15. A Handmade Crown #3
My obsession with all of those crime books, murder and makeup videos, and the cast of long-standing television shows turned out to be more than just a phase I went through.
She presented me with an article I’d written on the pursuit and capture of a serial killer in the country’s capital, a proud smile lighting up her eyes.
Lucais and I had married two years earlier, and while my mother’s memory of meeting him for the first time was hazy, she loved him and couldn’t think of a better match for me.
I gleaned most of this from the way she doted upon him, constantly offering to make him a snack or pour him a fresh drink—even though he had barely taken a sip from the first one she’d finally nagged him into accepting.
I gathered that we’d been together long enough for children to be expected, but I couldn’t determine the number of years that had lapsed from our discourse. It made me uncomfortable.
Not knowing how much time I’d lost with them was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. The skin all around it was becoming red and raw as I tried to reach it with the tips of my nails.
The whole time we talked, Brynn stood against the counter behind my mother’s chair, slowly chewing on pieces of dry cereal.
She didn’t take her eyes off us, though they slid back and forth between my face and the face of the High King at different points in the conversation with an almost serpentine gleam.
She certainly seemed to know things, like the enchantment hadn’t worked on her to its full extent.
I wondered if she was somehow part-faerie, too.
Eventually, there was a knock at the front door. I tensed, but Lucais squeezed my knee under the table when my mother stood up to answer it. As soon as she was gone, Brynn pounced.
Throwing the cereal box to the side, she took one long step from the counter to the table and braced her hands flat on the wood, leaning down to speak quietly into the small space between us.
Her voice was foreign, even down to the intonation, and the words sounded far too mature for the baby sister I had left behind before she’d even completed her first decade of life.
“I know what you are,” she hissed at Lucais, with all of her adult teeth, “and I know what you did.”
Blood drained from my face. When I looked over at my companion, he appeared amused by the admonitory edge to her tone.
The faintest smirk ghosted across Lucais’s lips, but he showed faultless restraint and matched the severity of her stare with his own impenetrable golden eyes.
After lingering for a moment to consider the challenge, she switched her merciless glare from his face back to mine.
I expected a many number of things to come out of her mouth, even the profanities she never got the chance to learn from me.
Brynn stood over me like a waking nightmare or a vengeful angel—a beautiful, strong young woman held together by the bandages she had been left to apply around her broken bones herself because the sister who swore to stay and protect her had disappeared one night and not returned for…
How many years has it been, Brynn?
But she didn’t tell me. She didn’t say any of the things I wanted to hear. All she said before she stepped back and sidled up against the counter was, “Amelia was right about you.”
My sister fell out of my reach like the wrong end of a lifeline slipping over the side of the ship. I lurched towards her, pushing halfway out of my seat as I tried to swipe her hand from across the table, but it was fruitless.
“How long?” I whispered sharply, my hand still extended between us as if it could mimic an olive branch. “How long has it been?”
Brynn laughed bitterly. “Wow. You really are pathetic.”
Her gaze snapped up, her attention snagged by the person my mother had just brought into the house.
She stepped between us for the blink of an eye, moving to open the fridge and pull out a drink for her newest guest. I followed Brynn’s stare to find her childhood best friend standing in the middle of the room, looking at me like she couldn’t believe I was real.
Alice.
Lucais tapped one finger against the top of my knee. This is the child you wanted me to help?
I swallowed and gave him a subtle nod. I didn’t anticipate the time jump, obviously.
The High King regarded her for what felt like an eternity, but it was probably only a few seconds.
She’s doing a lot better now. She’s saving for surgery, he informed me, and I began to suspect that he was reading people’s minds—or sorting through their memories.
It was probably the latter because our mental telepathy was strictly related to the mating bond, and he hadn’t been able to do it with Enyd.
The best I can do is bestow a magical inheritance to help her with the costs of that.
She has everything else covered, so she doesn’t require any type of enchantment—not even a protection spell.
Alice has no disillusionment about who she is or who she is going to be.
I smiled at her softly.
Alice looked healthy, happy, and like the authentic version of herself she’d always dreamed about becoming as she stared at me with round, bug eyes the colour of melting chocolate.
They reminded me of Amelia’s eyes—Amelia, who I hadn’t seen yet, and who had apparently said something to Brynn about me in the years I had been gone.
I wondered if she’d stepped in to help out in the role of an older sister or if they’d simply gossiped about me to conceal their hurt that I hadn’t even said goodbye.
Amelia hadn’t known that I was leaving at all. I’d left John in charge of explaining that away, considering that he was part of the reason I left in the first place, and I’d taken the coward’s way out with Brynn.
“You don’t look any different at all.” Alice’s voice was filled with honest surprise. “Seriously. What the fuck—sorry, Mrs. Roberts,” she rushed to add, her voice spiking in pitch. A faint blush touched her cheeks. “Nah, for real, though. Can I get your skincare routine?”
