Heart of Stone (Rock Star Fairy Tales #1)

Chapter 7

C h apte r 7

There’s No Place like Home

Early AM, Thursday, February 19 th in Margot’s Bus in the back lot of the Reve l Coliseum

M argot sat on the modified bucket set, swiveling aimlessly as she stared at the ceiling of the converted bus she called home. The space was small but comforting. Familiar. Even though it wasn’t the same configuration she had grown up in with her mother as they traveled the other continent, the bus was the same.

The old bus interior had a small kitchen and mini fridge on one side, a tiny toilet tucked to the other side, and a bed filling the back against the doors. At night, they would pull down a plank and tuck it above the bed, making Margot’s bunk. She had felt so safe there, sleeping above her mom, secure in the passenger seat as they drove from place to place. Showering outside on cold days had never been her favorite, and Margot still relished a hot shower, but those days had been easier somehow. Simpler.

Then her mom had gotten sick, and Margot barely recalled the days between sleeping in the hospital and being shuttled across the world to live with a stranger. Maddie had been a good aunt, showering Margot with the love and affection her niece needed and giving her a predictable place in the new world, but from the start, Margot only had eyes for Ash. Though she was only 15, and he a “worldly” 18-year-old, she would never forget the first time she saw him, stumbling into the bar late one night with her cousin Niklaus, both of them shushing the other as they tried to creep back into bed. Sometimes, Margot wondered if the reason she had latched onto Ash so strongly was because she had just lost her mother, and his cool distance was a solid replacement—unattainable, just like her mother now was. She could pine after Ash like a painting of an angel or a photograph of her mom laughing on a dista nt beach.

When she turned 17, the old bus had shown up. A stranger had driven it right up to the bar one day. They had been closed, Margot still repainting the trim while the others had gone into town to get dinner, and the man had simply walked inside and smiled at Margot as though recognizing her immediately, despite her bedraggled paint-smeared pres entation.

“Margot Tanner,” he had said, his voice friendly, and Margot thought she should know that sound, recognize the man. Then he was handing her the keys with gentle warm hands. “This is yours, of course. I’m sorry it took a while to get it o ver here.”

“Wait—” she had called after him, but he left immediately, saying nothing else. She had dropped the paintbrush and followed him outside, but he was gone. Her mother’s TW bus was parked off the side of the parking lot, next to where Maddie parked her truck. She had gone inside, sat on her mother’s bed, and sobbed her h eart out.

It had been Ash who had comforted her then. Gently. Distantly. He had coaxed her out of the bus that night and into her room, even wiping her face free of paint as she sat listlessly on her bed. Over the next month, he had found her in the bus often, never saying anything, and when she started talking to him about her life with her mother, he listened. When she said she couldn’t stand the bus this way, couldn’t stand the memories but was conflicted about ignoring such a huge part of her past, he had left her, returning later with Niklaus and Timothy, and they were the ones who suggested the remodel. A project, Nik called it. A new start, Timothy said. They had redone the entire bus, this time updating the features and adding Margot’s favorite treat: a shower.

Glancing at the back where the beds used to be, she smiled, seeing the small sink and stove to the right of the green wall that hid the toilet and shower. It had taken some magical thinking to redesign the space, but having the water in the back actually worked out, and they were able to raise her bed in a bunk along the side of the van, butting up against the wall of the shower. A low counter beneath her bunk served as a desk so she had workspace and storage available. Her spinning chair was specially designed to sit flat on the floor near the head of the bed, though she could also fold it down into a foot stool or lift it up to sit a third passenger. With it open, she could splay her legs straight toward the small kitchen at the back of the bus, though now, as she spun around, staring up at the white plank edging her bed with each rotation, she sat crosslegged, her knees easily clearing the desk where her small laptop perched.

Along the still-original green back wall below the bottom of her bunk was a small row of windows, interrupted by three framed pictures: one of her mom on a beach in Belsune, her hair wild around her face as she laughed; one containing both of them, Margot around ten years old, standing next to her mom among a forest of huge redwood trees, both of them smiling; and the final picture much newer: Margot, Nik, Ash, and Timothy at the lake, all of them young and goofy as aunt Maddie yelled at them to smile.

Behind her bed was a tiny closet with shelves holding randomly colored bins of her clothes, and then the driver’s seat. Though the drivers were typically on the left side here on Ardon, the bus was from Belsune, so it had the driver on the right. The dislocation felt by those who normally drove in Ardon was part of the reason why Margot didn’t let anyone else drive her bus—a lesson learned early when Ash had tried to move her bus from one side of the parking lot to the other when they first started the demolition—and nearly tipped it into the ditch at the edge of the lot. He wasn’t used to thinking about the space the bus occupied from that side, but they still gave him crap for that day. He hadn’t been allowed to drive anything for months—everyone jostling him out of the driver’s seat if he tried to claim it, grumbling about how they wanted to get to their destination—not end up in a ditch s omewhere.

The driver’s seat was a regular configuration, but the passenger seat next to it was able to spin around, though not like her desk chair. It had to be road-safe and only flipped around with a handle. Nik usually sat there when he visited her, though he sometimes complained about the clothes she had dangling from the small rod across the top. She may abuse their fancier RVs for the washing machine, but most of her clothes she hung up to air dry.

The bus was small, her bed just big enough for her to sleep comfortably, still covered by the t-shirt quilt her mom made the summer before she died, the two of them laughing about their horde of shirts from all the places they had been. The bed was surrounded by a few precious books tucked along the walls, but Margot was home. It was still the bus she grew up in, but now it was hers, the ghost of her mother finally put to rest.

A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts, and she sighed, letting her spin glide to a stop. She faced the side door and glared through the window at the top of Ni k’s head.

“It’s open,” she grumbled, then started spinning again, not eager to face this newest betrayal.