What We Choose to Keep
I was caught between two realities, one still chasing the other.
My bare feet pounded the sharp rocks and sparse grass of the alley as I ran full throttle toward where I knew Raven’s car waited, where I knew I would find him, where I knew he wouldn’t let me down.
But at the same time, I still hadn’t left my hiding spot.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t blink.
Just moved.
Through the kitchen, past the microwave without a turntable and the refrigerator without a lightbulb and the fuse box near the washer and dryer. I yanked the door open and slipped into the yard, jumping from the threshold to the grass, the pulse against my wrist cuff drumming like a ward stone in one of Raven’s Daeganean rituals.
I launched myself over the fence and landed harder than expected. My backpack bounced against my shoulder blades, heavy, painful, the turntable’s rim slamming into my spine with every jolt.
And then I was running, my brain catching up with my reflexes.
Raven’s car waited at the edge of the next block, in some house-for-sale’s half-hidden driveway, the passenger door open and waiting. I could barely see him in his dark shirt and pants, silhouetted against the light inside the car, but he was there, just as I knew he would be.
Two police cars sped across the street ahead of me, but missed me in the shadows of the alley in my black hoodie and, quite possibly, whatever protection spell Raven had woven around me as he watched my sprint toward him.
He caught me before I plowed into the side of his car, unable to stop. I let him spin me into the passenger seat as he pulled my backpack from my shoulders and a second later closed my door quietly behind me. Then he was edging into the driver’s seat, shoving the pack at me as I buckled the seat belt.
We didn’t speak until we were three blocks away, a dozen alarms still going off behind us, out of sync and proud of it.
“You good?” he asked, pulling into a surprisingly busy all-night laundromat parking lot where we could hide in plain sight. He braked to wave an older woman with a basket of laundry on each hip across our path before parking at the far end of the lot.
“Define ‘good,’” I choked out between heaving breaths.
He gave me the barest twitch of a smile as he flicked his thumb toward the din. “Sorry my tiny distraction took so long. It was all I could think of without either of us being face to face with them. I meant to push some energy at Chuck’s car out front and got a little too enthusiastic. I hit all the car alarms on the street, plus a house alarm. Guess I was worried it wouldn’t be enough to get you out.”
Finally, I caught my breath. “I never doubted you for a minute.”
And that was the difference between Raven and Charlie. One never failed me, and the other never failed to disappoint. With Raven, I was safe, protected. With Charlie, I was encouraged to let down my guard and then left behind as if my surrender to my feelings was some kind of victory for him. Back in Ireland, Rune had stroked his ego, and he’d walked away from me because he loved how needed she made him feel. Now, he was waking up from that dream. I’d had to live with his decisions, and now, after all this time, so did he.
“Hey, I talked to Dru while I was waiting for you. You might want to respond to her messages.”
“Oh!” Tapping the dark face of my watch, I winced as it sprang to life. Alert after silent alert scrolled past without a response from me. I moved the bezel to an automatic answer, SAFE, and pressed it to send. I suspected I’d get a lecture when we checked in for a debrief at Dru’s office. “So much for the easiest assignment ever.”
Raven shook his head. “Definitely not the easiest for you, even with a key. Give yourself credit.”
I patted my pocket. I still had the key. “Hopefully, I won’t need this again.”
“Hopefully not. The professor’s got eyes and ears on the house now. Surveillance is clean. Audio’s already coming through. I told her we heard Rune talking to Lovey on the burner, so we know Rune and Marco’s network is still at least partially intact. That’s one piece of an important puzzle. By the way, the video started broadcasting before we were interrupted, so—”
I waited a couple of seconds for him to finish, but he didn’t. “So?”
He sucked air through his teeth and instead of looking at me, stared off at the dumpster beside the laundromat. “Um, so Dru’s going to want to talk to you about a few, um, things.”
“Like what?” I couldn’t remember which rooms I’d searched before or after Raven finished with the cameras that would have captured me looking for stolen books.
“Like I smell a lecture coming on being petty. I think it was taking the fuses from the breaker box that did it.”
Not worried, I shrugged. “But we got what we needed?”
Raven shifted in the driver’s seat to study me. “According to the professor, yes. We got everything we needed.”
I exhaled. “And a few extra things.”
He raised a brow. “Like?”
If he was expecting me to say closure or something mature, he was sadly mistaken. I pulled the overstuffed backpack off the floor of the car, up between my knees, and into my lap. I motioned for Raven to open the pack before it burst.
He paused, frowned at me, unzipped it. Two rolls of toilet paper sprang out. One hit him in the chest and the other bounced into the back seat.
“Of course,” he said, laughing.
“Hey, it’s only truly petty and inconvenient,” I replied, “if you take every roll.”
“You took every roll.”
“I absolutely took every roll.”
“Um, yeah, so that’s what the professor wants to talk to you about. She says your petty revenge days are over.”
“She saw it all?”
“Hmm. Enough of it. Though I have to admit, I’m not sure whether I like the missing batteries or the missing turntable more.”
He shook his head—I was certain he was impressed—as he reached inside my pack. The bag settled between my thighs. A current ran up my arms until I realized he wasn’t even aware of how deep he was digging into the bag. Then his hand brushed something else: the bottle containing the feather. He froze and pulled it out gently.
“What’s this?” he asked softly. “I heard the audio, but I don’t understand the significance.”
I stared at the vial in his hand. The crow’s feather still floated inside, cork snug, the oils long dried. Being an empath was all about emotions, but I was too numb to understand what I was feeling. Charlie still had feelings for me. Charlie knew exactly how badly he’d messed up his life. Neither mattered. It was too late.
