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Skye felt conflicted as she watched Rowena slide the lock into place after Alan Noble. Were they doing the right thing, not telling him? She would have given anything to know what happened to her mum all those years ago.
It had been Liam’s choice to go with Gina. And before Gina had shown him she was still alive, it had been his choice to help psychopathic Thea try to kill the rest of the Nemaro. He and Thea killed at least two of Hunter’s clan who died in agony when Thea forced them across their boundary - the waves on the sand.
And if Liam reconsidered and wanted to return to Bannimor, would that even be possible? If the Nemaro figured out who he was when Gina brought him into their midst... She shrank away from the thought again, and felt ashamed. Whatever else had changed, her preference for avoiding ‘too hard’ didn’t seem to be one of them. But after the hell she, Hunter and Morgan had been through two days ago, surely she had earned the right to avoid crazy-scary, at least for a few days?
As if agreeing, Rowena said, “I think we're finished in here. Skye, why don't you get some fresh air on the beach?” Then she looked doubtful, and seemed to change tack, “or spend some time in your studio, get some drawing done? You haven’t used the studio since...” she glanced at Hunter, “since you got your memory back. Take Hunter with you. Morgan can bring your coffee out. Right?” She looked at Morgan for confirmation.
“Sure,” Morgan agreed.
“I’ll get my sketchbook,” Skye said, jogging towards the stairs. But she stopped when she heard Morgan say, “Where did all those people come from?”
She looked back and saw that curious onlookers were obscuring the light spilling in through the vast picture windows. Some leaned close to the glass looking in, others strolled by, or stood a little further back and took pictures.
“Haven’t they ever seen people clean before?” Morgan said, irritated.
“Must be tourists,” Rowena said. “There isn’t much to entertain visitors at this time of year. It’s getting too cold to swim. They’re probably looking for somewhere to have breakfast. Maybe we should open so they can at least eat?” She looked at Morgan to gauge her thoughts.
“Um...” Morgan and Skye looked at each other, and Skye knew the same possibility had occurred to Morgan. Had the events of the weekend already got out?
Morgan hesitated a second more, then shrugged. “Sure, why not? I think we have enough food. I can make a couple of tarts. The extra money would be good.” She strode to the kitchen to check what they had.
“Shall we help?” Hunter offered.
“No, we’ll be fine. We can call Annie if we get stuck.”
Skye ran up the stairs, retrieved her mother’s sketchbook, and trotted back down again.
“Do you want to stay for another coffee, Daniel?” Skye heard Rowena ask as she reached the café.
“Oh, thanks Rowena, but...” her dad hesitated, and Skye recognised a polite reserve in his expression that wasn’t what she’d expected to see. She thought he’d started to return Rowena’s feelings for him. “Look, I’d better head off. Mike offered to drop me home when he left, but I wanted to help clean here first. I told him I’d walk back. The air and the exercise will do me good. Get my thoughts moving in the right direction for the new book I’m working on.”
“New book?” Rowena tried to look pleased.
“Hope so anyway. Still in the notes stage. Hey, thanks for breakfast, and the company. It’s been fun. And once again - thank you for the party you threw Skye last night.” His smile was warm and Rowena’s responding smile was genuine, but politeness tinged her farewell. Skye knew Rowena felt a touch of disappointment. Yet another aloof kind of departure between a Lauder and a Sebastian today, she noted.
Skye said goodbye to her father, then headed down the hallway with Hunter, wondering about the change in her dad. Or had she simply been seeing more than was there? Or perhaps just hoping there was more. Hoping her dad was really over her mum.
*
The second Skye closed the studio door behind them, Hunter pulled her away from the door and further into the sparsely decorated room. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. Then he kissed her until she was dizzy, her head spinning with his potent presence, feeling every atom in her body throwing off sparks of Hunter. When he drew back at last, his lips were barely an inch away from hers. “Did I say ‘good morning’ already?” he whispered.
“Not like that, you didn’t,” she said breathlessly. “And it’s only polite for me to say ‘good morning’ back,” her murmur ended when she pressed her lips to his. For a while, nothing in her world existed except him, his arms around her like this.
