Chapter 43
CHAPTER
I tore down Bascite Boulevard, Emelle and the others right behind me.
A deep fog was gathering between the mansions, slathering me in a sticky second skin that seemed to hold me back. My legs and lungs burned by the time I’d raced upstairs and barged into our room to face the chaotic mess the Good Council had left behind.
Dazmine’s corner of the room was the worst. Her bed was in absolute splinters, as if the elites had thought she might be hiding clues about her whereabouts in the frame itself.
Her dresser was knocked over and cracked down the middle, her bags were torn apart at the seams, and every pot or bowl or mirror around her space had been shattered and now laid in fragments on the floor.
The rest of our spaces weren’t much better.
My pillow was ripped wide open like Cilia’s, leaving an array of feathers spread everywhere like the softest snow.
My mattress had been upturned. Even my drawers were emptied, my dresses, toiletries, and spare pens and bottles scattered unceremoniously across the floor.
I couldn’t even feel relieved that I’d already removed the handful of little black pearls weeks ago. Not when dread sunk into me at the ringing silence their search had left in its wake.
“Willa?” I called, racing forward to check under the bed, in the corners of the wall, under each overturned piece of furniture.
Footsteps thumped into the room behind me. I heard Emelle’s soft gasp of alarm and Lander’s curse under his breath, but my eyes had gone blurry as my fingers scrabbled to lift everything I could find.
“Willa,” I called again. “Are you okay?”
More footsteps joined Emelle and Lander behind me… just as a perturbed, high-pitched voice squeaked from a crack in the wall.
“If absolutely disgusted by this rat’s nest counts as okay, then yes.”
“Oh, thank God.”
I crouched to let Willa scurry up my arm and into my palms. She sniffled at me, her beady eyes peering at me in concerned assessment.
“I have walls to hide behind, Rayna, but you don’t—no matter how much you like to pretend you do. I should be asking if you’re okay.”
“I’m…” I tried to finish that sentence on a positive note, but the word fine got sniffed back up. I nuzzled Willa to my cheek.
From the doorway, Cilia whimpered, “I just don’t understand—why would they touch our stuff if they’re looking for Dazmine? And why are they looking for her anyway? She might be a bit…” Cilia wiped away a tear. “…standoffish sometimes, but…”
“Well, she obviously ran away,” Norman Pollard said beside her. “And running away’s against the rules.”
“But why would she run away?” Mitzi asked on his other side.
I held in a sigh. I had a feeling I would hear this conversation a lot over the next day, and I’d have to maintain a perfectly neutral face every time. I tried to practice that now as Cilia began to moan about her pillow again, and Mitzi offered to let her sleep with her tonight.
Emelle rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Do you want to stay with Lander and me, Rayna?”
I saw her eyes glance at her own ruined bed. Her birdfeeder laid on its side on the floor beside it, its seeds strewn everywhere. Not that she ever slept here anymore anyway, but tonight was out of the question.
“Yeah, I can Shift my bed into something bigger that would hold all three of us until we can get this room cleaned up,” Lander chimed in. “Or I could sleep on the floor while you two…”
“Oh, no thank you.” I straightened. Emelle removed her hand from my shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it.” It was a kind gesture—one that I appreciated with a pang of something like homesickness—but I didn’t want to disrupt the routine Emelle and Lander had created together.
And I certainly didn’t want to sleep in a bed that they’d made…
memories in. “I’ll go ask Wren if I can sleep with her. ”
Emelle nodded slowly, but both she and Lander were looking at me with something a little too shrewd, a little too sad.
“Rayna,” Lander said, surprising me with the insistence in his voice as he lowered it. “I’ve known you since I was a baby, but one memory really sticks out to me during our whole childhood.”
I looked up at him. “What?”
He adjusted his tie thoughtfully before speaking.
“When we were about five years old, my grandma was supposed to be watching you, me, and Quinn, but she fell asleep in her rocking chair a couple hours in. The three of us snuck out of my house to go play some street pentaball. Remember that?”
I nodded, though the memory was a vague one for me. I could have probably dug into my own mind—or Lander’s—to assess it properly, but I was too transfixed by the intensity of his gaze to do anything besides stare at him.
“You fell and skinned your knee,” Lander continued. “There was blood everywhere, but you refused to wake up my grandma and ask her for help bandaging it. Do you know why?”
“Why?” I whispered.
“You didn’t want her to feel bad for falling asleep on babysitting watch,” Lander said. “You chose to bleed until your wound scabbed over rather than cause someone else the slightest bit of discomfort by asking for help. And you’ve been that way ever since.”
Emelle nodded beside him.
“It’s okay to inconvenience people when you need help,” she said. “The people who love you will help you anyway, knowing that you’d do the same for them.” She gave that same sad smile.
I wanted so badly to tell them everything right here and now. The words were climbing up my throat, but… I wouldn’t just be inconveniencing them if I gave in to the urge. I’d be putting them in the exact same situation I’d put Dazmine.
