Redemption (34 page)
Authors: Veronique Launier
Tags: #teen, #teen fiction, #YA, #YA fiction, #Young Adult, #Young Adult Fiction, #redemption, #Fantasy, #Romance, #gargoyle, #Montreal, #Canada, #resurrection, #prophecy, #hearts of stone
“Can I?” He points at the piano.
“I was hoping you would.”
The rest of the room is silent as they look at us. He sits at the piano and I bring a chair next to him. I didn’t plan on using a guitar but now that I have the Goddess with me, it’s a given.
His fingers strike the piano’s keys and the melody flows out. They’re all watching us, but I don’t care. Surrounded by music like this, I’m in my element. The music is slow and melancholic and I pick at the strings of my guitar along with it. Finally, when it feels like the melody has nowhere else to go, it picks up a little faster and I sing along to it.
In your eyes lies the weight of stone,
The guilt of centuries carried alone.
But you would never go home,
When redemption wasn’t your own.
With ancient shadows holding grudges,
And painful truth is at last delivered.
But you’re not ready to face the judges.
And you only think of what has been severed.
Strings in the background whine a slow haunting sound and I turn to see Antoine has picked up a violin to join in. Chills creep up my back and I close my eyes to sing the refrain.
When everything is more complicated than it seems,
When all my control amounts to nothing.
You stand fast next to me, my angel of stone,
You carry me when I cannot fly.
The song is over, but we remain still for a moment longer, we don’t want to break the spell.
I lean to Guillaume who is still sitting at the piano bench and whisper to him, “I wanted to write you a love song, but I couldn’t. With the circumstances, it felt wrong.”
His eyes tell me he understands.
“Come with me,” he says. He grabs me by the hand leading me to the window by the fire exit.
He helps me climb up on the roof and we stand there side by side enjoying this perspective of Montreal. The landscape below us has changed in the past week and many buildings that had stood the test of decades now lay in ruin.
We see another thing from our vantage; hope. We see people taking others into their homes, and crews of volunteers still working to salvage people’s belongings in the rubble.
“So what happens with Ramtin? Will we have to get rid of him like we did the stone monsters?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “He’s ancient. It won’t be as easy. But for now, he seems to have different plans.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I.”
“Why is my Native heritage so important?” I ask.
“I don’t think it is because it’s Native, it’s just that you have two channels to essence. I think it’s important to realize that like old man Robert said, essence is universal.”
“It’s what binds us all,” I whisper.
Life will never be normal again. But normal is overrated, after all. Guillaume puts his arms around me and I lean into him. It isn’t a burning, consuming happiness, it can’t be yet; we’re still mourning. He mourns the loss of a shared past while I mourn that of a potential future.
Eventually we will be whole again, and then we will truly enjoy the gift we were given when we found each other.
“Aude,” he says, his voice husky.
I turn toward him and he wraps his other arm around me. I rest my head on his shoulder, snow falls around us. The first snow since the earthquake. And as a thin layer of white covers the scenery below; I know that, though things will never be the same again, I will be okay with it one day. In the background, Antoine is fiddling in true Québécois fashion. I’m home.
The End
About the Author
If you were to look up random in a dictionary, you might find a picture of Véronique. She is the servant to two little girls and three feline overlords. She is also an avid reader, a dreamer, and an Internet addict. Her highly obsessive personality is often the subject of many jokes amongst her family and friends, but it has served her well; she wouldn’t have written a book without it. She is studying everything Persian from the language, to the history, to the cuisine—another side effect to her obsessive personality—and likes to dance.
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