Solana
It's deathly quiet in the house today – not that I'm complaining. There isn't anyone in the lounges or dining hall, no one hanging around the kitchen island pestering our head chef, Lucy, for something to eat.
Which means we have free reign over the spread of veggies and dip, as well as other snackable grab-n-go type foods that have been arranged on the kitchen island. Eli is consuming, more accurately inhaling, his food at twice the rate of Tate and Dean. Ace doesn't make a move unless I do, opting to follow my lead rather than make himself at home like the rest of Death has.
Lucy and some other chefs are busy getting started on tonight's dinner, so she doesn't hover over me. But she does send me a wink when she notices me rolling my eyes playfully at the way the guys are eating like this is their last meal.
"Wow," my brother's voice calls from one of the kitchen doorways. "First they get you to come home and then they get you to leave your room?"
Rhys comes up to me and cups my face in his hands, looking at me intently, checking the whites of my eyes and feeling my forehead. "Tell me the truth, did they drug you?"
Ace's lip curls into a tight snarl which luckily my brother doesn't notice because he's too busy throwing his head back in laughter. Lucy and the other kitchen staff share in his amusement, grinning to themselves at his antics but carrying on with their duties.
"No, weirdo. If I stay in my room everyone will come looking for me," I lie easily. My family will come looking for me, that's not the lie. The truth is that I left my room so I can show them all my favorite secret spots in the Grove, and because I know that I can use the four of them as my scapegoat.
Why am I in the kitchen? Because they needed to eat and I go where they go. Why did I agree to come back? Because I've got Ace who can teleport us home the very second I want to leave.
I mean...teleport us to his home.
"No they won't. Mom told everyone that you won't be here until tonight for dinner." Rhys mentions casually after taking a large bite of an apple.
"Then how did you know I was already home?"
"Please," Rhys scoffs with self-assurance, "I'm your favorite brother, I know everything that concerns you."
"Xander told you." I say flatly. Rhys has never been very good at bluffing.
His expression falls and his whole body visibly deflates, "Xander told me. But! I didn't tell anyone else, so that has to earn me some brother points."
I lean up against the kitchen island next to the stool my brother occupies and give him a grateful nudge. He's not wrong. Of all my siblings Rhys is the one who I confide in the most, the one who doesn't roll their eyes or guilt me over every one of my life choices.
"What was that bullshit earlier about you envying me? You've got it made in the shade here." I try not to sound too eager for an answer.
He lifts a shoulder up in a nonchalant shrug, "I just think it would be nice to have a life beyond the Grove."
"You love it here," a ghost of a question punctuates my words because now I'm really wondering whether or not he loves it as much as he says he does.
"I do," he says but it feels like there's a "but" attached to it and I gesture for him to spit it out. "But...I don't know how to not sound like a dick for saying this. Just that I didn't exactly choose this life, you know?"
"Neither did Calla or Cole —" I start to argue but he cuts me off.
"That's exactly the point though, Sol. At least they know where they stand here, they have very definitive roles to play. But me? I'm like the new Uncle Incandis. Guardian brother to the next queen. Which is fine, you know, family business...I get it. But sometimes I wake up and I just think if I flew off right now would it really make a difference?"
Rhys gets lost in his own thoughts, staring aimlessly straight ahead of him affording me the time to really digest what he said. I never knew he felt this way, I never knew he thought of me and my life as something to envy. I've been too focused on the past and revenge to appreciate my freedom.
"It's not as glamorous as you think out there, Rhys. You fit in here," I say, looking over my shoulder at my four guard-dogs and thinking about how each of them were adrift before finding a home with each other. And now somehow I've ended up there, too. "You belong here."
Rhys' expression sobers. "Make no mistake, Sol, you belong here. You just haven't figured out that you're the only one of us who can belong elsewhere, too. You're the hybrid." He gives me an unconvincing smile and then plasters on his happy-go-lucky face to address the guys. "You guys enjoy exploring, make sure she's back in time for dinner." And with that he teleports out leaving me with my four scapegoats and a lot to think about.
