Awakened by True Love’s Kiss
Awakened by True Love’s Kiss
SNOW
It’s been twenty-four hours since Ariel disappeared.
I sit in our living room in the dark, my arms wrapped around my legs.
I have work in a half hour, but I don’t think I can get up from this spot. The dark heaviness in my heart has turned my body to lead. There’s no use getting up.
Ariel’s tea mug is still in the sink. Her blanket is bunched up on the end of the couch where she always leaves it. One of her copper hairs is stuck to the armrest, bright as wire in the streetlight leaking through the window.
Her lipstick is still on the bathroom counter, the cap off, because she always leaves the cap off and I always put it back on and complain about it drying out.
I put it on this morning. Then I took it off again because the apartment felt wrong with everything in its place, like the rooms already decided she’s not coming home.
And I don’t understand.
Ryder said it was me who came and picked up Ariel. It wasn’t me. I was too busy running the roofs, using HAM flyers as target practice for my daggers, and feeling generally shitty about life after the fight with The Seven.
I had no idea I could feel worse.
But here I am. It’s like I've eaten something poisoned, and it’s rotting me from the inside out, slowly killing me until all I want to do is lie down, close my eyes, and never wake up.
Rosie’s unicorn pencil case is clutched against my chest so tightly the bent tin edge digs into my palm.
I pulled it from my bedside drawer after scouring the city for the past…I don’t know how many hours straight, only to come home with no Ariel, no answers, and no more roof left to run. I haven’t let go of it since.
The unicorn on the lid is almost rubbed away from where Rosie used to pet it with her thumb. I drag my own thumb over the faded rainbow mane, over and over, trying to find some piece of her still living in the metal.
My chest hollows until I feel scooped clean. No heart. No ribs. No guts. Just a dark, scraped-out place where my friends used to live.
I keep losing Rosie. In different bodies, with different faces, and every time it takes another piece of whatever is left in the middle of me.
My fingers clamp harder around the pencil case until the metal creaks.
I built myself out of my friends. Rosie first, then Ariel, then all of them, my whole heart divided up to each for safekeeping because I never trusted myself to hold it. Now I'm learning what's left when they're taken.
Nothing.
There's nothing left.
Just skin around an empty space.
And there is only one realization I can come to.
It's my fault.
Because only one other person knows Ariel's secret other than me. Only one person could be the one plucking people from my life in such a perfectly timed sequence.
The Seven.
The last time I saw Ariel was the same night as my fight with The Seven. I haven’t seen either of them since.
My stomach twists so violently I almost gag.
I brought him backstage at the Pumpkin Coach Club. I put him three feet from Kiki while she healed me with her level four mage powers, asked her if maybe she could help him too. And then she was gone.
Goldie disappeared after I let him close enough. Then Cinder.
Every name stacks in my skull until it feels like fingers pressing behind my eyes.
Carolee dead on our doorstep.
Then I remember his expression when he saw her. The shock there, raw and unguarded, before he could tuck it away behind one of his masks.
If he did this, why would he be so upset? And if he was behind it, why did he keep letting me get close, letting me follow him, letting me see pieces of him he could have hidden?
Or maybe I’m just a stupid girl clutching a dead girl’s pencil case, trying to carve mercy into a pattern that keeps ending with my friends gone.
The guy in the underground train station flashes through my mind. The mage we cornered. The one I thought we were saving.
We’re here to help, I told him.
I said it with my whole chest, standing beside The Seven like we were the same kind of monster in the dark. Like we were hunting the same villains. Like I had found someone who understood the shape of my rage.
We were both tracking magic-kind.
My breath catches.
We were both tracking magic-kind.
Only I was trying to keep them from disappearing, and he was the shadow at the edge of every disappearance.
That’s the part that makes me want to scream until my throat tears open.
Because I stood beside him and thought we were facing the same direction.
I press Rosie’s pencil case into my forehead until the bent corner bites into skin and the metal gives a tiny, wounded pop beneath my grip. I wrench my eyes shut so hard I see stars as I push it even harder into me.
Poison Apple is the heart of it. The safest place in Boston for mages, fae, shifters, Lost Girls, glitter freaks, weirdos, and anyone too much for the outside world. I led him right into it. I gave him names, faces, routines, weaknesses, secrets.
