Page 16 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)
Chapter 16
Aubrey
“We’re not going back to town,” I told Kit, for some reason trying to keep my irritation with him going despite the bag in my hands.
A whole bag of granola bars.
No, not just granola bars, but the good kind. The expensive ones we’d never been able to buy when I was a kid, with real chocolate in them. There had to be five boxes worth of them in there, all different kinds, with almonds and cherries, and peanuts and chocolate, and just...If I’d come across the bag ten years earlier, I’d have thought I’d died and gone to a better place.
Stranger still, given the way Kit had reacted to them, he couldn’t stand them. So knowing he was going to be trapped out here with me, he’d gotten them specifically for me.
But he kept acting like he hated me.
Kit turned, strapping a backpack across his midsection, and rolled his eyes. “Obviously we’re not going back to town.”
“But you—you told your brother...” What had he told his brother, exactly?
Aubrey and I are going to get our shit together and figure out what to do next. We’ll be in touch .
Not a word about where we were or where we were going.
His lips quirked up in a wicked smile. “Figured that out, did you? I told Frost what he wanted to hear, and it made him feel better. He doesn’t need to be worrying about us while he’s busy trying to deal with Delta’s inevitable tantrum when the current stones don’t work.”
When the current stones . . .
“What?” Yes, there was a note of panic in my voice, because what? The current stones weren’t going to work? Slate was going to continue shaking, threatening to...to...
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Kit said, holding another backpack frame out in my direction. “We’ll fix it. Or, I suppose, you’ll fix it.”
Right. Because he thought I was going to bond the whole mountain myself, and then why would we need to worry about the family stones at all?
Wait.
I blinked a moment, staring into space, stunned. Why would we have to worry about the four—or five—family stones, if Mount Slate could bond a person? For a moment, the idea felt freeing, like the whole of the Summerlands could be free of...of what, though?
If my father had still been the man in charge of Duskbringer lands, then sure, being free of him was better for everyone. But he wasn’t. Aunt Titania was, and she cared about what was best for everyone.
I was in a fog as Kit packed us up, securing the straps on the packs and making sure we were bringing everything with us, including more extra water than even I thought necessary.
When I looked at the gallon jug he was carrying in addition to the canteens attached to the packs, he shrugged. “Don’t want to run out of water. Can live without almost anything else for a while.”
Odd, how he’d packed everything up without asking for my help or complaining that I was too distracted to offer it.
Finally ready, he went up to the passenger side of the car and opened the glove box, pulling out a worn, brown folded piece of paper. He flattened it out on the now closed trunk of the car in front of us and motioned to something that I couldn’t focus on because?—
“How old is this map? Is that hand-drawn?”
“It is,” he agreed, smoothing it out with one hand and smiling at it. “And I don’t know how old it is, but it cost me a fucking fortune. The important part is that Nikka said it was accurate. This is where we are. That’s where the chalet is. And we need to follow this little hiking trail up and around to come in behind the chalet.”
I watched his finger follow a tiny line around, through fields of little trees and over enormous hand-drawn rocks, before turning to stare at him. “Are you serious? Mountain climbing?”
“Like I told you,” he said, waving dismissively. He was always so dismissive of anything standing in his way, such an unapologetic asshole. I rolled my eyes at him, but he ignored me. Also as usual. “We’re not going to need the heavy climbing gear.”
“I don’t suppose it occurred to you that I don’t know how to use any climbing gear? Not even the...not heavy kind. Whatever that means.”
“We’re hardly going to be climbing at all,” he said, sighing and clearly wanting the conversation to be over already. “The chalet is barely a few dozen feet higher in elevation than this spot. It’s just that some of the terrain is a little rocky is all.”
A few dozen feet, he said, like that was nothing.
“Have we forgotten that I’m having seizures because of that elevation?”
He turned and looked at me like I was a particularly slow child and he was waiting for me to catch up with the rest of the class. When I just stood there staring at him, he sighed and turned back to the map. “You’re not having seizures because of the elevation. You’re having seizures because the whole fucking mountain is trying to bond itself to your brain.”
Oh, right.
The impossible: me, bonding.
Not only that, but me bonding to the whole of Mount Slate. Not a single stone, but a giant mass of them all together. I still didn’t understand how that was possible at all, but there was Kit, acting as though it was a foregone conclusion.
Because his stone could see the future, and apparently that was what she’d seen. Me, bonded to a whole mountain.
I shook my head, and I wasn’t sure if I was denying the words or simply...confused.
None of it seemed possible. I wasn’t even sure I wanted it to be possible. I’d always wanted to be “normal” and bond a stone. A simple stone, like everyone else. A sapphire or agate or amethyst. Maybe a diamond, even. As long as it was a stone, and I didn’t have to deal with the fact that I was an adult and unbonded anymore.
I’d once had a potential employer look up my criminal record when I’d put in a job application and listed no stone, because he was convinced it wasn’t possible for an adult to be unbonded unless they’d committed some crime so heinous that it had warranted severing. Needless to say, I hadn’t gotten the job even though he’d been proven wrong.
Still, Kit was demanding that the two of us hike up half the mountain. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t the steep part and we wouldn’t be scaling sheer cliffs, but that didn’t mean it was nothing.
“This is crazy,” I told him, and he rolled his eyes. Never interested in hearing a dissenting opinion. Well he could freaking deal with it and listen to someone for once. I spat the next words with a vehemence that at least got his attention, even if he still didn’t seem to care all that much. “I literally know nothing about this. I can’t climb a mountain. I don’t even know how to...to camp.”
At that, he lifted an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you’ve never, not once in your life, slept rough?”
I glared at him. “I wasn’t homeless.”
That got me the other eyebrow. “What’s wrong with being homeless? I’ve been homeless. It just means you don’t have the money society thinks you should have to pay for a roof over your head, which is frankly bullshit.”
“The Gloombringer always said”—he pursed his lips at that, and he wasn’t wrong, but darn it, not everything Oberon Gloombringer had said was a lie. Was it? “They say that most homeless people are mentally ill and can’t take care of themselves.”
For a moment, Kit just stood there, staring at me. Then he let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, shaking his head. “First of all, that’s bullshit. Second, think about that for a minute. If it were true, do you think being mentally ill means anyone deserves to be unhoused?”
I stared at him, then leaned back onto the back of the car, eyes not focused on anything at all because...what kind of excuse was that not to help? It was crap, pure and simple, and for years I’d accepted it as just the way things were. Acceptable to dismiss an entire group of people for reasons that didn’t even make sense.
Was I a monster?
“Don’t feel too bad,” Kit grumbled, turning back to look at the map again. “They’re using psychology against you when they say things like that. Just...worry about it another time. We’ll work on fixing the world when we’re sure we’ve saved it so it can even be fixed.”
It was the closest thing he’d ever been to nice, and I wasn’t sure how to handle that. Also, what did a man who’d grown up rich care about fixing the world? One who dressed like a duelist, who’d said he had been a duelist, which Aunt Titania rightly thought was one of the worst things plaguing the whole of the Summerlands?
But at the same time, he wasn’t the Moonstriker heir, and he’d seemed unimpressed by the idea of flying a doctor out to the chalet just for me.
Who the heck was Kit Moonstriker?