The Chosen: A Resurrected Series Novel Read online

  I freed one hand so I could softly touch Mason’s cheek and assured him, “It’s so different and it’s freaking you out. That’s all.”

  I didn’t actually believe that.

  Mason shook his head and took another deep breath. “I remember him, Bella.”

  “You remember who?”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head again. “That’s not right. I am him.”

  “You’re who?” I demanded.

  Fabulous. My husband had lost his mind.

  “Liam!” he shouted. “I’m… God, Bella, you have no idea how confusing this is! I’m him but I’m still me.”

  “Liam,” I repeated. Of course I knew the name. I knew this young man’s name used to be Liam just as I knew this young woman’s had been Chloe. “Mason, this isn’t funny.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” he snapped. “And you have no idea how badly this is fucking with my head because every time I look at you, I’m ecstatic that we’re here and we can finally be together but I also don’t want to look at you because you’re not my girlfriend! She’s dead and I’m not and that’s why I haven’t…”

  His voice trailed off and he backed away from me, lowering his eyes again to stare at some invisible spot on the kitchen floor near my feet.

  “That’s why you don’t even want to kiss me,” I finished for him.

  He nodded but wouldn’t meet my eyes again. I had been anxious almost since the beginning to explore these new bodies, even more so after Nurse Claire explained to me just how intimacy worked here, but Mason had repeatedly pulled away from me, claiming he needed to get used to being human first or that he was scared he would end up hurting me or he was overwhelmed and confused by it all.

  I never understood his explanations for this distance between us, but I believed him because why wouldn’t I? We’d never been warned resurrecting the person whose body we claimed could be a possibility; it had never occurred to me that it could happen. But as I stood in our kitchen watching my husband grapple with his new reality, I knew he was telling me the truth and I knew then why he’d kept it a secret: something had gone wrong and the consequences could be deadly.

  “So you… remember him?”

  “No,” he sighed. “I am him. I’m still Liam Carmichael. And I’m still me.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense!” I yelled. I don’t know why I yelled at him other than he was scaring the shit out of me.

  But he didn’t yell back at me. He just lifted a shoulder and nodded. “I kept watching you in that room… wondering if this was normal and they just didn’t tell us and it would go away after a while. But she never came back. Chloe was never… resurrected.”

  “Stop saying that,” I demanded. “Liam isn’t resurrected. You remember him and his life. I guess it can happen. I mean, these brains, they store memories, right? That doesn’t make you him.”

  “Bella, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s not just his memories. My life here, my life with you, all of those memories and experiences are mine and they’re all just as real to me.”

  He’s insane. This trip and reviving the body has been too much for him and he’s lost his mind and now I’m going to lose him.

  “Mason,” I whispered, “what are we going to do?”

  He finally looked up at me and shrugged, but I’d never seen so much sadness in his eyes. I wanted to throw my arms around him and hold him tightly, but if he were telling the truth, part of him resented me for being me, so I didn’t go near him. “There’s nothing we can do, Bella. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll just pretend everything went exactly the way it was supposed to go and I’ll… eventually learn to adjust.”

  “Adjust,” I repeated, another breathy laugh escaping only this time, it was filled with the biting pain I felt. “You mean, you’ll learn not to hate me because I stole your girlfriend’s body so I could live here?”

  “Bella,” Mason sighed, “I don’t hate you. How could you think that?”

  “You don’t hate me. Liam does!”

  “But we’re the same person!” he insisted again.

  I threw my hands up, exasperated because he wasn’t even making sense. Perhaps because he is telling the truth. But how could anyone stay sane waking up with someone else’s memories and personality?

  How little I knew and understood then.

  Mason stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked over his shoulder toward the door. “I can go to the store by myself since you’re so nervous about it,” he offered.

  “Ok,” I whispered even though I didn’t want him to leave, especially now. I wanted him to stay and offer me answers and reassurances that everything would still work out and we would be happy and we’d have the life we’d escaped across the universe for.

  But when he faced me again, I was certain it wasn’t just my imagination that he looked relieved.

  “Do you want anything?” he asked.

  You.

  I shook my head slowly.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he promised. He snatched the keys from the counter again and offered me a strained smile before he left our apartment. I never even thought to ask him what he wanted at the store so badly.

  I waited until I could no longer hear his footsteps on the concrete stairs outside then collapsed onto our sofa. We didn’t have a television yet. We’d been given money and a credit card; whoever owned that house in Waco had a television in the living room, but it hadn’t interested either of us. Suddenly, our apartment seemed chillingly quiet though and I wished I had something to break the silence.

  Here’s the thing: there was no going back for either of us. I was trapped on a planet with a man whose mind was no longer his own. I had traveled here for him, but he could no longer love me the way he once did and I knew even then, only three weeks into our new lives on Earth, that every time Mason returned home could be his last.

  Chapter 3

  I planted my hands on my hips and fixed him with my best “You really have lost your mind” glare. Mason looked up at me from his laptop and gave me a look that I interpreted as “No shit.” My interpretation of that one may have been a bit biased by the fact that I really didn’t think he needed to find a job, and he especially didn’t need to enlist the help of the same men we were trying to avoid now since we didn’t want them to know something was so wrong with Mason’s mind.

