CHAPTER 20
Ileft Foxbury Manor feeling as though I’d made a deal with the devil. The envelope stuffed with my grandfather’s research was heavy with what it had cost.
The contract had not included anything for Kessian’s part in it. Whatever that was, Warwick hadn’t felt the need to get it in writing.
We walked back to Lunaris, parked at the end of Warwick’s mile-long drive. The first thing I did inside was fish through the old tithes in my studio for something that could dispel anything Warwick might have cast on us to spy, but none were found, and the truth serum had dissipated.
I got in the driver’s seat and turned onto the road, keen to put some distance between myself and Foxbury Manor.
I had so many questions for Kessian. Had he managed to find anything in the study? How had he known the numbers to the safe? Most of all, what had Warwick meant when he said, “You already know what I want from you”?
Then there was the kiss, which, brief as it was, still replayed like a record skipping back to my favorite part.
Kessian had kissed me out of necessity, because we’d have been caught otherwise.
But I’d kissed him because I’d wanted to.
Before I could ask any of my questions, Kessian said, “Could you take me home tonight?”
An unexpected, painful tug in my chest made it hard to breathe, so I only managed a very articulate, “Oh?”
“I’d just like to sleep in my own bed.” He looked away, out at the dark world rushing past.
I was worried about the wraith but didn’t know how to articulate it without it sounding as though it came from the more selfish desire to keep Kessian close. The change in his demeanor worried me. All the cheer had drained from his eyes. Even the stars on his cheeks seemed dimmer.
I turned down the road toward his place. If the wraith came … Lunaris would be there, and she was only marginally more safe than anywhere else.
I parked up outside. “Can I come in so we can talk?”
“’Course.”
The memory of standing on this front stoop, imagining a future where I came back, hit me as we walked through the door.
Kessian dumped his keys in a bowl by the door, kicked off his shoes, and walked the short distance through his house to the sliding door out back, where there was a small garden crowded with two small patio chairs and a round table with mosaic glass.
A hydrangea took up the entire corner, its blooms in various shades of pink, purple, and blue, yellow cone flowers peppered around it, a few dahlias towering out of the bush to one side.
Kessian lit the citronella candle. Dusk was falling and the mosquitos would soon swarm.
“Have a seat. I need to water my plants. They’re looking a bit parched.”
I sat in one of the chairs, the folder of research in my lap. He moved stiffly as he filled the can from a hose and poured water into one of the hanging baskets, balancing on his cane. I offered to help, but he shook his head.
“It helps calm me. Taking care of something else. Makes up for all the times I can’t take care of myself.”
It was an opening to ask him more, but I decided to start with the least personal of the questions running through my mind.
“How did you know the numbers to that safe?”
“I didn’t know. I can’t even remember what they were now.”
“But you got it right on the first attempt. How?”
“Do you think that place is haunted?”
The abrupt change in topic caught me off guard. “I went with a friend to a party there once. I never saw anything out of the ordinary, just loads of drunk teenagers.” I had been too much of a rule follower to drink. Just trespassing had made me anxious. “Why?”
“Maybe this will sound crazy, but it felt as though someone else’s hand guided mine, making me turn the dial to the correct numbers.” He paused mid-drizzle of the hydrangea. “Part of me thought maybe … maybe it was Edwin’s ghost.”
My heart thumped hard. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, but I hated to think my grandfather had died so restlessly that he’d come back to haunt the living. It was meant to be quite a painful experience for the spirit.
“Did you find something in there?”
He blew his fringe out of his eyes while shaking out the last of the water from the can on some lavender.
“I couldn’t read through the documents quickly enough to find anything in particular, but some of them didn’t look like normal contracts.
There were runes on some, and it felt … off.
A magical signature, but not like yours.
More tinny, like the sound your ears make after a concert. ”
“What’s mine like?”
Kessian focused steadily on refilling the watering can. “Smells like burgamot, makes you feel like you’re drinking sangria by the sea.”
I shouldn’t read too much into that, but I’d never been so flattered.
Kessian rushed on to say, “So if we didn’t take that contract, who did? Edwin’s ghost? Someone else?”
“I don’t know.” We didn’t have any clues to follow on that front. Perhaps my grandfather’s autopsy would provide a new direction, but until then, the only lead I had was to talk to my family and go through the research to see what could be used.
Before any of that, I still had another question. The worst one. “Kessian … What did Warwick take from you?”
He had his back to me. It went rigid.
“You don’t have to tell me. I know you like your secrets.” And I was trying not to take that personally. I had no right to them, and I hadn’t exactly been consistent about whether I wanted more intimacy from him or less.
But after that kiss, something had changed. I’d spent my life sacrificing my well-being to keep others protected. That was the first time someone had protected me.
“It’s not a secret. Not really. It’s just—humiliating.”
I waited. Eventually, he set the watering can down and slumped into the chair across from me. “When I moved here, I didn’t have much. You saw. My whole life fit inside my car. While I was sick with Bowen’s Wane, I couldn’t work as much, so I couldn’t make much money.”
“Did you have any family that could step in?”
“Nope. Single child to a single mum, who sold our council house and went backpacking across Europe to live out the youth she couldn’t as a teen mother to an extremely high-maintenance queer kid.”
“You don’t strike me as high-maintenance.”
