Tell the Wind and Fire(72)

And I, I found slowly, discovering the truth as if it was something I had found under dust in the attic of my own home, I did not want to join the committee. Not even to save Ethan. I was so tired of compromises and cowardice.

Aunt Leila looked at my face and sighed.

“Did you hear nothing of what I told you? Did you understand nothing of my story? That Ethan Stryker’s blood tortured your father and murdered your mother, my sister, and exiled you, my niece as dear as a daughter. That I have seen them do the same to countless families, and I will not stop until every drop of his blood has answered for mine. Doesn’t it matter, what they did?”

My mother gone, my father wrecked, my aunt twisted, my life ruined. If I thought about it too long, I felt the same consuming rage that Aunt Leila must have felt. If I had stayed with her instead of meeting Ethan, revenge might have been all I wanted as well. Rage might have consumed me until it was all there was left of me.

Mark Stryker had not suffered as Aunt Leila had suffered. Mark had no excuse for all he had done. But when you were making other people suffer, no excuse was good enough.

Ethan had known nothing, had done nothing but try to help me and try to save the city. Aunt Leila was murdering people, but Ethan had given himself up to save someone. I had already underestimated him, and I would not let him be condemned.

“It matters. Something else matters more. I love him.”

“Love?” said Aunt Leila. “What of it? I loved my sister, more than you ever loved her, you who denied her to the whole Light city. Do you think any force in the world cares about who you love? Love never saved a single human soul. I have seen so many suffer, so many children and women and men die of neglect or brutality or starvation. Do you think any one of that crowd cares about your trouble? Did you care about theirs?”

“Not as much as I should have.”

Aunt Leila nodded, watching me with intent eyes, pitiless as a wolf. I did not know what had changed her, what had made her someone who prized revenge above love. I did not know if she had always been like this, for as long as I had lived and loved her.

Ethan cares about the crowd’s trouble, I thought. Ethan does.

“You can have the doppelganger,” Aunt Leila said at last.

“What?”

“The doppelganger,” Aunt Leila elucidated, saying the words with a certain malice, as if she wanted to take love as well as my beloved from me. “He’s the one you were with at this hotel, isn’t he? He’s found some way to take his collar off. When we found Ethan Stryker in the Dark city, I thought he might be the doppelganger, but we tested him—he’s the real thing. But you seem to like the imitation well enough. You can keep the doppelganger, and we will kill Ethan Stryker in two weeks, in a festival nobody will ever forget, in a purge of all his kind.” She licked her lips, like a wolf after a meal, and I felt sick watching her. “We have to have the real one. He’s the one I want.”

“They’re both real,” I told her. “But he’s the one I want too. It was me who took the doppelganger’s collar off. I saved him, but that doesn’t mean I love him. It means I would have saved anybody. You think you can keep me from saving someone I love?”

“I already saved a man for you once,” said Aunt Leila. “Not this one. Not a Stryker.”

She spoke as if it was entirely her doing, as if the world changed only by her will. I had spent so long feeling guilty for what I’d done, for putting on an act to get Dad out, for pretending to be innocent and thereby losing all innocence. It was something I had done, and I would not let Aunt Leila take it away from me.

“I saved him,” I said. “Not you. And I’ll save Ethan.”

“Lucie,” Aunt Leila said, obviously trying to be patient, “I don’t understand the way you are acting. I spent so long planning for us to be reunited. I rallied the sans-merci to bring you back to me. I told them what had been done to you and to my sister, and they rose up to reunite us. I thought of you every day of the two years of your exile. And now . . .”

“And did you think that nothing would happen to me in two years? Did you think this is what you were going to do to me, once you got me back?”

Aunt Leila looked annoyed, as frustrated as a parent with a child who could not understand their homework. Her determination did not even waver. She did not take me seriously at all.

“We are finally together again. The city is ours, and justice is being done. Can’t you be good?”

She walked over to where I was sitting and gently stroked my hair back from my face, and I knew then what I had not known when we were separated by exile and time: that she was lost.

She acted like I was a little girl who would accept Carwyn instead of Ethan as if they were dolls. Neither of them was real to her. Even I was hardly real to her. Maybe the child she had loved was real, but that was not me. Not any longer.

I whispered to her, “You should know me better than that.”

Outside, I could still hear the murmuring of a crowd, like the turbulent air before the violence of a storm.

“And you should know me better than to think you could save him. You should remember better. Tell the wind and fire where to stop,” said Aunt Leila. “But do not tell me.”

She should have remembered that my grandmother was the first to say those words, when people said she could not save the man she loved.