“I know what I see, Grace. And this isn’t the way for me.”

“Because you won’t let it be,” Hudson tells him. “What if your vision is wrong? You said yourself that sometimes things are blurry—”

“Not this. This has been crystal clear for years.” He smiles at me, even chucks me on the chin. “Don’t be sad, cher. It’ll be okay.”

Then he glances down at the bracelet on my wrist. “Besides, we’re not done quite yet.”

“What does that mean?” Charon demands. “I need to go to bed. I need—”

“Your pacifier?” Remy asks, even as he winks at me. “Keep your diaper on, Charles. This’ll only take a couple of minutes.”

Charon’s face goes from pasty white to bright pink to red to nearly purple, which is one hell of a journey to watch. I’m actually fairly certain that if he keeps this up, Charon is going to explode. Although that wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing.

But Remy ignores him, choosing to focus on me instead. “I didn’t negotiate for the cuff removal because I still need something from you.”

“Well, that was a pretty shite move, wasn’t it?” Hudson asks mildly.

“I had to make sure you still needed me, too,” Remy says. “And now you do. Free my magic, and I’ll remove your bracelets, and your magic will be free, too.”

“I don’t know if I can do that—”

“You mean you won’t do it,” he says, and he doesn’t sound angry. Just disappointed—in himself, in the situation, and most of all, in me.

“No, I mean I don’t know if I can. Without my powers—”

“That’s what the tattoo is for,” he tells me. “You need to trust it.”

“The way you trusted me?” I ask, because his lack of trust hurts. I thought we were friends.

“It’s not the same thing at all.” He sighs, drums his fingers on his thigh as he searches for what he wants to say. “I couldn’t afford to trust you guys and be wrong, Grace.”

“I know,” I tell him, because I do.

He’s spent his whole life in prison, his whole life under the thumb of people like Charon and the windigos, who will as soon rip you apart as talk to you. Is it any wonder the boy has trust issues? Maybe instead of being disappointed that he doesn’t trust me, maybe I should be thrilled that he’s trusted me as much as he has.

“So what do you want us to do?” Flint asks as he shifts a still-deadweight Calder from one shoulder to the other. I can’t imagine how tired he must be after carrying her for this long, but he doesn’t falter. Doesn’t show by even the flicker of an expression that he’s annoyed—if he even is.

“I need Grace,” Remy answers. “She’s the only one who can do this.”

I step back and brush my hand against Hudson’s. It’s a small reassurance, one I know he doesn’t even need, but it’s one I want to give anyway. And one I can tell he appreciates when his smile turns soft.

He takes my hand, tangles his fingers in mine for just a few moments before letting me go. But I feel the heat of his touch for much, much longer.

“I’m ready,” I tell Remy as I step back to him.

He takes my hands and holds them faceup, my arms extended out from the elbow. Then he softly, carefully presses his palms to mine. “You need to dig deep, Grace. I’ve been imprisoned my whole life. My magic is buried far below the surface.”

I nod. Close my eyes. Take a deep breath. And reach for him with the furthest recesses of my mind.

At first, I don’t feel anything, just a blank canvas across from me. But after a minute, I know he’s there. I can feel him—little pieces of Remy squeaking through the wall.

A wink. A laugh. A slow smile.

Knowledge. So much knowledge.

Kindness.

Wariness.

And then, when I start to despair of ever finding it, a thin, wispy tendril of power.

It’s elusive, darting this way and that as I chase after it. I try to catch it, but my hand reaches right through it again and again and again.

Frustrated, I open my eyes and take a deep breath. My arm is burning, and when I look down, I realize that the bottom of my tattoo—the part that wraps around my wrist—is glimmering a little. I look closer, try to encourage the warmth to spread.

When I go back in, I find the slippery tendril of magic again, and this time I reach for it with my tattooed arm. It slips past me twice, but third time’s the charm, and I catch hold of it.

As I do, it zips along my fingers, kindles to life inside me, and then burns out just as quickly. I dig deeper, search for another tendril, a bigger flare of power, but there’s nothing there, and my heart drops to my toes.

How do I tell him that? How do I tell this boy with the infinite eyes and even more infinite heart that there’s nothing there? That whatever well of magic his mother said was inside him is actually little more than a puddle?

I know what that feels like, know how it empties you out—how it hollows you—to know that the people you trusted most in the world betrayed you. Bargained away your freedom like it was little more than a trading card.

My parents knew, they knew that I was a gargoyle, and they never told me. They knew there was magic in this world—magic my father could even wield himself—and they told me nothing. They kept me ignorant, did whatever they could to obfuscate the situation so that I felt odd, out of place, a fish out of water in my own body…and in my own life.

To have to explain that to Remy, this boy who was born in a prison, who lost his mother when he was five and never knew his father, who was raised by prison guards and inmates who came and went…how do I tell him that the one constant in his life, the magic he’s counted so heavily on, is just one more ephemeral thing? Just one more shit circumstance he’ll never be able to get out from under?

Because no matter how much Remy might wish it otherwise…he doesn’t have a hidden well of power. His mother lied to him.

147

Totally Lit

I take a deep breath, try desperately to find the words not to break his confidence and shatter his heart, but when I open my eyes, Remy is already watching me. His green eyes swirl with mist as he holds my gaze and drawls, “I told you you’d have to go deep, cher. You may not have found it yet, but it’s in there.”

“I’m not so sure, Remy. I can’t—”

“My mama wouldn’t have lied to me, not about this. She knew it was my only chance to get out of here, and she wouldn’t have given me false hope.”

I don’t know if I agree with him—not when I would have said the same thing a year ago. I would have laughed at anyone who tried to tell me my parents were liars. Who tried to tell me that the whole reason I existed was because my parents went to the Bloodletter and basically sold me to her before I even existed.

“It’s in there, Grace,” Remy says again, and there’s so much confidence in the statement that a part of me wants to yell at him, to tell him that he doesn’t know. That parents do bizarre and terrible things every day, tell bizarre and terrible lies. Sometimes we never find out, but sometimes we do, and when that happens, hiding from it isn’t going to change anything. But his belief in his mother is absolute. “You just have to dig until you find where she put it.”

“How do you know she didn’t lie?” I ask.

“Because she was my mother,” he answers. “She may have made mistakes in her life, but she wouldn’t have left me unprotected as long as there was breath in her body. This is how she protected me.”

And there’s something in his words, so simple and yet so profound, that takes me right back to the days before my parents died. To the whispered fights, the tense meals, the way they clammed up whenever I walked into a room.

How could I have forgotten that? I wonder, even as I go searching for Remy’s magic again. In the aftermath of their deaths, how could I have forgotten how tense things had become around the house?

How every time I turned around, my mother was handing me a cup of tea to drink. Insisting on me finishing it even when I’d rather have a sparkling water or a Dr Pepper.

How my father kept trying to talk to me, but my mother would interrupt, her face alive with a fear I didn’t understand.

How they’d asked me to spend Sunday with them so we could talk about some stuff, but how I told them I couldn’t because I had to finish up a set of volunteer hours before I did my college apps.

It all seems so silly now—that I missed out on my last chance to talk to my parents, to see them alive, because I was trying to pad my college applications. Which I ended up never going back in and filling out. What a damn waste.

I can’t help wondering now, as tiny glimpses of Remy’s magic slide in and around my searching grasp, what it is they were going to talk to me about and how I could have forgotten that they wanted to.

Had they decided I was finally old enough?

Were they going to tell me what they’d done?

Were they going to tell me everything?

I’ll never know—they died before we could have the conversation. The brakes failed, their car went over the cliff, and Lia got her way.