Chapter 89 #2
“Shh.” The red-haired man grabbed the woman and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Don’t worry about it. What can he do?”
The woman broke away. “Idiot! Fool! He can kill us! I hate you. I hate you. I hate what I feel for you. It’d be better if I’d never met you.
If Dagrid knew his wife had a son by his fifth cousin, do you think he’d stop with killing me?
You? The baby? No. Fool! He’d kill all my children.
He’d feel they were all tainted. He’d rather start over than risk—”
The boy started to cry. A mournful wail. His arms reached out to his mother.
She glared at him, her lower lip trembling. “I can’t see you again,” she told the red-haired man.
He held out his hands. “You’re being irrational—”
The musician sucked in a breath as his gentle mother spun, conjured a knife, and stabbed her lover in the heart.
He hit the ground. Dead.
The musician held very still. He stayed cloaked, hidden from his mother’s eyes.
She stared at her freckle-cheeked son. She held the knife, its blade dripping red.
The musician held his breath as his mother walked toward the boy.
His brother?
No. Not his brother. Not his sibling.
Not like the citrus and pearl dust scented one or the trickster. Those were his siblings. He would do anything for them. He would die for them. This boy? This boy was a danger to them. A danger to his mother. This boy would be the death of them all.
His mother’s face crumpled like a wad of tissues clenched in her hands. Her lips trembled and tears slipped free as she stared at the boy’s freckled cheeks.
He looked at her face and began to cry, his arms trembling as he reached out to her.
“I can’t . . .” she whispered, shaking her head. “I can’t do it. Someone . . . if only someone would do it for me.” She stared at the cracked ceiling and dropped the knife. “I won’t kill you. Fate will have to do it for me. I have to protect my children. I have to . . .”
She glanced at the baby. For a moment, it looked like she’d touch his shiny hair or press a finger to his freckled cheek.
Instead, she turned and hurried from the apartment, sealing it in illusion.
She locked the door and locked all sound inside.
No one would find the dead man. No one would find the child.
Not for weeks, months—a long, long time.
She meant fate to be time.
But the musician didn’t know. He only knew his mother was in danger, and his siblings too. He only knew if his mother wasn’t strong enough, he’d have to be strong for her. Just like when his sister wasn’t strong, he was strong for her too.
He twisted his hand and threw his cloak free. The baby stopped crying and hiccupped. It stared at him with wide, solemn gray eyes.
“You hurt my mother,” the musician whispered.
The freckle-cheeked boy reached out to him.
“I won’t let you hurt her anymore.”
The musician wasn’t very big. He was still a little boy himself, barely into his power. Still, he was strong enough to pull the chubby toddler free.
The baby sniffed and whimpered, and the musician began to sing him the song about the rabbit and the woods and the adventure, but in the end, he left out the part about the mother.
The freckle-cheeked boy rested his head against the musician’s chest.
“Mama?” he asked.
“No,” the musician said.
He carried the baby, cloaked in illusion, far, far north, walking until his legs burned and he stumbled over cracks in the sidewalk. The baby—not really a baby—was almost as big as he was. They weren’t really very far apart in human years.
At the tall, black iron gates, the musician asked for the rocklike one. When the rocklike one saw him, he laughed.
“What have you brought me?”
“A mistake,” the musician whispered, frightened but pretending he wasn’t. “Take it.”
“Is it your brother?” the rocklike one asked, tasting the baby’s blood.
The musician glared at the rocklike one. “No.”
The rocklike one laughed. “What if it dies?”
The musician’s lip quivered. “I don’t care.”
“All right then. I’ll take it. What do you want in return?”
“To never be bothered by it again.”
The rocklike one tilted his head. “Hmm. Never is a long time. How about twenty years?”
To the musician, who was still a child, twenty years sounded like an eternity. “Okay.”
The rocklike one struck the bargain. The musician left the baby crying in the rocklike one’s cold arms.
He went home to his mother and curled in her lap.
When she asked him to sing her a song, he shook his head. He couldn’t. His throat was too tight.
“Why do you look so sad?” she asked, stroking a hand through his dark hair. “My beautiful boy, why do you look so melancholy?”
He told her what he’d done.
He cried in her arms.
She stroked his back and murmured, “Shh. Shh. Don’t worry. Shh. It will be fine. You did good. You did right. Sweet boy. It’s okay. Shh. Don’t talk about it again. Don’t tell. Don’t . . . Shh. It’s all right.”
After a long cry, the musician climbed out of his mother’s lap and went to play with his sister. And no one but the mother noticed that from that day forward, his songs were always sad. He was permanently shaded with melancholy.
He’d taken her tears and locked them in himself.
They never spoke of the freckle-cheeked baby again.
* * *
The solemn one watched the illusion fade. The colors swirled like an impressionist’s sunset, falling into reds, pinks, oranges, and golds, until they bled into nothing.
He looked down at his mother.
She was in his arms, but her spirit had already fled.
The wind waited for his response.
The brush of salt from a cosmic tear. A sharp, ragged breath. A pained moan. The shiver of a broken heart.
Even anger was a response. A clenched jaw. A hardened gaze. A hateful curse.
But no.
He was as hard as granite, as opaque as solid rock. His expression was as flat and unfeeling as a heart of stone.
The only indication the solemn one had seen his mother’s illusion was in the way his gaze lingered on the cooling paleness of her skin. Was he looking for answers in her unseeing eyes?
Had she thought of him?
Had she mourned him?
Had she ever wanted to find him and free him?
No. He wouldn’t be asking that.
The solemn one set his mother on the floor. He stared at her and then let out a quiet sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling the knife free from her chest. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who you were.”
He wiped the knife and sheathed it.
“If I had . . .” He smiled and stared into the stark gray of his eyes in the window’s reflection. “I would’ve hunted you down sooner.”
He stalked from the penthouse, never noticing the silent gray rag man floating after him.