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Mia’s shriek happens first, her face blanching as she lifts her arm, points at Pollux and begins to sob. All my littles crumple before Pollux can so much as reach Josh.
Josh’s complaints that he’s fine, he’s fine fizzle into nothingness. Then he’s screaming, too, yelling, “Get away! Get away from me!” at pitches I’ve never heard anyone’s voice take before, much less Josh’s.
Pollux flinches and cuts his skates so he stops short.
Andromeda swears, releases my hand, and darts onto the ice toward him. Pulling a necklace out of her shirt and over her head, she clamps the pendant in Pollux’s hand, then she vanishes. My head pinches as it grapples with the fact she’s just…evaporated. Into thin air.
When Pollux reaches the rink exit where I’m standing, he’s helpless. Tense. The hand clutching the necklace Andromeda gave him shakes. Pain soaks through every inch of him as he whispers, “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.”
I grip his sleeve. “Shh. It’s all right. Are you all right? Is everyone else all right?”
Pollux’s mouth opens, but no words come.
Rink attendants launch onto the ice, and my heart lunges as my gaze follows them toward Josh to discover there’s red on the ice. Blood. Pollux’s presence slips out of focus. My hand loosens from his clothes as I scramble to the other side of the bleachers, nearer to the glass where Josh is. Making eye contact with one of the attendants, I scream “Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay!”
The attendant nods, yelling, “Looks like a nose bleed. Must’ve hit the wall just right.” Confused, the man scans the screaming and crying mess of kids all around him. “For now, let’s get everyone off the ice.”
Zahra meets me, gripping my arm before I can head back toward the rink exit and await my littles. “Pollux wanted me to tell you he’s taking Meda home.”
I scan the bleachers for Pollux but find only my abandoned knitting bag. “When did they both disappear?”
“After Meda met him, they both vanished. A few moments later, he was apologizing, then after you rushed over here, he told me the kids would be okay soon. They just need to get the stress out of their systems, but they should already have forgotten what happened since Pollux turned on his glamour or something. Then he told me to let you know he was taking Meda home.”
Glamour.
Soulmates aren’t affected by their other half’s glamour.
My fae folder told me about that. That’s why I didn’t see him disappear when Zahra did.
Taking a breath, I nod. “Okay. One thing at a time. I’ll deal with Pollux later.”
Chapter 33
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh, hypocrisy. You realistic curse word, you.
“Daddy, are you having a breakdown?” Andromeda asked while Pollux lay in his bed, arms clamped around the stuffed bee Kassandra had made for him.
Children screaming.
Crying.
Suffering.
It brought back too many memories.
Those awful memories had crowded out all logical thought and sent him fleeing home as though he had once been a child himself.
He hadn’t, of course.
So many years ago, he’d been born into this world as the culmination of a doctor’s fears over the course of many decades. Pollux was the pure terror a man held when he had dedicated his life to fighting against illnesses without the tools required to even provide an ounce of hope. The fears that made Pollux up were not ones that worried about pride.
They simply, desperately, did not want people to hurt, but in those days, the methods to stop hurting were so fragile. Often, the best way to end pain then…was to lose the patient entirely. And that, of course, was where Cael had usually come in.
Cael was peace at the end of so much agony.
In those days, Pollux was nothing more than a constant, unhelpful companion.
