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Chapter Twenty-One
I sat on a bench across the road from an old brick fire station. Hunter had dropped me back off at home before he’d disappeared.
He did that a lot, was just gone. It wasn’t that I needed him around every moment, but the way he went from being such a vital part of my life for a moment to disappearing gave me whiplash.
So I’d brought myself here, to the place I hated to come, because it was the only place I could think of right then.
The bench—old and in need of replacement—groaned when someone sat beside me. The scent of incense told me who it was without me looking.
“What do you want?”
“To see if you survived your little trip,” Gran said.
I didn’t look at her, choosing to stare at the fire station instead. “You look like the fae.”
“Do I? Or do they look like me?”
I blew out a slow breath. “Normally your non-answers are a little charming, but I just don’t have the energy today.”
She huffed out a small laugh, as though my annoyance were worth it. “I’m older than the fae, Ava. We’re connected, but not the same. What I am doesn’t matter anymore, since I’m the last. What I am was lost to time long before there were humans or fae or supernatural.”
The last? The fact that Gran was alone hit me harder than it should have. It made sense, I guess, why she’d taken me in as she had. She understood what it meant to look around and not see anyone like her, to not fit in anywhere.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You know more than you think you do.”
“You like to say that, but we are beyond the ‘believe in yourself’ talk, aren’t we? This is end-of-the-world shit, and I’m not qualified to deal with it.”
She sighed, then leaned back on the bench. “Do you remember the first time you came into my shop?”
I thought back to how young I’d been, how scared. I’d ventured into a few other occult shops, but they’d never felt right. I’d walked in and felt the fraud of the place, that it was just a hipster trend where teenagers went when they wanted to annoy their parents. I had been ten, lost and frightened and so used to keeping things bottled up. No one wanted to adopt or foster a child who saw ghosts, and it had taken a while for me to learn that lesson.
I’d received a flyer for an occult shop, and something had drawn me to it, a need for connection. “You had a cup of tea already set out for me when I walked in.”
“And you’ve always wanted to know if I knew you were coming or if I just happened to have the tea. Why haven’t you ever asked?”
“Because I liked the idea that you were waiting for me. I didn’t want to know if that wasn’t true.” I took a deep breath, then asked. “So, were you waiting?”
Gran looked over at me—I could see through my peripheral—and smiled. “Yes, I was waiting for you.”
“How’d you know about me?”
“A friend mentioned knowing someone who could use a little guidance.”
Another piece of a puzzle about me I knew nothing about. It felt like my life was a game played by others for me. “And this friend?”
“A story for another time, perhaps. The moment you walked in, when I really saw you, I knew they had been right. I haven’t always done the best by you, but I’ve always tried.”
I wanted to argue, to tell her she could have given me a home, but what was the point? I’d made it clear from the start I wanted a normal life, and of all the things Gran could give me, normal wouldn’t ever be one of them. “You knew about Fredrick. You knew about everything. How does this end?”
She didn’t answer, instead choosing to gesture at the fire station. “You come here a lot. Why?”
“It’s where my parents left me.”
“I know that, butwhydo you come here?”
It didn’t shock me she’d know something I had never told her. Of course she knew this was the exact station where my parents had abandoned me, where they’d left me like the worst game of ding-dong-ditch with a really shitty prize.
