24. Rain

Chapter 24

Rain

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I'd gotten every concession we could have wanted from both Oberon and Huxley, in exchange for trifles we didn't give a damn about. The closure of a lab we were planning to close anyway. The lowering of taxes on some Dawnchaser imports; money that we'd been using to fund research we'd completed the year before. The loosening of our stringent policies about school records, which I'd always thought had been excessive anyway.

Everything was going better than I could have hoped, and still, the feeling of wrongness rode me.

Iri didn't want me to tell the people present that I was the Moonstriker heir. Why?

Adair seemed even more on edge than the day before and kept pointedly not looking at either Huxley or Oberon. Was he ashamed of what had happened between us?

But no. He wasn't avoiding my eye. Only theirs.

The Dawnchaser cousin, Ivy, had been in attendance, sitting in a chair at the edge of the room, alternately looking at Oberon like he'd kicked her puppy and like she wanted to melt his brain with her laser vision.

Good thing Dawnchaser luck stones didn't tend to have brain-melting abilities, or I suspected the Gloombringers would be desperately trying to figure out what to do about their broken succession now instead of later. Once more, I let my mind skim over thoughts of Aubrey, deliberately not dwelling on him.

Frankly, he was a side issue I didn't need to handle. He wasn't my responsibility.

What I needed was to figure out what the hells was happening right in front of me.

We took a break in the late afternoon instead of pushing forward, agreeing to eat our evening meals separately in order to unwind from the long day.

Everyone seemed quite pleased with the deals they'd managed on behalf of their families. Oddly enough, it had looked well-balanced to me. Very much the give and take of true diplomacy. If I weren't so unsettled, I'd have been quite proud of the day's work.

I took a walk in the garden alone after dinner, and I wasn't exactly looking for Adair. I wasn't not looking for him either, though.

I tried not to blush as I passed the spot where we'd stood the night before, two slight imprints from where his knees had pushed the grass down still marring the spot.

I bit my lip and moved on, quickly.

Too quickly.

I turned the corner and ran straight into Ivy Dawnchaser.

She blinked up at me owlishly, looking...well hells, she looked like a half-drowned kitten. Her hair was loose, not up in its previous chignon, or sleek and stylishly fanned across her shoulders, but more like it had come undone and she hadn't noticed. Her pantsuit was wrinkled, as though she'd slept in it and not changed afterward. Most telling, her eyes were red and swollen, like she'd spent quite a lot of time crying.

"I'm terribly sorry, Lady Dawnchaser. How rude of me, not paying attention to where I was going." I bowed slightly, trying to show respect without overdoing it and offending her. The Dawnchaser family was well known for strict adherence to social rules and taking offense at the tiniest of slights.

Not that I expected poor miserable Ivy to challenge me to a duel or something, but there was no reason to court trouble.

She gave me an odd little half smile, cocking her head and looking at me for a moment, silent. When she spoke, it was the last thing I'd expected. "You're so...kind. Are all Moonstrikers so kind now? Delta was always so cruel, and Cove...I never thought he saw any of us. Just kept staring off above our heads at something we couldn't see."

Mother, cruel? That was...odd. I'd never heard anyone call her that before. For Uncle Cove, well, that was actually an apt description. I always assumed he just wanted to be somewhere else, so he was never quite present.

"I couldn't say overall, but my siblings and I do try. I'm so sorry you've had bad experiences before. If it makes you feel better, Uncle Cove has always been a little...absent?"

She smiled at that. "Absent. That's an interesting way to put it. I suppose you know him better than I do. Maybe he just didn't want to be at formal functions at all."

"That's almost certainly true," I agreed. "After all, I'm here instead of him for many reasons. I can't say that isn't one of them. "

She laughed, but after a second, it turned into a sob, and she slapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh, I'm...I'm so sorry. I shouldn't—I should go to my room and—" Despite the muffled words, she didn't move. It almost felt as though she couldn't, like she was rooted in place, tugging at her unresponsive legs as they stayed put, shoulders trembling and hand still over her mouth.

"I've a better idea. Why don't we find somewhere to sit? You look like you could use a rest." I lifted a tentative hand to lay it on her shoulder, and she absolutely folded into me, squeezing her eyes shut tight to forestall tears and leaning heavily on me as I led her toward one of the benches placed randomly throughout the hedges. "I'm so sorry you're having a difficult day, Lady Dawnchaser. Is there anything I can do?"

"Do?" she whispered, sounding incredulous, looking up at me as I helped her onto the bench. "You really mean that, don't you? You want to...to help me. Why?"

"Why wouldn't I? You're in distress, and I hate to see anyone in distress. Especially if there's something I can do to help." I glanced around, then shrugged helplessly. "Admittedly at the moment my resources are limited, but if there's anything I can help with, I'd like to."

"The Moonstrikers really have changed." She stared at me for a moment through watery eyes, then gave a firm nod. "Good. Someone needed to. We all needed to. But we weren't going to change, even if we wanted to. It's too late for us now."

"Maybe"—I cleared my throat, swallowed my heart, and hoped for the best—"Maybe Florian can change things, too. Maybe we can all do it. Together."

