“What if that’s the wrong question?”
She smiled. “Yeah? What’s the right one?”
“You’re you. Who is that? Who does she want to be? And how can I get her to kiss me?”
She raised herself on her arms and leaned over my face, letting her hair tickle me. Her lips touched mine, and it was back—the electricity, the current that ran between us. I had missed it, even as it burned my lips.
But something else was missing.
I leaned over and opened the drawer of my nightstand, reaching inside. “I think this belongs to you.” I let the chain fall into her hand, her memories spilling between her fingers—the silver button she had fastened on a paper clip, the red string, the tiny Sharpie I gave her on the water tower.
She stared into her hand, stunned.
“I added a couple of things.” I untangled the charms so she could see the silver sparrow from Macon’s funeral. It meant something so different now. “Amma says sparrows can travel a long way and always find their way back home. Like you did.”
“Only because you came to get me.”
“I had help. That’s why I gave you this.”
I held up the tag from Lucille’s collar—the one I carried in my pocket while we were searching for Lena and I was watching her through Lucille’s eyes. Lucille looked at me calmly, yawning from the corner of the room.
“It’s a conduit that allows Mortals to connect with a Caster animal. Macon explained it to me this morning.”
“You had it all this time?”
“Yeah. Aunt Prue gave it to me. It works as long as you have the tag.”
“Wait? How did your aunt end up with a Caster cat?”
“Arelia gave Lucille to my aunt so she could find her way around the Tunnels.”
Lena started to untangle the chain, untying the knots that had formed since she lost it. “I can’t believe you found it. When I left it behind, I never thought I’d see it again.”
She hadn’t lost it. She had taken it off. I resisted the urge to ask her why. “Of course I found it. It’s got everything I’ve ever given you on it.”
Lena closed her hand around it and looked away. “Not everything.”
I knew what she was thinking about—my mother’s ring. She had taken off the ring, too, but I hadn’t found it.
Not until this morning, when I discovered it lying on my desk, as if it had always been there. I reached into the drawer again and opened Lena’s hand, pressing the ring into it. When she felt the cool metal, she looked up at me.
You found it?
No. My mom must have. It was sitting on my desk when I woke up.
She doesn’t hate me?
It was a question only a Caster girl would ask. Had the ghost of my dead mother forgiven her? I knew the answer. I found the ring lying inside a book Lena loaned me, Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, the chain serving as a bookmark under the lines “Is it true that amber contains / the tears of the sirens?”
My mother had been more of an Emily Dickinson fan, but Lena loved Neruda. It was like the sprig of rosemary I found in my mom’s favorite cookbook last Christmas—something of my mother’s and something of Lena’s, together, as if that was always how it was intended to be.
I answered Lena by fastening the chain around her neck, where it belonged. She touched it and stared into my brown eyes with her green and gold ones. I knew she was still the girl I loved, no matter what color her eyes were. There was no one color that could paint Lena Duchannes. She was a red sweater and a blue sky, a gray wind and a silver sparrow, a black curl escaping from behind her ear.
Now that we were together, it felt like home again.
Lena leaned into me, grazing my lips gently at first. Then she kissed me with an intensity that sent heat buzzing up my spine. I felt her find her way back to me, to our curves and our corners, the places our bodies fit together so naturally.
“Okay, this is definitely my dream.” I smiled, running my fingers through her incredible mess of black hair.