Dad, it meant he wasn’t a baby, thank God. I’d been worried about that.
I let out a half-hysterical, half-sorrowful sob.
I felt like I was losing it. The power coursing through me was overwhelming, and I couldn’t get the tears to stop. I didn’t think Zodia cried.
Maybe their hearts hardened over time.
Would mine? Would this ache ever leave?
Aries held his hands out to hold me. “Aren’t you afraid of my blood?” I was drenched in it, some drying, some still very wet.
“At first I wondered if it would hurt us, but the others were standing in it and it didn’t harm them.” He took a tentative step, then another. Then he gathered me into his arms where I melted, sobbing into his shoulder until I couldn’t anymore. “I’m so sorry, Larken. I know this isn’t the life you wanted.”
“No, it isn’t.”
After the battle, time seemed to move slower. I looked to the place Kes fell, closing my eyes when the nightmarish memory surfaced. I pulled away from Aries.
“Can I see my mom now?”
“Of course.” His eyes promised the world, and I knew he would give it to me if he could. He would’ve saved Kestrel if he could, too. “She can live in your territory, if you’d like. Libra conceded her to me, and I concede her to you.”
My territory. “How far away is your territory?”
“Only a thought away, Larken. Distance is meaningless to us.”
Right.
“I wish we were neighbors,” I said lamely, wondering who my neighbor Zodia were. Maybe I should pay them a visit, bake some cookies. Depending on who they were, I could even lace them with poison.
I took a steadying breath. “I don’t know how to go to her.”
“Just think about her, and you’ll be drawn directly to her. Or for now, I can take you.”
I shook my head. “I have to depend on myself now.”
And a twelfth of the world’s population depends on me. “What will happen while I’m gone? Taurus’s Guardians are dead, right?”
He gave a nod. “I can have someone watch over things until you return.”
“Helena,” I said. I trusted her. “But can you have someone else that you trust watch over Kes? What about the older woman who called me ‘bella’?”
Aries took in a deep breath. “Done.”
Helena appeared in front of me and gave me a tight hug that made the knot in my throat double in size. I remembered the kids outside the tent village, starving and living in squalor. I remembered thinking that if they were my people, I’d make sure they had enough to eat and proper places to live. “Please make sure the people are fed. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Tell them I’ll provide them all houses and… Well, just tell them I’ll make things right.”
She promised to check on them and feed any who needed it.
I stepped back and took a deep, shuddering breath. Then I thought of Mom.
30
Mom was in my room in Aries’s castle. She was sitting on the bed, holding the wooden hoop, her thumbs brushing over the x’s she’d cross-stitched into the dark fabric. When she saw me, she startled and clutched her chest in surprise. Then the hoop was forgotten, flung onto my bed in her haste to reach me. Despite the blood-stained wings tucked against my back and the blood coating every inch of my dress and skin, she hugged me.
“You’re alive!” she sobbed.
I cried with her. Tears squeezed from my eyes as I pressed them tightly closed. “I have a lot to explain, Mom.”
She huffed a laugh as she wiped her cheeks. “I’d say so,” she tried to tease, but I didn’t miss the way her eyes combed over my feathers.
We sat on the bed, facing one another. One ponderous word at a time, I gave her the truth and left nothing out.
I started with Kestrel’s death and Kes’s appearance – she took that better than expected – all the way to the day everything fell apart, including how Kes left to go check on her and Dad once they were collected.
She started to panic, thinking Dad might be dead, but I reassured her he was fine and that Kes, in a new body, was with him. Then I told her about everything that happened when I came here, how kind Aries had been, what Xavier did, and that Kes came to save me and was captured in the process. I told her how I felt about Aries. That I loved him. That I fell hard and