Chapter 7 #2
Lingering dregs of pain wash over me, and when I touch my side my fingers ghost over scabbed skin – my body doing its best to heal, though the wound aches like I’ve been pitted.
The darkness presses its palms over my face and clamps my ears with a quiet that feels suffocating.
There is no one here to save you, it snarls into my ear. There is no one here for you. There is—
I sit up. Grope around for my wallet, retrieve a key, and unlock the bottom drawer of my bedside table. My special painkillers lie below a dozen other bits of loose memorabilia and broken tools, and I extract the blister foil from its plastic baggie.
Armed with two tablets, I ease out of bed, grab a sweater to hide the blood and cover all traces of Raven.
By the time I’ve slipped into the living room, the digital wall clock blinks five a.m.
A clinking in the kitchen stops me in my tracks. I lighten my feet, pressing myself into the dark out of habit.
As I round the corner, I recognize the cadence of footsteps on the kitchen tile and the quiet glass clink of someone who’s been raised to never cause a scene.
I take a step to retreat. Maybe I should come back later – both me and Tia have always been night owls, but we’re an explosive duo even in the day, let alone when we’re both sleep-deprived and cranky, so I’ve always avoided her.
No point ruining my mood when I’m trying to enjoy the witching hours by myself.
Still. Ever since the gala, our conversations have reduced from a ninety-six per cent chance of hostility to a solid forty-five per cent. And, even if I absolutely made those numbers up, it doesn’t erase the new, gentle side of Tia’s cold and people-pleasing facade.
Surely we can co-exist for now.
Before I can overthink it, I step into the kitchen.
Tia’s hunched over the freezer drawers, her hands pawing through like a raccoon in the trash.
Wet, long hair hangs over her face, resembling one of those Chinese ghosts my parents used to scare me with, and her pyjamas are drenched on the shoulders, her glasses nearly falling off her face as she passionately disembowels the freezer.
In short, she looks like a mess.
It’s almost adorably pathetic. I lean against the doorway and fold my arms. ‘Looking for something?’
Tia shoots up and kicks the drawer closed with a foot, eyes wide. The harsh kitchen light throws her face into a strange play of shadow and colour, illuminating the lump on her forehead and her enormous black eye. ‘What are you doing here?’
I whistle. The memory of me – Raven – crashing the Range Rover into Lune flashes through my mind. ‘Damn, you look like roadkill. What happened to you?’ I cross the threshold, bypassing Tia to grab a pitcher of water from the fridge.
‘I . . . fell down a flight of stairs.’ Tia’s gaze follows my trajectory, and she steps aside for me to grab the pitcher. We’re almost shoulder to shoulder, and Tia takes another step away to make more space. ‘What about you?’
I slam the fridge door and fill a glass halfway. Shit. I hadn’t thought about whether Tia would notice how rundown I look. ‘What about me?’
‘You look like a ghost.’ Tia goes back to rummaging in the freezer, and finally emerges triumphant with a bag of peas. ‘Why are you so pale?’
I down the pills with the cold water, and set the glass down with a sigh. ‘Food poisoning.’
We stare at each other.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Tia says, and at the same time I go, ‘There’s no way that’s from falling down the stairs.’
More staring. When I trace the exhausted lines of Tia’s forehead, and the wrinkles crinkling around her eyes, I find red veins over white sclera and a puffiness I’m familiar with. ‘You were crying?’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Tia pivots away, adjusting her bag of peas until I can’t see her face. ‘Look, leave me alone, okay?’
With her free hand, she grabs for the bottle of moonstone supplements on the counter.
I try not to stare as she shakes three out onto the counter.
Three. A luxurious number. My body aches for the same, but she’d find it strange – I only ever need them when I use my magic, so I make sure not to leave patterns of my usage in the Sentinels’ stash.
Still, as she turns around to grab a glass of water, I dart over and slip a supplement from the bottle, then tuck it into my palm.
Before she turns around, I sneeze.
Tia pauses. ‘You’re sick too?’
‘From the rain,’ I admit, without thinking.
She looks at me funny, and I’m struck with the memory of sneezing over her barely two hours ago – just that we’d both been in different positions, different costumes.
You’re sick too, like she’s already drawing a parallel in her head.
To distract her, I say, ‘So, do you always hide in the kitchen at three a.m. licking your wounds, or were you just feeling particularly pathetic?’
Her face shutters. A vein in her neck spiders up to her jaw. She reaches past me and grabs the moonstone supplements. ‘I should’ve left you out in the rain. Now get out of my way, you make me sick.’
‘I’ll make you sick,’ I correct, because treating it as a joke is the only way to temper the flaring irritation in my chest.
Tia glares at me. She elbows past me as she goes to leave.
I resist the urge to push back. ‘Why didn’t you leave me out in the rain?’ I ask instead. ‘You don’t care about me. You sit in this tower and cry about yourself and you never care about anyone else.’
When Tia whips around, her lips tremble, but her eyes are dry. ‘Are you done?’
Okay. Too far.
Growing up around so many Foxes means I’ve always been good at body language. Right now, tensed shoulders and stiff-jawed, Tia is a cup overflowed to the brim. One touch and it’ll go spilling over. Her icy front fractures under the weight of her gaze.
It is unfortunate, I guess, that I have beaten and been beaten by Tia to the brink of existence, and still sometimes she stands before me looking so pathetic that I’m forced to be nice to her.
Tia flinches. Her glare morphs into something unshakably pained, and she turns back to leave. ‘Go to sleep.’