25. Miri
25
Miri
I woke in the forest. My entire body ached. The joints in my fingers and toes cracked as I sat up and glanced around, hoping to find Lex on the other side of me, hoping our farewell hadn’t been real.
But I only found Carter and Ivy huddled together about a meter away. She kneeled on the ground, leaning into his shoulder while they both sobbed.
“I can’t believe he did this,” she said. “There has to be a way back. There has to be a way to get to him.”
I shoved my fingers into the dirt, closing my eyes and willing the life energy of the plants around me to grow, but they didn’t respond. I listened for the trees, praying I might hear their whispers, but nothing came. Only the sounds of my spouses’ tears and my own racing heart echoed through my mind. Lex, of course, had been right. Our connection to fairy magic had faded away, and whether that was because we’d cast ourselves out or because we’d spent it on the fairy king, I’d never know.
Pushing onto my knees, I crawled to Ivy and took her hands. The rush of connection that usually came from touching my wife was noticeably absent, and when I looked down at our joined palms, the scars were gone.
Our physical manifestation of the oath we’d taken, Until the end, had disappeared. In its place was clear, unblemished skin.
I grabbed Ivy’s face, holding her cheeks so I could stare into her eyes. “It’s over, my love. He wanted it this way. We need to go home.”
“We can’t leave him, Miri.” She scrunched her eyebrows and narrowed her steel gaze. “We need to go back.”
I would have sat there and argued with her for the rest of eternity if that was what it took, but footsteps cut through our anguish, and a familiar voice made me stand up.
“You all right, little coz?” Edward rushed toward me, throwing his arms around my shoulders to pull me into a big hug. “Bleeding Christ, have I got a proper story to tell you.”
Jon and Kit walked a few paces behind him, their faces lighting up when they saw Ivy. The three Washington siblings hugged, and Lizzie leaped into Carter’s arms, crying while she hugged her big brother.
“Fucking hell.” Edward put me down and stepped back to run his hands over my face. “You look like shite.”
His ginger hair stood on end around his head, caked with almost as much mud and grime as was on his face. His emerald eyes shimmered with emotion, making his golden-tanned skin even more blush.
“You look like you’ve spent too much time in the bogs.” I brushed a piece of grass off his face, and his lips broke into a smile. For half a heartbeat, I’d forgotten what we’d lost. I’d forgotten my prince of darkness had given himself up so that we could have this reunion.
“There has to be another veil,” Ivy said, returning my focus to the present. “Between all of us, we can find it. We can go through it and?—”
“Ivy, you claimed the entire human realm and everyone in it,” Carter said. “That includes the other veils, too.”
She looked crestfallen but resolute, her defiant chin jutting out as a rebuke to Carter’s logic.
“Let’s regroup, okay?” I said. “We’ll go back to our room and?—”
“No,” Ivy said, glancing in the direction of where the entrance to Faerie had once stood. “No, he wouldn’t stop looking for me, and I won’t stop looking for him.”
Carter and I exchanged worried glances, but it was Kit who finally broke through to her.
“Hey, hey, hey.” She grabbed Ivy’s face and rubbed her thumbs over her cheeks. “We’ll find him, okay? I promise. But we’re exhausted now, and we can’t pour from an empty cup. We need rest.”
“Diana won’t hurt him,” I added. “Remember, she said we were honored guests. She’ll keep him safe until we can save him. Siobhan, Finn, Donnelly…they’ll protect him.”
Ivy didn’t like it, and honestly, I didn’t either. But I didn’t see how we had another choice.
With our hearts heavy, we returned to Killwater, only to discover the town repaired to the way it had been before Beltane. People bustled around, completing their business like they weren’t just in the woods devouring each other a day ago. When we charged our cellphones, we realized we had been gone for two months. Today was Midsummer, and that seemed appropriate given that was when all of this started. It had to end where it began.
We went back to the same bed-and-breakfast we’d stayed in the last two times we’d been here. Bill and Keely were surprised to see us but welcomed us all the same.
“You look like you’ve been through hell and back again,” Bill said, handing us keys to a few rooms.
“Something like that,” Carter quipped, taking one before handing the others to Edward and Kit to sort out.
“Will there be a Midsummer celebration tonight?” Ivy asked. “Out in the woods?”
I knew where her mind was going. She thought we could go back and try to find the fairy realm that way.
Bill glanced between us, perhaps seeing more than our appearance, and raised his eyebrows. “By the looks of ya, I’d say your days out in the woods are over. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Ivy did not, and perhaps I’d always been a romantic at heart because I wanted to believe my gut feeling was wrong. I wanted to think we’d go back into the forest and find fairies dancing around bonfires with flowers in their hair and ambrosia on their lips.