“Maybe not anymore. Back then, I wanted to be in every school activity, try every new hobby, and not only could she not afford to kit me out for whatever latest craft project had taken my fancy, I wanted her involved. I was a stage ten clinger. A bad case of wisteria, and the people I climbed all over couldn’t hold me up, so they all left.
I can’t even really blame them. I’d have probably done the same. ”
My heart ached with the parallel cut of my own family history, only I’d been the one to leave. Forced out, more like.
“Dom too?” I guessed.
Kessian let out a sad, derisive noise. “Dom liked me that way. Made him feel important to be needed. It was after I got my Bowen’s Wane diagnosis that everything fell apart. That was a little too needy for him.”
I was biased and not given to afford Dom as much grace as Kessian on this. “He was an ass.”
“In the end,” Kessian agreed. “We weren’t married, though we’d talked about it.
He hadn’t signed up for ‘in sickness and in health’ yet, and as it turned out, he wasn’t ready to be a carer.
Maybe if my prognosis wasn’t fatal. He said he couldn’t watch me waste away, would rather remember the ‘real me.’ As if I’d become a different person.
It’s just life, isn’t it? Things change.
People come and go. They’re right for you, then they’re wrong. ”
He said it with a sort of philosophical distance. The kind I often masked with when intellectualizing a painful moment was easier than dealing with the enormity of the feelings it evoked.
“You’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with Warwick,” Kessian said.
“No. I was thinking how hard it must have been.”
Kessian shrugged. “Others have it worse. Anyway, I should tell you. No point hiding it. What’s left of my pride is already forfeit, so … Warwick evicted me over two months ago.”
Anger bubbled up inside of me. “He can’t.”
“He can. My tenancy was a lease, and he’s chosen not to renew.
He owns the whole park. You might have noticed it’s quiet?
I haven’t got any neighbors anymore. He’s going to tear it all down.
Probably build a hotel to fill with tourists.
I’d move somewhere else but …” This part he looked away for.
“Can’t afford it, right? I could just about afford this place when I moved, but everything’s more expensive now.
I’ve watched every rental that’s come up in the past two and a half months.
Nothing in my price range. No market for a house share, either.
Not many young people stay in Shearwater. ”
I didn’t often see red, but I was starting to. “But you work at the spa. He’s the one signing your paychecks. And your abilities are an asset, why would he chase you off?”
“He told you the spring’s been less powerful lately, yeah?
I think he believes my abilities siphon it more than usual.
He’d prefer to charge tourists an extorted rate just for a dip than pay me as an employee to act as an intermediary between visitors and the spring, so their visions are clearer.
More useful. In the end, the reason doesn’t matter because the result is the same. ”
“Is there anywhere else near Shearwater that’s more affordable?” I asked.
“I’d have to move to the other end of the country, or another country altogether, to find something.
” He pulled his knee up, resting his chin on it and picking at a fray in his shoelaces.
“Besides that, I don’t want to leave. Shearwater chose me.
” He tucked his chin, pressing his forehead against the hole in the knee of his jeans. “Nobody else has.”
An alarming answer rose on my tongue. I would. If I wasn’t cursed to always leave and you weren’t cursed to be left behind, we’d make a good pair.
I didn’t think he’d believe me.
Kessian sighed. “Listen to me, crying over a broken nail in front of a broken bone. In a week, I’ll be living out of my car, but you’ve lived that way for nine years.”
“I had Lunaris.”
“Still. I bet it was hard.”
“Suffering isn’t a competition.”
“But if it was, you’d win?”
I let out a breath. “I’m not much good at comfort, but it would help if you didn’t deflect. Can I make you tea?”
“I’d take a hug if one’s on offer.”
Physical affection was not normally my first choice, but I was relieved he asked, because I’d wanted to and didn’t know how. We both stood, him leaning on the table a little until I drew him in. He wrapped his arms around my waist and leaned on me instead.
It was nothing like the stiff, awkward hug I’d shared with Amelia a few days ago.
There was a type of pottery I’d never gotten to try—kintsugi, where the broken shards were fitted back together, the cracks sealed with gold.
The healed pots were made more beautiful by the uniqueness of their scars, but it had never felt the same way for me.
My scars made me socially awkward, cowardly, prone to preferring the safety of my imagined fantasies than the risks of more cracks that came from taking chances.
But Kessian fit against me like our broken shards matched, and the way my heart warmed, it could have been molten gold.
I held him close, my nose buried in the citrus tang of his shampoo, and for a second I let myself wonder. What if the visions from the strid were wrong? What if we cleansed the strid, made Shearwater safe? What if we both found a way to stay?
Kessian’s arms loosened around my hips, but he didn’t step away. “If that’s all the questions you have for me, is it all right if I ask you one?”
“Yes.”
He looked up at me through his lashes, that rare shyness keeping his voice low. “You kissed me.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Did you mean it?”
The garden was quiet, but my heartbeat was loud.
It was a yes or no question, but I felt like I needed better words than a single syllable.
I tripped over all the long-winded explanations for how I’d arrived at that moment.
My conviction that it would end in goodbye like always, that my heart was full of bubbles and wouldn’t survive the kiln if the flame of my affection burned too hot.
Kessian’s grip on me loosened. My silence had gone on too long, and he was interpreting it the wrong way.
I didn’t let him go. When he met the resistance of my arms, he looked into my eyes again, and this time I didn’t fumble for my words or overthink them.
“Yes,” I said. “I meant it.”
His lips parted in shock, and I leaned in to kiss them.