All he wanted to do was pull her close to him again, but he dutifully put them on. The room was transformed into a fairy cove, the carpet a sheet of silvery water that broke around his shoes. The lights on the walls, far from ruining the effect, gave the impression that a horde of glowing fairies had infested the place. Only the music and the buzz of voices intruded on the spell. Reef tried to shut them out. He was so dizzy, his brain still clouded. He remembered reading on a forum that valuable fairy sapphires were hidden in this very cove, but he couldn’t see them anywhere in the room. He half closed his eyes. The lights were spots of gold, bleeding into each other, spreading over the walls—
Something popped up in the corner of his vision: a holographic creature, a miniature silver dragon with cartoonish purple eyes. He realized someone was trying to initiate a chat with him using a digital pet as a mouthpiece, and then realized that the chat channel was already open.
“Hi there,” the dragon piped. “Guess what—it stopped snowing finally. I’m going to send you some pics of me braving the outdoors again.”
“Who is this?” Reef asked.
“Who else? Shasta.”
Reef frowned at the girl Cadence was carrying down the stairs. He tried to make his foggy brain work.
“I’ve decided you’re going to be in Canada in time for Christmas,” the dragon said. “Okay? Do I have to make you promise?”
It clicked—Shasta must be Cadence’s sister’s name too. She was the little girl’s namesake. Reef looked at Cadence bundling her daughter into a coat while the girl tried to stuff wispy hair back into her ski cap.
“Cadence?” the dragon went on. “There’s no one here. You’re the only one I have. You and about six lopsided snowmen.” There was a pause, and then—“Are you there?”
Someone else was trying to hail him on the chat channel too, but Reef was already tugging the strap off his head. “Here,” he said, thrusting the goggles back at Cadence. “Someone was trying to chat you.”
He noticed Aedric’s alien friend pulling off his goggles too, although Reef hadn’t seen him put them on. Had he been the one trying to hail him just now? Reef supposed a translation program would be the only way they could communicate. Cadence was already carrying her daughter toward the hallway, her goggles twined around her wrist. Reef abandoned the idea of getting them back. What would he even have to say to me? He had only one idea.
“Hey.” He caught up to Cadence. “Did you ever read anything in the Girl Queen stories about a Fated Blade?”
“I don’t remember. I stopped reading those stories a long time ago.”
“Has Aedric ever mentioned it?”
She turned to him in the mouth of the hallway. “Aedric always says nothing is fated, it’s just that some things happen in the right place, at the right time.”
He looked at her holding some other guy’s kid, going home to some other guy’s apartment. “And some things don’t.”
She reached over and trailed her fingers over Reef’s arm where his leech-hunter patch would show if she were wearing her goggles. “I wish I’d met you before I’d met Aedric. I think everything would have been different.” He caught her hand, moved close enough to kiss her again but felt unsure this time.
A few bulbs winked to life around her. “If I get visas before Aedric does, will you leave him?” Reef blurted.
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
He must have looked surprised at her quick answer, because she added, “Would you want to raise a daughter here?”
The wispy hair escaping from Shasta’s ski cap was a halo, lit by a thousand bulbs. Reef’s gaze traced the outline of the girl’s tiny nose, her rounded chin. “She looks more like you than like Aedric,” he said.
Cadence frowned. “She’s Croy’s.”
More surprise, and then guilt for thinking she’d take Aedric’s daughter from him if she got the chance. Croy couldn’t know anymore that he had a daughter, not in the state he was in.
Cadence looked away, and he wanted to tell her that he didn’t really think so poorly of her, but he could only step back and stuff his hands in his pockets and then she was gone, down the hallway and out the door.
Aedric’s alien friend slipped past Reef to follow her but then stopped and turned back. “Aedric,” he said to Reef.
Reef was hit with a sudden flash of suspicion and alarm. Not his own. He studied the alien’s face, but it was stoic as ever. “He’s not a good guy,” he said to the alien. “I get it.”
The alien disappeared down the dim hallway. Reef stood against the wall, felt the music humming in his bones, saw pinpoint lights whether his eyes were open or not. He thought about Cadence warm against him, and about Shasta needing a father. He thought about what the three of them would look like on a poster all together. He wanted to leave but he waited until his head felt a little clearer. As he walked out, the lights on the map all flashed red. “Your move, China,” he mumbled to himself.