Chapter Twenty-Nine - Evie #2
The girls went still. Both of them looked up at the sky. The brightness pressed harder. I couldn’t see His face or hear His voice. But I felt intent in that light, hungry and searching and furious with the shape of denial.
“He—” I swallowed, “He found me,” I whispered.
One of the girls came over and took my hand. Her fingers were small and cool and steady. The other shook her head.
Words moved through me in a slow, cold wave. He doesn’t know this place.
The brightness scraped against the sky again, trying to force a seam open. The garden shuddered, but it didn’t break. The unfinished trees bent inward. Their blank leaves darkened. The upward streams of water arched higher and began to circle us, weaving a ring of silver around the clearing.
The girl holding my hand squeezed once. She shook her head, and then the other girl shook hers as well.
My mouth went dry. And the brightness surged once more.
The girls looked up at it with expressions far too old for their little faces. They weren’t afraid. Their expressions were something colder. Like recognition or even disdain.
Then, as if bored with the attempt, the brightness receded. And the garden started breathing again. The trees rose up. Their leaves rustling. The flowers bloomed, and the water receded.
I realized only then that I’d stopped breathing entirely and let it out in a shaking rush.
“What is this place?” I asked.
The girls turned back to me. The same little shared glance passed between them.
Then one of them shrugged. That wasn’t an answer, or maybe it was, and I just hated it.
I looked around the clearing at its half-made beauty, the pathways that seemed to form as I noticed them, the flowers still deciding what they were.
“This is… a garden,” I said.
They both furiously shook their heads.
“Our… garden?” I asked.
They nodded.
“Why am I here?”
That made both of them smile in a way that somehow felt fond and secretive at once. One of them shrugged. The other spread her arms out wide, turning in a circle as if to welcome me.
I wished Luc were here to see this, to see our girls. And then I crouched in front of them slowly, trying not to scare myself with the fact that I wanted to touch them more than I wanted anything. Up close, they were even more like him.
The same pale blue eyes. The same long, dark lashes. The same beautiful, dangerous mouth softened by childhood. One had a faint little freckle near the corner of her lip. The other did not. It was the only easy difference between them.
They smelled like clean air after rain and something warm I couldn’t name.
I reached up carefully and touched one girl’s hair. Silky and real. The other leaned into my hand first, like she already knew she could. That nearly killed me, and my eyes filled so fast I had to blink hard.
“You look like your father,” I whispered.
Both girls brightened at that, like they were pleased.
One of the girls looked past me toward the clearing, and her whole face brightened. She lifted her hand, small fingers spread wide, and tapped her thumb to her forehead.
The meaning hit me a second later. It was sign language for Father.
I turned, and there was someone standing beyond the garden gate. He stood in shadow, but not the ordinary kind. The darkness around him felt alive, deep and endless, and somehow brighter than light. It bent strangely at the edges, as if the air itself didn’t know how to hold his shape properly.
I knew him, and I didn’t.
At first glance, it was Luc. He was tall and still and beautiful in that terrible way of his that always made him look a little unreal.
But the longer I looked, the less human he seemed.
Light curved around him instead of striking him.
The path at his feet flickered between bloom and ruin, between stone and ash, between something newly made and something impossibly ancient.
My pulse stumbled. The girls slipped from my reach and ran toward him with bare feet and soft laughter, their matching dark auburn hair flying behind them.
He knelt as they reached him. My throat tightened so hard it hurt. One girl took his hand. Then the other. He swallowed them up in a hug, and the whole garden seemed to exhale, like it knew him. Like it had been waiting for him.
I stood slowly. The figure at the gate lifted his head. I couldn’t fully see his face, not because it was hidden. Because my mind seemed to slide off it every time I tried, as if whatever stood there was too much for my dreaming self—or my waking self, if this wasn’t a dream—to take in all at once.
“What… are you?” I asked. The words came out before I could stop them.
The girls looked back at me. The figure at the gate didn’t move. One of the girls shook her head slowly as she shrugged as if to say, “He forgot.” The other tilted her head, pale eyes luminous.
A shiver went through me. The garden dimmed for one second, then brightened again.
Something in my chest pulled hard, a painful little twist of recognition and grief and certainty I couldn’t explain.
I stared at Luc—or the thing that was also Luc, or more than Luc, or whatever he was standing in the gateway, and every part of me felt suddenly too small to contain what I was seeing.
I looked back at the girls. “What are your names?”
That made them both go still and look at each other. The one with the freckle turned fully toward me. The other’s fingers tightened around Luc’s hand.
When they spoke, they spoke together. And the sound did not become language. It became wind moving through branches and water over stone. And bells in a place too far away to find, and static slipping under a song.
I frowned, straining to hear. “Again,” I said.
One of them smiled sadly. The other shook her head.
“Why?”
This time, their faces changed. The softness went out of them, replaced by something too old for their little cheeks.
One of them reached up and touched her lips with two careful fingers. Then she shook her head. The other pointed toward the brightness waiting beyond the garden. Her small hand opened, fingers spread wide, then closed slowly, like she was gathering a thread only she could see.
My breath caught when I understood immediately. The warning bloomed inside me, silent and certain. Names were how He found things.
I looked back at the sky instinctively, half-expecting that awful brightness to be there again, pressing at the walls of this place. It was gone, but I could still feel it. It was beyond the edge of the garden, looking for a door. Looking for a way in.
My stomach turned, and I took a step toward them. Then another.
“I don’t want to leave you.”
The admission slipped out before I could stop it. It was ridiculous. They weren’t here. None of this was real. But they felt real enough that the thought of waking up without them made grief rise in my throat.
The girls let go of Luc’s hands and ran back to me.
They hit me with enough force to make me laugh through the tears that had finally spilled over.
I dropped to my knees and caught them both.
They were solid, warm, and small. Their arms wrapped around me, their little bodies pressed close, and for a moment, I held my daughters in this garden.
I buried my face in their hair and breathed them in.
They were rain and something electric and familiar underneath it all.
One of them patted my shoulder with grave little seriousness as if to say, “You’ll know us.” The other leaned back just enough to look at me and shook her head.
I swallowed hard and said, “Who?” But I already knew.
The girls smiled, and then, the garden began to thin at the edges. But it wasn’t the garden. It was me. A sensation came on like waking and falling at the same time. The light shifted. The clearing blurred. Their arms around me grew lighter, their faces softer, harder to hold in focus.
“No,” I whispered. “Wait.”
One of them touched my cheek. It felt exactly like a child’s hand should feel. The other buried her face against me.
Then someone whispered, “Wake up.”