Chapter 15
It was an ungodly hour, but it was the best Ezra Bright had felt all day.
He hummed as he strolled back through the empty lobby, bouncing like a dancer doing the shimmy while he made his way back up the stairs.
His shoulders felt so light. All of him did, after what had happened in the garden.
He’d performed magic. He’d cast a spell and no shadows had shuddered.
Celia hadn’t snapped into pieces. Rather, she’d held him together—palms pressing so near to his own.
Ezra had seen himself reflected in her pale eyes; but unlike Everett’s abject terror, Celia had watched him with awe.
I can make things grow.
He was also, it seemed, impervious to injury.
In hindsight, this didn’t surprise Ezra.
It explained all the times he’d “miraculously” escaped getting hurt: The crocodile who’d tried dragging him into the Nile.
The time he fell from the wishing tree’s upper limbs when he was eight, landing in the grass with nary a broken bone.
Or the countless “sword fights” with George that never left bruises.
And yet, as Ezra went to unlock the door to the room he shared with Vincent, he noted that his left hand was still bandaged.
Not to mention sore. Why had the sphinx statue managed to draw blood when none of the Great War’s bullets had?
He eased open the door. Vincent seemed to be sleeping. A mosquito net was rolled over the four-poster bed, fluttering slightly from the breeze of the nearby open window. When Ezra went to shut it, he realized it looked out straight into the section of garden he’d just left.
“Leave it open, will you?” A voice drifted out from the canopy. “Otherwise, I’ll wake up charbroiled. You failed to tell me it would be so hot out here in the desert.”
Through a slit in the gauze, Ezra could see Vincent, lounging on some pillows with his arms behind his head. Bedclothes billowed around him like clouds—many and voluminous.
“You wouldn’t be so warm if you weren’t hogging all the sheets.”
“You wouldn’t blame me if you felt how soft they were.
Egyptian cotton has ruined me for all other bedding!
” Vincent sat up and it became obvious that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
His bare chest hadn’t changed much over the years—those were the same ridged muscles Ezra had excavated while their archaeology notes fluttered around his small Oxford quarters. “Come feel it!”
Ezra didn’t trust himself to move. The lightness he’d felt coming upstairs was gone.
In its place were memories—not the scars he’d shared with Celia, but everything he’d done to try to heal them.
He remembered Vincent’s hands in his hair.
Their mouths meeting. Those glorious muscles.
The smell of sweet sweat. The velvet of his tongue.
How it went down, down, until he lost all sense of time and space and self…
He didn’t want to lose what he’d found in the garden.
Ezra liked that vulnerable version of himself.
He could even possibly grow to love it…
Vincent made no move to cover his nakedness. “I’m not going to bite you, Bright. Or kiss you,” he added in that low, husky tone of his. “Despite how much I’d like to.”
There was an armchair by the open window.
Slowly, very slowly, Ezra sank into it. Another breeze blew past—and on it was the scent of violets.
Violets and steel. No sooner had he caught it than a balled-up sheet smacked him in the chest. It was, indeed, quite soft. It would have made a very nice toga.
“I’ll be careful with Biz, so long as you can promise me that you’re being careful too,” Vincent said, sliding out of the bed.
He was wearing the silk pajama bottoms the hotel had provided—thank goodness.
These shimmered in the lamplight as he made his way toward the window.
“That Sinclair girl. How much do you really know about her?”
I know she stowed away in her father’s luggage when she was fifteen.
I know she’s shown me more about myself in four days than a lifetime at Thornhill taught me.
I know her father was murdered by the Apex.
I know she lost everything to the Order.
I know she feels just as cheated as I do.
But Ezra didn’t think these were the answers Vincent was searching for. He’d heard the jealousy in the question. He could see it in the way the young man stared down at the garden where he and Celia had so recently stood.
“Enough,” Ezra said.
“Oh, Bright.” Lamplight glinted off Vincent’s fair hair as he shook his head. “I know a gold digger when I see one. And I’ve seen the way she looks at you.”
“Like bacon.”
“Bacon?” Of course, Vincent wouldn’t understand the reference. It was a joke he only shared with Celia. “Well, yes. Some sort of meat, certainly.”
“I know she’s not helping me for nothing.
” Ezra hugged the sheet tightly. “None of you are. Biz wants enough treasure to save Thornhill without your fortune.” A guess, yes, but a good one, based on how easily his half sister had surrendered her engagement ring.
