Chapter Twenty-Seven
I hate myself for being one of those clichéd people who cries on the tram, but as soon as I sit down, I weep, turning my face toward the glass and trying not to sniffle too much.
The worst thing is how guilty I feel about betraying Elizabeth.
It was all for nothing. It wasn’t moving on, it was just being played, being preyed upon because I’m a shifter.
I wonder bitterly how many times in one life I can make the wrong choices about people, first Carl and now Bastian.
Yet despite everything, I can’t think of them both in the same sentence.
I remember Bastian saying, I think you’re brilliant, Lando, and I feel a rough, clenching sensation in my chest. For a second, I can’t get in enough air, panting and huffing.
If this is what actual heartbreak feels like, it’s more physical and brutal than I’ve been led to believe by rom-coms. It has much more in common with grief, the wearying woundedness of it that seeped into my bones after Elizabeth’s death.
All the rest of the way home, I think about the bathroom.
When I put my key in the door at Beryl’s, I find her standing on the other side of the door, holding Mr. Pebbles like a baby. He hisses at me and I hastily wipe my eyes.
“There’s a friend of yours from college here to see you, pet,” Beryl says, gesturing to my bedroom. “I signed them in and let them sit on your bed. Also, I changed your sheets. Mr. Pebbles did a piddle on your pillowcase.”
“A friend?” My heart races. I wonder if Bastian has jumped into his Mini and scurried round to Chorlton to beat me home off the tram, but when I open the door, it’s Kira Tavi sitting on my bed.
My disappointment is like ash on my tongue.
She is the last person I want to see. She might have had good intentions, but right now, all I can think about is everything she’s taken from me.
Kira seems to know it, because she holds up her hands placatingly.
“I’m not here to fight again. I just want to show you something.” She reaches into the pocket of her duffle coat.
“No, get out.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” she says, her voice quiet. She’s holding something in her hands, a photograph, with the picture turned away from me. “Please, just look. Then I’ll go, I promise.”
I stare at it. I wonder what terrible picture she has to show me. Maybe it’s Bastian and Cameron together, proof that they were friends. If that’s the case, it can’t possibly hurt more, and she’ll be gone soon, so I nod wearily.
She hands it to me. It’s a black-and-white photo of two women, both standing next to an ambulance, wearing green uniforms and tin helmets.
They have their arms around one another in a friendly way.
One I recognize from my dream with a painful pang.
The same dark skin, the same infectious smile.
The woman my shifter loved. The woman who died in the cathedral bombing.
“How did you—”
Then I catch sight of the ring on the woman’s finger, the ring I saw in my dream/vision but didn’t truly notice until now. It’s the same ring, that distinctive silver setting, as the ring on Kira’s finger.
“That’s my great-aunt Bisan, Bisan Tavi.” Kira presses her finger against her face. “My ring used to be hers.”
B for Bisan.
“Bisan,” I whisper. I move a trembling finger over to the face of the person standing beside her, holding her so fondly with a wide smile and knowing eyes. Could it possibly be?
I glance uncomfortably up at Kira, running through every time this term that she has messaged me wanting to “chat” and I’ve ignored her.
Answers about my visions were literally walking around college and I was so scared of what Kira might tell me about Elizabeth that I didn’t even consider listening to her.
I am once again caught up in a well of self-recrimination against my past shortsightedness—Lando, you absolute twat—until I remember that I listened to Kira today and look what it’s done to me.
My suspicion and anger rise back up like a volcano.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because of them.” Kira points at the face of Bisan’s companion with a determined expression.
“My great-aunt Bisan was in a relationship with them at a time when it was taboo in our world, and even in the human world. Aunt Bisan chose them, even though they were white and they presented female. Even though she was a witch and they were a shapeshifter.”
I can’t speak. I stare into their eyes, a different type of emotion pushing through the sadness of my fight with Bastian. A gentle recognition, a warming in my heart that seems to say, I know you. Hello again.
