I stared at him. There was something strange here. Something odd. I felt like I was missing something. Jacob was speaking to me almost like we knew each other better than we did. He was acting as if we were more than siblings connected by blood. He was acting as if we were friends.
I pressed my fingers to my forehead. Was Jacob like Finn? Could he erase memories?
Jacob smiled at where my fingers rested on my forehead. Then he slowly nodded.
I widened my eyes.
“What—?”
Before I could finish my question, he disappeared. There was no illusion. No knots. He was there, and then he was gone.
He’d done something like this before, in the north. Jacob didn’t always use illusion. Sometimes, he used . . . it was hard to describe, but it felt like anti-illusion. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. Or, more accurately, I could feel the absence of it. It was like matter and antimatter—you didn’t know what it was, but you knew it was there.
The wind had left with him. The apartment was a disaster. It looked like a tornado had blown through it. Magazines littered the ground. The kitchen table was overturned. Even the mattresses had flipped over in the fight. A coffee pot had slipped off the kitchen counter, shattered, and spilled coffee across the floor.
It was a disaster, and like a disaster, there was quiet after the storm. The only sounds were Ragnor’s pained groans and Celia’s quiet, peaceful, sleep-tinged breaths.
I found a pen beside the overturned table, grabbed a magazine, and wrote a note on the cover. It was a gossip magazine, and the cover was an image of Luvic, with the headline, “Downward Spiral? Luvic Bard’s Devastating Grief.”
I wrote a note: “Wedding tomorrow. You’re invited.”
Then Ragnor and Celia began to stir, so I dashed to the bed, knocked on the floor, and dove into the monster’s highway.
58
The wind had known many things in the infinite expanse of its existence. It had known that humans, for all their failings, were wondrous beings too. When they were born, the wind rode on their first cry, and when they died, the wind traveled down their final exhale. The space between that first inhale and that final exhale was filled with what humans called life.
A human’s life, though, was a strange thing. There was a nameless, unwhispered, unacknowledged longing inside them. For what? For whom? From birth, they were strangers abandoned on the doorstep of a world where they didn’t belong, and where the spirit of them could never be truly known. They watched a sunset and marveled in its beauty, but the sun never acknowledged them. They heard the cool water’s murmur and wept at its promise, but the water flowed past, ignoring their tears. They stood in the firelight of the stars and longed to reach them, but the stars remained aloof, untouched, and the humans remained unknown.
They longed to be seen. To be known.
They only wanted to find their way home.
There was beauty and splendor in this world, but what did it matter to a human if that splendor never knew them? Never knew they’d walked the hills, traveled the seas, or wondered at the stars.
So they longed, and mostly, none of them spoke out loud what all of them knew. They were exiles in a strange land, longing for the home where they were known.
Where, once, they had been loved.
The boy’s chin was tilted toward the sky, his green eyes the color of a northern forest on a cloudy day. His mouth was turned down at the corners as he stared pensively at the newspaper-covered window in the rundown brick building.
Across the narrow, shadowed street, an old, toothless woman sat behind a table of coyly waving plastic cats, gold-trimmed lace fans, and windup toys that clattered noisily in the late morning. She’d been watching the boy since he’d left the citrus and pearl dust scented woman’s apartment. The wind had seen her before. She’d warned the trickster not to enter the building, because people went in but never came out. She smelled human. Not conjurer. But that didn’t mean anything. There were no ordinary humans; all of them were capable of infinite good or infinite horror.
The wind brushed against the boy’s cheeks. There were no tears there, but he looked as if he’d almost reached the gates of paradise and had been told he’d have to turn around. That he wasn’t allowed inside.
“Do you think she’ll forgive me?”
The wind huffed. The citrus and pearl dust scented woman was not known for her forgiveness. It wasn’t a quality the Bards valued. The trickster was rare in that he’d forgiven the girl for the basement and the cage, but then he had killed her in retribution.
The wind swirled around the sidewalk, pushing the stagnant air and stirring up dust.
“You’re right. Of course you’re right.” He sighed. “Today didn’t go at all like I planned. Do you think she would’ve liked my gift?”
He smiled, and the wind shoved at his knees.
“You think?”
Of course he should still give it to her. Why not?