  “Four months, Bella. We’ve been here four months and I can’t sit around this apartment all day like you do. I really will go crazy,” he muttered.

  I crossed my arms and scowled even harder. “Well, some of us didn’t have a choice back home. We were stuck inside all the time anyway.”

  Mason’s features softened as he sighed at me. “I know. I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. But I’m not… well, you know. I’m human. I have to live like one.”

  “I’m human, too,” I snapped.

  Mason turned the laptop around so the screen pointed toward me and arched an eyebrow at me. “Then look for a job with me. They’ll put anything on your resume you want and teach you any kind of skill.”

  I wanted to be a mother, and you sleep in a different room. Where’s that on your damned resume?

  I grunted and fell in the seat at the table by him so I could scan the list of jobs he’d pulled up. “I don’t want to be a mortgage broker, Mason. I don’t even know what that is.”

  Mason lifted a shoulder at me and pulled the laptop back toward him. “We have limited options. Nothing that would require finger printing, so no teaching jobs or working with kids or anything in security.”

  “Then how did Dr. Garrett become a doctor?” I asked, the tone in my voice cutting and hard.

  I seemed to be snide all the time now.

  Mason noticed, of course, but he never mentioned it. He knew he was the reason.

  “I don’t know. Maybe all this finger printing as part of people’s background checks is fairly new. I was twenty-three when I died. How should I know?”

  I hated it w
hen he said shit like that.

  “You’re not dead,” I snapped.

  “Not anymore,” he agreed. “Here. I like the reputation of this bank. I’m going to see if Mr. Schultz can get me an interview.”

  He showed me the screen again but I stood up and stormed into the kitchen, slamming a few cabinets as I tried to decide why I was in there in the first place. After almost five months on this planet, my husband, the man I’d left my family and home for, still looked at me with the same sense of regret and sorrow mixed with longing and expectation, and it was driving us both nuts. I didn’t like the way I treated him now, but I couldn’t help feeling so angry all the time. He brought me here and, ultimately, I was happier as a slave in his father’s house than I was a free woman in this world that offered me far more than I could have dreamed of at home.

  Because here, I was completely and utterly alone.

  Mason’s tall frame appeared in the archway that led into the kitchen and he told me, “I’m going to see Mr. Schultz. I’ll be back this evening.”

  I didn’t acknowledge him.

  By now, I had at least gotten over my fear of leaving the apartment and when I realized there was nothing in my kitchen that would allow me to return home, I grabbed my keys and slipped on my tennis shoes. There was a dog park less than a mile from our apartment and even though we didn’t have a dog, I often went there when Mason left. I had asked if we could get one, but he claimed he didn’t like them.

  I supposed Liam didn’t like them.

  He said it didn’t make any difference because they were the same person now, and even if he could tell them apart, he suspected they’d both feel the same way.

  So I told him half the time, I couldn’t even understand him when he talked that way.

  We hadn’t spoken again for the rest of the day.

  I found an empty bench at the park and it didn’t take long for a playful beagle to bring a yellow ball to me. Her owner, a pretty woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties with short brown hair and tortoise shell glasses, called for her dog to leave me alone. That’s how I learned the dog’s name.

  “It’s all right,” I called back. I smiled down at the beagle and took the ball from her. “Ok, Bailey. Let’s see how far you can fetch.”

  The woman sat down next to me and watched her dog chase after the ball. “You just made a new best friend for life,” she teased.

  I smiled at her and knew she was talking about the dog, but I wished she were talking about herself. I had yet to make a human friend here. And I desperately needed one.

  Turns out, she was talking about them both. Or would have been had we been given the chance.

  “Bella,” I said, bravely extending my hand even though I hadn’t felt this nervous since my first days on Earth.

  “Nora,” she answered, taking my hand. She had a genuinely friendly smile and as Bailey brought the ball back to me and I tossed it for her again, I found myself telling Nora a different version of my story but my story nonetheless. Moving to a new place for my husband, the distance that settled between us after finding myself so far from home, my heartache over knowing the marriage and family I had wanted would never be mine.

  “Oh, Bella,” Nora whispered. “Do you think he met someone else?”

  I watched Bailey bite down on the ball then happily run back toward us. I wanted to lie to her because that would have been such a simple answer. “No,” I said honestly. “It’s me. He cares about me, and in a way, I think he still loves me, but it’s not the same. He’s not in love with me anymore.”

  “Oh,” Nora sighed. “Men are such assholes.”

  I laughed even though I didn’t know if that were true or not. I only knew Mason, and he wasn’t an asshole. He couldn’t help what had happened to him, but that didn’t make it hurt either of us any less.

  Bailey put her paws on the bench and placed the ball triumphantly between us and we both reached down to scratch behind her ears. She grinned at us and panted and nudged the ball in my direction. Nora picked it up instead and tossed it as far as she could. Bailey let out a delighted bark and ran after it.

