Page 77 of Spears and Shadows (Defenders of the Light)
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Nora tooka sip of her black coffee and grimaced as it burnt her tongue. When she was nervous, she had no patience to wait for it to cool.
As she looked up from her steaming mug, the reason for her nervousness walked in the café door. Odelle spotted Nora sitting at the quiet corner table and signaled that she was going to order a drink before coming to join her.
Nora went over exactly what she was going to tell Odelle about what had happened over the last few months for the dozenth time since she had gotten her sister’s text message earlier in the afternoon. Nora had woken up in her own apartment, thoroughly confused and disoriented. For a moment, Nora had thought that the entirety of the fight with the Shadow had been some sort of vivid fever dream, but the pieces of armor piled at the foot of her bed told a different story.
There had been a series of messages from Odelle, telling her that she had brought her home to sleep off her magic-induced hangover in her own bed. However, Odelle hadn’t foreseen Nora sleeping for over twenty-four hours and had eventually had to leave to go to work. Odelle made it very clear in her messages that saving her life in such a spectacular fashion as to be unconscious for over a day in no way got her off the hook and that she still owed her an explanation.
There were also several messages from Drew and Adam, assuring Nora that Adam’s condition was improving, although he was still in the hospital for monitoring.
So, Nora had peeled herself out of her bed, her mouth as dry as sandpaper, feeling as though she had drunk more than she ever had in college. She called Odelle to set up this coffee date, then made a quick stop by the hospital to see Adam on the way over. When Nora had expressed her nerves about telling her sister the whole truth to Adam, his answer had been simple.
“I guarantee you I was just as nervous when I had to tell you the whole truth. I had been imagining all the ways that moment could go for seven hundred years, and I felt like my heart was going to explode. But in the end, the truth is always the right answer. Look how wonderfully it turned out for us.”
The wisdom of Adam’s words was somewhat diminished by the fact that he was gesticulating with a spoon full of Jello in an oversized hospital gown.
Now, as Odelle slipped into the seat across from Nora, she hoped that her good luck when it came to the truth would continue to hold. Nora opened her mouth to start with an apology, but it snapped shut when Odelle started speaking first.
“I have to come clean. Drew filled me in on most of what’s been happening.” Odelle took a sip of her cappuccino and licked the line of foam off her upper lip. “I was too impatient to wait for you to wake up, and you know me—it wasn’t hard to pry the important parts of the story from Drew.”
“And you believe it?”
Odelle snorted into her foam. “After everything I saw, I think I have to. Otherwise, that would mean I need you to take me to the mental hospital, like, yesterday.”
“I guess that makes my job a little easier then.” Nora sighed in relief.
Odelle shook her head.
“Don’t think this gets you off the hook. I want to hear your side of the story. I need to know why you didn’t tell me about all this sooner, and I need to know what’s going on with you and Adam.”
Nora knew she owed the whole truth to her sister, as long a story as it was to tell. She took one more sip of her coffee and then launched into the tale, starting from her first meeting with Adam. Odelle was a perfect listener, as always, nodding along and asking incisive questions in that way that made her an excellent reporter.
When Nora got to the point in her story where she could have told Odelle the truth, she paused, trying to get her thoughts straight.
“I wish I had a better reason for not telling you, but I guess I was just scared,” Nora admitted. “It was all so new to me, and the thought of there being something so terrible coming after me…it felt like if I told you, then it would be after you too.”
Odelle looked at her quizzically. “It looks like not telling me made me more of a target.”
Nora winced. “I know, but you’re my little sister. You’re so aggressively capable that I have to keep you safe from yourself. You hear about something dangerous and you run towards it instead of away, looking for the next great story. It makes you a great journalist, but it’s bad for my blood pressure.”
“Okay,” Odelle snorted. “First, hello pot, it’s kettle. You are one of the most reckless people I know, so don’t give me that ‘you run into danger’ nonsense. And second, you shouldn’t worry about my journalistic instincts. Trying to make a story out of a secret society of immortal sorcerers on the news sounds like a great way to ruin my credibility forever.”
“Fair enough.”
Nora continued with her story, through the part where Adam told her the truth about her past lives. Odelle grew quiet and Nora was unable to gauge her reaction. She soldiered on, recounting how she had found Odelle’s voicemail and set off to save her, explaining how she had left Adam a message so that he would know to come after her, but she wouldn’t know what his plan was so she wouldn’t give their presence away to the Shadow.
Reaching the part where she found Odelle under the train tracks, she finished lamely, “And, well, you know the rest.”
There was a long silence before Odelle responded. “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that you didn’t tell me all of this until now, because I definitely wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it with my own eyes.”
Nora was taken aback at Odelle’s forgiveness in the face of her protracted lying.
“You’re taking this awfully well,” she ventured carefully, “Especially since the last time I saw you, the Shadow had you convinced everything was my fault.”
It was Odelle’s turn to look like she was grasping for the proper words to explain herself.
“I will admit, I was furious,” Odelle began. “But it was Adam who changed my mind in the end. I was convinced that you had chosen this crazy band of sorcerers over your own sister, but when he threw himself in front of me to save my life, I was forced to see things differently. If he loves you enough to give his life for me, even though he’d barely met me… Well, that really says something, I guess. It’s hard to feel betrayed when a stranger is willing to die for you.”
