The maids had just started setting the table when Felix returned inside with Julia tagging behind. All conversation of lichund and werewolves came to a grinding halt.
It felt like betrayal, lying to her. But Jaylin answered all her questions about his time in the forest with well-contrived answers. He survived by drinking water from a stream and poaching fish. He lit fires with his pocket lighter and journeyed for days until he found a road where he could hitch hike to the nearest gas station and dial the only number he remembered by heart: Quentin.
“Oh, honey,” Julia said when he was done. “My poor boy.” And she choked him in another one of her suffocating embraces. He hadn’t even pulled away by the time the front doors were swinging open and Sadie was hauling in a case of beer, Tisper and Matt just behind her.
He ran to them just as they were setting down their things, threw his arms around Tisper and Sadie who both swallowed him in a unified hug. It lasted almost too long, before he detangled himself from their arms and stopped in front of Matt. He was hanging his jacket on the coat rack, a brace strapped around his shoulder.
“What happened?” Jaylin asked.
Matt shrugged strangely at his question. Car accident.”
Tisper snorted. “Now you want to be humble? He jumped out of a moving truck. He hasn’t shut up about it since then.”
“In all fairness, it was a truck he sent through the gates of hell to get you,” Sadie added keenly. “That does make it kinda cool.”
Jaylin gaped, reading Matthew’s freckled face twice over. “That was you?”
Matt scratched at his neck, but before he could even try to humble himself, Jaylin tossed his arms around his neck in a hard hug. “I can’t believe you did that, Matt.”
“Okay, okay—ow. Don’t kiss me; I can smell the booze on you.”
“Just on the cheek.”
“Jaylin—no!”
Matt fought off his affections until the front doors opened again and a cold draft swept in. He stepped through quietly, Bailey, sealing the door behind him. He didn’t say anything, but when his eyes met Jaylin’s, there was a kind of silent understanding between them. After a moment of lingering, he slipped by without a word to be greeted by an enthusiastic cheer from Leo.
They started a game of poker on the living room table—Leo, Imani, Bailey, and the other man they called Dylan, as well as the woman with the dark hair who shot him eerie glances now and then. Three other women arrived, but Jaylin never came to know their names. He could only assume they were Quentin’s sentinels by the way the others greeted them. Full of praise and reward.
Every seat was taken at the table, plus two extra chairs the maids had to fetch from the supply closet—and the ones for themselves as they were invited to join the feast. Quentin was the last to seat himself, clad in fresh clothes and free of the smell of cooked meat. He wore a gray dress shirt—no tie—and the slacks Jaylin had only seen him in a handful of times. The ones that made him look so much older.
Everyone had come dressed nicely. Tisper wore something black and strappy from the back of her closet. Something Jaylin had only seen her in a handful of times. Sadie even stood three inches taller in her high heels, and Matt—well, Matt had at least come in something besides a hoodie and jeans. The purple sweater probably belonged to his father; it was much too clean and much too large for Matt.
Jaylin looked down at his own outfit—a blue t-shirt and a pair of Alexander’s sweats. At least he hadn’t been the only one. Felix still wore his same mangled jacket and shredded jeans—only this time caked a bit with dirt from the garden.
A feast had been laid out, and the maids went around to each corner of the table, lifting the silver lids from the platters. Jaylin had never seen so much food, but according to Lisa, Quentin had been hard at work since six in the morning, preparing this and stewing that.
More prominent than anything was a platter of venison that sat in the middle—thick, tender slabs of meat that made Jaylin’s stomach groan out so loudly, he crossed his arms to quiet it. Fresh bread had been baked and sliced and stacked in baskets on both corners besides heaps of mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables, and so many other dishes foreign to him, but fresh and steaming and deliciously candied in crusts of cheese and glistening sauces.
The others laughed over stories, clanked glasses in celebration, drank to their hearts’ delight. But Jaylin ate. He ate until he ached—until everyone had finished eating, and he was still forking cuts of venison onto his plate. He ate until he couldn’t possibly eat anymore, and that numbness was nearly gone. Nearly forgotten.
All he could do now was wonder how Quentin cooked like this. How he knew just what spices to use. He didn’t seem the type to look up recipes or to go by the book. Had he memorized the laws of cooking, or was it intuition?
