“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Gabriel smiled down at me once I opened my eyes.
“Where are we?” I tried to get up, not recognizing the street corner I had passed out on.
“Two men carrying an unconscious young woman wouldn’t look good, so Embry went to get us tickets before the cutoff and we are in an alley waiting for you to wake up,” he explained.
“Passing out on the street was too risky, but a man with an unconscious woman in a dark alley seemed safe?” I questioned his logic.
“People expect shady things to happen in alleys. They don’t question it as much,” he looked at me like he was taking it all in and definitely had me blushing.
“Thank you for catching me,” I swallowed, smiling both because I was shy under his gaze, and because the nearness of him made me smile.
“Anytime,” he brought me back up to a standing position but kept me close, leaning in for a short, sweet kiss.
“The boat leaves in twenty minutes,” I checked my watch. I wanted to ask him what this was, to figure out what we would tell Embry, but I didn’t. He looked at me like there wasn’t even an ounce of him that regretted his decision, but I couldn’t help but worry the island really did put everyone on it under some magical spell of love and optimism that would all disappear once we reached the mainland.
“We have time then,” he teased. He leaned in but let me bridge the last inch before a kiss that made me weak in the knees. From now on, that was the only reason I wanted to be fainting into people’s arms. “We should board. Like Embry said, I don’t want to be here when they realize it’s missing.”
“Always the voice of reason,” I said it teasingly, but as I finished the last word, I felt a negative energy, like when Donovan had come to New Orleans. It was much weaker, but it was like the entire positive vibe of the island got upset at it.
“Get behind me,” Gabriel pulled me behind him as the sky went dark and four people appeared in front of us. “Go to the ship,” he told me.
“What’s missing?” the person closest to us was a woman, but she was wearing a trench coat, with a hat covering most of her face. It was jarring to see Henry’s army in anything other than black.
“Who are you?” I asked, stepping out from behind Gabriel. I put my hands up with my palms facing them, ready to use my powers if they made a move.
“Is ‘Your Worst Nightmare’ too much of a cliché?” she asked the person to her left as I felt a chill behind me. I turned to see four more people show up, blocking the exit Gabriel wanted me to take.
“If it’s accurate, I say go with it,” her friend had a look in his eyes like he wanted to rip us to pieces, and I could tell he would enjoy it.
I was pretty sure that the way they were making jokes meant that they were here of their own free will, not being manipulated by Henry, but I didn’t know the logistics of his control, and so far, only two of them were talking.
“We’ll take the girl and no harm will come to you,” the woman told Gabriel. Something about her voice felt like a hammer against my skull, but I tried to shake it off.
“Over my dead body,” he said through clenched teeth.
“It would be my pleasure to arrange that for you,” she braced herself with her arms mirroring mine, only when she moved them, icy air surrounded us, like she was summoning a blizzard.
I could see her bring her arms down and although I didn’t know what she was throwing at us, I knew it wasn’t good, so I put up my force shield. It kept us safe from the avalanche she poured on us, but the weight was going to crush me if I didn’t push it off.
“The first chance you get, I need you to run,” Gabriel looked me in the eyes with that look of utter intensity, laced with fear.
Instead of answering, I shot my arms up to push off the snow, but they were expecting it. As soon as I lifted my force shield, jets of hail, sparks and weapons flew at us from different directions, causing Gabriel and I to separate to avoid being hit.
Gabriel pulled knives out of nowhere and got to work, brandishing one and throwing the others. I tried to freeze as many assailants as I could, but it was like they knew the limitations of my magic and operated around them. Instead of coming at me from one direction, they came from everywhere, making me constantly have to defend myself instead of being able to take the offensive.
I had two of them frozen, but the third one’s Gift seemed to be popping in and out of places, so one minute he was behind me, the next he was beside me and so on. His weapon felt like a baseball bat, but he wouldn’t even stay still long enough for me to confirm what he was hitting me with.
Every time I turned around to find him, I could see how Gabriel was doing fending off his five attackers. I watched the number drop to four, then three… He was down to the two talkative ones when one of the men on the ground got up and came at him from behind. Gabriel was concentrated on the front with nothing but a knife in his hand, leaving him nothing to throw. I ignored my fight and blasted the man away from him.
