Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Riley
It’s been a long day of on and off searching with nothing to show for it but a sore ass from riding this creature. All we’ve gathered is that Torin can feel the magic from the Door opening, but there’s no clear pinpoint on where.
“Do you think he already opened it?” I ask as I slide off the feline creature. “Did we already fail?”
“I don’t think so,” Torin says. “But I don’t know.”
We’ve scoured every inch of this city with no results.
Just a few minutes ago, Imani sent out an alert to reconvene back at the department, so I immediately set to work convincing Torin that the fastest way there would be by subway.
He’s disappointed and gives his wolf many pets.
I also pet the feline because even if riding it wasn’t the best experience I’ve had in my life, I do like the creature.
They enjoy the attention but thankfully aren’t upset when I send them back into the earth. They would have been sent back anyway once I touched someone else, even just bumped into them, since I’d lose my necromancy power.
“I already miss them.”
“Sorry,” I say.
Torin sighs and looks down into the subway. “Disgusting.”
“I know, but it would have taken an hour or more to ride there, and this will only take twenty minutes.”
“An hour sounds better to my ears.”
“Well, it’s not,” I say as I lead him down and onto the subway.
It’s pretty empty besides a woman with a crow familiar, so we take a seat and I open my backpack to pull out the book that might have the answer to my curse.
I get one sentence read before Kit is watching the crow who is also very interested in her.
It’s doing a little dance with its wings spread and its head bobbing.
“Kit, focus.”
She quickly looks back where I have enough time to finish reading the same sentence before she’s watching the crow again.
“Kit, we don’t have much time. I need to read this.”
She huffs and looks back, allowing me to at least finish the page before she falls asleep just like that, dropping me straight into the darkness I loathe.
I grit my teeth and slam the book shut. “Fuck.”
“It’s okay. Don’t get upset. Let me read it to you,” Torin offers as I feel him reach for the book.
“No. Forget it. I didn’t want to read it anyway,” I say, feeling frustrated.
The answer to my problem is so close, and yet…
I don’t even know what the answer is. I already read much of the book yesterday, but so little of it even makes sense to me.
I can understand the language because of the lady’s magic that allows me to speak with Torin, but that doesn’t mean I understand the words.
And I definitely can’t understand them if Kit falls asleep one more time while I’m trying to read. It pisses me off. All of this just… pisses me off. The Magical Interference Unit over here dragging me into this with some big idea that I’m useful when I can’t even do anything anymore.
“Stop,” Torin says as I feel him tug on the book. I stubbornly hold on to it briefly before he takes it from me. “Riley—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hmm…” he murmurs. And then, after a moment, he lays his head on my shoulder.
I’m so irritated that the second he does it, I want to tell him to get off me, but I don’t even know why.
I choke down my frustration and try to calm myself while my attention turns to the sensation of Torin leaning against me and the warmth of Kit on my lap.
How could I possibly be mad at her? And…
really, I know it wasn’t her I was mad at.
I just get so frustrated that I’ve found avoidance to be the best.
“Are you tired?” I ask Torin.
“My head is. My brain is so massive that sometimes it’s really hard to hold up,” he says before switching to Shaarunen so we can’t be understood. “Same with my dick. It’s so massive to have to carry around all day. It’s a burden I must bear.”
“You are absolutely ridiculous,” I decide.
He chuckles.
“I can’t see where we are, so pay attention. We want off at Sixteenth Street. They’ll announce it, but I might miss it.”
“Okay,” he says, and for the rest of the subway ride, we sit in silence—him leaning against me and me lost in my thoughts, fingers trailing through Kit’s fur.
When we arrive, Kit wakes up and my world of dark becomes a world of light again. I quietly leave the subway, and Torin follows me up to the surface, down the block, and across the street to the department.
Imani sees me when I walk in. “We still have a few we’re waiting for. Go have a seat somewhere. I’ll call you when we’re ready.”
“Okay,” I say as I wander, looking for a quiet area before I end up at my old office.
It’s Vinny’s office now. Kit doesn’t follow me inside; instead, she perks up when she notices a familiar she used to play with when I worked here and didn’t rely on her every second of the day.
And since losing my sight, I’ve practically forced her to be my eyes.
I feel like such a dick. She hesitates before running back to me.
