Page 12 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 12

Aubrey

“Thank you again,” a voice said, filled with genuine emotion. “I appreciate you fitting us in at the last minute like this. He’s really starting to worry me.”

My mouth was as dry as a wad of cotton balls again, but with a bit of coppery tang, like I’d maybe bitten my tongue. I blinked my eyes open, and cringed at the bright light everywhere around me.

“Oh, hey, he’s waking up, I’d better go and make sure everything is okay,” the voice said, and I realized they were talking about me.

Kit Moonstriker. He was talking about me.

I was worrying him?

I forced my eyes open again, blinking repeatedly and lifting my hand to shield them from the bright outside world. I opened my mouth to ask where we were, or what was going on, or why he was worried, but all that came out was a garbled mess of syllables that didn’t resemble words at all. Panic welled up in me at that, but Kit reached out and squeezed my arm.

“It’s okay. This will pass. I’m not pretending confidence in things I don’t know, and I’m not bullshitting you. Your brain is just a little scrambled at the moment. It gets better.”

I wanted to demand how he knew that, but I didn’t think I could properly ask, so I didn’t try again. Instead, I focused on breathing.

Kit glanced over at me, then back again, and that was when I realized he was driving. That, and there was a building behind his head. Rather, we weren’t anywhere near the chalet. There were buildings outside the windows of the car.

He reached down to his clavicle, holding up a clear stone tied into a leather band. “This is Nikka. She’s an aquamarine, and sometimes, she knows the future. She swears you’re going to be okay.”

My eyes focused on the stone, and it seemed to twinkle at me. I waited for the usual jab of jealousy when someone talked about their amazing stone powers, but it didn’t come. Only the relief that Kit probably knew what the hell he was talking about when he said I was going to be okay. That I hadn’t lost my ability to speak forever.

People losing their voices happened sometimes, I was sure. What was it my grandmother had said when she’d ended up in the wheelchair when I was a kid? Not all of us start out abled, Aubrey dear, but even when we do, best to remember that’s a temporary state .

That had stuck with me in ways I suspected she hadn’t intended, but also...it was good. It made me appreciate what I had, and that there was nothing inherently wrong with a person being disabled, when that day eventually came. That it did come to all of us, no matter who we were and what we did. Goodness, righteousness, and even money didn’t stand as some kind of magical bulwark between humans and disability.

I’d just rather expected it to be something like my grandmother hurting her back and not being able to walk anymore, when it came for me. It had never occurred to me I might not be able to speak.

Still, I could handle this, regardless.

I took a deep breath, then another, focusing on words in my head. On how to form the one I needed.

“Doctor?” I finally managed to ask.

“Yes, that was the office of the doctor here in Yomi. It’s a pretty small town, but they’re the only doctor’s office anywhere near us, so they’re full service. Even better, their afternoon wasn’t too busy, so they offered to fit you in as soon as we get there.” He motioned forward. “We’re a couple miles away still, but I have to admit, I started to worry when you didn’t wake up on the way here. When I left the chalet, the plan was to let you decide whether you wanted to see a doctor, but?—”

I held up a hand, nodding my understanding. I’d have done the same in his shoes, so I didn’t need an explanation.

He squeezed his stone tight for a moment, and I imagined he was speaking to it. Ahh, there was the old jealousy.

It was lonely, growing up surrounded by people who all had a stone for a best friend and having none of your own. Even the people who bonded stones that didn’t speak had a sort of...well, a bond with them. There was a presence there. They were never alone.

I’d always had an acute sense that I was missing something important. That there was something wrong with me, and that was why no stone wanted me. It didn’t matter how many times Mother and Grandmother had told me they didn’t believe that was true. It had always been couched in the idea that someday I would bond, and I couldn’t help but wonder...what if I didn’t?

And then, of course, I hadn’t. I was now twenty-two and still unbonded. I was the only person I had ever met who didn’t have so much as a tiny diamond, and it was like living without a last name. Every employment application asked for stone information. Every college application, every government form, every person you spoke to at a party. “What’s your stone?” was a safe question, because every adult in the Summerlands had a stone.

Everyone but me.

I sighed and closed my eyes to blot it all out. As much as Kit had proven to be an asshole, he hadn’t done anything wrong just by bonding a stone. Maybe it wasn’t my fault for not having one, either, but I couldn’t blame Kit for my own baggage.

Plus it had been kind of him to take me to the doctor and not let Titania make it into a major production. Flying a doctor all the way to the chalet just for me had been the last thing I’d wanted—was still the last thing I wanted. As much as I also wanted to make Aunt Titania happy, that was simply too ridiculous.

It wasn’t until Kit reached for the start button on the car that I realized we’d stopped. When the car was off and he’d removed his seat belt, he turned to me. “This is okay? I didn’t want to force a doctor on you.”

How oddly thoughtful of him. I took a deep breath, hoping for the best, and braced myself before trying to speak. “Okay.”

He smiled at that and then motioned to the building to one side of us. “Here we are, then. The only doctor’s office for fifty miles in any direction, and they’re waiting for you.”

I nodded, and was grateful when my body didn’t rebel as I reached for the door handle. I was still trembling minutely, but it wasn’t out of control or painful. Better yet, the horrible noise was absent. Everything sounded strange and hollow, but it wasn’t being drowned out, and that was what mattered.