“I told you I’m not against shapeshifter and witch relationships,” Kira goes on. “I didn’t have it out for you and Elizabeth and I don’t have it out for you and Bastian. Telling you Aunt Bisan was in love with a shapeshifter was the only thing I could think of to prove it to you.”
I nod soundlessly, but I can’t take my eyes off the photo of the shapeshifter, like they’re an old friend I’ve been missing. It’s staggering, this beautiful truth that they were real. That they lived.
“What happened to them?” I ask, trying to hide my urgency.
“My aunt died in the Second World War, during a bombing,” she says quietly. “Her shapeshifter disappeared after that.”
I look down at the photo of my shifter and think, It’s really you.
In their female form, they have brown curly hair, waved in that forties fashion.
They have a long face, large eyes, and a pointed chin.
Their eyebrows are bushy and strong, and give their face such an arresting look.
I think I can see all the stories of their life in their eyes: the protests, the wars, the loss of their parents, and the miracle of Bisan’s love.
“Did they have a name?” I press, all attempts at casual speedily unraveling. “Or even a last name?”
“Why are you asking?” Kira takes the photo back protectively, and I’m deeply disappointed. I want to hear their name so much, it feels like something essential and hopeful has been snatched away again. “Why do they matter to you? Do you know them?”
I open my mouth. No, I think. But also, yes, better than anyone.
I stare into Kira’s quizzical and slightly expectant face and realize, suddenly, I have no reason to keep this secret anymore.
It’s not like she can stop me trying the spell if I want to, and if she wants to get me in trouble for stealing a book, so be it.
What do I care? I’m already known as a murderer, why not add thief to the moniker?
I reach under my bed and pull out The Witchlore of Bodies.
“Because I read their diary,” I say, opening it to the first page of the journal. Kira stares at it like it’s a live snake. She nervously glances at the closed door.
“This was part of the John Rylands exhibition, did you…?”
“Nick it? Yeah.”
“You did?” Kira’s dark eyes are boggling. “You stole it?”
“So? You stole a personal file,” I say quickly. “Besides, we’re going to give it back. They don’t know it’s even gone.”
“But there was nothing in the exhibition notes about it having a diary in the back!”
“Shifter blood lock.” I shrug. “Opened the diary and revealed a … spell.”
I’m hesitant to admit we were looking for the resurrection spell, mainly because I don’t want Kira to know all her suspicions about Bastian were correct.
“And your blood unlocked the spell and the diary,” she murmurs, tentatively touching her finger to the page and then turning pages back until it’s open on the revealed portion of the resurrection spell.
I’m surprised how sad it makes me to look at it now, and I glance down at my bedspread, eyes stinging.
“So this is the resurrection spell he tried to use with his other shifter? He was going to use you like he used her?”
That’s an unnecessary kick in the face and I take in a sharp breath.
“Happy you’re right about him?” I sneer. “Do you want a gold medal?”
“No, I want to know why you were doing it,” she says. Her eyes are intensely focused on me. I wonder how much of my motivations she has already guessed. I’m too emotionally exhausted to lie.
“He told me we were going to do it for Elizabeth; we have all the ingredients.” I swallow hard, thinking about Bastian pushing me out of the way of the boggart and pulling me out of the water. Everything he did, every little kindness, was a lie. “But now we’re not doing anything together.”
Kira looks nervous. “Did you break up?”
“We weren’t together,” I say, even though I felt like we could have been. What would it have felt like to call Bastian my boyfriend? I shake my head bitterly. “No thanks to you.”
“I’m really sorry it hurt you.” Kira looks down at the book. “But he wasn’t being honest with you, and … you did need to know.”
I close my eyes to control my temper. She’s right, of course, but I wonder if there is anyone else in the world I would hate to hear these words from more.
Maybe Carl Lord. Or my parents. But, oddly, Kira seems to care about me more than my parents ever did.
That gives me a little bit of needed perspective and I take a slow breath.
Why does it matter if she was the one to tell me?
I snap at myself. It doesn’t stop the fact that he lied to me and used me.
“None of it matters now.” I sigh. “I don’t know if it will even work without him.”