I got it. My heart sank, and I balled my hands into fists. But I got it.
Angry at myself for even attempting to open up as I had, I shrugged. “Look, whatever, dude, I was just trying to be nice. I think I’m gonna split, though, because I really do have someplace I have to—”
“I’ll go.” He frowned, looking as unhappy about it as I was surprised by this unexpected turnaround.
“What?”
He shook his head, still looking like he wasn’t sure why he was agreeing to come with me, which didn’t exactly fill me up with warm fuzzies.
“I’ll go,” he said again, abruptly. “Oui, I’ll go.”
I narrowed my eyes at his bark, feeling prickly and defensive all of sudden. If he didn’t want to go, he didn’t need to go. I wanted to snap that at him, but I was suddenly exhausted, far too tired to keep arguing with him. It was always the same thing.
I rolled my eyes. “God, you’ve always been such a stubborn ass.”
His brows dropped, and he blinked, looking at me like I’d sprouted a third eyeball.
I blinked, too, because... what the hell had that been? “I... I mean you—”
He shook his head. “Let’s just go, Betty.”
His nostrils flared, and my heart felt like it’d suddenly stopped beating for half a second. The way his mouth and tongue had caressed my name—it’d felt so damn familiar... so... so familiar, like I’d heard it said in that way a thousand and one times. A brushstroke of vowels and consonants. A tender caress, and an expression of fond exasperation. I swallowed hard, and finally, my stupid feet listened to my stupid brain because I turned and started walking.
I had no idea where I was going. I just needed to get away from him for a second. Away from those blue-jean-colored eyes that’d been my favorite color ever since I’d been a child and decided there was no shade prettier than that. Away from the way he smelled, like freaking man and leather and all things uber-manly and sexy as hell. My breathing hitched as panic wormed a hot little hole through my gut.
From the moment Le Pew and I had bumped into each other, I kept having all these weird feelings and sensations, like I knew him, really knew him.
I’d never bought into the whole reincarnation deal, but how the hell else could I explain what was going on here? I was vexed by him, like, out of my mind annoyed with him, yet I didn’t want him going anywhere.
From the second we’d locked eyes on that pier, something inside my body had gone click. A missing piece of the puzzle—that strangely echoey and empty place inside my heart that, all my life, I’d tried to fill with books and comics and stars and James, and had always just been so empty and void—was now burning bright, raging inside of me, telling me I’d found it. I’d found him.
Tears blurred my vision. What was happening to me? Humiliated beyond belief at this visceral reaction burning through me, I picked up my pace. I needed to get away from him, from his smell, from those eyes, and from the rough, scratchy tenor of his sexy French voice.
Something was dangerously wrong with me right now. I started to jog, but soon the jog turned into a fast trot, and then a clip, until finally I was full-on sprinting at the end.
I knew I looked crazy, and I felt it, too.
I was pinging on all cylinders. I needed to see my brother. He was a nurse. He could tell me what was going on. Maybe I’d hit my head without realizing it. Ever since I’d fallen off that stupid pier, nothing had made sense.
It felt like I’d been walking in a dream all my life, and then this strange French dude appeared, and I’d finally woken up. Each second, minute, hour that ticked by with him near was awakening something deep inside me, something bottomless and full of such terrible pain that I’d shoved it far down to the point that I’d not known it had even existed until just now.
From behind me, I heard him calling my name, and I couldn’t help but wonder what in God’s name he was thinking, chasing after me this way. If I saw someone breaking down like this, I was pretty sure I’d run in the opposite direction. And yet, when his scratchy voice cried out to me again, it was like a rope had been wrapped around my soul and was now squeezing tighter and tighter, stealing the breath from my lungs and telling me to turn around, to stop.
Stop. Stop. STOP!
I came to a screeching halt, which he’d clearly not been prepared for because he barreled into my back. I heard his sharp, angry growl and felt the reverberations of that sound move through his chest because, rather than shove me away, he wrapped his arms tight around me, dragging me in close, holding me fast, like I was his anchor, like I was vital.
