by May Peterson
I sucked in a tremulous laugh. “Lately has been an awfully long time. I’m very glad you’re back, Weifan.”
Her brow quirked. “But?”
“You and Father have unsettled business. I’m afraid you’re not the only one.”
Chapter Seven
Tibario
Now even my body was making excuses.
Fuck being a cat-soul, honestly. I had no idea how to handle this.
The long night of assassination, masquerade, and abandoning my childhood would-be-sweetheart had triggered some kind of stress response in my new soul. Because after a noisome six hours tossing and turning, I awoke to a horrific urgency to catshape.
The lore was always that this was a full moon thing. The Colombi had held airborne balls on the full moon, filling the skies with streaking gray and white forms like aimless snow gods. But at a waning gibbous, I was overcome. All tabby fur and sharp claws, and I had the most awful desire to cry. It came out as caterwauling, and an enormous relief whenever I scratched things. Scratched things with substance, that let me dig deep, leave claw-stripes of useless rage behind.
It took me about two hours to find my way back to humanshape. And just in time, because I had plans for this already rather dubious night.
Rising to clean my face and dress myself, I found a surprise: I still had my tail. Long, furry, striped. My muscles were all one landscape of pain. Somehow I hadn’t human-shaped back all the way. And I’d have to rearrange myself again to absorb the tail.
Fuck it. I cut a hole in the upper back of a pair of trousers. That didn’t look so bad.
I grabbed the locket from where it was tucked behind my dresser. Mercurio’s flat was a cat’s step away.
And it was dark when I slipped through my hole in the Deep. Mercurio may not be home yet, at even this house. If she still lived here.
Hm. Mercurio was almost certainly not her name anymore, may not have been for years. Once again it struck me how little I really understood her.
I knocked at the door twice, stood straight, and tried not to look too feral. The tail was awkward. It wagged without my volition, made me feel back-heavy, kept brushing against my legs. I willed it to stop.
Then the door opened. She stood on the other side.
Her eyes widened, lips slightly parted. A scarf was wrapped around her head, and a bottle-green men’s jacket that was far too big for her draped her arms. Between the unbuttoned flaps showed a satiny undershirt and a flash of smooth, bare chest. No jewelry.
My breath stopped in my lungs. This was so obviously the girl from last night. And so obviously the “boy” I’d left weeks ago.
“Tibario.” She sounded soft as the retreat of rain.
“Hey, kid.” I shrugged.
She scanned my body, as if checking that I was all still here. Something bitter and tender and heavy radiated from her. Then she brightened unexpectedly.
“You have...a tail.”
Said tail fluttered to one side, batting the side of my leg. “You. Are right.”
That good old Gianbellicci charm.
She took a deep breath. “You want to come in?”
Casually worded, but her voice shook. I nodded, smiling as reassuringly as I could, and then we were in her little ghost-scented room. A candle on the table, empty bottles on the floor.
I had been here before I died.
She glanced at my tail, then back at my face. “I think I can guess the story there.”
Or at least divine it. But something needed done first. Fumbling, I pulled the locket from my pocket.
The distance between us felt abruptly insurmountable, like I was extending the locket out into an abyss. It struck me how shitty a thing this was to do. I was essentially forcing her to expose herself in order to accept this. So words tumbled out, faster than thought. “The chain. Is. Broken. I accidentally pulled it from someone last night. It looks like a piece you used to own, something of your mother’s? So I thought maybe you’d lent it to someone, or that at least you could fix the chain?”
What a truly convincing story. But it would give her an out. If she didn’t want to tell me about her life, she could pretend that the girl I’d abandoned was a friend.
I wished she could let me in. But that could only happen if I showed her it was safe to.
She took the chain over to her table, held it under the light. A frown formed and passed. “It’s only the clasp. I can fix that, once I get to some tools.”
All right. She took the out. It was up to her. I nodded, disappointment and shame and dearness rattling in my lungs.
Her back was still half turned to me. Slowly, she appeared to relax, show me her face. Misery and gratitude were warring on it.
“When I repair it.” She gulped audibly. “I am giving it back to you, and I want you to keep it. A-all right?”
I opened my mouth to speak, and found nothing to say.
She went on. “I made this for you. You were...supposed to come back for it.”
Oh.
And I hadn’t come back. So she had been wearing it, in the cold treasure hall of her father’s greed, staring him down like a thundercloud the moment I appeared to strike.
A vain, exhilarating thought had pierced me when I’d seen her: she was there waiting for me. Instead, she had been probably mourning me.
Barely thinking, I sat down hard on the chair.
I would have welcomed anger from her. Instead, what I got was her flushing face, rueful with a bashful smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For not showing you who I was.”
The guilt in her tone left bruises on my mind. “Why? You had no responsibility to.” My hurt looked so puny and pointless now. “May I...may I ask your name? Your real name?”
That smile flourished, sad and luminous, the gratitude declaring victory over the misery. She looked for a moment like she’d cry. Then she unwrapped the scarf from her head, letting her loose curly locks fall across her shoulders. She looked shockingly new, like a girl who had been watching me all my life from where I couldn’t see her.
