Chapter 6
six
There were pancakes in the oven. Dad had made them in the morning, and he heated them up for me. It was almost noon, apparently. Fi set the table and wouldn’t even hear about me helping her.
As I watched them with my heart in my throat, I felt…guilty as fuck. I wasn’t used to being taken care of like this. I did this for them, not the other way around.
But when I sat down to eat, there was no more room left for guilt.
The pancakes and the honey, and even the milk tasted like home.
I’d loved the food in Verenthia, especially that in the Frozen Court that the palace had brought me at my request, but this was something else.
This was warmth and love and memories. Good memories.
I ate until I couldn’t push down another bite.
Then I told my family, “I’m going back to Verenthia.”
Of course, they didn’t like it. I didn’t think they would, but the look of pure accusation that I got from the both of them broke my heart all the same.
“You only just got back,” Fiona whispered.
And Dad shook his head. “So, you pop up in a-a-a ball of darkness in my front yard after eighteen days of being on another planet, and then you tell me that you want to go back?” A second of silence. “No, Nilah. No.”
“I have to, Dad. Trust me, I have to.” So many things I couldn’t say out loud to them.
So many fucking things that I hadn’t dared to even think about myself yet.
Too much. Entirely too much to handle right now, especially since this ink on my arm became heavier with every passing second, a reminder that I couldn’t go to Verenthia because I’d already tried. I couldn’t go back.
But yesterday I was tired.
Yesterday I wasn’t myself.
Yesterday I was weary from having been spit out of Verenthia—and today I was not. I had rested. I had food in my system. I was wide awake. And I was going to try again.
“You have to stay here with your family,” Dad said. “Nilah, I know we haven’t had the best of relationships, and I know I didn’t believe you when you told the truth. I will have to live with that for the rest of my life, pup, but—”
I grabbed his hands in mine and stopped him.
“I promise you, it’s not about that at all, Dad.
I am not mad.” And I wasn’t. Disappointed and heartbroken, but every day a little less.
I understood, even though it was hard. I got it.
It wasn’t easy for him, either. “I swear to you that this is different.”
“It’s different here, too, Nil. People no longer talk about you the way they did. Dad has a job, and I actually made two friends since you’ve been away. People have been apologizing to us almost every day—it’s different here, too!” Fi said.
My poor heart.
I smiled at her. “I’m glad. I’m really glad, Fi, but again—this has nothing to do with my life here.”
“Then what does it have to do with?” Dad demanded.
Fuck, why is this so damn difficult?
We were standing between the kitchen counter and the dining table, as usual, and he was right in front of me. His warm eyes had turned darker as he waited for my answer with his breath held.
“With Verenthia,” I whispered. “With Rune.”
“Who the hell is Rune again?!”
“He’s…he’s the Midnight King. He, um…”
“He’s your boyfriend.” Fiona’s voice rang in my ears, and fucking hell the way that word made my heart jump even in the situation I was in. Boyfriend.
“Yes.” One could definitely refer to Rune as my boyfriend, even if we had never talked about labels. To be honest, I never gave a shit.
“You were gone eighteen days—when did you have time to get to know a boy well enough to start a-a-a relationship with him?!”
“He’s a fae, Dad,” said Fiona, but my dad didn’t even hear her. His eyes were on me.
I got that he was pissed, I really did.
“Actually, it was a lot longer in Verenthia. I think over two months. Helid did say that time moved differently here and there, and he was right. But regardless, Dad.” I gave him my most honest smile.
“He was going to come back here with me. That was the plan, and now I’m here, and he’s there, and I have to go to him. I have to find him.”
He shook his head. “Why can’t he come to you?”
The question hung over my head like that dark cloud that had taken away the sky in the Quiet. For a moment, I imagined the door of the house opening, and Rune coming through with his messy hair and his torn shirt, his eyes ablaze with silver flames.
I imagined he’d gone all the way to the Neutral Lands and had passed through the Aetherway while I’d been unconscious. He could do that. He would.
“You were bleeding, Nil. We’re not stupid,” Fiona then said. “We know something happened. You have a tattoo under there, too. A big one.” She looked down at my right shoulder.
