Death of the Family

I took a deep breath and looked him right in the eyes.

"Sometimes, there's promises you can't keep," I said. I held out my hand as a peace offering. "Look, you can believe that you're dead or you can believe that you're not. But I'm going to get you to Meggie no matter what you think, got it?"

He sniffled and wiped his face. "Meggie wouldn't break a promise," he insisted, "She wouldn't!"

"Meggie's not perfect," I replied. "You're dead."

"How do you know!" He exclaimed. This man didn't know anything. He was just a stranger with blood all over him and a body. The body was probably a bad guy. Meggie never took the bodies with her.

I apparently wasn't nearly as good with kids as I hoped I was.

I gestured wildly at my body. "Because I'm dead-" Now I gestured at myself. "-and he's dead, and everyone else I know is dead, because this is the place that you go when you die. And if Meggie promised to protect you and you died, she failed on that promise."

Eddie heaved a deep, panicky breath or two as he looked around frantically for something to disprove what he was being told. Tears welled up in his eyes, "But-but she promised," he said with a broken voice, "She-she'll come and get me. She'll come here and get me so I can go home. I wanna go home!"

"She won't come and get you," I insisted. "If you keep thinking that she will, you're never going to get back home - do you want to spend the rest of your life waiting for someone who won't come, or do you want to come with me and figure out how to get you back to Meggie?"

Eddie made a sound of distress and clambered to his feet, "No No NO! Meggie will come get me! She always does!"

Then there was a flash of light and he felt like little balloons were popping all over his skin, and then he was looking down at the man.

"Meggie will come get me!" he tried to say again, but it wasn't his voice that said it. He stamped his foot in frustration. What was going on!

I was so startled by the transformation that I accidentally hopped from Nathaniel's body to my own. Natty boy went crashing to the floor as I went scrambling up to my feet, trying to get a good look at the man the little boy had become.

"...I probably should mention that we all have special powers here," I slowly said, looking the boy over. At that size, he could easily beat both me and Nathaniel up, and probably get a good hit or two in on Asmira before she knocked him out.

And seeing that Asmira wasn't here, I just had to hope that he would calm down.

Eddie's eyes widened and he stumbled backward into the wall, "Why are you awake now?! Why is he the body?!" in his confusion he had stopped crying and was now just looking frantically between them, fear in his eyes.

...Apparently, confusion was a good way to stop the tears.

"It's my power," I said, giving him one of my classic smirks as I gestured at myself. "I can possess people and things. I was actually the one you were talking to earlier - the guy next to me is Nathaniel. He was unconscious and hurt, so I was helping him out by keeping an eye on his body."

I paused, looking back down at Nathaniel.

"And, to answer the question you're probably going to ask, I just switched back because I felt like it."

Eddie whimpered, clearly not understanding. He was as tall as the man now, but he didn't know why.

"You-you were him?" he asked after a moment, his voice still wrong.

I nodded.

"I was," I confirmed. "It's...magic."

I poked him in the chest.

"Just like magic made you an adult," I added.

Eddie tried to back away again when the man poked him but the wall was in the way.

"But I can't do magic!" he insisted. He had to get out. He had to find Meggie. Meggie was looking for him and he was scared. He had to find her. He had to get home.

"Then how did you get so big?" I asked. After the words left my mouth, I realized that my response might not have been the best way to get my message across, so I decided to go at it again from a different approach. "We all get magic when we end up here. Some people might have already had it, like yours truly, but other people like Nathaniel on the ground over there got it once they came here."