Here she was. At last.
“My name is Violetta.”
Violetta. Like the flower, one of her favorite flowers. “That is a gorgeous name.” I stood, bowed with all the theatrical grace I could muster. “It’s an honor to meet you, my lady Violetta. I am Tibario.”
And I have loved you for a very long time.
She didn’t comment on the “my lady,” which suggested that was right. She’d tell me more when she wanted me to know.
Tears sparkled in her voice. “Were you ever going to tell me that you had died?”
My tail twitched, my whole body alive with yearning and pain, and my next step destroyed the gap between us. Whether I hugged her first, or she me, I wasn’t sure. Only that my arms were around her again, and this time I wasn’t letting her go.
She cried into my shoulder, gale-force sobs rocking her against me. My arms were as tight as I dared for them to be, my fingers running down her hair.
When her breathing began to calm, she stepped away slightly, our arms entwined. Her face was red, raw, and the way she rubbed her eyes on her sleeve...my heart ached.
“Yes.” I blew one of my bangs away from my brow. “I was planning to after I, uh, attempted to kill your father. Thank you for pushing me out a window, by the way. There’s a decent chance he thinks I drowned, which seems like an advantage considering the sound failure of the assassination attempt.”
She sniffed. “I want him to think I’m dead, too. It’d be the next best thing to what he really wants, which would be an entirely different person being his ‘son’ instead of me.”
As parental entanglements went, I tended to think my son-of-a-crime-queen-sorcerer-who-I-used-to-share-a-mind-with was a fairly prize-winning entry. But Violetta won, hands down.
She dabbed her eyes. “I’m not sure it is. Rosalina thought you were a ghost, if you want to know. You do rather look the part. The tail adds a certain je ne sais quoi.”
It was time to catch her up, then. I began describing the events of my murder in skeletal strokes. It was one thing Violetta could absolutely not blame herself or her elusive magic for.
Of course, in my gut, the knowledge roiled that she distrusted being pardoned perhaps more than any other thing. Her frown expressed a field of emotions: doubt, worry, sympathy, anger. “So you don’t know who actually killed you.”
“No.” But I did know better than to ask Violetta.
In theory, I could have gone to her first, before ever seeking Mio. I could have arrived bearing the gift of a thousand diviner’s secrets, like what I would have to say and who Mio’s mysterious enemy was. Violetta could have solved it all before the problem was even born. In theory.
She had taught me that in that theory lay the deadly trap of her existence, a chasm that sucked the rest of the world toward its core. If the future was something Violetta Benedetti could mechanically assemble the way one did a wheel, then she was responsible for the future. She would become its avatar, with all its fire and teeth and claws. And no one could endure that.
“Neither do I.” She scowled into the dimness of the room. “But I foresaw your death.”
A harrowing sense that this could be a dream lapped over me. “I don’t understand. I thought you were avoiding doing just that.”
Her scowl deepened. “I was waiting for you to come back. Terrified. Apparently, so was your mother.”
My eyes must have looked like fucking saucers.
“She came to me, the night it happened, begging for a divination. So I looked. And confirmed you were dead.”
Mamma came to her?
A memory bubbled up, of Mamma mentioning Mercurio in a strange fashion, as if knowing it was not her real name. Not using gendered language to speak of her.
She knew. She’d known the entire time. Known I had reconnected with her. Who she was. Where she lived.
And she had known Violetta believed I was dead, permanently dead, and had never said a word.
A freezing sensation settled in my spine.
I grasped her shoulders, drew a gasp from her. “Are you all right? Did she hurt you?”
“Of course she did, Tibario. And I hurt her back.” The pits of her eyes flamed. “It hurt to tell her that you were dead. It hurt both of us.”
My breathing was thick and rapid, full of the paranoia of Mamma and her panopticon of secrets. A moment passed in which I imagined that this might all be a false experience Mamma had built for me, that everything since my death had been one long episode of sorcery-spun illusion.
Her fingers patted my hands, soothed them into letting go. “My point is, I... I don’t know what it all means. Your mother, your death, Father, us. The inside of my head is a simple chorus of ‘he’s back, he’s alive, he’s back, he’s alive.’”
That was offered alongside a sheepish grin, but her face reddened until her freckles all but disappeared. Once again, I had trouble not noticing how her blush climbed up her ears and down her throat, vaguely exciting in how much space it claimed.
I wanted to touch her again, put my arms back around her. But that had been easy when I was comforting a crying friend. Now it was...more daunting.
I nodded, gulping a few greedy breaths. “Can we sit?” I gestured at her sofa. I’d never asked that way before, careful and tentative. The fear rushed up in me that I was about to either scare her off or sour something that I had wanted to nurture back to strength.
We both seemed to be trembling slightly as we took seats, the good person-sized gap between us feeling ceremonial and important. Violetta and me and our say-no-mores, all in a row together.
It needed to finally be spoken.
