Page 45

It had been the sort of day that Sera couldn’t wait to see the back of.

The north chimney had fallen prey to the winds and tumbled right off the roof, Theo had gone to bed in a grump because he hadn’t been able to beat a level on his video game, and to top it all off, she was now outside the front of the inn, in the bitterly cold night, trying to determine whether the stranger lurking suspiciously next to Nicholas’s car was an axe murderer.

It was possible Sera spent a little too much time worrying about axe murderers.

The stranger turned at the crunch of Sera’s footsteps in the snow. “Sera?”

“Nicholas?” She let out a relieved, exasperated breath. “Why are you lurking about in the dark?”

Nicholas stepped away from his car, into the light spilling from the inn windows, his breath fogging white in front of him.

She blinked. And blinked again. Was it Nicholas?

His hair had been combed neatly and ruthlessly back from his forehead, making him look older, and there was a dullness in his eyes that she’d never seen before.

He wasn’t wearing leather, armour plating, or gauntlets, either, but had put on dark blue jeans, scuffed white trainers, and a grey jumper with the white collar and buttoned cuffs of a shirt peeking out from underneath.

The bizarre doppelganger of Nicholas fidgeted with the cuffs of his shirt, obviously ill at ease. “I was just on my way out.”

“Where to?”

“Er.” He shifted. “I’m supposed to be meeting my father for a drink in Manchester.”

Sera did not know how to process this information.

She had never met Nicholas’s father, but from everything she knew about him, the best way she could think to describe him was that he was Albert Grey with even more inherited wealth, an even bloodier family history, and no magic.

Nicholas didn’t talk about him, but Sera knew that his father had been persistent in trying to bring his son and heir back into the fold.

About a month after Nicholas had arrived, his father had appeared uninvited in the lane at the bottom of the inn, driving back and forth like Luke’s mother had, getting increasingly frustrated with the fact that he simply couldn’t find it.

Sera’s spell had kept him away, but they could see him, and she would never forget the way Nicholas had huddled in the kitchen, gauntleted arms over his face, shuddering in the throes of a panic attack at the mere possibility of his father setting foot in the only place he’d ever been free of him.

“Do you want to see him?” Sera asked now.

“No.”

“Then you don’t have to.”

“I think I do,” Nicholas said, fidgeting with his cuffs again. “Not for him. For me. I ran away.”

“You’re twenty-three. You’re not a child. You didn’t run away. You left.”

“No.” Nicholas smiled weakly. “I ran away. Like a coward. I couldn’t live in their world anymore. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them, but instead of saying so, instead of telling them why I was walking away and that I was never going back, I just ran away.”

“You got out the only way you knew how. That’s okay.”

“Thanks. That’s a nice thing to say.” He looked at the ground, cheekbones pinking slightly. Then, fists clenching at his sides, he said, “He’s going to keep coming. I need to put an end to it. I need to say what I should have said when I left. It’s time.”

“If that’s what you feel like you need to do, okay,” Sera said slowly. “Why are you going like this, though? Why aren’t you wearing your usual clothes?”

He looked away. “It’s a costume. It’s ridiculous.”

“Has someone said that?”

He shrugged.

“Does it make you happy?”

“Yeah.”

“And is it doing anyone any harm?”

“No?”

“Then who the fuck cares what anyone else thinks?” said Sera. “If I told you that someone thought I was ridiculous, you’d demand to know who so you could run them through with your very shiny, pointy sword.”

“ Did someone say you were ridiculous?” Nicholas demanded at once, temper igniting.

Sera smiled. “Nicholas. Why aren’t you this fired up on your own behalf?”

“Because a knight is supposed to be kind and brave and loyal.” He stared at her earnestly. “A knight is supposed to protect other people, not themself. A knight shouldn’t make themself bigger by stepping all over everyone else.”

“A knight can’t protect other people if he doesn’t protect himself too,” Sera said gently.

“But…”

“You’re happy when you’re in your leather and your gauntlets because that’s what feels like the real you, right? The you that you want to be?” He nodded. She squeezed his hand. “So be that you. Don’t let your father take that away from you.”

“My armour is in my car, so I could put it on when I get there…” Nicholas thought about it for a minute. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Watching him, overcome by an unexpected, protective ferocity, Sera said, “Do you want me to come to Manchester with you?”

