“Hello, Thomas,” I said quietly as my brother came to a stop. I hadn’t seen him since he was old enough to leave the house, but tragedy was good at bringing people together.
I knew even some of Thomas’s children were affected by whatever disease had ravaged the village. I couldn’t stop the sickness from spreading, even if I could help with other things—cleaning up, keeping my mother and stepfather warm, doing what I could against an unstoppable plague.
I knew the stories that were circulating about me. The Ghost Child. I was a curse on the villages that I walked through, if the rumors were to be believed. And if the villagers were suspicious of you, well, you might as well tie yourself to the stake and light the fires for yourself. If Thomas were smart, he would have stayed away from me.
“Hello, Michelle.” He didn’t raise his gaze to mine, but that was alright—I didn’t think I could tear mine from the grave either.
Silence fell between us for what felt like an eternity before I had to say something. “I didn’t know how to save them. Believe me: I tried.”
“I believe you.” We were both silent once more before he said, “I want you to come live with me.”
“What?”
“Well, you can’t really take care of yourself, can you? Nobody is going to take a child seriously.”
“People are going to notice another child, Thomas. I know you have a few, but they can count.”
“So many people are dying of the sickness. It would not strain belief if my wife and I said that we took in a child who lost her parents.” He gestured toward the small marker for my mother’s grave. “It’s the truth.”
I frowned up at Thomas. “What prompted this?” I asked. After all, he and I had never been really close. He had always taken after my stepfather—and he was making a name for himself away from his half-witch sister and the family secret.
“I’m tired of losing family,” Thomas admitted. When that got me to look up at him, he gave me a sad smile that barely touched his eyes. “I’ve had time to think,” he said. “And having a sister that stays young, that doesn’t get sick, that won’t leave. . . .”
He let the sentence hang in the air, but I knew he was thinking of Miriam. I hadn’t been able to save her, either—from running away with a man who promised her everything and then killed her for the crime of not having a son.
All at once, I threw my arms around Thomas and buried myself in a hug. “I would love to stay with you,” I said, holding him as tightly as I could. I felt his shoulders drop before he hugged me back just as tightly.
Chapter 8: A Shoulder to Cry On
For a long time after I left my past, I stayed where I was: laid out flat on the porch and staring up at the stars. I needed to wait until my head stopped spinning before I could even say anything.
I could feel quiet tears sliding down either side of my face. I had no idea which of the many emotions rushing through my body had prompted those tears, either, so I couldn’t even begin to explain myself if Tara asked.
Thankfully, though, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she flopped backward and lay watching the stars in silence as I gathered myself.
“I thought no one wanted me,” I said at last.
Tara turned so that she was propped up on one elbow, facing me with one eyebrow raised. “Oh?”
I didn’t turn her way or shift my position at all, still staring up at the stars. “For the longest time, when I was with Aaron, before I met the Rendezvous, I thought I must have been abandoned. No one came looking for me. Then, when I started to remember my mother, she was the one person I was related to by blood that I could remember caring about me.”
Tara nodded softly. “And now, you remember the truth.”
I closed my eyes and nodded, the tears continuing to slip down the sides of my face. My ears were wet from the salty tracks they left behind. “Yeah,” I breathed out.
Tara watched me for a long time in silence before, gently, she reached over to take my hand. “Then I will help you see more. I believe everyone deserves to be loved and to know their worth.”
I nodded softly. “Thank you.”
Tara nodded before she took the hand she was still holding and used it as leverage to pull me up so that I was sitting and facing her. “I will help you see more of your past—but on one condition,” she said.
“Name it.”
“You must not get so lost in what you used to have that you lose sight of what you have in the here-and-now and what you will have in the future,” Tara said seriously. When I looked up at her in surprise, since we’d already more or less had this discussion, she shook her head. “I have seen people lost in the wrong tense who are not Future Seekers. Lost in their pasts—or lost in the future they do not yet have. You must not allow yourself to fall into this trap. King William would like nothing more than to dissuade you from a call to action, and if he cannot erase your identity, then at least he can erase your good heart and desire to help others around you by making you focus on the ones you lost.”
“I’m not going to stop loving my friends just because I remember my family.”
“Good.” Tara got to her feet and took me with her. “Then I will help you remember more about them. I know that the simplest memories are often the best ones. Perhaps we can find a family dinner to remember together.”
“That would be nice,” I agreed before I stepped forward and pulled Tara into a hug. “Thanks. I didn’t know how badly I needed this until I had it.”
Tara smiled as she returned the hug. “I have my own family. I know I seem distant, but I do love them. And so I understand why you want to see yours.”
“You’re amazing; you know that?”
“Yes, I do,” Tara said with a smile that I couldn’t help mirroring as we headed inside together.
I hadn’t been in such a good mood in a long time—practically since before Iceland—so I completely expected to go to bed and dream of my mother and my family.
So imagine my frustration when, instead, my memories turned to something more recent—and far less happy.
