The corners of Ronan’s lips quirked up and an echo of the same madness from earlier reentered the gargoyle’s colorless eyes. “Save the family my Maeve helped, I shred the rest of ’em limb from limb. No matter how accepting my clan was, they couldn’t overlook the murder of sixty humans. It didn’t matter much to me anyway, Maeve was my everything and she was taken away from me.”
Once the story was done, Ronan seemed to curl in on himself. A long, whooshing sigh left Cash as he stood and rounded the ratty coffee table to put a hand on the other gargoyle’s shoulder.
He turned to look at me. “Can you give us a couple of minutes, dragonfly?”
I nodded, torn between wanting to listen to the rest of the conversation and the desire for fresh air. The atmosphere of the trailer had suddenly become claustrophobic, and that suffocating feeling carried me out of the trailer and into the cool morning air.
I crouched next to a grouping of ridiculous plastic flamingos and put my head between my knees, trying to calm myself down.
I hadn’t expected any of this when I pushed for Cash to bring me along on this trip. Cash knew though. He’d known the entire time.
It made me angry, not necessarily at him, but at the choices he’d made every step of the way.
Rubbing at the spot in my chest where my heartbeat continued to thump in its usual human fashion, I pondered and picked through my emotions. I pulled each one out like it was some kind of collectible kept in a cabinet, turning them over in my mind as I tried to figure out just how I was feeling about the revelation that Cash and I were meant to be together.
Confusion, anger, fear, and anxiety were paired alongside elation, contentedness and a strong sense of rightness. Like everything in the universe had lined up so I could meet the wingless gargoyle with silver eyes.
Why else would I have driven the way that I had to California? Or why Peep—a car that realistically shouldn’t have made it out of Nebraska, let alone across the United States—had only broken down once I made it to Port Haven?
I wasn’t sure if I ever believed in fate before now, or at least I hadn’t wanted to. Believing in fate meant that everything that I had gone through with my mom and with Mike was meant to happen.
On one hand, that was comforting. Believing those things were fate meant that there was no choice I could have made that would have changed the outcome. There would still be years of living like a ghost under Mike’s thumb, and my mom would still have died.
But on the other hand, it meant fate was cruel and fickle. If Cash was my fate, who was to say that it still wouldn’t end horribly just like everything else in my life? Cash was strong and impervious to most things, but he could still be hurt or killed.
Even the thought of something happening to him made my chest ache fiercely.
“Dragonfly?” Cash’s voice broke through the mental Rubik’s cube of emotions that I was currently trying to solve.
I don’t know when he’d come out of the trailer or when he’d crouched down in front of me, but his concerned silver eyes were locked onto my face.
At some point I’d plopped down onto the ground amongst the flamingos and pulled my knees up to my chest.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, trying to push down the torrent of emotions I was currently experiencing.
“I called out to you a few times, but you were too deep in thought to hear me,” Cash said softly. “Are you ready to go?”
“Already? Don’t you want to stay for the day to make sure he’s okay?” I asked, nodding at the trailer.
“I’m fine, go and have yer talk,” Ronan’s voice called from the still open door. “Ye definitely need to.”
“He’s okay,” Cash said, a small smile on his face. “I think it was good for him to tell his story.”
I nodded, remembering the feeling of relief when I finally told Cash the truth about my past. It was like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders and I could finally breathe again.
Cash held his hand out to help me up and as soon as I took it the same feeling as always overcame me. The proof that our connection was somethingmore.
As soon as I was on my feet I gently pulled my hand from his grasp. “Let’s get in the truck,” I mumbled, hurrying past him and doing my best to avoid the hurt in his gaze.
The first twenty minutes of the ride was spent in silence. Cash looking forward and me looking back, watching Ronan’s trailer sink into the distance until it was gone completely.
The silence grew until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Turning to face him, I finally blurted out: “Why are you so different from him?”
The truck slowed and Cash glanced over at me. “What do you mean?”
“He’s not all there, Cash, and he still talks like he’s been living in the fourteen-hundreds. You two had similar things happen to you, so why do you seem completely sane?” I asked.
Cash sighed and pulled to the side of the road, flipping the engine off and turning to face me fully. He looked tired—or at least as tired as an immortal that rarely slept could look—and he ran a hand over his face and through his dark hair before answering my question.