Panic clawed at my brain. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, why I suddenly felt such a soul-deep and cutting pain, even as I wanted to turn in his arms and scream out to him that he’d found me. He’d finally found me.
We landed hard on the rocky patch of earth, and somehow, I was on my back, knees spread wide, cradling him between my legs. Our chests heaved as we fought for breath. I stared up into a color of blue as familiar to me as the tattoos on my body.
I fought the damn, stupid tears, but they came in great, big, ugly torrents. Some girls looked pretty when they cried, glamorous and sexy. Not me. I was an ugly crier. My nose got bright red. My eyes got puffy. My already-pale skin turned a ghostly shade of white.
He looked angry, which only increased my panic. I wanted so desperately to get away from him. I was having a breakdown of epic proportions, and the second I got my tumultuous emotions under control, I knew I was going to feel humiliation like I’d never known before in my life, the type that would eat away at me all the days of my life. The type that, even when I was eighty and had one foot in the grave, the second I thought of it, I’d be cringing, dying on the inside, and wishing like hell I had a do-over button in life.
Sounds I’d never heard myself make were spilling off my tongue, broken and desperate, and I could almost hear the words whispering through my heart.
You found me. You found me. You found me...
But they made no sense, so I cried harder as I kicked and grunted and tried to shove him off me. It was the damnedest thing, though, because even as I commanded my brain to run away, my hands had a mind all their own. They were fisted tight into his crazy-looking shirt and holding him close, nails digging in so hard that thin ribbons of blood began to bloom.
The second I saw it, the madness snapped, and I could think again. I could reason. I could see what I was doing. With an inarticulate cry, I released him and wiggled out from beneath him, my movements frantic and desperate.
He was quick to move back, giving me room, space. I knew I’d probably scared the living crap out of him. So why wasn’t he running away? Why was he just kneeling there, looking at me with his mouth hanging open and shaking his head over and over again.
Like he was sure this had to be a dream, too.
But it wasn’t. It so wasn’t.
Roughly swiping at my cheeks, I dried my tears and took several deep breaths.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked, not expecting him or anyone else to answer.
Laying a large hand over his chest, he frowned as he said, “My name is Gerard Caron.”
Those puzzle pieces, missing for so long—another one of them just slipped into place.
Click.
I blinked, and he blinked right back. And I swear, for just a brief moment, the earth literally trembled beneath our feet.
Chapter 8
Rumple
I watched them in the scrying bowl, wondering for the millionth time if I’d made the right decision. The bright bloom of scarlet on Gerard’s neck would haunt me forever.
I remembered the many nights he and I had shared around the family dinner table talking of our hopes, our children, and the future. Once, he’d been the infamous Lothario of all of Kingdom, and I the dark prince. We were hated and reviled by most, but together, we’d bonded over our shared love of his daughter.
It had taken me decades to get Gerard to
trust me. He was far less approachable than his pretty, intelligent wife had been, but he was loyal. Once his trust had been earned, there was no man more willing to lay his life down for his friends than Gerard.
He may not remember, but I did, and I knew that what’d been done this day was a sin I could never come back from. Not in his eyes.
And yet I was just selfish enough not to give a damn.
Running a lazy finger over the rounded rim of a crystal tumbler on the stand beside me, I watched them begin the process anew. I watched their story unfold for her.
Someday, Shayera would want to know it all. Someday, she’d have questions, and I was determined to have all the answers. And so I watched, my heart caught in my throat, my role in this drama beating like a heavy drum in my chest.
She wasn’t yet born, but already, I could hear my wife’s vitriol, see the reflection of hate burning in her ice-blue eyes when I called their debt due. I was a right bastard, and well I knew it.
Danika’s words echoed in the chambers of my mind. They would forever haunt me. I’d made my choice. I had to deal with the consequences.
