Chapter 7
Princess, Meet Raze
Zayne
The front door slams. We all look at each other.
“Well, that went well,” I say to the room in general.
Holly’s mum and dad both look worried. Understandable. That was quite a revelation, and I never saw it coming. Though thinking about it…it makes sense of a lot of things.
All the same, I can’t believe they kept the secret this long and that Holly’s not their real daughter.
So where did she come from?
I’ve got a few ideas, and it’s not anywhere on this world. She’s going to love that.
“I like her,” Josh says. “She’s pretty.”
“Grimlet likes her too,” Grimlet adds from the table, where he’s stuffing his little face with cheese.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk,” I feel I have to point out.
Josh snorts. Yeah, that was never going to last long. But nobody seems fazed by having a talking gargoyle sitting on their table. This is Elderfell, after all.
“I'd better go and check on her,” her mum says.
“Maybe she needs a little time, Pam,” her dad replies. “It’s a big thing to come to terms with.”
Yeah, fucking huge.
Josh leans across the table and semi-whispers, “You should go. And be nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
He snorts again. Grimlet throws a piece of cheese at me.
I catch it and pop it in my mouth. Then I push back my chair, reach across, grab a piece of toast off the plate, and shove it in my mouth as I head toward the door.
I pause and turn back. “Josh, think about everything you know about mirrors. We’re going to have to open one. ”
Josh grins. “This is turning out to be way more interesting than I expected.”
I shake my head.
“Zayne,” her mum says, and I pause again. “Tell her it doesn’t matter. Tell her she’s our daughter and always will be.”
I nod.
I grab our coats and head out of the house. At least it’s not snowing, and I can follow her footsteps around the house and across the lawn. I spot her huddled on a bench overlooking the ornamental lake, staring out over the flat, grey water. She’s shivering.
I head toward her slowly, trying to work out how to be “nice.” I mean, it’s not something I’ve ever worried about before. Or aspired to.
It’s strange. I put Holly out of my mind when I left here. I just wanted to forget about this place. Or not so much wanted—I needed to forget. And yeah, I was feeling a little as though Holly had betrayed me.
She found me that day, unconscious in the snow. Not far from Silvergate, where my dad was found crouched over the body of my mother. Blood in the snow.
Holly must have seen something. Whatever she said. Something that would have cleared my dad. Because I will never believe he killed my mother. Never. They had a volatile relationship; hell, my dad had a volatile relationship with everyone. But he loved her. And he couldn’t go on without her…
So he left me and Tansy.
Bitter? Me? Fuck, yes.
But despite her betrayal, my feelings for Holly are still there. Beneath the bitterness. I suspect they always will be however this plays out.
But that’s something to worry about later because I can feel that tug of urgency.
We need to find Tansy and the other children.
Right now, I have no clue where they’ve gone and no idea how to get them back.
I can’t help but think that Holly has some part to play in this.
I’m not sure what, but her denial that magic even exists is holding us back. We need to break through that.
Her arms are wrapped around herself, and she’s shivering. I walk up without saying anything and hand her coat to her. She shrugs into it and sits back down, then looks up at me. Her face is blotchy from crying, and her lips tremble.
“I don’t know who I am,” she says.
“Of course you know who you are. This doesn’t change anything.”
It’s weird. I remember saying something similar to Amber not that long ago. I see echoes between the two of them all the time. Maybe that’s why I’d been drawn to Amber. She was the first person I allowed myself to get close to after I left here.
“My foster sister Amber, she lost her memory,” I say to Holly. “And she used to say that: 'I don’t know who I am' thing. All pathetic and woebegone.”
Her eyes narrow at that, and I continue, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told her—it doesn’t fucking matter what happened in the past. It doesn’t matter where you came from. You know who you are, what you are. You get to choose.”
She blinks at me a couple of times while she processes that. “Did your sister ever remember?”
“Hell yeah. And let me tell you, she was better off not knowing—but that’s a story for another day. Come on, Holly, how bad is it?”
“But my mum and dad aren’t my mum and dad.”
“Maybe not biologically, but does it matter? They still love you.”
She sits there, nibbling on her lower lip as she thinks it through. “I wonder what happened to their little girl—Laura,” she says. “How sad. How tragic for them.”
“I’m guessing there was a really good reason why it happened, though.”
But what? Why?
“Maybe you’re the daughter of a mafia prince,” I suggest. “And they needed to keep you safe from their enemies.” I don’t think that at all, actually, but it sounds interesting, and Holly had a thing for reading romances about people like that.
Her lips tip up in a small smile, and some of the tension goes out of me. She’s accepting it. Thinking it through.
She frowns. “You know, in some ways, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve always felt that I don’t fit in here—in Elderfell, I mean, but also—I’m really so different from Mum and Dad. And this explains why.” She looks at me. “Do you think I’ll ever know where I came from?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But as I said, it doesn’t really matter. You get to choose who you are.”
“I guess so. It’s weird, isn’t it, that we were just in that shepherd’s hut and that was where I was found?”
“Yeah, weird. But strange things tend to happen in Elderfell.”
Her face goes still. She’s thinking of something else, and it’s not pleasant.
Her hand comes up to rub at the spot between her eyes.
“Don’t think that this makes me believe in magic,” she snaps, then shakes her head.
“God, we’re back to that again. I don’t want to talk about magic and stupid mirrors.
” Her eyes narrow. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?
That I came through some sort of magic mirror. ”
That’s exactly what I think, but I suspect she doesn’t want to hear that. It occurs to me again that her disbelief in magic is almost…irrational. But it’s also starting to piss me off. She needs to get over it.
Because as soon as I’ve had that talk with Josh, we’re heading back to Silvergate.
I just shrug, and that seems to piss her off even more.
She jumps up and paces back and forth in front of me.
I can almost see the steam coming out of her ears.
She turns to face me, hands on her hips, full of attitude, and I have the most inconvenient urge to kiss her.
But then she sniffs. “What next? Are you going to try and make me believe that monsters are real?”
I grin at that one. And it occurs to me that if I want to prove that magic—and monsters—are real, then I have the perfect way to do that.
Plus, it’s probably the quickest way. Not to mention, the hardest to ignore.
And maybe it’s time for Holly to learn just how much I’ve changed.
Because I’ve realized something—five years ago, things got rough, and I walked away from her.
I’m not walking away from her again.
I give her a slow smile.
“What?” she snaps.
“You’d better believe the monsters are real, princess.”
“Don’t call me princess. And what do you…” She trails off and stares at me, her eyes widening. “What the…”
She can deny magic all she likes, but even she must feel the shudder in the air around us. I step back—I need space for this.
“Zayne?”
But I can’t answer because the change is sweeping over me.
Raze is coming out to play. The air snaps, pressure rolling off my skin.
Heat blooms along my spine as bones lengthen; leather groans; the world tilts on a hinge.
Scales chase over my arms like frost, then catch—emerald, then blue.
When the wings rip free, the membranes grab the cold and sing.
Raze stretches, tasting the sky, and the ground seems very far away.
Holly stares up at me. I think she’s frozen in place—probably overwhelmed by my magnificence. Then she blinks once, whirls around, and races toward the house.
I launch myself into the sky.
I punch straight up through the thin winter light and hover overhead until she disappears into the outbuildings surrounding the manor house. Then I bank hard over the roofs and let the sound tear out of me—a bell of fire and thunder that rattles the gutters.
Yeah. I quite like my monster.
And I’m sure Holly will too…once she gets to know us.