Nathan
I managed not to shift for the half hour that Lydia kept me waiting. Thinking about everything but Chris in that bathroom and her mom finding me in my underwear kept me relatively sane.
Mr. Gavin’s snores ripped through the silent house like claps of thunder. So far, Lydia hadn’t woken him up to show him that I was in his daughter’s room. “Please,” I whispered, while looking at the ceiling and all beings beyond it that cared to listen. “I will literally die if this doesn’t go well.”
Someone chuckled, and footsteps crept towards me. It took me a moment to place Lydia’s voice inside of the sound.
“Sit down, Nathan. No one is going to punish you.” I sat on the furthest end of the couch. The seat gave me vantage points of all of the exits in case I would have to run for my life. “Her dad doesn’t need to know about this.”
“What’s the catch?”
She laughed harder and covered her mouth to quiet the sound. “There’s no catch,” she said. “He would overreact and completely miss the opportunity to talk to you guys about being responsible.”
“Oh. About that. We weren’t—”
“I’m not talking about safe sex.” Sex was a word that should never come out of her mouth. It sounded weird and wrong. Her vocabulary should’ve been restricted to words like peace treaty, statutes, and magical laws. “Christine and I have talked extensively about that. I’m talking about being responsible with your powers. Both of you.”
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I’d escaped having the talk with anyone outside of Paul, and I wanted it to stay that way. John had never wanted to be my dad, and my other one had …
I stopped that thought dead in its tracks. I was sitting next to Lydia Shaw. The last thing I needed to do was show her how weird the dogs from my nightmares made me. I’d dreamed of them almost every night for as long as I could remember. White dogs, stories about shifters, campfires, someone screaming my name.
Dali!
It was just that those dreams weren’t always harmless and hearing that name wasn’t always comforting.
“You know,” she said, “I would give anything to go back a few weeks and just sit down and talk with you like this. We could’ve avoided a lot of things. I will never forgive myself for treating you like I did, Nathan. I tend to go overboard when it comes to her.”
“I understand,” I said. “She has that effect on people.”
“She does. She’s really wonderful, but she comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of stress that you might find difficult to manage. That’s what I mean about being responsible. She skipped a dose of the potion, and now she’s sick. Do you know what seeing her like that could be doing to you?” She took my silence as a yes. “Life is inherently stressful, Nate. All we can do is try our best not to make it worse and deal with the things that are unavoidable.”
Mr. Gavin laughed in the other room, and she waved her hand dismissively as if that was something he did in his sleep all the time. She smiled at me.
“Tonight,” she said, “was avoidable, and I don’t want to have to worry about you two. We are so close to everything being peaceful, now and forever, if my team does this right. She doesn’t have to lie to me about using her powers. There’s no need for her to have them, and there’s no reason for you to be involved either. You’re adding stress to yourselves for no reason. I want you guys to relax now that there’s no Kamon. Be carefree. Be young. Everyone who could’ve hurt you is either dead or will be soon. Devin included.”
“What?” I said.
Mr. Gavin suddenly stopped snoring, and the abrupt silence made my ears ring. Lydia bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I assumed you knew since you were there when he was sentenced for killing your parents.”
I was. The Magical Council had consented to his punishment with no mention of mercy, but I hadn’t thought about what that meant until now.
Devin was going to die. I waited for the intrusive memories of him killing my mother and the pain that had caused me, but nothing happened. I was numb.
“If you’re not okay with it, I can talk to the Magical Council. He doesn’t have to die if it bothers you.” I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t care if Devin died, and I tragically didn’t care if he lived. There was no high road for me to take, not when he’d spilled my mother’s blood all over a forest.
“This is one of those unavoidable things that life throws at us,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
But she watched me, waiting for me to show my crazy side, until her phone rang.
The guy on the other end said, “Boss, everything’s set for tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Tyler. There will be a nice bonus in it for you if you bring me that panther in the morning. Dead or alive.”
Remi.
Lydia’s tone was confident, but her scent told a different story. The fact that she smelled so worried about a girl with little to no power made my fragile bones squirm under my skin.