Chapter XVII. Domenic
XVII
DOMENIC
WINTER
Domenic sauntered out of Iseul’s study and halted at the kitchen’s edge, marveling at the image of Ellery Caldwell rooting through the cabinets. Twin mugs of coffee steamed atop the counter.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Um, sugar.”
Domenic unsheathed the greatest wand in history and gave it a flick. The pantry door opened, and the jar floated out and set itself neatly beside the mugs.
“Thanks,” Ellery said. Then, as a teaspoon sailed from the silverware drawer to join it, she smirked and added, “Wow. What manners.”
“Yes, I’m a man of many facets.” Ignoring the sugar, Domenic snatched one of the mugs and downed it.
He was the kind of exhausted where just to stand was to strain against gravity, yet his thoughts whirled, delirious and drunken and jumbling together like crashing traffic. His hands shook as he lowered the mug.
“How’d the call go?” she asked.
“I think I gave Sharpe’s secretary a heart attack.
I said my name and she made this sort of shocked squeaky sound, like a rabbit.
Do rabbits make sounds? Actually, never mind.
That’s not important. I told her I wanted the Council here as soon as possible.
She mentioned Sharpe had another call with the Prime Minister in an hour, and you know what I said? I said, ‘Cancel it.’ Just like that.”
Ellery Caldwell quirked a brow. Ellery Caldwell standing in his kitchen. Ellery Caldwell barely a foot away from him, spooning far too much sugar into her mug.
Then her amusement dissipated, like the steam wafting off her coffee. “So the Council’s really coming here, then.”
“Yeah, they are. I didn’t tell them that you’re here or what we have planned, but I’m done letting them bully us. We’re the Chosen Ones, for shit’s sake! And we’ve fulfilled two prophecy pieces in twenty-four hours. From now on, they come to us.”
Ellery chewed on her lip, an expression Domenic already knew to mean she was worried. “I think we did the right thing. But the most powerful people in the country won’t appreciate being strong-armed.”
“Actually, breaking news, we’re now the most powerful people in the country.
I mean, one day, this place will probably be a museum.
” He gestured around grandly. “Welcome to the residence of Domenic Barrow, Chosen One. Also Councilors Iseul Seong and Hanna Mayes. It’s within this humble abode that our great story began. ”
Ellery studied him as she sipped her coffee, and he feared she disapproved of joking about such dire circumstances—but Domenic couldn’t fathom treating them any other way.
Then a smile crept across her face.
“Because a full set of electric appliances and expensive antique furniture really screams humble,” she drawled, then pointed at the breakfast nook. “Don’t tell me—is this really it? The table where the Chosen One ate his morning toast?”
“What an eye you have! Indeed, that is the very one! And here, come on.” He bounced through the dining room and into the parlor.
“It’s on this settee where he had many a breakdown.
And this! The powder room he once slept in during that week last Winter when all three of the house’s occupants had the flu and he, ever the gentleman, claimed the only toilet downstairs. ”
“How chivalrous of you.”
“How heroic, you could even say.”
Ellery snorted lightly and examined the small portrait of Domenic along the stairwell, the one Iseul had insisted on commissioning for his and Hanna’s fourteenth birthdays, less than a month apart. Then her gaze strayed to the second-floor landing. “What’s upstairs?”
“Our bedrooms.” When she moved to pass him, he leapt up and braced one hand against the wall and another on the railing, blocking her path.
The room tipped rather excessively sideways as he did so.
He tallied how much coffee he’d consumed in the last forty-eight hours, but either math was beyond him at the moment or he wasn’t remembering right, as that number couldn’t be correct.
Unless he was invincible now. Perhaps he was.
“Oh, you expect an invitation?” he asked.
“I thought I was getting a grand tour,” she said dryly. “Besides, you barged into my bedroom this morning. It seems only fair.”
“I, uh…” He hoped he was invincible. Otherwise, should Ellery Caldwell enter his bedroom, he might actually die.
Rather than test it—or even answer—Domenic spun and bolted up the stairs.
“Are you cleaning it ahead of time?” she called, charging after him. “That is cheating!”
“I’d never!” He slammed his door behind him and frantically drew Valmordion, cursing himself for ignoring Iseul’s frequent prods to tidy his space.
With an intended swish that was more like a jerk, enchantments exploded across the room.
The window curtains yanked aside so violently that Domenic ducked for cover as a rod shot toward his head like a javelin.
