Chapter 2

MARIA

I felt conflicted when we arrived back home. Or at least as close to home as we were ever going to see.

A big part of it was that I suddenly felt so helpless. All my life, I'd been the master of my destiny. I saw Burt the first time when I was about Val's age and within a week I knew he was the one for me. It took less than another week to convince him of that and we were married and had started on our family a couple of months later. The two of us worked together, raised two wonderful children and created a thriving ranch before Val started junior high. Nobody gave us anything; we worked for it. If we got lazy, the ranch and our future suffered. If we put more effort into it, we could see the results a short time later.

The thing is we made it work. We had control over our lives, over our environment.

My first slap in the face was losing Val. When he went on that survival trek and didn't come back and that damn Jimmy wasn't any help, I almost lost it. I found myself bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. And there was no way I could control it. I just cried like a baby until I was done and no amount of holding, consoling, or anything else had any effect. It was like a part of me died when he didn't come home. And of course, being his mother, there was always that nagging thought that I should have been able to do something to prevent it, even though I knew that wasn't true.

The man who came out of that forest wasn't the boy I'd watched go in three months before. Bev had told me she was going to claim him years ago and had been getting her nerve up to really go for it all that time. When he left with her brother to do their wilderness thing, she grabbed him and laid one on him that I'm sure left him hard for the first few miles into the woods. She was worried about him when he didn't come back but she was still strong. She made no bones about it. When he came back (not if, but when), he was hers, no matter what. But when he did show up, she was the one following him around like a puppy dog.

There were other changes in him, his physique and his new ability to wish things to happen being the two most noticeable. Talking to him was different. He had grown up. It was like he'd been away to college for four years, not lost in the woods for three and a half months...

And then losing Burt. Thank God, it didn't happen, but I knew in my heart it was going to as I watched him waste away to practically nothing from that damned cancer. My strong, handsome man turned into a weak skin-covered skeleton right before my eyes.

Dreamer and his cave gave me back both my men. There's no doubt Val went in there to die and Burt was practically dead when he made Val and Bev take him there and that neither of them should have come out alive. When the three of them came out of the forest with their wolves, I swear, they looked like gods. Burt never looked so good and there was something magnetic about him, something I realized Val had had when he came out and hooked up with Bev. When Burt told me we were going back to his cave, there was nothing I could have done to stop him, even if I'd wanted to. As we walked away from the kids and he put his hand on my butt and squeezed, I wanted to fall on my back right there and let him claim me.

I felt better than ever before when I woke up from my nap in the cave. I'd had my indoctrination and seen all the things that Dreamer had helped others with throughout the ages and was more than willing to help do whatever job it was that had drawn Val and then the rest of us to the cave.

But to find out everything was gone and we had no say in the matter and didn't even realize it was going to happen until it was over and done with – that was too much. I felt like I'd been an ant, toiling away, doing my ant thing, happy with my life and my production only to find I'd been in an ant farm all along and the kid who owned it wasn't happy with things and decided to shake it up, destroying everything I'd worked for with the rest of my hive. I could control my destiny up to a point and then, seemingly at a whim, that destiny could be taken from me and another forced upon me. Or I could cease to exist, as almost all my fellow inhabitants of Earth had. What happened to them? Did they go to their chosen heaven or hell or did they just disappear into oblivion, as if they never were?

Had I been happy with the way things were going on our planet? Heck, no. The two political parties, each a mirror vision of the other, constantly striving for more and more power while dragging more and more of their constituents into their thrall both scared and disgusted me. The greed and power madness of the politicians was dwarfed by that of the corporate world. The pursuit of the almighty dollar justified doing anything. Morals and ethics were for weaklings, something to tie you down.

Mankind had succeeded in polluting just about everything on the planet. The skies were brown, the dirt was drained of nutrients, replaced with insecticides, water contained enough poison to cause cancer, whether it was from the tap, the stream, as rain or in bottles. The government even regulated how much poison they could include in foods and beverages.

So, we had a chance to start over. The soil was back to where it should be, maybe even better. That was obvious by looking at the trees bursting with oversized fruit. I could smell life when I held a handful of dirt near my face. There were things growing in my garden that shouldn't survive further north than Chile or Equador. The sky was clear and Dreamer had told us we could drink water right out of a pond or a stream without fear. He may have taken everything we were familiar with and either removed or modified it, but he hadn't lied to us.

Burt had expressed it pretty well when he said it was a choice of accepting this new world or ceasing to exist. That made all my complaints dubious.

To be honest, it was the principle of the thing that got to me. I didn't run across any changes I didn't like. Some would be a bit more work than we were used to but none were real problems.

I'd held Burt's hand in mine most of the time since we came into the house, feeling like a newlywed exploring her first apartment. I have to admit, I liked what they'd done to the place. It felt like home, even though I could point out countless things that had been changed.

When Rosa came upstairs to tell us that dinner was ready, we followed her down the hallway to the stairs. Seeing her walk down the hallway in front of us, what came to mind was that Burt was going to enjoy making her pregnant. That was so not like me it wasn't funny. I'm no prude, but both Burt and I took our marriage vows seriously and neither of us has had any reason to doubt the other's fidelity. I could remember that attitude, I could actually feel it, yet I also felt with all my heart that Burt was going to make other women pregnant and it was not only OK, it was desirable, his duty. I knew in time I'd make love with and have children by both my son and my daughter's boyfriend and while it didn't turn me on, it didn't turn me off, either. It was like anticipating trying a new restaurant all my friends said was good. Once again, it wasn't me. But now, I guess it was. The fact that I could feel the way I had before the change yet feel exactly the opposite a second later scared me. Just another of many conflicts.

"Rosa, did Val and Bev get back?"

"No, Patrona."

We passed by the kitchen. Subi was lying on the rug next to the door to the mudroom, her ears up, watching for any food that happened to fall or get tossed in her direction. I walked over to her and opened the doors to the mudroom and to the outside.

"Subi, go get Val and Bev and bring them back."

She ran in the direction they taken when they went exploring.

The dining room was full of people. Miguel, Margarita and a couple dozen of Miguel's 'cousins' were either sitting or bustling in and out of the kitchen with steaming dishes of food. Rosa wasn't technically a cousin, being Margarita's sister. I'm sure half the 'cousins' had less blood in common than Val and Christina. Margarita's husband, Raul, was in the kitchen, carving a roast pig that they'd somehow wrestled off the spit in the fireplace and onto the kitchen table. He'd no sooner fill a platter with meat than one of the women would bring it into the dining room.