And I was oddly okay that it was too late. Charlie had never been right for me. Not really. He had been so well-loved by everyone and such a seemingly nice guy that I always figured that the problem had to be me, even in the months since when I’d started to appreciate the slowly deepening friendship I shared with Raven and how I was finding purpose in my work with occult libraries. When it came to men, my picker had been broken, so I’d let all my friends find a “good guy” for me and push us together, all of them thinking that their choice for me would treat me so much better than my own bad choices.
But the truth was that Charlie loved me most when he thought I needed rescuing, and he lost interest when I was strong and independent. No matter how many times he had said he appreciated a woman who could stand on her own, what he loved most was the drama of a woman who would require him to give up everything. The martyrdom was where he found his purpose in life, his sense of fulfillment.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the feather. Then I looked up—Raven was close enough to breathe the same air—and I looked back down, like the bottle might vanish if I blinked. “That,” I said, “was once the most romantic thing I’d ever given someone.”
He didn’t say anything. Just turned the bottle in his fingers, then stopped abruptly. “It’s still here. After everything.”
Glancing up, I found him staring at me. “It doesn’t matter.”
Raven turned the vial over in his palm, then looked at me. “It matters. You haven’t read it yet.”
“No.”
“You should.”
Read the energies was what he meant. I hesitated. Then reached for it.
My fingertips brushed the glass. It took me two tries to thumb open the cork. The scent of oils and sacred powders my witch friend had used to bless the feather wafted out like a genie from a bottle. Emry had anointed the feather with frankincense oil to bless its journey and dusted it with powdered alabaster to keep the memory intact. A fragile anchor to something too fleeting to hold by ordinary means. Maybe I could’ve let go much earlier if I hadn’t begged her to preserve the power of that memory. Emry’s blessing had been stronger than I’d realized. The emotions clung, preserved like an insect in amber.
Closing my eyes, I let the threads of energy and emotion rise. Below the surface was what I remembered: Charlie finding me alone on a rainy rooftop on campus, staring out over the city and licking my wounds after my split from Jakin. Charlie pointing out the clearing of the clouds and the rising moon. Charlie making me smile again, confessing his long-simmering feelings for me, building me up, putting me on a pedestal, salve on my recently broken heart. The two of us talking all night and watching the moon set and the sun rise. The way the new day had dawned, and I’d felt that maybe I was worthy of love after all.
Then there was the lightness of leaving the rooftop and spotting that feather dry at my feet, like some kind of blessing on what I already knew was about to be an important relationship. It was how sweet that moment felt that conjured sadness now.
Unraveling the threads of Charlie’s emotions, I opened my eyes. Raven was watching me.
“He kept it where he’d see it every time he came home,” I said. “Every time he left. He remembered. And still did everything he did.”
“Maybe he couldn’t let it go.”
“I don’t know, Raven. I meant to take it with me, but I couldn’t find it when I went back for it. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him have it in the first place.”
The echo of Charlie’s energy was soft—like warmth through wool.
Sorrow. Regret.
Settled-in sorrow, the kind that had lived there a while. Like someone had loved something once and didn’t know what to do with the ruins of it.
Of course, I couldn’t find it when I went back to get it! I thought he’d destroyed it, but instead, he’d hidden the souvenir of our time together.
I opened my eyes. “He never stopped loving me. But he didn’t love me enough to choose me.”
Raven didn’t flinch. “And you?”
“And I accept that now. There were a lot of other messed-up emotions and situations going on when we got together. Since then, I’ve had to look at him at work every day, but what I’m understanding now is that he’s had to look at me, too. But I stopped waiting for him a long time ago.” I held the vial for a second longer. “But I kept telling myself I hadn’t. The truth is, I don’t grieve for him now. What I grieve is who I thought he was. And what I thought he was to me. That’s what I’m sad about. Not that I don’t have him now. Not that I can’t get back what we had.”
Rolling down the window with my free hand, I stared out at the dumpster next to the laundromat. “Let’s move, okay? Just drive. Open road.”
Raven didn’t question me. Or argue. He touched the hair sticks at his topknot, the quick check he did when he was re-readying for something, and punched the car in reverse. The wind from the open window drowned out the sound of night as it whipped my loosened hair into my eyes. We were on the highway within a minute.
Upending the bottle, I shook it until the calamus of the feather stuck out of the opening. I fished it out and held it up between thumb and finger—weightless and dark.
I looked up at the night sky. The wind was steady and sure, pushing in off the front fender. I was ready to be free.
I didn’t need to confront Charlie again. I’d done that, and he’d made his choice. I didn’t need to scream at him and spend any more of my energy on him. I could have closure without another confrontation because closure is a dish best served cold, with no heat left. Just indifference.
I held the feather out the window, grasping tightly. Then I let it go.
Caught on the current, it instantly vanished.
The feather was gone. The road was loud and dark and mine.
The dashboard light lit Raven’s face as we drove in silence. I rolled up my window and settled into my seat. I could almost swear he was smiling, but it was too dark to be certain.
Left hand on the steering wheel, he rested his right hand on the console between us, palm down. But close enough that I could feel the warmth of his hand near mine.
My closest friend, I reminded myself. The one person who quiets my demons.
I dropped the bottle at my feet and slid my hand over his.
“Dinner?” he said. “My treat. Some place nice.”
I blinked at him. “At the restaurant Dru chose for—?”
He smiled. “Seems a shame to waste an evening.” He nodded at my bare feet and the black flats next to them. “You’ll have to wear your shoes.”
“Like a date?” I teased.
“Like a date.”
THE END
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