Chapter 5
Idon’t think Lily’s hurt. I don’t think?—
I don’t think I lost her, but my eyes don’t want to believe the evidence of my hands. Lily was gone for an hour and I’m as fucked up as I’ve ever been. Just because I can’t feel any blood doesn’t mean she’s fine.
But when I pull back to look at her, Lily reaches up and slaps her hand over my eyes.
“You’re not supposed to see me yet!”
The room goes silent.
There had been a fuckload of carrying voices bouncing off one another. August and Julien went sprinting off to somewhere else. Down a hall, maybe? Hades has a window open and leans halfway out of it, looking for?—
I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want Lily, and the words out of her mouth?—
“Angel.” My tongue trips over the word, but guess fucking what? I don’t care about that either. “I’m going to see you. I just—you were gone. You have to let me see if you’re okay.”
“No.” Lily’s hand over my eyes is warm. My heartbeat is in my skeleton. It’s all over my skin. I need to—kiss her? Strip off her dress so I can make sure that every inch of her is okay? I need to marry her. We were supposed to be married by now. “You’re not supposed to see me until I come down the aisle.”
I could pull her hand away, but I don’t.
“Lily.”
She sighs. “This is not going according to plan.”
“I don’t think it’s going according to anybody’s plan. Let me see you.”
Or I might cry. I might break down into big, ugly sobs in this empty room by a parking garage, and who knows what happens after that? Maybe I stay out by the lake all night. Maybe I crack up in front of my brother and a photographer and a journalist and a guy who could kill all of us, probably.
Lily takes her hand away slowly. Her face comes back into view. Big, green eyes, shiny, like she could cry but decided not to. Flushed cheeks. I fucked up her hair a little bit, but she still looks perfect. Her lower lip wobbles.
“You weren’t supposed to see me like this.”
“You weren’t supposed to get kidnapped. Either time.” No wedding is supposed to play out like this one. I can’t tell if it’s more fucked up or less fucked up that I can’t picture it going any other way. Do crime scenes usually see a pretty girl on the street and ask her to dinner? Do human train wrecks snap out of it at first sight? That’s not what happened to me. Poor Lily.
Another sigh, this one softer. “That’s already been, like…litigated. We’ve gone over that. This was supposed to be our wedding day. So can we get on with it.”
“Jesus, I love you like this.”
Lily starts to laugh, and I put my hands on her face and kiss her right in the middle of it. She’s warm. She’s warm and alive and sweet. She tastes slightly citrusy, like she had a virgin mimosa while they were getting ready. Something shakes in the far distance. I spent one summer doing a deep dive on Pompeii. People got out because it spewed ashes into the air for, like, eighteen hours before the eruption. I’m not fucking Vesuvius. I’m not Pompeii. If everything foundational about me is spewing ashes, then that would fuck up our wedding day even more. The thought dissolves into the kiss. Lily’s hands are on my neck. A kiss is a warning of an eruption, if you think about it, but I’m not thinking much at all. Certainly not about dick jokes.
“We need to go to the hospital.” Here comes Mason, Protective Dad Mode activated.
Lily pulls away, her hands slipping down to my lapels. “What? No.”
Yes. Yes, actually we should go to the hospital. Because a chunk of molten knowledge flies out of the active volcano of my memory and almost cracks my skull.
Lily’s pregnant. I don’t want to blurt that out here in this room, but it’s true. Someone with a medical degree should be in charge of deciding if she’s okay.
“He’s right,” I say.
Lily narrows her eyes. “Did all the guests leave?”
“No,” Mason allows. “But the ceremony doesn’t matter as much as?—”
“Yes, it does,” Lily interrupts. My brain is finally starting to put together that her wedding dress is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Black lace neckline. Black lace sleeves. It looks like the white blooms out of black lace. Like Lily’s touched down in mid-flight to become a bride. All the color of her—her red hair, the slightly smudged lipstick from where I kissed her, the bright flush of her cheeks—is so vivid it hurts. “Do you think I’m going to let them do this?”
“Lily—” Mason says.
“The kidnapper can go fuck himself,” Lily continues. “My grandfather can go fuck himself. They are not going to win. Not on my wedding day.”
“Your grandfather?—”
“He’s the one who hired that asshole! Walsh came into the bridal suite and said he brought me a gift from my grandfather! It was some email from a private investigator that says my mother’s dead. That’s how he wanted me to die. Thinking she was dead. Where did he even go?”
She cranes her neck to look. Just then, August and Julien emerge from the hallway, August signing.
