Chapter 21 #2
“So I had to tell Willa everything to get her to lie to Emelle and Cilia for you. Then I went looking for you at three in the goddamned morning. And you know what I found when I got to that abandoned classroom, Rayna? Nothing but a roomful of pissed off plants that told me you’d disappeared into thin air with the very man I’d asked them to trap! ”
Dazmine’s chest was heaving, her nostrils flaring, and a sudden surge of guilt wound its way around my ribs at the thought that I’d caused this: more panic and stress in her life after Jenia’s exile.
Perhaps she saw that regret solidify in my eyes, because the next second she huffed out a laugh.
“Oh, no. You’re not keeping this from me. Not after I had to listen to Norman Pollard burp his way through a drunken victory song when he won another round of mini pentaball. That shit was scarring.”
Willa’s whiskers twitched with a sigh.
“She’s right, unfortunately. We deserve to know.”
Dazmine wrinkled her nose down at the mouse. “What do you mean unfortunately? I thought we were supposed to be ganging up on her together?”
“We are. And that’s rather unfortunate given your previous attitude toward my favorite cheese-providing human.”
“I have not had an attitude—”
“Okay, okay.” I tried to massage that growing heaviness from my eyes. I glanced at the walls. “Is the coast clear, Willa?”
The mouse nodded. “I already checked for spiders before you got here. There’s nothing but a colony of termites next door. And my whole family is in the dining hall begging for crumbs like the desperate vagabonds they are.” She sniffled in distaste.
“Okay,” I said again, this time in resignation.
If I refused to tell Dazmine what had happened after she’d helped me, I had no doubt she’d only become even more suspicious of my motives and make each of my days a living hell—maybe even report those suspicions to the Good Council.
Besides, now that I understood more about Mind Manipulating, I knew that even Lexington wouldn’t be able to walk around without a blockade to keep all those thoughts from pouring in.
He wouldn’t have a reason to lower his and invade her mind.
She was just a random classmate of mine as far as he was concerned.
I turned to slip my pearl into my nightstand drawer, where it clinked against the others, and began to quietly describe that space between stars that Steeler had dragged me through.
Landing on the pebbled beach by the old lighthouse.
Steeler’s fangs and ears. The faerie blood he claimed ran through both our veins.
The four other faeries waiting inside. Felicity and her tea.
Each little bit felt like a weight easing off my chest.
By the time I got to the part about the pendant and the makeshift Branding, Dazmine broke her silence with a sharp, “Let me see it.”
I hesitated for a few seconds before swiping away my mass of hair and turning around, letting her and Willa take in the faerie insignia burned against my skin: the heart does not falter, apparently.
Willa whistled through her two front teeth.
“Prove it,” Dazmine said when I turned back around.
“Prove that I’m part-faerie? I can’t. I don’t even know if—”
“No, no.” Dazmine waved a hand as if my supposed faerie heritage couldn’t matter less to her. “Prove you can read my mind. What number am I thinking of?”
After a moment’s pause, in which I realized she was dead serious, I sighed and lowered my blockade.
Her mental voice blared outward immediately, strong and tinged with that faint, echoing screech, while Willa’s thoughts flowed toward me like a smaller, clearer stream.
Their overlapping still created a cacophony that made my head start to spin, but it was easier to untangle their mental voices when there were only two of them.
“Seventeen,” I told Dazmine.
She narrowed her eyes. “Color?”
“Teal.”
She widened them. “Animal?”
“A satanic leaf-tailed gecko.”
Now she almost dropped Willa in her shock.
“Holy shit, you really are a Mind Manipulator.”
“And a Wild Whisperer,” I made sure to add, wrapping my blockade back around myself to block out the harsh overlapping her words and thoughts made with Willa’s.
To my pleasant surprise, the head spinning stopped at once.
And come to think of it, none of those paranoia symptoms that Garvis had warned about seemed to be taking root inside my head.
A dull ache had returned to the base of my skull after leaving Steeler’s bamboo scent, but it seemed…
Lighter. More like the ghost of a throb than pain itself.
I didn’t feel anything like Jenia Leake had looked in that courtyard, screaming and spitting on her hands and knees.
“Dazmine,” I started hesitantly, because I knew we had to get going within the next two minutes and I wasn’t sure I wanted to start this conversation now.
But if she knew about my second brand… “Did you ever see another burn mark like this on Jenia, before she was exiled? Maybe… maybe under her arm?”
Dazmine’s head snapped up, confusion creasing her forehead.
“No. Not before the… the incident, at least. After the incident, she was always draped in so many sheets that I never saw anything but her mutilated eyes. But…” The crease of Dazmine’s forehead deepened.
“She did come to visit Jenia in the sick bay, Dyonisia Reeve did, along with a posse of her Good Council elites. She ordered me out and wouldn’t let me back in until hours later, just as they were finally leaving.
” A stiff pause. “Are you telling me you think…?”
That Dyonisia had secretly branded Jenia with Mind Manipulating bascite while she lay there half-delirious? Yes, yes I did.
But before I could say that or elaborate on why, a frantic set of footsteps thumped its way toward us from the hallway outside, and I sucked my breath back in as the door burst open to reveal—
Wren?
I stared at the image of her panting in the entrance, my stomach dropping when her wide, frantic eyes bypassed Dazmine and Willa completely and landed on mine. The fact that she appeared to have sprinted here meant something was wrong. Wren didn’t run.
“Rayna. Come quickly. It’s Emelle.”
My heart shriveled and exploded all at the same time, flooding me with a fear so potent it seemed to scramble up my lungs.
“What’s wrong? Is she okay? Where is she?”
I had just seen her merely twenty minutes ago. If something had happened to her in that measly time fame…
I was already lurching forward, my blockade wavering and my hand reaching for my knife, when Wren shook her head.
“She’s safe in the parlor. But a bird just arrived with news about her home village, Merkwell—it’s under attack.”