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“It’s clear.” Gregor whispered, reaching down to offer a helping hand. After a moment, a pale hand grabbed his. A pale arm followed by a pale body came with the hand, slowing being pulled from the dark hole it had been hidden in.
“It is cold.” The white-skinned girl complained, dropping Gregor’s hand to wrap her arms around herself and shiver. Gregor smiled, tucking some of her silvery hair behind her ear. Gregor pulled a large sweatshirt over the girl’s head, leaving her to figure out how to put it on the rest of the way as he moved the large stone back into place. They didn’t want others to find the entrance to the Underworld.
“I have a pair of jeans in the car for you too.” Gregor told the girl as he took her hand and began to lead her away from Central Park. “I don’t know if they’ll fit right, I had to guess on the size, but they’ll keep you warmer that those.” Gregor didn’t have to explain what he meant by “those”. Anything Luxa had left the Underland in was unfitting for the cool, Overland night.
The couple was quiet as they walked through the bustling city. Even at night, the sounds of life in the big city surrounded them. Gregor once told Luxa he was glad the entrance was in New York City because if anyone saw her, it wouldn’t be that hard to brush her strange appearance off as nothing more than an eccentric teenager. Luxa had no idea what he meant until a few months ago when he showed her Broadway.
“Where are we going?” Luxa asked in a quiet voice when Gregor wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to him. A large group of people was headed their way. Gregor had an odd look on his face.
“It’s a surprise. But you’ll like it, I promise.” Luxa scrunched up her nose at Gregor’s secrecy. Admittedly, Gregor’s surprises tended to be nice but he had mentioned a car and Luxa was not especially fond of the metal contraptions. The first time Gregor made her get in something he called a “cab” she nearly hurled. Though she didn’t mind the “subway” as much which Gregor figured was because it was also underground.
When Gregor stopped in front of an old, rusting car that might have blue at one point, Luxa cringed.
“That looks even less safe than your cabs.” She complained. Gregor opened the passenger door for her, rolling his eyes.
“I’m a safe driver I promise. And I even went for a test drive this morning to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything in the couple of months since I drove last.” Gregor promised which, based on the Underland queen’s face, didn’t make Luxa feel any better about getting into the vehicle. Despite that, she did climb into the passenger seat. Gregor closed the door and gave her a few minutes of privacy to slide on the blue jeans on over her softer Underland pants. Luxa was not comfortable with the feeling of denim against her bare skin. The Underland queen knocked on the window to let Gregor know that she was finished and he came around to the other side of the car.
Gregor put a key into the ignition and turned it. A few loud, sputtering noises came from the vehicle before the quiet purr of the motor took over and headlights blinked on in front of them. Gregor ignored the pointed look Luxa gave him.
“Seatbelts.” Gregor insisted before he pulled out onto the street. For one, Luxa had no arguments against Gregor’s order and quickly, with a little help, strapped herself into the car. Anything to make the strange contraption feel safer.
The first part of the drive still had Luxa on the edge of her seat and nerves frayed but as the traffic began to lessen, Luxa began to calm down. Luxa dropped her hands away from her seatbelt a few minutes later. A song was playing on the radio. The singer was male, with a deep, crooning voice accompanied by heavy drums, a harmonizing background chorus, and some kind of string instrument. Gregor looked to be mouthing along to the words, drumming on the wheel with his fingers. Luxa looked outside her window.
The city was passing them by, all tall buildings and grey streets. People of all sizes and colors hurried along the roads. It amazed Luxa, the different colors humans could come it. The most variation she had ever seen in an Underlander was the dark hair and odd eyes that her cousin Hazard boasted but only a few miles overhead there was a rainbow of different people. Without thinking, Luxa reached over and grabbed Gregor’s hand. The Warrior looked startled at her sudden movement but he didn’t protest as she compared their skin tones once again. The contrast was striking. Luxa pushed Gregor’s sweatshirt sleeve further up his arm and compared their skin even more. While you could see veins like crossroads spreading all across Luxa’s arm, Gregor’s darker skin was crisscrossed with pale scars. The underside of Gregor’s arm was considerably lighter than other areas of skin but new black marks marred the surface.
Luxa traced her fingers over the familiar marks. Though the…”tattoo” was new to her, the words were a mix of clicks, scratches, and taps.
“A letter can be itself.” Luxa translated easily. “Why?”
Gregor smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“Lizzie and I got in an argument a few weeks ago. She later sent me a written apology but she used the Code of Claw as well as the Tree of Transmission to keep its message secret from our parents who sent a group of letters together.” Gregor exhaled loudly, blowing some of his messy hair out of his face. Gregor wasn’t very good at getting haircuts in a timely manner. “It took me nearly three days to figure out why the letter wasn’t making any sense to me.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know why but I just felt that this was the right thing to get.”
