by Teresa Roman
By the time I parked in my driveway, I was thoroughly exasperated. My phone rang just as I put my key in the door. Relieved to see Devin’s number, I picked it up.
“Did you get home safely?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just pulled into the driveway.”
“Good.”
“Can we talk about what just happened?” I asked.
“We will, but not tonight. It has to be in person.” He paused. “Are you inside your house yet?”
“I just locked the door behind me.”
“Good. I have to go,” he said. And then he hung up.
Chapter 9
Half a dozen times that night I fought the temptation to pick up the phone and call Devin. I thought about our kiss and wondered how I could kiss someone, only to have them regret it and run in the opposite direction.
When I was done obsessing over our kiss, I agonized over what it was Devin needed to tell me. For months, I’d suspected there was something he wasn’t telling me, but what could be that bad that he thought he had no right to me?
When I finally fell asleep, it wasn’t for long. I woke up shaking from the same nightmare I’d had at Devin’s house, except this time he wasn’t there to wake me up, so the dream played out longer. The sound of the woman and her child crying must’ve alerted the people inside the building. A stream of cloaked figures ran out into the courtyard. They gathered around the woman who was holding her child in one arm and clutching her dead husband’s hand with the other. Nothing they said consoled her. Eventually, one of them lifted the little boy into his arms and another carried the woman until they all disappeared back inside. The cries continued. I looked around trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement. I fixed my gaze on the statues that flanked the courtyard. They were somehow alive. Although they still looked stone, they were moving. One let out a roar, the other let its shoulders slump and head bow. Actual tears fell from their eyes. But how could statues cry? I woke up with the sound of their weeping still ringing in my ears. So much pain. I could hardly bear it. But why? I didn’t know those people, they weren’t even real, just figments of my overactive imagination. So why did they affect me the way they did?
When morning came, I tried to push thoughts of Devin out of my head, but eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore and dialed his number. He didn’t answer. I stared out of my kitchen window into the backyard, trying to decide how to spend my day off. I thought about going through my father’s things. It was something I needed to do at some point, but I couldn’t bring myself to go upstairs and open the door to his bedroom. Instead, I lay around all day alternating between watching TV and reading. By nightfall Devin still hadn’t called and I went to bed, angry. I worried that things would be awkward at work the next day, but despite that, when morning came, I couldn’t get to the hotel early enough.
Devin wasn’t there when I walked through the lobby doors. I tried calling him, but my call went straight to voicemail. A few minutes into my shift, Rob told me that Devin had called in sick. Maybe he believed Devin really was sick, but I wasn’t buying it. I’d seen him two days before and he was totally fine. I dug my phone out of my pocket and called him again, ready to demand an explanation, but he didn’t answer. Frustrated, I jammed my phone into the back pocket of my pants. If I was at home, instead of at work, I would have flung it against the wall.
“Excuse me, miss.” A woman’s voice broke through, interrupting my thoughts. I reminded myself that I was at work and turned to see what the person wanted.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“I called for a few more towels over an hour ago,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” I gave her a half-hearted smile. “We’ll have someone bring them over right away. What’s your room number?” I jotted it down and she walked away.
The day dragged on, and the moment five o’clock rolled around I bolted out the door and headed straight for Devin’s house. It was stupid, I knew it. He might not even be home and, even if he was, what would I say? And how would he respond? If he told me that kissing me was a mistake, I would die. It was foolish to have started something with him when my heart was still raw with the pain of losing my dad, but he was the one who kissed me, not the other way around.
I got to his house and spotted his car in the driveway. As I parked, he opened the door and stepped out to greet me, looking like he hadn’t slept in days.
“You really are sick,” I said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I’m not sick. I’ve just had a lot on my mind.”
“Are you going to invite me in?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, backing up to give me space to enter.
I turned around to face him as he closed the door. “Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on or are you going to keep me guessing?” I demanded. My stomach twisted into a knot. “Because if you’re not really interested in me, then you should just say so.” I hadn’t intended to blurt everything out like that, but now that I had, there was no taking it back.
He looked surprised, then confused. “No, you got it all wrong, Lilli,” he said, shaking his head. “The truth is, I’ve never felt for anyone the way I do for you.”
His confession took me by surprise. I desperately wanted to believe it, but, if it was true, why had he been avoiding me for the past two days? “Then what’s the problem?”
“We should sit.” Devin and I settled down on the couch beside each other. He turned to face me. “I’m glad you came over. I shouldn’t have missed work today; it was stupid of me. It’s just that—I needed some time to think.”
“About?”
“About the right words to use.”
“What do you mean the right words?” All of a sudden I felt sick to my stomach, afraid that he was going to say that we could only be friends.
“I want to tell you everything. Every secret, every single thing I know that you don’t. The problem is I want to tell you for all the wrong reasons, and I hate myself for it.”