If Gabriel hadn’t noticed the man before, he definitely reacted to him being thrown into the garbage can beside him. I wasn’t even thinking about my bat-toting disappearing act when he popped in out of nowhere and gave me his best whack yet, right in the stomach.
I doubled over and fell to my knees, catching the anger in Gabriel’s eye just as he threw his knife into my attacker, who’d had his arms raised to incapacitate me more permanently now that I was down. This left Gabriel weaponless with two Gifteds ready to take their shots.
I forced myself to move past the fact that I was winded, and tried to blast the woman into the wall, since she was closest to him. Just as I shot my arms up, Gabriel reached for something sharp on the ground and stabbed her with it. I shifted to the guy coming at Gabriel from his right. He made a noise when he hit the wall, before falling to the ground.
I was expecting Gabriel to yell at me for my carelessness, his standard response to nearly losing me, but we were both silenced by an elderly man who came out of nowhere, holding a box. “Come,” he said, opening a door to the building behind Gabriel.
“Who are you?” I asked, sensing that he was not a part of Henry’s army. He felt… ethereal. Like he was a lot older than he looked.
“My family took care of the Bearers of the Crescent Moon for centuries. You need to get on the boat,” he held the door open behind him, but kept walking.
“How do you know…”
“I know lots of things, Gabriel. I know that coronet won’t help you if you get arrested, and I know that you are missing generations of Bearers from your line,” he said while walking, not looking back once.
“How do we find them?” I asked, but Gabriel looked skeptical. Nell’s book implied we were only missing one object, not generations worth.
“This is all you need,” he lifted the box above his head, but held on to it as he brought us through corridors. “Kiki entrusted me with it before she…” he cut himself off and slowed the pace for a tiny moment, “it contains something from every bearer that came before her.”
He was like a human Rafiki, bringing us through an underground maze with no ending, but I could almost taste the salty air before he opened a door I hadn’t even seen in the pitch-dark hallway. The sun nearly blinded me as we stepped onto the top deck of the ship. I could see Embry below at the ticket counter, searching for us.
“How did you do that?” I asked the man.
“Remember where you came from Lucy. Not just the pieces, but the whole picture,” he put his hand on my sternum. My first instinct was to pull back, but his touch made my headache go away. It was warm and full of light, not that I understood it.
He put the box in my hands, then bowed. When he stood up straight, he got this smile on his face, like he had accomplished something he’d been working on forever. Then he faded away. I don’t know how else to describe it, except one second he was standing in front of me, and the next he was blowing away like dust in the wind.
“Wait!” I tried, but he was already gone.
Gabriel, who kept his head on in all situations, went to the edge and called out to Embry, who was heading back to town in search of us and would have missed the ship.
“What was he?” I asked Gabriel, before noticing that as shocked as he was, anger was his dominant emotion. And it was directed at me.
“You nearly died,” he pointed out.
“What?” I asked, more focused on the guy with secret doorways onto ships who disintegrated in front of us than on what happened in the alley.
“You put your own life at risk to save mine,” he was fuming. He was trying to hold it in so he wouldn’t yell at me and cause a scene, but also talking fast so Embry wouldn’t witness it.
“He was going to kill you,” I argued.
“It doesn’t matter, Lucy. I don’t matter.”
“You matter to me.” I took a step towards him, but the look in his eyes stopped me dead. His hatred and disgust were reflected back at me.
“This is another reason I shouldn’t…” he cut himself off, shaking his head. “I’m Gifted. So if he had killed me, I would come back. And even if that wasn’t the case, I am here to protect you. I meant it when I said I can’t lose you Lucy, and it isn’t just because of the prophecy or your birthmark or a promise I made centuries ago,” for a moment, his anger deflated and I thought this was one of those times where he was yelling at me because he was scared, but he would realize that we were both okay now, and clearly stronger together. Instead, his eyes went cold as he said, “This was a mistake.”
“Coming here, or…” I knew what he meant. A part of me had been expecting it from the very beginning, but hearing him say it… I couldn’t breathe.
“I never should have kissed you. I’m sorry, it was my mistake to lead you on and… let’s just go back to not talking,” he wouldn’t meet my eye as he went over to find Embry and tell him what happened. I felt like I’d been whacked in the stomach with a baseball bat all over again, only this time I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt the warm tears welling up and roughly wiped them away. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it, but he was breaking my heart.
