Gladly Beyond (8 page)

Light from the enormous window at one end flooded the room. Nonna’s
sugo di pomodoro
bubbled on the stove behind me. The smell of cooking tomato, garlic and basil wafted through the room.

I had already given Branwell a rundown of the meeting earlier in the day: the ‘audition’ parameters, the Sandbox Rules, the Michelangelo sketch.

“You think the Colonel has an actual unknown Michelangelo?” Branwell asked.

“Hard to say.” I glanced at my brother. “It’s certainly possible given the provenance of his family vaults.”

“And this job?”

“It should be a slam-dunk for us. Pierce is a pretentious jackass, and Claire can be . . . unpredictable. We’re the professional, steady ones.”

Branwell grunted. “Good. Getting this job would take a lot of pressure off.”

“Agreed.” I nodded. “The last thing I want to do is move the company to a larger city and leave Mom alone to deal with Tennyson.”

And you too
, I mentally added.

I had yet to bring up Claire Raythorn’s disturbing blankness. Chatting with her in the stairwell had been the same. No shadows. Just her lovely sculpted face and velvet voice. A sense of connection and that shock when I touched her wrist . . .

“How’s your GUT been lately?” I tried to lob the question in casually. Like I was changing the topic or something.

But, of course, it detonated like a grenade.

“My GUT?” Branwell’s eyebrows snapped to his hairline. “The same.”

“No changes?”

“Nope. But you wouldn’t ask the question if something hadn’t happened. Like I said, something’s up with you.” Branwell beckoned me with a gloved hand. “Out with it, man.”

Even though we technically shared a genome, Branwell was my opposite in many ways—the difference in our ‘talents’ ensured it.

As usual, he was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve, homespun-style shirt with embroidered zigzags around the cuffs. Leather gloves encased his hands, the same zigzag embroidery around the wrists. His long hair was knotted in a loose man-bun on top of his head, while his beard currently reached mountain man proportions. All ensuring not a sliver of bare skin showed from his nose down.

In our world, you did what you had to in order to function.

I pretended to assess how much more cheese needed to be grated while thinking how to frame my next question. Branwell and Tennyson’s lives were already pressure-cooker tense.

So, you know that supernatural inheritance from our father that isn’t too bad for me, but hell on earth for you two . . .

“Has your GUT ever just stopped working?” I finally asked.

“
Magari
.” He snorted. “It never lets up.”

That was the truth. Relentless tenacity had always been the strongest feature of our
abilities
.

Every first born D’Angelo male for the last seven hundred years had been cursed with a Grossly Unusual Talent—the ability to see, hear and feel the past and future. It had always been a complicated mix of psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience.

But my mother conceived triplets, causing the GUT to fracture, scattering it helter-skelter between us boys.

You’d think the fracturing would be equal or logical or, at the very least, understandable.

You’d be wrong.

Branwell and I—as identical twins who had once been a single egg—shared the past portion. Tennyson got the future GUT all to himself. Lucky him.

My GUT was pretty vanilla, in as much as a paranormal, freak-of-nature talent could be.

Basically, I saw the past in an extremely limited way—I could see shadows of what someone or something had been.

On a daily basis, I saw the silvery shapes of who people had been in previous incarnations. Objects showed me nothing unless I touched them and nudged my GUT. Then, like with the table earlier, I could see things that had happened around the object. I couldn’t see entire historical scenes and never heard anything . . . well, almost never.

My GUT was gentle and subtle—vanilla, remember?—not hampering my day-to-day living. Though there had been two times when it proved more powerful.

My brothers’ GUTs were not quite as benign.

The hearing-past was Branwell’s portion of the talent. Clairaudience to use the proper lingo. Branwell had a complicated GUT, full of weird rules (that he probably had color-coded and laminated somewhere).

If something inanimate touched his body—bare skin, lips, mouth—Branwell would hear what occurred around the object the last time it changed form in some way.