“You’ve lost me.”
His beautiful eyes looked conflicted. I wanted to fix whatever was hurting him, just like he always tried to fix things for me.
“The right thing to do is walk away and go back to where I came from, so you can have the life you were supposed to. The problem is, I don’t know how to do that.”
He was talking in circles, confusing me instead of clearing things up. “What kind of life am I supposed to have?”
Devin looked straight in to my eyes before answering, “The life your mother wanted you to have.”
Chapter 10
A barrage of questions flooded my mind and I tried to sort through them and decide which one I needed answered first. “How would you know what kind of life my mother wanted for me?”
“How do I put this?” Devin paused, searching for the right words. “Since I’ve gotten to know you, I’ve been able to put a few things together.”
Another vague reply. Something he was frustratingly good at. “You have to stop giving me half-answers. Whatever it is you need to say, just spit it out already.”
Devin took a deep breath. “You asked me more than once what brought me to Crescent City, and I told you it was the ocean and the trees. Do you remember that?” I nodded, and he continued. “What you should have asked is what made me stay.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping we were finally getting somewhere. “Tell me. Why did you decide to stay in Crescent City?”
“I stayed because of you.”
“Me? Why?”
“It’s—well.” Devin began to fidget, opening and closing his hands and then staring at them like they had the answers he was looking for. “I’ve felt like an outcast for as long as I can remember. I think, because of that, I’ve always wondered what life was like away from home. So one day I decided to find out.”
“And that’s how you wound up in Crescent City?”
“Yes. Although it wasn’t t
he first place I visited. In fact, I had every intention of moving on and continuing my travels until I saw you.”
“At the coffee shop?”
Devin shook his head. “That wasn’t the first time I saw you. The first time was weeks before that. I’m sure you thought of our meeting as pure coincidence, that I happened to stumble upon you just as you were searching for a job, but that’s not true. I’d been following you around for a while, trying to think of a way to get to know you, and that day in the coffee shop a chance presented itself.”
“Why would you want to get to know me?” Maybe the idea of Devin following me around should’ve freaked me out, but I was too focused on trying to make sense of what he was telling me.
“I wanted to know why you were here in Crescent City instead of with your mother.”
His answer stunned me. “What?!”
“You look just like her,” Devin continued, oblivious to my outburst. “You have Naiara’s eyes, her hair, and her fair skin. From a distance, I actually thought you were her. Then I realized that wasn’t right, but you look too much like her to be anything but her daughter.”
My head spun. Somehow Devin had known my mother? But that wasn’t possible. He was only a year and a half older than me. She died when I was a few months old, and he, too would’ve been too young to remember her.
“How do you know I look like her?” I’d talked to him about my mother, plenty of times, but I hadn’t told him that. Maybe he’d just assumed.
“I’ve known your mother my whole life.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, feeling an odd sense of frustration brewing inside me. “She’s dead, and has been for a long time.”
“No.” He shook his head. “She’s not.”
“Devin, why are you doing this?” He had to know how painful this was, especially after everything I’d confided in him.
“I don’t want to hurt you, but I owe you the truth.”
“Just . . . whatever this is all about, can you spit it out already?”
Devin sighed and rested his hands on his knees as if he were bracing himself. “Like I said, I’ve known your mother for as long as I can remember.” He turned his head toward me. “You believe she’s dead, but she’s not. When I came to Crescent City and saw you, I knew you were her child. What I didn’t know was why you were here without her. It made me curious and I wanted answers, so I followed you, hoping to find out, but what I discovered only led to more questions. I realized the only way to figure out what you were doing here was to get to know you, to become your friend, and helping you find a job seemed like a good way to do that.”
I stared at him, eyes wide with disbelief. A part of me wanted to believe he was right, that my mother was alive, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Still, I didn’t think he was lying. He believed every word he was telling me, which meant he’d had an ulterior motive for being my friend and had been keeping me in the dark about it for months. “And . . . did you get all your questions answered?” I choked out.
“I think so. There are, of course, missing pieces of information, but your mother is the one who has those.”
“Right, of course.”
Devin ignored the sarcasm in my voice and continued. “The best I can figure is that your mother must have come here to Crescent City at some point and fallen in love with your father. But Naiara was promised to someone else already. Perhaps she realized the man who thought of her as his would hunt her down, and that he’d find her here with another man and his child. She must have left to protect the two of you.”
“Who is this him you keep referring to?” I asked, intrigued by Devin’s story. Even though I remained skeptical, the voice inside my head that kept telling me he knew too many things I hadn’t shared—like my mother’s name and how I looked so much like her—got louder by the second.
“Your mother’s husband. Zoran is his name.”
“My mother is married?” My stomach tightened at the idea of her with someone else after I’d spent my entire life watching what her absence had done to my father.
“Yes,” Devin replied.
“Was she married to him when she met my dad?”
