eyes. “Well, come on, then.”
Dead. He was definitely dead and in Hell. Had to be it. Either that or this was some weird-ass dream because he'd passed out in front of the TV and there'd been a
Jim got to his feet as the lads and the wolfhound headed for a table set with silver and china, and without a lot of options, he followed them over to “tea.”
“Won't you have a seat?” Nigel said, indicating the vacant chair.
“I'll stand, thanks. What am I doing here?”
“Tea?”
“No. Who are—”
“I am Nigel. This rather acerbic fool”—the blond nodded at the dark-haired guy—“is Colin. Byron is our resident optimist and Albert is the dog lover.”
“I go by Bertie to friends,” Mr. Canine said as he stroked the wolfhound's ruff. “So, please, by all means. And this is the darling Tarquin.”
Byron pushed his rose-colored roundies higher on his straight nose and clapped. “I just know this tea is going to be fabulous.”
Sure it was. Absolutely.
It's finally happened, Jim thought. I've finally lost my damn mind.
Nigel picked up a silver pot and started pouring into porcelain cups. “I can imagine you are a bit surprised to be here, Jim.”
Ya think? “How do you know my name, and what is this place?”
“You've been chosen for an important mission.” Nigel put down the pot and hit the sugar cubes.
“A mission?”
“Yes.” Nigel lifted his tea with his pinkie extended, and as he looked over the rim, it was hard to pin down his eye color. It was neither blue nor gray nor green…but it wasn't brown or hazel either.
Good God, it was a color Jim had never seen before. And all of them had it.
“Jim Heron, you are going to save the world.”
There was a long pause. During which the four lads looked at him with straight faces. When no one else started laughing, Jim picked up the slack, throwing back his head and belly-rolling it so hard, tears spiked into his eyes.
“This is not a joke,” Nigel snapped.
When Jim caught his breath, he said, “It sure the hell is. Man, what a fucked-up dream this is.” Nigel put his cup down, got to his feet, and walked over the bright green grass. Up close, he smelled like fresh air, and those weird eyes of his were positively hypnotic.
“This. Is. Not. A. Dream.”
The bastard punched Jim in the arm. Just balled up his smooth hand into a fist and fired the thing hard.
“Fuck!” Jim rubbed the sting—which was considerable. Pipe Guy might have been built lean and long, but he packed a punch all right.
“Permit me to repeat myself. You are not dreaming and this is not a joke.”
“Can I hit him next?” Colin said with a lazy grin.
“No, you have horrid aim and you might strike him somewhere delicate.” Nigel returned to his seat and took a small sandwich off a wheel of perfect little snackie-poos. “Jim Heron, you are the tiebreaker in the game, a man agreed upon by both sides to be on the field and settle the score.”
“Both sides? Tiebreaker? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You are going to have seven chances. Seven opportunities to influence your fellow man. If you perform as we believe you will, the outcomes shall save the souls in question and we shall prevail over the other side. As long as that win occurs, humanity will continue to thrive and all shall be well.”
Jim opened his mouth to shoot off some shit, but the expressions of the lads stopped him. Even the smart- ass in the group was looking serious.
“This has to be a dream.”
No one got up to punch him again, but as they stared at him with such gravity, he began to get the creeping suspicion this might be something other than his subconscious talking while he was out cold.
“This is very real,” Nigel said. “I realize it is not where you saw yourself going, but you have been chosen and that is the way of it.”
“Assuming you're not full of shit, what if I say no?”
“You won't.”
“But what if I do.”
Nigel looked out over the distance. “Then everything ends as it stands now. Neither good nor bad wins and we are all, including yourself, over. No Heaven, no Hell, all that has gone before wiped clean. The mystery and the miracle of creation over and done and dusted.”
Jim thought back on his life…the choices he'd made, the things he'd done. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“It isn't.” Colin drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. “Think about it, Jim. If nothing exists anymore, than all that went before was meaningless. So therefore your mother doesn't matter. Are you prepared to say that she is nothing? That her love for you, her darling son, is not valuable?”
Jim exhaled as if he'd been hit again, the pain of his past ricocheting through his chest. He hadn't thought of his mother for years. Maybe decades. She was always with him, of course, the only warm spot in his cold heart, but he did not allow himself to think of her. Ever.
And yet suddenly, and from out of nowhere, he had an image of her…one so familiar, so vivid, so achingly real, it was as if a piece of the past had been implanted into his brain: She was cooking him eggs over the old stove in their ancient kitchen. Her grip on the iron pan handle was strong, her back straight, her dark hair cut short. She'd started out as the wife of a farmer and ended up as the farmer herself, her body as wiry and tough as her smile had been soft and kind.
He'd loved his mother. And although she had given him eggs every morning, he remembered that particular breakfast. It was the last she'd ever made—not just for him, but for anybody.
She'd been murdered come nightfall.
“How do you know…about her,” Jim asked with a voice that cracked.
“We have a vast knowledge of your life.” Colin cocked an eyebrow. “But that begs the question. What say you, Jim? Are you prepared to relegate everything she did and everything she was to—as you would put it so bluntly—shit?”
Jim didn't like Colin very much.
“That's all right,” Nigel murmured. “We don't care for him ourselves.”
“Untrue,” Bertie piped up. “I adore Colin. He hides behind his gruffness, but he is a wonderful—” Colin's voice sliced through the compliment. “You are such a fairy.”
“I'm an angel, not a fairy, and so are you.” Bertie glanced over at Jim and resumed playing with Tarquin's ear. “I know you're going to do the right thing, because you loved your mother too much not to. Do you recall how she used to wake you up when you were small?”
Jim closed his eyes hard. “Yeah.”
His bed growing up had been a small twin in one of the farmhouse's drafty upstairs rooms. He'd slept in his clothes most nights, either because he was too exhausted from working out in the cornfields to change or because it was too cold to lie down without multiple layers.
On school days, his mother had come in singing to him…
Except he wasn't the one who had left her, and when she had gone away, it hadn't been voluntarily. She had fought like a wildcat to stay with him, and he'd never forget the look in her eyes right before she'd passed. She'd stared out of her beaten face and spoken to him with her blue eyes and her bloody lips, because she'd had no more air left in her lungs to carry her voice.
