36. Lochgrub
Chapter thirty-six
Lochgrub
A s I sat alone on the beach, watching Morgoya’s tall, thin figure getting smaller and smaller as she walked along the water’s edge, I thought about it.
About the nights that I had spent lying awake in my single bed, tucked up beneath layers of blankets pulled all the way over my head with only my face free, and thought about killing my father.
My father figure.
My mortal louse.
Dark, disturbed thoughts—too wicked to be entertained by such a small child, but entertained and enjoyed, nonetheless.
I had wanted to end him, end his reign of tyranny over my mother. I had desperately wanted to make things right and safe and okay in a way that would be permanent.
But I could never bring myself to take it further than a single thought. It never became an idea or a fully thought- out plan. It didn’t matter how badly he beat her, or how much of our money he stole and gambled away, or how many pieces of furniture he broke in our home, or even what irreplaceable things he so violently ripped away from us.
I could never do it.
Would never do it.
And so I understood why Lucais couldn’t do it, either, even if it was the right thing to do. Even if, maybe, the execution of the Malum would be a kindness.
There had been humans who wanted to hurt my father, too.
I had a boyfriend when I was sixteen, whom I had met at a regional school sporting event, and even he wanted to hurt him. He had seen the bruises on my mother, the large fingerprints marking my own skin, and he had promised that he wouldn’t let it happen again. He talked me through the violent things he would like to do to that man…and I had broken up with him the next day.
Some of my father figure’s friends had acted on similar thoughts. Better matched by age and strength, and fuelled by too many beers, I could recall more than one night where more than one friend had stood up to him for us. Swearing, bleeding, and throwing punches out into the street until the police were called.
But they never came back after that. Even if he didn’t.
A part of me had liked their violence. Related to it.
The other part of me was scared to death—not of them or what they might have done if they were ten years older or a few drinks more sober, but of the silence that would have followed once my father’s playlist came to an end.
The piece of my heart still hanging on by a thread and bruised to the point of blackness—the part of me who never grew up and out of those rose-coloured glasses and would be the same age as Brynn was forever—would have broken irreparably to lose a parent. Even one whom I hated.
Even one whom, as it turned out, was never really my parent at all.
Lucais had let the Malum live in exile after committing a heinous crime while attempting to commit another.
A crime against the High Fae’s mating rituals, and an attempted assault on the Witch Covens.
Why had his father been able to disobey him when the whole of Faerie had been forced to bend to his will in freeing the slaves?
Had he reigned in his power and used only his words to give the order not to do it? Had he refused to play the crown’s card because it was his own flesh and blood?
Maybe it was his fault, his error in judgement. A new High King, a new era in Faerie, and a war that ended in the creation of the human race happening all at once must have been overwhelming for even the most powerful of the High Fae.
Lucais’s guilt was raw and genuine. He couldn’t be blamed for wanting to prevent the hunt that would have begun for his family members—and for Wren’s, too.
Fuck.
Wren had a sister. Wren had lost a sister. And he’d gone straight upstairs the night the caenim attacked us at my home in Belgrave to check on mine.
I’d accused him of being loyal to a lover.
It was his sister .
The soft whirring of the wind alerted me to his arrival as he evanesced, and then his voice followed, quiet and low as the purr of a cat.
“Auralie?”
As I climbed to my feet and brushed sand from the back of my legs, I caught sight of Morgoya in the distance, waving a hand in the air to signal goodbye before she vanished in a flash of green and gold.
“The High Lady filled me in,” I mumbled a little sheepishly, as I smoothed down the already smooth fabric of my skirts and stared at his polished boots, “and it turns out that we aren’t so different after all. Maybe some part of me still wants to blame you, but I can’t. For any of it. Because I understand.”
I understood what pain could do to people—what it had done to me. How it could speak for you, and sometimes act for you, too. What it could take away, what it could offer up in replacement, and how some nights you couldn’t even tell the difference anymore.
The relief of passing it onto someone else was familiar to me, as was the self-hatred that followed. And then the denial. The blame. The explanations and the excuses.
Anything to keep on hurting. At least then, I was capable of feeling something.
At least then, the High King and what was left of his inner circle after the war were capable of feeling something.
“She’s gone, Auralie. My sister is gone, and I’ve had about three hundred years to make peace with that.”
