57 #2
Her voice breaks off, but she keeps stroking Aris, more gently than I’ve ever seen her be with any other creature.
Then she lies on her back, her white hair splaying around her as she looks up at the ceiling, her amber eyes snaring on my paintings.
“But the thing I miss like a part of my heart is my wyvern, Melody. She was my best friend. My everything. I grew up with her. I rode through every storm with her, literally. And weathered them. And not to be able to ever see her again…never fly on her again…it’s not something I have yet figured out how to live with.
She was a part of me, a huge part of who I was and am, and just forgetting her and moving on…
I will never move on. I’ll never forget her. ”
She frowns and pushes herself upright, blinking furiously as tears well.
“Hells, I was the Crimson Death.” She grabs a fistful of her long white hair and stares at it like it might betray her again if she looks away.
“And now I don’t even have my damn fucking hair color anymore,” she chokes out, laughing weakly through the sting of it.
“Well for that—” I bend and produce one of the tiny flacons I made that morning at the temple out of a drawer. “We could change that.” I hold it up.
“No. Not red,” she says, shaking her head.
“I wasn’t thinking red.” I grab the sack with all the flacons I made, along with the glittery powder I bought on the market, and step up to her.
“Do you trust me, Blair?” I ask, snorting a silent laugh at the fact that Caryan and Riven have both asked me the same question over the course of the last two weeks. What is it—trust-issue month?
“I guess, in a weird way I do. If you mean by trust that I don’t think you’re gonna slit my throat in my sleep,” she jokes. But suddenly, she sits up very straight when I reach for her hair and start to separate it into strands.
“Okay. Then close your eyes and let’s try something.”
She eyes me, then the sack, clearly uneasy.
I swat her arm. “Hey, come on! I’m not putting a spell on you or anything.”
“Right. If you don’t go to warding and spell-weaving, I guess you probably can’t anyway.”
I roll my eyes, but she closes hers. The campus conjures brushes and bowls unasked, and I mumble a quiet thank you to it before I start to open up all the tiny flacons.
I made the colors in pastel tones, and now I add glitter into them too.
I’m not sure whether the glitter will wear off fast, but I think it might look gorgeous, even if only for a day or two.
As for fae coloring, my one strand of hair is still lilac—hopefully proof that the colors I created won’t fade.
Ryder now has a bleached section where his hair used to be blue, but he told me he wanted it that way.
He said he went to a fae stylist in town to unravel the spell and shift the color to blond; otherwise, the magic would probably have clung to him for a long time.
I start working the paste into the strands, painting them in the pearlescent hues of the rainbow until I’m pretty confident I’ve reproduced hues that match the scales of Blair’s wyvern. The paste, unlike human hair dye, just sinks into the hair and then disappears. I’m done in twenty minutes.
“Okay. Now open your eyes and look,” I say when I’m happy with the result. I left most of Blair’s hair white, just dying strands here and there, so it looks like an actual rainbow glinting in her hair.
She opens her eyes, looks back at me over her shoulder, then stalks to the mirror and covers her mouth with both hands, amber eyes wide with shock.
She stands like that for so long, I grow uneasy. “If you don’t like it, we can just—”
“I look like her. Like my wyvern. How did you do that? How?” She touches her hair. “How did you manage that effect?” Her amber eyes find mine in the mirror.
I shrug. “I just tried to make them look the way she looks here on the ceiling. Do you like it?”
Blair only nods and a heavy weight falls from my shoulders. She spins, sending the glitter I worked into some strands sparkling like stars. “Oh my gods…I feel like a new person,” she says finally, still looking at herself as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with the person in the mirror.
“Right. I thought it was time for a change,” I say while I start working the color I made for myself into all of my hair. It takes much less time, because I just kind of slap it onto my whole head and work it into all my hair before the paste sinks in.
Then I step up to the mirror next to her. Okay—fae hair dye is pure magic. In my reflection, my hair glows a soft, sparkling amethyst, glittering gently as I turn, spinning until it settles around my shoulders like stardust.
I stare at myself, stunned by the grin spreading on my face, mirroring Blair’s. But—she’s right. She looks like a different person, and so do I. I no longer look like a frightened girl at all. No, I look more fae than I ever have. I no longer stick out with my dark hair and brown eyes.
And deep down I know the lilac means something else too.
But most of all, it was my choice. My decision. My body. My fate.
My chin rises and a kind of determination sets my features. Fuck them all. And most of all, fuck Caryan.
Blair’s hand finds mine, and for a moment we just stand there, grinning at each other in the mirror like two mad fae females who did something reckless, something terribly wrong, and don’t regret it for a second.
“To new beginnings,” Blair says, squeezing my hand tight.
“To new beginnings,” I agree.
We both flinch as the campus surprises us with a bowl of nougat ice cream, dusted in rainbow frosting and edible glitter. It plops into existence on the table behind us, as if the campus is celebrating our new beginning right along with us.
We eat it all, the whole huge bowl of ice cream, until our bellies ache.
Then we lie on our backs and talk about everything and nothing, letting the night carry our words away.
Blair tells me about her childhood, about Caryan, about her aunt, and I tell her about Lyrian and the first boy I was ever interested in and how Lyrian almost killed him.
“We could go away, you know. Buy a house somewhere. Have a horse or two, cows, sheep. Grow our own crops,” Blair says finally, again glancing up at the ceiling.
I turn my head, studying her profile, the warm glow of her amber eyes. “What—like you’re going to be a farm girl?” I tease. I don’t quite believe it, and yet, absurdly enough, I can picture her that way with startling clarity.
She laughs. “Yeah. Hells, at least I’ve got the cowgirl boots already. And riding a horse can’t be as hard as riding a dragon, so I’m pretty confident I could manage that.”
“And milking the cows and shearing the sheep?” I giggle when Blair snorts.
“Easy. I know my way around nipples and scissors.”
“Gross, Blair.”
She laughs too, a hand over her belly, then turns serious. “That had always been my dream, you know. To one day return to the hut in the woods where my mothers raised me. We’d been happy there. It was always the life I dreamed about having one day, once all this was over.”
“With Caryan?” I ask carefully.
I regret it when she scrunches up her face.
But to my surprise, she says, “You know, funny enough, he was never really part of that fantasy. I don’t know why.
Maybe I always knew we wouldn’t last. It was a dark time, and now I realize my obsession with him had everything to do with my aunt—and very little to do with him.
He was right. I was selfish. I never truly saw him. I only ever saw myself.
“That’s what life under my aunt’s heel was like.
We were all just trying to survive. You had to play by her rules—she controlled everything.
Well…almost everything. Almost every part of my life.
And Caryan was just a way for me to take something back, you know?
To claim a piece of myself. And I guess, in the end, I was the same to him. ”
She exhales softly, then looks at me. “So…what do you say? A house. You. Me. Aris?”
“Sounds like a plan,” I say and curl up around Aris, resting my head on Blair’s thigh.
Blair runs her hands through my hair, and the ache hits deep and sudden—because this is what I’ve always dreamed having a mother would feel like.
Gentle. Steady. Someone who would have protected me.
Someone who would have held the world back for me.
Someone who would have made me feel safe.
I close my eyes, and maybe it’s just the bond, but I feel oddly at home.
In a way I never felt with anyone before.
And maybe, just maybe, we could really be happy, because right in this very moment, I am.
In this moment, I can really believe that everything will turn out well.
That there’ll be no war, no more pain. That everyone’s going to be happy in the end.
And I cling to the moment with all my might, as if I somehow can make it come true by not letting go.
Then sleep claims me.