How I Found You (26 page)

Lathiaus had found a new toy.

Just as I was about to give up hope, Rose shouted, “I warned you.”

My focus went to her. She was holding something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. Well, not until a tiny flame flickered in her hand. She had matches. With a slow breath, she allowed the lit match to drop onto the driveway. I watched in awe as the flame instantly spread into fire, igniting on the oil spill of the overturned minivan. The flames travelled along the river of oil until they reached Lathiaus.

“This was my death,” Rose told him, “and now I grant it to you.”

The blaze reared up to him as though it had a mind of its own. Spitting fire leapt skywards, enveloping Lathiaus and swallowing him whole. He screeched and hissed for what felt like an eternity, and then… silence.

I closed my eyes. I was out of the game. And so was the demon. 

The fire fizzled out in the rain, and all that was left of Lathiaus was a black cloak and a putrid heap of bones.

Grant him her death. Ha. That she did.

There was a long hush. I couldn’t have found the words, even if I’d had the voice to speak them. I was woozy, and my eyelids felt like lead.

I took a final peek, just in time to see Caicus walk over to the remains. He stomped on the debris, turning the bones into nothing more than dust that would wash away with the rain.

It was over.

“Rose, you vanquished Lathiaus,” Caicus said, looking at her in awe. “You’ll go down in history as a hero... Hey, if anyone ever asks, will you tell them I did it?”

And then I lost consciousness.

Christmas Day

MY NAME IS OSCAR VALERO.

That’s one of the three things I know for sure.

The other two are these:

One
—It’s snowing.

Two
—My heart is incomplete.

I trudged inside from the winter snow, passing beneath the grand, arched doorway. My footsteps echoed off the high stone ceilings and marble floors.

Home bitter home.

In fact, it wasn’t until I’d experienced life in a
real
home that I’d noticed how much like a museum this place was. I supposed it actually had been a museum at one stage. Before we staked our claim on it.

I kept walking, ascending a wide marble staircase. My shoes clicked on the floor. I missed carpet. Good old soundproof carpet. A few of the elders passed me, heading in the opposite direction, but we didn’t acknowledge one another. That was nothing new. They thought me to be insolent. I thought them to be pompous. Eh, it was swings and roundabouts.

I strode along the first floor and followed the corridor around. If this really had been a museum, the exhibition rooms were now our bedchambers. Saying that, most of the bedrooms resembled exhibitions even now. Mine was okay. It was
me
. Lots of dark colours—browns mainly. It was fairly big. You know, standard for a dwelling like this. I had a balcony though, which I liked.

I reached my room and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. No more Christmas merriment. Just me.

I manoeuvred my way through the thin, brown drapes that marked the entrance to my balcony. Back outside again, the bite of frost stung my face. But it didn’t bother me. I sat on my chair, high above the world, looking out onto the white blanketed mountains. I saw nothing else. No people. No animals. Just mountains. That was our world: no one got in, no one got out.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. I could have left whenever I wanted. Although what would be the point? Hell, I had nowhere to go.

There was a scuffle at my bedroom door.

I groaned inwardly.

“Leave me alone,” I muttered.

Caicus bounded in. His hair and clothes were dusted with snow. I expected mine were, too.

“Where did you go?” he asked, fumbling through the drapes to join me out on the balcony.

“To my room,” I replied, deliberately stating the obvious.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s Christmas. Come outside and play.”

Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “I don’t want to
play
.”

“So, what do you plan on doing? Moping around up here all day?”

“Yes.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged, still in annoyingly high spirits. With a hop, he pounced onto the metallic railing of the balcony and jumped down onto the snow-coated ground below. It was a fifty-foot drop, so he really made a splash when he hit the bottom.

He whooped in delight and threw a snowball at me, then scampered off like an excitable puppy.

The missile shot past my head and exploded against the balcony wall. I scarcely glanced. It was obliterated now, just powder on the granite. How easy it was for something with such a seemingly solid mass to instantly reduce to nothing. 

I closed my eyes indignantly.

I was a snowball.

I used to be a solid mass, ready to cause mayhem, but now I was spent, scattered and broken. Sure, my battle wounds had healed—the literal ones, anyway. They always did. It was only my heart that would not mend.

I wasn’t looking for pity. I chose it to be this way. I chose to leave, and I chose never to recover. I sent myself to emotional purgatory. And that was where I was determined to reside.

After
that night
, what followed was merely a blur of irrevocable events. This was how I remembered them…

I regained consciousness around an hour after Lathiaus was vanquished. I was unable to move or speak, but Rose…

I winced. It hurt to think her name.

…Rose sat beside me through the night, easing the pain and listening patiently as I tried to speak. Gradually my body healed. By morning, my voice had returned, and my limbs were my own again. Mary and Roger came home and we spun them a yarn about storm damage.

“Uh, yeah, the storm knocked over your minivan. And, uh, it knocked a couple of holes in your dining room table, too.” Et cetera.

They didn’t question us. They were good people. They probably gave allowances to us, assuming the party had got a little out of hand. Which I supposed it had. Ha.

For a long time, I truly believed that I would stay with her. With Rose. I could picture it, in a blissfully ignorant sort of way. But even in my modest fantasies, it seemed too good to be true. In hindsight, it was too good to be true.

I think that realisation first came to me when Rose started griping about the bores of returning to school. I suddenly became aware that she was human. She had a human life, and she was fragile and precious. The severity of what I’d put her through began to dawn on me. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. She was a human and I’d dragged her into a violent, ferocious world—one which she should
never
have been exposed to. It was reckless, selfish and irresponsible of me.