“Not technically. But they were promised to each other from childhood, which means they’ve belonged to each other since then and no one else.”
By promised to each other, I figured Devin meant engaged. I tried sifting through all the information he had just given me. My mind was a jumbled mess. His whole story was insane. I took a deep breath. “Let me see if I’m getting this straight. My mother left the man she was supposed to marry, met my dad and fell in love with him, then gave birth to me and left us just in case her fiancée found out?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any.”
I clenched my hands into fists and felt my fingernails leave little half-moon welts in my palms. Why would Devin tell me something so outlandish?
“You do realize this story makes no sense, right? If she was afraid, she could have called the police, got an order of protection or something. She’s been gone for almost eighteen years. You’re telling me in that whole time she couldn’t have called my dad even once to let him know what happened to her?”
“It’s not that simple. Where your mother and I are from, things don’t really work the way they do here. We don’t have police, and since I’m not certain what an order of protection is, I’m pretty sure we don’t have those, either.”
“What are you talking about? Where exactly are you from?”
“We’re from . . .” He paused before answering. “Our home is called the Wilds.”
“The Wilds? Where’s that?”
“You can’t find it on any map, Lilli. At least not on any human map.”
I frowned. “And why is that?”
Trying to find the right words, he glanced at me, then fixed his gaze on his hands, which he held in his lap, fingers laced tightly together. “The Wilds isn’t part of this world. It’s a place humans can’t get to, a place of magic.”
“Magic?”
Devin’s serious expression threw me. It seemed impossible that he actually believed what he was saying. No wonder he didn’t think I was crazy after I told him about my dreams—because he was completely and totally out of his mind. All I could do was stare at him, speechless.
“You don’t believe me,” he finally said, offended.
“Oh, come on, Devin. You didn’t really think I would, did you?” I laid my hand gently on his shoulder. “But you’re completely sure that you believe it?” I wanted to give him a chance to back out, save his dignity.
“Yes, of course.” His lips curled into a mad grin. “Why would you believe me?” he asked rhetorically.
“Devin, why are you doing this?”
“I finally work up the courage to tell you the truth, knowing what it could cost me, and you don’t believe me.”
There was nothing to say, but I tried anyway. “You know I care about you . . .”
He started to laugh. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? You actually think I’m crazy.” He looked at me waiting for a denial, but I couldn’t give it to him. “Fine, since you don’t believe me, then I guess I’ll just have to show you.”
“Show me what?”
“The truth.”
Chapter 11
I sighed and folded my arms across my chest, not sure what else to say. Devin got up from the couch and took a few steps. Then, before my eyes, he disappeared. I gasped. Breathe, Lilli. If I hadn’t been sitting down, my legs would have given out from under me. I felt faint and nauseous and convinced that I was losing my mind, again. Just like I had at my father’s funeral.
I reached out towards the spot Devin had just been standing in, but he’d vanished, just like my mother had at Dad’s funeral. I’d convinced myself that I’d seen her ghost. Devin certainly wasn’t one of those, which meant there had to be another explanation.
“Lilli.”
I turned. Devin’s voice cam
e from the hallway that led to his room. I got up to follow it and saw him as he walked down the hall towards me.
“What the hell?” I said as I wrapped my arms around myself, protectively. “How did you do that?”
“Magic.”
“What?” I looked up at him, still not certain that my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. I backed away as he approached me.
“Let’s sit back down.”
I hesitated for a moment, but, realizing that I needed him to explain things, I took a seat beside him and waited for him to start talking. “It’s called magic, Lilli. That’s how I can teleport.”
“Magic?” I’d spent most of my life trying to convince myself that there was no such thing, and here Devin was, telling me I was wrong, and at the same time showing me I wasn’t crazy. It should’ve been a relief, but maybe thinking myself insane was better than realizing so much of my life had been a lie. “What are you saying, that you’re some sort of magician?”
“Well, I suppose that is one of the terms used to describe our kind . . .”
“Our kind?”
“Witches, Lilli. You, me, your mother, that’s what we are; the sons and daughters of magic.”
“Witches?” I waited for him to say he was joking, but he didn’t. I knew there were people who thought they had powers, who worshipped the occult, but I’d never been into that sort of thing. “Oh, come on. I am not a witch, I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“Being a witch is not something you get to decide to be. Whatever you think you may know from what you’ve seen on TV or read in some human book, get it out of your head. Being a witch is in your blood, it’s who you are. And despite our appearance, we are no more human than elves or fairies.”
“It can’t be,” I whispered.
I tried to turn my head away. Devin reached for my chin and forced me to meet his gaze. “This doesn’t have to change anything between us, Lilli.”
“Devin, I don’t believe in witches and magic.”
He looked at me as if he couldn’t understand my refusal to accept everything he’d just told me. “You still don’t, even after what I showed you?”