The dresser drawers hurled open, and dirty clothes crammed into them with such force that the whole structure toppled over, scattering the mountain atop it—loose coins and crinkled gum wrappers, emptied training wands and used subway tickets—across the carpet in an avalanche of trash.
The singular picture frame crashed down.
The hoard of empty glasses and mugs on his nightstand teetered into each other with calamitous clatters, spilling stale dregs of water and orange juice.
Only the bed (thank everything) obeyed him: the quilt tucked itself beneath the mattress, the pillows arranged themselves upright—though they did belch out a loose feather or two.
Ellery threw open the door and yelped as she tripped on the crumpled curtain. Her arms flailed out for balance until she fell and caught herself on the floor—only a foot from where Domenic was still crouched, like a soldier in trench warfare.
They locked eyes, then burst into simultaneous, hysterical laughter.
“It looks like you tried to clean with a bomb.”
“Believe it or not, this is…” He gasped for breath, tipping dramatically onto his side. “This is actually an improvement.”
“Is it? There’s barely any decorations in here. It looks like a guest room.”
“It was a guest room. I just never bothered to gussy it up.” Surveying it, he spotted his discarded Enchantment Theory III textbook lying beneath where the dresser had once stood. “Well, what do you know? I’ve been looking for this! You think I’ll still need it?”
This only made Ellery laugh harder, a real laugh, like the one he’d heard at Mercester Square. She, too, tipped over and rolled onto her back—eight, maybe ten inches away from him. “This is … This is real, isn’t it? It’s really us.”
“It’s really us.”
“Alderland’s saviors.”
“The Chosen Ones.”
“It’s up to us to stop the cataclysm. Us!”
They continued cracking up on the floor for what might’ve been a minute or might’ve been an hour.
Time had gone sludgy, like the leftover grounds at the bottom of that seventh mug of coffee.
Valmordion’s heat simmered deep in Domenic’s center, and he kept picturing himself like a planet.
Like if you peeled back his layers, the crust of his skin then the mantle and flesh or however the order went, you’d find the exploding magma of his core.
Power of the most incredible, unfathomable sort.
“Do you think we actually can stop it?” Ellery murmured. “Whatever grand feat of magic it asks of us, you really think we can pull it off?”
She looked so strange in Valmordion’s filter.
Not strange in a bad way—definitely not in a bad way—but like whatever vibrancy Valmordion lacquered over the world didn’t apply to her.
She was all contrasts. Light glinted off the planes of her face, and iridescence limned the frizzed waves of her hair.
Shadows laced down the slopes of her neck, her cheeks, her mouth.
Shadows that he swore moved as he stared at them, hypnotic as the eye of a storm.
She looked like a fixed point. Like it was impossible not to notice her.
“Yeah. I think we can,” he answered truthfully.
Ellery smiled, and so did he. Her eyes were glassy, and so were his. Their worlds were reorienting in indescribable, terrifying ways, two stars colliding, yet he was no longer the least bit sorry about it.
He felt compelled to touch her.
He inched his hand forward until his knuckles skimmed hers.
Much like when they’d hugged in the Barren, an electrifying rush swept over him as if he’d been doused in ice water.
Reflexively, he wrenched away, and the two of them sat up and scrabbled back, panting and gaping at each other.
His every hair stood on end. His magic shivered down to that exploding magma core.
And despite the past two-or-singular day, despite everything, he was suddenly wide awake.
“I, um…” Domenic said, because he felt the need to say something. Ellery’s cheeks blazed pink.
Downstairs, the back door slammed open. Footsteps clobbered through the kitchen.
“Dom!” Hanna yelled. “Dom, are you here?”
Domenic’s mood crash-landed like a meteor.
“Oh, shit.” He scrambled up and rushed downstairs, where Hanna had already reached the foyer. “Hey.”
“Hey? Dom, from the bottom of my heart, what the fuck? Why didn’t you show at the Council meeting?
I’ve been everywhere—at the Gardens, every movie theater uptown, driving around in an NDC vehicle because I’ve been so panicked I—I lost my car.
And Iseul, she’s beside herself. She even went to Peak, asking how you were behaving on the train home, if—”
“Woah,” he said. “Take a breath. I’m fine.”
Yet Hanna uttered a noise between a growl and a scream. “I should’ve known leaving you here was a bad idea. This isn’t class, Dom. You can’t just flake on a Council meeting—”
“I didn’t flake.”
“Well, you look like shit, so you sure as hell weren’t sleeping. So what were you—” Hanna cut off, sighting Ellery, who stood by the banister. She’d tucked Iskarius’s sheath beneath her sweater.