“I didn’t come only to ask your forgiveness and to assure you were safe. Though that last is very important to me, and the first is more like a fond wish.” I was afraid to look directly at her, not because of what her face would tell me, but because of my degrading nerve. “I told you I’d come back, and I never did. I think I’ve understood there was something between us for years, and I simply wouldn’t look at it.”
Her breaths were quiet almost-sounds, as if she were listening with her entire body.
“When I died, it was hard to feel anything at first. It fell on me like a rockslide, all such a shock. But there was a moment when it was something of a relief. For it to be over.”
I braced for horror from her, rebuke, panic. Instead, she whispered, “I understand that. Like you can finally put a weight down.”
And for the razor’s edge of a second, I had felt beautifully light, like waking from a nightmare about years of forgotten schoolwork.
This had set something loose in me that I hadn’t known was bolted down.
“After that,” I continued, “all I could see was regret. The Deep is a wide, dark place. I was drowning in regret, and that’s what death was. I expected to regret the person I’d been, or not being good enough, not having had all the pleasures I used to dream about.” I sniffed, pacing my breathing. “So it was a bit strange, that one regret above them all was the heaviest. One that seemed so easy to have fixed, if I’d just tried.”
How small and infant it seemed, to hate most the thought of dying alone, with a life behind me full of loved ones. One loved one in particular I had ignored.
I looked up at her then. The permanent frown lines of a face used to pain, her dear flutter of freckles and soft curls. The candlelight made her eyes jewellike.
“I never told you that I love you.” It rose from me, the tidal weight of that regret, finally hitting the shore. “My dearest friend. The only person I wanted to see, before the lights went out. I spent the better half of my mortal life loving you. And I barely knew who you were.”
There. It was out of me now, hanging in the shadows between us. Only then did I dare look at her. Her eyes were huge as if from shock, which would have been adorable had I not been so on edge.
She blinked a few times and pulled her coat tighter around her. This image of her was entrancing—the waves of her hair falling over her brow and shoulders, the bulk of the coat like armor, the silky undergarment beneath. Her exposed collarbone and shoulders made her look vulnerable.
“Do you—” She gulped audibly. “Do you really feel that way?”
I was blushing so hard I was dizzy. “Yes. Absolutely.” It might have been the most honest admission of my darkened life, next to me choosing Mamma over Mio. I desperately needed the first to balance the second. Someone existed that I wanted to be. And I wanted it to be a person inside Violetta’s world.
A dazzling storm of feelings clamored in her naked gaze, like lights settling to the earth. A wry laughter, a sniff, the aura of heartbreak that she wore like a cowl. Witnessing these feelings was like learning her real name, as if only by that magic was I able to see her in the dark at last.
Her voice was thick. “I wish I had known. Isn’t that silly? Years of knowledge I’ve spent my life wishing I hadn’t known ahead of time, and this one thing I wish I had.”
Hope and fear were kicking each other up and down my heart. “Why?”
The laughter grew, became warm and bitter and cutting, tearing down some veil between us. “Because I love you too, Tibario.”
The kicking escalated, became exhilaration, a yearning so bright it felt like dying again.
Her mouth crumpled, indicating a swallowed sob before she went on. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t be together.”
Oh.
Definitely just like dying. All over again.
Chapter Eight
Violetta
“Oh.” Tibario’s mouth took on an O shape, something dying in his expression.
For my next trick, I would not fall apart over this. His resurrection was cause for joy. And joy it was. One I would savor forever.
Did he know how magical he was, appearing at my door with a cat’s tail, his hair a mess, radiant with the phantasmal glow of his rebirth? Did he know how much it had hurt and how much it had healed, to have his arms around me again, in the lightless water of the bay?
How much it’d changed me, to wake up to the taste of dreams I had thought long dead. Dreams of warm nights and being loved, of the smiles of gentle young thieves.
“I—” He cleared his throat. I could have kissed him, his face was so riddled with youth and pain and beauty. That fluffy tail batted the side of my sofa, perhaps without him realizing it. “I certainly have no wish to twist your arm. But I...don’t think I understand?”
A dozen papery excuses came to mind. Our families were too at odds. I was too dangerous to love. We shared too many wounds.
None of that was the true reason.
I longed, with the urgency of starvation, to tell him the naked truth. Just as when he’d held the locket out to me, humming with its unspent possibilities.
“When you died, something else died too.” I tried my best to even my tone, breathe. At my core, I had never dared hope he could love me. I’d distinctly hoped for him not to, because of how terrifying it would be to get what I really wanted.
Then he came in on the scent of midnight air and ruined everything by wanting me.
“Before you died, I had a dream. I dreamed that someday I would tell you. I would wait until we were alone and at peace, and say, ‘You know your old pal Mercurio? Have I got a story for you about her.’ And...then you would love me.”
That admission burned on the way out, my vain obsessive yearning. But he was completely open to me, gaze wide as a sea.
“I’m not sure exactly how I thought it would happen. Maybe that you would take me in your arms and say you’d been waiting for this, that you actually liked me better as a mollygirl, or something, and we’d...be happy. Live together, smile together, dream together. That’d I wake up at night and you’d be there, next to me. I used to dream of us.”
