Rose Petal Graves (The Lost Clan #1) (12 page)

“Do you know sign language, Catori?” Cruz asked.

I blinked. “She’s—She can’t—”

“Lily’s mute.”

“Mute?” I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to repeat the word. It felt like a bad word. One that should never be spoken out loud. I raised my gaze to Lily’s. “But I read that article about you, and it wasn’t mentioned.”

“Because it’s nobody’s business,” Cruz said.

Dad made some hand gestures and Lily smiled, and then she wriggled her hands, and he smiled.

“You know how to sign?” I asked my father.

“I had a friend who was deaf. So I learned a few words.” He looked at Lily who spun her hands and tapped them together.

“That means,
I’m really hungry
.
I could eat like a cow
.” Dad said.

Lily laughed. It was a strange, hiccuppy laugh. When she saw me staring, she stopped abruptly.

“I could eat
a cow
, not
like a cow
,” Cruz said, chuckling also.

“My sign language skills are a little rusty. Anyway, I didn’t want to crash your get-together. I just came by to tell Cat that I was leaving.”

“I’m ready to go,” I said, soaring out of my chair faster than the puck on a high striker. “I’ll go get my coat.”

“Will you come by later for a drink, or are you heading back to Beaver Island tonight?” I heard Dad ask just as I reached the booth.

Tony had left but Aylen was still there. She placed her hand on my arm. “That’s Lily Wood, isn’t it?” she whispered. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but I really did want to interrupt.” Her eyes moved toward Lily then back toward me.

“Go introduce yourself if you want to,” I said.

She started hyperventilating with excitement. “Satyana, Shiloh, do you want to go meet Lily Wood?” They looked up from their tablets.

“She’s here?” one of them asked, dragging her headphones down to her neck.

Aylen nodded and—unfortunately—pointed straight at Lily.

“Could you be any more obvious, Mom?” the other twin grumbled.

“Yeah, you’re embarrassing us.”

“Could you try being nice to your mom, for a change,” I said.

“Please, Cat, don’t get involved,” Aylen said.

“Don’t what? Tell them that they act like brats? That they take their mother for granted? You have no idea what I would do to get my mother back. No idea.” My voice was so low that it vibrated inside my chest.

“Don’t talk to my girls like that,” Aylen snapped, wrapping a protective arm around Shiloh’s shoulders. Or maybe it was her other devil-daughter.

I blinked.

“I’ve decided to go home with my family. They need me,” Aylen said.

“Fine.”

“I didn’t mean to—” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I raised my voice.”

“It’s fine. Have a safe trip.” I walked back over to my father. “I’m ready.”

He slung his arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “See you both later.”

Lily nodded while Cruz just sat there, observing me.

As we walked out of Bee’s Place, Dad said, “Isn’t it nice that they’re coming over? Lily is such a sweet girl, and she’s only a year younger than you. And—”

“I’m not three, Dad. I don’t need you to organize playdates for me,” I said, stepping out of his reach. “I don’t want to be friends with that girl. Or with Cruz.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just don’t,” I said after we’d stepped out of the restaurant. “Mom would have understood.”

Dad’s face whitened.

It was a mean thing to say, and I wanted to take it back, but I also wanted him to stop treating me like a little girl who didn’t know her own mind. I knew my own mind. Only too well.

I twirled around and walked up the street instead of toward the hearse. “I’ll see you at home,” I called out, my voice choked up with tears. I had no right to cry, and yet the stress from meeting Lily, Aylen’s rebuke…it made everything pour out of me.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and walked, and walked, through the sand dunes and down a snaking forest trail. The wind licked my cheeks and the cold made my eardrums ache, and yet I kept walking. I took the trail that wound around the sand dunes and cut across the fields tended by Rowan’s oldest gardener, an eighty-something-year-old woman named Holly. We’d had a class outing to her greenhouse where she’d explained how to nurture soil to grow plants. I remembered how she’d touched a bud and it had cracked open and blossomed before my very eyes. I’d told my father about it, and he’d said it was probably a magic trick. Now I wondered if it wasn’t just magic.

