Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The park was only a mile from her papa’s home.
As they walked, Lia gave Kayce a better summary of the new story her papa had written.
Other than the fact that he wrote it, she couldn’t figure out what he meant by the notion of a family tale.
That nagged her almost as much as the foreignness of Kayce walking the streets beside her.
Had it only been a couple weeks ago that she had listened to music, longing for Norenth to be real as she left Papa’s?
She wrung her hands, trying not to fidget too bad. The Victorian house soon loomed over Kayce and Lia, withered rose bushes climbing the front porch railing.
Lia paused before the front door. “We need to fix you. You can’t run around with a sword anymore.”
She was delaying.
She hadn’t been back here since the funeral.
And while voicing her struggles to Kayce in their alcove had eased the grief, she knew this wouldn’t be painless.
Not with the way her chest tightened, her eyes pricking at the sight of letters with his name sticking out from the mailbox.
Her nail caught on the loose skin around her pinky.
Kayce frowned, hand tight on his sword. “You cannot fix perfection—”
“Remember, I wrote you,” she warned, a wry smile emerging. “And I recall exactly how far from perfect you are.”
He held a hand to his chest. “You wound me, my lady.”
“Just wait till you see what they have at the mall, which we will need to go to eventually. Then you’ll really think I enjoy your suffering, Your Highness.”
Reluctantly, Kayce propped the sword beside a planter.
Their banter had always eased her anxiety, but when Lia opened the door, whatever peace Kayce’s teasing provided was stolen by vacuous silence.
The air was stagnant, the windows sealed as if to hold in the last vestiges of bergamot that only lingered in the farthest corners of the room.
Blood pulsed in Lia’s ears as they walked into the foyer.
A tissue box remained on the coffee table from the funeral.
The easel where her papa’s portrait had dominated the room was empty.
Lia stopped, unwilling to trespass further into the tomb it had become.
She tore her gaze from the easel but remained frozen.
The emptiness, the sneaking around to get here, it set her teeth on edge, cemented her feet.
She knew that if she took those stairs, a different person would come back down.
Whatever they found, there would be no forgetting it.
And suddenly, Lia wasn’t sure if she could face that yet.
A warm hand settled on her shoulder. “No matter what we find, your grandfather cared for you,” Kayce said, his voice calm.
“He’s still here. You knew he would have answers.
Painful, perhaps. Difficult. But necessary.
” Taking a step past Lia, he broke the invisible barrier keeping her in the foyer, then shifted on his heel to look back at her. “He would help you if he could.”
Lia managed a half-hearted tilt of her lips, uprooting herself.
He always knew what was raging inside her head.
Granted, he came from there. But, a thought gnawed at her as she led him upstairs.
“If he would have helped now, why not tell me before?” she mused.
“Why the convoluted story he didn’t even finish? ”
It had circled her mind like a restless stray while they walked, hoping they might find the answers, yet dreading the implications. But the truth had to come out. Stories just didn’t come to life in your bedroom. Nightmares didn’t just chase you down alleyways.
The door to her papa’s study was open, but nothing could have prepared them for what they found inside. It was ransacked.
Frozen once more, Lia gaped at the drawers pulled open, papers strewn everywhere.
The coffee-brown shelves paneling the walls should have been lined with novels.
Instead, most of them scattered across the floor, splayed open like broken birds.
An older laptop sat open on the desk, a sea of papers and notes smothering the keyboard.
“My mom wouldn’t have done this,” Lia breathed.
Kayce held out a hand. He spied the fireplace, twin to the one in the sitting room below, and grabbed a poker. “Stay here.”
“Like skies I am.” She moved to grab the other one.
They divided the house, making quick work of canvassing the study and the rest of the second floor before doing the same downstairs. All they found was the back door open, but no one else was there. Lia only loosened her breath when they returned to the study.
“Who would break in to trash Papa’s office?” she wondered aloud.
“Someone looking for something,” Kayce gathered. “Maybe what we are hoping to find.”
Lia didn’t exactly find that comforting. She started for the desk, pushing aside the leather chair before rifling through the papers. Broken glass clinked when she pulled a picture frame free from the mess. The four of them, last Christmas. Lia’s hand shook.
