The Last Resort

The Last Resort
Naomi

“No.”

The word bounces through my skull with nowhere to land. I grip the edge of Oakley’s bed, my fingers winding around a spire of worn wood in the same shade as her hand-me-down dresser and bedside table. “No?”

“No, I will not return to Fraser’s–to his palace.” She waves a hand in dismissal and looks down at her lap. “I’ll make things so much worse for Ian.”

My scoff resounds through the room, but Oakley doesn’t even wince. She moves so slowly. Her skin has a sick, gray pallor, and her eyes… Goddess. She is very ill. 

I’m sure her family is under the impression that she’s just exhausted after being kidnapped by a beast and carted across the kingdom. I’m sure they’re forcing her to drink tea and keep busy. I’m sure everyone in Silverhide has heard the fake tale I’ve spun so eloquently by now to keep not only her, but Ian, and everyone we came in contact with, safe. 

I thought she’d be feeling better than this. 

I really believed she’d be improving. 

“Oakley, you’re dying.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Fraser warned me this was a possibility.” I kneel in front of her and take her thin, clammy hands between mine, begging. “Look at me.”

She does, and the yellow sheen around her irises makes me feel physically ill. 

“You cannot stay here. I thought you’d get better. We all did. We thought–we thought you had a chance, and we took it, but you’re going to die here in this bed if you don’t let me help you.”

She can’t even pull her hands away from mine. She doesn’t have the energy for it.

“We have two options as it stands. One, I take you back to Fraser. He’s the only person who has ever seen this process before. This is new to us, new magic I don’t know how to address. He might be able to help us, if there’s anything else that can be done.” Even if what’s done is just to keep her comfortable. That thought settles against the center of my chest like an anvil.

“What is my other option?” she asks, but her voice is rich with defeat. 

I already know this is pointless. 

“I take you home with me to Moonrise, but I’m worried you won’t survive the jump.”

She barely did the first time. We left Fraser’s mountaintop palace and went directly to the Roguelands, which took much of my magical reserves, as well those of Juliette and Fennec. The three of us spent an entire day recovering from magical depletion while my father and great-grandfather tended to Oakley, but then, it wasn’t clear how sick she truly was. Normal people do not tolerate translation well at all. Her reaction was expected. The nausea and vomiting. The excessive fatigue. She hit every mark. 

But she didn’t get better. 

She won’t get better after jumping from here to the Highlands, either. 

But it would be a swift death. A slow, gentle one, like just drifting off to sleep.

“So I die either way? Regardless of where you take me?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly, and it breaks my heart. 

“I just want him to have a shot,” she says under her breath, her exhausted, almost milky eyes meeting mine. “He’s the prince of the Deadlands. He can’t just disappear forever. He has to come back, and if I make it worse, if my presence is the reason he can’t come home, then….” She tapers off, looking down at her hands again. I resist the urge to press my fingers against her forehead to check for a fever I already know is there and dig into the pocket of my cloak instead, pulling out a single vial of translucent liquid with a soft, golden sheen. 

It’s priceless, so incredibly rare. It can’t be replaced. It’s one of the last in existence. 

It can’t be mimicked, and Goddess, people have tried. We’ve been trying for decades. 

This is truly the final option I have. 

I set the vial of my great-great-grandmother Isla’s tears on Oakley’s bedside table. “This is a last resort.”

She slowly looks at the vial. My throat feels raw and tight. 

“I can’t help you, Oakley. I don’t know how. I wish I did. This medicine is extremely potent. I’m not sure it’ll help, but there’s a chance it could heal you, temporarily, or cure you completely. Or… it will decide to let fate take its course.”

I stare at the vial for a long time. I never knew Isla. I’ve seen her pictures. I’ve seen her likeness in the eyes of Misty and her children, and their children. None of them have Isla’s healing gifts–not in the same way, at least. Misty is known to be an incredible healer, but her powers are strangely limited these days, like they’ve waned since her early adulthood. Her son has some gifts like that–fixing a broken bone, closing a scrape, fading a bruise. But his children and his nieces and nephews are normal. 

Isla’s powers were given to her by the Goddess, not inherited, like I’ve inherited mine. 

This is all we have left of her. 

Oakley and I say nothing for a long time. 

I finally rise and leave the multi-generational home, quietly floating down the narrow, tilted hallways and down multiple flights of stairs. Ryan is not in Silverhide. He and Aviva are in the Roguelands continuing their search for Ian. That was part of my grand lie: I rescued Oakley, but Ian refused to leave those woods in the mountains between Eastonia and Crescent Falls. I have no idea where he is, I told them. He wants it that way. 

They will not give up, and that kills me. It’s gutting me from stem to stern to look over my shoulder at the village of Silverhide knowing their search is in vain and that I’ll likely never see Oakley alive again. 

If she dies, Ian will never be the same. He’ll never forgive himself. He will never move on. 

And for some reason, it sure as fuck feels like my fault. 

I blink, and I’m back in Skye’s spacious living room in Moonrise. She lives in the city center, in one of the golden neighborhoods surrounding the university. She has no view of the lake, but I don’t think she cares. She rises from her couch with Lucan wiggling in her arms in an attempt to free himself and toddle over to me. I glance at the archway leading into their sun-drenched kitchen, where Alex, her vampire husband, leans his weight against the stone arch, his ocean blue eyes intent on mine, waiting. 