I gave him Ariel.
The pencil case slips from my grip and clatters against the floor. A brutal sob claws up my throat, but it gets stuck there, lodged behind my teeth.
The Seven took her.
Or he helped someone take her.
Or one of The Seven did, while another one would have stopped it if he’d been strong enough to get control.
I don’t know why. I don’t know where. I don’t know how much of him knew what was happening.
But Ariel is gone, and he is gone, and the shape of his absence fits too perfectly over hers.
I grab the pencil case again, pressing it flat over my sternum like I can shove Rosie back into the hollow place and make her hold me together.
I keep replaying the fight. His voice saying we’re done. One removing my hand from his sleeve, gentle, so gentle, and now I understand it. That wasn’t him letting me go.
That was him saying goodbye before he did something unforgivable.
I should hate them.
All seven of them.
But I can’t.
That’s the worst part. It’s exactly like I told him.
A complex mixture of personalities and power, and I fell for each one separately, and for the whole man.
My body still remembers the first time One pinned my wrists and the whole world sharpened around his hands. He didn’t look at me like I was his equal then. Not yet. He looked at me like a reckless human girl with too much mouth, too many knives, and no survival instinct.
Needling One for his critical, control-freak nature became one of my favorite hobbies because he always noticed.
Every plan. Every trick. Every twitch before I moved.
He could keep up with my speed, my mouth, my fury, my stupid need to throw myself at danger just to prove I could still move faster than grief.
He saw the worst of it and came after me anyway, protected me like I was another part of himself. And then he sent Four after me when I threw myself into the harbor.
Four met my dare and jumped. He turned the freezing water warm around us like my recklessness was something to answer, not scold. He made my blood catch fire, but more than that, he made me feel like my too-muchness had finally found another too-much.
Six gave me the truth without sanding down a single edge. He said what he thought. Asked for what he wanted. No games, no soft little lies, no pretending desire was a gift so few people are willing to give.
Two played the game with me. Pretended not to care. Let me pretend not to care right back. We were a pair of smug disasters acting too cool for every soft thing in the room, when really, the soft things were exactly what could kill us.
Five made sweetness feel dangerous in a completely different way. When I squealed over those tiny pigs, shame flooded his face, and then delight came rushing through so bright it hurt to look at. Like maybe some part of him had been waiting for someone to love the thing he hated in himself.
Three walked into my dreams, my past, with such careful footing that it made it easy to share the biggest pain of my life. The way he took my face in his hands, cradling it so carefully as he kissed me for it, drilled down into my bones.
He was wrong. It was never about loving them for their powers. I fell for the way they made me feel like every strange, sharp, hungry part of me had somewhere to go. Like I didn’t have to shrink to be loved. Like I didn’t have to become softer, safer, quieter, easier.
Like maybe I had never been ordinary at all.
And Seven.
Seven.
The part I wanted to reach but was scared to touch. The black-eyed wound at the center of them. The hunger that looked too much like mine. The part I swore I could love too.
I didn’t lie when I said I love unconditionally, which is what makes the betrayal tear me apart. Love sits under my ribs like a knife I can’t pull out.
I should hunt them. I tried tracking them down. But I realize when they don’t want to be found, they can’t be.
Which means up until now, they’d let me.
Every rooftop. Every alley. Every time I thought I was catching up because I was good enough, fast enough, stubborn enough.
I wasn’t.
But some part of them wanted me. Some part of them wanted me to see.
Some part of them wanted me to stop them.
I pull my knees closer to my chest until I’ve fallen over onto my side on the couch, Rosie’s pencil case still on the ground.
I want to die.
The thought settles over me like a glass lid.
My limbs go heavy. My breath thins. The apartment fades at the edges until all that’s left is the couch beneath my cheek, the taste of something bitter at the back of my tongue, and the slow, poisoned dark closing around me.
A movement by the window forces me to slowly raise my gaze to meet the motion. The dark shape moving into my apartment should strike terror into my heart. I should jump up and fight him off. I should finally put an end to his miserable life like he wants, but I don’t.