— — —
Ace
My attempts to give her privacy to speak to her brother fail miserably, I can't help but hear every word of their conversation. All of her attempts to escape us I attributed to her need for freedom, her need to escape. But from the tone of her conversation with her brother maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe she's not on the run – maybe she's searching for something.
Searching for somewhere to call home. Somewhere to belong.
Not unlike Tate and Dean, or Eli, or Hunter. Whether we were kicked out, thrown away, or ran away, we all ended up creating a life together – a family, a place to belong.
That's what Sol's missing.
Or at least, that's a part of what she's missing. I'm hoping I can gain insight from other perspectives on what makes Sol tick, and what it is that she wants.
Rhys swiftly teleports out but Sol doesn't move a muscle, she just stares idly at the space where her brother was just standing. I can see flames beginning to coat the wispy tendrils of her brown-black hair and before I'm consciously aware of it, I move so I'm behind her and try to soothe her with my purr. Her tattoos go haywire and begin to Rorschach...ink is morphing and shifting to the rhythm of my purring with hypnotic effect.
"Solana?" I whisper, mesmerized by the way she can alter her appearance like a cuttlefish.
She snaps out of her thoughts, tattoos fixating in place, and hair still unnaturally black.
"Yeah, sorry." She turns and gives me a tight smile. "You guys ready to go?"
"Fuck yes!" Eli cheers, always the adventurer, carefree and up for fun.
"You haven't eaten much, Sol. There's no rush, we can wait." Dean says, his need to look after everyone having followed him here despite this being her turf, her home.
Unsurprisingly Tate remains silent, even though I can feel him chomping at the bit to go exploring. It's been decades since we've been able to fly freely.
Solana dismisses Dean's henpecking and shows us the grounds around the palace's perimeter. Dragons fly freely above and around us, wolves run around chasing after dragons and vice versa.
And while that should be the most exciting part of the Grove, it's nothing compared to its beauty. The colors here are brighter, there are shades of colors I swear I've never seen before, and there's a lightness to the air making it feel almost easier to breathe.
For the first time it hits me how badly Sol had to have been hurt to leave a place like this, to leave her entire family and her life behind.
"We're protected beneath a shield, like a dome. It keeps us hidden from view and alerts the guards to trespassers." Sol explains to the guys.
"Over this way are the gardens. It's where our namesakes grow." She leads us towards a large blossoming tree with three distinct sections of flowers growing in beds around it.
"Calla lilies, for you know who. Toxic when ingested, fatal in high enough quantities. My sister is aptly named." She chuckles. "Cole's named for a family of flowers, colchicaceae. Street names include Naked Ladies, though I can't speak to how appropriate his naming is, thank the Gods. Ingestion can cause multisystem organ failure, much like the effects of a single conversation with him." She grins at her jokes at her brother's expense. "And most obscurely, for Rhys, the Ricinus plant which is dangerous to breathe, touch, and ingest. One of, if not the most deadly poisons to humans."
"Which leaves the tree," I assume by process of elimination.
"That tree?" She nods towards the one in question, the one growing in the center of their poisonous family garden. "That's a Magnolia tree, for my mom."
I want to ask her where her flower is grown, but I worry that the answer is related to her leaving home. As if uprooting her plant could erase her existence.
"I grow in the shade where it's wet." She beams impishly at us, a challenge glinting in her eyes before she shifts into a breathtaking black and purple dragon and takes off into the sky.
Dean and Tate are hot on her trail and before I take off after them too, I shift and allow a begrudging Eli to hop onto my back. He's just mad he's the only one here without wings.
Sol is a sight to behold on any given day, but here in the Grove with absolute freedom? I'll call her a bare face liar if she tries to tell me she doesn't miss being here.
She leads us away from the center of the Grove, past inhabited grounds and deep into wild and unadulterated woods. She hovers in the air for a moment above a small clearing in the trees before she backflips and nosedives into the clearing like she's diving into a pool.
When we follow her down I'm surprised to find that that's exactly what she did. Beneath the tree canopy, buried in this forest, is a waterfall that feeds into a small lake. Solana surfaces from beneath the water back in her human form and beckons us to join her.
"Welcome to my favorite place in the world."