I had been staying with Hannah for the past year or so. She was actually a relatively new member of the family, having married her husband, George, one of Jacob’s grandsons, two years ago. But when George had been drafted to go to Korea, the whole family had agreed to my offer to stay with Hannah and help her out. After all, she had literally just found out that she was pregnant when George had to leave.
So, I moved in with Hannah to help her around the house. As she got bigger and had a harder time bending over or cleaning, I more or less took over entirely. Sometimes, I felt like a glorified maid, but the time I spent with Hannah chatting the nights away did a lot to ease that feeling.
Truth be told, I had also needed that chance to be able to spend time with her, especially since it had taken Hannah a while to get used to the entire concept of a ghost child that had been in the family for generations. At first, she thought George had been joking around . . . until she met me.
And promptly fainted.
Obviously, our relationship had vastly improved since that time. She told me about how her mother had worked in one of the factories to help the war effort in the 40’s and how she had wanted to do something similar for this war—but no one would hire her or even take her seriously.
And there, we found common ground. No one ever took me seriously because of my physical age, and I could absolutely relate to wanting to live up to a mother’s legacy.
“My mother was a leader,” I told Hannah as I cleaned up after dinner and she worked on the ingredients for a pie. She was due any day now, so she couldn’t do much of anything around the house; but she loved to bake, so I’d bring her the ingredients and she’d do all the work putting together our meals. “Everyone in the village where I grew up loved her. She had this way of encouraging people to be better. Everyone went to her for advice.”
“So she was a lot like you.”
My mouth parted in a small
‘o’ shape as I turned toward Hannah. “Not . . . really,” I said. “She was a lot better with words.”
“But you’re a good listener,” Hannah said with a fond smile.
I shrugged, not entirely sure what to say in response. And after that, we fell into silence—until we heard a knock at the door.
A telegram.
I knew what the telegram was when I saw the expression on the face of the man in the door, and I took it gently, handling it the way I would handle a hand grenade.
I didn’t know what to do. I had no way to protect Hannah from the news I had in my hands, but I absolutely didn’t want to be the one to hand it to her. I didn’t want to see her crumble. She’d become one of my closest friends in the last few months, and I knew—I just knew—she would fall apart.
I didn’t want to watch another member of my family lose themselves to war.
I lingered in the doorway, but by the time I actually reached Hannah, her smile had fallen as she watched me. To my dismay, I could tell by the way her eyes welled up with tears that she’d figured it out.
I rushed over to her and wrapped her in a hug before she’d even fully gotten to her feet, and we went to the floor together as Hannah sobbed into my shoulder. “I’m not going to go anywhere, Hannah,” I swore. “I’m staying right here with you. You’re not going to be alone. Do you understand me? I’m going to take care of you, alright?”
Hannah didn’t say anything, but I felt her clutching tighter to my shoulders, so I held her that much closer. I made her lots of promises that night, even though I knew she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t listen. But I talked to her anyway, because I knew from experience that simply having someone there, having someone who would try, could make a big difference.
When I woke up again, gasping, I was crying hard, and I simply couldn’t stop. The grief was too recent, too real, and I felt like I couldn’t find my breath. I grabbed onto my pillow and buried my face in it, letting out a few sobs before I tried, again, to get my emotional feet back underneath me, taking deep breaths and keeping my eyes squeezed shut.
I was still on edge, so I hadn’t been prepared when someone came pounding on my door. “Michelle? Are you okay in there?” Izzy asked.
I kept my silence, wondering if she would go away. But I must have been screaming loud, even in my sleep, because she pounded on the door a few more times. I knew she would try to break in if she thought I was in trouble, so, finally, I called out, “I’m fine!”
“That’s not true,” Izzy shot back without missing a beat. “So are you going to let me in, or do I have to get drastic about testing the integrity of this door?”
I shook my head, but I also knew that Izzy didn’t make idle threats, so I got up quickly and opened the door. “You’re such a drama queen.”
“It’s the only language you royal types know how to listen to,” Izzy said as she strolled past me and plopped herself down on the edge of my bed. “Must have been some memory. I haven’t heard you sound like that since Bobby died.”
That was like yet another punch to the gut, and I simply couldn’t come up with anything to say in response. Izzy had been on the time-repeating ship where I met and fell in love with Bobby—and she had been there as I held onto him while he aged a hundred years and died right in front of me. I barely remembered the moments right after he died, but I know I wasn’t quiet about my grief then, either.
“Hey.” Izzy bumped shoulders with me and then gave me a bracing smile when I looked up at her. “I know you’re struggling right now. I know you’re all over the place. And I know Aaron and I can’t exactly do much to help. But if you’re going to wake up sobbing like that, the least I can do is make sure you don’t wake up alone, too.”
The promise was so similar to the one I remembered making Hannah that it caught me off-guard—and then put me right back in the memory until I was crying all over again, leaning deeply into Izzy’s shoulder as she hugged me. “I’ve outlived them all,” I whispered into her shoulder. “All of my human family. They keep dying on me, and I keep remembering it.”