“Nothing,” Julien says. He runs a hand through his hair. His face is pale. August’s isn’t. “There was an exit through the neighboring building.”
“This motherfucker.” Hades pulls himself back through the window and closes it, flipping the latch like it offended him. “We’ll find him.”
“After the wedding,” Lily orders. “Take me back to the cathedral.”
Our second arrivalcauses more of a stir. Some of the guests have moved out to the lobby, and a gasp goes up when Lily and I come through.
Then Sunshine marches in like an army general, a critical eye on Lily’s dress.
“We’ll need a few minutes, and then it’ll be good as new. Are you okay?” She pulls Lily into a tight hug. “We don’t have to talk about it if you’d rather not.”
“I’m fine,” Lily says, loud and clear. “I am extremely fine. I might’ve gotten something on my dress.”
Sunshine snaps her fingers, and four older ladies surround her.. Lily’s hidden behind a wall of bridesmaids in pink dress.
“Jesus, Jameson. I can’t let you get married like this. Come on.”
Gabriel’s hand is on my elbow, and then he and Jacob Chambers are ushering me down a hallway and into a bathroom.
“What are you talking about? I look fine.”
My brother takes me by the shoulders and turns me. There’s a mirror over the sink.
Oh.
I look like shit.
I didn’t know I was grabbing my hair so hard. There’s a scratch mark on one of my cheeks, almost like I was in a fight, but I wasn’t. And the look on my reflection’s face isn’t good. I look haunted. Skittish. I look better than I feel, though. Because I feel like a corroded wire. I feel like an electrical fire waiting to start. I feel like I might die any second.
That’s not the right feeling for the happy ending of a story, I’ll tell you that.
Gabriel puts his hand on my shoulder and meets my eyes in the mirror. “Lily’s okay.”
“I know.” I give him a jerky, half-human nod. “I know. She keeps saying that.”
“You’re okay.”
“Sure I am.”
“You’ll be okay,” he says firmly. It could be possible, since Gabriel’s okay. He’s not pale and thin and coming home in the middle of the night with stab wounds anymore. His clothes are perfect, but he’s not obsessive about them. He looks comfortable in his body.
I try to believe him.
Jamie, my mom whispers.
Not now, not now, not now.
The nice thing about Jacob Chambers is that he’s a talker. He chats about how we should fix my hair and how the guests seem to think the delay is just some extra drama and practically none of them have realized that anything went wrong. All the ladies think I’m obsessed with Lily because of how I ran out of the cathedral. I accidentally stare at him for too long while Gabriel’s cleaning my face with a damp paper towel—no idea how I scratched my own face, or if some mystery person scratched me when I wasn’t paying attention.
Jacob claps my shoulder. “Cheer up, old chap,” he says in an aggressively American accent. “Wedding bells, and all that.”
“Right. Wedding bells.”
It’s weird as all fuck to be in a cathedral bathroom with Jacob Chambers and Gabriel, but it’s familiar enough that I don’t hear any other voices in my head. The shaking-Vesuvius sensation stops. I almost feel normal when Jacob goes out and retrieves my tux jacket, which I’d completely forgotten about.
“Is she still out there?” I ask him in my most normal voice when he comes back, the jacket held high.
“The bride, Lilith? Yes. She’s here. Mason is standing guard, along with his private security friends.”
“They’re not private security,” I tell Jacob. “They’re just guys.”
“Just guys,” he repeats. “Of course you’re right. Just guys. I would never presume to argue with the groom on his wedding day.”
“Don’t tease him,” Gabriel says.
“Sorry, handsome.” Jacob flashes me a smile, which falls into a frown as he shakes out my jacket. “What did you do? Step on this? How quickly do you think we could find an iron?”
The answer is, I guess, very quickly. Jacob’s gone for a minute or two. He returns with my jacket looking way better than it did when he left.
He and Gabriel get me back into it.
Then we’re out in the hall, heading away from the bathroom. The constant hum of voices from the nave is like white noise. Terrifying one second. Comforting the next. Gabriel opens a door, and we go through it, and I’m back at the front of the church like I never left.
This is so fucking disorienting.
Mason comes out after us and takes me by the elbow.
The shaking was more real than I thought. The people at this wedding have to be concerned by now. I wasn’t this much of a wreck before.
Part of the problem is that none of this seems real. Who has a wedding in a packed cathedral that gets interrupted by a kidnapping? Who has a wedding that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a different kidnapping? It would be less shocking to find out that I haven’t lived in reality since I was a teenager.
