son that no one knows about. The boy and his mother came to us and are staying at one of the homes. Thankfully for them, not the house that was hit last night.”

Shiv started cleaning her nails and wouldn’t meet my eyes. She still had the same mannerisms from years and years ago when she hunted down the maniac that had kidnapped my son. My sister-in-law was slipping into business mode, and for her, business was violence.

“When you say came to us, you are talking about you personally?”

“No, the organization.”

She still didn’t look up from her nails. “We need to loop Pete into this. Find out which of his homes are currently not being rented. We’ll move the women and children there, clear out all of the homes they’ve been staying in and amp up security wherever we put them.”

It went without saying that whatever Shiv decided was what we were going to do. This sort of situation was her specialty. Grabbing my phone, I started texting Pete as she continued.

“Can you find out which of the other four homes this woman and the boy were staying at?”

I just raised an eyebrow at her.

She shrugged. “Okay, stupid question. Finn, I’m going to need that information.”

Brows furrowed, my husband stared at his sister. “Why?”

“You know why. Because they’re going to be coming back and I’m going to be waiting for them.”

I spoke up. “We. We are going to be waiting for them.”

Shiv turned to me. “Who’s we?”

“Me, you, and Yekong.”

That started quite the argument.

“Me and Yekong, fine. You’re not going. No offense, Jen, but would be a liability.”

I shook my head. “Less than you think. Jim has been teaching me how to shoot. Talk to him. On a range, I’m a better shot than he is. And he’s a better shot than you are.”

“First off, I don’t believe that for a minute. Second, there is a hell of a difference between firing at a target on a range and firing at somebody who might be firing back. You’re not coming.”

“I know what the risks are. Siobhan, these women ... these women were brutally murdered, and we created the shelters to keep them safe. It’s our fault. Whether you want me there or not, I’m going.”

The things that I had been through in my life had changed me. It pushed me just off-kilter of what most people called sane. Once I made up my mind, it was done. Absolutely nothing to dissuade me. Besides, I had an advantage that neither my husband nor my sister-in-law knew about.

Getting up, I walked away from the two of them and went to my bedroom. I opened the safe and took out the metal box. Tucking it under my arm, I went back downstairs, lamenting the stroke I’d had more than thirteen years earlier as my left foot dragged a bit. That was also the first time I’d seen the contents of the box.

Sitting back down at the table, I entered the code, opened the lid, and gently removed the contents that were wrapped in black felt. Finn and Siobhan watched intently. Peeling back the felt, I revealed the gleaming gun.

It almost shone as it lay there on our kitchen table, covered in runes. When I had been stuck in the dream realm while pregnant with Cynthia, her namesake, my other self, came to help me fight the creature I had first seen when I traveled from 1968 to 2018.

There was a waystation between Then and Now, a different realm that bordered on all others and seemed to be the center of creation. While there, in that blink of an eye, I saw a floating slug, larger than a dirigible. It was trying to break through from that reality into ours. It was cold, malevolent and starving. As it stared at me and I stared at it, part of the creature tainted my mind and part of my emotions tainted it.

My grip on sanity was forfeited as its sterile, ancient, alien presence bled into me and my penchant for human feelings entered the creature.

Later, it found its way into the realm of dreams and was using that realm to enter ours, ready to feast upon us.

Visiting Uluru in Australia, the closest place on Earth to the Dreamrealm, I tried to face down the creature. I would’ve died there if my other self hadn’t arrived and killed the creature using the gun that was now sitting in front of me.

I received the weapon by special courier a few years ago, along with a letter from Cynthia. She explained how she had received it from George, her bodyguard, protector and sometime lover, who had obtained it while he was in the Mossad. It had been used to kill Jack Parsons years after his supposed death in that explosion. He’d been fueled by occult power and had gone mad, and the gun put him down, just like it had the creature in the Dreamrealm.

She had thought that there may be a time I would need what sat before me and I was grateful for her foresight.

Almost mesmerized, Shiv slowly reached her hand towards the gun, but stopped and looked up at me. “It’s beautiful, it really is, but it’s an antique. If you were coming with us, I would get you something more practical, but you’re not.”

Making sure that she met my gaze, I took a beat and then responded. “I’m going, and I’m taking this gun.”

Siobhan rolled her eyes, got out of her chair, and walked towards the stairs. Without seeming to think about it, she reached around and touched her lower spine as she made her way out of the kitchen. Time had not been kind to any of us. For a while, Finn had been confined to his wheelchair, I still felt the remnants of my stroke, and Siobhan carried with her scars both visible and invisible from her many wars protecting those she loved. A few minutes later, I heard her upstairs with her daughters and Cynthia.

Going down to the basement, I took the frozen cookie dough out of the freezer, brought it back upstairs, and started doing some baking. It calmed me. I wasn’t much of a cook, and that was a heck of an understatement, but my husband and daughter were. They would make buckets and buckets full of different types of cookie dough and actually enjoyed the process.

When I needed to stop my mind from racing or to push away the thoughts that came at the edge of my consciousness with claws and daggers, I would portion out and bake a bunch of cookies and add something on top. I kept mini-M&Ms and Reese’s Pieces just so I could feel that I contributed something more than putting the cookies in the oven.

That afternoon my baking was because I could feel Finn’s stare in the back of my skull.

I knew that he was furious. I wasn’t a warrior; I wasn’t an assassin; I was an accountant. I got it. That I wouldn’t take Siobhan’s directives when it came to a situation like this seemed ludicrous to him. But he also knew that once I made up my mind, the discussion was effectively over.

It was part of what had been gifted to me from that creature in the realm between Then and Now. Things that bother other people just weren’t a concern for me. I could keep my weight within a pound or two without effort. I could hold my hand over a flame until I could smell the skin burning. Avoiding temptations seemed almost nonsensical to me. I simply couldn’t understand how and why it was difficult for some people. There were gifts and there were curses that came from my link to the creature, and my husband knew them all.

When the cookies were done, I made my additions: red sprinkles on half, blue sprinkles on the other half. I liked how they turned out and the endless cycling of my mind slowed.

Before she took my place in the eldritch machinery that was fated to drag me back to 1968, Cynthia had taught me as much as she could.

We were basically the same person, so it was a tremendous advantage to learn from someone who had lived an additional fifty years and had experienced what I had. One of our regular topics of conversation was what to do when the gibbering shadows in my head grew too loud. She used counting of something random, like the pinholes in a ceiling tile, or the steps from the back of the house to the shed. Sometimes something as simple as counting prime numbers worked. Other times, working on seemingly impossible math problems would help us cloak the fissures in our brains with a gossamer blanket of rationality.

I thought that she would be surprised to learn that I added baking for those we loved to our arsenal.

By the time I put the shakers of sprinkles back into the cabinet, Pete and Yekong walked through the door. I gave Yekong a little wave as I hugged Pete.

His voice was almost a whisper as he hugged me. “Some things never change, huh, Jen?”

He had been the son of Cynthia’s heart and had driven her wherever she wanted to go. For all of her other gifts, that woman was a horrible driver. It was hypocritical of me to dwell on that failing, because so was I. When she left us, he started driving for us despite his inheritance from Cynthia. And there he was, once again being the driver, picking up Yekong at the airport and bringing her to us.