15. A Handmade Crown #2
“She’s probably making a pot of tea…so you need a mug,” Lucais muttered, glancing around.
Just as I was about to point him to the cupboard at the end, he made a satisfied sound and lunged towards it.
Lucais pulled out a mug I’d never seen before in my life—but at least I still knew where they were kept.
“Here you go.” He placed it down in front of me distractedly. “Now. What’s missing?”
“Milk?” I offered weakly.
He snapped his fingers and spun on his heels towards the brand-new fridge I’d also never seen before. “Yes, I—” The High King broke off and went still as a statue, except for the very slight tilt of his head as he stared at something on the refrigerator door.
“What is it?” I demanded, fear curdling the contents of my stomach. “ Lucais. What is it?”
Before he answered me, the spell timed out.
I heard the grandfather clock in the hallway begin to tick again, followed by an incessant hum like a swarm of bees above my head.
Then the sound of a dozen different televisions each set to a different channel switching on.
I shut my eyes as everything came rushing back to the surface of time, and—
“—can’t remember the last time I saw the old Ogre since the bookstore closed down, but I’m sure if I give Patty a call, we could set something up.
It’s so seldom we get you back home, after all,” my mother was saying.
Her voice was normal and easy as it filtered through the kitchen and filled up all of the vacant, frozen corners, breathing life and substance back into them.
My eyelids fluttered aggressively, trying to acclimate to the scene before me in the weak afternoon light. The townhouse was west-facing, and very little natural illumination came in through the windows after the burst of morning sun at the back doors faded away.
Standing by the stove dressed in a set of pink cotton pyjamas, my mother wore a knitted shawl that had once belonged to my grandmother around her shoulders.
I stared at it, feeling the colour draining from my face.
Without missing a beat, Lucais reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of longlife milk, setting it down on the table before taking a seat next to me.
The rickety wooden chair creaked beneath his weight.
Far too casually, he slung an arm around the back of mine.
When I felt a crossbreeze tickling the nape of my neck, I leaned back to peer down the hallway.
Finding the front door still open, I elbowed Lucais in the ribs. He followed my line of sight and waved a hand in the air, closing it with magic—right as Brynn strode into the room, scowling down at the two of us like she had witnessed the entire scene and had long outgrown her thing for fairies.
For a moment, I thought back to the three-eyed faerie in the palace and how insurmountably guilty I’d felt when I thought of Brynn finding out. But the way she was staring at Lucais made me second-guess myself, and a low, unsettling feeling took root in my stomach.
What did you see on the fridge? I telepathically demanded of the High King as we carefully and quietly observed my sister’s movements around the room.
She sauntered over to the pantry and pulled out a box of dry, sugary cereal, popping pieces of it into her mouth like popcorn as she leaned back against the edge of the counter and stared daggers at me.
Somehow, each crunch sounded like a threat.
I tried to gauge whether she really was taller than me or if I was just in a state of all-consuming panic.
There are three usual suspects that interrupt the rhythm of time between our worlds, Lucais said through the connection between our minds.
Time passes differently depending on how it’s filled.
The couple of months you’ve spent with me shouldn’t have equated to more than a year back home under normal circumstances, which means that something major happened while we were away.
Huge global events kind of seize the timeline here until it haemorrhages in weeks and years.
Global events like…?
Generally, it’s a world war. He hummed in his mind. Sometimes, an axis-tilting political election.
Or? I pressed him because he didn’t seem to believe that either of those things were the cause.
A plague.
A plague?
I tried so hard to keep the disbelief from showing on my face, but my sister was watching us with eyes like a bird of prey, and she caught the microexpressions before I did.
The look on her face darkened.
Our mother was oblivious, chatting absentmindedly while she brewed a pot of tea with her back to me at the stove.
She talked about all the things that played into John Dante’s decision to ultimately close up shop and retire to his derelict cabin out of town with Patricia Farley to keep him company.
From the snippets I managed to glean between my sister’s staring competition and Lucais’s mental telepathy, it sounded like he was putting all of his energy into fighting a million-dollar property development company who wanted to buy up his land and demolish the cabin so they could build a resort.