Then she drew back, taking a shaky breath. “Wow. I could go on being polite like this all day. But Rowena’s right, I haven’t drawn for ages.” She untangled herself and crossed the room to her jar of pencils, but stopped still, staring at them. Then she turned back to look at Hunter.
“Just now, in the café, before Liam’s dad turned up?” she said, “I got the feeling Rowena almost remembered everyone collapsing there. Can you imagine what that must have been like? I’m guessing utterly terrifying. If she remembers... If anyone remembers, won’t they want to find out what caused it? The gas leak explanation won’t hold up for long.”
Hunter frowned. “They couldn’t possibly know what was behind it. The Nemaro are Forgotten, and unseen unless a human is already dying. Anything connected with them is Forgotten. It’s part of our curse. Wiped from the face of the earth, and from the minds of humans. Except for me, thanks to you.” He sat on the long sofa that served as his bed.
“And except for Jarrod, at least for a while, thanks to us both. And Thea. They were not just seen, but remembered.” She frowned, “although everyone seems to have forgotten them again. Ethan has. Rowena and Dad and Mike have. I think.”
She sat beside him on the sofa, staring blankly at her paintings opposite. “We actually don’t know what the fallout is going to be. Everything keeps changing. Every time we try to do the right thing, something else goes wrong. I haven’t wanted to think about this at all, but I guessed that because your connection to your clan broke when you set the stolen souls free, everything was back to normal. But what if it’s not? What if everyone finds out about the Nemaro?”
Hunter visibly tensed, but he didn’t speak at once. Finally, he said in a low voice, “So what if they do?”
“What?”
He stood. “So what if they get found out? So what if they even get found, literally? What has that got to do with us anymore? Why don’t we just...get out of here?”
“Well - but -”
Emotion suffused his face. “Let them get what’s coming to them. Jarrod attacked our friends. Thea stole their souls. The only reason the entire village isn’t dead or under the sea, mesmerised in Lithus, is because we stopped them.”
“I know. Exactly. Things could get ugly here in the village, and maybe your clan will try to attack again. Do we need to find out more?”
His expression hardened. “That sounds like another way of saying ‘you’re still trapped.’” He moved away from her and faced the side doors and the horizon, his arms crossed, his body tense and defiant.
Skye felt torn. There was nothing she wanted more right now than to escape whatever might be coming. Her hope that there would be no fallout from the recent craziness, and no repeat of it, fought a sinking dread in her gut. Something was coming. But everyone they loved was still here. They couldn’t just cut and run. She rose and stood in front of him, her hands on his shoulders, and looked up into his face, not speaking. She held his gaze, and as they stood there in silence, she had a sense that they stood in the centre of a roaring wind, in the still eye of a storm. After a while, it seemed to ease, and his face softened. His eyes were sad now, not angry.
He leaned closer to rest his forehead against hers. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” She touched the tip of his nose with hers, then kissed him.
“How do you do it?” he smoothed a strand of her hair behind her ear as if it was a meditation.
“Do what?”
“Make me better. You make me want to be better.”
“You’re so much better than you think you are, Hunter. And if anything is coming, this kind of stuff is impossible to prepare for. We’re making it up as we go because we have to.” She said the words calmly, but the truth of them made her feel like she was something tiny in the path of something enormous. She knew he was probably feeling even worse. Would they ever be free?
He sighed, looking over the top of her head through the side doors, down the lane to the ocean. Then he met her eyes, his beautiful charcoal gaze solemn and clear. “I’m not sure I know what the right thing is. Or if I’ll be able to recognise it if I have to choose. Every instinct I have tells me to go, to be anywhere but in the path of this storm. But I promise I will at least try to do what seems right to me if the storm comes and we have to face it.”
“That’s all any of us can do.” She hadn’t thought it was possible to love him more than she did, but the emotion that surged in her chest was so vast, she had to turn away. “We have sooo done enough to deserve this break,” she said, walking back to the table beside her paintings. She hit ‘play’ on the old CD player she and Morgan had found at a thrift store. Thrift-store-find CDs always felt like the best vibe for making art. Music filled the room as she picked up sketch paper and pencil and presented them to him, smiling. “And now we draw. Ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, starfish-girl.”
