Page 2 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 2

Aubrey Sagara (Duskbringer)

Aunt Titania was kind of the best.

She was worried that she “wasn’t as fun now that she was sober,” but that just wasn’t true. She was kind, and sweet, and funny as heck. I’d read once that people were often funny because of childhood trauma, and that tracked with her.

It was probably mean of me, and people always said not to malign the dead, but I blamed my father for how much she hated herself.

If her own brother hadn’t spent most of her life telling her she wasn’t good enough, she wouldn’t believe it so deeply.

“You should’ve seen his face when I told him we were going to retile the entryway,” she was saying, clearly holding back laughter. “You’d think I’d told him we were going to replace his children with similarly sized lizards. Like boring black-and-white tile was just the best thing in the universe and color was pure evil.”

I shook my head, sighing, but it was easy to imagine Titania’s old butler being horribly offended by the sunset-colored tiles she’d replaced in the castle’s entry. Most of the castle staff loved Titania and were excited over everything she did, from formally changing the family name back to Duskbringer to pulling out the bland black-and-white marble tiles in the entryway of the castle and replacing them with stunning hand-painted ones covered with swirls of blue, gold, and purple.

The old butler, though, had been a holdover from not just my father, but his own father, the man who’d made the switch to black-and-white in the first place.

I’d been given to understand that they were very similar people, my father and his. After more than a lifetime of working for the two of them, the butler—Smythe—was absolutely scandalized whenever anything was changed away from their preferences.

“He’ll probably survive,” I pointed out.

She shook her head, then paused, leaning it to one side and causing a cascade of red curls to tumble over her shoulder. “I mean, he’s not gonna die, obviously. But he’s been starting to make noise about retiring. Which is probably reasonable anyway. He’s like ninety or something.”

I thought he wasn’t quite that old, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been nearly eighty, so I didn’t try to correct her. Who knew? Maybe she was right. Some stone types prolonged the lives of their bonded humans. For all I knew, he was a hundred-and-fifty. It wasn’t as though we were friends and I’d asked him.

The car we were in—an enormous black limousine that had almost given me a heart attack when it had arrived to pick us up at the airport—rounded a curve in the road, bringing us to a new side of the mountain. Not that it looked terribly different from the previous side, but it did bring our destination into view.

“The chalet.”

Aunt Titania had been casually referencing it for weeks now, since I’d gone to stay with her at Rain Moonstriker’s request.

Not that it was a trial to stay with Aunt Titania; it just hadn’t occurred to me to return to Gloombringer Castle after the way I’d left there. Heck, as easy as it was to refit Aunt Titania in my brain as Duskbringer, the castle remained firmly Gloombringer in my mind. It was the definition of gloom: enormous, gray stone, and full of dusty relics of a bygone era that should perhaps have been left in the past.

All but her.

But Rain had been right. Aunt Titania was strong and impressive, managing to pick up leading a family and its lands seamlessly...but she was also lonely.

There wasn’t a lot I was capable of doing. I didn’t have a huge expensive education or any natural talents other than the strength it took to lift heavy stuff, but there was one thing I could do: exist. I could be Aunt Titania’s rock. Show up, be company, listen to her, and speak in return. It wasn’t even a trial, because again, Aunt Titania was a delight. She was the polar opposite of my nasty father, caring and hopeful and interested in everyone else and their issues.

She reminded me of my mother, who I’d lost less than a year ago, and if I was a comfort to her, well, she was doubly so to me. It was good to have that kind of influence back in my life.

Titania seemed to notice the direction my eyes had gone and turned to look. She sighed, watching it with something almost like trepidation.

That caught my attention, because she’d never seemed bothered by the idea of the chalet before. “Are you okay?”

She sighed again before turning back to look at me. “I’m...not sure. I wasn’t alive the last time we did this. Oberon was practically a baby at the time, and he got hurt when they were doing . . . the thing. Whatever it is. What if I screw it up?”

“If anything is going to ‘screw it up,’ Aunt Titania, it’s the fact that either Dane or Rachel Sunrunner destroyed Nausa. You’ll do fine. You’ve handled everything the world has thrown at you this year, and that alone is really impressive.” Leaning toward her, I tugged her into a sideways hug, and she let her head fall onto my shoulder.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Always. I’ll always be here for you.”

I ignored her answering sniffle, because as much as she was better than my father or hers, Aunt Titania had been brought up with the weird notion that having emotions was something to hide. Something to be ashamed of. So we didn’t talk about feelings, staunchly pretending they didn’t exist.

Frankly, I had no idea how my mother had ever existed in their world with them at all. She’d never been one to hide her feelings.