People were crowding onto the top deck, so I put the box in my backpack and watched the island disappear. I held onto the steel railing, bracing myself for a couple of hours of seasickness, but as I stared off into the distance with my heart breaking, I got flashes of someone else going through the same thing…
I knew I was Judith from the shawl I was wearing, the same one from her portrait at Alaric’s estate. It was a different island that she was staring at, thinking of all the reasons why she was leaving, reminding herself of all the excuses why she shouldn’t, but she still closed her eyes and looked inside her mind, into her own memories…
“Oh, Judith, you have perfect timing, my son should be here any minute,” a woman said excitedly. She had ebony hair that was going gray, and I would guess her to be the owner of the apothecary-like shop Judith just walked into. It was more established than Nell’s, but nothing compared to Ingrid’s.
“Darling, come, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” I heard while browsing through different herbs and roots.
“Mother, I don’t have time for this,” he argued.
I froze and felt a shiver run through me when I heard his voice, but Judith had an entirely different thought when she recognized him.
“Henry,” his mother sounded stern, but he laughed at her.
“Fine, I’ll say hello, but I have somewhere to be,” he bent down to kiss her cheek. The nearness of him paralyzed me with fear, but Judith was nervous with excitement, her heart reacting to him the way mine did to Gabriel.
“Henry, are you ready?” a female voice called from the doorway.
“Coming!” he responded. “I promise I’ll meet your friend another time,” he told his mother. “Nice to meet you,” he called out through the shop on his way to the door.
“Oh, that boy… he drives me crazy sometimes,” his mother was shaking her head in the direction he took while Judith walked over to her.
“Boys can be oblivious sometimes,” Judith shrugged while the woman went to put the shop sign to ‘closed’, ushering her to a back room.
“He will wake up one day and realize there is more to life than parties and loose women, but until that happens…” she let out a deep breath, then took out a book. “Where were we?” I looked at the pages and recognized them as spells, before the memory changed…
I was sitting at the very back of a classroom, trying to be invisible in the all-male university. Henry sat in the row in front of me, occasionally turning back to talk to the person beside me. He was quick to put his coat on and head out as soon as class let out, so I hurried to bundle myself up and followed him.
“Henry!” I called, catching up to him on the stairs outside.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I’m Judith. Ric’s friend. I sat behind you in class.”
“Oh, of course,” he was friendly and charming, like in Annabelle’s first memory of him.
“I heard you asking about cosines. If you’d like, we could study together before the exam. My father was a professor, so…”
“You’ve been doing this for years,” he understood.
“I’m studying on Saturday either way, so if you wanted to stop by, we could go through things. I’m sure you understand tangents way better than I do.”
“Oh, I doubt that, but a study partner sounds nice. Judith, right?”
“Yes,” I could feel that her cheeks were on fire, though it probably looked like they were red from the cold, not from finally talking to him one on one…
All of a sudden, I was waiting at home for someone who was never showing up, wearing something I would be more likely to wear to a ball than to a study session. I heard the door and could feel her excitement bursting as she ran over, then took a moment to compose herself before opening it.
“Alaric,” she said, confused.
“May I come in?” he asked. “It’s freezing out here.”
“I thought you were at the early Christmas party,” she asked, stepping aside so he could warm himself up by the fire.
“I was, but then it got boring.”
“Is boring code for Henry showed up?”
“For what it’s worth, I think he had every intention of coming here before Anya showed up at his place.”
“Not much,” Judith took the pins out of her hair.
“I know you think you know him, and he was perfect that night, but the way he’s treated you since…”
“I know,” she assured her oldest friend, but I could feel her pain and reluctance. “I would have forgotten him and moved on, but he keeps showing up all over the place. I mean, what are the odds he would be in the only mathematics class they allowed me to attend?”
“What about Mrs. Hathorne’s son? She thinks he’s perfect for you,” he reminded Judith, but she just looked at him over the bridge of her nose. “No,” he argued.
“Henry. I heard his voice and nearly died,” she admitted.
“What are you going to do?”
“Ace the exam, graduate top of the class, find my happily ever after,” she shrugged, pretending she wasn’t heartbroken, but the smile she gave him was genuine.
“You’re amazing, Jude,” he said, and I could tell how much he loved her, though I don’t think she saw it. Yet.
“You’re the only one who thinks so, but I plan on changing that,” she didn’t let it bring her down…