Over
I realized Charlie was looking past the jewelry case toward a shadowy corner of the cathedral, not too far from the women’s bathroom. He was looking for someone.
For her.
I felt the pang of jealousy through my bones. I took a deep breath.
Illyria had sat with me on the floor of the safe house’s bathroom and pressed a cold, damp cloth to my cheeks a few hours before and then bandaged the wounds my attacker had inflicted. For as much as my leg hurt, my head hurt, my shoulder hurt, and my hand hurt, I could ignore that kind of physical pain as I’d been trained as a soldier. The military hadn’t trained the empath out of me though. If anything, they’d enhanced those abilities once they’d discovered them.
I’d been nauseated by Charlie’s emotions and the clarity of the deceit in them, but I could only feel them. Illyria, with the spiritual gifts of the Daeganean priesthood, had been able to see all the things I’d felt—a muddled mess of confusion, hope, desperation, and a strange satisfaction with the sacrifice he perceived himself as making.
How could I not have seen how messy he was, except that Charlie had gone to such great lengths to show me only the self-sacrificing, heroic side that he was so proud of? It was a mask, yes, but at least it was a mask that he wore for everyone, not just me. I understood now, even if most people who knew him would never believe it.
Charlie, according to Illyria, was the most fucked-up man whose mind she’d ever peered into. For all his golden boy antics that had everyone believing he was such a good catch and had me believing he was a better man than someone like me could ever deserve, Charlie had deep and hidden psychological issues. He measured his self-worth by his sacrifice for others—to the point where he felt euphoria. The harder the sacrifice, the higher the high. His martyrdom was an addiction, and even if he wanted to do what was right, whoever this Bambi-Rune woman was had him believing he was making the ultimate sacrifice. Unless I lost myself again and entertained the death wish I’d finally gotten under control for the first time since my traumatic childhood, I didn’t stand a chance in my competition with her.
Watching Charlie now, I realized I was learning who the real Charlie was. The stronger I was as a person, the less interested he was in a future with me. He needed to save someone, maybe everyone, but for now, he needed to save some other woman more than he needed to save me, even if she had fabricated her woes to manipulate him. The man who had promised to be my champion had found a new damsel to be his distress. The time had come for me to confront him, and I felt the nausea surge throughout my body yet again.
“Charlie, come with me. Let’s sit.”
“Um, sure.” He didn’t move. He was too focused on the shadows.
“Charlie.”
I took his hand and led him down the aisle to the altar, knowing suddenly and surely that this was the only altar I would meet him at. The closer I limped, the brighter the stained-glass windows beyond it. It was beautiful, light, airy. It was everything I didn’t feel at the moment, but my hands began to tingle, as if I could suddenly feel the energy and emotions of everyone who had walked here before, even before it was a monument built to Saint Patrick.
This was an old place, older than when Christ had walked the earth. This had been a holy place long before.
A place of healing. My headache eased. My leg didn’t hurt as much. Every scrape on my body itched.
My hands felt almost as if I had grabbed an electrical wire in each of them. The energy pulsed through my palms, up into my arms and shoulders. I could barely breathe. I stopped, squeezing Charlie’s hand to the point where he was wincing but not telling me so. I took a few steps backward to where the energy wasn’t as fierce and pointed to space on the nearest pew.
“Here,” I said. “Let’s sit here.”
Charlie looked as if he were on stage with a spotlight on him. He was antsier in his own skin than the energy in my palms was. I knew it had nothing to do with the energies of this holy site and everything to do with whoever was watching.
“You just, um, want to sit here?”
The prospect of being stationary seemed to make him nervous, even though he could still see a good third of the cathedral from where we sat, including the outer areas where the shadows were deeper.
“Charlie, we need to talk.”
He groaned. I knew what he was thinking. “We need to talk” had been a famous statement from his ex-fiancée every time she had a complaint, except for the one time when she should have talked to him before leaving him at the altar. Still, I couldn’t find a way to begin our conversation.
