19. Chapter 19
“Awww,” I murmured as we watched Margaret take baby Ben into the house. “You’re adorable.”
“I am not.”
“Well, you’re not now, obviously. Now you’re all manly and... gruff?” I said.
Ben snorted. “Gruff?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just spouting masculine words to appease your ego.”
“I’d say you need more practice, but I don’t need you to appease my ego.”
I planted a kiss on his cheek. “Then you won’t mind me saying that you’re being adorable right now.”
Kira mimed vomiting into the bushes, and Ben reached over and pinched her wing. She whirled around, sending soil flying as she fixed us both with a demonic glare.
“Don’t. Touch. My. Wings,” she said. “Maeve, tell him.”
“Yeah, don’t touch her wings,” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth.
“If you two are finished being disgusting, can we talk about this situation, please?” Kira asked. “Why is you and Adrian coming to Dusk such an important event that there’s a portal to it?”
“I’m not sure.” Ben checked over the top of the bush and then stepped over it in one big stride. “But we’ve got to find out.”
I took Ben’s offered hand and scrambled out of the bushes with him. Kira flew to join us, and we crept toward the back door.
Once we were in the kitchen, I realised the entire house had undergone a major modernisation between then and the last time I had snuck in. The greens, browns, and yellows that everyone in the 80s seemed to love so much dominated the colour scheme. And every item of furniture seemed to have frills or tassels.
Gods, was I glad we were past that era of decoration.
Ben led us through the house in search of his parents, and when we heard a quiet conversation taking place down the hall, he beckoned us after him. We squatted at the door to what looked like a living room through the small opening.
I could just see Margaret, still holding a tiny, sleeping Ben, and her husband sat next to her, fussing with another baby in a carrier. That must have been Adrian.
I had always known that Ben’s parents had brought him and his brother to Dusk from Japan, but we had never really spoken about his adoption. Perhaps there was nothing really to speak about.
“I’m sorry for your losses.” Another voice that belonged to someone out of sight materialised. “It must have been quite a shock to learn that your curse doesn’t make exceptions for adoptions.”
“It was,” Margaret said, patting Ben’s back as she rocked back and forth. “But these boys are our silver linings.”
Margaret’s protectiveness over her sons was a secret to nobody. She had once tried to throttle me after I had saved Ben from drowning in the ocean, believing I had injured him. Given the chance, I reckoned she would have tried again if I just passed her on the street. And that was even before she learned I was sleeping with her son.
“What worries us is the future,” Ben’s dad said. “We’ve always wanted children, but... have we put them at risk by bringing them into our family?”
“Please don’t tell me you asked me here to tell you if your boys succumb to your curse,” the disembodied woman asked. “You know no Seer can easily predict deaths.”
“We want you to tell us,” Margaret said. “But only if you can.”
I looked to grown up Ben, who had concentration etched onto his face, so I had to nudge him to get his attention.
“Did your parents hire a Seer when you came here?” I mouthed.
“We used to have a Seer over every time someone was born or came into the family,” Ben whispered. “It’s tradition. We want to know if anyone has a future that has... trouble in it.”
“In case one of you gets into shenanigans?” Kira muttered. “Bit late for that, isn’t it? You’re literally watching your own past.”
I waved a hand to silence them both as the conversation continued inside.
“All I want to know is if my sons will grow up happy and healthy,” Margaret said. “Surely you can tell me that?”
A few moments of silence followed, filled only by baby Adrian gurgling from the carrier.
Adrian was a cutey in this time, too. Shame he turned into such a pill.
“One of your boys has an inescapable destiny,” the Seer said, “which will lead him to do great things. He will grow up happy and fall deeply in love. And this love will benefit you all.”
I rubbed my cheek against Ben’s shoulder, and he kissed my forehead. Destinies could change at the drop of a hat, but I hoped she was right about this one.
“Which son?” Margaret asked.
“I cannot say,” the Seer replied. “You will have misgivings about this woman, but you must trust your son. She will bring out the best in him.”
“Still waiting for that one,” Kira whispered.
Under any other circumstance, I might have given her a playful punch, but at the risk of giving ourselves away, I refrained.
“Should we... should we ever tell them why we brought them here?” Margaret asked. “Why we had to take them from their home?”
I looked at Ben, who squinted at the door. What did she mean? Was there a reason Ben and Adrian had to leave the place they were born?
