Chapter 32
CHAPTER
Thirty-Two
What was that noise?’ Thea gasped as she ran round and round the stairs, back down into the Magic Quarter. ‘Are we under attack?’
‘It was your weathervane.’ Jasper’s voice was steady as he ran at her side.
‘Surely it’s your weathervane.’ Despite knowing that they may be about to meet their fate, that was the detail Thea’s mind snagged on.
Jasper’s small sigh almost went unheard. Almost. ‘Actually, it’s yours. It was a gift. It used to be a nuisance, but I suppose it makes for an effective warning system.’
Thea fell silent as the spiral staircase ended, spitting them out into the Magic Quarter.
The – her – weathervane was the first thing she saw.
It had reclaimed its dragon form, though it was much, much larger than it had been last time, its wings stretched out across half the Magic Quarter as the apothecary roof groaned under its weight.
‘Are we under attack?’ She clamped a hand to her side, bracing against the stitch needling her there.
She’d been doing far too much running of late.
Jasper eyed the Quarter, vacated of all magical folk in the half hour since Thea had departed, the void crackling and hissing down the centre. ‘Not yet, but I would say it’s coming.’
‘What does Heloise want with me?’ Thea turned to Jasper. ‘Now would be excellent timing for my memories to return. Am I Claire? Nicola? Alicja?’
He gave a single, sad shake of his head.
Thea blew out an aggravated sigh.
‘There you are!’ Zofka had cracked open the door of the Gingerbread House and was peering out. ‘Hurry up and get inside.’
As it happened, everybody was inside the Gingerbread House.
A sea of faces turned as Thea entered, Jasper bringing up the guarded rear.
She tensed as Rose marched over, her eyes narrowed into fierce slashes.
‘You worried us half to death,’ Rose accused, yanking Thea into a crushing hug.
‘First you skipped out on the first Quarter meeting you’ve ever missed, then you bolted up the apothecary and wouldn’t let any of us inside, and then you skedaddled out of the Quarter itself!
’ She gave one of her disapproving sniffs, which was rather too loud, pressed against Thea’s ear.
‘What makes you think you can get away from us that easily?’
‘I . . . I broke the Magic Quarter,’ Thea said, looking around in bewilderment as Rose released her with a squeeze. ‘The wards and the void—’
‘Adds a bit of excitement.’ Zdenka grinned at her.
‘Once I had two jealous lovers duel over me,’ Paní Dagmar said fondly. ‘Many a witch was caught in the crossfire.’
‘And I’ve nearly burnt half the street down twice so far,’ Zofka reminded her, brightening as if she was proud of the fact, Gretel shaking her head at her side.
Rose patted Thea’s hand. ‘The point is, we all make mistakes, dear. Even Wojslav has been known to feed off the occasional pixie.’
The nearest pixies fluttered away from the vampire in the corner. He picked his elongated teeth delicately. ‘We all have our vices.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Thea forced out through the lump in her throat. It felt like she’d swallowed a toad.
‘Well, don’t you worry a bit about this battle,’ Rose continued.
‘We’ve got our marching orders and . . .
’ She lowered her voice, giving Thea a devious little smile.
‘It’s been half a century since I’ve had a good fight; I can’t wait to take down this Heloise.
Sister indeed.’ Another sniff. ‘The only family you need is us.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Zofka called out, nudging Talibah with excitement as both women hovered nearby.
Thea sat at the last available table with a bump. All this emotion was wearying. Talibah, Zofka and Jasper joined her, squeezing in tight.
‘It’s like we’ve always told you.’ Talibah’s amber eyes gleamed with something Thea had spent so long looking for in other places – in men that had turned out to be toads and among the pages of her romance novels – that she’d underestimated how the best thing of all was seeing it reflected from the eyes of her friends, the family that she’d cultivated by herself: love.
‘You may not have sought this out as your home, but look at what you’ve built here. ’
‘Home is where you belong,’ Zofka added, ‘And you’ve belonged here since that first night the three of us sat down to eat dinner together.’ She grimaced. ‘And I even let you cook! Though how you burn goulash, I don’t—’ She stopped talking when Gretel nudged her.
Thea wasn’t even pretending not to cry any more.
‘I love you both more than you could ever know.’ She turned to Jasper.
He was already watching her. She was not ready to forgive him for keeping the truth from her, but she didn’t have the energy to continue hating him when he looked at her as if she was the sun.
He seemed more lost than Thea had ever been, living alone with his secrets and a past she might have once shared with him.
She reached out a tentative hand and touched his.
He jerked, his gaze shadowing as he looked at her hand.
After an extended minute, frozen in place, he responded, interlacing his fingers with hers.
Once more, she was struck with how warm he was, how tender.
How that heat licked between them, almost chasing her thoughts clean out of her head.
‘I know that you look at me and see a history, an entire past between us, but I have spent the last seven years with a different family, and—’ She swallowed hard, looking to Zofka, to Talibah.
‘I don’t need to be whoever I was then. Because I am happy here.
I love the community I’ve built, the friends I’ve surrounded myself with, and my cosy little home with Cinnamon.
Everywhere I look in the Magic Quarter, I see my home. ’
Jasper’s throat bobbed up and down as he gave an unsteady nod. ‘I understand,’ he said in a gravelly tone.
‘So, I am not going to guess my name any more,’ Thea whispered. ‘Because who I am, who I want to be, is me. Exactly as I am now. My name is Theodora and this is my home.’
