Chapter 38 Rhiannon
RHIANNON
Five days later.
It had taken a full day of sleep, and another two of silence, for me to process all that had happened enough to even speak.
On the fourth day, Ember insisted I talk with Calypso, who apparently had a head for business.
I’d given her the go ahead to quietly look into every bit of information we now had about O-Tex.
The Board of Directors had no idea who owned the company—and for now, we’d decided to keep it that way.
In a month, there would be a funeral and official coronation on the island, but I couldn’t think of that now. I rolled over in bed. Eryx sat next to the window reading. He smiled when he noticed I was awake. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I whispered. “Thank you for staying with me.”
He closed his book and got up, climbing into bed next to me. He’d hardly left my side for five days, leaving only to take food and trash away, and forage for sustenance. Ember had assured me on one of her brief visits that everything was being handled.
“I feel better this afternoon,” I said with a sigh, leaning into Eryx’s chest. “And by better, I mean I can keep my eyes open.”
His arms went around me. We’d slept in bed together every night since the day my mother died, but hadn’t had sex once. Once the grief had set in, my exhaustion had bottomed out into an endless pit. Even walking to the bathroom was almost too much for me.
Physically, nothing at all was wrong with me.
Sera had looked me over top to bottom, tested my blood every which way possible, and I was in near-perfect health according to the numbers.
But I’d finally stopped fighting rest, and now it seemed I was incapable of anything else.
It was awful. I leaned against Eryx, worrying.
“I can practically hear you thinking,” he whispered. There was a laugh in his voice. It might have been infuriating that he found my fury at being so tired adorable, if I hadn’t loved it so much. “Would you care to share what you’re worrying about?”
“No,” I said, feeling even more anxious now.
“Please,” he whispered in my ear.
A few weeks ago, that would have sent us into a frenzy of lust. Now, every muscle in my body felt as though it was made of lead. Better to rip the bandage off though. Since I’d started speaking again, Eryx had encouraged me to be honest with him, and I believed that’s what he wanted.
“I’m worried you’ll lose interest in me because I’m not able to have sex right now.”
“Oh,” he said, his deep voice vibrating through me. He moved back a little so that I fell back into his arms, but he curled over me so that he looked me in the face. “That is not a problem for me.”
I blinked several times, then frowned.
He only smiled. “We have a lot of years ahead of us for sex. Right now, you need rest. You need to heal.”
I flopped back onto the pillow dramatically. “It’s taking too long.”
He mimicked me, spreading out next to me. “It’s taking as long as it needs to.”
“You really don’t care?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, getting up and pressing a kiss to my forehead. “I love you, Rhi. And I’ve been asking you to rest for quite a while now, as you well know.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He moved towards the door. “I am going to have burgers and watch scary movies with Briony, Ares, and Eli.
You are having a girls' night with your sistren—and Avaline.” Eryx opened the door to show all four of the Orphium Maere waiting outside, each of them carrying armloads of supplies.
Avaline brought up the rear, carrying a pitcher of what looked like sangria.
“Have fun,” Eryx said, waving as he disappeared into the hallway.
An hour later, I’d been caught up on gossip.
Sera had already fallen asleep next to me in bed, which was comforting.
She’d always fallen asleep easiest with the rest of us chatting around her, and the familiar feeling of being surrounded by my loves, knowing Eryx was just downstairs with the rest of our family, made me so happy I could cry.
Lara was spread out on the couch at the end of my bed, peppering Av with questions about how Blaire’s prisoner had simply disappeared. But there were no satisfying answers, apparently.
“And no one has seen her since?” I asked.
Ember, who sat at the end of the bed painting my toenails a shocking bright pink, shook her head. “No.”
Calypso sat in front of Av at my dressing table, who was braiding her long hair in the most intricate fishtail braid I’d ever seen.
Avaline sighed. “It’s the strangest thing.
I looked through every one of the photos from the inmates’ files from the Asylum.
” She paused, smiling. “Briony managed to get a hold of them after you fucked with everything.”
I laughed and Ember glared at me. “If you don’t want this all over your foot, hold still.”
