As I clambered into the van, Ruse reformed on the driver’s side.
Thorn loomed over my seat with a worried frown. “Are you all right? It looked like—”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “It has nothing to do with… with anything important. Please, let’s just get out of here.”
Ruse took one look at me and shifted the van into drive, and I left yet another piece of my old life behind.
Good riddance.
15
Sorsha
Red and purple lights flashed in the old fortune teller booth. The mechanical figure with her cracked plastic cheeks and glittering turban jerked a little to the left, still running on some reserve power source in the fairgrounds.
I popped in a quarter. “Who’ll they cast in my role when they make a movie out of this craziness?”
The crone’s creaky voice was starting to outright sputter as she ran out of juice. “The answer lies in your hea-a-art.”
I nodded sagely. “Okay, so an Eastwick-era Michelle Pfeiffer then.” Dye her hair red—it could work. We’d just need to invent time travel first.
I readied another quarter. “Am I even going to survive to see that movie?”
“All things are possible if you find the w-w-will inside yourself-f-f.”
The fortune-teller was basically a Magic 8-ball with a face. Since my restless wandering had led me through the night to this part of the fairgrounds, she’d answered my previous questions with cryptic remarks like, “Your chances will rise with your spirits,” and “Sadly, my ancient eyes cannot see that far.” It was a good thing she only cost a quarter. And also that her owner had left the money collection panel open so I could retrieve my few quarters for repeated rounds.
But maybe I didn’t want real answers. Maybe that was why I was interrogating her rather than getting some much-needed sleep. If I lay down with nothing to occupy myself, it’d give my worries a chance to really dig into my brain.
Not that they weren’t jabbing plenty of spades into me as it was. As I pushed in one more quarter, my throat tightened just a bit. My next question came out in a rough murmur. “What am I?”
“Seek with an op-p-pen mind, and the truth will become c-c-clear,” the fortune teller informed me.
Another voice followed on the tail end of her response, low and sly. “But clearly you’re a tall drink of water up way past her bedtime.”
My pulse skittered, but only for a second. I knew that voice. I folded my arms over my chest. “Very funny, Ruse.”
The incubus sauntered from behind the booth wearing his typical smirk. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You’ve seemed disconcerted ever since we left the grocery store. I figured I’d make sure you hadn’t wandered off too far.” He cocked his head, taking me in, and of course at that exact moment a yawn I couldn’t hold back stretched my jaw. “And you should be in bed, shouldn’t you?”
“With you there too, you’re suggesting?” I said, not totally against the idea.
The brief tensing of Ruse’s features tied a knot in my stomach. He was against it, apparently. “I suspect you do need some actual rest at this point,” he said.
“I suspect I’m not going to be able to get to sleep until I’m at least twice as exhausted as I currently am.”
“Let’s see if we can’t tire you out some more then.” He eyed the crone in her plastic box. “This old gal doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Come on.”
I was already tired enough that I couldn’t be bothered to protest. We wandered across the vacant lots where various carnival rides had once stood until we reached a sort of plaster hill about ten feet high that must have supported some part of a track.
“Mountain-climbing is good, solid work,” Ruse said, clambering halfway up the lumpy side and then offering his hand to me to help me. I waved it away and scrambled up to the top on my own.
The peak had enough room for at least three people to sit side-by-side. One of the ride operators must have used it as a lounging spot before we’d discovered it—an open beer can was wedged into a notch at one side. I drew my knees up to my chest and peered out over the desolate fairgrounds in the thin glow of the moonlight.
Ruse settled in next to me, leaving what felt like a careful space between us. Was he shunning all physical contact now? What was up with him these days?
Or maybe the problem was me thinking the incubus had to still be into me after our intense but admittedly short entanglement.
I resisted the urge to scoot closer to him, as good as it might have felt to have one of those well-toned arms around me. Which was the right choice, because a moment later, he said, “It has something to do with the man you saw in the store, doesn’t it? You knew him, and it wasn’t with happy memories.”
Since he wasn’t touching me, he couldn’t feel how much my body tensed up at the question. I gazed determinedly at the city lights in the distance. “There were some happy ones,” I said finally. “A lot of them. At least, I thought they were happy at the time.”
“Do you want to talk some more about that? Get it off your chest?”
I didn’t really want to talk about Malachi any more than I’d wanted to see him, but it could be I didn’t have any more choice about the former than I’d had about the latter. As long as I held the thoughts in, they’d keep gnawing at me. It wasn’t as if Ruse was going to judge me for my failures in committed relationshipping.
I shrugged, picking at the tab on the beer can. The sour smell of the stale alcohol fit my mood perfectly. “He’s the only serious boyfriend I’ve had. We were together for two and a half years, lived together for almost a year of that… Everything seemed to be going great. I was in love with him, thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. I hadn’t told him about the Fund stuff or Luna yet, but I figured we’d get there.”
Ruse sprawled back on his elbows, watching me with a mild expression. “I sense a rather large ‘but’ coming this way, and not the sort I enjoy checking out.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but my lips twitched at the joke. “Yeah. But.” The memory came back to me, so sharply it stole my voice and my breath. I braced myself, summoning all the detachment the years afterward had allowed me to cultivate.
“One day I got home from the job I had back then, manning the cash register in an ice cream shop, and it was like… like he’d erased every trace of his presence from the apartment. All his clothes and books, his shower stuff, the armchair his dad gave us—gone. Oh, except that he’d bought all the dishes and silverware, but he was kind enough to leave me one plate with a knife and fork.” I grimaced.
Ruse blinked, looking genuinely taken aback. “Totally out of the blue—no arguments beforehand? Not that up and leaving that way would be normal even under those circumstances, as far as I understand it.”
“Nope. As far as I knew, nothing had changed. He left a note…” I swallowed hard. “He said he felt like he was lying when he told me he loved me, that he couldn’t seem to fall in love with me because I wasn’t quite what he needed. That’s the last I ever heard from him. He ghosted me completely. I hadn’t even seen him again until tonight.”