Chapter 19 A Familiar Place
A Familiar Place
He came back to himself the next time excruciatingly slowly.
Flickers of memory reached him, where he realized it wasn’t the first time he’d been awake, or even the second. He remembered being jerked unwillingly back into consciousness by a great deal of pain, right before someone or something knocked him out again.
They’d been loading him onto something, two or three people at least, and his leg and shoulder had hurt horribly.
He still felt weak as a kitten.
He had a memory of his mother being there, but he had no idea if that was real or a dream. He remembered other faces, at least one mage and a different witch, not his mother, but none of them wanted to come into focus behind his eyes.
He’d felt someone else there, too. Just thinking about her made his chest hurt.
Leda. Leda had been there, hadn’t she?
Had he dreamed her, too? Had they brought her to him, or him to her? Who would have done that? His mother, possibly? Maybe even Forsooth.
Gods. She was probably furious with him.
Not his mother. Leda. Although possibly his mother, too.
Leda was probably absolutely fucking furious with him, and those times he’d been awake before now, he remembered panicking when he couldn’t decide if he felt her there, and when he absolutely didn’t feel her there, and when he could feel her but knew she’d already left the room.
Maddeningly, he had no definite memory of definitely knowing she’d been with him.
He couldn’t remember her being there while she’d actually been with him.
He knew her magic mostly in its absence.
He knew her presence mostly when it left.
When she wasn’t there, he’d felt like he might actually die.
Which suggested there were times when she was there, didn’t it? He told himself it did. He needed to believe that it did. But he had no conscious memory of that, which made him wonder if he sank back into sleep whenever she stood in the room for longer than a few seconds.
Fuck. She probably didn’t love that.
It was the thought that finally brought his eyes fully open.
Really, it was two thoughts: the crashed together realizations that he wasn’t in excruciating pain, that she might really be there, and he didn’t want to wait to notice until after she’d left. He wanted to see her with his own eyes.
He was so damned thirsty.
He also felt drugged.
They’d definitely given him something.
Worse scenarios crossed his mind in the next handful of seconds, when he couldn’t focus on any part of the room.
He imagined himself chained to a wall beneath Greythorne Manor, like Alaric had been for months.
He imagined himself chained to a different wall while Sirena and her sociopathic husband tried to decide what to do with him until Malefic came to deal with him personally.
He pushed those thoughts away, unable to deal with them.
Even so, when he finally got his eyes to focus, he felt a deeper weight of fear lift off his heart and chest. He wasn’t in a dungeon. It was dark, but there was a fire. He was lying on his back, staring at a ceiling he almost recognized.
He was pretty sure he was lying on a bed.
The light was dim, tinged with gold, but most of the space was dark, and he could handle that now that he knew it was nighttime, and not him buried in a hole underground.
He fought to swallow, staring up at a ceiling that was now achingly familiar, but still somehow not the one he’d expected to see.
This one flickered dimly with an old spell of magical stars, most of them green and blue, with smatterings of white and red.
A snake writhed sensually over the arched surface, and he followed it passively with his eyes.
A whale went by next, and a dragon with leathery wings. The creatures were made of stars, too.
He slowly raised his head. He was relieved when he could.
His neck wasn’t broken.
Nor was his back, and he could feel his legs.
His shoulder hurt like fire still, but no longer like it was burning him alive, eating away at his flesh and bones from within.
It felt more like a regular injury now, like times after Skyhunt practice when he’d slammed into someone or something too hard, being overly aggressive on the pitch.
Like the time he’d flown, hard, into the wall of The Eyrie.
Or the time he’d gotten into a aerial fistfight with that fucker, Strangemore.
The memory made his jaw clench.
He closed his eyes again, then opened them, and that time, he felt it.
Maybe he let himself feel it. Maybe he’d stopped trying to convince himself he was dreaming, or wrong.
Fingers wrapped into his, on his right side, the side that hurt less.
A soft weight rested on his abdomen, and when he raised his head next, he saw the black curls.
He raised his head a little more and saw her face lying sideways on him, just under his ribcage.
He let his head drop.