Slowly, as if in a daze, I lifted my gaze to meet the chestnut brown eyes that were caressing me as softly as his lips had. “Morgoya said it was Wren’s sister.”
The High King’s shoulders jerked upwards in a casual dismissal. “Margot was like a sister to both of us.”
“Oh.” I nodded, feeling a sudden wave of vertigo rolling over me. Shivering, I brushed it off. Clamped my mental fist around the magic that stalked me before it could move or speak. “Well, I’m sorry for what I said...”
Lucais smiled at me forlornly. “As am I.”
“Call it even, then?” I asked, squinting up at him and trying for a smile.
He nodded, taking a step forward, and his midnight curls fell over the creases on his brow. “We made some grave errors during the war and the months after it ended. Consequently, it will be much harder to put the Malum down now. But we will. Aura, I promise you that we will.”
Letting him take both of my hands in his, I breathed in the scent of smoke and sunlight emanating from the High King of Faerie and waited for the grey skies to fade back into the rainbows of dancing light.
The magic hissed.
I silenced it again.
We had made up, so his mood should be improving…
A piping shriek rang out, and I whirled, backing up against the hard planes of Lucais’s chest, searching for the source. It was a soprano, ringing out through the air like a song, so it couldn’t be the caenim. It echoed with fear and panic and—
“Calm down,” the High King said with a laugh, wrapping one arm around my waist and placing his other hand across my thundering heart. His long fingers splayed out, spanning nearly the entire length of my collarbone. He bent his head to mine, nudging my face towards the water with the bridge of his nose against my cheekbone.
The sea had risen up like a fountain, like an enormous orb of water was being sucked from the surface, and inside of it was a—
“Mer—”
“No.” The High King placed his lips against my temple so I felt his smile. “We have iron nets to keep us safe here. That’s a lochgrub. They’re usually harmless.”
A lochgrub—that’s what Wren had called me when I’d refused to step through the gateway.
Eyes wide and heart stuttering, I blinked at the blob of seawater hovering above the surface, trying to peer through the ripples and glare of grey light to glimpse the creature inside.
“The Merfolk clip their wings so they’ll be easier to hunt,” the High King explained, his breath tickling my ear. “Some of them risked fleeing into these inlets when we lowered the iron nets before that could happen, but they remain trapped in the water, too scared to take flight in case they land on the wrong side of the nets. That’s what it’s doing now—trying to fly—but it just can’t bring itself to break through.”
I stared and stared and stared at the creature in the moments that passed as the fountain of water slowly began to fall back into the sea.
It was small, but it looked almost human. With two short arms and legs, webbed feet, and long fingers, it had skin instead of scales that shimmered like a pearl. The wings were translucent, the gold-tipped outlines barely visible as they shuddered, and its body-length hair was the colour of seaweed and starlight.
Right before it sank beneath the surface again, the creature turned to face us.
An angelic face, huge eyes wide and glistening with regret, stared back at us as we stood together on the sand. It lasted for a heartbeat before it disappeared, sending small, dark waves crashing upon the shoreline.
“That’s a lochgrub?” I whispered.
“That’s a lochgrub,” the High King confirmed, pressing a warm and affectionate kiss to the top of my head.
I took his hand and let him lead me away from the inlet, back towards the House, but I wasn’t aware of anything as we walked.
If he spoke, I couldn’t hear him. If the dinosaur remains were still there, I couldn’t see them. If the courtyard or the room beyond it were empty or filled with faeries again, I couldn’t notice. And if the light sky had indeed begun to clear, I hadn’t looked at it.
After Lucais walked me back to my room and I frantically searched for the copy of The Sins of Stars I had kicked under the bed, all I could think about for the rest of the afternoon was the ethereal vision I had seen along the beach.
The lochgrub.
The creature Wren had likened me to before he brought me into the Court of Light.
He could have called me anything—any number of creatures who froze on the spot and refused to move or were painfully slow and indecisive.
But he’d called me a lochgrub.
And now that I had seen one for myself, seen that it was so different from what I had imagined, the magic in my veins had started to squirm again. Trying to speak, trying to be noticed. Wren had called me a lochgrub, and everything— everything —stopped making sense.
Because lochgrubs were strange, but they were absolutely and incomparably beautiful .