Rhiannon slid out of her jacket, revealing creamy pale skin. She moved around the kitchen with that same preternatural grace as she ground beans for coffee. Watching her was witnessing art in motion. I sighed deeply, envying the way shemoved through the world with such ease, utterly captivating anyone who came in contact with her. It was a skill I did not possess. Rhiannon was a generous bolt of the finest silk, and I was as smooth as a cheese grater.
“Have you ever thought about why it is necessary for me to present this way?” Rhiannon replied as she dumped coffee grounds into the wildly expensive coffee maker I’d purchased with her in mind.
Her words snagged, catching on the corners of my perception of her. Rhi had always been like this, as far as I knew, and yet something in her words suggested it was a cultivated state.
She gestured to me. “You are messy. Irritating. Wild.”
A part of me wanted to argue, but her tone wasn’t insulting. Rather, it was tired, deeply, deeply tired. And nothing she said was untrue, so I nodded. She opened the refrigerator and took milk out, bringing it to the frother and measuring out enough for both of us to have generous helpings.
When the milk was going, she placed a perfectly manicured hand on her pristine decolletage. “And no one questions if you are elegant, intelligent, or capable.”
A sinking feeling went through me. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew when my perception had failed me, and now was one such time. “In this life, I have always been different,” she said. “Even before I ascended. I was…biggerthan everyone in my village.”
Humans had been smaller in size when we all ascended. I had been tall as well, but I’d never been as large as Rhi. Being different, in any way, when we were born invited scrutiny. I nodded, slowly starting to understand.
“I was too big, too loud, too beautiful.”
I smiled at the last phrase. Rhiannon would never go so far as to deny that she was, indeed, too beautiful. But my smile fell away, quickly, remembering what life had been like for Sera when we found her. Though she was a tiny thing, and did not have the same issue of size that Rhi had, she was, bysociety’s standards, the most beautiful among us. Ethereal, really.
And it had almost ruined her. If she had not ascended, it might have. It took her years to want to stay, to not mourn the death she anticipated as a release from all that had happened to her. I had never thought about what Rhi might have endured. She never talked about it.
Any visible difference, on top of what set us apart as parapsychs, had always been dangerous. And before we’d ascended, we were vulnerable. Far, far too vulnerable. Each of us carried those scars, but Sera and Rhiannon most of all.
“There is no use in looking backward, Ember. But my grace is not a joke. It’s how I survived.” Her eyes averted as she turned from me.
I rushed around the kitchen island before she could lift the pitcher off the frother, my arms going around her. She smelled, as she always did, expensive. Heavenly. Ever so slowly, one of her silken arms hugged me back.
“You are not a joke to me,” I whispered. “You’re a marvel. You always have been.”
She nodded once, a single tear sparkling in her left eye. When she blinked, it was gone, disappearing inside the most beautiful assassin I’d ever known. “I am so glad you’re here,” I said, my voice cracking. “To smooth out my rough edges.”
“Oh, Ember,” she breathed as I pulled away from her. She sighed, bringing down mugs. “I know this has been hard.”
I couldn’t voice the fears I had about what might happen next. From inside her jacket, her phone rang. She was in the middle of making a beautiful froth of foam in my mug, so I fetched her phone for her. When she answered, cradling the phone between her cheek and shoulder, she sounded different: Sharp, capable, and confident. “Yes, I understand.”
There was a long pause as the person on the phone talked. I had tried, early on when she left, to find out who she worked with at the Consulate. But the entire organization above thebureaucratic levels was so opaque as to be a complete mystery. Humans assumed that the Maere and those in Trinity leadership knew much more than we did about how things were run.
“They had hex boxes.”
Another pause.
“Four.”
Yet another pause.
The truth was that the Consulate was run, at the highest levels, by parapsychs who went practically unnoticed in mundane life. And to folks like me, they were simply voices on the other end of the line. People who called to tell me my mistakes, and who I called to complain. To be perfectly honest, it was all a lot of bitching and moaning.
“Destroyed now. Ember crushed them.”
A longer pause this time.
“Thank you, I will tell her.”
Rhiannon hung up. Checked twice to make sure she’dactuallyhung up. Then turned her phone off entirely. As it shut off, her shoulders slumped, her hand flying to her forehead, her thumb and index fingers pinching the bridge of her nose. She blew out a tightly held breath. “Your approval went through. You and Ares are the girl’s official guardians. She’s to stay with you, though, wherever you choose to reside.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, which surprised me a little. I hadn’t known I’d wanted the girl to stay with us until just this moment. “What about the Necrolines?”
She shook her head as she leaned against the kitchen counter. “They said nothing about punishing them.” She was visibly shaken. I wondered for the thousandth time who she’d worked for, and why she feared them so deeply.
