43. Principles of Banking II
Once again, I waited for the shift. Something would change, either in me or in the universe.
Nothing did.
There were very few boundaries left between Ciarán and me, and giving in to each other and our affections felt more like locking into place than undergoing a great change.
I didn’t feel different. I felt secure.
Ciarán would stay on this side of the Rift with me. I’d felt the decision solidify within his mind. Being apart was simply not an option at this point. Maybe it was co-dependency, but I couldn’t imagine a life without him after all we’d been through, and nor could he.
So with the knowledge that we would not allow the Rift to separate us and a proper mattress beneath me after so many long weeks, I slept soundly and dreamlessly in his embrace on the narrow twin bed.
No matter what came next, in this moment, I was safe in Ciarán’s arms, and he was safe in mine. Together. Whole.
We woke up in the late afternoon to do laundry, check in with the others, eat dinner, and poke at the giant rock, but I returned to the apartment above the bagel shop with Ciarán as night fell since there weren’t enough beds for all of us in Siobhan’s living quarters above the tavern.
I fell asleep in Ciarán’s bed, still exhausted from our travels, but Ciarán wandered the apartment, looking over his family’s things while our laundry rattled in the dryer.
I felt as if I’d just closed my eyes when he leaned over me to shake me awake.
“Wren, your father is back.”
I startled upright, half-expecting to see Maxwell Brenton standing in the room, but Ciarán, in his freshly laundered tunic, nodded at the window.
The clock on Riley’s bedside table read 4:37 AM, and I frowned at the early hour as I staggered to the window.
Through the onslaught of rain and gloom of night, I made out the shape of a research van. A tall man stood in the halo cast by an iron-wrought streetlamp outside Gams’s shop, inspecting the rock.
That asshole couldn’t resist a mysterious boulder after all.
“Stay here,” I growled.
“Wren—”
“It’s fine. I’ll take care of it.” It was still dumping rain, so I threw my wool cloak on over a Keel Watch Harbor crewneck I’d found in Liam’s closet as I whisked through the apartment and down the stairs.
Ciarán followed me to the sidewalk but waited under the eave of the bagel shop entryway as I marched down the stormy street to meet my father.
“Thought twice about the rock then?” I shouted when I got closer. “Since I know it’s not me you’re here for.”
Maxwell turned to face me slowly. The way he rubbed his hands together reminded me of a fly.
“I never got my money. Gas isn’t cheap, and if you’re wanting to go into geophysics, you should already know it doesn’t exactly pay well.”
“Gas isn’t cheap, but you drove for hours and then turned around and came back? To pay for more gas?” I screwed my face up at him. “I already knew you were a crap scientist, but I didn’t think you were that dumb.”
“Excuse me?” Maxwell said the words through a disbelieving laugh. “My mountain of accolades and research says otherwise.”
“Crap. Scientist.” I repeated the words at him, and the corner of his condescending smile twitched. “I actually thought for a second you came back for the rock, but then I remembered. You’ve never been curious.”
“I’m plenty curious. A good scientist always is. Now, my money—”
“But you aren’t curious. You knew I existed. A daughter. Made out of you. And for eighteen years, you didn’t wonder at all about me?” I couldn’t help the rising anger. It figured that the only time in my life he’d willingly made himself available was when I had bigger issues to deal with.
Maxwell rolled his eyes and turned back to the rock.
“This again?” he drawled. “I told you before. I don’t want any part of it.”
Those words he’d said at Von Leer came back once again.
He didn’t ask for this.
He didn’t ask for me.
A few weeks ago, the words had devastated me. Now, however, I could only think how small he seemed.
“If you don’t want any part of it, why’d you come back?”
“I already told you. I want my money.”
“And I don’t believe you. You could’ve sent an email.”
“Emails are easy to ignore,” Maxwell chided. “I don’t trust your mother to not give me what’s owed.”
I laughed at the audacity. If I didn’t, I might’ve hit him instead. “If anything, you owe her for raising your daughter for you.”
“I didn’t ask her to do that.”
“But thank God she did. Thank God you estranged yourself from me before I was born so I didn’t end up anything like you.”
“And yet you’re trying to get into my alma mater to study geophysics in my footsteps in a building with a study room named after me. You’re more like me than you’d like.”
I was more like him than I’d like. Not only was everything he’d said true, but I looked like him too. Some days I hated myself for it. Today, however, I didn’t have the time to.
