Page 68 of Clubs

“I am, yep.” Fiddling behind the register, she kept giving that familiar smile. She didn’t look the same as she did in the memories. Her face was rounder, nose softer, lips smaller, but it was unmistakable. The girl in the dreams and the girl who stood before me had to have been the same people. “Why do you ask?”

“Um,” I said, apparently being the only word I remembered at the moment. Eventually, I managed to spit out, “Do you know Guinevere?”

Pouring a coffee behind the register, she cocked her head to the side. “Not off the top of my head. Why do you ask?”

Her demeanor had shifted, the friendly, customer service voice was starting to fade out into something a little more defensive. “She, uh… She said you could help us.”

Slowly setting the coffee onto the counter, she squinted at me, and then at Declan. Her eyes came back to me, and the faintest hint of a smile teased the corner of her lips. “Oh, yeah? With what?

“Make sense of the things we’re seeing,” Declan answered. “Are you familiar with the phrase par animarum?”

That hint of a smile stretched a mile wide. “I am very familiar with that phrase.” This time, when she said it, there was only joy in her voice. “Why do you ask?”

“We…” I knew we had a man tied up back home and everything, but if Guinevere was right, and this was another one of us, she could answer so many questions. She could make so much of the last two years make sense. “We think we are…”

“And you’re stuttering because I look like someone you know from these ‘things’ you’re seeing.”

Partially fueled by joy, partially terrified to ruin this moment with why we were really here, all I managed out was, “Kind of.”

“What was her name?”

“Véa. I called her Véa.”

Suddenly, the woman on the other side of the counter beamed like a little kid. “Do you remember yours?”

I almost responded, but behind her, coming through the hall to the kitchen, was a man. A man I remembered from those memories.

One I knew before I had met Drogo. One I had grown up with. One I had watched become the man who stood before me now. Only, he was different too.

His long black hair was tucked in a bun behind his head, so I could see his ears. In those memories, they had been pointed. Then, he was an elf, or at least part elf. But his bright blue eyes hadn’t changed a bit. Neither had that strong jaw, big nose, and thick lips. Those lips that stretched into a smile as wide as the woman’s behind the bar. “Fuck, you look so much like you used to.”

I couldn’t help it. For some reason, talking to him, looking at him, felt like traveling back in time. Suddenly, I was in that igloo with the hot spring, the one with the algae that turned bright colors, and I was barely old enough to leave the house alone, but I was with him, and another girl with hair just as white as her skin, and a dark-skinned, brown-eyed girl with the sweetest smile. We were dipping our toes in the water, and it was so cold everywhere else, but the four of us were in that hot spring, and everything was right with the world. It didn’t matter how cold it was out there, because we were so warm in that igloo.

And the memory flashed, and suddenly, it was just him and I. That boy with the pointed ears was sitting with me in a grand room. Don’t ask me to describe it—I couldn’t if I tried. Because that wasn’t what mattered about the memory. What mattered was, we couldn’t have been more than ten, he had something in his lap that almost resembled a guitar, and I was plucking the strings on an instrument that I could best describe as a harp, but unlike any I’d seen in my current reality. And we were playing, and we sounded magnificent. Like angels.

“Nix?”

Laughing, he jogged around the woman at the counter. “Anise.”

I hadn’t even taken time to notice the man behind him, but now I did. And another memory flashed. He looked like Drogo. He looked like Drogo in the memory, and he looked a bit like him in the modern world, but there were differences. Most notably that Drogo was a bit more fit than that man. I didn’t remember his name, though. I remembered admiring him. I remembered loving his smile. That looking at him felt like home. That it was warm and safe. That he was warm and safe, and I cared about him on the deepest level.

“That means…” the man said.

“You’re Drogo,” the woman said to Declan, smiling still.

“Declan, actually.” He glanced at me. “And she’s Brooke.”

And suddenly, while I was still staring at the man on the other side of the counter, who I only just now realized was holding a small child, Nix wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug. He was only a few inches taller than me, probably somewhere around 6’4”, but he hoisted me off the ground and spun me in a circle.

As I laughed, and he did too, this almost indescribable feeling washed through me.

Like my entire life, I had been walking in place. Stagnant. More times than I could admit, than I dared to admit, I was miserable. I was lonely. All I had was my baby sister, and I had nobody to help me with her. I was a parent when I had never asked to be, and I had no one else.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, I got smacked with community. That was the only way to describe this. Sisterhood. Sure, the guy who was spinning me in the circle was a man, but I felt with him how I did with my sister. The same was true for the man with the toddler on his hip. Family, but deeper than that. A connection like I had only ever felt with Declan, without the romantic or sexual attraction.

Like I belonged.

As Nix set me down, I got a peek at Declan. He was also embraced in a bear hug by the man from the memories whose name I didn’t remember. But in those memories, they looked eerily similar. In this one, all they shared was race. Indigenous descent. But then, they had been family. Brothers, maybe?

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