8. Lucina #2
“Selene!” Gemma smacks her tattooed arm. “Stop that.”
The Lakelet hardly looks remorseful. “She’s practically screaming her thoughts at me, G. I’m just answering the questions she’s too scared to ask out loud.”
Gemma rolls her eyes, downing more of her moonshine.
“Your grandmother told me you were from the commoner lands,” Kimber says. It pulls my attention so fast, I nearly snap my neck to look at her.
“My… grandmother?” Maybe she was talking about Nana? Ivy’s grandmother was the only one I ever had. Catherine’s mom was just as stuck up as she was, and Merrill’s mother died long before I was born.
“Mhm,” she nods cheerfully. “My coven are Seers. The Elders are far more skilled, but all of us can see through the veil. The spirit world is like a layer on top of ours, and only Diviners can see through it.”
Kimber takes a small sip from her jar, and Selene snickers at how terrified I must look right now.
“Kimber,” I say slowly, “what grandmother?”
Her green eyes crinkle, then she points just above my right shoulder, and my stomach drops. “She won’t show herself fully to me, but her spirit is tied to yours. She follows you.” Kimber pauses, listens, then she says plainly, “She wishes she could have met you.”
My heart falls, slipping from its place in my chest and smashing into the dirt at my feet.
The hair on the back of my neck prickles, and chills rake my skin. I can’t speak, and when Kimber notes my sudden silence, she winces. “I’m sorry, did I freak you out? I didn’t mean to…”
“That’s okay,” I manage to say, but not without my words sounding strangled. “W-what’s her name? My… grandmother.” It sounds foreign in my mouth.
Kimber shakes her head, glittering strands of her thick hair shifting with the movement.
“She won’t tell me that, she won’t even show me her face.
Your grandmother has bound herself to you as a Velkan spirit; she has more authority over her presence than other ghosts.
I can only see what she wants to show me and nothing more. ”
I chug a good bit of my moonshine. “What do you mean she’s a Velkan spirit?”
Selene and Gemma groan, but Kimber’s eyes light up, as if I’d just brought up her favorite subject.
“There are four different kinds of spirits,” she starts.
“Those chosen for eternity on Aura’s Elysian fields, wicked souls that are forced to endure the wrath of Pyra and her Hound, lingering ghosts that choose to haunt Vita forever, plagued with unfinished business, and Velkan spirits.
They are the rarest.” Kimber’s green eyes are bright and brilliant.
“Velkan is an ancient term Solians have used since our creation. It translates roughly to Warden. These souls have been offered eternity in the afterlife, but they decline it. Instead, they bind themselves to a living person, perhaps a loved one or a family member. They are bound forever to their living host and sworn to protect them until the very end. But when their host dies,” she snaps her fingers, and I flinch, “the spirit of the Velkan winks out of existence. It’s a great honor to have one at all; most people don’t. ”
Gods, my brain is fuzzy. And overwhelmed. So, overwhelmed. “Okay…so, my grandmother—”
“Dedicated her soul to you,” the Diviner replies simply.
My chest is warm from the moonshine… and another feeling that I’d felt a few times in my life, but never like this.
Catherine was sparse with it, Merrill didn’t even know the word, and the love I thought I had with Topher was hardly authentic. Jude and I shared a love that was stained with what we’d endured as kids, and due to her hatred of the word, Ivy never uses it.
But this love…to blindly bind herself to me…that runs deeper. I don’t even know her, and she’s sacrificed eternity for me.
“I—” My stammer dies off when I spot the Captain, just outside of the gathering crowd, speaking with an older man and woman.
I hesitate for a split-second, unsure of what I’ll even say, but then I’m moving before I can talk myself out of it.
“I-I’ll be right back,” I say to Kimber, and Gemma tracks my gaze when I stand from the bench.
“Good luck,” the Mender offers as I pass, and nerves gather in my gut.
My balance is slightly thrown, but I manage to find my footing as I weave through the crowd. I have no idea what I’m going to say when I make it over there. Gemma told me I should just be honest. She said to be candid and sincere, but what if he says no? What if he won’t do it?
I make it through the crowd, stepping into his line of sight. The Captain’s idea of ‘dressing up’ includes his detailed silver weapon-clad vest, a thin black undershirt, and black jeans. Better than him being covered in blood, I suppose.
When he sees me approach, he says something to the older couple, and they bow low before walking off. He straightens himself, folding his arms across his chest. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look more…” his steady voice trails off, silver eyes sliding over my skin.
“Alive?” I supply for him, static pricking the air.
