She licked her dry lips, suddenly parched, uncomfortable in her own skin and in her surroundings.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Allende. And no, you won’t have to keep me against my will. I very much wish to stay, to help you out and be your fake girlfriend. A deal is a deal, and I will hold up my end of the bargain.”
This time, Paloma’s smile seemed tentative, a touch searching. Did she somehow glean something as she sliced Deryn in half? Deryn hoped she wasn’t that transparent.
“All right, then. Lachlan will send you the agenda of appearances. I have a few scheduled for this week, and the next is fully booked. I will be traveling to the mainland for meetings in the coming weeks. I don’t expect you to perform the role there. I do, however, expect you to be discreet, Ms. Crowhart, in whatever pursuits you will endeavor while I am away.”
Deryn took the second slap with a smirk. And this time, she had no more tether to keep her from responding.
“Why, Ms. Allende, does that mean you will be available for my so-called pursuits while on the island?”
She deliberately stood up, taking a few steps that brought her face-to-face with Paloma. The scent of burnt sugar was all fire now and made her rock back on her heels, but she leaned right back, inhaling deeply, letting Paloma know she was taking her scent in.
Predictably, Paloma’s nostrils flared, yet she did not step back, which only widened Deryn’s smirk. This woman and her resolve not to give an inch would be the death of her.
“Of course not. The ‘fake’ in this fake relationship, Ms. Crowhart, is nonnegotiable. You and I are performing for the crowds. What you do in your spare time, I don’t care, as long as you are discreet.”
“And will you be? Discreet, that is, Ms. Allende, in your pursuits?”
Deryn watched very carefully as she spoke for any reaction, for any sign of displeasure or insult. Instead, she got a smile. One that reached the dark eyes.
“I won’t need to be, Ms. Crowhart. I don’t pursue.”
Deryn choseto walk to town, leaving her bike in the sumptuous parking lot of the resort. The woods, all white pine and red oak, breathed around her in the evening air. The temperatures had been kind despite it being early December, and the foliage still maintained some of its spectacular late-fall fireworks. Oranges and yellows, crimsons and ambers, covered here and there by frost. She sensed the fiery embrace encased in ice with every step she took deeper into the forest.
It felt like being transported back to twenty-five years ago, when life was all about running in the woods, chasing Seren, hiding from Rhiannon… Ceridwen had been off to college, and their mother was busy at the flower shop. And Deryn was free.
She stopped by the old oak—which had surely been standing for centuries on this little speck of dust in the Atlantic. Tall and gnarly, the tree had seen life and death and everything in between. And in what was probably the blink of an eye for it, it had seen Deryn grow up.
The oak stood just off the edge of the cliff, some of the bigger boulders shielding it from the wind, giving it the protection that had allowed it to stand for hundreds of years. To see all that life and all that death.
Deryn didn’t touch it as much as she fell into it, her forehead dropping to the centuries-old trunk, and suddenly the noise and all the tumult in her mind quieted, leaving her at peace with her thoughts.
Chief among them was the one she had nursed in silence since she arrived.
Deryn Crowhart was lost. In her hometown, with her family, in her power…somewhere along the way, Deryn Crowhart hadlost something that might have been her very self, and all the fame, fortune, and celebrity hadn’t helped her find it.
To her left, the path wound down the cliff and to the place where Deryn had spent almost twenty years of her life, yet it was no longer familiar. Tonight, however, as she took a few steps toward it on the time-worn gravel, even the wind seemed to hasten her.
The back garden gate was never latched, and it opened easily at Deryn’s push. The lights were off in the house, which only signified that Seren’s shift was as long as always at the Brew. It made Deryn oddly satisfied that her twin had achieved a life on the island in ways Deryn herself had failed. Not that she had tried. Certainly not as hard as Seren. Though her twin sometimes was the duck in the familiar waters, Deryn, who could barely swim, often sank like a rock.
The money that Rhiannon made in the big, scary world had served the entire Crowhart family. Ceridwen saved the flower shop and paid off the debts that had slowly choked her mother’s joy while she was alive. Victoria bought her share of the Tavern from the co-owners, to whom she had had to sell in the first place, to make ends meet. Deryn went to culinary school in New York, and Seren opened Crow’s Brew after community college. And above all, the family kept Crow House.
Standing in front of it now, Deryn wondered if it would ever feel like home again. And then the answer came to her, lay hard on her heart. The unyielding heaviness of rejection.
Deryn Crowhart had no home.
Something died in her the day they buried their mother. Something that connected her to the limestone two-story cottage with blue shutters, to the sumptuous garden that had always been tended to art-form standards. The high ceilings, the sloping roof, the small, beautiful details of generations of Crowharts born, raised, and farewelled within those walls. They no longercalled to Deryn, even if among those details would be her hidden scribbles on the drawing room wallpaper. Her mother had not punished her for them. Elizabeth just sat back and sighed heavily at little Deryn’s sheepish smile at being caught.
Her mother and her tired, sad eyes. Her mother and her thin hands with prominent knuckles, short nails cut to the quick, blue rivulets of prominent veins running under the translucent skin, worked to the bone. The mischievous child that Deryn had been did not know that Elizabeth Crowhart had been holding on by the skin of her teeth to her daughters, to her house, and to her flower shop, which had been in the family for four generations. Deryn didn’t know about the mountain of debt. About the constant ringing of the phone, signaling creditors demanding payment. About Child Services coming to their door more often to check on what the wild twins were up to, since they caused so much trouble in school. Well, Deryn did—setting fires, causing explosions. Seren and Rhiannon would cover for her, but how could they cover that teenage anger? How do you cover Fire Herself?
Between Elizabeth being torn in thousands of directions and Victoria caring for a sick man while trying to hold up the money pit that was her nascent restaurant back then, unruly children only caused fatigue. Deryn could still see the exhausted look in her mother’s eyes. Eyes, so much like her own, though Deryn’s had never been that tired. Or that scared.
She took a few steps, no longer able to avoid the true reason she had come to Crow House gardens.
The Crowharts had a family mausoleum in the Crow’s Nest cemetery. Most of the older families did, since space was so scarce on the island, the townies had to adapt. And so, they took over customs from places like New Orleans and their aboveground burial sites. Sure, their reasons were different—flooding and swamp land were not issues Dragons ever faced—but the island graveyard was a dead ringer for St. Louis Cemetery No.1 in the Big Easy.
Deryn smiled at her own pun. It was, however, true. Much smaller, yes, but just as strange with its superterranean mausoleums and crypts. And the Crowharts were even stranger because they didn’t place their dead immediately in the town’s cemetery. They buried them in the gardens of Crow House for a few years, prolonging the goodbyes and reliving memories at the graveside. Deryn remembered her grandmother’s second funeral, a small and warm affair where Victoria had made all their favorite foods and the stories seemed to last till morning. And then their garden lay resting. Waiting. That night, when they were holding a wake for their grandmother, nobody knew they’d be laying their mother to rest in it in less than three years.
