21. Miri
21
Miri
L ex was on edge. We all were. Something heavy hung in the air, something more than the ritual or the way Ashley had ditched us. I sensed foreboding on the horizon, and I couldn’t explain it. Chewing my bottom lip, I counted the number of humans while my spouses argued about whether we should leave or wait it out.
I sensed the fairies in attendance. Perhaps it was because of their connection to nature or because they had lived among the trees so long they were a part of the forest. Their auras shone around their bodies like halos, like I’d had my eyes open under chlorinated water too long and looking at them was like looking at white blurry lights. The queen’s aura was the brightest. Did that mean she was the most powerful?
“Ashley’s the closest we have to a clue,” Carter said. “If she can undo the gift, we’ve got to try.”
Lex took a deep breath and sucked on his cigarette, but stopped arguing. Maybe he accepted the lot we’d cast for ourselves and decided to wait it out.
“Okay, fuck it.” Carter headed back toward the table. “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m starving.” He sat and pinched at the turkey to pile it on his plate.
“Carter—” Ivy moved to stand next to him. “If you consume the food of the fae, you could get stuck here.”
“Yeah,” Lex said. “Like Persephone and shit.”
“Ashley promised not to harm us.” Carter took a deep breath, raking his eyes over the spoils. “We didn’t get stuck last time. How much longer are we going to wait for the queen to finish?”
No one answered him, and my own stomach growled.
“Do you want to go to your death on an empty stomach?” Carter looked at me. “If I’m not leaving here anyway, then I’d rather enjoy the time I have left.”
I’d been nauseous since we left Killwater, but now that we’d been stopped, my adrenaline had subsided and left an empty hollowness in its wake. If we were here permanently, at least we’d be together. If Carter wanted to give in to temptation, I’d go with him. One of my nannies used to say there wasn’t anything in this world that couldn’t be fixed by a good meal.
“I’ve got a terrible feeling about this, but I’m with you until the end.” I held out my hand to him like I had last night. He took it, hooked his thumb around mine, and gave it a shake. “You’re right. This could be our last meal.”
Ivy exhaled and sat opposite me, taking a piece of turkey and putting it on her plate. “Until the end, right?”
Carter and I nodded.
Lex flicked his hazel stare between us, inhaling his cigarette down to the butt before stabbing it out and walking over to the table. He resigned himself to the spot next to Ivy. “In for a penny.”
Then, like a screwed-up family, we ate a Samhain dinner together surrounded by the fae. The turkey melted in my mouth, cooked to perfection and somehow still warm and juicy despite sitting out the entire time we’d been here. The wine wasn’t the sweet floral decadence I remembered, but cinnamon flavored and spicy, like a warm, fluffy blanket for my veins.
As soon as it settled in my gut, the worries from my day disappeared. The taste may have been different, but the high was the same—like I floated above my body, a part of this world, but not at the same time.
“Did you guys hear voices in the woods, too?” I asked, my prior anxiety about the trees dissipating.
“My pop,” Carter said, nodding. His eyes shimmered as he blinked back tears and cleared his throat.
Ivy nodded and met Lex’s stare. “Marcus.”
“Same.” Lex gave Ivy one of his rare looks of genuine affection before nodding.
“I heard my parents,” I admitted.
We fell quiet, a simple peace laced with the grief of our departed loved ones. Wasn’t that what Samhain was about? Wasn’t that when the veil between the realms was the thinnest? If there were an afterlife, I hoped our beloveds were watching us. I hoped they knew how much we missed them, how much we still carried them in our hearts. The thought twisted in my chest, making my eyes burn, and I clenched them shut as tears trickled over my cheeks before I could wipe them away.
“What’s your favorite memory of them?” Ivy asked, reaching across the table to grab my hand.
I smiled, the visual coming from somewhere deep in the back of my brain. “My mother used to take me walking in the gardens at Windsor. We liked to pick roses.” That was where my love for plants came from. “She told me the reason flowers were so magical was because no two are the same. They may look alike, and they may come from the same roots, but a closer look always revealed that each one was an individual.”
Ivy smiled and looked at Carter. “What about you? Tell us about Pop.”
“He took me to the Bears first home game every year—just me and Pop,” Carter started, wiping at his own wet eyes while he talked. “My sisters weren’t allowed to come. He’s the one who always told me to stay optimistic. To keep the faith and the rest will come.”
