Chapter 74
Okay. I wasn’t going to pretend I had any idea what
had just happened. But it was all good, so I’d get the gory details
later. For one thing, she was knocked
up, and he was happy as a clam with a
detective’s badge, but neither of them wore wedding
rings.
I had tons of gossip to catch up with, and couldn’t wait.
But first, my bag, my shower, and my—
“I did hear you!”
Tina came in, looking adorable in a floor-length black woolen skirt
and a lavender long-sleeved T-shirt. Her hair was pulled up in a
ponytail. Black Christian Dior gladiator sandals (my Christmas gift
to her last year) on her delicate feet completed the
picture.
And the little
portrait, of course. The small painting, no more than an inch long,
looped over her wrist by a blue satin ribbon.
The portrait I’d seen
once before. The portrait I’d never seen . . . on Tina’s wrist.
“I’m glad you’re
back, Majesty. Ah, you look beautiful, but you have dirt on your
nose. When you have a moment, I’d like your signature on some
accounts His Majesty wants you to be able to access. I know,” she
added, holding up a small hand, palm out, like a traffic cop.
“What’s his is his, and what’s yours is yours, and he doesn’t own
you, and he should keep his own money, yes, yes. But he wants you
to have legal access to everything he owns, and now that the sale
on the Brazilian pineapple plantation has come through, he has
another revenue stream he’d like you to—ah. Majesty? Why are you
looking at me like that?”
“I didn’t know. Tina,
I swear I didn’t—” I took a staggering step toward her and
completely lost my feet; I ended up crouching in front of her. She
looked startled and embarrassed, and tried to move to help me
up—she clearly didn’t dig queens kneeling at her feet—but I seized
her hands and squeezed, clinging as though they were the anchor
line and I was the drowning dumbass and she was the anchor. “I
didn’t!”
“My
queen—”
“I never made the
connection. I couldn’t understand—neither of us could
understand—why we ended up in Salem where we didn’t know
anybody.”
“Majesty—”
“I didn’t mean to
play God with your great-great-great-great-great-great-great—how
many?—never mind, I didn’t mean to wreck her life, Tina, even
though I probably did. I just wanted to help, but I messed it all
up. I think helping her maybe wrecked the future. But maybe not; I
don’t know, that’s the awful part, but
I’d never have hurt you. I mean her. I really did want to help, and
it’s my screw-up and not Laura’s. Laura tried to stop me. I swear
it on my—on myself.”
“Wreck? Oh.
You—wreck?” Her eyes, her beautiful big pansy eyes went wider than
ever—she was practically turning into an anime cartoon right there
in front of me. “You could never—you did never. I thought you understood. His Majesty
explained you would be back soon and we could tell you what we
knew. We didn’t want to keep things
from you.” She anxiously scanned my face. “You understand, don’t
you?”
“What—you could tell
me what you knew?”
“Caroline remembered
you, of course. Both of you. My great-great grandmother remembered
the two very tall, very beautiful blondes who dressed strangely and
spoke even more strangely.
“She remembered
everything the angels—for so she believed you to be—everything the
angels said. She went away shaken but grateful. She left
Massachusetts and settled farther west, happy to have her life and
her wits.
“And she told her
daughter what happened to her. How faith can become first a shield,
then a club. She told her girl child how the angels saved her from
a cruel mob and a crueler death. And her daughter told her daughter, who told me. It was my favorite
bedtime story, the only one I never tired of.” She paused. “It was
Erin’s favorite as well.”
I was still clinging
to her hands, still staring up at her and wishing I was human
enough to cry real tears. But I wasn’t, and never would be again.
Instead, what was waiting for me down a tunnel of centuries was the
woman who had no friends, only soldiers. The woman who made the
Marc-Thing, or allowed the Marc-Thing to be made, and didn’t know
where her husband was or if he was, and
didn’t care.
“Tina, I shouldn’t
have. I didn’t know, but that’s exactly my point. I didn’t know, which should have been all the reason
I needed to steer clear of another life.”
Tina pulled one hand
out of my clutches, and I let her. For a second I thought she was
going to haul off and give me a well-deserved belt on the jaw.
Instead, she carefully turned one of my hands in hers, palm up, and
bent forward and kissed it. Then she folded my fingers over her
kiss and speared me with her dark gaze. Her long blonde waves had
come loose—her hair was everywhere, but I was too busy looking into
her eyes to shake it out of my way.
“My dear dark queen,”
she said, and gifted me with the warmest smile I’d ever seen on her
face. “I have always known.”
She let me cry on her
lap for a long time.