I bit my lip to try to comply. She was my commanding officer, after all. “So we don’t know who she is?”
Lara shook her head. “Nor a clue what Blaire’s relationship to her was.”
It was an odd way to put it, or rather, it tripped something in my memory. “Wait,” I breathed, sitting forward.
Ember looked up, and I thought she was going to scold me again, but instead she capped the nail polish. She knew when I’d made a connection between things, and waited for me to speak again.
“Myrine said something before I killed her. Something like, ‘not even his own…’ but then she stopped and told me to figure it out myself.” It wasn’t even really a question why I’d forgotten it.
My mother’s dying revelations, in conjunction with her actual death, had wiped everything else out of existence until now.
Calypso picked up her laptop and opened it. “I wonder if the end of that sentence is…” she trailed off as her fingers flew over the keyboard. The room was silent but for her typing. And then the sound slowed.
Avaline leaned forward, gasping. “That’s her. With hair, but that’s her.”
Calypso’s eyes narrowed sharply. “This is an obituary from… this can’t be right.”
Avaline’s mouth fell open. “From nearly thirty years ago. But… she didn’t look even a day older than this.”
Calypso turned the laptop around to show a photo of a pretty young woman with skin pale as porcelain, and dark brown hair. Lara sat up a little to look at it. “She’s cute. And dead?”
Calypso shook her head. “It says here that Vesper Blaire was Archibald Blaire’s ‘natural’ daughter. Her mother was some model he had an affair with. And then she died in a horrible car accident—apparently the body was so mangled that they had to have a closed casket funeral.”
Ember sat back, sighing. “Or she’s one of us, and she ascended.”
Sera rolled over in bed, her eyes open. I wondered how long she’d been awake. “If she ascended, then why did he need to give her whatever all that stuff was that he was making? Why wouldn’t Myrine have just told him what she was?”
Ember’s head tilted to one side. “Those are good points. Do we think he found out she was a parapsych?”
Sera sat up. “Maybe the mother was. Sometimes if a talent is small, people go their whole lives without anyone knowing they’re not human. People just think they’re awkward.”
Ember shook her head. “I don’t like this. We don’t know what he did to her before that night, and she’s just out there on her own.”
Lara sat up, sighing. “Fine. I’ll find the cute girl.”
Ember glared at her. “I didn’t ask you to.”
Lara threw her hands up in the air. “No, it’s no trouble. I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll just go find Blaire’s love child and bring her over to the right side of things.”
“Saints, you are annoying,” Ember said with a snort. But she laughed.
We all did.
Lara’s eyes met mine, a question in them. I nodded. It was okay. We were okay. Her smile in return was a little sad, but it was a volume closed in both our lives. Things had been over between us for decades, but neither of us had ever completely moved on, or fallen in love.
It was time now. Next to me, my phone buzzed at the same time as Ember’s and we both got photos of the movie night happening in the basement. Stanley had transformed into several different versions of monster cats to amuse Briony, and all of them were laughing.
Sera’s fingers laced through mine as she looked at the photos, her eyes lingering a bit too long on Eli Cabot’s handsome face. I didn’t say a thing. She was still raw from things with Max, and I knew my friend. It would take her a while before she could move on.
But the fact was that we all needed joy and love of all kinds in our lives. My eyes fell on Calypso, who was closing her laptop. “So,” I said with a deep breath as her eyes met mine. “Are you ever going to tell us what you were running from in Aradios?”
All eyes turned her way. Calypso sighed, staring at the ceiling. “Too much sunshine.” She grinned at us, gesturing to her pale skin. “The cost of sunscreen was bankrupting me.”
As the six of us devolved into giggles and storytelling, it occurred to me that everything I’d told Myrine before she died was true. This was where my allegiances would be for the rest of my life. Here, with these people. In this house.
O-Tex didn’t matter. Being Otrera’s queen was irrelevant. This was my entire world. It might be messy and imperfect, and I needed to create boundaries for myself that let me rest better, but I wanted every silly text message, and every long intimate talk.
The world outside was grim at the best of times. But in here, inside these walls, we were safe. And I would cherish every moment of it for as long as I was allowed.