15. Wren
Wren
I’ll stab Forest. On principle.
Considering it makes me feel a hell of a lot happier after my interesting conversion with Sabine. But he’s unconscious, and there’s no sport in that.
“You, sir, are in for another wild ride,” I mutter.
Let’s hope he’s going to handle this round better than the last. It’s always challenging when he first falls into his memories. He’ll be out for a while. Whatever he’s seeing in his head, it drowns him, utterly.
“What should we do?” Helene bites her lip before catching herself.
I remember that habit.
Dangerous.
“We leave him there.” I shrug. “Builds character.”
“What if he gets cold?”
“Then he’ll finally stop talking.”
She glances at me. “I’m not sure—”
“Unfortunately for all of us, he’s hard to kill. Trust me.”
She steals the air in the room. It’s not large enough to stride from one wall to the other without knocking into a handful of furniture. Her bed is the largest piece in the room, and yet it takes up less space than the dresser leaning to the side.
Helene’s apartment is too small for her.
Too cold. Too cramped. Too human. Shabby as hell.
And somehow she’s made it warm. Alive.
A woman like her deserves a palace instead of the chill, steep peaks of this place, the roofline cutting up toward the sky, spearing the wedge of moon. Oil spills of yellow light seep through the living room windows onto the dead lawn below.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t mind this room for sleep, with its four walls broken only by a door. She doesn’t want to look at the view.
A quick grin disguises my worry especially when her breathing goes heavier.
Her scent floods my senses.
“I’m nervous. I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“How about you show me around, monster? I haven’t been given the grand tour,” I say instead.
“I'm still waiting for your name," she fires off quickly, looking at me rather than an unconscious Forest.
“Ah, a situation where you scratch my back and I scratch yours, huh? I like the idea.”
She pushes a lock of honeyed hair from her forehead to give me the full weight of her scowl. How many people does she make squirm with that look?
The I’ll-chop-your-balls-off-and-feed-them-to-you-if-you-don’t-do-what-I-say look?
I fucking love it. She’s too nice to throw it at anyone else, though. Only me.
We turn to face each other.
“I caught your name in the bookstore but I want to hear it from your mouth,” she adds.
“My mouth—” My gaze dips to hers. “—is built for better activities than talk.”
This cycle is moving faster. I feel it, the difference, the speed. I’m not sure why or how.
Also, fuck that bird for kissing our girl first. Stupid oversized chicken.
Even without his memories he focuses on one thing only and it’s not duty. It’s dick.
She blushes when I reach for her, then stalls when I lift her hand to my lips to brush them across her knuckles.
“Wren Stonebreaker.”
She adjusts the hold and grips my hand, squeezing to prove her point. “Helene Blake.”
Yes. It’s her. After years of waiting for her to make an appearance, I’m touching her again, and the soul shining in her eyes is the real deal.
"It's a pleasure.” It always is.
“Leave the bird and get your ass out here,” Nicholas calls.
The walls might as well not exist. His agitation cuts right through the rickety plaster.
I smile at her. “How about you make us something to drink and we’ll check on your sister?”
Letting go of her hand steals the last warmth from my body.
Dramatic, but unfortunately true.
Helene nods, glares, and stomps out of the room hard enough to rattle the entire house. But the mention of Audra does the trick and erases any sort of irritation at my suggestion of coffee.
Nicholas has Audra settled on the small couch with a pillow beneath her head this time. The girls’ chest lifts and falls in a steady rhythm, and her hands loop on her lap.
Helene pauses to swipe the hair from the girl’s face before heading into the kitchen. A muscle in Nicholas’s jaw jumps.
She promptly ignores both of us.
Nicholas catches my gaze.
Ah. Here we go.
An arched doorway separates the compact living room from the smaller galley and she stands there for a moment, watching her sister sleep.
There are pieces of her in this iteration. I see some of Hellevi in Helene’s long straight nose and the pertness of her lips, now turned down with worry.
Being around her is coming home, leaning into the familiar embrace when a time in life wasn’t tainted by loss and grief and suffering.
Despite the air of decay and the mold problems, the apartment is warm, inviting, and homey. Worn in most places, but Helene has always been a woman who values use first. Then comfort.
Style has never mattered to her.
“Someone better start answering my questions because I’m about two seconds away from a full blown meltdown and no one wants to see that,” she says.
“You mean, your lovely eruption at the bookstore wasn’t a breakdown?” I tease.
She squeezes the tin of store brand coffee hard enough to dent it. “It wasn’t even close. Now which one of you cares to do the honors of explaining this situation to me? You. You were stalking me.”