Through trial and error, we had figured out the object had to be large enough to be felt, liquids and livings things didn’t count, the change had to be obviously noticeable . . . (And by
we
, I mean Tennyson and me as kids, and by
trial and error
, I mean we would scream while ripping a piece of paper and then sneak up on Branwell and slap it on his bare neck. We were nothing if not scientifically thorough.)

All of which explained the gloves and embroidery. Branwell altered everything that touched his skin in a sound-proof room.

But, like me, if Branwell touched an object and concentrated, he could sift back through the sound at each point of change. It was tiring and overwhelming—the cacophony of noise, the unexpected situations—but he could do it.

We were two sides of the same coin. I saw the past in a limited way. Branwell heard it. It made art authentication a lucrative business choice.

Tennyson, on the other hand, was future clairsentient (more lingo). He could feel the future emotions of those around him. Or, at least, that was his story and he was sticking to it. Tennyson got all kinds of pissy when we asked too many probing questions about his GUT.

Being around emotion-f people was . . . difficult, so Tennyson lived by himself in the family villa just north of Volterra. We talked on the phone more than anything.

Not that I would bother him with my current GUT problem—

“So what’s up?” Branwell asked and then held up a hand. “Wait—do you suppose Nonna has any more of that
pecorino
from Sardegna?”

My twin did have this thing for cheese. Branwell stood, moving for the fridge.

“Let me see.” I waved him back down.

I finished with the
parmigiano
, put it away and then dug around the fridge until I found the
pecorino sardo
wrapped in wax paper
.

In complete silence, I flaked off several chunks of the white cheese for Branwell, spacing them neatly on a plate. I slid the plate across to him.

He shot me his usual look. A cross between ‘thank you’ and ‘stop treating me like I’m in kindergarten.’

I returned with my typical ‘let me help you’ blink.

Branwell sighed.

“Okay, go. Tell me what happened.” He picked up a piece of cheese and popped it in his mouth. Hyper careful not to alter it in any way before eating it.

“Claire Raythorn has no shadows.”

He froze.

“You sure?” he asked around the mouthful of cheese.

“Uh, yeah. I stared at her long and hard during the meeting. I think she was a phone call away from a restraining order by the end.”

“No shadows.” Branwell pursed his lips, reaching for more
pecorino
. “Is that possible with someone who isn’t a relative?”

“I have no idea. She’s blank, that’s all I know. Granted, the Colonel and Pierce were both a little sputtery too.” I cut a wedge of cheese for myself. Salty and tangy. “It makes no sense.”

“Weird. So Claire looks like me or Tenn? Empty air behind her?”

“Yep. Not a hint of anything.”

For some reason, I couldn’t see the past life shadows of those closest to me.

Mom, Branwell and Tennyson were completely blank. Sometimes I would get a flicker from Chiara and Nonna, but they were generally absent too. Aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends . . . I tended to see more, though there was the static with them as well, like I had seen with the Colonel and Pierce.

“How do you feel about her? Claire?” Branwell asked.

I shrugged. “She’s pretty. You’ve seen the photos. Tall. Built like a runway model. Blond. Gorgeous blue eyes—”

“You’ve always had a thing for tall blonds.”

“True.”

“So that’s . . . relevant, I suppose. Claire seems a little standoff-ish.”

“Precisely.”

“And then there’s the psycho video. She’s all ice until she cracks and the crazy sneaks out.”

“Something like that.”

“Not your type.”

“Exactly. Look,”—I waved the cheese knife at him—“I get your subtext and the answer is no. I’m not in
love
with Claire. I barely know her.”

Up until now, the family explanation for lacking shadows had been based on available evidence—blank persons were people I loved.

Basically, the more I loved someone, the fewer their shadows.
Love
had been the criteria. We reasoned that people I loved were emotionally too near. It was like holding a pen to the side of your eye. If you were looking straight ahead, the pen was too close to be seen.

But now . . .

I sighed. “Assuming my GUT is not fracturing or changing, we might to have to reassess our assumptions.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Branwell nodded. “We know one branch of reincarnation theory states that, life after life, you tend to associate with the same souls. You become bound to each other. I’m your brother in this life, but in other lives, I have probably been your father, son or best friend. We know, empirically, that mom and I were vitally important to you in at least one past life.”