And what exactly did I plan on doing? Bringing her along on every mission I had? Taking her to every underworld battle that I’d be assigned to? Being a witch was a vocation. We were warriors. And she was just a girl.

It would have been cruel to take normality from her. How could I have done it? My altruistic side could see how much freedom was in her grasp, and what a great life she could have—and
should
have. I’d have envied her if I hadn’t been so magnanimously in love with her.

So, I left. In the middle of the night. No warning. No goodbye. Hardly surprising, really. Goodbyes were too difficult for a coward like me. Instead, while she was sleeping, I snuck into her room and placed my half of the silver heart on her pillow, then I kissed her head and walked. And I didn’t stop.

Once we were out of Millwood, Caicus charmed us a car. It wasn’t a Lamborghini Gallardo, but it was okay. We didn’t speak on the journey home. He drove, and I stared out the window.

When we returned to the coven, we told them everything: about Marco, Rose, Lathiaus… We didn’t get the heroes’ welcome we’d hoped for. They kind of nodded and reluctantly congratulated us. A few of them were peeved about Marco—not because they cared for him, but because he was a damn good combatant. I could vouch for that.

As the weeks passed by, I thought only of Rose. Sometimes I considered going to her, but I never did. And I knew that she wouldn’t find me. That was another thing about being a witch—you didn’t get found.

The seasons changed and the leaves turned orange and fell from the trees. I watched their lives deteriorate until the trunks were all but bare. Their gradual demise happened alongside mine, so I took solace in them. We faded together.

And then the snow came, thick and heavy and not going anywhere anytime soon. People said that nothing would grow beneath the winter snow. That was me. Beneath snow. Standstill. I didn’t grow. I didn’t live. I was frozen.

Purgatory.

Caicus bashed on my door again.

“Go away!” I shouted.

From the balcony, I heard my bedroom door open and he stomped in.

I kept my gaze transfixed on the white mountains and the opaque silver sky.

“Go away,” I sighed.

He halted at the gap in the drapes and lobbed something at the back of my head. It was small and sharp and sent a bolt of electricity down my spine.

I looked to the floor where the bullet lay.

What the…?

I spun around.

“You can have your stupid heart back,” she said.

My jaw dropped. I didn’t know if I smiled, or laughed, or wept…

“Rose,” I whispered.

She paused. Her expression gave away the fact that she’d probably had a whole angry speech rehearsed, but was too thrown to remember any of it.

“I don’t want it anymore,” she blurted out. I guessed that was around line seven of her speech.

Actually, I wasn’t having much luck, either. I’d had four months to think of all the things I would say to her if ever I saw her again, and yet there I was, my moment to shine, and all I could come up with was, “Hi.”

Line, please?

“Hi,” she said back. “I’m very angry at you.”

I nodded my head. But it was hard to look understanding while beaming with joy.

“I’m very angry at me too,” I offered.

“How could you leave like that?” she demanded.

I stood up now, face to face with her where she hovered, veiled behind the thin drapes.

“I wanted you to have a better life,” I told her honestly.

She didn’t seem to like that.

“You
ruined
my life,” she screamed at me. “You took away the thing I love most.”

“Caicus?” I tried to joke.

Uh, oh. That didn’t go down well. Eh, maybe she’ll laugh later.

“Look,” I said, sincerely, “I know what I put you through last summer, and I care about you too much to involve you in this world. It’s dark and it’s scary—”

“So what?” she snapped. “The world is always dark and scary. But it got a little brighter with you in it, and it got a little less scary, too.”

“Less scary?” I raised my voice. “Don’t you remember what you had to see? Death, violence, carnage beyond what you ever imagined possible—”

“Yes, I remember. I lived it. Because it was my life too. And you had no right to take it away from me.”

“I had every right. It’s my responsibility to protect you.”

“Since when!” she spluttered. “Who asked you to?”

“Since forever. Since I let you die the first time.”

“The first time?” she frowned.

“Not this lifetime,” I elaborated as best I could. “I mean, when I lost you before. I could have saved you.”

Rose stared at me. “No, you couldn’t have.”

I kicked my balcony chair in frustration. “Yes, I could have.”

“Did you go back? Did you do the Retracing spell, too?”

“I don’t need to,” I told her. “I carry the memory with me in every life.”

She staggered backwards. “You remember it?”

“Not exactly. I don’t know what happened back then, but somewhere in my subconscious, I know that I was to blame for your death. I’ve always known. How could I forget? How could I ever forgive myself for that?”

She touched the drapes as though she were reaching out to me. The anger began to fade from her eyes.

“Forgive yourself,” she said softly. “It was my decision. And I’m going to keep making decisions, with or without you.”

I snorted.

She carried on, “You saved my life.”

“No, I risked it.”

She smiled at me benevolently. “You stopped me from drinking the poison. You gave me the chance to fulfil my prophecy. Sorry,
our
prophecy,” she corrected herself. “It was destined for us. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead by now, and the line of witches would be too. Why can’t we celebrate that?”

I hung my head. “I don’t want you in this world,” I repeated adamantly.

“You don’t want me in your world?” she asked.

I laughed bitterly. “My world doesn’t exist without you.” I bent down to pick up the two pieces of silver heart. And as I did, she stepped through the drapes, out onto the balcony.

I could see her clearly for the first time, and it was impossible not to stare. Not that I made any attempt to resist.

“That’s our heart.” The half-hearts were nestled in the palm of my hand. Rose pushed them together. “It’s complete.”

I swallowed.

She grazed her fingers against my chest, where my real heart pounded in exhilaration.