“Celia wants more magic so she can get revenge. And you…” He didn’t dare finish this sentence. Not when Vincent stood so close.
“Revenge?” The other young man arched an eyebrow. “That sounds juicy.”
“It’s sad, really. Lord Beaumont—her father—was too progressive for the Order’s tastes.
The Apex cursed him for challenging his leadership and Celia couldn’t reverse the spell.
It was an ugly death. Wrong.” Ezra thought about his own father: snowfall hair and mad ramblings.
What had Thomas Ellington done to deserve them?
“She wants to make it right. She wants to kill the Apex and dismantle the Order.”
Vincent let out a small laugh. Its heat glanced off Ezra’s neck.
“She does strike me as an eye-for-an-eye sort of girl, but that plan sounds awfully ambitious, no? We were hiding from Hugo on a train, for God’s sake—and he’s a midsize fish in the magicians’ pond.
This Apex fellow must be a shark. Or a crocodile.
Or…” He gave a flippant wave. “You know what I’m trying to say. ”
“He’s Celia’s problem,” Ezra found himself saying.
Vincent tilted his head. In their room’s dim light, he looked operatic.
“All the more reason to keep her at arm’s length.
She’s useful now, yes, but I can’t help but wonder if she’s using you.
If Miss Sinclair gets you mixed up in this whole warring-magicians business…
Well, I don’t want to see you getting harmed for her crusade. ”
It was Ezra’s turn to laugh. The sound crescendoed between them.
Vincent raised his eyebrow once more. “What’s so funny?”
“I can’t get hurt. That’s what Celia and I discovered: My magic repels any attempts to injure me.”
A second blond eyebrow rose. “You’re on first-name terms with her now?”
“It seemed silly not to be. The rest of us are so informal—”
“The rest of us have history.” Vincent sighed, and pushed away from the window.
“I know I sound like a jealous cad. That’s because I am one.
I care for you, Ezra, more than any gold locked away in some secret pyramid, or any far-fetched revenge arc.
I—” His voice broke then. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and Ezra felt his own heartbeat match.
“I don’t think Celia Sinclair could say the same. ”
The air had turned a bit too warm, the moment too tender.
Ezra closed his eyes.
The scent of violets had faded, and now he could smell the desert.
Always changing, eternal, empty dust. His heart sloped like some faraway dune.
He’d missed this. Loving Vincent was dangerous, yes, but a landscape he could navigate.
Still, there was only so far they could go…
A life together? A true life? That remained a mirage.
It was one of the reasons Ezra had stopped himself in that Oxford library.
Why he held his eyes shut now. He was so sick of hiding, and Biz deserved better than to serve as a prop, but Ezra was still too terrified to tell his half sister this one last truth.
She could handle a wartime massacre. She’d accepted the burned letters. But would she love all of him?
Could anyone?
He opened his eyes and looked back at Vincent. All these feelings—all the words that might convey them—went dry in Ezra’s throat.
When he finally did speak, his voice cracked. “I’m glad you’re here, Vincent. You and Biz,” he added hastily.
There was a shimmer in Vincent’s eyes, before the man blinked. “Of course you are!” he said, too loud. Too heavy. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Without my deep pockets you’d be sleeping out in the sand instead of that armchair.”
“I don’t care about the money or the suits or the fancy hotels. I care about you. I always have. And I always will. I—” Ezra faltered again.
He exhaled.
Vincent inhaled.
“You do know the bed is big enough for both of us,” he said slowly. “I told you before, I won’t bite.”
I might.
The jackal called out again, its reedy howl threading through nearby palms. It sounds so lonely, Ezra thought.
Some wild, impulsive piece of him wanted to howl back.
There were other wild pieces of him. Wanting.
He shut his eyes and tried to smell violets once more, tried to recall exactly how it had felt to hold that handful of thorns with Celia Sinclair.
He hadn’t felt alone then, no. He’d felt…
seen. Finally. He was no longer the Egyptian child in England.
Or the European tourist at Alexandria’s train station.
He was not a hero. He was not a monster.
That’s what she’d told him, and Ezra wanted so badly to believe her, wanted, wanted, wanted…
but it wasn’t that easy to unsee the Germans’ bodies.
The ones that always swam up from the darkness behind his lids.
Those ghosts didn’t care about flowers. They didn’t give a shit that he was haunted. To them, he would always be a—