Snow started falling. I looked up. Cold flakes landed in my open eyes. I blinked and looked down at the uneven ground that swelled underneath my boots. Everything would be white again. I kicked a pinecone out of the way and followed its trajectory with my eyes. It smacked right into something bright red. With the falling snow, it took me a second to realize it was a boot.

It moved. And then there were two boots. And two legs sticking out of the boots. And then the two legs bent and the body collapsed.

“Gwenelda,” I whispered, or shrieked. I wasn’t quite sure. I fell to my knees next to her.

She didn’t move. She didn’t speak.

I sucked in a breath and placed a hand on her back, against the flimsy black sweater she wore, to feel for a sign of life. When her back rose and fell, I let the trapped breath whoosh out of my mouth. I lifted my hand off of her and tried to roll her onto her back, but my hands slipped. I tried a second time, but again, they glided right off. That’s when I noticed that my skin was stained red, the same red as Gwenelda’s rubber boots. I twirled my hands in front of my eyes, attempting to connect the dots.

“You’re bleeding?” I asked stupidly.

I dragged her sweater up a few inches. The white T-shirt underneath was soaked in blood. It had even started to seep into the snow, turning it pink, like the strawberry shaved ice I bought at the fair each summer.

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” I said, pulling the sweater back down. “It’s going to be all right.”

“No ambulance,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.

“Why not?”

“Because doctors”—she planted one hand on the snow and pressed down hard; her fingers vanished in the white—“will not know”—she gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut—“how to close wounds inflicted by—” She flipped herself onto her back, letting out a deafening cry.

“Inflicted by what?” I asked.

She stared into my face. “By faeries,” she said, before losing consciousness.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered. “Gwenelda?” I shook her. I stopped when I saw more blood leaking out of her. Maybe I’d angered the wound. I placed my palm on her cheek and tapped slowly. “Gwenelda, wake up.”

She didn’t so I yanked my cell phone out my coat pocket, but it slipped through my fingers, disappearing into the pink snow besides Gwen’s body. I bent over and grabbed it. I was going to call my dad. No, wait, I couldn’t call him. He thought she was a madwoman, which she was—in a way. But I couldn’t just let her die. With shaky fingers, I dialed Blake’s number.

He didn’t pick up, so I tried him again.

“What?” he huffed.

“I need your help.”

“My help?” The pitch of his voice changed then, becoming almost strident when he spoke next, “Are you okay? Did something happen? I heard you walked back—”

“I’m okay. Remember my aunt?”

“The weird lady from Canada?”

“Yeah. That one. Well, she’s in really bad shape.”

“How bad?”

“There’s so much blood,” I whispered.

She wasn’t moving. Had she died? She said she could die of faerie wounds. Would it be so terrible if she had?

“Catori!” Blake sounded pissed. “Where are you?”

This woman could have killed my mother.

“Where are you?” I heard Blake shout.

Could have
. Those two magic words jolted me out of my wicked deliberations. I looked around me, but there was so much snow falling that I couldn’t see anything. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember where I was when I bumped into Gwenelda.

“Holly’s field,” I said, lids flying open. “I’m in Holly’s field, by the woods.”

CHAPTER 15 – FIREFLIES

I took off my coat and placed it on top of Gwenelda’s unresponsive body. I shivered, so I walked briskly around, attempting to stay warm. Blake would be here in a few minutes.

“Catori?”

I snapped my neck in the direction of the voice. The grayish sketch of a body filled with color. “Cruz?”

“Are you all right?”

“
I
am, but she’s not.” I pointed to Gwenelda whose small body was slowly becoming invisible underneath the heavy snowfall.

“Who’s she?”

“Gwenelda,” I said. “How did you find me?”

“I…I went to your house and you weren’t there,” he said. “You’re shaking. Where’s your coat?”

I tipped my head toward Gwen.

“You’re going to get sick,” he said, shrugging out of his leather jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.

The silk lining was so warm that I pulled it tighter around me and the leather crackled.

“What happened to her?” he asked, kneeling besides her.

“Faeries,” I said.

“What? Are you sure?”

“Only faes can inflict mortal wounds on hunters, right?”

