Page 127 of Stealing Tink

I nod.

Blaise reaches out and touches my hand. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do if we find him?”

It’s strange, being able to say the words. “I don’t know.”

She goes to leave, but I find her name escaping my lips, “Blaise?”

“Yes?”

“The person who took my voice—they needed it to bind a realm. I always wondered why they needed my voice specifically. Do you think it has something to do with”—I gesture to the room and nothing in particular—“all of this?”

“Hm. Nox is probably the better person to ask. But I know he has his theories. One of them is that while your body remained in this world, there were aspects of you that could potentially act as a tether.”

“A binding,” I say, almost to myself. I can’t help but think back to the night the Nomad brought my hand over Venus’s painting, the way I could feel the magic emanating off of it when the others couldn’t. Another side effect of being woven into multiple places, I suppose. But then I remember another question I have. “What does Zora mean?”

Blaise smiles. “It means light.”

CHAPTER 56

The castle is cold as I wander through it to the hall of tapestries.

Nox, Blaise, and I found the last one years ago. It’s hanging on the end of the hall where my dreaming body used to sleep, empty. Sometimes I take it down from the wall and lay it out across the dais, willing something—anything to appear.

Five years, and nothing.

I don’t know what I wish to see appear upon it. The Nomad—Farin, as my brother calls him—living out a peaceful life? Chasing down a different version of myself? A high I can only experience from a distance? It would likely hurt more than it would heal.

The wound of losing the man who chased me across worlds healed long ago. Well, it scabbed over, at the very least.

Blaise used to ask me every so often what I would do if I found him.

She stopped asking three years in.

It’s not that I don’t have a good life here. Nox and Blaise were eager to take me in. My brother spent too much of their money renovating the attic so I would have a comfortable place to stay. I’ve made good friends with my niece, who, peculiar as she is, I find refreshing.

Even if I am convinced that the imaginary friend in her head isn’t quite so imaginary.

And Blaise and I have become close.

Then there’s my parents.

That’s been strange. They’re not the parents I remember. Not the ones I lost when I ran away from home, hoping to protect them from the Nomad. But every once in a while, I get a memory of them, from back when I was Zora and not Tink, and a piece falls into place.

I’ve grown to love them, but I think I would have anyway, even without those memories buried somewhere deep underneath the surface.

At least once a week, they have us all over to their house, and we eat and play games, and it all feels right.

Except for the empty seat next to me. But I try not to think about that.

Besides, that seat was never meant to be filled anyway.

I love my life here, I do.

Well, I love the people in my life here.