I had eased up on Betty and Gerard’s trial. I’d planned at first to kill one off each night, resurrecting them the following morning. They would have been doomed to repeat the cycle of life and death over and over again, trapped in the same day until they finally admitted their feelings for one another and broke the temporary curse.
But apparently, my years with Shayera had softened me more than I’d known. Gripping Gerard’s neck fast, feeling the life slowly drain from him, watching the bulge of his eyes, and hearing the gasps of his feeble breaths—that’d been the moment I’d altered course.
Beyond all reason, beyond all belief, I still loved them. I’d thought my love for Shayera had been the only real thing I’d known, that my patience with and kindness toward her family was merely because of my desire to please her.
When I’d felt Gerard’s life slipping away and witnessed the burn of terror through Betty’s eyes, I’d experienced a startling epiphany. I loved them. They were my in-laws, but they were so much more.
The Spider had shown me their fates—one where they chose each other, and one where they both decided to walk away and forget. My soul had crumbled in my chest when I’d witnessed that reality.
Betty had gone on to live a life of joy and contentment, happily settled in France with a home full of children and her days filled with love, heartache, smiles, and tears until she finally breathed her last and moved on to the next phase of existence.
Gerard, on the other hand, hadn’t fared so well. He’d gone on to become the bitter, jaded Casanova he’d once been, leaving a trail of broken hearts and embittered fathers in his wake. And though he was of Kingdom and naturally long-lived, his life had ended tragically and far too soon when, one dark and drunken night, he’d decided there was nothing good worth living for any longer.
I closed my eyes and heaved a weary sigh. I was expelling a great deal of magic to keep them in the enchantment. I was tired to my very depths.
I’d come home and settled Euralis into his bed, grateful to still have my one boy with me. He was the only thing keeping me partly sane.
“And so you’ve decided your course, then.” Danika’s scratchy voice broke through my weary contemplations.
Cracking open one eye, I studied her. She sat beside the fire and across from me, legs daintily crossed and sipping on a mug of something I could only assume to be tea. Her long brown tresses were loose and flowing, and the flowers that cascaded through the locks were wilted and dying at the edges. Her spider-silk gown no longer twinkled, and her smooth, alabaster skin looked pale and washed out. She gave me a tight grimace.
“Mind if I join you, Rumpel?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I did not think you would wish to speak to me again after what I’d done.”
My voice cracked, and I had to clear my throat twice to rid the lump from it.
She shrugged one thin shoulder. “Maybe, just maybe, it’s dawned on me these past few days that I can’t keep pretending the world isn’t a bloody mess and that maybe, just maybe, the only way to right these wrongs is to take the road less traveled. Maybe.”
Snapping my fingers, I cleared the vision from the scrying bowl. “What’s happened to Jericho?”
Jericho, the man in the moon, and Danika had had a generational love affair. They’d been together far longer than any of the rest of us, yet I did not see Danika losing her head as I had. I could not understand how she bore it. I could clearly see the pain reflected in her eyes, but still she smiled weakly at me.
Perhaps it was her fairy nature. I did not know. But I very much envied her ability to still breathe right.
“Jericho does not remember me,” she said simply and took a sip of her tea.
“Does that not kill you?”
She sighed. Her piercing gaze ripped right through me, exposing me and leaving me feeling naked before her. “Oh, Rumpel. You and I, we are not so different after all, are we, my friend?”
I heard something in her words. A plea? I wasn’t sure, but something gave me pause.
“You wish me to help you recover Jericho?”
“Jericho and I waited centuries before. I can wait again.” Her smile was bleak. “He does not remember me. His life is good, now. Only I suffer, and maybe that’s the way it should be. I need to fix things for my godchildren. Apart from Jinni and Paz, none of them survived the curse unscathed.”
Her words picked at the raw wound inside my soul, and I found myself glancing down into the clear water in the scrying bowl, knowing no time had passed, yet desperate to see it all unfold, determined that I would fix this damn bloody mess no matter the lengths it took me.