“That’s how it used to be, but maybe—”

“Maybe she did it to herself? Is that what you were about to say?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Oh, come on.” I stepped away from him. “Look at the wound! No one does that to herself. The faeries were probably trying to get their magic back or maybe they were just trying to get rid of her. She doesn’t want me to call an ambulance, but I have no clue what to do.”

“Do
you
want her to live, Catori?” he asked, glancing up at me with those magnificent green eyes of his.

“Well, I don’t want her to die,” I said.

He turned his attention back to the prostrate body and peeled my coat off of her. Then he exposed her back and placed his hands on the wounds. As he mumbled words in that language I didn’t understand, his fingers began sparkling with gold flames. Slowly, magically, the large cuts mended, the torn pieces of skin reattaching themselves. She was still covered in blood, but there wasn’t even the hint of a scar. There were also no more tattoos.

“Is she…Did she die?” I asked, crouching down beside Cruz.

“She did. But her spirit wasn’t far.”

“Her spirit? You mean, you can resuscitate people?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you bring my mother back then?”

Cruz pulled down Gwen’s sweater, draped my coat over her still body, and then turned toward me. Tiny snowflakes drifted between us. They tangled in my long hair but evaporated when they touched Cruz. “She’d been gone too long. Her spirit was no longer next to her body.”

He unfurled his long body and stuck out his hand to help me up. I took it, even though I didn’t need his help.

“Thank you,” I said.

Many thoughts slipped in and out of my mind. From the intensity of his gaze, I could tell that his mind was crowded with contemplations of his own. Tentatively, he raised his free hand toward my cheek. He let it hover in the air, millimeters away from my skin. Even from that distance, I could feel the heat of his palm.

“What about Lily, Cruz?”

“What about Lily?”

“You say the marriage is arranged, that your relationship with Lily is fraternal, but that’s not the way she feels about you.”

He frowned. “I spend every day with her. Lily is my best friend. I can assure you that I’m not attracted to her in the way I’m attracted to you.”

“Which you really shouldn’t be.”

“Which I really shouldn’t be,” he repeated, softly cupping my cheek.

I should have insisted that we were all wrong for each other, but I simply didn’t want to. As intrepid, or perhaps as idiotic as a moth drawn to the sun, I tilted my face up toward Cruz.

He moved closer to me, which made my body temperature soar, a combination of the fire raging underneath his skin and the wild thumping of my heart. I waited—for what felt like an eternity but lasted only a second—for him to press his lips against mine. My mouth tingled, my nose, my ears, and slowly every inch of me was consumed by Cruz’s fire. The heat was startling at first, but soon it became deliciously bearable, like basking in the sun on a gloriously hot day. He spread my fingers with his, all the while exploring my mouth with his tongue, alternating the pressure of his lips from hard to gentle, obliterating the memory of the kiss we’d shared in his car. I’m not sure if it was because he was magical that his embrace was too, but I was sure that I’d never been kissed like this before.

“Ahem.”

I spun away from Cruz so fast that I lost my balance. His arms shot out, circling my waist to hold me up. He didn’t let go when I’d regained my footing, which made Blake’s jaw flush.

I pushed his arm off, and took a step toward my friend, but he backed away.

“Why did you call me if you had him?” Blake asked, his voice vibrating with irritation.

“Cruz just got here. I didn’t know he was coming.”

Blake’s legs were planted wide and he held his chin up. “He’s engaged, Cat. I thought you were a better person.” He shook his head. “Your mother would’ve been so disappointed.”

Heat filled my eyes. “Don’t you dare bring Mom into this.”

Cruz’s chest pressed against my back and his hands wrapped around my upper arms. “Don’t let him get to you,” he murmured in my ear.

Blake’s good eye darkened. “If you have something to say to me, man up and say it!”

“What you just witnessed, buddy, is none of your business.”

“It’s your fiancée’s business. Maybe I should go inform her—”

“By all means, tell her. She won’t care,” Cruz said.

She would care.

“Is that really the sort of guy you want to be with, Cat?” Blake asked. “One with no morals, no respect.”

“You better stop talking now,” Cruz warned.

“Or what? You’re going to punch me?”

“Go ahead. Break some more bones in my face,” Blake said. “I’ve had so much worse.”