14. Lucina #2
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” he asks, and his voice jolts my mind back in place.
“Aside from the fact that an Ajax loiters on my porch every night, watching me sleep?”
“I don’t—” The Captain cuts himself off when his tone comes out defensive. “Yes, aside from that.”
I inhale deeply, debating how much information to share. What keeps me up at night is far more complicated than he knows. “Nightmares,” I settle on. Simple enough.
The crickets sing through the brief silence. Then Callan’s head rolls to the side, and I feel his stare searing into the side of my face. “About what?”
“None of your business.” The words come out like the crack of a whip.
He remains silent for a moment, and I start to panic.
“Sorry, I—”
Callan’s laugh splits the air vibrantly. It’s genuine and full-bodied and normal–even though none of this should be. But the sound does funny things to my insides; it twists them all up and spits them back out in the wrong places. I hate it.
“You’re right. It isn’t any of my business.” When his laughter dies off, the silence creeps back in.
“So, what else can you do besides toy with people’s memories?” I pull my gaze off the stars to look at him, and when his head twists, his silver-eyed stare is piercing.
“Do you want me to tell you or show you?”
My gaze locks on the hint of a smile on his face, then my reply comes out as a whisper, “Show me.”
In one swift motion, he sits up and faces the pool of water below us. I pull myself up beside him, pressing my palms into the cold stone behind me. Stupidly, I let my eyes wander… just for one selfish moment.
Way too many muscles ripple underneath the thin fabric of his shirt as he readjusts himself further over the water, the veins on his arms swollen beneath his tanned skin. We didn’t have men like him in Draycott, but Chiaros, Ivy would have had a field day with someone who looks like Callan—
The Captain’s gaze swings to me so suddenly that I feel like I’ve been caught in the act of doing something I wasn’t supposed to.
All I can do is stare back wide-eyed as he sweeps his grey stare across my face…
my hair… over my shoulders, and down my bare legs, all the way to the pointed toe of my boots.
I’m seconds from combusting underneath that stare when the air between us becomes electrified, tiny shocks stinging my skin like static. Callan fixes his gaze on the shallow pool below us, gesturing an open palm towards the water.
I nearly fall off the rock.
A human head emerges; a circle of ripples cascading from where dark slick hair has broken the surface. Then a set of shoulders follows—
Holy gods.
It’s me.
The illusion of myself slinks out of the water and begins climbing the rocks towards where we sit.
She wears the same outfit I have on, complete with muddy boots and my frayed shawl.
Every detail is identical. My chaotic dark curls fall to the same length, and I swear he’s even cloned each freckle that dots my nose.
I’m speechless. Utterly speechless as she climbs towards us, so close now that I can smell her, and when I get a whiff of rosemary and vanilla…I eye Callan suspiciously.
But he’s concentrated entirely on her.
The illusion of me comes to a stop a few inches from the toes of my boots, a captivating smile pulling at her lips. I reach out a shaky hand, then flinch when she reaches back to me. As soon as our fingertips touch, Callan closes his fist, and she vanishes. As if she never was.
All you can hear is the crickets, as I struggle to form a coherent sentence. Somehow I string together enough words to say, “You… got my smile wrong.”
Callan snorts, leaning casually back on his hands. “No, I didn’t.”
My gaze snaps to him. “How?” I ask. “How can you do that?”
“Disciple-born Sol are illusionists, Lucina. All of us can do that. We can create illusions of anything that we’ve memorized—” He cuts himself off abruptly, and silence falls like a thick blanket around us.
Memorized. Me?
“Um—" I force out, desperate to change the subject. “I don’t think I’m meant to have magic,” I tell him, dropping my face to study my open palms. “All I’m capable of is wildflower genocide.”
“Pax told me about that,” Callan admits, looking alongside me at my empty hands. “But you wouldn’t have magic if you weren’t meant for it.”
“Yeah, well, not everyone can figure it out as quickly as you did,” I sigh, pushing my hair behind my ears. “The Dame told me it only took you a few hours.”
“It took my whole life.”
I meet his stare and am suffocated by it.
“I knew magic before I could walk, Lucina, that’s what was expected of me; to know it before I even had it.
I was expected to wield and control it as soon as I Split—to master it in hours.
I didn’t have any other choice.” The weight of his words settles around us, heavier than the rock we sit on.
“You, on the other hand, did you even believe in magic before you came here? Did you even know anything about it?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you can’t control it if you don’t understand it.”
A steady thump begins beating against the deep well inside me. He’s right, I don’t understand it. It’s…foreign to me.
“Show me,” he says, and I whip my head up to find him scanning the rocky ground on the other side of the shallow pool. He jerks his chin to the stones above the waterfall. “Pick up that rock over there and toss it into the water.”
The ‘rock’ in question is the size of my head.