Page 57 of Edge of Stars

I look back to check that the sound hasn’t roused Maximus. Once that’s confirmed, I sprint across the flagstones and then down the dock. I can’t ignore the feverish scratches at my sanity any longer. I can’t keep running from it or battling to pretend about it.

I can’t keep the brave walls up for another minute.

In this case, not another second.

A tiny speck on the clock that feels like eternity, before I reach the end of the long quay and finally sink to my knees.

And let the heartsick tears pour out.

And every racking, roiling emotion along with them.

“I did my best, okay?” I cry at the wide waters. Part of me hates them for keeping such deep azure repose and glass-smooth calm, but the other part is giddily grateful for the exact same things.

Even more so as I swipe my face with both hands, fighting to clear the grieving salty tracks much sooner than I expected. Though Maximus and I have likely been here for close to twelve hours now, this is the first moment I’ve had to simply sit with these feelings. But also the confusion around them.

What do I even feel? What’s even real?

I wish I had half a laugh to give back to that. In any other place or time, it’d be a pathetically sappy song lyric. For all I know, it might already be. I sincerely wish it was. In a song, it’d be two to four fleeting minutes of metaphorical meandering and symbolic pining. But this…it’s the unfiltered honesty of my heart. The pure pondering of my soul. And they’re both fissured like every sidewalk in downtown LA right now. Chunks of feeling and longing and responsibility and ruin, pulled apart by forces far under the surface of what everyone thinks or assumes.

Even me.

The girl already raised with several levels of surreality, having to perform that mental separation every day—often several times a day if Veronica was in fine form—now wondering which side of my brain is up and craving my mother in more ways than I thought possible.

“Mother.”

I rasp it as strongly as I can, knowing that’s how she’d demand the iteration regardless of the desolation that drove it. The surety makes me smile—only a little at first, but it grows outwardly as I look inwardly. If she’s here so strongly in my head, maybe she isn’t dead. So was she truly spared? But for what? Hecate wouldn’t be dense enough to just let everyone go. Not without milking whatever advantage she could from the situation.

The deliberation takes me back to square one. Stark fear. Impotent despair. They rush on tracks that collide and fume in my new, clenched words.

“Mother. Talk to me. Tell me. Please…please.” Splinters dig into my palms as I press harder and harder to the deck, hands stiff against my sides. “What do I do? How do I know if it’s the right thing to do? How do I pick? I…can’t… I…don’t know what…”

But the tiny wood pricks aren’t why my cheeks are soaked in tears again. I’m as adrift as if my shoulder blades turned into sails and followed the wind out to the ocean itself. But even with a sextant, a compass, and nautical GPS, I’d be lost. In the middle of the nowhere called my mind.

What am I doing?

And why am I trying to figure that out here, when I should have ordered Poseidon and Proteus to take me back with them?

I shouldn’t have jumped so fast at the sea king’s ultimatum. Didn’t all my experiences with Hecate teach me anything about trusting deities of any kind?

But isn’t Maximus a deity?

I plop back onto my butt, blinking at the water for a long second before an addled giggle invades. “All right, all right,” I mutter, hoping to assuage whatever higher wisdom that threaded the thought into my synapses. No way did it happen organically. Not every battery in my body drained to these critical levels. “But he’s the exception.”

To save more face—not that my existential counselor cares—I weave a weary finger into the air. The motion tracks my sights back across the lagoon. Its moonlit swells, aided by the strengthening breeze, are more than welcome in the frenetic flurries of my senses.

I pull in a huge inhalation. Though I’m significantly calmer now, lungs suffused with night wind and nostrils taking in myrtle and eucalyptus, I’m already thinking about getting up and returning to the villa. As much as this scene should be in a Kriti tourism reel, there’s one important factor missing for this island visitor.

But maybe the land’s famous fairies have been flitting into my thoughts—and, in the quixotic way of fairies, conspired in my favor. I stick with the theory, thinking somebody will need to be thanked for the heady pleasure of watching my birthday-naked husband on approach down the narrow dock.

“Do you little imps take Venmo, or is this going to take gold pieces and a full-on shrine?” Though right now, I’ll gladly agree to either. Or both. Maximus Kane’s form, in full pagan warrior mode, is worth any finder’s fee on the planet.

I’m not done with the conclusion before he approaches so close, I’ve got to arch my head back to meet his gaze. Not a rough chore; perhaps one I’d also pay for. The tips of his hair are getting mildly lifted right and left, and the riot of stars in the sky behind him start to reflect in his intense blues.

I sigh. I think. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to breathe.

It’s as if he already belongs up in those cosmos.

Is he sure he’s only half a god?