“They will find out in their own time,” the Seer said. “But their pasts will not find them while they are on Dusk.”
A discussion Ben and I had had previously resurfaced. Ben had told me that his mum had done everything she could to keep him and Adrian on Dusk. Was this why? Did she fear something would happen to them if they left? And what ‘past’ could the Seer possibly refer to? How much history could two babies have?
“So if we keep them here, they’ll be safe?” Margaret asked.
“Safer than anywhere else.”
Yup. That was the nail in that coffin.
“If there’s nothing more, I have another appointment scheduled.” The shuffling inside suggested the Seer had stood up and the three of us scrambled to move away from the doorway.
Ben darted back into the kitchen, and Kira and I followed him. We slipped out of sight just as the living room door opened and all three adults stepped out, with Margaret still clutching baby Ben.
“I will schedule another appointment with you,” Margaret said as the Seer headed for the front door. “I must know more.”
“There is only so much we can learn about our loved ones’ futures before it interferes with their destinies,” the Seer said, her hand on the front door handle. “So I may not see the answers you’re looking for.”
“I will be happy if you only try.”
The Seer pursed her lips and bid them farewell. As soon as the door closed, Margaret and her husband retreated into the living room.
I rested my head on Ben’s shoulder as he stared at the wall, eyes glazed.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
To learn that his parents had hidden something important in his past was jarring enough without also discovering that this secret was the very reason he had never left the island, despite always wanting to.
“Yeah,” he said, in a faraway voice. “We should... go back.”
With that, Ben took my hand and led me toward the back door. I squeezed his as we retreated, in the hope it would be of some comfort to him.
***
Once we jumped back through the portal, Kira made a beeline for the end of the corridor, backing away from us.
“I’m going to check on Bronwyn,” she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “See you in a minute.”
I shot her a grateful smile, and she winked back at me. Ben and I needed a minute to talk, especially given that his eyes had barely unfocused since we left the Everhart manor.
“What are you thinking?” I wrapped my arms around his waist and rested my chin on his chest, gazing up at him.
“That we need to have a serious talk with our parents,” Ben said.
He finally snapped out of his thoughts and dipped his face down toward mine.
“I’m sure they only kept things from you to keep you safe,” I said.
“Is that a good enough reason, though? We’re adults now and if there’s something dangerous they had to take us away from...” Ben trailed off, his eyes glazing over again as he descended back into what I suspected was a quagmire of questions. “... they should have told us a long time ago.”
I let him process his thoughts for a moment, hoping a long hug would help ground him as he tried to make sense of what he had just learned.
“What I don’t get, though,” he said, his arms wrapping around me too, “is why Adrian and me coming to Dusk is an important event.”
The floodgates opened to my own questions, and my brain quickly drowned in them. Their arrival on Dusk had meant a lot to the Everhart family, but did that constitute a significant event for the entire island? Unless there was something more to Ben coming to Dusk than becoming a part of the community. What if he had a role to play that affected everyone?
“There has to be a reason,” I said. “I mean, if you think about it, if you hadn’t come to Dusk, then we wouldn’t have had our anonymous date nights. Then who would have tried to make peace between our families?”
“Haven’t exactly succeeded at that, though, have we?”
“Not yet.”
Although we were fast running out of time to do that, too.
A loud crash further into the ship had us both stiffening in each other”s arms, but seconds later we sprinted down the hall toward the noise. Whatever that was, it couldn’t have been good news.
The bangs and crashes grew louder as we hurried toward the noise, and we burst into the food hall. Pirates threw punches at each other left and right, picked up chairs and chucked them with all their might. Along the edge of the room, Kira hurried Bronwyn and Adrian along, all three crouched low to avoid the pots, tankards, and cutlery flying overhead.
But a blockade of chairs stood in their path, and I dashed around the edge of the room to help, with Ben at my back.
“What the hell is going on here?” I shouted over the hubbub as I grabbed chairs and handed them back to Ben, who chucked them aside.
“They started arguing over the ending of a story,” Adrian called back. “They’re not even drunk!”
“Well, come on, for goodness’ sake, let’s get out of here before they kill one of us!” Ben cried.
We cleared a path, and I grabbed Bronwyn’s arm to help her hurry along. But three pirates barrelled toward us, facing away as they fought off several more pirates trying to beat them with chairs. All five of us slammed against the wood and the amulet rocketed out from my shirt and just grazed the porthole near my head. The amulet glowed, and white light enveloped my vision.