Shadowed (Fated) (13 page)

Margaret stared at him as if she wasn’t sure she
wasn’t dreaming or imagining it and was too scared to move in case she
shattered the illusion and he vanished.

‘Cyrus?’ she finally croaked.

He nodded.

Her face crumpled and she threw her arms around his
neck with a sob, hugging him so fiercely that Cyrus looked in danger of
toppling on top of her. Before he could right himself, she grabbed his face in
her hands and started smothering him in kisses. Evie noticed Cyrus stiffen, his
hands splayed at his side. He lifted one and gently patted Margaret on the
back. Evie watched with a mixture of amusement and pity.

It had to be weird having a strange woman act
hysterical over him. Someone needed to tell Margaret about his memory loss. She
cleared her throat but Margaret didn’t notice. She was gazing rapt at Cyrus
now, still clutching him, tears streaming down her face.

‘You’re alive,’ she kept repeating.

Evie cleared her throat again. ‘Mrs Locke,’ she
said.

Margaret looked up startled. ‘Mrs Locke,’ Evie
continued, ‘Cyrus has kind of lost his memory.’

Margaret blinked, confusion dulling her smile. The
tears dried up. She switched her attention to Cyrus.

‘You don’t know who I am?’ she asked in a shaking
voice.

Cyrus shook his head at her slowly. ‘I know you’re
my mother. They told me you were.’

Margaret shot a glance over his shoulder at Evie.
‘Where did you find him? Where? How? Where’s he been all this time?’

‘We found him wandering near the Bradbury building.
He’s been in hospital. But we’ve no idea what actually happened to him.’

Margaret’s hands slowly slipped from Cyrus’s arms.

‘You came back,’ she said in a whisper. ‘How did
you come back?’

He shrugged in answer.

‘We thought you might have an idea,’ Ash said from
his position leaning against the wall. ‘We’re getting nothing from him.’

Margaret stared at Ash blankly for a few seconds
but then her gaze swept towards the pile of books on her desk. It was only a
brief glance before she turned back to Ash.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is the way through still
shut? Did you check?’

‘Yes, we just went to the Bradbury building. It’s
definitely closed.’

‘So maybe the prophecy was wrong?’ Vero added, her
voice bright with hope. ‘Maybe it never meant that the White Light was going to
die. Maybe it was just interpreted wrong?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’ Evie asked, her eyes narrowing. ‘That
suggests you have an alternative theory.’

Margaret looked up at her, suddenly flustered. ‘No,
I don’t. I can’t think why. But I’m not going to question it either. My son’s
back. That’s all I care about.’ Her attention returned to Cyrus.

‘Er, mum?’ Cyrus said, obviously finding the word
strange to use on this woman he’d just met. ‘It’s not exactly over. There are
more of these monsters – I mean unhumans – out there. These guys
are trying to fight them.’

Margaret slumped against the desk, the happiness
draining out of her like an arterial bleed. ‘Please no,’ she said simply.

Cyrus scanned the room. ‘But isn’t that what we
are? Isn’t that what I was? A Hunter? Didn’t I do that? I don’t get what …’

‘I lost you once,’ Margaret said, taking hold of
his hand, her voice breaking. ‘I can’t go through that again. I won’t.’

Cyrus stopped talking and bit his lip instead.

Evie stared between them. She hadn’t foreseen this
and felt suddenly stupid. She wondered if she should intervene and say
something but then she felt Vero nudging her in the ribs.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said.

Evie frowned at her. What? She looked back at
Cyrus, who was busy scowling at the floor and at Margaret who was stroking his
hair off his forehead and gazing at him in adoration, and she realised with a
shock that Vero was right. Of course they needed to leave Cyrus here. What had
she been thinking? They had no right to ask Cyrus to join them. Cyrus had given
his life – or as good as. He couldn’t be expected to join them again in
the fight. And neither did Margaret deserve to lose him for a second time. Not
now she’d just got him back.

Evie nodded to Vero and the two of them backed off
towards the door where Ash was already waiting. At the top of the stairs, Evie
cast one quick glance back over her shoulder. Margaret had pulled Cyrus into
another fierce hug and this time he was hugging her back.

‘Bye,’ Evie whispered, her throat burning.

They were in the car, pulling into traffic when a
fist landed hard on the hood. Vero slammed on the brakes. A car behind them
honked.

Cyrus stood panting, hunched over the front of the
car, glaring at them. He raced around to the back passenger side, yanked the
door open and piled in beside Evie.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he told them, breathlessly.

The three of them exchanged a glance and then,
without a word but with a big grin on her face, Vero stepped on the gas and
sped off.

Evie slunk out of the living room and made her way to the room she’d
shared for a night with Lucas. She’d been trying to avoid it, but she really
didn’t want to sleep on the sofa again.

She stood a while in the doorway trying to conjure
the ghost of Lucas – squinting through her lashes to see if she could
picture him lying on the bed, one leg bent sideways, the scars on his chest
catching silver in the moonlight. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t
make him appear. The images in her head were fragmenting, fading away.

She trudged to the bed and lay down, recalling for
just one perfect second how it had felt when she had lain there with her head
on Lucas’s chest and listened as he told her all about his family. She wondered
idly how Flic was doing before pushing the thought away. Thinking about Flic
and what she must be going through only made her feel even worse. It sapped all
her strength, and she needed whatever strength she could summon in order to get
through the coming days.

Without being aware of it she had started counting
the notches on the bedpost. Cyrus, the old Cyrus, had made them. It made her
squirm on the sheets, hoping he’d washed them. Though she hated to admit it,
and she was trying not to think of how Margaret must be feeling, she was
secretly glad that Cyrus had come back with them.