“Right,” I snarled, “because who would want to be anything like a crap father and a shit scientist?”
He paled in the light of the street lamp. “I have international prestige in my field that most academics can only dream about—”
“You told me paleomagnetists were the rockstars of geophysicists. Do you know what that actually makes you? A loser. Because only losers unironically call themselves the rockstars of anything. You don’t care about answers to questions. You don’t care about science. You care about validation.”
“This ‘loser’ was the greatest thing to ever happen to your mother,” Maxwell scoffed.
“And then she threw it away for you, a child she hadn’t even met yet, and a career selling smut novels to the lowest denominators.
And still living at her mother’s it appears since this is where you had me bring you, though I don’t see either of them here.
So go ahead and call me a loser for not being around, but remember that Eliza is the bitch that abandoned you eighteen years on. ”
Something snapped inside me, striking like a matchstick. I struck out at my father with a fist swathed in flames of blue.
He stumbled aside, and my knuckles slammed into the rock.
I thought the resounding crack had to have been the bones in my hand splintering against the stone. It certainly felt like it, and I cried out in frustrated pain.
I readied my other fist to strike at Maxwell a second time, but Ciarán grabbed me from behind.
“The ground, Wren!” he warned, and I noticed the quaking pavement for the first time.
That magnetic pressure from the volcanoes of Skalterra was hitting its limit, and I could feel the fissures that ran along the bond.
Pressure was releasing too fast.
“There she is. The girl who attacked her admissions officer,” Maxwell snarled. “I knew you were a violent thing.”
“You haven’t seen violent,” I warned.
“Wren.” Ciarán’s murmur was sharp, and I turned to look at what had stolen his attention.
The stone in Gams’s doorway was dissolving, flaking away into something that reminded me of the ash Nightmares left behind.
It evaporated in a wave, billowing inwards and I stepped into the shop to chase its receding outline.
While the stone had destroyed the windows and door, the shelves of Gams’s shop remained intact, as if they’d all been frozen within rather than displaced by the rock.
A shelf of blue painted chickens appeared opposite the register, and my heart ached as Gams’s shop was revealed aisle-by-aisle. When the rock had completely disappeared, the storm winds howled in from the busted back windows.
Ciarán steadied me in the gale, and I shouted over the wind.
“Mom?”
The wind howled back, and frustration started to mount when a voice, too rough, too cruel, and too masculine to be my mother’s, brought my heart into my mouth.
“If you want to see your mother alive again, come down here with your hands over your head!”
My chest turned cold.
“Who was that?” Maxwell hissed from the doorway, but he was the least of my concerns now.
I raced for the door that led to the basement to Gams’s chicken painting workshop.
The door that led to the Rift.
“Wren, be careful!” Ciarán’s warning was wasted on me.
There was a man threatening my mom.
“Mom!” I skirted through the basement door, nearly pitching myself down the steep steps that led to Gams’s workshop. Ciarán steadied me in the doorway, but I shook him off and led the way down the stairs.
“I want your hands up when you come down!” the man’s voice called from around the corner. “You come down here with Skal weapons, and I shoot, got it?”
My heart constricted, and the pounding of the mountains screamed in my head like a loose pressure valve hissing steam.
I took the last few wooden steps of the staircase slowly and came around the corner with my hands up by my head.
Breath escaped me, all of it leaving my lungs as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
I’d seen horror after horror in Skalterra, yet none of them compared to the barrel of a pistol pressed against my mother’s temple. Her brow was streaked with sweat and her cheeks flushed. Her blonde hair fell from its braid, and her pupils dilated with fear.
Stanley’s gun shook in his hand where he held it up to Mom.
He was the ghost of his Nightmare form here in Keldori.
Thinning hair, shorter than me, ill-defined musculature, and a curve to his neck that suggested years of poor posture at his bank job—he was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen because there was nothing scarier than an insecure man with too much power at his fingertips.
It was too violent of an image, my mom at gunpoint, for the modest workshop. Gams’s kiln sat in the corner. Her paints were still out where she’d left them. Her apron atop the workbench made it look as if she’d just stepped out.
“You made it through Lyria’s doorway,” Mom breathed. The tension she’d been holding her shoulders relaxed. “Wren, you made it. Oh, I’m absolutely furious with you, but you made it.”
“Put the gun down, Stanley,” I said.
“It’s Titus.” Stanley jammed the gun against Mom’s head. “And you can tell your precious Grimguard to come out. I know he’s still on the stairs.”