  “Are you going to leave him?” Nora asked.

  I looked away from the dog and blinked at her. Leave him? He’d been my world at home and here, I held onto some irrational hope that one day, he would wake up the man I fell in love with and be just him. Or that he would somehow be able to suppress Liam’s memories and personality and want to be with me again.

  “No,” I finally said. “I can’t ever do that.”

  Nora lifted a shoulder at me. “One day, you’ll feel differently. Trust me. Just remember, Bella. This isn’t the Dark Ages. We aren’t dependent on men anymore. You can move back home or start a new life anywhere you want.”

  I flinched as Bailey bounced in front of me, dropping the ball at my feet. “I can’t move back. I can never go back.”

  “Why?” Nora asked.

  I cursed myself for saying that aloud. What was I supposed to tell her now? I flipped through a catalog of the many books I’d read in the past four months since being taught to read English and found an appropriate lie, except it probably wasn’t much of a lie. “My family never liked him. They told me if I married him and took off with him, I wasn’t welcome back.”

  “Wow,” Nora breathed. “You’re surrounded by assholes.”

  I snickered and threw Bailey’s ball across the park. “Do you think I should do something? Like a job, I mean. I wouldn’t even know what to do.”

  “You’re so young,” Nora pointed out. “Go to school. Study something you love. Be prepared because you won’t be able to live like this forever.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed quietly. “This can’t go on forever.”

  I took Nora’s advice and found a program in accounting technology at a local community college: boring and not something that interested me, but like Mason had predicted, bookkeeping didn’t require fingerprinting and was a safe area for us. I finished the program in only a year and Mr. Schultz immediately offered me a job for his freight shipping company in Atlanta. His offices and warehouse, combined in one enormous building, were like a labyrinth, but after a few months, I got a feel for the place, and settled in and even though the paperwork was tedious, I liked having a job.

  There was something oddly liberating about setting my alarm each morning just like Mason and leaving to catch the bus, returning home each evening, grabbing a glass of wine and turning on the television while he sat at the other end of the sofa, lost in his own thoughts as usual.

  There were moments, of course, in which we could both forget the pain we each held onto. My pain over losing the boy I’d fallen in love with and had left my world behind for, had literally changed everything about my life and body in order to be with him only to arrive here and have him unable to love me the way he once did. But I knew Mason still loved me. I could tell every time he looked at me that boy was still there, and the young man he was now was tormented by the guilt of what he’d done to me. And that was his pain: his guilt and his love mixed with his grief over losing Chloe. And I was the constant reminder of both.

  But sometimes, we’d come home from work and I’d be in an unusually good mood for no particular reason and I’d turn on the radio and open the patio door. I’d pour us both a glass of wine and pull him out onto the patio with me so we could watch the sun set or the lights over Atlanta and we’d talk about our crazy coworkers or use coded language to reminisce about our lives back home. On those nights, it felt like having Mason back. My Mason and mine alone. Even his laugh, which would have been so foreign in his old body, just seemed to fit the boy he used to be.

  And those nights reminded me how much I loved him.

  There were other moments, other snippets of normality and this friendship that had blossomed between us. We frequented the pool at the complex together on the weekends, and sometimes, he talked me into going to the movies with him even though I didn’t really get the appeal of superhero movies. B
ut Mason loved them and I loved watching him as he sat there enraptured by the action on the screen.

  And he never failed to remind me that despite our own personal tragedy and the loss of the fairy tale we’d been promised, he loved me and would always love me and would die to protect me.

  He always knew more than me. He always understood the dangers of the world we lived in far better than I did. And it took me a long time to realize he’d been trying to prepare me.

  During those two years, nothing really changed between us though. And I knew it was killing him. My Mason was racked with guilt and remorse, but I’d sort of accepted that my Mason no longer existed. He’d been changed by this resurrection, this mistake, this aberration. When he looked at me, he saw me through the prism of Liam’s memories and thoughts and feelings, and now that I was in this body, he would only ever be able to identify me as Chloe even though I didn’t have much in common with Liam’s dead girlfriend.

  We couldn’t go on forever.

  At the time, I had no way of knowing what finally drove Mason to leave me, whether it was the pain he felt over seeing me day after day because I looked just like Chloe but I wasn’t her or the pain he felt because I was the woman he loved but couldn’t really be in love with anymore. I only know I came home one evening and threw some leftover lasagna in the oven, poured myself a glass of wine, and turned on the news.

  By eight p.m., he still hadn’t come home so I called his cell phone, but he didn’t answer. Worried, I reached out to the only friend he had, another young man who’d crossed over, but he hadn’t seen him either.

  I didn’t sleep at all that night.

  In the morning, I called in sick to work then did the only thing I could, not knowing then what a tragic mistake I was making: I picked up my phone and called Mr. Schultz, the man who coordinated new arrivals in Atlanta and helped those of us who’d crossed over when we needed help.

  After tearfully explaining why I’d called, he fell silent on the other end for a long time. I thought he’d hung up on me.