We sat in silence, my hand in his. I still loved him. I couldn’t understand how any human could simply stop loving someone else immediately and get over them and all their wrongs. I couldn’t sever my emotional bond with such superficial disinterest. To me, it was a testament to the depth of my feelings that the love was still there somewhere amid the anger and hurt.
He stared at his feet. I stared at the altar. Finally, we spoke at once.
“Charlie, I’m worried sick about you—”
“Lilah, I just want to thank you for—”
We stopped and looked at each other sheepishly.
Then I nodded. “Go ahead. You first.”
He pursed his lips and stared again at his shoes. He laced his fingers through mine with one hand and encased both of our hands with his other. “Lilah… I couldn’t have gotten through this last year without you. I know you didn’t have any real interest in me when we first met, but I’d just come out of a miserable relationship and being around you gave me purpose. I felt like I had someone to live for again.”
I bowed my head. What he meant by having someone to live for again was that he had someone he thought he could help, someone he could save. He’d never exactly been a hero to me, but he had been very gracious with his time and with his support, even when I had wanted nothing to do with him emotionally. He had been there for me, even if his being there for me was more a product of his need to give than my need for someone to support me.
“You were that distant light on the horizon, Lilah. For this entire past season, I knew that if I could be supportive enough, be enough of a giver, that you would stand on your own two feet again, and you would get over all the bad things that had happened to you. I’m grateful that I got to be the one to help you through that, but I will never forget what you did for me, and I just want to thank you for being there during—”
“What the hell, Charlie?” The words spilled out before I could turn to glare at him.
He frowned. “What did I say wrong? I mean it, Lilah. I’m really grateful that you were such a special friend to me this past year.”
“‘Special friend’?”
The words caught in my throat. I didn’t know everything, but I knew well enough that when a man who has a special place in your heart tells you he’s grateful for the “special friendship,” then any progress to a more “special” place in his heart is already over.
Charlie was saying goodbye.
“I don’t understand, Charlie. I don’t.”
“I just really want you to know how much you mean to me. You know I’d take a bullet for you, don’t you?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t give me any ideas.”
He gave that awful snicker that came out whenever he was hiding something. “I mean it. I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. But I’m at a crossroads in my life, and I’ve got a big decision I’ve got to make.”
My throat tightened. For as big as the cathedral was, there wasn’t possibly enough air to fill my lungs. He was still holding my hand but limply. I tightened my intertwined fingers around his unconsciously until he winced. He pried his hand out of mine and shook it in the air for a moment, then stretched his fingers in front of him, wiggling them.
“What kind of crossroads, Charlie?” This wasn’t the first time in our time together that he’d mentioned crossroads. It was just his way of saying he refused to make a decision if it meant someone might be unhappy with it. Anytime conflict arose and he couldn’t avoid it, he disappeared from social media for the next week and called in sick.
“It’s… it’s complicated.”
“Oh, shut the hell up! I don’t want to hear ‘it’s complicated’ out of your mouth ever again.”
I realized that I was talking too loudly because several people in the cathedral had turned to frown at us. I forced my voice into a whisper and leaned in close. He smelled like butterscotch and powdered sugar. I straightened to avoid the smell.
“Charlie, what is wrong with you? Is someone threatening you?” Illyria had said as much. Remembering what Emry had said to me and what I’d seen on the laptop in the safe house, I added, “You’re being manipulated.”
“Me, manipulated?” He started to say no but shrugged instead. “I guess it’s possible, but I don’t think so. Like I said, I’m in this crossroads, and I’ve got to make a decision. It can’t last much longer. I’ve got to make the decision now.”
“Right now?” I played along. In my gut, I knew he’d already made his decision, even if he couldn’t admit it to himself.
“Okay, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but sooner rather than later. I can’t keep putting it off. I’ve got to do something. I can’t keep living life this way.”
“What way? Everything was fine a few days ago.” Or so I’d thought.