“What did you and Lizzie argue about?” Luxa asked quietly. Gregor grimaced.
“That’s something else I have to tell you. Um…Boots is coming to live with me in New York.” Gregor admitted. Luxa grinned.
“Gregor that is great news!”
“Right, I’m really excited to have her here but Boots doesn’t remember the Underland-not like the rest of us.” Luxa got a terrible feeling in her chest. “She remembers some names but she doesn’t know why those names or creatures mean anything to her.” Gregor squeezed Luxa’s hand. “Boots wants answers about what happened to our family and my mother doesn’t want Margaret to know anything more about the Underland than she has to.”
“What do you want?” Luxa asked after a few minutes. She found herself scared to know his answer.
Gregor dropped Luxa’s hand in order to run his hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”
He was lying. Luxa had been friends with the Overlander too long to not be able to tell when he was lying to her.
Luxa sat forward in her seat, looking out the front window of the car. Suddenly, Luxa was angry. Extremely angry. Gregor wasn’t going to tell her all of this at first. He was going to wow her with whatever stupid surprise he had planned first and then leave her with this bad, half-thought out lie until the next time they saw each other, however long it might be until then. Gregor seemed to sense her anger because he moved farther away from her in his seat and turned up the music.
The rest of the ride was spent in frigid silence. The music was left on but even it could not fill what their casual conversation had left when Luxa abruptly stopped it.
Gregor took a small, dirt road. Tall trees bordered either side of the road. They were so different from the vegetation in her home. The grass covered ground was bizarre as well. Most of what Luxa had seen of New York was more like her home, a city of stone; this new, less populated area was odd. Luxa wanted to be too angry to be awed by this new area, to completely ruin Gregor’s plans of surprising her with another amazing Overland sight but it was hard.
Gregor stopped the car in a wide open field. Trees surrounded the area but there was at least an acre of clear land in front of them, only grass and wildflowers left to cover the Earth. Gregor turned off the car and got out. Luxa could hear him moving around outside, pulling things out of the back of the car. She watched Gregor walk towards the top of a small hill. He laid out a thick blanket and placed some kind of basket and some extra blankets down to hold it. He returned to the car with an almost guilty look on his face.
“Are you too mad at me to come out of the car?” Gregor asked when he opened her door. Luxa wanted to say yes, tell him to turn back around and take her home but instead she climbed out of the car and let Gregor lead her to the blanket he laid out. Gregor and Luxa laid out on the blanket, side by side and looked to the sky. Luxa heard herself gasp. There were thousands of stars overhead. Luxa had seen a few stars in her trips to the Overland, on especially clear nights a few were visible-even in a never sleeping city like New York but she had never seen anything like this.
“It is beautiful.” Luxa breathed. She reached an arm out towards the sky-knowing she could not reach the twinkling stars but wishing to try anyways. Luxa found herself imagining her and Aurora flying high above the Earth with the stars. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do so without Gregor. Ares would have blended into the night sky.
“I know.” Gregor breathed beside her. Luxa blinked away what felt like the start of tears and looked over at Gregor. He was looking at her instead of the sky he was supposed to be watching. Caught staring, Gregor blushed but he didn’t look away. “I knew you would like them.”
“This is not like the night sky in New York.” Luxa replied. Gregor gave her a crooked smile.
“I know. Down in Virginia, there are even more to be seen. The farther away from the big cities the more of them you can see.”
“The farther away from me.” Luxa said before she could stop herself. She knew Gregor wasn’t leaving her. Gregor had left his family, the most important part of his life, to return to New York-to have some kind of connection with the Underland. But Luxa was still scared. Still constantly thinking about how long it took her to be okay with Gregor not being in the Underland.
Gregor tumbled into her life eleven years ago and knocked everything out of place. She lost her cousin, her uncle, Ares. Then Gregor left and she was a twelve year old queen trying to rebuild a city and keep peace between two species that had hated each other longer than anyone could remember. There were nightmares and hallucinations and scars and illnesses she couldn’t explain. When she finally started to feel like herself again, Gregor had somehow found his way back into the Underland.
As hard as growing up after the war was for Luxa, it was even harder for Gregor. He was thin and scarred when he returned to the Underland. Dark circles left hollows around even darker eyes and he had never looked so lost before.
He doesn’t look like that anymore, Luxa thought. His skin has gotten the healthy color it once had back. His smiles reached his eyes. He was a healthy size again. Scars still decorated his skin like carvings on the walls of her home and he tried to cover them up with dark “tattoos” that remind him of the Underland but those who know him know better.
