I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps they wouldn’t have escaped without me, but I wouldn’t have escaped without them, either. Or Ophelia for that matter.
We passed barren fields as Adrian placed a call to Rhett, his voice a backdrop to my thoughts. “Fifteen minutes…immediate departure…”
As we turned the car onto the private runway, Charles woke. Rhett had the plane running. We rushed over, his gaze scrutinizing us more harshly the closer we came.
“No, no, no. Not getting in my plane like that, dirty as field rats and smelling of rot.” He shook his head. “No way. Ain’t gonna happen.”
I glared at him. “We paid you.”
“Fine,” he said, huffing through his nose. “Fine! I don’t get paid enough, tell you that. Grab the towels in the back. Don’t touch nothing, don’t get nothing dirty, or you pay for that, too.”
“Go on,” I said to the children, shooing them to follow Rhett onto the plane. I turned to Charles and Adrian. “What are we going to do with them?”
A muscle twitched in Charles’ jaw. “I couldn’t care less.”
I frowned. “Are you okay?”
“My parents are dead. What do you think?”
I stared at him with searching gravity. The pain of losing his parents was one we shared, but I wasn’t ready to deal with those emotions right now, and there was nothing I could say to make him feel better.
Once we boarded, Charles told Rhett to take us to a location in the Japanese mountains. The Liettes’ home, I guessed. Rhett’s only reply was a flippant quip that we should do nothing and let him take care of everything, since that’s what we were doing anyway.
Adrian lay on a small bunk in the back cabin. I should’ve been exhausted, but my mind stirred with too many unanswered questions. I grabbed the ragged brown towels from the compartment near the bathroom and tossed them over all the seats. Charles and I sat opposite the children, a small dish on the table between us, empty except for some dusty peanut residue.
“Sorry,” I said to the children, “I haven’t even caught your names.”
The boy introduced himself as Aspen and the girl as his sister, Autumn. “Valeria took us in several years ago—” the boy began.
“Bullshit,” Charles said.
The boy blinked. “Did Valeria not tell you of us?”
“My mother,” Charles said, turning to me, “would never take in one of the Chibold.”
So they were fire elementals? I covered his hand with my own. “Please, let them talk.”
Charles was suspicious, and, admittedly, I didn’t like the way they kept staring, unblinking, an inky blackness to their eyes. But if what they said was true, they were family.
As I delved more deeply into Charles’ thoughts, I read he was only remotely thankful the twins had saved me; mostly, he blamed them that I’d been in danger in the first place. The children clearly had the power to rescue his parents but had allowed them to die and nearly gotten us killed in the process. Why hadn’t they acted sooner?
“Tonight’s events had to happen this way,” Aspen said.
The usual blue vibrancy of Charles’ eyes faded to a stony gray, and he clenched his fist over the armrest of his seat. I placed my hand on his arm, hoping to soothe him. We all dealt with grief in our own way. Detachment was the only way I knew. For Charles, grief was handled through anger and a need to place blame.
He slumped in his chair, pressing his lips together.
I asked the children—these Chibold—about their capture, about how they had survived so long. The Maltorim had been waiting for us, but not entirely for the reason we had thought. They didn’t know how to destroy these children, and the Liettes provided no answer. They’d hoped Charles would help them solve the riddle, that somehow bringing the family together would be the key to solving this small mystery.
“Though our kind are nearly extinct due to the lack of host families, some of us have found a way to survive by helping dual-breeds in exchange for their hosting,” Aspen said. “The Maltorim does not take kindly to this, but there is not much they can do. Their only option is to kill our host families, but we protect them. Even once they’ve ended the lives of the host family, we’d still live for centuries more. The Liettes being alive was the only thing that kept us in holding, and the Maltorim was aware of that. We could have left at any time. They thought Charles might be able to reveal more—reveal another way to end our lives.”
“You were trying to help the Liettes, then?” I asked.
“They wanted us to escort Charles once he was ready to approach the Ankou and purge his Cruor side. We were to be introduced to him at that time.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Aspen settled his gaze on me. “You were involved.”
“Of course I was involved.”
“No, you don’t understand. Not you, the woman Charles wanted to grow old with. You—as in the very reason we were originally sent here.”