“It was rude of me to belittle your efforts. I didn’t mean to make fun.”
“Whatever.”
Kingsley looked at her kindly. “I’m truly sorry to disappoint you. I’m… quite flattered that you cared so much to come all this way.”
“So you didn’t miss me… not at all?” she said, daring to ask one of the questions she had wanted to ask since they were reunited. Had she misunderstood everything? The way he’d looked at her before he disappeared—and the fact that he had asked her to break her bond and steal away with him—was it all a dream? All that time she had grieved for him, mourned for him, dreamed of him, schemed for a way to get him back…
and it was all for nothing? He’d never felt the same for her?
How could she have been so stupid?
“I’m so sorry,” he said, patting her on the back as if she were a child.
Good god, if he’d meant to console her, he was going about it exactly the wrong way. He was making her feel like a silly schoolgirl who’d had a crush on her teacher. “Right.”
Mimi nodded. She just wanted him out of her room and out of her life. She never wanted to see him again. If there was one thing she hated more than Kingsley’s indifference, it was his pity. “I think you should go now.”
But Kingsley stubbornly refused to leave. “Listen, come take a ride with me. I want to show you something. It might explain better than I can.”
Mimi heaved a sigh. “Do I have to?”
“I promise I’ll stop bothering you if you do.”
“Fine.”
He drove them out of the city, beyond the borders of the seventh, to the endless swaths of nothing that surrounded Tartarus. The dark incalculable void where nothing grew and nothing lived, and there was only the dead and those that kept the dead. They drove into the vacant barren land, to the black irradiated earth, the devastated valleys where the Black Fire had raged from the beginning of time. In middle of the infinite darkness he stopped the car and got out, motioning for Mimi to follow him.
He knelt by the side of the road and asked her to do the same. She crouched down next to him.
“See that?” he asked, pointing to a small red flower that was sprouting from the ashy black desert. “Remember what it was like before? Nothing could grow here. But it’s different now. It’s changing. The underworld is changing, and I’m part of the reason why.”
It was just a weed, but Mimi did not want to take away Kingsley’s fierce pride in its existence.
“It’s going to take a long time, and maybe it will never be as beautiful as earth, but who knows.” He touched the petal of the flower with the tip of his finger. “There’s nothing for me up there, you know,” he said quietly. “It’s peaceful down here.
I belong here.”
She could read between the lines: this was the reason he would never return with her back to earth
. To return to his former existence would only bring him pain. In mid-world, Kingsley martin was a pariah, neither angel or demon but a Silver Blood, a vampire who was shunned and distrusted by his own people.
Maybe he’d loved her once, or maybe he hadn’t, but it was all irrelevant now. Whatever love he had was gone. Perhaps it had never been real. Only his pride in this small growing flower—that was real.
Mimi finally saw what she had been denying from the moment she’d laid eyes on him again. Kingsley looked different because he was different. Down here, he was whole, he was himself. He was not plagued by the screams of the thousands in his soul. While he was Croatan, he was also free.
Now she understood why Helda had said, If you can get him to leave with you, you can have him.
Kingsley would never leave the underworld. He had everything here: adventures, new experiences; as the Angel Araquiel he would bring life back to this dead land. She did not want to take that away from him. If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another’s well-being is more important than one’s own. It was so awful to grow up and realize you couldn’t have everything you wanted, Mimi thought.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said finally, as they made their way back to the car.
“No one’s happy here, you know that. But I am content, and maybe that’s enough for me.”
They drove back to Tartarus in silence. Mimi was afraid of saying something she would regret, and Kingsley was lost in thought. When they arrived back at the palace, the trolls seemed to sense their mood and kept out of their way. There was nary a servant in sight, when usually they were constantly hovering, offering cakes or champagne or hookers and hot tubs.
Kingsley walked Mimi to her room. “So I understand this is good-bye, then?”
“Yeah, well.”