Oh. Grief.That’swhat this was!
The cord around his waist tightened, and he looked up to see Alistair using his hands to carve out a portal in the icy depths of the supernatural grief, and Scout stared at him.
He was simplyportalingout? Using magical means to escape this terrible, terrible loss?
Alistair gestured impatiently for Scout to swim closer so he could use the portal, and for a moment, Scout thought about it. Escape with Alistair, then escape Alistair, then return to fight another day.
He’d reached up a hand, his lungs burning, to swim toward the light when he felt a tug on his ankle. He glanced behind him and sputtered, because he saw not only Lucky, both hands around Scout’s ankle, but Kayleigh, her arms around Lucky’s waist, and Marcus, his arms wrapped around Kayleigh’s thighs. Marcus was partially out of the dark presence of grief, but even through the undulating, warbling surface of the dark pool, Scout could make out Helen with her arms around Marcus, and shadowy figures beyond Helen, their arms wrapped around her to ground her.
All these people, braving the terrible cold, the chilly depths of bottomless sorrow, all to keep Scout right there on the island, where he belonged.
Scout turned away from Alistair and reached down to grasp the rope of magic wrapped around his waist. He thought about all the times he’d needed love, craved attention, adulation, from Alistair, and all the times Alistair had coldly rebuffed him, had ignored him and been cruel to Kayleigh—to all of the children in the compound, actually.
That was how, he realized.
That was how you cut the cords that bound you to someone who didn’t deserve your care.
With indifference.
He parted the rope without thinking about it, just like Alistair had for years and years and years.
Alistair stared at him for a moment, and then, Scout assumed, took his own portal out.
Scout’s lungs were bursting, his eyes—stinging with the salt water he was submerged in—were starting to only see gray. He made his body limp and allowed himself to be towed backward and backward and backward, until he lay gasping on the beach, Lucky sobbing on top of him, Kayleigh by his side.
“Where’d Alistair go,” Kayleigh managed, after choking up seawater for several minutes.
“Who cares,” Scout rasped. “We’ll never grieve his absence,” and with that, he laughed softly and hysterically to himself while the others hauled him to his feet, dragged him to Lucky’s apartment, and practically poured him into Lucky’s bed.
HELEN, MARCUS,and Kayleigh helped Lucky strip Scout down and put him into warm, clean sweats before tucking him into bed. Then to Lucky’s surprise, while those three went to change—and to tend their businesses—Piers and Larissa stayed to helpLuckydry off and put on sweats, because he wasexhausted.Once Scout hit the mattress, Lucky was so tired he might have collapsed in a wet heap on the floor without their help, and he was stammeringly grateful as Piers dropped his clothes on the bathroom floor.
The metallic clink of something heavy in the pocket of his jeans caught his attention, and he managed to mumble enough to Piers that Piers put his lucky coin on the bedstand before Lucky rolled next to Scout’s shivering body and fell fast asleep.
When they woke up again, it was night.
Kayleigh was asleep on Lucky’s recliner, curled up like a child, and the smell of stew—something hearty with potatoes—filled Lucky’s apartment.
Lucky grunted and tried to sit up, and Kayleigh told him to hush. “You and Scout need to eat,” she explained with a yawn. “A lot. You both did lots of big magic and used lots of energy, and you get to eat and sleep for a day before you go back to work.” She pretended to scowl. “You lucky jerks.”
“Next time you can drown in… in whatever,” Lucky finished weakly. He’d recognized the emotion immediately when he’d entered the darkness that lurked over the soul trap of the clearing.
Kayleigh’s eyes narrowed speculatively as she dished up two big bowls of stew. One she set on the bedstand by Scout, kissing his forehead gently when he didn’t even stir, but the other she brought over to Lucky. She handed it to him, wrapped in a towel because the bowl was hot, and he looked at the spot on the bed next to him.
With a smile, she made herself comfortable and patted his thigh through the covers.
“We’re sort of like family now, aren’t we?” she said.
Lucky shrugged. “Not that I have any, but yeah.”
She nodded and regarded him thoughtfully. “What was it?” she asked after a moment. “What was the great darkness? Scout didn’t know the first time, but he… he kept mumbling something as we were dragging him back. Do you know what it was?”
Lucky nodded, swallowing hard past the lump in his throat. “It was….” He took a breath. “It’s the feeling I had when I realized Auntie Cree wasn’t going to breathe again—she died in her bed, and it had been just her and me. It’s that thing in the pit of my stomach when I realized I was going to have to leave my home, my Auntie Cree’s house, and the city I grew up in with only the cash in my pocket, because otherwise I’d be dead.” He thought, but didn’t say, it was the feeling he’d had when Auntie Cree had come to fetch him when he’d been mostly a baby and his grandmother had saved him from a life of poverty and want. Instead he focused on the most immediate moment, the moment he’d known exactly what the darkness was, the briny, bone-chilling suffocation that had threatened to take away his boy and his breath at the same time.
“It’s the feeling I had when he disappeared off the deck of the ferry,” he said gruffly. “And I thought for a moment I’d never see him again. I get why he wasn’t afraid of it, you know. He’d never experienced it before.”
Kayleigh’s hand tightened on his knee. “Grief,” she said roughly. “It was grief. All those people, grieving over Tom. It must have collected over the clearing, trapping them all, making their spirits sick with it.” She let out a breath. “How do you think we get rid of it?”
Lucky took a bite of his stew and shook his head. “I don’t know, but if I know anything, I know your brother has a couple of ideas.”