That was true.

My GUT is generally benign, but if all the stars align just right, it can be powerfully terrifying, sparking a bonafide past life regression. It’s only happened twice in my life.

The first occurred when I was a kid. My mom had decided to take us boys to visit an old friend in London.

I was just ten-years-old, so I don’t recall where we were exactly.

All I know is this—one minute, I was walking through a perfectly modern British doorway with my mom.

The next—I was rushing into a Victorian bedroom, thrusting a bowl under the chin of a pretty woman just as she vomited bright red blood.

Suddenly, I was thirty-year-old Michael Strickland—London MP—and my sister, Anne, was dying of consumption. A terrified maid hovered nearby, wringing her hands around a handkerchief.

I was fully immersed in the past.

I could smell the metallic blood. I heard Anne’s labored breathing as she lay back, trembling hands clutching her cotton nightgown. Felt the cool wet of the washcloth Michael used to wipe her face. Spoke Michael’s words of love and support.

I had been at her bedside for nearly a week, tending to her, watching her slowly slip away. So much grief and frustration and loss. The heavy weight of silence filled the room. I focused on Anne’s chest, stuttering up and down. Tasted the tears on my upper lip.

I watched, spellbound, as Anne gave one last gasping, rasping breath. Blood bubbled from her mouth. She choked and then lay still.

The agony of that moment . . . I collapsed over her body, weeping . . . ugly, soul-wracking.

I surfaced from the regression into the same room. Only back in the present.

Shocked. Stunned. Sobbing uncontrollably.

I turned to see my mother with a hand over her mouth, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She had experienced everything
with
me. But from Anne’s point-of-view. Mom had been Anne. Felt the agonizing pain, the terror of drowning alive. The knowledge that she was leaving her beloved brother alone in the world . . .

Branwell, who had seen us pause, said it was just like a blink. A stutter of only milliseconds.

But for me and Mom, it had been much longer. Minutes. Maybe even half an hour.

The experience was traumatic. It had taken months before I could even talk about it without crying. I clung to my mom, worried that she would die like Anne.

The whole episode was a watershed moment for everyone. Our ‘talents’ had never affected anyone but us three boys. But now we knew the GUT had fractured so much it could involve outside people.

I had experienced another past life regression with Branwell in college.
That
one . . . well, let’s just say I still had nightmares about it.

Fortunately, the regressions implied that most of my past lives had occurred along my mother’s Scottish and English heritage, not my father’s Italian one.

Which was a relief. I probably had experienced few, if any, past lives in Italy. Which meant the chances of walking down a street with Chiara and suddenly watching her die from a knife through the chest were slim.

It’s the little things in life.

But what did this mean for the present situation with Claire?

I looked at Branwell while eating another bite of
pecorino
, pondering.

“Love might still be key.” He shrugged. “We’ve always assumed that love in
this
life was the connecting factor. But what if that’s wrong?”

“Meaning?”

“Maybe love in
past
lives affects it too. So if you loved someone in the past, you can’t see the shadow of that life, which would result in someone looking sputtery.”

“Are you saying I loved Pierce and the Colonel in some past life?” I snorted in disbelief. “Because that seems . . . unlikely.”

“They’re your past lives, dude, not mine. You must have some freaky stuff in there.”

“I don’t know—”

“There are two options here.” Branwell reached for another slice of cheese. “One, your GUT is going haywire. Or, two, our previous assumptions about how your GUT works are incorrect. Aside from the shadow thing with Claire and the rest, has everything else been normal?”

“Yeah.”

I told him about testing the table at the Colonel’s.

“Look, Dante, there’s no manual for our GUTs.” Branwell waved his hand back and forth between us. “We’ve always been in figure-it-out-as-we-go mode. Up until now, maybe you hadn’t met anyone outside friends and family who had been emotionally important to you in other lives. But you probably loved people other than your current relatives and friends in the past.”