A Promised Fate by Cat Mann Page B

him, and carried him up the steps,
down the hall and into his room.
    As soon as his head met the pillow, he curled onto
his side and shoved his thumb into his mouth. Ava would have taken
his hand away from his mouth and tucked his fingers under his
pillow to help him break the thumb-sucking habit, but I left him
alone. She was probably right to discourage his thumb-sucking but I
liked to watch him be little and innocent. He won't go to college
sucking his thumb, I always told her. I kissed his head and his
plump cheek, covered him with his blankets, pulled myself away and
closed his door.
    Ava’s laptop was in the office,
her House to Home site pulled up and open. I minimized her work, took her
laptop to our bedroom and brought up my baio applications and email program.
I unloaded the pile of documents I had brought home for review onto
the bed, stripped down to my underwear and set a gift I was
debating even giving Ava on my nightstand.
    “Baby?” She didn’t budge even after a gentle shake to
her shoulder so I balanced her in my arms and, as carefully as I
could, I carried her to bed. I tried to ease her onto her own
pillow but after I rolled her out of my arms, her hand gripped my
shirt at my chest, she nuzzled her face back into my neck and
breathed in deep.
    “Hold me,” she mumbled in her sleep and tried to wrap
her body around me as I bent awkwardly over the side of the
mattress. I glanced down towards the footboard where the laptop sat
propped open next to a stack of paper that was as thick as an
encyclopedia and hesitated.
    After trying to unclasp her hand from my shirt, I
felt Ava’s grip tighten. Her eyelids were squeezed firmly shut and
her face was twisted and pinched.
    Oh, crap, a nightmare...
    Ava started to thrash, and as usual when her dreams
get to that stage, I started to panic. In one swift move, I wrapped
her up against me and held her in bed. My arms around her tightened
and I tried to keep her from moving too violently. I always worry
that she will hurt herself and now I worry for the baby, too. Ava
started to cry, hot tears streamed down her round cheeks and
whimpers broke loose from her throat. Shushing her, I told her over
and over again that I am there for her, that I love her and that I
am sorry. She sobbed and held fistfuls of her own hair and pulled.
I couldn’t drag her from the depths of her mind. No amount shaking
or pleading could render her conscious and free her from her
hell.
    Ava has different types of nightmares and in our time
shared together, I have learned to be able to tell them apart. Some
are quite a bit more severe than others. She relives the death of
her of mother, but with decreasing frequency. I had noticed that
her dreams of Lucy were limited mostly to around the holidays, when
memories are active and when those we miss most are most with
us.
    She has grown to accept also the
dreams that satisfy her role as a fate – the constant pacing up and
down dim corridors, listening to the pleas of the petitioners for
death and choosing the next life that is due to end. To say that
the emotional stress of cutting a thread is difficult is to engage in
understatement, but that stress is who she is.
    A tear may slip down her cheek in the middle of the
night when it is time to say goodbye to someone new, but that
feeling is nothing compared to the dreams that take her back to the
Kakos. The lifelike images that bring her back to the torture she
endured with Damion and the memories of guns, nooses, knives,
poison and fire are agony for her. The flashbacks are a main
feature of her dreaming mind and I have come to dread them. But
lately something new and profoundly dark has been stirring inside
her and it is these dreams, the nightmare that I’d one day stop
loving her, that terrify me most.
    Hours passed and the tears continued to roll. I was
wet, my shirt suctioned and clung to my skin. Ava’s damp hair lay
matted down her neck. I never let go of her, not for a single
moment. I