“The fantasy of unconditional love,” Rosie said to her reflection, “the lie of unconditional love is that you can love someone from afar, someone who never even looks at you in return, and it’s okay; it’s pure and virtuous and noble. But it’s not okay. Fuck the fantasy!”
She was twenty-three; a perfect age, perhaps, to walk away from her youthful dreams and harsh disillusionments. Her Aetherial parents claimed that age meant little in the Otherworld, but it counted here on Earth, where she’d always lived. So, it was time to admit that if she kept offering her heart to someone who didn’t care, she shouldn’t be astonished to find it so bruised and broken. Time to grow up.
The face in her dressing table mirror was deceptively serene; a creamy oval with bright silver-grey eyes outlined by kohl and plum eyeshadow, a strong nose and mouth, glossy burgundy-brown hair falling to her shoulders. She’d been told there was a touch of the Pre-Raphaelite about her, but she considered herself too short, and usually too scruffy from gardening, to be any kind of siren.
Pretty or plain? Depended who was looking at her. Human or Aetherial? Impossible to say. It was just her familiar self gazing back. Surprisingly calm, after what she’d witnessed. So this was the face of a young woman who knew it was time to discard all romantic delusions and make a practical, adult decision.
The luscious greens of the garden were framed in the window behind her. Outside, oak trees swayed serenely, oblivious of the quiet collapse of her world.
“How did it all go so wrong for us?” she asked. “Was it the closing of the Great Gates, or is that just a convenient scapegoat for everything?”
She touched a fingertip to a scar on the side of her neck, a thin, reddish mark the length of a finger. Still there, after all these years. She rarely thought about it, but today, for some reason, it disturbed her. She arranged a lock of hair to conceal it.
Rosie looked around the bedroom that had always been hers, with its stone fireplace and treacly wood paneling, thick cream carpet and king-size antique bed. On those bedcovers, she thought wistfully, she should have had wild sex with some demon prince—but she never had. Behind the door of her wardrobe, she’d once found a secret passageway into a chamber where a magical tree grew, its roots bursting the floorboards. Not a dream, but a manifestation of Aetheric reality.
The Dusklands had always been fluid, capricious as waves. Of late, she rarely dipped into them at all. Did the Aetheric realm fade for those who turned away from it? Or was she turning away because she couldn’t bear to see it fade?
Rosie didn’t know anymore. Idly, she opened an old bottle of nail polish and began painting her fingernails. The color was dark and multihued, like a peacock’s feather. As she worked, she thought about her brother Matthew. Was he right to claim it was time to forget the Otherworld, since it was now lost to them? To accept that although it had been their parents’ birthright, it was not theirs? To dismiss it all, even the Dusklands, as a dream? We must go forward, he insisted, and live fully in the mortal world.
Making the decision to go Matthew’s way felt like an ax about to fall. Yet the other way was mist and darkness, and had brought her nothing but tears.
“What am I waiting for?” she murmured.
A memory surfaced. She’d been very young, five or six. She was playing in the garden… discovering the innocent wonder of the Dusklands, of stepping sideways into a world that was like this one but watery and full of mystery… then hands had grabbed her shoulders and yanked her back into the real world, and Matthew was shouting at her as if he’d snatched her out of danger.
She remembered her fear and confusion. To this day, she didn’t know why he’d been angry. It had been the first time, but not the last… Not that Matthew’s warnings had ever stopped her. Perhaps, after all, he knew something she didn’t.
Rosie sat back and studied the gleam of her painted nails. Each nail was different—navy, green, purple—and each one changed in the light, flashing magenta or bronze. She examined the bottle. The color was called Zeitgeist. German, literally “time ghost.” So, the spirit of the age was oily. Many-colored. Fugitive.
“Figures,” she said out loud.
“Rosie?” Her younger brother, Lucas, put his head around the door. “Are you okay?”
He looked worried. “Come in,” she said, smiling as she displayed her iridescent fingernails to him. “That’s us, that is.”
“What is?”
She moved her hand to show the color change. “Aetherials are like that. No one sees us as we really are.”
Lucas looked at her with a half-smile, and went to sit cross-legged on the end of her bed. At twenty-one he was dark-haired, good looking and coltishly long-limbed. His presence soothed her. Of all her family—and despite the argument she’d had with him earlier—she was closer to him than to anyone. “Seriously, are you still furious with me?”
She sighed. “No, of course not.”
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “Don’t sit up here brooding, Rosie.”
“I’m not brooding.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“I’m standing at the crossroads. Deciding which way to go. Remembering everything that’s happened and realizing that I need to walk away from it.”
“And?” He sounded anxious. “Come on, what are you thinking?”
Brushing her hair aside, Rosie touched the scar on her neck. “About the day I got this.” She breathed in and out. “About the Wilders. Do you think we’ll ever be finally, completely free of them?”
A long pause. Lucas looked steadily at her, frowning slightly. “Do you want to be?”