Chapter 16 #2
If I really could become a Mind Manipulator, I’d be able to remember that swim. I could assess every missing piece of memory for myself instead of trying to string together what everyone else remembered and claimed about my past.
And as much as I loathed Steeler for what he’d done to me—for taking so many vital pieces of me away—he was offering to hand me the very weapon I needed to defeat him. Him and Dyonisia.
No one is good, I had told Dazmine the other night.
But could I be good, if I had the right tools?
As if I needed more persuading, Steeler said, “You’ve already hindered my ability to use Mind Manipulating anyway.” A wry smile as he gestured at his chest. “And it’s not always… fun to have to juggle two powers at once. I’d rather be able to perfect my Walking.”
“But if I become a Mind Manipulator…” I started slowly, a small trickle of hope deflating. “I’ll be juggling two powers at once.”
“Yes.”
Here, Steeler’s eyes strayed to his feet, just for a second, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me anymore.
A muscle throbbed in his jaw. In the twirling firelight, I saw the faint scar of where I’d nicked him a week ago.
God of the Cosmos, I’d given this man—this faerie— nearly as many physical wounds as the emotional ones he’d given me.
And I tried, tried, tried to make myself feel smug about that.
Steeler cleared his throat.
“Two powers at once—and a third lurking beneath the surface, inhibited by those pills—it’s a risk, Drey. That’s why it… why it wasn’t until you told me about your headaches that I thought it might be a risk worth taking.”
Okay, now that pissed me off. Who was he to decide what I should risk or not?
“So you’ve known about this alternative all along,” I said, my voice dropping just as cold as my mug had become. “Yet you didn’t think to ask me what hardship I’d be willing to try to handle? You just thought you could choose that all on your own, did you?”
The closest twin, Sylvie, dropped a hand on my arm.
“Everything Coen’s done this last year has been for you, Rayna.”
I almost snorted at that. Everything Coen’s done… if everything he’d done had been for me, he would have included me in all his plans. Not ripped me away from them and loitered in the shadows of my reality to talk to me when and where he pleased.
No, I didn’t believe he’d done any of this for me one bit. And as much as I didn’t want to hurt Sylvie’s feelings—pirate or no pirate—I ignored her and bit out, “What’s the risk if I do this, then?”
An unnatural paleness had washed over Steeler’s face. He seemed to be scraping in deep, slow breaths.
It was Garvis who answered in his stead, setting his mug down on a side table with a small clink and speaking in a wispy, mild voice.
“Lunacy, mainly. Neither humans nor faeries are meant to handle more than one type of bascite at a time. The more magics you have, the greater the symptoms of paranoia, anxiety, confusion, incoherency… For many, it only takes two powers to drive them mad. Some can handle up to three. Four is when it always gets bad.”
He made it sound like this happened all the time. And suddenly, my thoughts snapped to Jenia Leake, screaming on her hands and knees.
What if I’d truly seen a second brand on her arm?
And what if that brand hadn’t increased her Wild Whispering abilities at all, but given her a second power?
Those butterflies that had been circling her head, for instance—they’d moved as if compelled to flutter faster and harder than their wings could physically handle.
As if she had been able to talk to them and control them.
I didn’t know why or how Jenia could have been branded with Mind Manipulating, but it was another twisted, vile thing that seemed to click into place inside me.
“You don’t have to decide right away,” Steeler said, his voice raspier, more gravelly than before. “You can—”
“Let you wipe my memory until next week, when you propose this to me all over again? No, thanks.” A pause hung on my lips, but only for a moment. “I’ll do it. I’ll take the Mind Manipulating.”
Silence.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
More silence, this time swollen with all the sounds I hadn’t been able to fully hear since my Branding: the constant grumble of thunder, the smashing and clashing of the ocean, the snapping of fire and screeching of wind against the windowpanes.
All of that had been overpowered by the music of the jungle or the babble of animals over the last year.
But here, in this cottage, there was no jungle, no animals except Felicity—who had finally quit fiddling with pots and pans to lope forward with a tin container rattling with objects.
“Coco asked me to collect some metal pieces for you to choose from if you said yes,” she said now, holding the container out to me. “I’ve sterilized all of them with witch hazel, by the way.”
When I only stared down at the tin, she rattled it again.
“Go ahead! You said yes, right? Pick the shape of your new brand.”
Gingerly, I reached out and took the container, sifting through the items inside: a bent spoon, a copper coin, an old key, a broken bell.
“What’s this?” I asked, lifting a pendant by its chain, letting the firelight wink against its intricate engravings. Swirls and loops and lines.
