Chapter 19
NINETEEN
GWENNA
I wake up to sunlight through the windows, a pounding in my temples, and an empty bed.
Slowly, I shift my weight on the mattress, rolling from hip to back, and groan.
Because my body feels spent. My lips are rubbed raw, my limbs ache. I’m sore everywhere—from the lake, I think. The water.
But then a ripple of something passes through me—a sense memory, a flash of skin and hands and body heat—and I feel the instant, urgent need to crawl back into the belly of my bed and pull the sheets fully over my head.
Not just from the lake.
A fierce, glowing shame burns in my chest, like I’ve swallowed a hot coal. I curl into a ball under the sheets so tightly that I can press my knees into my eye sockets, as if I can push the wavering feeling of about-to-burst tears back into my head.
I couldn’t just fail at the one thing I needed to do last night. No. No, the first thing I manage to do after narrowly surviving hypothermia and drowning, my first instinct when my own life and potentially the survival of the earth as we know it is at stake, is sex.
I’d laugh if I didn’t think it would hurt.
Because on top of everything else, I’m also desperately thirsty, I realize. My throat is dry to the point of painful, and of course I didn’t fill my water bottle before going to sleep.
Swallowing fruitlessly, I push my way out of the nest of blankets and sit up. Sweats are somewhere—my water bottle, too. I can slip into the kitchen and back in two minutes; three, tops.
When I open my door, the hallway is quiet, and I’ve padded almost all the way down the stairs and across the first floor before I hear someone.
Kingston and Kai, busy at the counter, their backs to me and the fridge hanging open.
“Idiot,” Kai mutters. “What are you, cracking them in there whole?”
I hang back in the doorway, barely daring to breathe, but it’s too late.
“Gwenna.” Kingston straightens when he sees me. “You’re awake.”
“I am,” I say, hesitant. “I was just…” I lift my water bottle, as if I need an alibi to be in the kitchen. “What are you doing?”
“Making crunchy scrambled eggs, apparently,” Kai mutters, looking disdainfully down at the bowl in his hand, then up at Kingston. “You gonna pick all this shell out, or were you expecting me to?”
Kingston’s nostrils flare. “Fine. Why don’t you make her something?”
“You know what? Gladly.” Kai unceremoniously dumps the bowl of ribbony raw eggs down the garbage disposal and heads for the fridge.
“Did you sleep well, Gwenna?” Kingston asks.
“Yeah.” My face heats. You were there, I think. It's sweet, achingly sweet, to think of the two of them in here, trying to cook me something to eat. But the fact is, I don’t really feel like being…scrutinized right now. Especially in light of last night. Both parts of last night.
My gaze flies to the floor. God. I’m supposed to look him in the eye right now? Either of them?
It’s one thing to push back on being not not that kind of girl. One thing to be, I don’t know, sexually aggressive and give an impromptu blowjob in a fencing gym. One thing, even, to be with Lanz and with Cal.
But these two…
I lift my eyes again, and both Kai and Kingston look away quickly—but not quickly enough.
They were staring at me.
My heart throbs in my throat again. I should just go back to bed.
“Hello?” a voice calls from the foyer, followed by the heavy slam of the front door. “Is anyone here?”
Morgan. “Kitchen,” I manage, my voice a little raspy. Kai’s suddenly busy with a package of bacon, a cigarette—unlit—jammed in the corner of his mouth. Kingston’s pouring a glass of water, which he hands to me.
“Thank you.” I take it, wondering if it’s better to chug it here and leave or make some excuse about why I need to go back upstairs, when Morgan bursts in from the dining room.
“Gwenna? Oh, thank goddess.” She swings over to me, a snow-scented breeze in her wake and coat swinging open around her. “You’re okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. They took good care of me,” I add, realizing too late what I’ve said. Jesus.
Morgan pays me no mind.
“Here. I brought you--” She dumps her tote bag onto the countertop, a clinking, clacking heap of vials, bottles, jars, tiny bags with corded drawstrings. “Everything, I guess.”
From the stove, Kai snaps around and immediately narrows his eyes. “No.”
Morgan laughs lightly. “Relax, Kai. It’s—”
“I said no.” He stretches across to the island, spatula brandished, and uses it to push the heap farther from my reach. “That stuff will kill you.”
“Oh, like that’s any better?” Morgan counters, nodding at the cigarette.
“Yeah, actually. I know how this’ll kill me.” He plucks it from his lips, gesturing for emphasis.” Little by little, them bam—emphysema. Predictable. But that stuff…” He waves a hand at the counter. “It could go crazily haywire and you’d have no way of knowing until it was too late.”
Morgan narrows her eyes and, lightning-quick, snatches the cigarette from his hand and flicks it into the garbage disposal.
“Hey!” Kai lunges for the drain, but once again, she’s faster, and stabs the switch by the sink. The kitchen fills with the grinding sound of the disposal, and Kai scowls.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Can we please not?” I ask, eyes fixed on the potions and tonics and whatever they are. To Morgan, I ask, “Will any of these actually help?”
Morgan looks daggers at Kai, but her gaze softens when she comes to my side. “Depends on what ails you. How are you feeling?” She slides a hand to my forehead, her fingers pleasantly cool.
How am I feeling?
Anxious. Angry. Trepidatious. Ashamed--or no, just embarrassed, deathly embarrassed, of myself and what I seem to want, what I seem to think is a good idea.
