Page 24 of The Discovered
“Do you miss Earth?”
“I try not to think about it,” I said, realizing that wasn’t really an answer. I sighed. “I think I’ve become very good at handling loss and sudden change. Having your mothers die before your eyes as a kid and finding yourself magickally teleported into the streets of New York City will do that to you.”
“Is that why you saw your power as a curse? Because you blamed yourself for your mothers’ deaths?” Daelon asked, but it sounded more like a statement of fact.
I swallowed. Now it was my turn to shut him down. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“None of it was your fault. They saved you, Áine. They—”
He stopped when he saw the look on my face. He was right. I knew that deep down, but I couldn’t think about it. I needed a break from feeling it all.
“Okay, sorry. What happened after they sent you to New York?”
I had to take another sip of whiskey, but this story I didn’t mind telling, so I told it all as Daelon listened intently. It was liberating to finally be able to tell someone the whole truth. I told him I didn’t miss Earth, but I did miss my friends. They taught me how to love and be loved again.
The State of New York didn’t quite know what to do with the mysterious orphan with an Irish accent and a large inheritance in an American bank account. There were forces on my side though, from whatever spell my mothers had cast to protect me, and that magick somehow influenced people to help me when they probably wouldn’t have otherwise. From the ages of ten to eighteen I was passed around from foster home to foster home, and most of the adults hated me and wanted access to my inheritance. They told me I was selfish, and I almost started to believe them.
It was a miracle I made it out with only damaged self-esteem. I saw what the system did to other kids my age, and I always knew it was my mothers’ special bracelet that kept me safe. I sometimes wished I still had some of my power, if only to protect everyone else. But I didn’t, so I kept my head down and white-knuckled my way through those eight years of displacement.
Most of the time I didn’t miss my magick because I knew it had brought about my mothers’ deaths. Even without it, though, I felt out of place and yearning for a place I saw in my dreams. I quickly learned not to talk about my clairsentience because it made people fear me, and they called me a freak. Actually, they called me a freak anyway for the way I talked and the way I saw the world, so I stopped talking, and I dropped my accent. I stopped thinking about the magick I felt as a child and my mothers’ bedtime stories. I nearly convinced myself that none of it had been real in the first place. Despite my subconscious yearning for home and the power I had lost, I was determined to live life as a human to honor my mothers. I ignored their voices in my dreams that reminded me I would someday return home. I ignored the tingling in my bracelet that reminded me my power was never truly gone.
I met Steph one day in Central Park. I sensed her energy when I passed by her as she casually rolled a joint on a picnic blanket, unbothered and unashamed. Her hair was in many long black braids, cast into a bun on the top of her head. She wore a maxi dress and a leather jacket, and her dark brown skin sparkled along her cheekbones, nose, and eyelids. It was an intense energy, yet soft and warm and maternal. It had something I craved. She seemed to sense me too, and she asked if I wanted to join her. We talked for a very long time, and a year later I told her about my clairsentience as we applied for schools together. We met Rena and Nick, and I got a degree in Anthropology, which was a bit ironic now that I thought about it. It was basically my attempt at taking a crash course on how to be a normal human.
I didn’t feel so out of place anymore. My friends may not have been witches, but they cared for and accepted me. They healed the damage of my years in the system. But there was always a part of me that knew that life could never last. As much as I tried to suppress it, I always knew there was this huge, gaping void inside me where my power was supposed to be. Nothing in the human realm was ever enough to quell the emptiness or the sense of unbelonging. I was caught between yearning for something more and convincing myself I was undeserving.Because what I thirsted for had killed my mothers.
When I finished telling the story, Daelon was silent for a moment, his eyes soft and open.
“Do you still think you’re undeserving?” he finally asked.
“Sometimes. But not when I’m in that ocean. Not when I feel it all. There’s something I need to do, but I don’t know what,” I said. My eyes watered, but I didn’t let any tears fall. “There are people who need my help.”
Daelon remained impassive but looked away and into the fire. “Thank you for telling me all of that.” He set his gaze back on me. “You are where you belong now.”
I nodded, letting out a deep breath.
“Look at me,” he said softly. His eyes were warm and inviting. “You deserve it all. Everything in this world and the next. You are more deserving than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Something about the fire, the blanket draped around my shoulders, the whiskey, Daelon’s kind words, and everything I’d just revealed, led a tear to escape my eye.
My cheeks warmed as Daelon moved closer to brush the droplet away with his thumb. He sat back, but there was still less than a foot between us.
“It’s me who is undeserving,” Daelon whispered, so soft I could barely hear it over the crackling of the flames. “Undeserving of you.”
I was speechless. Was this why he was constantly shutting himself down with me? Daelon didn’t ever act undeserving. If anything, he acted like he deserved it all. It was hard to reconcile all these parts of him—the domineering, the protective, the vulnerable, the controlling, the caring, the broken, the unworthy. Who was he really? And why did it not matter how confused he made me, or how much he didn’t tell me, or how irrational my feelings for him were… None of it mattered as he sat facing me, his face so close to mine, my skin tingling at the ghost of his touch on my cheek.
My breath caught in my throat, and I remembered my dream in the early hours of the morning. When Dream Daelon had looked at me like he owned me. When he climbed on top of me, I felt his bare chest, and he had dared me to admit I wanted to kiss him. When I did admit it by leaning into his lips—
“Is it frustrating not being able to read my energy?” Daelon asked, pulling me out of my dangerous reverie. His gaze reeled me in, and his tone dared me.
“Very.”
“Triple that frustration and yearning,” he leaned in closer, his breath tickling my skin, “and then maybe you could begin to fathom how badly I want to read your thoughts right now.”
Although the whiskey helped to numb the pull of my power, it only made my irrational longing for Daelon grow stronger. I looked to his lips and then back to his eyes. His jaw tensed and a flash of the untamed gleamed in his eyes, eerily similar to the look I saw in my dream. It was commanding of all my attention. The energy between us was palpable now, distracting and all-consuming. I could nearly taste it.
He closed his eyes, fighting a battle with himself I’d watched him fight many times now.
“Maybe we need to stop thinking,” I thought aloud, emboldened by the warmth in the pit of my stomach.