If I wasn’t torn in so many different directions at that moment in time, I would have snorted at how true to character that sounded.
I rubbed at my chest to soothe the pang in my heart.
Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Lucais tipped his head towards a pamphlet on the refrigerator when I glanced over at him.
They call it a pandemic now. Look at the information sheet pinned up there.
He met my sister’s sharp, suspicious gaze and cocked his head to one side as if he was reading her expression like a book.
They went into a full lockdown here and lost months of their normal lives, he added after a moment.
That’s why we’ve come back so far into the future.
It sped up time for them in a catastrophic way.
Not just for them, I wanted to say. But I kept the thought to myself. The price for abandoning my sister was my cross to bear.
“Grandma’s dead,” Brynn said flatly. I flinched, blushing furiously, and she scoffed. “Grandpa, too.”
“Brynn!” my mother scolded, turning on her. “Don’t be so cruel. You know it wasn’t Aura’s fault that she couldn’t make it to the funerals…”
I’m going to be sick.
My father’s parents lived overseas, and we rarely heard anything from them, but we’d been close to my mother’s family.
I’d been close to them, but they were moved into residential care on the other side of the country before Brynn was even born.
When they stopped being capable of shielding me from the abuse, I’d stopped telling them about it.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited, but that clock…
“Oh, hush, child. Ignore her.” My mother huffed, tucking the shawl a little tighter around a body that suddenly looked much thinner and frailer than I’d even noticed before. “Would you like a cuppa, Luc?” she offered, hesitating before taking her seat across from us.
My eyes grew round. Luc?
The High King ignored me, instead opting to flash one of his most charming smiles at her when he replied with, “No, thank you, Mrs. Roberts.”
A ball of nausea bobbed up and down in my throat at the title.
She’d cheated on the man with a fucking faerie, but never gave up his last name.
Even after she had finalised her divorce in the early days, before he came back with a generational pattern for his daughters to break and an entirely different attitude served on the side of addiction.
Somehow, the nausea intensified further when I heard her response to the High King’s velvet-smooth voice.
“Please,” she said, soft and brimming with endearment. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me mama?”
“Why would he call you mama?” I blurted. It took everything in me not to gag right over the sugar bowl. Why did I think this was a good idea? It’s never a good fucking idea. This is worse than Christmas.
She rolled her watery blue eyes at me and took a sip of her steaming tea. “He’s my son-in-law, the father of my future grandbabies. Why wouldn’t he call me that? It’s better than Mrs. Roberts, like I’m some school teacher.”
I realised that she’d poured me a cup of tea while I was fixated on the pamphlet tacked to the fridge, so I forced my hands to wrap around it. The warmth of the ceramic felt too hot, too real.
“Right,” I muttered, bringing the mug to my lips. And then, into Lucais’s mind, I shouted, Son-in-law?! You rewrote their memories so they think you’re my husband?!
He covered his surprise with a cough. Well.
“Husband” seemed a lot easier for them to digest than to admit that I’m your Oracle-fated soulmate with whom you might only accept the bond in order to avoid becoming the leader of all things evil.
Because then we’d have to tell her the man she had an affair with was actually from the Court of Darkness, which is highly suspicious and borderline depressing.
And I thought you wanted this visit to be short and sweet.
I growled at him inside my head.
“Do you know yet if you’re getting time off over the holidays?” my mother was asking.
With some difficulty, I managed to follow her through the conversation, learning bits and pieces of new information about the life that Lucais had fabricated for me in her mind to avoid erasing me altogether.
Since time had sped up so much, the enchantment that he’d placed upon her needed to follow the normal progression of human years.
And that meant explaining away my prolonged absence with a fancy new job in another city.
In her mind, my father had passed away in hospital after many trips in and out of the rehabilitation facility during the first few years after I was gone.
He’d suffered liver failure due to excessive drinking.
By that point in time, I’d already fallen in love with the city and pursued a career in investigative journalism.