REUNION

The Hellgate Chronicles, Book 1

CHAPTER 1

Somewhere in New Mexico
November 2015

After two decades of deliberate silence, my best friend from high school, Ziya, called me on my forty-second birthday.

I was sprawled out by a forgotten road in New Mexico, using the excuse of a coming gully buster to take a break from the back-breaking work at Spirit Wind Ranch. The ranch was my latest attempt to hide from the world, or more accurately, my own damned past.

I’d spent my last twenty bucks on a stash of green chile tamales and a bottle of mezcal that tasted like it could strip paint. The old timer who sold it to me probably thought I was just another drifter, blown in like a tumbleweed. He handed it over wrapped in yesterday’s news—not that I gave a damn about the headlines. Let the world burn without me. I’d left it behind.

Twenty years ago, I had hit the road with dreams of riding off into the sunset.

Cue the dramatic music, fade to black.

After sealing a gate to hell and stopping the apocalypse, all I wanted was to escape the bullshit. Except, there’s nothing romantic about running away. All that hero crap? Turns out, it’s just another way to end up talking to shadows and guzzling mezcal on the side of a road, alone on your birthday.

When you’re twenty, it doesn’t matter much. I willingly paid the price for my freedom. But at a certain age, you realize there’s probably more behind you than ahead. You start wondering if maybe you should have stayed in that stupid town you fought so hard to escape.

Forty-two years old, and what did I have to show for it? No family, no house, no car of my own. Not even a TV. Definitely no 401K. Only a photograph of the five of us, frozen in time a quarter-century ago. A faded photo taken moments before everything went to shit. I had scribbled out CeCe’s face with a black permanent marker so I didn’t have to look at her.

I peaked at seventeen when I saved the world from a near apocalypse. Life afterward felt like the world’s saddest after-party. Sure, the apocalypse was yesterday’s news, tucked neatly in my rearview. I’d been trying all these years to shake it off. What a laugh.

After polishing off the tamales and mezcal, I hunkered down in the front seat of the beater commune truck for a nap. Figured the rain would take a break by the time I resurfaced. Thirty minutes max. Then I’d cruise back up the canyon to the ranch.

That’s when Ziya rang me up on the psychic friends’ network.

She found me hanging out in a half-dream, half-memory I just couldn’t ditch, replaying like a broken record—the high school senior prom disaster. That was the night a classmate nearly turned our graduation into an inferno by barricading the doors and setting the gym ablaze.

The tip-off it was a dream? I never set foot in the gymnasium that night. Yeah, I’d planned on going. Had the whole thing worked out—dress, date, limo, determination to lose my virginity, and all the rest of the ridiculous prom parade. Instead, life pitched me into a face-off in the parking lot with shadow demons itching to make me their pre-apocalypse appetizer.

I stood next to the punch bowl, shrouded in misty dry ice, watching my classmates sway in slow-motion to a silent melody, surrounded by a downpour of confetti and balloons. Pretty creepy.

Ziya crashed the party, her presence slipping into my consciousness like ice water down my spine.

That she slid in so easily? I must have been lonelier than I thought. The idea of actually seeing her was a punch to the gut, so I kept my gaze elsewhere, like on Bobby Sutherland and Stacey Sparks, tangled up in their own world. Her head rested on his shoulder, his hands groping her butt.

“What’s shaking, little chicken?” slipped out of my mouth as Ziya materialized beside me, the old, comfortable banter falling back into place.

“What’s up, buttercup?” she volleyed back, our years-old exchange sealing the reunion.

Eyes still averted, my hand found hers in a well-rehearsed dance of fingers—twisting, snapping, ending with a flourish and the imagined pop of an explosion. Our secret handshake hadn’t lost its charm, even if the rest of the world had moved on.

I didn’t want to remember all the reasons I hated her—both the true ones and the ones I’d made up. The harsh words from our last real conversation echoed, feeling both a lifetime away and painfully close.

When courage finally found me and I turned to face her, Ziya looked exactly the age we’d first met, as if time had looped back on itself. At thirteen, she’d been the youngest kid in our sophomore class. Her neon pink braces and oversized round glasses were as awkward in my dream as they’d been back then. Her long, sleek hair fell in pigtails, framed by too-short bangs. The biggest difference? She wore institutional sweatpants that screamed ’70s housewife chic—a definite step up from the hideous sweaters and denim overalls of her youth.

