Chapter Twenty-Four
I’d forgotten this. I’d forgotten how when you first kiss someone, time stretches and bends around the taste of them.
I’d forgotten how having someone touch me is a solace, calming the parts of me that ache so deep down they can’t be soothed by anything else.
It’s blinding, the way it runs through me and wipes out all thought in blissful relief.
I thought I’d feel weird or sad doing this with someone after Elizabeth, but I don’t. All I feel is wanted and safe.
“I have a confession to make,” Bastian says.
“Oh?” I raise my eyebrows suggestively and he tuts, poking my nose.
“I’ve wanted to be here for a really long time,” he says slowly. “With you.”
I look up at his beautiful face, the disheveled hair, the hazel eyes that are full of gentleness, the many necklaces and chains hanging over his bare chest. I smile and reach up, playing with one of his necklaces, a row of shark teeth on a leather cord.
“It was sort of a date, wasn’t it?” I say. “The bar?”
“I was nervous enough for it to be,” he says ruefully. “But I don’t think it was the right time for you. I felt so stupid afterward.”
“You are lots of things, but you are never stupid.” I tug on his necklace, pulling him down to meet my lips, oily from the biscuits, his mouth tasting so sweet.
This is the wonder of it, the intimacy that comes once the threshold has been crossed.
Before, every time he touched me I noticed it; now, I’m so full of his touch and his skin and his body against mine that I don’t even notice the closeness.
I can relax into it entirely, knowing that any casual kiss or stroke won’t be spurned or pushed away.
I’d forgotten this, too, the happiness being with someone brings, the change from friends to something more.
“So your shifter was an ambulance driver in the Second World War?” Bastian asks, twisting his fingers into my curls as I pull the Oreo apart and lick out the middle. Above me, Bastian makes small noises of disgust and I smirk with the predictability of it.
“They’re not my shifter, but, yeah, they were.
Their father died during the First World War and he was angry that they had taken a male form and fought in the war, so they didn’t want to do it again.
They took a female form when the Second World War started and then …
well, they fell in love with a witch who was also an ambulance driver. ”
“A shifter and a witch, who’d have thought it?” Bastian says, and I pinch him softly.
“I wonder what she was called, their lover.” I stroke the page with the old ink on it, my fingers brushing over the letter “B.” Bella? Becky?
“They must have kept a young form, to stay with them.”
“Yeah, but they felt really seen by her.” I smile fondly. “They weren’t afraid.”
“Which is kind of amazing considering they were basically lesbians in 1940.” Bastian shakes his head. “That’s a rough time to be gay.”
“Yeah.” I don’t add that I think, sadly, the lover might have died in the bombing of the cathedral.
How would I justify it, since I haven’t read it yet, only seen it in my vision?
I feel a shiver of discomfort at all the things I can’t explain to myself.
“But sometimes you can’t help yourself, can you? ”
“You’re right.” Bastian’s voice is distant as he strokes my thigh. “Sometimes you can’t help yourself.”
We fall asleep like that, wrapped around each other.
Elizabeth and I never got to do this and I realize that it’s the nicest thing in the world, falling asleep hearing someone’s heartbeat in your ear, the sound of their breath like the ocean.
Bastian smells like antiseptic and blood but underneath, that unique scent that each person has.
His is sweet and musky and utterly delicious.
It’s the easiest I’ve fallen asleep since Elizabeth died. Then I dream.
I’m standing in front of the mound of fresh earth that’s marked with a simple cross, too early for a headstone. With trembling hands, I lay a bunch of carnations on the dirt, their petals white against the dark mud, cold with the early-January frost. I shiver and feel tears slip down my cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I couldn’t get to you, I tried so hard but … I couldn’t save you.”
I sniff and wipe my cheeks with chilled hands. I remember the people I have lost, my father, my mother, the years of my life that now seem agonizingly stretched.
“I’ve lived so long and never loved anyone the way I love you,” I murmur. “I miss you so much. Don’t leave me.”
I drop to my knees and press my hands into the cold earth, my tears falling on it like rain, instantly lost. I wish I could dig down into the ground and lie there with her. I do not know how to live without her.
