“I’ll pay you half now and half when we pick up the wand,” I told Griddish, who bowed lightly to me.
“Thank you, young druid.” He went over to his desk and brought me back a small business card. On it was written Two Elves Craftsmen LCC with his company’s bank information. Two elves. But now only one. Again, I felt for him and the loss of his twin brother.
I tucked it into my pocket and bade him farewell. As I was about to turn to leave, Dominic approached the elf, one gun in each hand relaxed at his side. “You remember the lady’s terms for paying you such a large sum?”
The elf didn’t show a hint of fear. If anything, he looked annoyed at Dominic’s little gun display. “I pledge on my honor to never make another skyborn-killing weapon in all my life,” he declared.
Keegan rolled his eyes, but I felt his promise was true. At least I hoped it was. I was living in the woods and out of a bus, what did I need the money for? I could always just sell another scale. But for him it would change his circumstances greatly, start him on a new path.
We loaded up onto the bus and I took one last look at Griddish. He’d better not let me down.
As Griddish levitated our bus up and out onto the street, Isaac sat next to me. “Yalash made my wand free of charge. I still paid him a donation, but it was pennies compared to what you just offered him.”
I nodded. “I’ve been desperate before. People do crazy things when they’re in that state.”
My mind thought back to the Grand Canyon fall. I’d stolen clothes, food, and even money to get by. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but I’d been in survival mode.
Isaac nodded. “If Yalash were still alive, he’d never have worked for the bad druids.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes grief makes you do things you never thought you would.”
My chest pinched then as I thought of my mother. No teenager should ever have to bury their own parent. It felt beyond wrong. I’d gone to a dark place for a few years after that. Actually, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t end up a drug addict or a stripper.
“Hey, Isaac?”
The bus was landing on four wheels in front of the house.
“Yes?”
“If I’m a fire druid, then my mom was one, right?”
His eyebrows pinched in confusion. “Yes, but a fire druid is a pure earth druid. She wouldn’t have been one of Ardan’s. That means she was like me, but … I never knew of any others left. I could have helped her.”
Emotions warred inside of me. My mother lied to me my entire life. She was my best friend and her betrayal cut me wide open.
“But she died of breast cancer. I saw her waste away…” Tears lined my eyes as I thought back to how my radiant and boisterous mother had been, and then was reduced to a sleeping skeleton.
Isaac placed a hand on my knee. “I have a theory about that … but why hash out the past? It happened. Best to move on and feel good knowing your mother was one of us. One of the good ones.”
I wanted to move on, to take comfort in the fact that my mother wasn’t one of Ardan’s monsters, but I needed to know how this all happened. And why.
“Tell me your theory,” I said, as Roxy put the bus in reverse and prepared to take us home. The rest of the gang shuffled to the back, giving us privacy.
Isaac stared out the window at the passing trees. “Fire druids have ancient magic. Magic, that when trained, can rival a pureblooded sorcerer.”
I don’t know why that knowledge scared me, but it did. Was I afraid of myself? What I was capable of?
“But everything has its limits,” he went on. “I think your mother used up all of her magic to keep you hidden, keep you from appearing human. It took all of her energy to keep that spell alive and…”
The world tilted on its axis as my vision blurred. The enormity of what he said slammed into me. “I killed her. I killed my mother…?”
7
Isaac tried to reassure me that it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t want to hear it. My mother had used up all of her power to keep me hidden, to essentially make me human, and it killed her. The thought brought me back to that dark place. The only measure of comfort I had was knowing that she was good the whole time, an original earth druid, never falling into Ardan’s gang of racist fleabags. We drove the rest of the way home in silence. I curled in my bunk with the curtain drawn. I only went out once, and that was to feed Hemlock. He let me get closer, but still growled. He was walking and his staples were looking good, so I was going to count that as a win.
When the bus finally stopped, I heard Isaac call out to everyone that we were home. Home. That word didn’t hold much meaning for me anymore. Not like it did when my mom was alive. My car was about the only place I considered home. Logan and Nadine were home. So I guess wherever we were was home. I knew I should open the curtain and get out with everyone else. Logan had come to check on me, but I’d told him I didn’t feel well and wanted to be alone. I should just be able to pull the curtain back and get up. But a thick depression had settled into me and I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to do anything but stare at the wall. Even when I heard Nadine struggling to get Hemlock off the bus, I didn’t move.
My mother had lied to me my whole life, made me think I was human. Then she killed herself by letting her magic dry up, and left me all alone to face this supernatural world. The bitterness sank in my stomach like a stone. How could she? Fresh tears leaked from my eyes.
I smelled him before he even pulled the curtain back. Logan. Like a crisp mountain breeze had just blown through the bus, his scent wrapped around all of me, saturating me. My dragon pulsed, sending heat to my core.
The bed pressed down with his weight and I tried to stop the tears.
“You can tell me anything, you know.” His voice was so full of compassion it nearly broke me. He knew I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t even sure dragon druids got sick. He stroked my back for a few minutes and we just stayed in silence as I pulled my emotions in. Finally, I rolled over and he wiped a tear away from my cheek.
“Isaac said that my mom had to be a fire druid too. That she would have had powerful enough magic to keep me essentially human, but it would cost her…” I didn’t finish. I didn’t need to. He picked up the rest through the bond. I sent him everything. All of my thoughts and fears and anger towards the whole situation.
His hand tangled with mine. “Sloane, it’s not your fault. You can’t do that to yourself.”
“How could she? Logan, I fed her, bathed her when she was all but ninety pounds and I was supposed to be at the prom having a normal childhood. How could she put me through that if she had the power to stop it? How could she leave me?”
She could have done a tree healing like Isaac did with Dom. But that expulsion of magic might have cost too much. It might have revealed me.