“Luxa,” Gregor looked guilty again. “I didn’t mean to make you angry. But I really don’t know what I’m going to do.” Luxa looked back towards the sky, trying to drown out the sad look she had seen on Gregor’s face with the image of the stars above her. “I have to do what’s best for Boots, and me, when she comes to live in New York. I haven’t figured out what’s best for Boots yet. Maybe it’s staying in Virginia like my mother wants her to-we won’t know until it happens.”
“So we will not see each other again?” Luxa said what she figured Gregor wasn’t willing to. That he couldn’t risk Boots seeing Luxa until they knew how she was going to handle things-if New York might even bring back some memory of the Underland locked away.
Gregor’s face appeared above Luxa’s, blocking out the stars. Hands on either side of her head held Gregor over her.
“You think I ran away across four states when I was sixteen just to avoid you now?” Gregor demanded. “I’m not leaving New York again. I can’t. But as important as the Underland is to me, so is my family.” Gregor dropped his head onto Luxa’s shoulder.
“Why was this easier when we were eleven?” Luxa asked after a few minutes. Gregor snorted.
“We had some dead guy telling us what to do through old poems. Now we’re the adults trying to balance living in two different worlds and no one wrote instructions for that.”
“Actually you are the one living in different worlds.”
Gregor lifted his head to pin Luxa with a half-hearted glare.
“You don’t think you’re not trying to too, even a little bit?”
“Perhaps a little.” Luxa admitted, looking away from Gregor.
Gregor rolled back onto his side of the blanket and looked to the sky. Luxa looked as well.
“When is Boots coming?” Luxa asked quietly.
“My family is supposed to be coming up in a few days.” Gregor replied.
Gregor’s hand found Luxa’s once again. Hands intertwined they stayed quiet, watching the night sky dance with the light of the stars. After a while, Gregor started to point out constellations and tell Luxa what he could remember about them from a book his father had given him years ago.
Suddenly Luxa pointed at something shooting across the sky. “What is that?”
“A falling star.” Gregor answered. “You’re supposed to make a wish when you see one.”
“Why?”
Gregor shrugged. “I’m actually not sure where that myth came fro-”
Luxa rolled over so that she was positioned over Gregor, much like he had done to her before and interrupted his reply with an open-mouthed kiss, vastly different from the first kiss they shared as twelve year olds.
“Wha-What was that for?”
Luxa rolled back over. She could feel her skin heat up with a blush. It wasn’t the first time she had wished her skin was darker so that she could hide her embarrassment easier.
“I was making a wish like you told me to.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
Gregor, for once, listened but Luxa could still feel his eyes on her.
Gregor and Luxa had not kissed since they were twelve. Four years had passed before they saw each other again and neither of them tried to push their relationship past friends. Gregor was still haunted by terrible nightmares and he had come to the Underland hoping for some kind of help-some kind of salvation after having to burry everything that had happened. When Gregor returned to live in New York permanently, Luxa had told herself her childhood romance was over-that she should be trying to act like a real queen. Evidently after two years of lying to herself, Luxa gave up.
“We should um,” Gregor cleared his throat. “We should probably start to head back if we have any hope of getting you back before the sun starts to rise.”
“I do not want to.” Luxa admitted. “I will stay the night.”
“Luxa!” Gregor sat up. “You know that’s not a good idea. The last time you were up here without it being totally dark your skin all but started smoking!”
“But I was outside then. I can stay inside your home until it is dark again.”
Gregor covered his face with his hands.
“Do you have any idea how bad of an idea this is? Not only is it dangerous and risky, but I will be murdered when I go back to the Underland for kidnapping the queen.”
“You did not kidnap me.” Luxa replied stubbornly. “And you should have thought about this being a bad idea before taking me outside of New York.”
Gregor rolled his eyes. “Right, I’ll remember not to let you out of Central Park next time in case you get any other wild ideas.”
Luxa reached up and pulled Gregor back to the blanket where she kissed him again, over and over until he stopped insisting that they leave.
“I am going to be in so much trouble.” Gregor complained. Luxa’s head was against his chest and a second blanket was pulled over the two of them. “I think it will probably be Howard who delivers the killing blow.”
“Shut up, Gregor.”
Luxa fell asleep on the ride back to New York. Gregor wrapped her in a blanket and carried her into his apartment building minutes before the sun began to rise. He sat Luxa on his bed and pulled out a pair of sunglasses for her.
Gregor shook Luxa awake and held the pale girl in a sitting position so that she could watch the sun rise out of his window. Groggily, Luxa smiled and laid her head on Gregor’s shoulder.
“How beautiful.” She whispered against his jacket, already falling back asleep. Gregor kissed the top of her head.
“I know.”