Unhooked(89)

My body shakes with the sobs I cannot hold back. “I love you, Liv,” I say through my tears. “Whatever happens, I always will.” She blinks up at me, her eyes soft, and I know she doesn’t recognize me. My Olivia is gone. But at least the girl who looks back at me isn’t afraid.

The Dark Ones stir behind me, their wings rustling. The largest of them holds out its great clawed hand. I look once more at Olivia, searching for some other way, but the world around me is already crumbling to dust. Even now I sense the Dark One’s impatience, so without any other choice but to stay and die, I take its hand. And I leave my friend and everything I thought I was behind.





He remembered everything, then. In that frightful moment, his fierce heart broke. . . .





Chapter 40


I WAKE TO THE ICY kiss of snow on my cheek. My hair is damp, and my body aches from its awkward position on the cold ground. In the distance, the sounds of the city wash over me. Above, the stars hold a steady, unflinching vigil. All at once, the memory of what happened and my own bone-deep regret flood through me. And it’s only the sound of a weak, rattling moan nearby that urges me to do something other than give in to the icy cold.

Hours later, when the wailing sirens have stopped and the doctors have decided that I will be okay, my mother finds me. She perches carefully on the edge of the narrow hospital bed, her usually wild red hair tied back in a braid and her face as drawn and tired as I’ve ever seen it. When she sees me stirring, she takes my hand in hers carefully, like I’ll shatter if jostled too much.

“I thought I’d lost you.” Her hands are cool and welcoming as they feel my brow and brush the flopping hair back from my face. “I thought they’d finally won.”

I want to say a million things. I want to apologize for all the times I thought she’d lost her mind. I want to rail and scream at her for what she did to me. In the end, what I’ve lost is too great, and all I can do is cry huge body-wracking sobs that shake me to my core and leave me feeling emptied out as she holds me tight. Even after the last of my gasping sobs have eased, it still takes a few minutes before I feel like I can speak without losing it again. “All those years, all those moves. You could have told me. You should have told me.”

She brushes my hair back. “Your father thought we could protect you. And I thought you deserved a chance at normal—a chance not to let what you were determine everything.”

“So my father really did leave to protect us? He really knew about me—what I was?”

“He arranged everything before he left us. He thought he could draw off the danger somehow if he wasn’t around, but”—my mom’s lips press together—“none of those loyal to him have heard from him in years.”

All at once the immensity of my mother’s loss—of both our losses—overwhelms me, and I start sobbing all over again.

It’s much later when I finally find the words to tell her everything that happened—how we were taken, how I found a way back, what I left behind. And when my story is spun out, when there’s nothing else for us to say, I take a deep breath and ask the question I’ve been wondering—and afraid to ask—since I awoke. “Did Rowan make it?”

Her expression is guarded. “He’s had a couple of transfusions already, but they think he’ll be okay . . . eventually.”

I sit myself up in the narrow hospital bad. “I need to see him.”

“You need to rest,” my mom says, sounding more like a mother than she ever has before.

“I’ve got an entire lifetime to rest.” Somehow the thought is not comforting. “I need to see him.” I need to make sure he is real, whole. That I haven’t lost him, too. “Please.”

She gives me the look she usually reserves for blank canvases, but in the end she relents and gets the nurse to wheel me down to the ward where Rowan is being monitored.

“Do they know who he is?” I ask once the nurse leaves us alone.

“Papers have been arranged.” My mom bites her lip, a sure sign she’s uncomfortable. “Not many knew what your father was,” she said. “But there were those who wanted to see his world united once again. Those who have helped to protect us over the years.”

“The landlord?” I ask.

She gives a small nod. “Not all my commissions knew who we were. But things had gotten more dangerous.”

I let out a shaking breath, understanding why. It must have been after Fiona learned how the Queen was being kept. I would have been hunted by Light and Dark alike, then.

Rowan’s room is silent except for the rhythmic beep of the monitors and the soft shushing whir of his oxygen. He seems shrunken in the narrow bed. Without his ship around him, he looks incredibly ordinary and incredibly young. “When will he wake up?”

“He’s been through a lot,” my mom tells me. “You can’t expect too much too soon.”

For once I’m thankful to have the mother I do. I’m glad I didn’t have to worry about thinking up a lie to explain him or what he is to me now. That will come later, with everyone else. “Would you give me a minute with him?”

I can tell she wants to argue, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gives me a kiss on the forehead and tells me I have five minutes.

His breathing is shallow but steady, and I notice he looks better than when he was unconscious in the snow. He isn’t exactly well, but he no longer has the bluish tinge to his skin that had me pulling myself out of my own despair and screaming for help.