Page 69 of A Winding Wave of Magic
He reached out a hand and hovered it over mine. “Yes,” he said with an air of decision and let his hand drop.
An image of a woman bloomed in my mind’s eye. The first thing that struck me was her beauty. The same tawny skin as Jonathan and the same darkly lined eyes, tilted toward her temples like a cat’s. A lush fringe of lashes and hewn cheekbones would have inspired Michelangelo along with the glassy tendrils of blond hair escaping around her neck. Magnetic light shone through obsidian eyes.
She was a siren, one of the vivacious folk who inspired poetry and art, though she was far more magnetic than any I’d met in real life. A true muse. The sublime embodied.
I also had no doubt that she was Jonathan’s mother.
The woman lay on a bed, and I was worried and very, very young. A queer blue tinge covered her skin, and she was shivering. She smiled and reached out a hand before her full, pink lips contorted into an “oh” of pain.
Concern and fear thrummed through my body when the woman bent in half, then wretched bile and blood into a basin at the foot of the bed. When she was finished, she collapsed onto the edge and then rolled to the floor, unconscious.
“Mama!” I cried as I fell to my knees, trying to shake her back to life.
But she didn’t move. Another woman rushed into the room, speaking furiously in a language I recognized but also didn’t. German? Italian? It sounded like a mix of both.
The memory disappeared along with Jonathan’s touch, and I was facing the sea again, still fighting the winds, but somehow quieter than before. Jonathan was staring out at the gray, kelp-filled waves.
“You’re very good at that,” I said finally. “I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t a seer that could focus so well. Most people’s thoughts are just a muddle.”
Jonathan sighed. “It’s taken some practice. And a bit of skill.”
“You seem to have a lot of skills for a sorcerer.”
He didn’t reply. We sat in silence for a few long moments, letting the memory swirl around us along with the salty air.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “That you had to go through that. That I assumed you didn’t know what it felt like.”
“I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I simply thought you might want to know—really know—that you’re not alone.”
“How old were you?”
“Six.”
I shuddered. Even younger than I had been when we’d lost my father. And Jonathan had watched it happen. “What was it?”
He reached down to trace a long finger through the sand by his feet. “Influenza.”
I gawked. “Your mother died of the flu?”
“Yes, the flu,” he snapped. “Up to sixty thousand people die of it every year in your country alone, you know. We lived in a remote village, there was no time to bring her to a hospital, and the nearest doctor was miles away. It took her quickly.”
I didn’t respond. I supposed there might still have been tiny towns in Europe where people died of things like the flu. Perhaps it had progressed to pneumonia or bronchitis. That would explain the blue pallor of her skin. His mother’s beautiful face rose again in my mind, and I could almost see her under normal circumstances, laughing with the kind of infectiousness that spreads to everyone around her.
“She was very beautiful,” I said honestly.
The edges of Jonathan’s mouth turned up in a sad, wistful smile. “Yes. She was.”
Something about his calm admission cut right to the quick of me. My heart clenched as the realization that Gran, too, was relegated to the past tense, sank like a sharpened knife through butter, without a hint of resistance. The kind of wound you don’t even know you have until it’s proven fatal.
I didn’t know I was shivering until Jonathan gathered me to his side and coaxed my head into the crook of his shoulder. Although there were only a few thin layers of wool and cotton between us (and only skin in some places), I couldn’t feel anything he thought or felt—just the warmth of his body pressed to mine. Not because he had figured out how to stop me, I realized, but because there was no room in my Sight or anywhere else for anything but complete and utter loss.
So, I let the grief come. I sighed into the kind of touch I so rarely admitted I craved and could almost never have. I ignored the fact that it was a strange sorcerer holding me instead of someone I knew and loved. And I savored the moment, knowing that in this man’s company, at least, I could mourn my grandmother the way she deserved.
Jonathan waitedat the house until I’d showered and gotten ready for the day so I could drive him back into the town. We took the short ride in awkward silence, and I was surprised when he offered to spend the rest of the day with me.
“Why?” I asked. “I know I’m a bit of a mess, but honestly, I’ll be fine alone.”
The moment the words were out, they weren’t actually true. It was just my default response to almost everyone. Don’t let them get too close, lest chaos ensue.