I settle on something more literal and immediate. “Achy.”
“Mmkay.” Morgan rattles through the bottles and jars, picking up and discarding a few before settling on a small silver case with a gleaming, bejeweled lid. She flicks open the clasp and extracts a single, round something between her fingers, about the size of a Cheerio. “This’ll work.”
I glance at Kai—not untrusting of Morgan, but still. “What is it?”
“Ibuprofen.” She snaps the case shut. “Happy?” she adds, in Kai’s direction.
“Overjoyed,” he mutters, not turning from the pan.
I palm the pill and wash it down with some of my lukewarm coffee, feeling my throat stick the whole way down.
Even after I’m done, Morgan is still peering at me, chin in her hands.
So is Kingston, attentive but silent at the end of the island, hands wrapped around his own coffee mug but not drinking.
“What?” I say—practically snap. “What are you all looking at?”
Morgan straightens up, and she and Kingston exchange a look.
“You,” he says simply.
I cave my shoulders in. “Well, don’t.”
Kingston, ever deferent, averts his gaze to the surface of his coffee. Morgan, however, doesn’t budge, and keeps her long-lashed eyes trained on my face.
“So what happened?”
I clench my hand around my mug. “You were there,” I say softly. “You saw.”
“You know what I mean, Gwenna.” Morgan’s tone is friendly, but no-nonsense. “What did she say to you?”
There it is. The question of the hour.
Kingston lifts his head slightly. Even Kai turns from his cooking to listen.
And I, against my will, am stuck in the center of everyone’s gaze.
I suck in a deep breath, like I’m flailing in the middle of the lake all over again, and try to get it over with.
“She asked what I wanted,” I start. “So I told her. I want to know what to do. How to”—I gesture vaguely at the frost-fringed windowpanes—“fix things. And she said she could answer that for me if I answered something for her.”
Silence. Morgan’s the first to nod.
“Which was?”
I take another deep breath. “She asked me, and I quote, Who do you think you are?”
The kitchen goes silent, save for the sizzling of the pan and the faint hum of the refrigerator.
“A riddle,” Kingston says at last. “Isn’t it?”
“I thought so.” My voice sounds terribly small. “But I didn’t have the right answer—obviously. So I…”
I trail off. So I sank like a stone to the bottom of a freezing lake.
An acrid, scorched smell fans out from the stove.
“Shit,” Kai mutters, and snaps off the burner. It’s too late: the pan he lifts is coal-black and charred.
Morgan sighs. “Here. Let me—”
“No,” say the rest of us in unison. Morgan scowls, but relents.
I smirk, grateful for the tiny flash of comic relief. “Can anyone in this family cook?”
The three of them exchange a look.
“Yes,” Morgan says at last. “The…cook.”
In the end, we settle on toast. I oversee the bread in the toaster; Morgan butters.
“So when you say you didn’t have the right answer,” Kingston says, after two polite bites of his not-too-burnt slice. “What was the answer you had?”
“I didn’t,” I say shortly. “Not really. I said I didn’t know, I guess?” My memory is a little fuzzy, to be honest. I rub my forehead.
“And then what?” he presses, gently.
“And then…”
And then I fell underwater, got pulled out by Callahan, and proceeded to throw myself at you and your foster brother.
My cheeks burn.
God, what is wrong with me? I think. I clench my fists so tightly I swear my fingernails cut into my palm. Who do I think I am?
“Haven’t touched your toast.” Kai appears in my field of vision, nodding at my plate.
“Oh. Yeah.” I poke at the crust with a fingertip, nudging the slice a half-centimeter forward on the plate. “There. Touched.”
Kai rolls his eyes. “C’mon. Don’t try to get out on a technicality.”
“I thought getting out on technicalities was what we were all about, here,” I mutter. But I submit to taking a bite.
“So that’s it, then,” Kingston says, folding his hands. “You’ve got to answer her riddle.”
“I guess so.” I swallow my toast. Somehow, talking logistics feels easier, or at least preferable to being in my own head.
Manageable. “But doesn’t that just put us back where we started?
Like, if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t have to go to the Lady in the first place, would I?
I’d know what I was and know how to make myself… be what I have to be. Right?”
No one says anything.
Which must mean I’m right.
“So we did all that for nothing?” I add, a desperate edge to my voice.
“Maybe not,” Kingston says. Then, more definitively, “No.”
I don’t believe him.
“We’ll fill in Dr. Emrys,” he goes on. “Perhaps see if there’s anything he can add—”
Of course. Pro forma, at this point, but sure. I nod, nod, nod, and clutch my coffee. Wishing it could be clearer, wishing I just knew, wishing for once in my life that someone would just tell me, flat out, what I needed to be and do to make everyone happy and everything all right.
“And I’ll go back to my Vivian files,” Morgan’s saying, dropping the jars she was idly stacking into a little tower. “Biographical stuff, I mean, not just magical. In case that turns up a hint or two.” She glances at Kingston, who gives a small, affirmative why-not kind of shrug.
“What about the other two?” He frowns. “Where are the other two?”
“You mean the other fifty percent of this dream team?” Kai glances around the kitchen, shrugging. “Well, next time Pretty Boy’s awake before the rest of us will be the first time.” He gnaws on his lip, pensive. “But it’s not like Cal to just disappear on us.”