“Okay.” I nodded. “Thank you. I’ll let you know if I need help with anything. Promise.”
Emelle nodded back, disappointment flickering in her eyes. “Well… see you tomorrow at the Testing Center?”
“See you tomorrow,” I told them both with a soft smile.
It was only after they’d left that Willa’s whiskers twitched in my direction. “What a missed opportunity. A Shifted bed sounds nice. You could have asked him to turn the sheets into cheese.”
“Oh, not you too,” I sighed quietly. Cilia and the others were still helping her pack up her own stuff, and I didn’t want them to hear and feel sorry for me. “I’m sure Wren’s bed will be perfectly fine.”
I wasn’t sure, actually. Wren was probably the least cuddly person I’d ever met, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she made me sleep on the floor.
“I think I’d rather share a wall space with Barty tonight.” Willa wrinkled her nose. “And he sings opera in his sleep.”
I sighed and brought her up to my shoulder so I could begin packing an overnight bag on my hands and knees—a nightgown from here, a bar of soap from there. Anything I could find in the rubble that looked somewhat useful, I threw in one of the ransacked bags.
Was there anything else I needed? Anything I didn’t want the Good Council getting their hands on if they returned to investigate further? The pearls were safe, but…
“… and he doesn’t wash his tail and keeps shitting on your book.”
“What?” I asked Willa.
I didn’t need her to explain further, though.
As soon as she’d said that last word, I could feel another memory dislodge itself in my mind and come to life in an explosion of mist that involved a request from Jagaros, a conversation with Ms. Pincette, and a map I’d stowed away in the wall behind the cuckoo clock in our foyer downstairs.
A map I was determined to never hide again.
Ten minutes later, with Willa safely deposited back into the walls and Ms. Pincette’s tome tucked away in my overnight bag, I poked my head into Wren’s room to find that I wouldn’t, in fact, be sleeping on her floor after all.
She and Gileon were slumped against the headboard of her bed side by side, their heads lolling against each other as they snored with a pawn-scattered board game between them.
Their clothes were on, and nothing about their positions screamed romantic to me, but I still felt that same strange pang of homesickness at the sight of them together.
Even Nuisance was buzzing in his sleep in Gileon’s lap, his shelled wings fluttering with every breath.
Well, now I knew why they hadn’t come running at all the Good Council commotion.
I eased Wren’s door shut again, hoisting my bag over my shoulder and gnawing on my lower lip.
The echo of my first night here at the Esholian Institute seemed to be closing in on me.
Even though I still had holes in my memories, I could remember peeking into tent after tent and feeling more and more unwelcome and out-of-place as I went.
The same deep-rooted loneliness I’d felt then was creeping over my bones now, twining around them and pulling tight.
Bascite Boulevard was shrouded in mist by the time I crept outside to trudge to that same tree I’d slept in once upon a time.
Everybody else must have gone home after the Good Council incident, because nobody passed me as I walked.
No lights flickered through the fog, no music permeated the air.
Even the usual background noise of nighttime animals—the chirping of crickets, the far-off hoots of owls, the clicking and screeching of bats—had dissolved in the haze.
Just one night, I told myself as I made it to the Wild Whisperer sector. I would take my second quarterly test tomorrow, get those pills from Nara, give them to Lexington, and then…. well, then there would probably be a lot bigger things to deal with than sleeping in a tree.
I almost ran into a thick wall of warm muscle before I saw him through the thickness of the mist.
Steeler was standing before that tree, his arms crossed.
“You can’t be serious, Rayna.”
My bones heated and shook off their restraints.
“I’m a Wild Whisperer,” I shot back, glad for the mist that hid the color warming my cheeks.
The fact that he hadn’t gone back to the lighthouse, that he’d stayed here to make sure I found a bed safely…
I cleared my throat to keep my voice steady and carefree.
“Sleeping in a tree is, like, the one thing I’m good at. ”
“I’d say you’re good at a lot of things, actually.”
His gaze didn’t flick down the length of my body, but I felt the weighted heat of it as if it had. As if he’d already memorized every part of me and devoured them whole.
“Just one night, little hurricane.”
Steeler’s voice was so soft, so achingly fragile, that I wanted to cradle it in my palms. When he offered his hand to me, something irrevocable shattered in the smoky quartz of his eyes.
“I know I don’t have any right to keep you,” he said on an exhale. “I know I don’t deserve to love you. But please, Rayna—give me one more night to be with you.”
My breath eddied away at the expression on his face.
He wasn’t asking to sleep with me—not in that way. He may have made certain suggestive claims in the past, but I knew by now that he wouldn’t ever pressure me into anything physical.
But could I even sleep, knowing he was in the same room as me? Could I stand it, with no Garvis there to stand as a buffer between us? What if I wanted to taste him again without the excuse of a Mind Manipulating lesson? What if I couldn’t smother the hunger within me that was reaching for him?
I had to say no.
It was for the best to say no.
It hovered on the tip of my tongue to say no.
“Yes,” I said, stepping toward him.
And that pang of homesickness inside me melted away.