“Lando.” Someone is rubbing my back, holding me gently, kissing my shoulders. I’m sobbing into the sofa with all the pain of this loss but it’s not just the shifter’s loss, it’s mine, too. Elizabeth is dead. I can smell salt and eucalyptus. Bastian.
“She died, the witch died,” I gasp, turning around and pressing my face into his chest. It’s so warm and the scarred skin has a stretched, smooth texture in some places and bumpy in others.
I brush my lips against it, comforted. “I saw her grave, the shifter’s lover, the one who died in the Second World War—”
“You saw what?” Bastian asks.
I don’t answer. I sniff and wince and wrap my arms carefully around his torso, wanting to squeeze him tightly but aware that he’s wounded.
Bastian strokes my back and kisses my hair.
It’s so comforting it makes me cry more.
Aside from Elizabeth, no one has ever touched me like this.
I don’t have any memories of my mother or father doing it when I was little and had nightmares.
Suddenly, I’m not just crying for everything now, I’m crying for the child I once was, lonely and without comfort.
There’s one thought, repeating in my mind: None of it has been fair.
I cry until I’m just hiccupping quietly, my cheeks and nose wet against Bastian’s skin, and he kindly doesn’t push me away. If anything, he pulls me closer.
“Are you ready to tell me what you’ve not told me?” Bastian whispers into my hair. The muscles in my back tighten with nervousness, but of course he’s worked it out.
“Yes.” I sniff.
“They’re not normal shifts, are they? Or normal nightmares?”
“No, they’re…” I take a great, shuddering sigh and shiver against the cold. “I don’t know what they are.”
“Tell me.” Bastian pulls a heavy, slightly itchy wool blanket over us. Its dark, ruddy colors make me think of big Canadian trees and shiny glaciers, and I feel cozy and safe enough to talk.
“Since I started reading the grimoire, I’ve been having these …
visions,” I say hesitantly. “It’s like I remember things that happened to the shifter in the diary.
Things they don’t mention but they all fit together.
Every time I’ve touched an ingredient for the spell I see their life, I feel it’s mine.
But how could I be getting their memories?
What does it even have to do with the spell?
We don’t even know if the same person who wrote the diary in the grimoire wrote the spell. … This is all so weird.”
“It is weird,” Bastian says. “But it’s a weird spell.
There’s a reason there are no resurrection spells anymore.
It’s a type of transformative power we only see in history; it’s volatile.
But shifters, you have that power naturally.
” He kisses my forehead reverently. “I’m not surprised it’s impacting you. ”
I swallow hard. It has been impacting me, not just the strangeness of it or the way the grimoire has been gradually sliding into my consciousness over time, but the heaviness of carrying thoughts and memories that are not truly mine.
“It is a lot,” I confess in a whisper, my eyes stinging.
“I know.” He sighs. “I wish I could tell you why it’s happening and why you keep shifting, but if I had to guess … I’d say it’s because it’s a spell that needs a shifter. So the magic is starting to connect to you. In some ways it’s positive, I think it means it’s more likely to work, but…”
“But it means I might have more shifts ahead of me,” I finish for him. More visions, too. Bastian nods.
“If I knew how to stop it, I would.” He runs a finger down my nose. “I don’t want you to be in danger.”
“I don’t want you to be in danger, either.
” I press my hand against the edge of his bandage.
He nearly died tonight. I remember how it felt to hold him in the cathedral, the helplessness overwhelming me, staring down at the inevitability of losing another person.
The idea of feeling his last breath leave his body, just like I felt it leave Elizabeth’s, is unbearable.
There are so many things I don’t know right now, but I do know I cannot ever do that again.
“Maybe … we could just stop,” I whisper, body tense with anticipation.
I know what I’m suggesting. If we stop, I won’t ever see Elizabeth again.
When I think that, I hear Counselor Cooper’s voice in my head: I would encourage you, Lando, not to be scared of it, of …
moving on. Bastian’s hand, which has been stroking my hair, pauses.
“Is that what you want?”
I don’t know how to answer that. Of course I want Elizabeth not to be dead, but do I want her back if she is different?
Do I want her back if it means I can’t have Bastian, just like this, warm and soft and holding me so closely?
Most important, do I want her back if I have to risk Bastian’s life again to achieve it?
“What’s left for the spell?” I ask, dodging answering.