A laugh bubbled up and out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Sure—”
I was interrupted by a knock on the ceiling—a dark, devious sound that spoiled the first moment of actual relief I’d experienced since returning home, and liberated an awful feeling of impending doom that began to leak down my spine. The timing was impeccable.
My gaze slid to Lucais, whose expression had hardened. The only other person in the room who seemed to have heard it was Brynn. While her posture had shifted when the knock sounded, she didn’t take her icy eyes away from my face.
Knock, knock, knock, knock.
“I am so very sorry to cut this short, but it’s time for us to go,” Lucais announced, rising to stand.
“You look well,” I rushed out in a gasp, nodding encouragingly to Alice. “Are you well?”
She beamed at me, braces and all, and did a proud twirl to show off her outfit. “I am really well.”
“We took public transport into town,” Lucais told them, surprising me with a twisty white lie, “and I’m afraid that, at this rate, we might miss our ride back.”
Brynn snickered. “Off you trot, then.” She wiggled her long, manicured fingers at me in a shooing motion.
Flashbacks to days when she had painted half of my fingers pink with the polish she got in preteen magazines streaked across my vision.
Knock, knock, knock, knock. “See you in another eight years, maybe.”
Eight years.
That made her sixteen years old. Alice would be eighteen. I’ve lost almost a full decade with her—
“ Now, ” the High King said firmly, helping me to stand with an ironclad grip on my arm.
“Thank you so much for the tea and biscuits.” He graciously dipped his head to my mother, who was smiling up at us like she couldn’t hear the pounding on the ceiling getting louder as it moved from over the top of our heads, down inside the walls, and towards the front of the house. “We can see ourselves out.”
“I’ll call you over the weekend, honey,” she sang out to me, turning to engage Alice in conversation as if it wasn’t the first time she’d seen me in eight years.
As if we talked on the phone all the time.
As if I wasn’t about to walk out of her house and slip back through a portal into an entirely different world.
Nearly tripping over my own two feet as I stumbled behind the High King to the doorway, I called out to them over my shoulder, “I love you! I’m sorry—sorry I have to rush off—”
Lucais yanked me out of the kitchen right as the hideous sound of nails on a chalkboard began to scrape down the front window.
I knew it was the caenim, but I didn’t understand why they hadn’t just broken down the door if they were aware I was inside.
The last time it had happened, I’d thought the horrific foreplay was simply to frighten my family.
“They’re trying to pierce the shield,” the High King groaned.
Instead of going back out the way we’d come in, he took a sharp turn down the hallway and dragged me up the staircase, tears racing down my cheeks like my eyes were leaky faucets.
“I’m sorry. I thought we’d have a little more time, but the whole lot of them have come straight here, which is extremely irksome.
I don’t understand why they decided to bypass the trail we left through the main part of town. ”
As he pulled me past my old bedroom, I stole a brief glance inside.
It had been turned into a storage room inclusive of a guest bed and furnished with plain items that had probably been purchased from an opportunity store in my mother’s spare time.
It didn’t seem to have even a single trace of me left behind in it.
I had really gone—I had really been gone for eight years.
“I’m not in the mood to unravel this mystery right now,” Lucais went on, more to himself than to me. He grunted as he tried to open the window in Brynn’s bedroom without shattering the entire window frame. The lock required a key, and it was missing.
Standing back as he forced it to yield, I surveyed the updated interior design. Her bedroom looked so different from the way I remembered. It was natural for a girl growing up through her teenage years, but disturbing for me on such a deep level.
Where soft toys and pretty dolls had once decorated her bed and the shelves on her wall, Brynn instead had a collection of preservation jars filled with strange types of insects and reptiles.
The posters of furry native animals, unicorns, and fairies had been replaced by collections of butterflies pinned up behind glass and posters of boy bands I’d never heard about.
An array of non-fiction books, covering all different subjects from Greek Mythology to Scottish Folklore, replaced the spots on her bookshelf once reserved for fairytales and look-and-find books.
I remembered that pink was her favourite colour once upon a time, but Brynn decorated using different shades of purple and offset the colour against black instead of white.
The only relic of the little girl I had once loved and protected so fiercely before I abandoned her was a stuffed bear sitting in the very corner of the room.
On the old, mirrored dressing table that had been handed down across generations of girls on my mother’s side of the family sat a bear I’d had since I was a baby.
It had no clothes, and the ribbon around its neck was stained with age and frayed at the ends.
But it was preserved on top of a stack of rogue fiction books, and around its torso—
A handmade crown.
Lucais pulled me through the window, the cold air slicing at the tears on my face like razors as we tumbled from the second floor down towards the ground.