“I’m sorry,” Izzy said in a similarly soft whisper. “I know how that feels.”
Right. I knew that she’d lost everything on that time-repeating ship, but suddenly, I realized: I’d never seen Izzy mourn. She had been pushing it all to the side and focusing on the Rendezvous—on the fight to make my father and his men pay for ruining her life. But I knew that wouldn’t change the fact that that loss still hurt.
And suddenly, I turned the tables to hug her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. We should have held a funeral or . . . something.”
“Hey, no, it’s fine,” Izzy said quickly. “I’d sort of already said goodbye on the ship.”
“Still.”
“Yeah.” Izzy hugged me tighter, and for a long time, the two of us simply sat like that, clutching onto each other like lifelines in the dark. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, either; I just know that we both needed it.
Finally, both of us seemed to decide we were fine at the same time, and we released each other. The silence became less of a blanket until Izzy cleared her throat. “Well, now I can’t even get mad at you for being grumpy all the time when you’re not in sessions with the head-shrink sisters. Not when I know what you’re remembering now.”
“You can’t call them that,” I said, though I was laughing, so I don’t think she took me seriously.
“I so can,” Izzy said. “You’re never really conscious enough to stop me.” She pinched my arm lightly to get me to jump and then laugh. “But if you’ve been remembering lost family members, I totally get why you’re upset. Anyone would be depressed with that hanging over their heads.”
“I’m a few hundred years old, Izzy,” I said—and for the first time, I could really feel it. I could remember a time well before the Industrial Revolution, and that meant hundreds of years of watching my family members die.
To be fair, the magic my mother had in her blood gave that side of my family a better chance at surviving, and they were hardier than their spouses. But that magic was diluted over time, and it hadn’t even been enough to save Miriam. Or Thomas. Or any of them.
Somehow, I’d managed to get the most powerful magic genes out of anyone, even my mother. It must have been some kind of fluke of fate. My father had said my mother was a powerful Halfsie, but from what I remembered of her, she rarely used magic, and she died of disease.
I felt that much lonelier, knowing I was some kind of aberration in my family tree.
Izzy watched me with her head tipped to the side before she pinched my arm again. “Hey. Whatever you’re thinking about that has you looking like that, stop thinking about it.”
“Thanks, Izzy; that’s very helpful.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Izzy said without missing a beat. She flopped backward, lying horizontally on my bed and waiting for me to flop back as well so we could be level to talk. “We figured you were older than us anyway. Me and Aaron. You’re supposed to be the king’s firstborn, so once we learned about the prophecy and your siblings and all that, it seemed kind of obvious you were at least a couple hundred years old, more or less.”
“Closer to six hundred, actually.”
“O . . . kay.” Izzy raised both eyebrows. “Okay, so I wasn’t expecting that much of an age gap.” She shook her head and recovered quickly. “You don’t look a day over two hundred and fifty.”
“Yeah, I somehow got all the power in my family,” I said dryly, though that simple statement had me thinking about losing my mother all over again, so I pushed the thought aside. “And honestly, I didn’t use much magic growing up. I didn’t exactly want to end up on the wrong end of a witch hunt.”
“Yeah, if you’re that old, then that was definitely a real issue for you,” Izzy agreed.
“I still remember telling Angelica—one of my cousins—about the pitchforks. I don’t think I ever really stopped expecting people to come after me
.”
“You know, humans aren’t that bad anymore,” Izzy pointed out. “I think me and Aaron have handled finding out about the magical world pretty well, don’t you?”
I smiled and nodded. “You’re a lot like Angelica—both of you,” I said. “I think if she heard that I had a best friend who spent most of our time on the run together trying to convince me to let him be my sassy sidekick, she would have fallen in love.”
“Then I guess I’m lucky she’s not here,” Izzy said, but then she blushed and fell silent.
I sat up at that, watching her closer this time. It was the first time that Izzy had really acknowledged anything like that—at least around me—and I had never seen her blush before, either. “You know I’m not going to get in your way, right?” I said.
“Michelle, I don’t really want to talk about that,” Izzy muttered.
I shook my head. “But you should know: I’m not going to. I can’t think of Aaron that way anymore. Not like I used to.” I gave her a smile that was partly a grimace as well, especially because this confession was as much a promise to her as it was to myself. I couldn’t ignore the truth anymore. “He’s a teenager, and I’m several hundred years old. The more I remember of my past and the people I raised, the weirder that gets.”
“Okay, when you say it like that, yeah, it’s definitely weird.” Izzy shook her head. “Have you told him that?”
I hedged. “Well, not exactly.”
“You know he’s still hung up on you, don’t you?”
“I thought after that whole brainwashing debacle—”
“He thinks you’re stuck on the brainwashing,” Izzy said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d definitely get hung up on it if someone reached in his head and made him fall in love with me. But maybe you should tell him that’s not the problem here.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Now we’re veering into drama queen territory again.”
Sister Seeker Page 9