But we didn’t. After a day of fitful rest and passionate deliberation, we snuck into the forest at twilight, the peach haze of the darkening sky not nearly as vibrant or beautiful as I remembered from four years ago. We wandered our tired, achy limbs down the trail that led to the valley, and my heart raced when I heard drums in the distance.
Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe all is not lost.
We crested the hill, but we did not see large flames raging in the distance. There were no fairies and barely any townsfolk, only a small gathering huddled around a tiny campfire. No more than thirty people sang and chanted, banging on tiny drums as they recited their ancient hymns. But there was no magic in the air. No one handed us bouquets and condoms and wine. Compared to four years ago, this hardly ranked as a party, much less a celebration the way we’d known it.
“No,” Ivy murmured before running down the hill. “No. This isn’t right. This isn’t?—”
My heart sank because I knew Faerie and everyone in it were gone forever. There would be no Midsummer festival, never again.
“Weeds,” Carter said, taking off after our wife, but I stood there with my arms wrapped around my midsection, struggling to pull air into my lungs.
Some of the locals called to Ivy as she burst through the middle of their ceremony, but she didn’t stop to talk to them. She took off into the woods in the same direction as we’d headed on Midsummer and Samhain. But I knew what she’d find.
There was nothing here for us. There was no Lex, no Siobhan, no fairy queen to bargain with.
My prince of darkness was truly gone, and I slumped in the grass to cry.
“You deserve to be happy. So be happy.”
How was I supposed to do that without him? Perhaps the gift was gone, but my love for him started long before that. Memories of the first time I’d met Lex floated to the front of my mind, when he’d been an eighteen-year-old blue blood with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove. He’d want to give the finger to the world, and in his own way, I supposed he’d never stopped doing that…not even now.
Sometime later, Carter and Ivy found me, tears staining their cheeks, eyes red and swollen.
“It’s not there,” Ivy said as she kneeled in front of me, her voice hoarse and cracked. “The veil is gone.”
“I know, my love.” I grabbed her face to kiss her, but even in our despair, I sensed the end approaching. We could spend our lives searching these woods and never have anything to show for it. If we did that, Lex’s sacrifice would be a waste. He didn’t want that.
We went back to our room, but we didn’t have much to say. What was there to say? We’d each lost a love of our life, and while we still had each other, it wasn’t the same without our king.
* * *
We stayed in Killwater as long as we could. Kit, Lizzie, Jon, and Edward went home, but my beloveds and I threw ourselves into research. Ivy held her mother off by simply not answering the phone, and Carter had figured out how to circumvent the rest of his tour. Edward made my excuses to our grandmother, but over the last few days, she’d gotten quite insistent that I return to Kensington presently.
I sat in the Killwater College library, staring at Ivy while she flipped through pages of some dusty old tome. She hadn’t showered in days, her hair fraying out at all angles from a messy bun on the back of her head. She never slept. She barely ate. She’d lost weight in the four weeks since Midsummer, and she didn’t have it to lose at the beginning. This wasn’t because of a magical separation like Solstice. No, this was from losing Lex…her counterpart…her companion since birth. Not that I could blame her. It was all I could do to bring myself to get out of bed every morning.
But I couldn’t go on like this. We couldn’t go on like this.
“Here,” Ivy said, pointing to tiny words that had long since faded to time. “To bestow her gratitude is to show her favor. A kindness done is a kindness earned.”
“What do you think it means?” Carter ran a hand over his face and took a sip of coffee. He, too, looked terrible. Bags hung under his eyes, and his hair had grown unkempt. He’d also hardly slept in days, and when he did, he’d wake up shouting for our husband like his nightmares were worse than reality. If he dreamed about Lex, I imagined they were. At least in unconsciousness, they were reunited. In this reality, Lex was a gaping hole in our hearts that would never heal, never scar over, never go away.
We were hardly taking care of ourselves. How in the world did we think we would find him like this? We were running on fumes.
“Don’t spend your life looking for me, okay?”
His voice haunted me. I heard it on repeat in my head. I heard it on the wind, when the warmth of the sun faded into the chill of the moon and the nighttime animals made themselves vocal. My prince of darkness had wanted us to move on. He’d wanted us to be happy.
We weren’t happy.
And what exactly were we looking for? A way into a realm we had permanently shut off? We could search until we were dead and never find anything substantial. To most of the world, fairies were myth. Legends. Bloody hell, we had researched for two years between Midsummer and Samhain, and it wasn’t until Siobhan showed up that we understood anything at all.
We were so utterly fucked and rolling in denial. But to stop would admit defeat, and Ivy had never been defeated by anyone. She wouldn’t stop now, and she’d drag both Carter and me down with her if she had to.