“No, go on. Go play,” I tell her.
She rears up on my leg, watching me, so I reach down and pet her head.
“I wasn’t upset with you. I was mad at myself. I’m sorry. Go play. I promise I’m fine,” I say as I push her in the direction of the other familiar. She glances back at me but when I wave her off again, she gallops after him.
I let her go but then just stand in the doorway, not knowing where to go without being able to see anything.
Torin grabs my hand and pulls me after him. He slides into a chair and drags me onto his lap, which is not what I’m expecting.
“What are you doing?” I ask, rather startled by the seat I’ve ended up with.
He wraps one hand around my waist and the other over my eyes.
I repeat, “What are you doing?”
“Why do you feel so much hate?” he asks.
“Hate? I… what are you talking about?”
“You hate yourself. You hate your affliction. You’re so frustrated with yourself.”
“And you wouldn’t be?” I retort. “You’d be happy to suddenly be fucking blind?”
“I understand your frustration, but why do you take it out on yourself? Why do you think so little of your capabilities because of this curse? You seem to think your only worth is your magic and that without the strength of it, you are nothing. You want to hide everything you are going through and feeling. You want to suffer alone. Why?”
“Stop trying to analyze me,” I snap as I try to get up, but he holds me still.
“You don’t have to answer, but you should think about it.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What? Greatness and then being stripped of it?” He lets out a humorless laugh. “Yes. Yes, I do. I’ve just had two hundred more years to come to terms with it. There was once a time when I probably could have stopped this curse you’ve been afflicted with by just a simple touch.”
I stop struggling when it hits me that he’s right. I’m not the only one whose life has fallen to shambles. “I don’t even know if it’s greatness I’m chasing,” I whisper. “I’m just tired and frustrated today.”
Torin is quiet for a moment. “You must have been tired and frustrated every day since I met you.”
“Strange, almost feels like there’s something that could have added to that.”
“No idea what it was, but now that your ass is on my dick I’m very horny.”
I would like to glower at him but from this position, I can’t do it with ease. “We are not having sex here.”
“No, no, we’re reading,” he says, dropping his hand from my eyes.
“And why do I have to sit on your lap for it?”
“I heard this is how you read to others.”
“Is it?” I ask, positive it’s not.
“It is in your sex books.”
“Fucking hell,” I growl as I try to get up, but his hand around my waist keeps me pinned down.
And then he begins to read. He reads it in his tongue, even though I know the book isn’t. “The language this book is written in, was it a part of your culture?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then… how did you learn it?”
“I’m a god.”
“I guess you did learn English ridiculously fast. A part of me feels like you were putting on an act that you only knew sex words, but that couldn’t possibly be true.”
“No possible way,” he says then continues reading. Even though I’ve already read this section, he reads over it anyway before I shake my head.
“I don’t understand it.”
“I don’t either,” he admits.
“But you understood those sex books just fine,” I grumble.
“I sure did.” He nibbles my neck and a shiver rushes through my body.
“No! Focus, dammit. I’m assuming the person who wrote this is dead, then… since everyone in your world died.”
“Not necessarily.”
“What’s that mean?”
“This isn’t from my world.”
“You hopped Doors before coming here?”
“No… I pulled it off the body of the man who killed everyone in my world.”
I try to spin around even though I can’t see him, which doesn’t really settle in until I’m halfway turned. “You’re telling me this was written by the man who came into your realm?”
“I don’t know. Could have been his… could have been someone else’s. But I understood very little of it, even after I studied it for a long time. Then I stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it.”
The door opens and I try to get up, but Torin is determined to hold me down. The only way I can go is down, which means that I end up in some weird neck hold so it looks like Torin was in the middle of strangling me to death instead of reading to me.
“Is this a new kink? Because I’d be interested,” I hear Mickey say. “When’s it my turn?”
“It’s not a kink,” I protest as I scramble away from Torin and slam my hip extremely hard into the side of the desk. “Dammit.”
Torin slides a hand around me and draws me against him. “I’m protecting him from lecherous eyes.”
“The only lecherous eyes I see are the ones directly behind him,” Mickey says. “Imani is calling for us.”
Torin directs me out of the room, and we make it out without running into anything, so I have to assume he does a halfway decent job of it.