Her gaze drifted off into the distance, considering for a moment, then she gave a small, hesitant nod. "Maybe. Florian is softer than Hux ever was. He...he cares about things. About Fawn. If you help Fawn, he might see it. But I don't know how you could. Not as long as Hux—" she broke off with a shudder, turning her whole body away from me.

"Maybe I'll find a way," I comforted, patting her on the back. Once again, she fell into me. This time, she outright sobbed on my shoulder, a wet patch spreading beneath where she buried her face.

She seemed to cry forever, made longer by the fact that I felt entirely useless. I didn't even know what was wrong, let alone how to help. When the tears finally died down to hiccuping sobs, she turned her face forward. At the sight of black mascara rings around her eyes, I pulled out my handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it without question, sniffling and thanking me.

"I'm sorry if I'm making the summit difficult," she finally whispered. "I don't mean to. I just don't have any control over it anymore."

"Making the summit difficult how?" I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. The summit was finally going how it was supposed to. Sort of. If you didn't count the way my skin continued to crawl, and I was convinced something awful was going to happen. She certainly hadn't been interfering with it that I'd noted.

She glanced up at me. "You haven't noticed that Oberon is...is off?"

"I don't know him terribly well, I'm afraid."

She nodded and leaned on me even harder. Like she was afraid any moment, my offered comfort would be retracted. "His luck. It's...it's bad. It's always bad when I'm around. I don't know how to fix it. I don't want...no, that's not true. I do want him to fail. I want him miserable and alone and—I'm sorry. It's awful, but I hate him."

I shrugged but tried to mute the motion so as not to shove her head off my shoulder. "I can't say he's made the best of impressions on me. I can see where someone who knows him better might come to feel that way."

That made her giggle, and she buried her face in my shoulder again. "That's...you're really very nice, Lord Moonstriker."

"Please, it's Rain."

"Ivy, then."

"All right. Ivy. And you"—it smacked me in the face, suddenly, what she was saying, combined with the Dawnchaser emeralds and their luck manipulation—"your stone sabotages Oberon?"

"It used to be his romances." Her voice had gone back to a whisper, like if she said it too loud, that would make it real. I wished for her sake that it wasn't already real. "When I loved him. My stone twisted all his romances to ruin, waiting for them to end. Waiting for him to turn to me."

"And he didn't."

"No. He didn't. Eventually, I came to hate him for it. Why was every woman in the world worthy of his attention but me?"

I couldn't have answered the question since I didn't know any of them, and probably hadn't even been alive when the events she was talking about had happened. But she didn't truly want an answer. There was no answer that could ever be good enough.

Hells, part of me wondered if someone had warned Oberon off, so he'd never looked her way by default. She was an important member of a rival family. It wouldn't have been the first time such a thing had happened.

Finally, she went on without prompting. "When I started to hate him, it wasn't just his romances. It was everything. He dropped things, went down the wrong hallways, sat and stared into space instead of doing anything at all. I'm poison for Oberon Gloombringer. Just my presence brings him to disaster."

"But you don't want it anymore," I said, leaping to the only obvious conclusion. It was interesting, since she'd admitted that she still hated him. If she truly hated him like she was saying, if she was still angry, then she'd be happy about sabotaging him, wouldn't she?

"I just want it to be over. I want to move on with my life. Why does it all have to be about him? I want my own life. I want something else ."

The impassioned words tugged in my chest, and I could almost feel them physically. I knew what she meant so well. How many times had I cursed that I'd been born to be the Moonstriker, that I didn't have a say in the course of my life? How many times had I wished I could turn right, when I knew I had to turn left?

She wanted a say in her life, and her own obsession with Oberon Gloombringer had taken that away from her.

"I didn't want to come," she said, subdued once more. "I begged Huxley to leave me. But he wanted to have Oberon at a disadvantage. He says...he says it's my own fault."

Unconsciously, my teeth bared in a snarl. What an absolute bastard. He truly was everything people had said. A man who would torment his own cousin for falling in love with the wrong man was no kind of man at all.

Sim's wind chime sound tinkled in my mind, determined to get my attention, and I snapped my head to both sides, concerned someone was sneaking up on us. But no. Sim sent me a vivid picture of Adair, but not in the garden. Alone in a bedroom. Then one of me, standing with Ivy, knocking on the door outside.

You think I should take her to Adair?

That didn't make a lot of sense, but Sim...well, Sim was proving cleverer and more talented than I'd ever realized before, so if that was what they wanted, I wouldn't question. I would take their advice. They showed me the images again and gave a chime I took as assent, so I turned to Ivy.

"I'm not sure, but I think maybe...maybe I can help you. I want to try, at least."

Without the hesitation one usually gave to an offer of help from a complete stranger, she clasped my hand in hers and squeezed it. "Thank you so much. I don't know how anyone can, but if you can, I'd...I can't do this anymore. I just can't."

She'd been waiting for help so damn long that it didn't matter who offered it any longer. Strangers with candy were acceptable, as long as it held the promise of an end. I would find a way, I promised myself. Even if the lot of us—me, Sim, Iri, Adair, and even his stone Rhodri—couldn't fix it, I would find another way.

Without another word, I led her back to the castle, following Sim's directions toward Adair.