If the cathedral melted down to reveal a mental institution, that would make sense.
Mason squeezes my arm. “She’s fine.”
I might be crazy, I don’t say. “She’s not going to be alone out there, is she?”
“Change of plans.”
I should’ve asked about this before I let Gabriel whisk me away to be repaired. Lily was going to walk herself down the aisle originally, but that can’t happen now. I just can’t figure out who’s going to do it. Her dad isn’t in the picture. Her mom might be dead or might still be missing. Her grandfather is a fucking psychopath. I’d turn to count the groomsmen, but I think I might pass out.
Instead, the music starts up and the guests hush.
The doors open.
Remy is the first bridesmaid down the aisle. Her footsteps are louder this time—she has shoes on—but they’re steady. She smiles at me encouragingly, which makes me feel like a piece of shit. I’m the older brother. I should encourage her.
But it’s taking every scrap of self-control I have not to sprint down the aisle and find Lily. I think another unhinged sprint might be too much for this wedding. Also, Mason’s grip is pretty tight on my arm. It wouldn’t be easy to get free.
The other bridesmaids are coming. They, unlike me, have it together. They’re all smiling and looking beautiful. Hades’s wife winks at him when she’s halfway to the front. Zeus’s daughter runs to her mother when she reaches the row they’re sitting in, and Hades’s daughter follows, so we end up with two mini-bridesmaids standing in the row.
I’m going to throw up if Lily doesn’t come out soon. Mason says something I don’t understand. Probably don’t throw up.
And then she’s there at the open doors.
Everybody stands up. Several people say awww. Because Nate’s walking Lily down the aisle. He stands tall and proud and doesn’t look nervous at all. The confidence reminds me of Gabriel. Nate’s only lived at his house since last fall, and when he first showed up, he was in bad shape. Washed out and thin and bruised from having been beaten to within an inch of his life.
Now, he could be one of us.
One of my brothers, anyway. I might not give the impression that I was beaten to within an inch of my life, but if anybody looks close enough, they’ll see.
Gabriel was right. Nate belongs with us.
With them.
I’m fucking heartbroken, and I’m…fine with it?
I’m fine with it because if I go down in flames, at least they won’t be missing a person. Nate’s a way better option than me.
The light from the cathedral windows comes down on Lily, and I forget to be heartbroken, because she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know a veil was part of her outfit. They must’ve put it on just now, and it’s not over her face, just cascading over her hair. White, with black lace, like her dress.
Lily’s smiling, but she doesn’t look shaken. She’s not tearing up. It’s the fiercest I’ve ever seen her look. A human sunbeam, and God help whoever tries to stop her.
She’s an angel.
The avenging kind.
Nate bends and says something to her, and she answers, her eyes sharpening, and then they’re here.
Either someone told Nate what to do beforehand, or he decided on his own, but he looks me in the eye and sticks his hand out to shake. There’s a camera lens in my periphery. August is getting all of this. No doubt it’ll look even better in the photos.
Then Nate puts Lily’s hand in mine.
Time to get married.
Not time to run out of here so we can be somewhere alone.
The cathedral blurs, but Lily stays clear. I’m not sure what the priest is saying, or if it even matters. Something about love and marriage and family. I’m supposed to be looking at him, but I can’t take my eyes off her.
“I was so scared,” I tell her, keeping my voice low enough that I won’t interrupt my own wedding ceremony. Again.
“Me too.” Her eyes, a lighter green than mine, remind me of sea glass. Then the light hits them a different way, and they’re the color of a jewel. “I was really scared. But I knew you’d come to find me.”
“I love you.”
Lily blinks, new tears shining in her eyes.
“I should have said it before. I thought I might not get to say it.”
She clears her throat. “I love you, too. I—I hope you know that. I hope you didn’t think I’d gone because I didn’t love you.”
“I can’t believe he made you write a note.”
“That guy was highly unintelligent,” Lily whispers. “He had to have known I’d use a code.”
“Maybe it was a trap.”
“Maybe.”
The priest is still talking.
“Jameson,” Lily says.
“Yeah?”
“There’s something else. Something I have to tell you. I think you have the right to know before you marry me.”
I squeeze her hand.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
I knew it was true before. That test couldn’t have belonged to anybody else. But hearing Lily say it is like walking out of a loud bar onto a silent street. My ears ring with it. My heart tumbles around in my chest like a deflating ball.
“I know,” I manage.
Her eyes get wider. “You do?”
“Yeah.” I squeeze her hand again. “Let’s get married. We can talk about it after.”