Page 26 of Cherish

“Oh, that’s right,” he agrees. But he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he reaches for the jar of pickles and pops several more into his mouth.

Then, with a mouth full of pickles, says, “It’s all the Shadow Queen’s fault.”

“We assumed as much, given the whole you-made-a-prison-for-her-like-a-god move,” Hudson jokes, but his eyes are following Jikan carefully.

“Honestly,” he says, then sighs long and hard as he reaches behind his head and tugs his ponytail tighter. “This whole story is proof of why it’s just a good practice to avoid falling in love. Ever.” He takes a swig of his mimosa and chases it with another pickle before adding, “Better to have never loved so you can’t get lost, as the saying goes.”

“You fell in love with the Shadow Queen?” I bite out the question—because that would be all kinds of fucked up if he then built a prison for her.

“Why in the world would you think that?” he asks, his eyebrows hitting his hairline as he pauses in the middle of opening a bag of pasta. Then adds, “She fell in love with a mortal,” as if that explains everything.

Shrugging, he resumes cooking, if you can call it that, while the rest of us watch him warily. Jikan’s not a bad guy, but he is unpredictable—which makes trying to anticipate his behavior more than a little stressful sometimes.

“She fell in love and got married.” He reaches for a small saucepan and puts it on the stove next to the water pot. “And here we are.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re going to need more explanation than that, Jikan,” Hudson drawls as he pulls his phone from his pocket and starts scrolling without missing a beat. “People don’t tend to go from falling in love to trying to overthrow a god without something in between. So what set her off?”

“The pregnancy, obviously.” Jikan makes a disgusted face. “Isn’t that what always sets women off?”

“That’s sexist as fuck, isn’t it?” Hudson interjects mildly, more proof that he’s listening despite the fact that his thumbs are now flying across the screen.

The God of Time’s eyes narrow in annoyance as he drops a heaping spoon of peanut butter in the small pan in front of him. But then he must think about what Hudson said—and what he’d said to provoke it—because he sighs.

“You’re right. I apologize. In this instance,” he stresses, “what set the Shadow Queen off is falling in love with—and getting pregnant by—a human time wizard.”

I stiffen, and my gaze jumps to Hudson’s. I mouth,The mayor?at the same time that he raises an eyebrow.

We’d never considered that the Shadow Queen and the mayor were allies, and I can see the cogs turning in Hudson’s brain now. If the mayor was trying to reset the timeline to save his daughter… Maybe the Shadow Queen wasn’t fighting us to be free of the prison as much as she also wanted the timeline reset to savetheirdaughter.

Jikan continues, unaware that my mind is exploding. “Because she’s from the shadows, a wraith, the Shadow Queen is immortal. But her mate was mortal, which made her deathly afraid that—”

“Her child could die,” Alistair finishes from behind us.

Considering the last time I saw him, he was happily ensconced in the parlor with his mimosa, I wasn’t expecting to hear his voice right now. But he must have decided to follow us after all, because he’s currently leaning against the kitchen doorway, staring blankly into the distance. But there’s a softness—and a sadness—in his face that makes me wonder if he’s remembering his own daughter with the Bloodletter. The thought of her—and the pain my grandparents must have felt when they lost her—has my chest tightening.

“What did she do?” I ask, biting my lip with unwanted empathy for the Shadow Queen that makes the tightness in my chest even more pronounced.

Whatever she did next, however awful it must have been to lead to being sentenced to an immortal life in prison, a part of me can’t help but wonder just what lengthsIwould go to in order to save the life of the child Hudson and I might one day have.

Suddenly, getting the key from Jikan and releasing her from her prison seems like the absolute right thing to do, whether she helps Mekhi or not.

Jikan adds a splash of orange juice to the rapidly melting peanut butter before cracking an egg on the side of the pan and adding that, too. Heather makes a small gagging sound, but thankfully Jikan ignores her as he continues the story. “While pregnant, the Shadow Queen became obsessed with finding a way to keep her child from eventually dying. She begged the child’s father for help, which he refused several times, as this kind of magic is both forbidden and highly unstable.”

Jikan stops to add a giant pinch of salt and the entire pack of linguine to the now boiling pot of water on the stove. Then he tosses a pinch of salt over his shoulder—“For luck”—before rapidly stirring the peanut butter, orange juice, and egg concoction he’d just assembled and reaching for the cinnamon and dried mustard.

“So, what happened?” Heather asks eagerly. “Did her husband ignore her pleas for help?”

“He should have,” Jikan tells her with a disgusted shake of his head. “But no. Love made him soft, too. And when she eventually gave birth, he couldn’t resist his mate’s desperation, and he performed a spell using forbidden time magic that would let their daughter live forever.”

“Let me guess.” Hudson finally glances up from his phone with a lifted brow. “Something went wrong.”

“You could say that.” Jikan grabs his champagne flute and tries to take a sip of his mimosa, but the glass is empty. And because I know we’re not getting any more story out of him until he has another drink, I start to head back to the fridge to grab the pitcher of mimosas I noticed there earlier. But before I can hop down from my barstool, Jikan just waves a hand and his glass is full again.

I want to ask him why he nudged my grandmother for more when he can just fill his own glass like that, but Hudson gives me a look I can’t quite decipher, and I let the question drop.

Jikan takes a long sip of his drink, then steps into the larder again. When he comes out, he’s got a bag of shredded, sweetened coconut that he drops next to the Oreos and chocolate chips already on the counter. “Get me a measuring cup, will you?” he once again asks the room in general before continuing his story.

“Anyway, the ill-planned spell didn’t bring the baby eternal life like they’d hoped—because she was pregnant with not one child but two. Instead, as she gave birth to the second twin, it bound the children’s souls”—he breaks off to dart a quick look at Alistair before continuing—“forever.”

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