Her first thought was to call her mom and then the police, but this was one more piece to this evolving puzzle.
What business was Papa entangled with? She needed to figure this out before calling anyone.
Even Mom. The imagination story was too fantastical for someone to come in here searching for it, let alone believing it to be true without proof.
But crazier things had happened in the last forty-eight hours.
Chewing her lip, Lia looked out the window. From here, she could see right out to the front yard. The driveway where she had kissed her papa goodbye. The street it led to, right where the police reports say he was struck by that car—
Lia squinted her eyes, focusing on the street. A driver would slam on the brakes to avoid hitting something in the road, even if they were distracted. It was instinct. Lia knew that from her driver’s ed classes.
So why were there no skid marks where Papa was hit? Or any at all on the road before his house?
“What if it wasn’t an accident?” Lia whispered.
She felt Kayce’s warmth behind her, his hand on the small of her back. He stood next to her, looking down at the street. “Sir Julian’s death?”
Lia blinked hard. He wouldn’t understand the mechanics of a car accident.
She tried to explain it in the plainest terms possible.
“The police said he was found there in the street, like he’d gone for a walk.
Neighbors said they heard a crash, like a car hit something.
It was filed as an accident, but the person who hit him fled the scene. ”
Kayce rubbed his jaw. “So no one really saw what happened.”
“No. So what if he was killed on purpose? Or what if he was attacked by a gremlin too, but the police didn’t know how to explain it so they made up the car accident story?”
“But what about the neighbor who heard the crash?” he asked gently. “Did his body look like it’d been attacked by a monster?”
Lia had tried not to think about the funeral.
It’d been a closed casket affair, but Mom had arrived on the scene with the ambulance when she heard the call at work.
She’d identified the body. A small kernel of relief eased Lia’s mind.
She would never want to consider a monster had killed her papa, and it seemed like she wouldn’t have to.
But the study remained destroyed around them.
Lia shook her head. “Something from Earth killed him, like a car. But if the driver didn’t try to stop…” She started to turn back to face the room. “I don’t think they wanted to.”
Kayce’s hand slid over her hip, pulling her into his side. She wanted to lean into him, like she had in the alcove. But they had answers to find. Now more than ever.
Digging deep, Lia focused on the task ahead. “Look for anything about the guardians that helped humans navigate their dreams and nightmares—”
“And stories being unleashed on Earth?” Kayce pulled away to begin flipping through folders.
It sounded too fantastical to be real, and yet, there they were, searching for it.
For something like Kayce, or something like the gremlin.
Something not of Earth. Part of her, the one enamored with stories, felt like a child searching for Christmas presents in her parents’ closet.
The bigger part held her breath like she was opening the lid to a box that was best left alone.
They worked quietly, each lost in their task of finding anything to do with the imagination story.
Lia had better luck deciphering her papa’s handwriting, but Kayce was a quick study.
It wasn’t as though she devised a whole language system for Norenth. She was no Tolkien.
Looking back to the wall of bookshelves, Lia saw Kayce’s fingers pause in their search. “Everything in this world is so strange,” he said.
“Boring, if you ask me,” Lia commented. “So far, I’m coming up with nothing but old manuscripts and Norenth histories.”
“Then think like this is Luddeck’s quarters. Where would he hide the goods?”
“I feel conflicted using skills from our smuggling pastime in my papa’s house.”
“Our intentions were pure!”
Unable to help herself, Lia prodded, “I wouldn’t exactly call your schemes pure of heart.”
“That’s a matter of perspective,” he shot back, matching her smirk. “Besides, I didn’t see anyone hold a knife to your throat and force you to join me.”
Lia hummed in thought, recalling those escapades like she could remember her first day of freshman year or the time she went to writing camp last summer. A true memory. Not a mere recollection of some dream or story written long ago.
A muscle feathered in her jaw, that earlier smile slipping like sand through her fingers. How could she have acted so dauntlessly there and be this trembling mess of a girl here? A reader, cloistered away with a cat for preferred company.