Outside, in the real world, Ziya was no longer the teenager from my memories but a forty-year-old woman, her life now confined within the walls of Elysian Manor, a long-term care facility where she’d been for roughly the last decade.

Allison had called me when it happened, leaving a message on the cheap flip phone I kept. Her voice, frantic and breaking in a four-minute voicemail, still echoed in my mind, recounting Ziya’s stroke. “I can’t wake her, Meg . . . why can’t I wake her? I’ve done everything. What am I going to do?”

I ditched my phone after that. It was too damn painful to hear her suffering and not be able to help. Of course, I dug it out of the trash immediately afterward. It might have been painful, but it was all I had.

“Looking sharp,” I managed to quip to Dream Ziya, my tone steady, betraying none of the storm brewing inside. “For a vegetable in a coma.”

It was a twisted kind of relief that she didn’t approach me wearing the face I once ached to forget. The version of her standing before me now was the one I held closest to my heart, the one memory I hadn’t tarnished with anger or regret.

Torn between wrapping her in a bear hug and letting loose a right hook, I anchored myself to the spot, gripping the edge of the punch table.

Something heavy crashed against the gymnasium doors, drawing my attention.

“Ignore it,” Ziya said, drawing my attention back to her. “It’s not real.” She twirled, showcasing the most ludicrous pair of Sasquatch slippers ever. “You like?”

“Your feet are a lot hairier since I last saw you,” I said as the noise grew quieter, fading away.

“A lot has changed.”

“Looks like it. Didn’t realize dream hopping was a new trick of yours.”

“You’re still awake,” she countered playfully, reaching out as if to snatch my nose, mimicking a gesture meant for a child. “Caught you on the brink.”

I recoiled, batting her hands away.

Giggling, she hopped onto the punch table, swinging her legs back and forth as she watched the dancers.

“Why the sudden cameo, Z?” I couldn’t mask the edge in my voice.

“Think you’d buy it if I said it’s because I miss you?”

“No,” I snorted. “Remember when you told me never to come back?”

Ziya’s expression darkened, a rare slip that showed her evasion for a straight answer. It was classic Ziya, skirting around the edges of conversations she’d rather leave buried.

“Thought I’d forgotten that, huh?”

The world slipped sideways.

I staggered forward as the prom and the table I’d been leaning on vanished. The gymnasium stretched, like saltwater taffy, melting into an all-too-familiar old-timey Sunrise Ski Lodge.

We walked side by side through the lodge’s grand front hall, under the silent watch of numerous stuffed animals perched high on the walls. Their glassy gazes followed our every step. A fire, large enough to rival a small room, crackled in the hearth, its warmth touching but not fully penetrating the chill of the space. In this version of the lodge, sprawling in my dream, an endless circle of stairs rose into the shadows above our heads.

I tried not to look up, ignoring the shadow demons lurking just out of sight. Their many legs moved with a disturbing, skittering grace, their claws tap, tap, tapping on the solid surfaces around us. Unlike the stairs, they had been real.

Right before Christmas break, a group from our class took an impromptu ski weekend up at Mt. Baker. Ziya had been at the front desk with Allison, trying to get the lodge’s emergency radio to work, while I patrolled the lodge looking for our missing classmates.

Ashley Wilson.

Nicky Clark.

Brandon Taylor.

They had died on that trip, their names etched permanently in my memory—the students who never made it back. They were the silent reminders of the lives lost under my watch.

“I was wrong,” she admitted.

“Whoa,” I smirked. “End times.”

“Yes, Meg, I was wrong. I’ll say I’m sorry if it makes you feel any better,” she said nonchalantly, as if we were discussing something as trivial as a misplaced book.

“Oops, mea culpa, sorry I threatened to melt your brain all those years ago. We’re still besties, right?” I said, laying the sarcasm on thick, mocking her. She’d never apologize. Not and mean it. I turned on her, stabbing my middle finger in the air near her twelve-year-old face. “Fuck off, Z. Just fuck all the way off. Nothing you can—”

“I need you to come home.”

That stopped my rant before I could really get going. I wanted to believe she missed me, but that wasn’t it. Of course not. Ziya was never one for emotions—a regular Spock with breasts.

“No,” I said, continuing to walk.

Ziya appeared in front of me, blocking my path. “No?”

“Yeah, no. As in, no thank you, that doesn’t work for me.” I grinned widely. “Bet you didn’t expect that, huh?”

She squinted at me, started to say something before changing her mind. Instead, she reached up and grabbed hold of my shoulders.

I fell . . .

 Down . . .

. . . down . . .