“I’ve done things I’m not proud of, and I can’t undo them. Lilah, I’m just miserable. This isn’t the right place to explain it, and I do want to explain it to you. Maybe sometime soon I can write it all down for you instead.”
“No, no writing.” Because I knew he never would. “You can tell me right now. What’s this crossroads about? What’s this big decision coming up?” I was tired of hearing about his indecision followed by vague visions of the future. It didn’t make him heroic at all, and if he was supposed to be the more emotionally healthy of the two of us, then I was damned for certain.
A few days earlier, I had thought his big decision was going to be asking me to marry him, but all that seemed so far away now. Regardless of Emry’s visions of an Irish proposal, we wouldn’t be standing on the Cliffs of Moher together, looking out over the ocean and talking about our future and how we’d gone to the ends of the earth for each other. The silence between us was awkward, painful even.
I bowed my head so far that my hair swished across my knees. Charlie’s words hurt. I should’ve been more pissed off, but all that anger turned inward as it usually did, and I felt it as hurt instead. Nike was right that I needed to let my anger out but I wasn’t good at it, not yet. Why wasn’t I ever enough for a man? In Charlie’s case, not needy enough anymore or a big enough lost cause. Pretty low bar!
“Please don’t do this,” I whispered.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t mean to hurt you, but I’ve got to do something. Haven’t you ever had that kind of situation where you thought you had to do something, and it didn’t matter if it was wrong, you still had to do it?”
What was the wrong he was willing to commit? Stealing two inconsequential books? Trying to steal a third that could change his reality? Or something more? This conversation felt more rooted in emotions than in finances.
“Yes, I’ve made decisions I knew were dead wrong,” I croaked out, “and I regretted it, too. Charlie, your intuition is telling you that it’s wrong. Why aren’t you listening to it?”
“Because I can’t stand my life the way it’s been these past few months.”
I felt the tears well in my eyes. They burned and then spilled down my cheeks. I looked away, not wanting him to see, but knowing that he would.
“Oh, Lilah, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that these last few months with you were bad. I just feel like, well, that my life is shit. I just don’t feel like I’m doing anything with it, and I’ve already helped you all I can help you.” He cleared his throat. “You know I’m a giver, right? You know how important it is to me to be the one who gives to everyone else. I find joy in it. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Just take your time with this decision, Charlie. That’s all.” As much as I wanted him to stop being indecisive, part of me didn’t want his decision to be against me, and empathically I knew it was. “You don’t have to decide right now or tonight or tomorrow.”
“But I do.”
“This decision you have to make, is it one you can go back on later? Can you get out of it if you have to?”
“I don’t think so. I may already be too far gone. I don’t know. All I know is that I would be helping someone who really needs me. More than you do.”
“I don’t understand how everything turned around so quickly. This was supposed to be a romantic trip for the two of us. All we had to do was retrieve the artifact, get it authenticated, and take it back to Dru. And while we are here in Ireland, have the time of our lives on a romantic getaway.”
“I know.”
“And suddenly here we are sitting in the middle of one of the most beautiful places on earth, and you’re thanking me for my… my friendship?”
I started to stand, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me back down to the pew. What I wanted to do was stand and scream. This wasn’t about him alone. It was about Jakin. It was about Ford. Three men I’d loved and not been enough for. Thanking me for all the help I’d been and what a good friend I had been. Telling me how much they had loved me. And yet, once again walking away into the sunset with someone else.
Even the oldest of hurts wrapped around me like a tourniquet. Not to save me but to choke me. Why couldn’t someone—anyone—love me for who I was and be willing to stick around? Why not, at the very least, be honest with me so that my decisions could be based on truth rather than on my trust in someone else to follow through on all their promises. I had taken them all at their word, and it hadn’t occurred to me that they were lying to me or to themselves.
