Page 35 of Taloned Heart

Lore shook her head and grinned. “You must learn how to live with them, my darling. It won’t always be easy.”

“They’re not my siblings.”

“They aren’t. But they are your future.” Blowing a kiss to her daughter, she said, “I need to go.”

“Can we do this again?” Nyx’s spine straightened and her jaw clenched. “It was... It was good to see you, mum.”

Mum.

Lore nodded and tried not to let her tears show. “We can, Nyx. Of course we can.”

CHAPTER13

“She doesn’t seem like herself,” Beauty muttered as they wandered through the muck behind Lore. “I remember her being much more...”

“Bright?” he asked with a snort. “Positive? Having an inner light that made everyone else feel rather sunny around her?”

Beauty gave him a look that said she was unimpressed. “Oh hush. She’s never been a person with a sunny disposition, I know that. But she’s different now, isn’t she? I can’t be the only one who sees it.”

Of course Lore was different. Abraxas didn’t know how to explain that without explaining the entire story, though, and he didn’t know if it was his to share.

And yet... He looked up ahead of them, where Lore had stayed within eyesight just as she’d promised him, and how angrily she stomped away from them, as though she was having an argument with herself. And he wondered if it really wasn’t his story to tell after all. He’d been part of it. He’d been there through all the ups and the downs and the oddities of their story together.

They had more than enough time to tell the story in its entirety. He could see from the set of Lore’s shoulders she wasn’t going to settle, and that meant they needed to figure things out without her.

Shaking his head, he let the words pour out of him.

“I made it back home with the dragonlings, and that’s when I met Tanis.” All of the story purged out of him, every single second of it.

How he’d wanted to give up, and how he had known that Beauty was right. He had to keep fighting for his family and his friends, who he’d left behind. How he’d stayed alive, even when he didn’t want to.

That evening in the storm. The leviathan that had almost overtaken their ship and how he’d seen a burst of starlight through the water and he’d been certain it was nothing more than the reflection of a falling star.

Beauty’s eyes turned glassy when he told her of their reunion, and she laughed at the story of the sailors terrified of their grown children. Together, they relived the moments as though she had been there. As though Zephyr had walked with them as well, because she mentioned how he would have reacted to much of it throughout the entire story.

And when he was finished, he nudged her with his shoulder. “There you have it. That’s why Lore is different, why I might seem a little different as well. We’ve all gone through more than we ever should in a lifetime.”

“I should say.”

“And you?” He waited for her gaze to find him and then lifted a brow. “What happened while we were gone? I thought you and Zephyr would stick together through all of it. I really thought we’d find the two of you here, together.”

He saw her wilt before his eyes. The mere thought of Zephyr made her question everything, and his heart broke at the sight of that. She deserved nothing but the best, and all he’d given her was a nightmare of a memory.

“Sorry,” he muttered, holding out his hand for her to take. She needed his help to get around a rather large fallen tree, and he marveled at how quickly she took his hand. Not an ounce of fear in her. “I didn’t think when I asked the question.”

“No, no really. It’s fine.” Beauty sighed and shook her head. “It’s just that we all thought so highly of Margaret. She promised so much and we were all so certain that we’d be moving toward something better, you know? Zephyr most of all. He’d have followed that woman into battle a hundred times over after what we did.”

Abraxas had forgotten the last time they’d all had been together was during that battle, and in the aftermath. He couldn’t imagine what Lore had felt waking up six months later, dragging herself out of the dirt only to find that everyone had moved on without her.

Shaking his head to clear his mind of that thought, he heaved in a great breath and let Beauty’s hand drop as her boots hit the muck. “I had forgotten...”

“About the battle?” Her eyes went wide as she stared at him.

“No.” Abraxas almost laughed at the thought of forgetting that. “No, of course not. I had forgotten the last time we all saw each other was in that state. No wonder none of us made normal decisions.”

“Well, and Zephyr least of all.” She shook her head again with disappointment and then pointed at Lore. “He was looking for someone like her to follow. And Margaret is an elf, just like Lore. They are two sides of the same coin, he told me. We should listen to what Margaret has to say. She knows how to run a kingdom. He was so full of doubt.”

Of course the boy would be. Everyone had looked at him like he was his brother, and he wasn’t. Zander had been born and raised to grab a kingdom by the horns and know exactly what to do in every situation that might arise.

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