Steeler’s hand jerked forward, surprise lighting up his face, just as Felicity said nonchalantly, “I stole it from Coco’s underwear drawer.”
He dropped his hand, his expression dwindling into unreadable hardness again. I raised my eyebrow at him.
“It’s just a little something my mother left for me. She died before I could remember her,” he added with a shrug before I could ask, “so it’s not sentimental or anything. You’re welcome to use it if you want.”
I rubbed the pendant between my fingers, studying the engravings—words, it seemed, in another language. Bordering the words were the silhouettes of three female faeries wearing crowns. Princesses, maybe?
“What does it say?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“It’s Sorronian for ‘the heart does not falter.’”
The heart does not falter. Such a beautiful saying coming from such a heartless man’s lips. I flicked a look at those lips once before blurting out, “You’re sure you’re okay with me using it?”
Why? Why did I have to give him a splinter of… of anything other than hatred when he was the one who’d brought me here against my will? When he still hadn’t denied the single memory I had of him?
“Of course you can use it,” Steeler answered immediately, either oblivious of my thoughts or choosing to ignore them. “It would probably look better than a spoon. Not that we’ll brand you where anybody can see it, of course.”
There was something about the way his eyes dipped down my body, as if imagining all the places a forbidden brand could hide, that made that damn feeling flop in my belly again.
But then he was asking the others “Ready?” and when they all nodded, clambering to their feet, I didn’t have time to try to push the feeling away.
Steeler turned to retrieve something from the mantle behind him.
When he pivoted back, two things were flashing in his hands: a pair of tongs and a crude, pointed knife even smaller than the extra ones in my sheath.
Quick as the lightning that blazed outside, he pressed this knife against the underside of his arm, took a quick breath, and—
“What are you—?” I jolted forward.
—sliced.
Blood gushed from the wound. Steeler refocused his gaze on the twins beside me, who stood in peculiar offensive stances.
“Remember,” he told them, hardly even panting. “Just the Mind Manipulating bascite. Don’t let her have an ounce of the other kind.”
I was too bewildered to even take offense to that.
For some reason, when he’d said he could share his Mind Manipulating power with me, it had never occurred to me that there would be blood.
Lots of it, more than when I’d nicked his jaw or cut his shoulder—splashing onto the rug at our feet where that tea had splashed minutes earlier.
Sasha and Sylvie were already focusing, their hands outstretched, eyes closed. From the lifetime I’d spent growing up with Fabian and Don’s Summoning magic, I knew it usually didn’t require this type of concentration. This… this was advanced magic.
I stayed silent, hardly daring to exhale…
As something rose from Steeler’s wound: a whirlwind of what looked like sparkling, silver dust.
Bascite.
From the original Mind Manipulating faerie who was still alive and locked up under Dyonisia’s rule.
I begged myself not to faint, not to let my knees tremble, as the twins sent that cloud of bascite straight into the pendant in my hands, merging the two metals together with a flash of silver.
And now Terrin stalked toward me, holding out his own hands.
“May I?”
I passed him the pendant as if it would burn me—which it would have, because a second later, violet flames burst from Terrin’s hands, swallowing the pendant in a ball of fire.
“That should do it,” he said rather cheerfully for the occasion.
As soon as his flames died into a glowing orange, Steeler took the pendant—the brand—from his friend with those tongs and faced me once more, ignoring the way his newest injury still pulsed with blood.
“Time to turn around, Drey.”
“W-What?”
“We can’t let anyone see this mark I’m about to make on you. But I think all that hair of yours will hide it if we put it on the back of your neck, don’t you?”
A flush washed over my chest at the realization that Steeler would actually have to touch me to brand me. That he’d lay a finger on me.
I should kick him in one of his wounds. I should barge out of this cottage and run. I should flee to the nearest village and cry for help.
But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t keep floating around in this constant haze.
Couldn’t keep feeling as if the right version of me was somewhere beyond my grasp, forever dancing just out of reach.
I’d told Willa I wouldn’t be able to find myself again until Coen Steeler was dead, and that was still true.
He’d taken too much of me, kept too much from me.
So now I would take from him.
I turned.
Steeler prowled toward me until his body was hovering just behind mine. Large, calloused fingers shifted aside my weight of hair with painstaking gentleness, scraping the nape of my neck nevertheless.
“Just a pinch, little hurricane,” he whispered against my ear.
And as lightning flared outside, as Felicity and the others watched on, he pressed the scorching heat of the pendant to my skin.