There was something about Charlie that reminded me sometimes of my mom, what little I remembered of her. Especially her promise to return. Had she been there when I needed her, she would have rescued me from my kidnapper, and my life would’ve been very different. I had always been certain of that. For most of the last year, Charlie had been there for me when I needed him. He hadn’t done much toward rescuing me, but that had been my choice. I kept my walls up against him until the moment that I was finally ready to let them down, and everything since then had gone downhill. Once I was in a safe place, no longer an outcast but like a normal human being who could laugh and love her job and find her place in the world, Charlie had become bored.
Every woman in his life had some element of damsel in distress, whether it was his former fiancée, whom he had fallen in love with after donating the kidney that saved her life, or whether it was me falling for Jakin Crutchfield, a man who for a while had wanted me dead, or this new person in his life that had skewed his emotions so far away from me so quickly.
“The redhead. It’s her. You want to be with her, not me.”
“No, no, no. Of course not.”
Then he snickered again, and I jerked my hand out of his.
“The redhead who broke into my room, who broke into our room and had your room key. The woman who attacked me. The one you’ve been sleeping with. It was her.” My empathic antenna was on high alert, no matter how hard he tried to shut me out. I didn’t need to take his pulse to know that it was thundering in his ears. It was more than the books and her manipulations. He earnestly wanted her over me.
Charlie looked away and shrugged. “That person had nothing to do with me. Or with why I don’t think you’re my person anymore.”
But I knew he was lying. I knew even as he was saying the words. When had Charlie become a liar? At one time, I’d believed him the most truthful person I knew. Now I could think of at least a dozen lies I had heard from him in the past week.
“I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, but I’m worried sick about you.” Being an empath standing in the full brunt of his energy made me forget my anger. This was the life force I was used to having next to me, and for a moment, I’d do anything to keep it. “Please give it another thought, whether you’re going to go through this crossroads or not. There’s nothing you and I can’t work out if we’re both willing, and I’m still willing.”
I felt his words rather than heard them:“I’m… not willing.”
Instead, he said, “Nah, there’s nothing going on with the redhead.”
Lies. Nothing but lies out of his mouth.
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t give up on him either. Charlie, in many ways, really had saved me. I hadn’t realized it until now, but he’d given me a chance at normal. Whether he was truly normal or not. I’d never known normal, at least not since before I was ten years old. But here he was, a supposed good man. I finally knew what a nice guy looked like—or thought I did. Never mind whether he was or not, it was how normal I was with him.
He can’t be like all the others. He just can’t be.
Maybe Dru was right about my picker being broken, but I wasn’t exactly the one who picked Charlie. He had been picked for me by Dru and the few friends I had, and I’d let them because I didn’t trust my own abilities to fall for the right man. They all thought Charlie would be wonderful for me—no one dark and devious, no one married and lying, just a nice guy, and something I had never had. An average Joe known for generously helping others.
Except now he was like the others. Lying. Lying about the woman who had attacked me in our room, lying about the woman he had gone downstairs to call from just outside the safe house. I had watched their entire conversation, both his side and her side, on the laptop screen while standing between Nike and Illyria and feeling my world crashing in around me. I had felt like I was at the funeral of my best friend.
Confirmation of the worst fears I’d swept under the rug for days now.
I had argued earlier with Raven and sounded like a fool. I had argued with Nike and Illyria, too, but there was no arguing anymore. My once-sweet Charlie had gone to the dark side with a woman whom the Daeganean priesthood had identified as a criminal mastermind, and I had agreed to help set the trap for him when Raven had asked as I was leaving the Hill of Tara. I had told myself that Charlie would easily pass this test. I had wanted to believe that. But even then, I knew it wasn’t so. I had known for months now that something was wrong with Charlie and me, and something was growing between Charlie and someone else. I had felt it in his energy, another presence. I had even talked about it with Emry, though she had assured me that she saw nothing of another woman through her psychic vision, at least none whom he had a romantic interest in. At least not at that time. Yet here he was barreling toward some uncertain but dark future, and there was nothing I could do to save him.
“Charlie.” I tried one last time. “Please, please, please, promise me that you won’t do anything or make any decisions until we get back to Florida. Ireland is magical, and maybe it’s fogging up your brain. Everything here seems so much more intense.”
