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“Perhaps happy is the wrong word. But I feel assisting you in this endeavor is my best opportunity to get what I need from you. In case you were unaware, love, you’re no good to me dead. Death is the only true end to a debt.”
Delightful.
“So what do you propose?”
“You don’t have the power to win back this city. Not on your own. Even if you manage to topple the power of the necromancers, which I believe you have grossly underestimated, you will still be the champion of a defeated city. You will be queen of the ruins.”
“Okay…” I still wasn’t sure if he was offering to help or was telling me the situation was hopeless.
“I will help you, on one condition.”
“Of course there are conditions.”
“Nothing in life comes without them. Not even love is unconditional, no matter what the poets try to tell you.”
“Ever the romantic, I see.”
Aubrey smiled stiffly. “You do nothing to understand me, yet pretend to know me. That’s a dangerous game to play. Yet I can see through you with no effort. Right down to the core of you.”
I looked away from him and back to the frozen skyline. I didn’t like the id
ea of anyone seeing that much of me, especially someone I trusted as little as I did Aubrey. But if he claimed to know me, it was difficult to imagine him lying. Fairies didn’t lie. They couldn’t. They could bend the truth masterfully to make it suit their needs, but they never outright lied.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“I see a damaged girl. Someone who has been broken apart and put back together again. Tell me, Secret, have you heard the term kintsukuroi?”
“My Japanese is a little rusty.”
“In Japan, there is a custom. When a piece of pottery is broken, it is put back together, but the cracks are fused with gold. They do not attempt to hide or diminish where the item was broken, but rather draw attention to it. Kintsukuroi means that something is more beautiful for having been broken.”
My lower lip trembled, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek to keep from letting the emotion show.
Of all the things people had told me after my time with The Doctor…with Kesteral…most of them were iterations on you’ll be okay. There was a steadfast belief from others I would be able heal and move on somehow. And when that proved not to be the case, they started treating me like I was a fragile thing, always on the verge of falling to pieces.
For Aubrey to be the only one who knew precisely what I needed to hear was stunning to me. His words shook me to my core because they were simple and elegant, yet healing somehow. They sank right into my soul, my poor damaged soul, and for the first time since leaving California, I didn’t feel like a lesser version of myself.
He offered me the gold to bind my own fractured pieces.
“Thank you.” My voice was hushed, but in the total stillness of our frozen moment, I had no doubt he heard me.
“I told you. I see you.”
And so he did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aubrey and I moved back towards the castle, and a companionable silence I hadn’t thought possible fell between us. He still hadn’t told me what he wanted from me or what he was willing to offer in return, but for a minute or two I didn’t want to ask.
We crossed a place in the grass, and a pang of remembrance clawed at me. Like a hazily remembered dream I pictured myself, many years younger and more naïve, running across this same lawn and chasing a pretty blonde girl in her broken high heels.
How much was changed and set into motion that night, when I first saved Brigit from a vampire but condemned her to something much worse than death? That was the night I’d met Desmond and Lucas, the night my life really started. And now I was back here again.
If I had it all to do again, knowing what would happen, would I do it the same? Would I save her and set those dominos falling in the same order?
Of course I would.
I only wished I could have protected her when it really mattered.
