Ghost Perfume | ✔

Prologue

TWO YEARS AGO

Excerpt from Michael Alistair's journal

My stalking ways are becoming an embarrassment. Alas, it's a necessity. But all seems well. I have decided, going forward, I will check on our fifth no more than once a month.

She doesn't know I exist. She doesn't know anything about her true home. The days tick by and no one discovers her. No one discovers that I have discovered her.

I think Lukas has begun to suspect something, but he's too distracted to notice or care much. Alexander is a blank as always. I will tell them about her when the time is right. Gabriel, I think, I will tell soon.

All is well. Then why do I feel this obsessive anxiety?

Lately I wake in the early hours in a cold sweat, sure that I must go now, seize her, and hide her somewhere safer, where no one will find her.

Explain to her the circumstances of her people and the ties that bind her to me and my brothers.

Explain, promise, that I will honor her right to refuse these ties that bind us.

But she is very safe exactly where she is. She could continue peacefully, as she is, for many years to come. It's my own proximity that might endanger her, should someone discover where I go so often, and through me discover her.

I must gain control over this desperate impatience, so I can make sound decisions. Impatience serves no one in a situation like this.

I think I have discovered a bomb that any day could go off.

But if there is, indeed, a bomb here, I must move carefully so as not to set it off. If enough time passes, if I change the laws and I pave the way, then the bomb will defuse on its own, with no one the wiser.

My little bomb-maker is young and ignorant. But already I admire her from afar. She is clever and resilient. Generous. She gets up day after day to serve her people.

Sometimes I think with regret that she obviously would make a strong ruler - a steady general to serve with us, a beloved general to serve our people. When she's older and wiser, perhaps.

I wrote there that I admire her. But admiration is not quite the right word.

This feeling is tenderness.

I've grown to know her, and on one view - strange irony - she's ours to take care of. Because she's one of us.

I won't impose this view on her. I'll pave the way for her to choose what she wants.

I can imagine how my brothers might disagree. Gabriel has no sense of right and wrong. Lukas is lost. Alexander has forgotten the fragility of others. I will control when and how they learn of her, and I will make sure none of them bother her. She needs space and time to live her life.

It will be her right to refuse the call. If she should hate us, even, it's her right.

But if - when she's older and wiser, and I have changed the laws and paved the way - she should tell me that she accepts the burden, if she offers her narrow shoulders as a fifth to our four shoulders, I would welcome most deeply this newest member of our silver-burdened circle.