Instead, I just lie here.
His shadow rises over me, and all I can do is close my eyes, waiting for the final blow. Shock sparks through the numbness, but I keep my eyes closed.
It happens again.
And again.
A tiny, disgusting kiss from a dead cat who refuses to stay dead.
My breath catches hard enough to hurt.
The tongue scrapes up my cheek once more, insistent and warm, and some small, locked thing inside my chest gives a weak, pathetic kick.
I open my eyes.
Lucifer pulls away from my face to look down at me, yellow eyes narrowed.
"What are you doing?" I ask, though I know he can’t answer.
From behind Lucifer, there’s a flapping sound. The white flutterbun followed him into my apartment and lands on my coffee table, a safe distance from me.
"You palling around with your new friend?" I ask in a croaky voice. "It’s nice to have friends."
Even as I say it, tears stream down the sides of my face. I’m so tired, I can’t hold it in.
Lucifer goes back to licking my face, and soon I feel a weight on the couch as the flutterbun cuddles up to me.
The flutterbun’s little nose twitches against my wrist.
I suck in a broken breath. Slowly and gently, I lower my arm until it covers the flutterbun, and it sinks down to lie next to me. Then Lucifer walks over and cuddles between the two of us until we are a pile.
Even through my pain, I can’t help but feel awe as Lucifer starts to lick the top of the flutterbun’s head, paying extra attention to the tiny horns and long ears.
"Is this what you needed all along?" I say, reaching out a hand toward the devil cat, ready to be scratched to hell at a moment’s notice. "You just needed a friend?"
My fingers find the soft part of Lucifer’s head. He pauses his grooming, and I still at the same time.
After a while, I let my fingers stroke over the top of his noggin, and instead of turning around to eviscerate my bowels, he allows me to pet him.
The flutterbun then twists its head from a lying position to start licking Lucifer. After a minute, a strange rumbling sound kicks up.
"Are you...are you purring?" I whisper.
Lucifer’s eyes turn hooded.
"It must be hard to go through life alone, without a friend," I continue to whisper, changing the angle to behind the ears. The black devil cat pushes into my touch, seeking more. "Now that you have one, you basically have a personality transplant."
I tried with Lucifer in the beginning. Left food on the fire escape, made stupid kissy noises, bought him a little fish toy on a string. Then he scratched me, pissed in my boots, knocked over my favorite mug while staring me right in the eyes, and I wrote him off as a lost cause.
But he’d been alone. Not just alone, killed, resurrected, then trapped, likely cut open, tested on over and over because someone wanted to know how many times he could come back. And if they did that to Lucifer, they did it to The Seven too.
The thought makes my hand still against Lucifer’s head.
A little boy in a cage with only a black cat in another cage nearby. A mother standing on the other side of the glass, telling him he was dirty and the pain was necessary.
No friends. No one coming for him. No one telling him the thing that happened to him was natural, and that he was lovable no matter what.
I hate the part of me that still aches for him. I hate that even now some stupid bleeding piece of me thinks maybe The Seven needed someone too. That maybe he still does.
Some energy returns to my limbs as the two animals turn their affections on me.
"I can’t let my friends down, can I?" I ask in an exhausted voice, even as their tiny kisses continue to trickle new life into my chest and limbs.
For all that I want to give up on everything, on everyone, on myself, I can’t. Rap still needs me. My friends are still out there, and I can’t stay down. I stayed down too long after Rosie died. I became so small I was barely a smudge of myself for years.
My friends wouldn’t want that.
Especially not when they need me the most.
Lucifer stops licking my cheek first. His ears swivel toward the window.
The flutterbun lifts its head.
"What?" I whisper.
Lucifer hops down from the couch, silent as spilled ink. The flutterbun flies after him, crooked but steady, landing on the sill beside his tail. Together, they slip out into the night.
The room goes quiet again.
I look down at Rosie’s pencil case, still on the ground. I lean over and pick it up, examining it though I know every line, every curve.
The unicorn is faded. The hinge is bent. The tin is scratched all to hell.
Still here.
My fingers close around it one more time before I set it carefully on the coffee table.
Then I do the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life.
I get up again. Alone.