“Have you seen Trishelle yet, Rumpel?” she asked softly, dragging me away from my grim thoughts. The knuckles of her fingers were blanched a deep bone white as she clutched her mug with nerveless hands.
I shook my head. “I know she was Betty’s best friend in her past life, but Betty is almost completely altered from the woman we once knew. She’s harder, more... angry. She’s not mentioned Trishelle, but I can see if I can find her. But where is Hook? In all this time, the blackguard hasn’t cropped up yet. Do you not find that—”
“Worrisome?” she said. “Aye, I do.”
“I was going to say unusual, but worrisome will do, I suppose.” I leaned back in my seat, scratching at my cheek and suddenly feeling all of my three thousand-plus years.
I was deeply tired and worried for my family, for my children that had vanished, for my bride that no longer existed, for the possibility that Ea Seko had been wrong, and even if Betty and Gerard managed to secure their happily ever after again, the very real doubt that it would be Shayera they gave birth to.
Not that Ea Seko had ever given me cause to doubt her before, but my very heart and soul rested upon this divination. I literally had nothing left, no other options, no other hope.
This either worked, or it didn’t.
The thought was crushing enough to make my stomach heave. I clamped down on my tongue, breathing through the panic eating a hot hole right through me.
“I fear I’m the very worst sort of company tonight, Rumpel. I shall leave you.” I looked up just in time to see Danika flick her wand and open up a travel portal behind her. She gazed at me with worried, dark eyes. “It is so easy to doubt and so very hard to hope. This should not be. Not for me. I work in the impossible.”
Our shared history together made me want to offer her some crumb of solace, but there was not even that left in me. If Danika barely held on to the slightest bit of hope, I’d lost mine entirely.
There was nothing but a yawning emptiness stretching inside of me now.
“Gods speed, fae,” I said with a clipped nod.
She held my gaze for only a second more before turning and vanishing into her brightly-jeweled travel tunnel.
Too weary to move, I snapped my fingers to view my in-laws in
the scrying bowl. My heart lurched the moment I saw Betty’s big eyes. Shayera’s were a startling shade of blue, more akin to her father’s than her mother’s, but they were the same size and shape as Betty’s.
If I narrowed my eyes and looked out of the corners of them, I could almost imagine it wasn’t a chocolatey brown, but an icy blue staring back at me.
Chapter 9
Gerard
The giant bird hadn’t eaten me, which was rather a miracle.
I won’t go into detail about how I nearly pissed myself when Betty demanded I ride in that monstrous contraption of hers. Needless to say, it hadn’t been my best moment. But once she’d demanded I either get in or stay... well. Thankfully, I hadn’t fainted.
Though my heart had fluttered mightily in my chest.
We were now back on terra firma, walking through a place she called a “grocery store.” Now this... this I liked.
We were walking down a long isle full of boxed stuffs—food, she’d said. I personally thought she was insane. Scratching my scruffy chin with a long finger, I stared at a brown-colored box with an image of mashed tubers on it.
I’d tried dipping my finger into the box, but had encountered nothing but hard paper.
“How in the bloody hell do you eat this?” I gently picked up the box and began rotating it, wrinkling my nose and grimacing at the strange weight sliding back and forth inside.
A woman with silvery-blue hair, pushing a modified silver bird—this one much smaller and without the steering wheel on it—walked along beside me and tossed me a dirty look.
I raised a brow.
Betty laughed, the sound a little high-pitched and frantic, as she snatched the box out of my hands and hugged it tight to her chest.
“Hello, Ms. Carol. Good to see you today. How’s your back?”
Ms. Carol, the blue-haired biddy, looked from Betty to me and back again before shrugging. “I’ll live.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Ms. Carol sniffed, which seemed to make Betty even more nervous.
“And who’s this strange feller?” she asked, pointing a thumb at me.
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