The last time he saw me, I was no more than a walking corpse in desperate need of food, rest, and time to sit with my thoughts.
“Yes,” the Captain admits, blinking himself out of some thought. “Alive.”
“Well, I suppose I have you and Gemma to thank for that.” I force down a deep breath, and he clocks it, his stare narrowing suspiciously.
“You didn’t come over here to thank me.”
Gemma’s warning to be honest rings through my head. “No, I didn’t.”
If it wasn’t for my liquid courage, I’d have crumbled underneath his stare. His irises are like heavy storm clouds, seconds from releasing enough rain to drown an entire city. But I have too much on the line to crumble, and I’m not really in the mood to drown again.
So, I straighten my shoulders and lift my chin. “I need your help with something.”
“Go on, then,” he says with a wave of his scar-flecked hand. “Let’s hear it.”
I take a deep breath and let the warmth from the moonshine settle in my chest. “I have people in…” I inhale sharply.
“Family, I have family in Draycott that I care deeply about. I can’t go back, but I don’t want them to grieve someone who isn’t dead.
So, I-uh…” I pull the note out of my bra as gracefully as I can, and his brows shoot up.
“I wrote them this. You can read it if you want, but it says nothing of Pirn or the Sol; they won’t know anything about this place, just that I’m okay.
I need them to know I’m okay.” Whether he’s pieced together what I’m about to ask, he doesn’t let on.
“I was hoping you’d take it to them for me. I can tell you where to drop it—”
Callan snorts. “No. Absolutely not.”
He might as well have punched me in the stomach. “But why not, I—"
“I won’t jeopardize the secrecy of Pirn,” the Captain snaps, his voice stone-cut and cold. “I’m not a mailman, Lucina.”
“Just read it,” I beg, the edges of my voice soaked in irritation. I shove the paper into his chest. “You wouldn’t be jeopardizing anything, Callan, please—”
He snatches it out of my hands and scans the scribbled words on the page thoroughly. When his eyes finally meet mine, they’re curious. Suspicious still, but there’s enough leeway there to suggest I haven’t fully lost this chance yet.
“I’ll do anything,” I say, and I mean it with everything I have.
That’s as honest as it gets.
A few beats of silence pass, him watching me as if he has a million questions but none that feel right to ask, and I watch him like a deer staring straight into the barrel of a hunter’s gun. A stupid deer.
“I offered to take you back,” Callan says finally, his gaze falling to the pendant hanging down my chest. “You love these people, right?” He holds up my letter, flashing the pieces of my heart I’d left plastered to the parchment.
“Enough that you wrote this, marched over here, and had the nerve to ask me to break rules for you when we hardly know each other.”
I don’t reply.
“When I found you,” he starts again, “I offered to take you to the commoner lands, but you didn’t want to go back.” He eyes the way my mouth clamps shut, then he says, “I want to know why.”
I blink away the familiar burn of impending tears. “If I tell you, will you take my letter?”
He senses it then, the uneasiness in my tone, the wound he’d unintentionally prodded by asking what he thought was just a simple question. Callan watches me for a moment. “It depends on your answer.”
I rub a hand over my face, then finish off my moonshine.
Honest. I can do that. For Ivy and Jude.
I exhale a heavy breath, then roll my shoulders back and meet his eyes.
“I didn’t want to go back because the man I grew up with was a violent drunk, his wife was a delusional enabler, and I was their burden.
” My confession chases my buzz away, and the Captain falls still.
“It was some cruel twist of fate that I ended up on their doorstep, but I’ve been trying to get out ever since.
I never belonged in that town. I knew it, and everyone else knew it too.
” The sound of the crowd behind us fades, and his silver-eyed stare darkens.
I nod to the letter he still holds. “Ivy and Jude have dreams, aspirations, and I had nothing. Then I woke up on that beach with a second chance. I think I’d be a fool to go back. ”
There it is—the truth. Raw, vulnerable, and bare. Laid in a messy pile before him.
Silence falls between us, and again, I’m just a stupid deer, and all he has to do is pull the trigger.
The Captain folds the parchment. Then he tucks the letter into his pocket. “I agree,” he says finally. “You’d be a fool to go back.”
“So, you’ll do it?” My heart beats with hope, dangerous hope, because if he doesn’t—
He nods once, and I nearly melt to the ground. “But Lucina…” My gaze snaps up to his. “Don’t tell anyone I did this for you.” Oops. “I’d hate to have to send you back to where you came from.”
And just like that, any evidence of a pleasant version of the Captain vanishes.