There was no hug he could give that would keep a child out of danger, no compliment from him that could make them love themselves, no forgiveness he could ask that could take back the cruelty of past actions. He just had to be here long enough to direct Lydia back to a proper father—one who was surely panicking over his daughter’s disappearance right now.
Still rubbing Lydia’s back as she cried, Rahil sent off a quick text:She’s safe. I’m with her at the cemetery. Don’t come.
He muted the chimer after and slid the phone away. “There there,” he muttered, brushing his hand over Lydia’s braids.
Her crying turned to the occasional lingering sob, and she wrapped her arms around herself, but didn’t pull away. Slowly, Rahil detached enough to relight his candle. The faint orange glow of it flickered over Lydia’s tear-stained cheeks. She wiped them, one side after the other.
Rahil offered the candle to her. She took it, cradling it between her hands.
Finally, she asked, “Dad didn’t send you here?”
“No. I came to visit my family.”Family. The sound of that word in reference to himself felt like he’d stabbed a blade into his own chest. It had been something like two decades since he’d used it out loud. Like a solid point. An eternal connection.
“Where?” Lydia glanced around, like a group of people might appear between the tombstones, but Rahil pointed across the graveyard.
“They’re buried on the far side. My sons, and my—my wife.”Exdidn’t seem important right now.
“Oh,” Lydia said. She had sad eyes, Rahil thought. Whenever the intensity left them, that was what they seemed to become. Sad. It reminded him too much of Jonah. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry for you, too.” Rahil nodded toward Leah’s grave. “Do you talk to her?”
“Twice a year,” Lydia recited, a bitter edge to her voice. Anger, over sadness.
“Except tonight?”
Lydia looked down at the candle in her hands, twisting it to spill the melted wax over the sides. “I don’t know,” she said, finally, and Rahil thought he understood.
“You just needed someone who wasn’t your dad, and you didn’t know where else to go.”
She sniffled and tossed her shoulders. The candlelight danced. “Well, yeah, but you’d make up some reason I can’t be a vampire because I cry too much, so—!”
It took a moment for Rahil to piece together the logical jump in her response, but then he got it, and he almost wished he hadn’t: she’d thought about coming tohim. She’d wanted to, and something had held her back, maybe the excuse she’d given or maybe the simpler reason that she hadn’t known if she’d be accepted. But she had needed a place to go and decided Rahil felt nearly safe enough to be that place. Rahil’s chest ached. He wanted to wrap her up in a second hug, while knowing that what she truly needed was the opposite of that. Even her mother’s grave was a better parenting substitute than him.
There was one thing maybe hecoulddo, though.
Soft but firm, trying to withhold any judgment—or worse, pity—Rahil asked, “Why do you want to be a vampire, Violet?”
Lydia dug one of her fingertips into the spilled candle wax hardening on the side of her hand. “If I’m a vampire,” she said, carefully, “then I can’t be a fae.”
Ah. “Is this because of your spark?”
She nodded her head, a tiny motion that made her braids jiggle. “If I turn, my dysfunctional spark will go away. I’ll be strong instead, and maybe I won’t be able to do everything I could before, but there’s lots of things I already can’t do, and I won’t need meds and be worried about missing them or losing them or the dog eating them and—” She drew in a sharp breath and let it out slowly. “It’ll be better. For everyone.”
“I see you’ve put a lot of thought into this.” Rahil didn’t agree with her conclusion—he knew the grass was not always greener on the other side—but he understood where she was coming from. He’d been in a similar position himself once, though he’d been twice her age with far fewer options. “Does thateveryoneinclude your dad?”
Lydia nodded again, this time with more assertion. “He worked so hard to get me my meds, but he’s sad they aren’t perfect, and he’s always scared they’ll run out, or they won’t work like they used to. Without my spark, Dad can relax.”
Ah, there it was—the deeper reason. Rahil could hear it in her voice, the sureness of her words and the fire beneath them. Not shame or guilt, but anger. Mercer was tearing himself apart trying to ensure his daughter had the easiest and safest life possible, when all she wanted was to just live—inconveniences included. Vampirism seemed like an easy way to make those inconveniences less reliant on him, less stressful to him.
It wasn’t true, though.
If only Rahil had a way to convince her of that. But he was pretty sure that was something only Mercer could do.
“You won’t tell him?” Lydia asked, turning stonier as she added, “Youcan’t.”
Fuck. Rahil did not like this, no more than he liked not telling Mercer why he’d started meeting with Lydia in the first place. He groaned. “I won’t tell himyet.”It was the most he felt comfortable agreeing to. “Because you should be the one to do that.”
“No!”