Kit led the way into a small clinic, where we were met by a woman in scrubs. “Mr. Emrys?”

“That’s me,” he agreed, and that was odd. I thought it had been Moonstriker. Maybe he was Kit Moonstriker the way some people thought I was supposed to be Aubrey Duskbringer. But that would mean he’d grown up outside the rich family, wouldn’t it? “And this is your patient, Aubrey Sagara.”

The woman smiled at me, handing Kit a clipboard and motioning for me to follow her, and I didn’t have much time for thinking about Kit’s childhood after that. They weighed and measured and tested me for all the usual doctor stuff, but also, they tested my reflexes, my skin sensitivity, and then put me in a giant whirring machine that was almost as loud as the noise that kept coming with the tremors.

The whole time, they asked questions. “Does this hurt?” featured heavily, yes, but they also asked for a plethora of details about the seizures, and anything the two incidents had in common. Ironically, the only thing I had been able to think of was Kit’s presence at both.

Kit, who’d finished filling out the information on the clipboard and handed it back to another woman, laughed and shook his head at that. “Are you suggesting you’re allergic to me, Duskbringer?”

I lifted a brow at him. “Honestly? It wouldn’t surprise me.”

I didn’t want to be an asshole to him, since he was being downright nice now, but really, he’d been fucking insufferable over the last day. Not that disliking something especially hard resulted in an allergy, but if it could, I’d have been deathly allergic to Kit Moonstriker. Or maybe Kit Emrys.

Or maybe Kit Moonstriker was the asshole, and Kit Emrys was okay.

Finally, we were sitting together in a small room with just three chairs and a medical chair-bed-thing—what the heck were those even called?—and it seemed like the tests were done.

“Think I’m dying?” I asked, only half joking.

Kit hesitated before shaking his head, which was rather telling, I thought. “Nikka said you’d be fine,” he said.

It was odd, how important that seemed to him. Oh, not that I was going to be okay; I wasn’t naive enough to think he cared about me. But he’d said that his stone thought I’d be fine earlier as well, and there he was repeating it like a mantra. Like if that wasn’t true, he didn’t know what he would do.

“The doctor seemed worried.” I stared at the signage on the wall across from me, something about foot inspections that I wasn’t really absorbing. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a doctor worried about me before.”

“I had one slap me once,” he said, tone light, but it was false. He was trying to make us laugh, but neither of us were in the mood.

I turned and looked at him. “Do something unintelligent?”

Now that, finally, elicited a real response. A wicked grin. “Always.” Then he rolled his eyes and motioned to his costume. “I mean, come on. I’m a duelist. It’s my job to do ridiculous, inadvisable things.”

That? That took me by surprise. “You’re...actually a duelist? I thought dueling was illegal in Moonstriker lands.”

“It is,” he agreed. “Delta outlawed it herself. I’ve spent the last decade living mostly in Dawnchaser lands.”

I continued to stare at him, feeling a little like I was ramming my head into a brick wall rather than having a conversation. “But...why?”

He snorted at that. “Too much to believe a man just wanted to be a duelist?”

“Yes.”

“Some of them do, you know. They train their whole lives. They love their job. For a while, anyway.”

The room was silent a moment, and I realized he had no intention of explaining further. So clearly, I had to prod him. “But you don’t. You said some of them, that implies not you. So why do it?”

He reached up and brushed his fingers against the aquamarine around his neck, sighing, then looked at me again. “Like I said, Nikka sees the future. She knew this was coming, and where I needed to be. Given my skill set, the best way to get into Huxley Dawnchaser’s good graces so we could mitigate his behavior, was as a duelist.”

That was bizarre. Almost incomprehensible. Why had he even needed?—

The doctor chose that moment to come in, smiling at us, and took a seat on the remaining empty stool in the room. “How are we feeling? No more tremors?”

I shook my head. If anything, the tremors had decreased since I’d woken up, and hadn’t returned. “I feel...miserable. But no tremors.”

“You said this is your first time at altitude, which is a possibility, of course. Have you...are you a musician, by chance? Learning a new trade?” She paused, looking at me a moment with her head cocked, then asked, slightly more dubiously, “Recently bonded a stone?”

That caught Kit’s attention like nothing else had. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, there’s some hearing damage,” she said, motioning to a file folder in her hands, “which could just be incidental from ambient noise at a workplace or music venue, but there are some other abnormalities that I’ve only ever seen once before, and that was in a traumatic bonding.”

I blinked in shock at the very notion. “What the heck is a traumatic bonding?”

“In the previous case, the child was too young to be bonding, and hearing the stone’s song caused her some hearing damage like this. In addition to the way your brain is reacting, well...this looks a lot like that. She also had seizures before the bond was able to complete.”

I shook my head. “But I don’t have a stone. I’ve never bonded.”

She nodded. “I saw that, and that’s quite unusual. It’s not the oldest I’ve ever heard of someone bonding their first stone, but it’s close. Is there any chance that there’s a loose stone in the vicinity of where you’re staying that’s trying to bond you?”

All I could do was sit there and stare at her. Was she saying that now, now , I might be bonding a stone? And worse, that I was so fucking broken that I was physically reacting like a small child?