“No, that’s not it at all. It’s not foggy. I mean, it’s confused, yes, and I’m confused, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt you, but it’s clear to me I have to make a decision, or maybe it’s already been made for me.”
He was babbling now. I had no idea what he was talking about, even though empathically I could feel his despair. Trapped. I’m trapped. He might as well have screamed it at me.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to hold him and make it all better, but most of all I wanted to force some sense into him.
Charlie just stared at his shoes and knotted his hands in front of him between his legs. He glanced up at the altar and his face froze.
I followed his gaze to the shadowy corridor to the left of the altar, beyond all the beauty and spectacle, where the older crypts emerged from stone floors and the interior of the cathedral was more stone than accessory. There, in the grayness, stood a woman in an open red jacket, unnaturally dyed hair peeking out of the hood as she stared back at us just as she’d stared at Charlie from the screen of his phone outside the pub. She was close enough for me to get a good look, this time at her face, and what I saw was the smirk on her lips. She took a step toward us, and Charlie leaped out of his seat.
“I’m sorry, Lilah. I am so sorry. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you back in Florida. Maybe we can talk then.”
He strode quickly through the altar area between other visitors and into the shadows where he grabbed the woman by the elbow and pulled her out of my sight. I sat there staring after the space that they had left. A chill ran through me.
I had lost Charlie, just that quickly, just in a few days, or at least it felt that way. Really it had been weeks, months. I hadn’t been oblivious to it but had chosen to look away; I’d ignored what my intuition told me.
I studied the rune scars on each of my wrists. I could do what Raven had urged me to do—explore my gift of sight by joining my “significantly impactful markings”—but I chose not to. He had given me that little boost from his long-dead god so that all I needed to do was press my wrists together, where I had left scars at the age of ten, and I would know everything I needed to know.
That was the problem. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know what was next for Charlie and me because I already knew there no longer was a “Charlie and me.” All I knew was that it might hurt more than it did now.
I rose to my feet unsteadily and, holding onto the back of the pew in front of me, I managed to find my way out into the wide aisle. My hands tingled again as I took several more steps, turning from mild and pleasant to feeling as if ants had covered my whole body. I could hardly stand to stay in my own skin. With every step, the energy increased. It rose in a crescendo and fell again, but higher than before. I stood in front of the tall pulpit, staring beyond a small gate at the Knights of St. Patrick’s helmets and swords on either side of the choir area, candles at each stall visible to me, and a man in a robe dressing each candle with what appeared to be sacred oils. Beyond him was the altar, off-limits to regular visitors like me, but drawing me toward it like a wormhole to some other world.
The wave of energy washed over me. Now it no longer felt like ants but like euphoria, as though I were some ancient saint lost in the throes of spiritual passion. Wherever the energy was coming from—whether it was the footfalls of thousands of people who had walked here before me or some ancient relic that had resided here for millennia and more—the lost feeling inside of me seemed to fade. My heartbreak didn’t hurt so bad at the moment because something in that energy told me that everything was as it should be. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear either, that Charlie was something that shouldn’t be, or that my relationship with him had been a mistake.
I fell to my knees, head bent back, staring into the arches and recesses of the cathedral, light gray and dark gray above, in stone, and the play of light from the stained-glass windows beyond the altar. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Someone bent close to my ear then. Even though I couldn’t move, I heard the words clearly.
“Charlie’s mine. He chose me, not you.”
When I opened my eyes, I saw Charlie pulling the redhaired woman away from me, clutching her by one elbow and around the waist. A large canvas bag that looked exactly like the one Nike carried a few hours earlier flopped against the woman’s back as Charlie ushered her away from me.
I’d hoped against hope that Nike and Illyria had been wrong, but Charlie and the woman had taken the bait. I couldn’t say I hadn’t given him every possible chance to come clean.
He looked back over his shoulder at me one last time and snickered involuntarily. The light in his eyes was already gone.
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