Jaylin looked to him across the table, his broad smile, radiant in the candlelight as he laughed over something Leo had said. And as happy as he looked, Jaylin could only envision that face in his head. That cold, terrified expression.
And then another flash.
He was staring into the barrel of a gun. The sight of blood on Quentin’s shoulder, the coppery stench of it. The way it made his stomach howl the same way the venison had. Then…in the metal. His reflection.
He shot up from his chair so fast, it hit the wall behind him. The table had gone silent and his mother reached for his hand. “Honey, what’s wrong? You done already? They haven’t even brought out dessert.”
“I just, uhm—” He passed over the faces. Too many eyes, watching him. Too many concerned faces, waiting to hear what he’d had to say. He’d remembered a piece of what he’d lost, but he didn’t want to remember the rest. He’d been the one to put that horrified look on Quentin’s face—it terrified him to think of what else he’d done. So he shoved his chair aside. “I need some air.”
And he left through the foyer, down the hall where Anna and Alex’s names maimed the doorframes, forever scarred in this place. He shoved open Mrs. Sigvard’s hummingbird door and he let the November air wash through him. It was frigid, a bone-biting cold. He wondered if snow would come early this year. How beautiful this garden would look coated in its powder.
Jaylin walked along the right trail, through trees and bushes barren of fruit, towards the rose garden he loved the smell of. But the perfume of them had gone. They weren’t vibrant anymore. They were browning around the edges, sad little skeletons once they’d shed their petals. That’s all they were now, just thorns.
The loneliness he felt scorched him inside and Jaylin plucked a dying rose from its stem and held the fragile petals in his palm until they broke off from one another. His eyes stung and he bit his lip to keep it that way—only a sting. “You couldn’t have stayed a little longer?” he said. To the roses, to the moon, to no one at all. “You’re the only one who understands this—the way I feel. Like a monster. I feel like a monster and I know you had to feel like one too. But you’re gone now and it’s not fair. I don’t want to do this alone.”
“Who are you talking to?” It didn’t sound like him at first. There was a depth to his voice, a sharp edge that cut into Jaylin like a knife.
Jaylin dropped the rose and spun to face him, and Quentin stood there—all of him washed in the pale blue moonlight, but his eyes. They were always dark. Too dark to read, too dark to understand. But a beautiful kind of a darkness. That scarce moment of night before the moon rises. “Who were you talking to, Jaylin?” he asked again when silence gave him no answers.
Jaylin looked to the petals on the ground. He wondered if that was how Quentin felt when she died. All thorns, no rose.
“Anna,” he admitted. Quentin looked confused—at least that was what Jaylin saw when the clouds parted from the moon, and a little more light spilled down on the garden.
“She loved you a lot,” Jaylin said. “And she was good. She was a good person. She helped me—she helped me get out of that place and I’m sorry for what happened to her. I’m going back inside.”
He crossed his arms and made for the trail, desperate to escape Quentin’s narrow gaze. But as he tried to pass him by, Quentin caught him by the arm, reeled him back.
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked. “You feel like a monster?”
Jaylin stepped back to gain some space between them. Dinner was turning to a sickness in his stomach. When he said nothing, Quentin took a step closer and the shadows washed from his face. Those eyes held something fervent now. Something that looked almost like pain.
“Jaylin, you’re not a monster.”
Jaylin blinked away the sting. “Why did you look so afraid then? That night—I remembered the look on your face. You were scared of me.”
Quentin’s eyebrows furrowed and he searched Jaylin’s face. His voice was so soft, almost brittle when he said, “Because I didn’t know it was you.”
Jaylin swallowed the fear that welled in his throat and he let himself roam the beautiful dark of Quentin’s eyes. “But I killed someone.”
That powerful gaze Quentin had—it finally fell away. “A lichund,” he admitted. “One Ziya sent to kill us all. You’re not a murderer, Jaylin. You saved us when we couldn’t save ourselves. You saved my sentinels and my patrols from Ziya. You saved me.” And then his eyes set on Jaylin again and the way he stared felt so heavy—so assertive.
It was hard to breathe.
“I don’t remember, I—”
“You will,” Quentin promised. “You’ll remember everything in time.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t even try to hurt you? I didn’t try to hurt anyone?”
