Page 68 of Cherish

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she tells me in a singsong voice. “You have pretty hair.”

“Thank you. I think your hair is very pretty, too.”

“It is.” She grins and shakes her head. “Mom tells me it’s beautiful.”

“Your mom is right,” Heather says, bending down so she’s eye to eye with Tiola. “I’m Heather.”

“You’re human!” Tiola’s eyes go wide, and she claps her little hands. “I’ve always wanted to meet a human!”

The words are so similar to what she once said to me that it breaks my heart a little more. Heather seems charmed, though, and the two of them chatter for several seconds before Tiola moves on to Flint.

She takes her time working her way down the line of paranormals waiting to meet her. As she gets to the end—shaking hands with Jaxon—her backpack makes a loud cooing sound.

A loud,familiarcooing sound.

“Tiola.” Hudson calls her name in the voice of a man who is terrified to hope. “Who’s in your backpack?”

“You know who’s in my backpack, silly!” she answers as she shrugs the bag off her shoulders. “I knew you’d come back, so I’ve been keeping her safe for you. I don’t think she knows who you are—she didn’t remember me—but I’ve told her all about you.”

My heart is beating so fast now that I’m afraid it will explode before she actually gets the backpack open. Just in case we’re wrong, I move closer to Hudson, clutch his hand in mine. And pray like I haven’t prayed in a long, long time.

“Come on, girl,” Tiola coaxes as she kneels on the ground and unbuckles the top of her backpack. “Hudson is finally here, and he wants to meet you.”

There’s another cooing sound now, and it’s louder this time. Then Tiola reaches in and pulls out a tiny shadow puff no bigger than a softball.

My first sight of the umbra has my stomach dropping to my knees. She’s not Smokey after all—she’s way too small to be the umbra who followed Hudson around our entire time in Adarie.

But then Tiola turns around and crows, “Meet Baby Smokey!”

She’s so excited that she practically screams the umbra’s name as she thrusts her toward Hudson.

At first, neither of them move. They just stare at each other, wide-eyed. Then Smokey lets out a loud cry and dives for Hudson’s chest. She spreads herself out as thin as she can, then crawls up him until her little face is right in front of his and she’s looking him straight in the eye.

Then she chitters and chitters and chitters at him, a long discussion that I don’t understand but somehow still sounds an awful lot like she’s giving him what for.

As for Hudson, he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t even make a sound. He just stares at her like he’s seen a ghost. And then he, quite simply, crumbles.

I reach for him as his knees buckle, trying to catch him before his legs go out from under him completely. But it’s too late. All I manage to do is get pulled to the ground next to him, and then we’re there, all together. Hudson, Smokey, and me.

I reach out to stroke the tiny umbra, but Smokey hisses at me and pulls every particle of herself onto Hudson so that no part of her is touching any part of me. Apparently, lack of memories notwithstanding, some things never change.

“You’re here,” Hudson says in a voice that’s filled with as much disbelief as it is joy. “You’re really here.”

Smokey, in her own way, seems to be saying the exact same thing to him. She slips back down his chest, and Hudson catches her, cradles her in his arms as he strokes her shadowy cheek.

Tiola says Smokey doesn’t remember him, and maybe she doesn’t. But if I’ve learned anything in the last few months, it’s that the heart and soul remember things that the mind can’t hold on to. If they didn’t, I never would have known what to engrave that bracelet with that I got Hudson.

And as Smokey coos up at Hudson, staring deep into his blue eyes, it’s obvious that there’s a part of her that very much remembers him.

Thank God.

Eventually, though, the excitement of their reunion proves too much for Baby Smokey, and she curls into the crook of Hudson’s arm and falls fast asleep.

I crouch down next to them as she snores contentedly and whisper, “I told you she’d be here.”

He rolls those glorious blue eyes of his, but instead of the sarcastic comment I’m expecting, all he says is, “I should listen to you more often.”

“I’m sorry, what did I just hear come out of your mouth?” I ask, looking back around at our friends, who all started doing their own things once the novelty of watching Hudson entranced by a baby umbra wore off.

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