Fuck. The relief he felt was nearly debilitating.
She was there. He hadn’t imagined her.
He only lied there for a minute, basking in the knowledge that she was there, that she was okay, that no one had taken her.
He couldn’t think about anything but her weight on him as she slept.
Her hand clutched his almost tightly. Her other arm and hand were wrapped around his waist, well above the part of his leg that still felt injured.
He guessed it wasn’t the glass that was still the problem.
The spells they’d hit him with had likely been worse than he’d realized at the time.
Other things started to coalesce behind his eyes, or maybe his mind cleared just enough that he could pull together a few other threads.
He wasn’t in his room in Malcroix.
That brought his eyes open for real.
He stared up at the ceiling overhead, and everything clicked together as he realized with a shock why it was so familiar.
He was in the Black Tower.
What in the fuck was he doing in his childhood bedroom at the Black Tower?
More to the point, what in the all-seeing Eye of Ra was Leda doing there? Who would have brought her here? Why would they have brought her here? And when would he have enough of his strength back that he could strangle them with his bare hands?
The thought of her being here, in his father’s house, with him unconscious and unable to protect her, made his panic so bad, he struggled to breathe. He raised his body more fully the next time, and managed to prop his free arm and elbow under him on the mattress.
It was his injured shoulder, and putting the additional weight and pressure on it made that fire burn exponentially hotter.
It hurt like fuck, but he gritted his teeth and bore it.
He looked down at her face. He managed to hold his body up with his back long enough to use the fingers of his free hand to carefully brush the hair off her cheek.
He knew it was her. Of course he knew, but that panic drove him to see more of her, to feel more of her magic, to know without a shadow of a doubt that she was there.
But he did know. Her magic swam all over his skin, through his aura. That sun primal of hers felt wrapped tightly around his black crystal. It made him feel better and worse at the same time, because it was so unquestionably her.
And shouldn’t she have woken up by now?
Someone had spelled her. Or drugged her. They must have.
But that was impossible, wasn’t it?
Gods. Had his father come back? Had he locked them both in here?
He was about to get up for real, to either wake her, or ease her off him if he couldn’t––
––when the door to his bedroom swung inward.
He froze, staring at another familiar face, one he should have expected to see but had somehow forgotten in his several minutes of irrational, uncontrolled panic about Leda.
His mother stood there, looking the same as she always did.
Her golden blonde hair hung past her shoulders in an artful curl.
Her pale face looked flawless, her grey eyes calm.
The only thing strange was her clothing.
She wore a jade-colored, silk nightgown and robe.
The long sleeve fell to her elbow below where her pale fingers gripped the edge of the door.
Despite the informal attire, clothes he hadn’t seen his mother wear since he was probably eight years old, she somehow still managed to look elegant and bizarrely put-together.
He saw the instant she realized he was awake.
Her grey eyes widened.
They took in his awkward position, half supported by his back and half by his elbow. They fell to the head on his abdomen then, and she held up a hand in caution as she briskly walked the rest of the way into the room, motioning for him to stay where he was.
He did. He didn’t lie back down, but remained in his awkward half-seated position, leaning to the left on his burning shoulder and elbow.
He watched as his mother pulled a few pillows off the sofa, and walked them over to him.
He couldn’t help but feel a flush of gratitude when she slid them behind him, so he could lean back.
She spent a few more seconds fussing with more pillows and with magic, until he was comfortably halfway sitting up.
He still had Leda’s head resting on him, her arm slung around his waist.
It was a relief to be able to look at her without straining.
He felt his panic slowly dissipating, too.
His mother wasn’t acting like he was a prisoner. She didn’t seem terrified, either, like she usually did when his father was lurking somewhere in the house.
He watched as she pulled a chair close to his side of the bed.
She brought it right up as close as she could to the mattress, and when he met her gaze, she was smiling at him, her eyes wet.
He immediately felt guilty, but she must have sensed some part of that, because she hastily waved him off, wiping her eyes lightly with her fingers.
Her voice came out low, melodic, and the familiar, cultured tones of his mother still had the power to comfort him when maybe they shouldn’t.