Quentin smiled, and it was like a medicine. The heaviness in his chest lifted. “There have been legends about the lichund—circumstances where they were different. Stories of them…protecting villages of us from hunters and hordes, back when we weren’t a covert society. When we were killed and tortured, like witches.”
“And you think I—”
“I know. I’ve known since I met you, that you would be different. You’re not a monster, Jaylin. You’re a hero.”
Jaylin searched his face, but there was nothing but truth in it. Nothing but honesty in his smile. It was hard to swallow, but the numbness was gone.
“Stay here,” he told Quentin. “I’ll be right back.”
That confusion twinged his brow again, but Quentin hung back, and Jaylin ran through the bushes and trees and the withering flowers, back into the house where the clatter of dishes and chatter had resumed in his absence.
No one noticed him as he slipped up the stairs, into his room, where Anna’s envelope sat untouched in his nightstand drawer. And no one noticed him as he slipped back down, hugging her name to his chest, and rushing back outside before anyone might stop him.
His nerves were alive and his heart beat too loudly, but he wasn’t sure if Quentin could even sense it—if their heartbeats were back to being one in the same. And before he could chicken out—before he could turn around and march right back into the house, Jaylin steeled himself and ran through the rose garden until he found Quentin’s dark silhouette, standing over the last living rose in a dying patch. The moon was close and large, and it haloed around him, melted around all the curves and cuts of his strong shape.
And as he turned, Jaylin held out the envelope.
Quentin’s eyes narrowed when he spotted the name at the top. “What is it?”
“I tried to take it to you that night you guys came to get me. From Ziya’s—from that place. I dropped it. He must have had it sent over.“
“Who had it sent?” Quentin asked, unlatching the clasp on the back, folding the top up.
“Gunner.”
He stopped for a moment and looked at Jaylin. Then Quentin dumped the papers out into his palm and he held them to the light of the moon. His eyes swept the first page, scanning over all of the words and the diagrams, and then flipped to the next. But there was a confusion—a slight shake of his head as he tried to comprehend what he was reading.
“You didn’t kill her,” Jaylin explained. “That was what Gunner said—that the pregnancy did. That she would have died when she turned back anyway. The silver in the bullets made her change but if anything, it made it faster. If anything it gave her mercy.” He nearly choked on the last word. Not because if the anxiety of saying it, but because of the look on Quentin’s face. The sheen in his dark eyes, the pain in his brow.
Then he lifted the page, slid it beneath the stack. And as he read the next, Quentin covered his mouth and shuttered a breath into his palm. Jaylin didn’t know if it was his explanation or what he’d seen on the paper, but it broke something in him.It hurt Jaylin to watch him crumble.
He turned from Jaylin and walked forward to the rose bushes, those papers—the evidence he’d tried so hard to deliver to him that night—just hanging there at his side like they didn’t matter anymore. Like they felt too heavy to hold up. He stood there for a long time, in front of the decaying flowers, giving Jaylin only his broad back. Cutting away his emotions. Carving that mote into the ground again.
The silence was like ice, and Jaylin stood there, shivering in it. “Quentin,” he said quietly, but there was no answer. He didn’t say a word, didn’t turn to look at him. Not until he urged again, “Quentin.”
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he asked in that voice that wasn’t his. Jaylin felt a dread at the sound of it—worse so at the sight of his tears as Quentin turned to look at him. The pain in his face, the clench of his teeth—ground so tight his jaw feathered.
Jaylin didn’t know why, but he moved closer. He wanted to understand Quentin so badly, but how could he do that if he still lived in his castle? How could he know him from so far away? “I was trying to help. I thought you should know. I thought it would help you, I—”
Quentin dropped the papers. The last bit of Anna that existed in this world went scattering to the ground. And he pulled Jaylin in by the shirt, strong arms folding around him—squeezing too tight, crushing him in. He felt Quentin’s jaw against his shoulder, felt the weight of him bury into it, and Jaylin tried to hug him back but his hands shook and he only managed to squeeze the shirt on his back. To let Quentin crush him however he saw fit, because he needed it. As much as Quentin did, he needed it.
“You’ve changed everything,” Quentin spoke against his shoulder. A whisper that hurried its way to Jaylin’s bones and splintered him like he was hollow glass. It shattered him. Shattered him because it was so honest. So painful and honest. “Thank you.”
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