Page 44 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The shame burned like a branding. As if I’d been tricked again—as if I’dletmyself get tricked again. But there were layers of other emotion piled thickly on top of that feeling—all-consuming films of rage, betrayal, desolation—and I couldn’t wade through it to find my own foolishness, cradling that feeling of naivety so the edges didn’t turn sharp and begin to slice me into ribbons from the inside out.
Buckling under the pain, I folded myself in half, clutching my stomach as my head grew heavy and hot with fast-rising congestion.
“Take me back,” I wailed, slamming my fist into the brick wall beside me. Pain shot through my knuckles, radiating across my wrist and up through my elbow to my shoulder. My skin scraped against the rough surface, but it only made me smash my hand harder against it as I hiccuped sobs and wild, animalistic sounds of sorrow and desperation. “Take me back! Take me back!Take me back—”
“Aura, I’m sorry.” Lucais’s presence was a distant warmth, a sun orbiting the void. I felt the sincerity in his apology and found the sensation strange. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I can’t. I’m not a—”
Time traveller.
Through the bond, I completed the sentence. The ache in my wrist became so profound that I had to stop hitting the wall, so I turned, barely managing to locate his face through the blur of tears in my eyes as a violent sob wracked my shoulders, and slid to the ground.
When the fibres of my coat caught and pulled against the rough surface of the bricks, making an unbearable scraping sound on my way down, I shrugged out of the sleeves. I didn’t care that it was freezing cold outside. I curled up, crestfallen, on the concrete slab that made up the front porch of my family’s home.
My chest was on fire.
Pain so intense it felt like a heart attack coursed through me, rolling out across my body in flares of sadness and regret from where my heart was splintering into a million different pieces.
I didn’t need him to say it out loud. Lucais was many things, and he lay claim to many different powers, but we’d walked into the one thing he couldn’t do. The one gift he couldn’t give me.
It was the limitation of a man who could do anything—
Anythingbut give the Malum their High Fae powers back.Anythingbut give the humans their connection to the High Mother back.Anythingbut give his soulmate the years she’d missed from her little sister’s childhood back.
“I thought you knew,” he said into the eerie quiet of the new world, sounding shell-shocked himself.
Shaking my head, I replied with a croaky, “No.” My throat felt swollen and raw from the hysterics, and there was a pounding bass drum in my head.
“A part of me suspected it was why you asked me to make them forget you,” he went on. “When you agreed to come with me without hesitation, I assumed you didn’t exactly plan on returning.”
“No,” I said again, my voice flat, dead.
I glanced up at my mother’s body standing like a wax figure in the doorway—a person I knew well, yet at the same time the face of someone I’d never met.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I admitted, so low he wouldn’t have heard if my confession wasn’t literally the onlysound left in the entire world. “I still don’t. But I’ve seen this on television.” I choked down another miserable sob that was nearly a laugh and lifted my head back to rest against the brick wall. “I take it that I’m not going to crumble into dust now or something?”
Lucais was already shaking his head. “You’re part-faerie,” he reminded me gently. “But if you were completely human, it would depend on how much time had elapsed. Time operates differently in Faerie than it does in the human world because the lack of magic here means that what could be days for us ends up being months for them. Their lives can end in the blink of an eye—and so can their childhoods, their youths, their years.”
He tipped his head towards my mother, his brow furrowing. “They know it too. Talk about it endlessly. Magic sustains the High Fae through the ages, and appeals to the humans who find out about the real world and travel into it to live with us. With the limitations removed, we can theoretically live forever, whereas human beings are bound to short bursts of consciousness while they remain on this plane of existence.”
I nodded because different threads of faerie lore showed up in all sorts of books and movies, and I’d heard about it.
Of course I’d heard about the humans who were lured into Faerie for what felt like a few weeks, only to return to their own realm and find that they’d overstayed their own lifespans. But even though the faeries in those tales had looked and acted differently from the ones I’d met myself, it was my own fault for not questioning it. For not seeking answers to the queries I was probably too afraid to ask for too many good reasons.
“How long?” I mumbled, swallowing down a gulp of what felt and tasted like a ball of snot. “I’ve been gone for, what? A couple of months at the most? How long is that in human years?”
Lucais made a small noise in the back of his throat. “That’s the problem. I don’t…” He trailed off, peering around my mother’s motionless frame as if he was searching for a calendar on the wall.
I knew he wouldn’t find one. She was never interested in remembering the day of the week—although she’d never been interested in checking the time, either.
And yet, suddenly she was the proud owner of an antique grandfather clock.
Huge, wooden, and loud, it clashed with almost everything else in her house. The reason why it might suddenly be there circled my mind, but I pushed it away. I could not bear to think about that.
“I’m not sure,” Lucais confessed, raking a hand through his light gold hair haphazardly. “Something isn’t adding up here. We should hardly be a year into their future, but Brynn was a little girl when we left, and now she looks like—”
“An adult,” I finished for him.
Brynn looked like she was fast approaching her eighteenth birthday—if she hadn’t already had it. Tears sprang to my eyes again, my face crumpling. I bent to hide my expression against my knees so he couldn’t see it while I heaved over a silent sob.