“I think it means that the queen only gives her thanks when she knows she owes the other person something,” Ivy said. “To show her favor.”
“It could mean favor as in favorite,” Carter said, scratching his stubble. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, and even if I liked a man with facial hair, I’d never known Carter to have any. It showed a carelessness he’d never before exuded. We were stretched at the seams.
“Or it could mean favor as in…owing someone a favor,” Ivy said, hope filling her voice.
I scoffed and shook my head, letting out a sad laugh. Both of them looked at me.
“What?” Ivy said, raising her eyebrows in disbelief.
“This is pointless, my darling,” I said, slamming my book closed. “All of this is pointless.”
“How so?” Her eyes turned molten, equal parts furious and wounded. “Do you think trying to get Lex back is pointless? That his sacrifice for us was pointless?”
She was goading me. She wanted me to fight back, to argue with her the way Lex would have. But I didn’t have the energy. We weren’t complete without him, and it was time we stopped trying to be. There we were, on the wrong side of a war that had nothing to do with us. We’d ended it for humankind, and given I’d reset the king to his default setting, I suspected we wouldn’t have to deal with him again.
That was the end, and there was nothing more to fix. I had died and come back to life, and because of that, we’d never see Lex again. That type of magic always required a sacrifice, all the lore had been quite sure about that. I didn’t remember dying. I barely remembered being stabbed through the chest, which made me question my life in ways I’d never considered before. I’d spend the rest of my breathing days trying to unravel it.
But I’d never do that if I never moved on. It hurt me to think about it, but I had been thinking about it for days…maybe longer. We were wasting our time here. Lex would never be free from the fairy queen unless she wanted him to be, and we’d never get into Faerie again.
“Okay, enough for today,” Carter said, shutting his book before grabbing Ivy’s hand. “Let’s go back to Bill’s. It’s getting late. We could use some sleep.”
But none of us slept very well that night. In the weeks since Midsummer, we barely talked unless it was about finding Lex, and I just…I hurt too much to do it again the next day and the day after that and on and on until forever.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
I knew what I had to do, even if it killed us, even if it made them so angry with me that they never wanted to see me again. Perhaps that would be best. Perhaps they were a bad habit. Cold turkey had always been my favorite way to quit.
Better make it quick.
“I have to go home now.” My heart ached to say it, but I saw no other way. I had wanted to stay with them, I’d wanted to throw my royal title away for my beloveds. I’d even decided that was what I planned to do before all of this. But now…now we were broken and worse yet, there were no pieces of us to put back together. What we used to have simply died out there on that battlefield.
“Don’t do this, Miri.” Carter sighed and brushed a finger under his puffy eye. “Not after everything we’ve been through. We need each other, maybe more now than we ever did. You’re just tired. We’ll regroup tomorrow and?—”
“No. Enough of this.” I took a deep breath and whispered a quiet, “I’m sorry, Ivy, but Lex didn’t want this for you. He didn’t want this for any of us.”
“Don’t talk about him like he’s dead.” Her voice broke as she said the words.
“He’s been gone for weeks,” I said. “If he could come back to us, he would have done it by now.”
“There’s got to be a way?—”
“Stop doing this to yourself, my love.” I brushed the back of my knuckles down her cheek, wiping away a tear. “Enough now. Enough.”
No one said anything after that. Ivy rolled onto her other side and cried herself to sleep. Carter clenched his eyes shut and breathed through sobs until Ivy’s whimpers softened into slow, deep breaths. And I got up.
After everything we’d been through, after all we’d already done for each other, I couldn’t bear to say yet another goodbye. So after I dressed and gathered my things, I stood at the doorway to take one last look at them, knowing in my bones this was right.
Ivy’s steel gaze crept open just as I turned to leave, glaring at me from her spot on the edge of the bed. She didn’t move to stop me, nor did she open her mouth to tell me to stay. It wouldn’t matter if she did. Though I loved her more than life itself, I needed time. I needed space.
I wanted to tell her I loved her, that I would never forget her, but even those words would fall flat. What was love, after all, compared to what we’d been through? What was love but chemicals and hormones designed to trick people into caring, only to have the rug pulled out from under them? What was a broken heart compared to duty and honor?
What the four of us had surpassed a silly, stupid thing like love years ago. We were the same soul existing in four bodies, and now that a quarter of us was gone, our combined life force was a leaking sieve with no plug to save it, least of all for a spoiled princess who’d already had her life planned out for her.
I might as well return to my sullen castle and live out my remaining days as peacefully as I could. So, with all of that weighing heavily on me, I turned to the door, opened it, and left my soul in Killwater with the two people who would always own it and the prince who’d sacrificed it all to make sure they could.