We turned onto a smaller road leading from the highway to the chalet, and it took me a moment to realize the road didn’t have painted lines because the whole darned thing was just a driveway. For one house. More than half a mile long and dark smooth asphalt, so it was clearly well cared for, but...

Unless Aunt Titania had been wrong, literally no one lived in the place. Why expend so much effort on a house no one lived in, that was only used for a week once every fifty years or so?

It was just like the giant limousine for the two of us, or her living alone in the giant freaking castle of our ancestors. It didn’t make any sense, and the people who lived that life didn’t even think about it. They didn’t ever consider it odd that entire nations revolved around them, while they sat around playing croquet and day drinking.

Not that Aunt Titania did that. No, she didn’t drink at all anymore, and she’d been hard at work since inheriting Gloombringer, trying to turn the lands around and make them something good again. But it wasn’t easy to fix an entire economy. Amalion City was the biggest city in all the Summerlands, full of people at or below the poverty line, who were desperately trying to eke out a living however they could. She couldn’t just magically change that in a month.

Of all the rich people I’d met since discovering my heritage, though, Aunt Titania was the one I absolutely knew could do it. She just needed time and resources, and she had both. Sure, Rain Moonstriker was a great guy, and I knew he would want to help, but I didn’t think he’d ever seen true adversity in his life. He’d been raised in a literal ivory tower, as a prince, with a family who adored him and took care of him. He’d never wanted for anything.

Aunt Titania knew what it was like to go without. Maybe not without food, but without love and care. Without respect.

We pulled up to the head of the incredibly long driveway, and I was almost overwhelmed with the sheer luxury of it all. I hadn’t ever seen a piece of glass that big outside of movies, but two entire sides of the house were just...covered with it. No walls, only glass, showing an interior that was also straight out of a movie, with dark wood beams on the ceilings, at least one crystal chandelier, and so much white furniture that it looked like they’d had a snowstorm inside.

Mom had always laughed at white sofas in movies, and said they wouldn’t last a week in a real home. Real people spilled things. They got dirt on things. Buying white furniture was just silly and frivolous.

Aunt Titania, as much as I loved her, never worried about ruining a sofa.

There were two cars parked to one side of the drive, a truck and a sleek cherry-red sports car. More familiar, in front of us near the entrance to the chalet, was an enormous shiny white SUV. I didn’t recognize the people climbing out of it, but it was just like the one Rain Moonstriker had driven me to the bus station in, and the dark-skinned man reaching into the back had the whitest hair I’d ever seen, despite the fact that he was clearly quite young.

Moonstrikers, then.

A handsome guy in a leather jacket took a bag from him, grinning with a million shiny white teeth, and the feeling that I was lost on a movie set was exacerbated. It made more sense to me now, why most people in the Summerlands were obsessed with the leaders of the four families.

My own father had probably been photogenic, and he’d certainly been handsome, but I’d never understood the appeal of the taciturn rich man who had never once smiled in my memory, either on television or during the short time I’d known him in person. These people? They were like something from a TV show, or an ad for liquor or an expensive car. They were young and beautiful and happy, and who wouldn’t want to know more about them?

The driver of the limousine opened the door for Titania, and as she was climbing out, I found that I couldn’t move a muscle.

I wasn’t a part of this world. I didn’t belong out there, with them.

In the moment, I wasn’t sure if I didn’t want to be part of it, or if I was afraid it simply wouldn’t accept me. I’d step out of the car, and the whole scene would crumble, the people staring at me because I was a dirty mechanic’s rag hung on the pristine chrome towel bar that held bleach-white towels intended only for rich people.

Titania slid from the car with her usual graceful ease. She was a part of this world. She smiled at them, and they smiled back. The young man in the leather jacket walked over. “Lady Duskbringer. Nice to see you again under better circumstances. I hope you’re doing well?”

He’d been at Gloombringer Castle, I remembered suddenly. One of the people there for the failed peace summit? I hadn’t exactly been introduced around, but I was sure I’d seen him there.

No, I’d been my father’s shameful secret. The son he’d only wanted in theory, but not in reality.

“I am, thank you,” Aunt Titania said to him, then turned to introduce me, only to find the place by her side empty. She cocked her head, confused but still smiling, and leaned toward the open door of the car. “Aubrey?”

I couldn’t stay in the car. But I couldn’t...this wasn’t my place. I looked down at my hand to find with some surprise, that it was trembling. Both of them were.

I, in fact, was trembling. All of me. Like there was a machine vibrating in my belly, and I couldn’t stop myself from moving along with it.

