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“He might have been able to end your life, but his deal didn’t involve keeping it. He got his sword, and it was cleansed in your blood. He can argue details all he likes, but you gave him what he asked for. Even the fairy king isn’t allowed to change fate.”
“But the lines… Didn’t I choose?”
Cal touched my cheek and gave me that smile of hers that was equal parts kindness and condescension. “I wasn’t talking about your fate. I’m talking about your wolf.”
Desmond.
“Where is he?” I wanted to get up again, but my limbs refused to take orders from my brain. I was only able to look between Calliope and Holden in a state of panic.
“You know the rules.”
Fuck the rules, I thought. “But he—”
“He’s fine, and he knows you’re here,” Holden interrupted. “He knows you’re alive.” He hid his pain well, but it was still there, raw and obvious if you knew what to look for. And I’d long ago become an expert on all the things that hurt Holden.
I focused my attention on Calliope, not able to watch Holden’s face too long. “What about Desmond’s fate?”
“I told you a long time ago you’d die next to someone you loved. And I was right.” Her gaze flicked to Holden before returning to me. “But I told someone else their fate that night too. I told Desmond he’d be the one standing with you in the end, and if you bled out on the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that prediction wouldn’t have been accurate.”
If there was one thing Calliope hated, it was being wrong.
“You brought me back.”
“In a sense. I knew if you died, my prediction for Desmond wouldn’t come true. I’ll admit, this isn’t exactly how I saw the whole thing play out, and you threw me off a bit when you decided to accept Aubrey’s help. Joining forces with the fae is sort of like divine intervention. It makes it hard for me to see the future. But there was no way I’d let my brother take your future and the future I’d promised your wolf.”
I recalled then the kisses she’d given before I left her for the last time. One on my sword and one on my hand. Perhaps they hadn’t been about affection at all. “You kissed the sword.”
“Not all promises are spoken out loud, Secret. Before you greeted your death with open arms, I made a final promise to you.”
Apparently Huey Lewis had been on to something when he sang about the power of love, because that was what brought me back. The kiss Calliope had laid on the blade of the sword, and the other one she’d placed on my palm, they hadn’t been her final farewell.
As it turned out, Cal had her own powers, and when she’d delivered those kisses, she was making a promise. “If you hadn’t been with Desmond in the end, I would have lied to him. And what’s one thing you know to be true of all fairies?”
“They can’t lie.”
She had brought me back because of something she’d told a werewolf. A supernatural creature she couldn’t stand to have in her home was the reason I was alive.
“That was what won Aubrey over in the end,” she concluded. “He might not have liked it, because it meant I bested him, but he had what he wanted from you. Your monsters were gone, the blade was his.”
My monsters were gone.
Yes, it all made sense now. The pain, the lack of healing, and why I couldn’t hear what Holden was whispering at the door. It was the same as it had been when I came back from Aubrey’s realm last time. Only now there was no reversing it. I wasn’t special anymore. I didn’t have any monsters within me, and this time I couldn’t have been happier.
I was human.
I was alive.
I let myself cry, and neither of them tried to stop me.
The world outside Calliope’s front door felt different and unfamiliar. Though I’d seen the decimation of New York firsthand, after two weeks recovering in an otherworldly dimension, some of the memories had faded.
In spite of the efforts being made to restore the city, it was still a mess, and I sidestepped rubble and garbage as I walked towards SoHo. Neither Holden nor Calliope thought I was ready for the outside world yet.
Coming back from the dead takes a lot out of a gal.
But when Holden told me about the funeral, no power on earth could have compelled me to stay away.
A