My mouth was suddenly dry again. “Nothing happened, Fi. I just…I have no choice but to go.”
The accusation in their eyes set me on fire.
Luckily, there was a knock on the door a moment later and I had an excuse to move away from in front of them.
It wasn’t Rune, and I knew it wouldn’t be Rune—he wouldn’t have made it all the way to the Neutral Lands so fast, I figured, even if he was on his way to me.
But I still hoped against all odds—until I opened the door and Betty was in front of me.
By the time she started cussing in my ear and hugging me like she meant to break every bone in my body, all my defenses were on the ground.
Betty had been, and apparently still was, a safe place for me, and I had no doubt in my mind already that I was going to tell her the whole truth the moment we were alone.
Couldn’t stop myself if I tried—and you know what?
That was okay, because I was not going to lie to my best friend no matter how insane my truth was.
Betty’s mom had made me cupcakes. The ones with raisins and chocolate chips that I adored. She’d never made them for me specifically before, but I guess things were really different here now, too.
“She is going to apologize to you in person, too, just so you know. She’ll give you today, but tomorrow—watch out because she will corner you the first chance she gets.
She feels awful,” Betty said when we sat down in the backyard to eat the cupcakes.
My dad was inside on the phone with whoever he was working with now, and Fiona sat with us on this long sofa that we kept on the back porch, her eyes on the side of my face every few seconds, as if she was afraid that I’d disappear into thin air.
“That’s fine. I don’t mind,” I told Betty, and grabbed a third cupcake even though there was a good chance I would throw it all up.
“You say that because you haven’t seen her crying and trying to speak at the same time,” Betty said with a devilish grin.
Fuck, I’d missed her face so much it wasn’t even funny. I’d missed the wild look in her eyes more than I thought possible.
“I think I’ll survive,” I insisted, taking another bite. It seriously was out of this world.
But who was I kidding? All of this was out of this world for me right now. I was a completely different person from who I was when I left, and I just didn’t know how to tell them that. I had no idea how to stop feeling like a stranger sitting there with them.
Home, home, this is home, I told myself, but it was difficult to believe it when it didn’t feel like it.
It didn’t feel like Rune.
My God, I was so, so screwed.
“She wants to go back,” Fiona said, and Betty whipped her head toward me.
“Is that so,” she said, but it wasn’t a question. We’d sat here maybe half an hour ago, and I’d told her the version of the story I told my family for now because Fiona refused to leave my side for a second, so she had no clue.
“I have to,” I said.
“You don’t. You don’t have to—”
The way she stopped speaking when I widened my eyes at her could have been funny. I almost smiled when she pretended she needed to cough so Fiona didn’t notice.
“Like I said, you don’t have to rush, that’s all,” Betty ended up saying, just as my dad came back from the house.
I shook my head at Betty to tell her that I did not want to talk about this right now, not in front of them.
The truth was that I wanted to stay, if only to get rid of this strange feeling I seemed to have gotten that said I was a stranger to my own family.
I wanted to stay, to rest, to make sure that they were okay, too, to understand everything that had happened since I was gone.
For now, I insisted we stayed outside in the back because that’s where the forest was. The forest with the Aetherway at the heart of it. The same portal Rune would come out of if he was already on his way to me.
I answered all their questions about how things worked in Verenthia, and what magic could do, and what kind of creatures I came across.
Then they insisted I showed them, too, and despite telling them that I didn’t know how to do proper magic, I did make them lights to play with.
Those starlight colored balls of light that came out of the palms of my hands with such ease that I nearly burst out in tears every time I made new ones.
Then they told me all about them, too, about Dad’s new construction project, and about the people who’d been coming with all kinds of foods and cakes at their door almost nightly to apologize for basically being assholes their whole lives.
Most of the neighborhood had seen Helid with his butterflies made of light right there in my dad’s driveway.
And word had spread, according to the girls.
People had talked online about it for days after I left, and they’d only stopped because there’d been no pictures.
No phones had worked, and nobody had been able to record it, just like Helid said.
Only the eye is sophisticated enough to witness magic. Our technology just wasn’t there yet.