Titania poked her head back into the car. My head snapped up to meet her gaze, and thank goodness, the shaking stopped. “Come on, kiddo. You’ve got to meet the Sunrunner and his friends. If we go fast, you’ll be able to get to know them a little before yet more people arrive.”

“Probably a good idea for everyone to get comfortable before Mother arrives and tries to take charge of everything,” a dark-skinned young woman with a cloud of obsidian ringlets said, rolling her eyes. She met my gaze as I stood from the car and smiled. “Not that you have to do anything she says, obviously, but she’ll totally try to boss you around.”

She was smiling at me like I was in on a joke, when I didn’t even know who her mother was.

Behind her, the young man with white hair sighed and shook his head. “She will. Perhaps you can just remind her you’re not a Moonstriker.”

“This is Frost,” the handsome young man who’d spoken to Aunt Titania said. “And his sister Ember. They’re Moonstrikers, though I suppose that’s pretty obvious.”

Aunt Titania grinned back. “It is.” She wrapped an arm around my waist and tugged me forward. Suddenly boneless, I let her. “This is my nephew Aubrey. Aubrey, this is the Sunrunner, Caspian. And Frost and Ember Moonstriker.”

The Sunrunner. The handsome guy with the million-dollar smile in the motorcycle jacket was the Sunrunner. Of course he was.

If Oberon had been anything like him, our people would have been a thousand times more interested in his life, and frankly, they’d already been obsessed. I swallowed hard and nodded to them, but they didn’t seem to notice that I was terminally awkward. They just kept pulling stuff out of their car.

Noise drew my attention, and I turned to find a woman and man coming down the stairs from the chalet. She was lovely, in long flowing clothes that made her look almost like a priestess of some kind, her dark hair in two perfect braids on either side of her face.

Him?

He was . . .

If Caspian Sunrunner had made me feel like a moviegoer who could never be worthy of his star power, this guy made me somehow feel like an actual peasant. He was wearing a skintight red suit that showed off every perfectly sculpted muscle on his body, his stark white hair—another Moonstriker, clearly—in a cut that probably cost more than every single thing I’d ever owned in my life, and the way he moved...I’d never met a human being so...slinky before.

The outfit he was wearing rang a bell in my memory, again from the movies. Was he wearing a dueling costume? As if some ridiculously rich scion of the Moonstriker family would ever be an actual duelist?

Aunt Titania’s brother, Puck, had died in a duel before I was ever born, and it was the last time I’d ever heard of a member of a major family in a duel.

As he neared, it became clear that every part of him was equally beautiful. He was literally stunning. Smooth skin, angular jaw, high cheekbones...something about the way his features came together was slightly vulpine, and yet, the overall effect was almost impossibly beautiful. Any evil queen asking her magic mirror who the fairest in all the land was would be offered an image of his face.

Just looking at the way he walked made me feel clumsy and wrong-footed.

I’d always been too big, born almost nine pounds, and it had been a problem exacerbated by puberty when I’d shot up to over six feet tall by the time I was sixteen. I’d eaten every scrap of food in the house to keep up with the growth, and I still worried Mom had gone hungry for it, even though she’d always assured me everything was fine. Even now I had horizontal stretch marks on my sides from where I’d grown almost three inches in a single summer.

I’d also put on a ton of bulk starting when I’d taken a job to pay for the extra food I was eating, and ended up lugging boxes around six hours a day after school. The extra weight hadn’t ever gone away, even in my recent lean springtime after Mother passed when I hadn’t been able to properly take care of myself. There wasn’t a ton of money to be had in untrained work carrying heavy objects, after all.

Frost Moonstriker beamed at the new man, going in for a hug immediately and eliciting a mutter of, “You just saw me yesterday, you great oaf.”

Oaf.

Because Frost was...well heck, he was taller than me. One of the only people I’d ever met who was taller than me, in fact. Of course the beautiful man thought tall, bulky men were clumsy, oversized bumblers.

When he pulled away, he smiled at Aunt Titania. “Lady Duskbringer.” Then he turned to look at me for a moment, his expression saying I was the very last thing he wanted to look at in the whole world, his lips pursing in annoyance at...what? Were my clothes not tight and shiny enough? My hair not in the right dramatic cut? “Well,” he said with a sigh. “Best we get to work bringing the things inside.”

He headed for where the driver was pulling Titania’s and my suitcases out of the trunk. When he got there, he stopped and waved me over. “Let’s get this done so we can get to lunch already, yes?”

Did he...did he think I was a servant, and he was bossing me around? What the actual hells?