My lips part to give them an answer I just can’t bring myself to say out loud, like speaking will only cement Oakley’s fate into the strange threads Skye supposedly sees so well. Did she see this? Every detail? If so, what a tremendous burden to carry. “She has Isla’s tears.”

I look down at my boots. They’re still stained with road dust from Silverhide. 

“Alex, do we still have coffee?” Skye asks. 

“I’ll put more on.”

“I’m not staying. I need to talk to my mom,” I cut in, forcing myself to swallow a crushing truth. I’m not ready to come clean. I just need to keep lying, keep telling my family I did all I could do to find him and help him. I went on the hunt for Ian without explaining my plans. I dragged my cousins into it. I came home with nothing but Ian’s dying mate to show for it. 

“Have some coffee, Naomi,” Alex says in that grating, holier-than-thou professor voice I’m sure makes his graduate students tremble. 

“I do not want coffee.”

“What exactly is happening right now, Naomi? Are you going to tell me, or do I need to take what I need to understand the situation you’re in by force?”

I turn to look at Skye over my shoulder, sizing her up. She’s in sweatpants holding a toddler. All-powerful mystic, my ass. “Try.”

Her eyes narrow to cat-like slits. 

“Enough. Both of you, stop.” Alex walks into the room, shoves a cup of tepid coffee into my hand, and strides toward his wife to pluck his son out of her arms. “I’ll call Blake if I must.”

“Do not rope my father into this,” Skye argues. 

“That’s wholly unnecessary,” I add.

But Alex arches his dark brows at both of us. “Is it? Because the vial of tears you gave that girl was one of three left in existence, so she must be in a really bad way.”

“I promised I’d keep this visit a secret, Naomi. You seem desperate. So what, exactly, is wrong with–”

“Oakley is Ian’s mate,” I half-snarl, half choke. 

Alex shakes his head, frustrated, but Skye just blinks at me. “That’s common knowledge.”

“It’s not. The family only assumed it when news that Ian, the family angel who can do no wrong and would never think of pursuing anyone he wasn’t totally, completely serious about, showed an interest in her.” I grip my mug like my life depends on it. “But apparently, I’m the one who’s blind because I didn’t realize how deeply they felt about each other until it was far too late.”

Alex sets Lucan down, and the little boy of three-ish zooms away at an unnatural rate of speed I assume he gets from his father. A crash rings out a few rooms away, followed by the unmistakable sound of books free falling off a bookshelf. Alex huffs and gives his wife a knowing and thoroughly encouraging look before turning on his heel and disappearing in an equally impressive flash. 

I slowly look at Skye. “You can look at me with your creepy eyes all you want. I’m not saying a Goddess damned thing.”

“What,” she breathes, “are you hiding?”

Everyone. Everything. Everything tying my stomach in knots. My fault. I should have just forced them to come home. I wasted so much time. Oakley would have had so much more time.

My entire world splits into pieces. A sharp pinch to my forehead is the last full sensation I feel before Skye pours into my head, skillfully bypassing what I thought were impeccable mental wards. I can’t even shove her out. She’s being aggressive about it, letting it hurt. 

“You bitch!” I shriek into a bright, white space now flooding my senses. 

“Cry about it,” she hums, and she digs deeper, yanking protected memories free. 

There is one I don’t want her to find. One I hold onto with so much force it’s threatening to split me into pieces. She realizes that I’m purposefully fighting against her magic for the sake of that one memory, that approximately sixty-second moment in time before Wren dragged me out of Fraser’s path when his body had twisted and folded into something so… so insanely right. 

I’ll give Skye everything else, anything she wants. 

Just not that. 

She pulls out of my head, and I feel it all. I fall away from her, staggering backward until my back bites against the wall so hard a framed picture of some far-off constellation falls and bounces sharply off the top of my skull. 

I open one eye, then two, into a fierce glare, but Skye is just staring at me. 

“Do you get it now? Why I can’t talk about what happened?” I sneer, but she continues staring, and eventually I realize she’s not really looking at me. She’s looking inward, untangling my own brutally tangled thoughts into something her complicated brain can easily decipher. 

I wait for our family’s personal computer to finish her calculations, rubbing the firm knot forming on the top of my head. 

Skye finally blinks and meets my gaze. “What the fuck has Ian done?”

“What do you mean?”

“He rejected her?”

“It was the only way.”

“According to whom, the person you’re hiding?”

I grit my teeth, and Skye fumes, her nostrils flaring with frustration. 

“Fine. I won’t say a word about the fox colony or the fact that you discovered some weird mountain palace where there should be absolutely nothing left of pre-veil society, but you’re going with me tomorrow to see Oakley. I might be able to help… if it’s not too late. Fuck, Naomi. A rejection? No wonder she’s dying. She’s not even fighting it!”

“And if it’s too late?”

Skye’s silence settles through the room, just as heavy as the feeling of dread creeping through my chest. 

“I can make it quick and painless for her.”