“Where are we?” I asked her before she’d even come to a stop.
“Hawaii.”
“Is that my family?” I looked at the man and girl, familiar strangers.
The older me smiled. “Yes. Our husband, Mark. And our daughter, Joy.” Then her smile disappeared. “It isn’t good news that you’re here.”
“You didn’t already know?”
She shook her head. “How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
She nodded. “You’ll leap to the future more and more now, and you’ll start to learn that there is no linear form in time. It’s disjointed, disrupted. We don’t move in a straight line. You being here-and-now is the first either of us have been here.”
“I assume it will be the last,” I said quietly. “How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
Ten years. I would only live ten more years. I couldn’t help but wonder how it would happen. Would it hurt? Would my family be safe?
“I don’t know what’s about to happen,” I told the older Mila quietly, “but you should go be with your husband and kid.” Smiling wryly, I added, “You’ve spent a lifetime with me.”
She nodded. The way she tilted her head was so familiar, as if I watched myself in a mirror, aged gracefully and somewhat different than I’d been before. Where would the next ten years take me? Had I lived fully?
Without a goodbye, she turned and walked away. I slumped, terrified at what I was powerless to stop.
Five minutes later, my older self collapsed to the boardwalk and was gone.
* * *
There’s no way to survive seeing your own death without feeling the emotional scars. It isn’t quite the same as witnessing other’s deaths. With them, you’re outside the event. Separate from it. The same cannot be said of watching yourself die.
I never leapt to my own death again. I built theories surrounding the circumstances, why it happens, how it happens, but I have no answers. Something internal, I’m sure. A disease. Cancer that I never catch, or an epic seizure that strips me of life.
For ten years, I’m mad about being healthy. I eat only organic, only raw, only the best. I grow my own food, strip out all meat and animal product. I never touch alcohol or drugs.
I fall in love. I have a child.
All those years of not interfering in the deaths of others. I suppose one day soon, I’ll find out if I’ve changed my own fate instead.
Today, we leave for Hawaii.
#
Heather Marie Adkins has always been obsessed with time and death. Only seems right she mixed the two into this story.
Find her at her website heathermarieadkins.com or follow her on Facebook
The Temple
If you enjoyed Heather’s story, check out her best-selling paranormal romance!
Vale Avari has a mysterious past and a laundry list of super-powers, but that's nothing compared to what she finds upon moving from small town U.S.A to even smaller-town England.
A chance dart throw lands her in Quicksilver, an off-the-map place with a big problem - people are dying, and word is, it's supernatural.
At her new place of employment, a temple dedicated to the ancient Mother Goddess, Vale learns something even more shocking - women guards are disappearing at an alarmingly patterned rate; women who possess special gifts like her own.
Supernatural powers aside, Vale isn't ready to believe in the Wild Hunt as the culprit, and she's determined to prove the deaths are acts of human violence.
Plagued by a brute with a history of domestic violence and lusting after a dark-eyed man with a secret, Vale has a limited amount of time to discover the killer before he strikes again. In the process, she'll learn things aren't always what they seem and the supernatural might not be so extraordinary after all.
The Hunt could ride for her.
The Eclective
The Eclective is:
Heather Marie Adkins
Christine DeMaio-Rice
Emma Jameson
P.J. Jones
Shéa MacLeod
M. Edward McNally
Alan Nayes
R.G. Porter
CD Reiss
Tara West
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