Jasper closed his eyes as he gripped her hand harder. A single tear chased down his cheekbone. ‘Oh, Thea,’ he whispered. ‘I have never been happier to hear you say that.’
‘I . . . What?’ Thea asked, catching his words.
When Jasper opened his eyes and looked at her, something in her head gave. She clapped her hands to her temples, her heart quickening.
‘Thea?’ Zofka and Talibah stood as one, as Jasper clenched her hand harder.
Her heart quivered and shook, insubstantial as a moth wing as the world shuttered around Thea.
And her head filled. Not with thoughts, worries and anxieties, but with life, in all its facets. Joy and grief, love and loss. It beamed through her as an entire lifetime of memories surged back.
Suddenly she was seven again, skipping through the forest around her home, picking lilac flowers to wear in her hair, when the world burst to life with a thousand threads in every colour she could name, and more she could not.
Each one fizzing at her fingertips with possibility.
Her parents had warned her this would happen one day, that she would have the power to play with fate, but that fate was a balance, and she was not its ruler, only its scales.
Still, she couldn’t resist, reaching out and brushing her fingertips against her own thread.
It was a bright, shiny pink, her favourite colour.
Rubbing closely against it was a second thread, a soft sage green that she instinctively knew belonged to Heloise, her little sister.
Thea frowned, annoyed at how Heloise’s thread seemed to be suffocating hers.
Heloise was five and wouldn’t stop pestering Thea, following her around and stealing all her playthings.
Thea had skipped into the forest to avoid her, but she knew their mother would scold her later.
Her cheeks pinkening with frustration, Thea flicked Heloise’s thread away from hers.
Another ten years, and Thea had grown into her power.
Heloise’s had sputtered reluctantly to life, but was a weaker echo of Thea’s.
And if Thea felt guilty for pushing her little sister away, that guilt eroded when Heloise began looking back at her with jealous eyes.
Manipulating their parents into turning their backs when Thea tried to warn them that Heloise hungered for more, that her ambition bordered on cruelty.
Another few years, and the forest was Thea’s refuge.
It crackled with magic, though never more fiercely than the day she met Jasper.
He gave her his cloak to collect flowers; she ended up giving him her heart.
When the storms hit that year and Thea was barricaded inside, hiding from Heloise’s little tricks and mind games, she fell in love with Jasper through the notes they managed to exchange.
And when the storms ended, they fell into a love deeper and truer than she’d thought possible, a love to shake the stars from the sky.
A love that saw her sister for who she was when nobody else cared to.
It had been a blustery evening in the forest, the white-eyed deer turning their gazes to the twin moons rising, when Heloise sprang her trap.
It was a simple loop of fate that had Thea believing Jasper was in danger from the tricksy demons who lived in a cursed lake on the other side of the forest. She had charged off to rescue him without a second thought when he had snatched her out of the trees and informed her what Heloise had done.
How her sister had bribed the lake demons to strip Thea’s flesh from her bones and devour every last slick of marrow until nothing remained.
Another flash of memory, this time exchanging the sweetest promises with Jasper under two swollen moons in a field of wildflowers, their scent clinging to her hair and skirts, even after they fled through the Crossroads into the human world.
A few years later, and a searing rip of pain and a second love, fierce and new and all-consuming as she birthed their daughter. Violet. Named for the purple flowers unfurling around their cottage.
Thea’s memories plunged further ahead, into the deep darkness she’d been dreading, that hole at the centre of her life that had made her believe she’d lost her heart.
Because she had. Death and fire and a loss so prolific it had robbed Thea of her breath.
Made her incapable of seeing anything beyond her own suffering as Violet had been violently taken from them at a tender age.
Burned on the altar of human ignorance and intolerance for the witchcraft they suspected Violet possessed.
Jasper dragging her to safety once more, though she was so lost in her ravaging grief she begged him to strip her of her memories, to make her forget it all. At the cost of forgetting him, too.
And Jasper, who had loved her enough to oblige her.
Thea’s heart-spell ceased its flutter as she felt her true heart beat once more.
At last, she was whole, the two parts of herself reuniting, the Thea of the last seven years meeting who she had been before.
Who she was. She was Theodora Stiltskin, and she was a fate-weaver.
Flexing her power, knowing it was hers, had been hers all along, was never borrowed – she felt it soar to answer her.
Like honey through her veins, a loving caress, a playful kiss on the tip of her nose.
She opened her eyes and stared at Jasper. Her husband. At that face she’d believed had been scored into the very fabric of herself. Impossible to forget. At the person she had loved for hundreds and hundreds of years, and would continue to love for evermore.
‘Thea?’ he gasped, his hands rushing up to her face as he searched her eyes, mistrusting that gleam of recognition within them. After all, it had been seven years.
Tears slipped down Thea’s cheeks, falling onto Jasper’s hands.
‘I remember,’ she said, their loss stealing the breath from her lungs, making her heart spasm with grief.
‘I remember it all.’ When fate-weavers wed, their powers mingled, making them stronger together.
Binding them together in a shared fate. It was why she had been able to enter his townhouse.
Why he’d been immune to the key she’d forged for Malek.
‘What about me?’ A sudden voice asked at Thea’s other side. ‘Do you remember your beloved sister?’ Heloise wiggled her fingers from the seat she’d materialised in, opposite Thea. ‘Hello, Theodora. Did you miss me?’