The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Six

I met Caitie in fire, and I lost her that way. It's funny, sometimes, how symmetrical life can be.

It's like a phoenix, like a question of rising from the ashes. Life as circles, maybe. Everything I have ever known has started coming back to tap me on the shoulder, to remind me that everything I've known is not what it seems and it never has been. Recently, my father told me that I have developed trust issues. It wasn't hard for me to grasp how, or why.

My mother and her best friend were assassins at Helford. My mother ran from Helford, and her best friend killed her. Her best friend's daughter came to kill me, but couldn't do it, and she lost her life trying to protect me from that fate. It's like a cosmic joke sometimes, when I take a step back and look at it. It's like a painting in an art gallery where I can sit on a bench in front of it and study the brush strokes, and I can comment about how ironic and unfair it all is, dissociating from a potential reality.

It was all so unfair. It was all so unkind.

Sometimes, I thought of my mother. She would have had so many high hopes for so long. She would have met my father and got out of a horrible life, finally free from her demons, and she could have had the normality she craved—but, like Caitie, another escapee from Helford, it ended up catching up to her in a bad way. My mother was murdered, my brothers along with her to make a point, and it was personal. And wasn't it the same for Caitie, who had to find her parents murdered and learn that it was a man she had once trusted, or at least respected the authority of, only to essentially have her life taken by the same man?

Life was cruel. Maybe that was why I couldn't stop thinking of it, the night before Lys Asbury's trial, constantly wandering between different US cities and having to come to terms with a world I had once wanted to understand, and a world I was lost inside of. I couldn't stop thinking of my mother and Caitie, and how they were alike.

My mother threw herself in front of her family to save them, and her having failed in saving us all wasn't the point, but instead the act of courage and heroism and love that went with it. Caitie let herself die when she conceivably could have escaped, when she could have watched the destruction of the world that ruined her like she deserved to, just to protect us. They both did horrible things, but they got out and they fought back, and they didn't get the end that they deserved.

Sometimes I have to take a step back and wonder how everything happened in my own life.

There comes a point where I lose track of understanding, where everything becomes a whirlwind of motion and endless passion and confusion and so much that I can't make sense of it. I met Caitie in a moment like a daydream, which morphed quickly into a nightmare. The night the ballroom went up in flames was still a moment in time that did not stick to my memory as linear, but instead a mess of a bright smile, a crashing chandelier, a red dress, the way her waist felt under my hands, the sound of my father yelling my name as I gasped for breath in the back of an ambulance. In the weeks following, where she didn't show up where she was expected to be, when nothing came up when I searched her name and she was nowhere to be found, I almost believed she had been my own hallucination, or maybe an angel. Later, after the carnage of the last several weeks, I started to think about her as more of an angel of death.

Finding her again in the hallways of that school, ghosting at her side in giddy excitement that she was talking to me, and she was there, that she wasn't a dream, was amazing. It was worth the side-eye from a Parker I didn't even know I didn't understand yet, and it was worth it to probably embarrass myself over how much I looked at her, hanging on her every word, believing in her even when I barely knew her.

My father had tried to tell me a while ago that that was part of her charm. I didn't want to tell him that, really, it had just been me throwing myself into it with my whole heart, not thinking it through for the first time, and just seeing what happened.

Of all the times I could have thrown caution into the wind, that time had been an unwise one in hindsight. It changed the course of my life—in a strange way, it gave me a life to live at all. In falling into Caitie's trap, she learned to love me as I fell head over heels in love with her, and it was enough that she chose to let me live with the same ease that she decided Rian could not.

If I had not loved her, and she had not loved me because of it, I would have died that last night. I would have been gunned down in front of her and Rian in my old bedroom, and she and him would have run away, and my father would have been broken. She would have won, and she would have had to choose between Helford and the Underground, and she would have torn the world apart in whichever fight she decided she needed to fight.

By choosing to allow herself to love me, she saved me at the same time of dooming her, and she had to have known it. It was why she killed Rian, and why she faked her death, and why she disappeared into a new identity where no one could find her first. In one emotional attachment, she changed the course of both of our lives, and I hadn't even known at the time how close I could have come to being murdered by her during any of the times we were alone, because she would have just been doing her job.

But it wasn't just that. Life would have been different with my mother.

I was thinking about her a lot lately, because these trials were dredging up all of these stories of spies and assassins that tried to break away, ones that murdered because it was either that or be the one murdered. I had a notion of what that life was like, but I couldn't imagine the militaristic brainwashing of Helford, or even more horribly of Shawn Masterson, to factor into that. My mother was just another one of that, a woman who wanted to get out of a terrible world. She was so similar to all of the assassins who had to sit in front of a judge in the coming weeks and hold their breath, wondering if they would be found guilty or if they would be able to walk free, knowing in their souls that they wouldn't deserve to go free no matter how much they desired to be.

She was my mother, and I still remembered her, young at the time but not too young to not remember what it was like to have her. She loved freely and she smiled a lot, and she sang when she did the dishes. To me, she was a kind soul, and it was hard to think of the hands that used to tuck me into bed at night as being the same hands that had killed people. That ignorance was bliss, really. Five years ago, I never had to look back on those moments and think like this, biased by the horrible things I now knew.

I was poisoned, a little, with what I knew. I couldn't help sometimes to think about what life might have been if my mother and my brothers had lived, and if I had grown up like a normal child, not knowing that there were assassins hidden in plain sight and spies keeping track of information they never should have had. It was a little bit of a fantasy dream, a relief for imagining what could have been—my brothers and I learning to hate each other in the way siblings do, all of us getting older, our mother and our father standing tall in a steady marriage, the life that I always wished I'd had.

Ignorance would have been so great. But, in the end, ignorance is not what I got, because then I never would have gotten here. And I can't imagine a life where I had never met Caitie Alastair.

From the night of the ball, with her in her red dress with her mysterious smile, she'd changed my life. The flames that had licked the ceiling and the smoke that had laid thick in my lungs for weeks were the beginning of something bigger than me, something as uncontrollable as that fire had been. Caitie had been one of the whirlwind miracles of my life, as much as she had been a curse, breaking away the rose-tinted glasses I had worn and opening my eyes to a worse world, a world soaked in blood and betrayal. From the first time she saved me until the last, it had been like my life had been on fire, burning away what I had known and allowing for the rise of a new universe just underneath, and I didn't think it was even going to end there.

Caitie was unforgettable. She was a force of nature, and she deserved to be remembered more for the selfless things that she did than the horrible things that she committed in the name of someone else, under the orders of people who just wanted to control her.

My life would have been much different if I had never met Caitie, but I wouldn't wish for that ignorance anymore now that I knew, and I understood, and I had loved the girl that destroyed Helford.

And if every night I dreamed nightmares of a midnight in France with a breeze standing still and the whooshing of an explosion vibrating my bones, smoke simmering into the sky as I looked at a burning building and wished for Caitie to just perform another miracle, then it wouldn't be the first time.