“Almost as much as I want to not go,” Nicholas admitted with a short rueful laugh. His puppylike green eyes shone down at her, brighter than they had been a minute ago. “But it’s not about what I want. I need to do this by myself.”

“Then why don’t you take this with you?” Reaching up to the clasp around her neck, Sera took her necklace off.

Nicholas looked horrified. “What? No! That’s yours!”

“Keep it just for tonight,” she said. It was the first time she’d taken the necklace off in fifteen years, but it didn’t feel wrong to take it off for this.

It felt perfectly, absolutely right. “Wear it, or put it in your pocket, or whatever. Just so you have it whenever you need a reminder that you’re stronger than you think and that you did a very brave thing when you walked away from everything you knew. ”

Nicholas let her drop the necklace into his palm. He stared at it in silent awe. (Honestly, it was far more awe than the silly necklace deserved, but Sera of all people knew how much a symbol could matter.)

“Look after her,” she said. “That swan’s tough, but she can break.”

“I didn’t know it was a swan,” Nicholas said in surprise, which was such a Nicholas thing to say that Sera laughed. “I always thought it was a firebird.”

Sera froze. “What?”

“You know, the one from the fairy tale? The firebird? I reckon it’s because whenever I see you wearing it, the light catches on it and the crystal looks like it’s red and gold.”

Sera’s voice shook. “I’ve never—I didn’t—I’ve never looked at it that way.”

“Well, no, I guess you wouldn’t.” Nicholas shrugged. “You’ve been wearing it since you got it. You’ve only ever seen it one way.”

He gave her a sweet, lovely smile and loped off to his car, and then, before Sera had fully realised what she’d done, before she could open her mouth to call him back, he had driven off into the dark, taking her necklace with him.

Firebird.

Her knees wobbled, giving way, and she dropped to the thick, packed snow, framed by the triangle of light spilling out of the open front door.

Firebird.

She couldn’t see the ghosts, but she could feel them, all of them, close, and they were holding their breath, waiting for her to finally understand.

“You didn’t leave me at all, did you?” Her voice broke. “I thought you were haunting me, reminding me of what I’d lost, but that’s not it, is it? You were trying to show me you never left. You were trying to tell me you’ve been here all along.”

She hadn’t lost them. She’d kept them with her. Because each time something had tried to break her, she hadn’t become smaller. She hadn’t become something less.

She’d become something more .

Firebird.

“Phoenix,” she whispered.

A creature of the sky and the stars, burning, dying, once, twice, a hundred times, only to come back, stubborn and persistent, to rise out of the ashes, to be resurrected, to live .

Firebird, phoenix, a stitched-up Frankenstein creature made out of every Sera she had ever been, and still here.

Still. Here.

It took Sera a long time to realise she was crying.

They were not dainty tears trickling prettily down her cheeks. They were great, big, ugly, gulping sobs. They came from somewhere deep inside, punching past her throat, as if a dam that had held back the tide for years had finally burst.

A car pulled into the driveway. A door opened, there was a startled pause, and footsteps crunched quickly across the snow. Then Luke was beside her, and as she sobbed and sobbed, lifting her face to look up at his, he gripped one of her knees.

His face was stricken. “What…”

Her shoulders heaved and she tried to speak, but all she could say was “Nothing’s wrong, everyone’s fine, I’m just…” and then she couldn’t say or do anything else except cry.

Luke tightened his grip on her knee, and she dropped her head against his chest. He was solid, immovable, here .

He stroked her hair, sifting through the shiny dark strands with ink-stained fingers.

She gripped fistfuls of his shirt in her hands as she sobbed into it, quite unable to do anything except let the tempest pass.

There was a rumble of thunder, the skies opened, and rain cascaded down to the earth. They were drenched in seconds. The timing was so inopportune and yet so very typical that Sera found her sobs turning, inevitably, into choked, sputtery laughter.

“I think I liked it better when it was tea.” Luke sighed.

She swallowed back the slightly hysterical laughter and looked up at him, blinking past the rain. “I’m the phoenix.”

Understanding sparked in his eyes at once. “You are.”

“And I just sent Nicholas away with my necklace!”

As this seemed to be an entirely unrelated segue, it needed some explaining. Luke was quick to reassure her. “He’ll bring it back.”

“I know. I just can’t believe…” Her throat closed up again. “Phoenixes and swans and ghosts. There were all these things about me I never really understood, but then Nicholas said he’d thought my necklace was a firebird and suddenly it just fit . I just needed to see things a bit differently.”