It was strange. Cyrus seemed different in so many
ways. His conversation was no longer ninety percent sexual innuendo, and he
wasn’t constantly trying to get her to sleep with him – but the one thing
that was the same was his obsession with being a Hunter. For him it had always
been about something other than revenge. And Evie had never fully understood it
until he’d explained to them that he was just following his instincts. They’d
led him to the Bradbury building, so who was she to argue? Maybe, Evie puzzled,
instinct
was just another word for
describing the tug and pull of fate. And following your instincts merely meant
taking the path that fate had plotted out for you. But that brought her full
circle. She no longer believed in fate – did she?

With a sigh she rolled over and pressed her face
into the pillow. For as long as she lived she’d remember Lucas telling her that
life took you down a path, and that sometimes it took you past bad stuff, but
that it always took you to exactly the place you were supposed to be.

She wished he was here right now so that she could
punch him. It was such a load of crap. This place she was in right now, lying
in this bed, alone and lonely, with her heart torn in two, was not where she
was supposed to be. And if it was, then she hated fate.

There was a cough from the doorway. She rolled
over. Cyrus was leaning against the door jamb.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

She frowned at him. She’d had to barricade the door
to stop the old Cyrus from waltzing in whenever he felt like it. Now he was
asking her permission? He’d evidently lost his memory and found some manners. Small
blessings. As she sat up she wondered if the softer, less in-your-face version
of Cyrus was going to be permanent or whether it would vanish the moment his
memory returned.
If
it returned.

‘Sure,’ she told him, sitting up.

Cyrus entered the room and looked around, taking in
the bunk beds with a sceptical, slightly perplexed expression on his face.

‘Did I make those?’ he asked, pointing at the
notches in the bedpost.

Evie twisted her head to look and then nodded at
him. ‘Yeah.’

He walked closer, obviously trying to count them,
but after a few seconds surrendering to defeat. He shook his head in what
seemed like amazement, though she couldn’t tell if it was that or something
more like awe.

‘But you made that, didn’t you?’ he said, pointing
at the massive crack running up one of the posts and frowning. ‘You were pissed
at something.’

Evie nodded. ‘You’re starting to remember things.’

Cyrus dropped down onto the bed beside her. ‘Yeah,
though not anything useful,’ he sighed.

Evie drew her knees up to her chest and leant her
chin on them, watching him, wondering why he was really in her room.

Cyrus turned to her then, drawing a short breath, a
flare of embarrassment heating his face. He looked down at his hands. Evie
stared at him, trying not to smile. Seeing Cyrus blush and lost for words was a
first.

He swallowed loudly. ‘Did we ever … er …’ He broke
off, the blush growing deeper.

‘Did we ever what?’ Evie asked, confused.

‘You know,’ he said, jerking his head towards the
notches.

Evie took a second to process. ‘No!’ she
half-blurted, half-yelled.

‘Really?’ he asked, frowning hard at her as if he
thought she might be lying, ‘because I …’

‘Really,’ she repeated more emphatically, jumping
up off the bed.

He looked up at her, frowning still, his turquoise
eyes darkening.

‘You didn’t like me much, did you?’ he asked.

She opened her mouth and then shut it again. ‘I
didn’t
not
like you,’ she said with a
sigh, sitting back down. ‘It’s just your ego kind of had its own solar system.’

‘Huh,’ he said, his eyes running over the bedposts.
He smiled to himself a little ruefully. ‘But I was good, right?’

Evie’s mouth fell open. Did she need to make it any
clearer that none of those notches was her? That they’d never slept together?
How would she know if he was good or not? Though judging from Darcy’s thousand
SMS messages and the squeals she emitted every time she saw him, she had to
concede, grudgingly, that he probably was.

‘I mean at fighting,’ Cyrus added quickly, seeing
her expression. ‘Was I good at fighting?’

He looked a little like a lost child and Evie had a
sudden and unwanted urge to brush his dark-blonde hair back off his face. It
was odd hearing Cyrus ask for reassurance. She was tempted to withhold her
answer, as she would have done with the old Cyrus, to say something sarcastic
just to annoy him. But she couldn’t, not when he was looking at her with such a
stricken expression on his face.

‘Yeah,’ she said softly, ‘you were good. You saved
my life. I never got to thank you.’

His eyes narrowed. He was looking at her again as
if she was some kind of puzzle, or an object whose value he couldn’t quite work
out. She wondered what he was thinking.

‘You’re welcome,’ he finally said. Then after a
beat, ‘Do you know why I did it?’

Evie shook her head. ‘No. I’ve been wondering about
it for all this time, wishing I could ask you. And now I get the chance, you
don’t even remember.’ She shrugged helplessly.

The cheeky grin was back. ‘I thought maybe it was
because we …’

‘No,’ she said, cutting him off again, at the same
time trying to fight a smile, something she found herself doing more and more
around him.

They sat in silence for a moment, Cyrus frowning at
his lap as if trying to remember the night at the Bradbury and what his
motivation might have been.

‘Just before you did it you told me that chivalry
wasn’t dead,’ Evie said.

Cyrus looked up. ‘That’s kind of cool.’

‘And your last words were,
I’ve led a charmed life.
’

‘Shakespeare.’

Evie shot him a quizzical look. ‘You remember?’

‘No, I just know the quote. Macbeth, right?
I bear a charmed life.’

She stared at him in amazement.

He shrugged. ‘I can remember random stuff like that
– quotes and things I learnt at school. Like I remember my Spanish. I
just can’t remember other stuff. The stuff that matters …’ He paused, scowling,
‘Like who I was.’

‘I can’t remember who I was either,’ Evie said
after a pause, thinking of how much she’d changed in just a few short weeks. ‘I
think that’s OK though. We change. People change. But the core of who you are
stays the same. You’re still Cyrus. There are things you do which remind me of
the old you.’