“No one will.”
“But if they do—”
“They won’t,” she bit out, sharper than she meant. She leaned her head against the window, glaring at the clouds as if they owed her something.
I let the silence stretch before I said, “I heard you met Nemo.”
She tensed as I crushed Brett’s phone in one hand. It disintegrated into dust, the remnants drifting upward into smoke.
“What was the point of that?” she asked, glaring at my hand. “Dramatic much?”
I shrugged. “What did you think of Nemo?”
Nemo was… sweaty.
“Sweaty’s good,” I said with a grin. “Drippy little man, isn’t he?”
“Can you not read my mind?” she snapped.
I had, many times. She wasn’t exactly subtle. Over the last century, I’d watched her thoughts fall to the ground much like the leaves that had begun to fall now that it was autumn. They were messy, brittle, and exposed. “Not likely,” I replied, licking my thumb to flip a page of the magazine I’d conjured.
“And why not?”
I turned to her slowly. “Because I don’t want to.”
She slapped the magazine from my hand but it vanished before it hit the floor. I let her have the win.
We didn’t speak for a while, she sulked and I waited. Her hip throbbed from the disguise; she shifted, running her fingers over the armrest. The number five was etched into the metal. She traced it like a talisman. Her mother was superstitious, and I’d watched Astoria flinch plenty at the sight of black cats and strange weather. It gave me a peculiar sense of joy to taunt her with them.
Her thoughts came wrapped in fatigue, soaked in the kind of weariness that settled into bones. Her thoughts wandered—to a missing father, a cursed coven, a family legacy as thick and toxic as tar. To James.If I’d never met him, we wouldn’t have had children. I wouldn’t have had to kill him. And maybe I never would’ve met… him.
Me.
I felt it before she thought it: that twist of regret and longing. The kind humans buried under resentment.
I wouldn’t have known the greatest loss of all…wanting what I can’t have.
She had loved. She had survived love being torn away. Again and again and again. And I—uninvited but constant—was still here.
In the space between heartbeats, in the shuddered breath before surrender.
They all met me eventually, but she had summoned me, whether she meant to or not. With blood on her hands and breath hitching in her chest, she had offered me more than a name.
If he’s always watching, always waiting, then this is his fault. Surely this is his fault.
It wasn’t, but I let her believe it. It gave her comfort and it created the chasm between us that I needed to do my job.
I didn’t speak again for the rest of the flight, but I didn’t need to. She felt me. Not just the brush of my shoulder when I moved, but the way I threaded through her senses; a shadow she couldn’t unsee.
I watched my mother and grandmother fight the Tempest Curse. I think I’d rather lose my name than fight Death for eternity.
She didn’t say it aloud. She didn’t have to.
Does Grim even know the origin of the curse? Or is he just making it up as he goes? And what about what he said in the warehouse—was any of that real? Nemo gave me nothing. Just a name. Just a stupid article…
Her mind spun in loose circles, each thought slipping further from the last.
And I listened, silent, steady.