She points a sticky spoon toward Nicholas.
“I was watching you. And a good thing I was,” he replies.
As usual, his abrasive tone is sandpaper on my ears. Helene shivers, but it’s not from irritation. Her flash of arousal colors the air in the kitchen.
Nicholas goes rigid in the corner like he’s trying not to breathe. He keeps his gaze fixed on the wall instead of her throat.
Never her throat.
“The creature was another troll, I believe. Why was it here? Why was no one else around when it attacked?”
Helene scoops a greedy amount of coffee grounds into the machine. She grabs the pot and flips on the sink, the pipes belching and hissing before the steady flow fills the vessel. The pipes here put all kinds of minerals in the water.
I taste it from here.
She doesn’t invite either one of us to sit. Nicholas looms in the corner like a surly child, and rather than wait for an invitation, I snake a chair out from beneath the table.
“It was a troll, pretty monster,” I reply. “You’re right.”
“And why did it get so cold?” She dumps the pot in the back of the coffee maker and spills half on the counter.
“The troll is a servant of Kari.”
She blinks. “Kali? The goddess of time and death?”
“Wrong pantheon,” Nicholas corrects.
“And why were you stalking me?” she snaps.
Nicholas scoffs and meets my eyes a second time. We tried lying to her before.
Different lives. Different endings. Never worked.
It doesn’t slow the curse. Lies buried her just as fast.
“Because I can’t stop myself from watching you.”
The coffee maker lets out a plaintive shriek prior to the first gurgle of black gold fills the bottom of the container.
“You’re asking the incorrect questions.” Nicholas says it like a threat.
Helpful as always.
Helene holds his black look for the longest time and grabs the pot, yanking it free before it finishes percolating. Three mugs clank together, and she lines them up in a row, soldiers slapped with disorderly conduct.
More liquid splashes on the already ruined counter. She steps aside and gestures like the host of a game show. “Here. I have no idea how you like them.”
I’m the first to move.
“Thank you.” The first sip stings my insides.
The stains decorating the inside of the mug are intricate, a psychologist’s ink blot dreams. But who gives a shit? She’s here. It’s her.
Nicholas wraps both hands around the cup like he needs the burn. Like pain helps. He drinks his coffee black and scalding, probably because he deserves it.
“Will Forest be okay?” Her voice shrinks.
Helene grabs one of the quilted throws she keeps in an old basket near the couch, draping it over her shoulders. And when she snags a free seat from the table, when she sags like her knees have stopped working to hold her up, her mouth twists in thought.
It’s a slow bleed from reality into fantasy. From denial to acceptance.
We’re strangers in her life and she can’t make sense of our sudden appearance. There are no tricks or costumes to make this look like the drama we’re introducing her too.
Maybe magic and costumes will speed this along.
“He’ll be fine.” This question is the easiest to answer. “Give or take a few hours. The force of his memories returning isn’t easy. It always happens this way.”
“Never this fast,” Nicholas growls.
Helene’s eyes crawl to mine. She hooks her fingers through the large loops of the crocheted blanket and her expression scratches my own memory. I study her, the familiar lines of her facial features, an impression of the fallen Valkyrie in the image of a modern woman.
“I don’t know what to make of this. A caffeine coma isn’t a great idea but it’s the only thing I can think of right now,” she says skeptically, her voice faint. “Magic. Isn’t it? Why no one came to help with the troll.”
She shifts again, and the light hits the spray of freckles across her cheekbones.
“At least no one was hurt,” she adds.
Nicholas is slower to move. He pries himself away from the wall and gingerly examines the coffee.
“You clearly saw. I didn’t poison it.” Helene takes a long sip to prove her point and disguises her wince when she burns her mouth. “It’s fine.”
It’s swill, but I’m not about to tell her differently.
“He’s an asshole. You’ll get used to it,” I tell her.
Translation: he’s trying very hard not to eat you.
“Chipper prick,” he grumbles, firming up his posture.
“It’s one of my many gifts.”
Helene stares into the depths of her mug, clutching its familiar girth. The coffeemaker gurgles out the rest of its brew but the half inch she’d left at the bottom has already scalded, ruining the batch.
She shakes her head and scrunches her nose. “Can we please move past the insults and on to the hallucinating and landing myself in a fucking psych ward? Did the man in my bedroom turn into a bird?” she asks. “Or did he drug me?”
I want to pull her into my lap and keep her there until the world stops trying to kill her.
So naturally, I nudge her knee instead.