Page 155 of One For my Enemy

“Roma?” Another nod. “He’s been working as a paralegal in my firm the last few months, actually. Keeping his head down, staying away from witches.” Bryn paused for a moment. “But I think he’ll leave soon.”

His mother tilted her head, curious.

“Sometimes he looks down at his hands, you know, and I see it. Static. A spark.” Bryn briskly sipped his tea, aiming for impassivity. “His magic is coming back. I don’t think he’ll be able to deny it for much longer.”

“You said he was trying to escape it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Bryn said slowly, “but…” He glanced down at his own hands. The lines in them looked different now, changed. There was something in the crevices of his palms that hadn’t been there before, and he doubted that anyone born with that sort of remarkability possessed the restraint to deny what they were for long, grieving or not. Remorse or not. Punishment, or not.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to,” Bryn repeated, and his mother gave him a quizzical glance. Then she rose lightly to her feet, rummaging through a cabinet full of bottles and pulling out a dusty amber bottle of something syrupy and viscous.

“Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Try this.”

Bryn grimaced. “I’m not going to drug him, Mother.”

“Who said anything about drugging him?” she asked innocently, and he took the bottle from her with a sigh.

“You don’t have to say it for me to know perfectly well what you mean,” he informed her, and she gave him another dazzling smile.

“It’s just something I played around with. Meant to be shared.”

He arched a brow. She blew him a kiss.

“Fine,” he relented, and she smiled, pleased. “I’ll take the gift, but just so you know, I’m not going to stop him if he wants to go. He isn’t beholden to me, and we certainly aren’t friends.” He sipped the last of his tea. “We never made a deal that he would stay.”

“Oh, Brynmor,” she sighed. “You have such a terribly human way of looking at things.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, of course. But anyway, take the bottle,” she urged him. “For your friend.”

“He’s not my friend,” he repeated, exasperated, but she wasn’t listening. It was very hard to keep her attention; she was young yet, as far as fairies went.

Eventually, Bryn rose to his feet, the neck of the bottle clutched tightly in his hand. He leaned over to brush his lips against her cheek as he went.

“Do you think your father will die soon?” his mother asked absently, looking out the window.

He didn’t tell her the boy she’d known was a man now, covered with grey hair and lines and with no sense of wonder, far less interesting to her now than he was all those years ago. She would probably consider it a detestably mortal thing to have done, if not a total betrayal.

“I’ll kill him myself if he doesn’t,” Bryn offered instead, and she smiled at him, waving him away as she turned back to her reverie. He strode to the front door, pulling it open, and behind him, the house disappeared. She’d have taken a new and more interesting form by then, surely. Meanwhile, it might take him all day to leave this realm if he didn’t start walking now.

Bryn wandered the pathway in silence, pondering each step. In this realm, things weren’t quite so permanent. Time moved in whatever direction it felt it should, turning and retracting in on itself in invisible currents and tides. He reached a hand out, feeling it warp pleasantly under his fingers, darting and preening and slithering. He might have been here an hour, maybe a whole day. By now, though, he knew well enough when to leave, to avoid missing the deposition in the morning.

Bryn was nearly back to the bridge for which he’d been named when he paused, catching something from afar. A young man with golden hair sat beneath a green oak tree, lazing in the shade with a dark-haired girl in his arms. He was conjuring something, a little flutter of wings for her amusement, and she looked up with an unburdened laugh, fingers outstretched to reach it.

It took a moment for Bryn to realize he was staring. At a certain point, though, the girl looked over, lifting her chin. She sat up slightly, letting her long hair cascade in waves down her back, and gave him a small wave, the boy beside her turning to follow her gaze.

Bryn raised a hand, returning the gesture. Marya Antonova smiled, soft and slow, and then blinked, as if she’d forgotten what she was looking at. She turned back to Dimitri Fedorov, looking momentarily lost, and he pressed his lips to her temple, soothing her. They curled into each other, retreating back into their private little world, and Bryn took a last, long look at them.

The scar on her chest was gone.

Bryn nodded, satisfied.

He crossed back into the land of the living sometime in the dead hours, the not-quite-morning ticks of the clock, and shook his head as he set the bottle from his mother on the corner of his desk. He hadn’t been totally honest with her, though that wasn’t quite the insult to fae that it was to humans. There was no point sharing truth with fae; they didn’t know what to do with it. They liked their own imaginations more.

Bryn glanced down at the envelope he still hadn’t opened, eyeing the script on the front.

Bridge.

---