“He sounds like he was fantastic,” I said. “I bet I would have liked him.”
“He was.” Carter grabbed my other hand. “And you would have. He would have liked all of you, too. He would have liked our strange marriage.”
“Lex?” Ivy said. “What about Marcus?”
Lex blew out a breath. “Marcus was…” He couldn’t finish without clearing his throat. “Marcus was so much better at this than me.”
“At what?” Carter asked.
“The show. The game. Being the Fairfax.” Lex shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes as waves of emotion seemed to overwhelm him.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Ivy said.
I agreed. “I would say there are few in the game better than you.”
“You guys are sweet,” Lex said. “But you don’t have to inflate my ego just because you’re married to me.”
I chuckled, and Carter patted the side of Lex’s face. “I wouldn’t do that. Your ego’s big enough whether we’re married or not.”
Lex cracked up and leaned across the table to kiss Carter, grabbing him firmly by the neck to hold him in place. Perhaps I should have been jealous of the affection so freely given to my Romeo, but I loved their love. I loved to watch Lex love Carter.
“What about you, Ivy?” I asked. “What do you remember about Marcus?”
Ivy sighed and intertwined her fingers, bringing them up to her mouth while she contemplated. “He was my friend at a time when I didn’t have many. He held my hand at big events, and I was braver because of it.”
Lex pulled one side of his mouth into a grin, wrapping an arm around Ivy’s shoulders to tug her closer so he could give her a gentle peck on the temple.
“You were brave on your own,” Lex muttered, probably thinking it was too low for me and Carter to hear. But I did. “You didn’t need my idiot brother.”
Before I could linger too long on that tender glint in Lex’s eye, I held up my glass of wine. “Cheers to the ones that came before us. May they never be far from our hearts. May the good memories see us through the bad.”
Everyone held up their chalice and sipped to our departed family members.
“To last dinners,” Lex added.
“Here, here,” Ivy and Carter said together.
It should have sobered me and made me pause to consider how we planned to get out of this. There was no telling when Ashley would be around to check on us again, and time passed differently on this side of the veil. Twelve hours here meant twenty-four out there. Three days could be a week. We might get back to our world to discover years had gone by. But the magical side effects of the wine dulled my reasoning, and when Lex made a crack at Carter’s expense, Ivy and I burst into hysterics.
The night went jovially on around us. We laughed at old stories from our college days and talked about things that had happened since then. In that tent with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no control over what happened next, the four of us rebuilt what we had created and torn apart two years ago.
This… This was what the gift was meant to be. Stripped of titles and pretense and the weight of the world’s expectations, we were free, so joyful and light.
A momentary thought passed through my mind, there and gone in a heartbeat.
What if we didn’t leave? What if we stayed like this forever? Would that be the worst thing?
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a reason why it would. Yeah, I wouldn’t see my family again. Perhaps I would miss my grandparents and Edward, and maybe Carter’s family, too. Other than that, most humans were disappointing. I could just as easily come back to this tent with my spouses night after night. I’d cook vegetables I had harvested myself and raise our children surrounded by people who understood what it was between us, who wouldn’t judge or try to keep us apart by tearing us down. Other humans lived here successfully, right? Would it be difficult for us to blend in?
“If we do make it out of this,” Lex added, returning my attention to the conversation, “I want to buy a house in the country, far away from everyone.”
“Agreed,” Ivy said. “Somewhere that’s ours. All of us.”
“If we make it out of this, I won’t go another two years without being together,” Carter said, squeezing my hand tighter. “I don’t care what I have to do to my filming schedule. I’ll figure it out.”
“We can have a big garden out back for our princess”—Lex shot me a wink—“and a gym in the basement for Weeds and Chicago.”
“And a darkroom for you to develop your prints,” I added, remembering those gorgeous shots of Ivy.
“Every night, we’ll make dinner together,” Carter said, “and then we’ll fuck in our hot tub overlooking the mountains.”
Ivy laughed, and the noise warmed all the parts of me that had frozen over while being in Faerie. I realized, as we sat there discussing our paradise, that I wanted it with a fury. I wanted it more than I wanted anything else in my life. If we left this place intact, if we went back to who we were, we may never get it. My life would be the royal family. Ivy and Lex would go back to their politics in DC. Carter would go on to be the next EGOT winner.
“It sure is a pretty picture,” I said, a small bit of melancholy creeping into my blood.