“You know what this means, darlin’.” They were more than halfway home by then, his hand on her knee at the red light, tapping her thoughtfully.
“It means your sisters are going to lose their ever-loving minds, doesn't it?”
He waved a hand. “That's implied. I hope you’re ready for the mob to descend as soon as he’s big enough to fly. There’ll be no livin’ with any of them until they get to meet him.”
Lurielle laughed as he turned at the light, just a few blocks from home. The home she would be bringing her son to in just a few short months.A boy.Him.
For the first time since the day she peed on her hand, her pregnancy began to feel real, beyond the attention to her diet and the detachment from her body. Real that transcended her lack of current clothing options. She was going to have a baby.A little boy. They would need to start thinking of names, buying clothes, planning for his future in a way that felt concrete and certain. She understood then why orcs celebrated so much. It was impossiblenotto want to scream her good news from Jack Hemming’s shining golden tower on Main Street, alerting all of her neighbors.
“This means we're going to have to have another one,” Khash went on. “We're going to need to keep goin’ until I get my princess. Don't go looking at me that way. Those are the rules, I didn't make 'em up.”
“Well, great news, Big Daddy. You're the one in charge of that. So why don’t you have a private conversation with your boys below the belt and explain the assignment next time. Becauseuntil then, that just sounds like an excuse for you to get that big dragon of yours all hot and bothered.”
“Darlin’, I don't need an excuse to be hot and bothered. You make this dragon hard every day that ends in Y. I'm just letting you know. Don't go gettin’ rid of those stretchy pants.”
She was still laughing when they stretched out on the sofa. She had the official printout from the doctor's office, something to put into her book.And you're going to write down everything that happened today. How you felt, that look in his eye, how tightly he held your hand.And who knows? Maybe by the time this one is out of diapers, you'll have this motherhood thing down pat. She exhaled deeply, expelling the stale hospital air from her lungs.
Maybe she’d be ready for a girl by then, Lurielle thought, and for the first time, she believed it without reservation.
Silva
The gate stood just a few feet before the road, wrought iron with bars blackened by age and cold, their finials tipped in ice-coated leaves, practically hanging from its frozen hinges. Silva was certain that at one time, the entire field beyond was likely enclosed by similar wrought iron fencing, pointed spires keeping would-be grave robbers away, but if it had indeed existed, it did so no longer.
The gate itself was the only remnant, a lone sentry in the snowy landscape, guarding nothing. Nothing she could see, at least.
Snow lay heavy at the base, drifted up against the stone threshold, so sunk into the earth that it barely existed. Beyond the gate stretched one small section of the cemetery, the oldest section. Indistinct stones were uneven lumps of varying heights beneath the snow blanketing them, all that remained of those interred beneath.
The world around her was hushed, as if the heavy layer of snow necessitated holding one’s breath. The cold was worrying its way through the thick material of her coat and the leatherof her gloves, making her tremble. There was no noise, no traffic, no birdsong. The whole world felt blunted, muffled by the endless white heaps.
Silva took an experimental step off the road, the toe of her boot crunching through the frozen top layer of the snow, sinking into the rest, up to her ankle. Another step, squealing once she found herself stumbling the next several, the momentum of the downward pitch from the road being steeper than she expected. She halted just before the gate, arms pinwheeling at her sides to ensure she stayed upright on the uneven, icy terrain. She was breathing hard, but not just from the exertion of her short journey from the car.
It’s just a gate.
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. A visible rupture, perhaps, a fissure in the earth. Something that screamedunnatural. Instead, it looked like an ordinary, neglected cemetery on the edge of town, one she might have driven past a hundred times without noticing. It was the ordinariness of it that unsettled her more than anything overtly strange might have. It wasn’t humming, there was no supernatural waver about it, the air around it did not shimmer. It was a hunk of frozen old iron in the snow. Nothing more.
She was able to take a step around it with ease, as she did then. There was nothing stopping her. Silva half expected to be zapped by an invisible force field when she did and felt foolish after she braced herself for an electric shock that never came. The backside looked the same as the front — nothing worth the journey.
Pivoting clumsily, she backtracked in her own footsteps, the only thing marring the unbroken snow, stumbling back up the small embankment and practically collapsing into her car. That was the furthest she’d managed since her arrival. The closest she’d been to the gate itself, the closest she’d been to actuallydoingsomething. Instead, she went back to what she’d been doing all morning — sitting in the car, crying.
It was not lost on her that this was a place of mourning.
He had been gone more than a year, and she’d never had the opportunity to grieve. That was why this all still felt so raw, she thought, why her heart still refused to heal. Those few scant weeks when she’d never left her apartment were spent in a shocked stupor. By the time she was back to work, everyone expected her to simply be over herbad breakup. She’d never had the chance to mourn his absence before she’d been cast in her next role, and now in this place — surrounded by nothing but snow and quiet, what remained after the loss of a loved one — she couldn’t stop crying.
She missed him more than she thought it would be possible to miss something. She missed the silky heft of his hair and the way it slid down the side of his head gradually through the day, like a glossy avalanche. She missed the weight of his arm around her in the dim, pre-dawn hours, missed the warmth of his hand around hers, walking down the street. She’d not noticed how particular the sound of his gait was when he was there with her, but now she could lie in bed for hours, staring up at the ceiling, hearing the click of his heels echoing through her head. She missed the version of herself she’d been with him.
It seemed so silly now, how miserable she’d made herself over afternoon tea. She’d give up her world and everyone in it just to have him back for a moment.
And now here she was, standing at the edge of a cliff, prepared to jump, to leave everything and everyone she knew behind, on the off chance she might come a step closer to him. She might not be here at all if it hadn’t been for the phone call.
This was all bad for her. Silvaknewthat. It was unwise to pick off these scabs; knew that she would never, ever heal if she did. Bad enough that she would always feel like a piece of her hadbeen cut away and that she would never be happy again, but that wasn’t the same as being actively miserable.
All of this, though; the Otherworld rabbit holes and clandestine auctions, it had opened her wounds back up, brought her pain and grief fresh to the surface, bleeding freely.
Which was why she found herself digging through the closet after Tannar left one morning, shortly after that disastrous night in their bed, seeking out an old cosmetic case. Inside it was his phone. The phone he’d left on her dresser the night he’d disappeared, beside the little porcelain bird locket on its chain.
Silva had wondered if he’d left it behind specifically so that she would understand there was no contacting him. She’d been foolishly optimistic that he had left it so that he would be able to reach her, but it had never so much as buzzed. She’d tucked it away in this little mirrored case, hidden with the rest of her vanity table items when they’d moved, and she had never taken it out again.
Better to let her heart forget as much as it could. Forget the lilt of his voice, forget the warmth of his skin when she pressed herself against him in the early morning hours, best to forget it all. It had been more than a year, and sheneededto start forgetting.
