Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
EMBER
The greatest Dark Deals are the innocuous ones, the ones a five-year-old would make.
— Jaxan D’Oron, Echelon to the
School of Dark Magic
Ifelt the tips of my fingers first, raw, aching with a sensation like straight blades had been jammed under my fingernails. Then there was the brutal weight pressing into my thighs.
Leland.
“Ember?” The sound of my name was thick with frustration, like this wasn’t his first time trying to wake me. I wanted to fall back asleep and forget he was there, but Leland started snapping his fingers in front of my eyelids a few seconds into me trying.
My eyes peeled open, and the first thing I did was glare.
The pressure on my thighs was him straddling me, my legs sandwiched between his knees.
He had me pinned on my back, still in the Circle of Seven, still in the middle of the clearing, encircled by a band of towering, ash-brown trees.
I arched my back to distance it from a root as hard as stone that was digging into my spine, but with Leland on top of me, relief was only temporary.
“Get off of me,” I yelled at him. “Leland,” I repeated. “I said get off.”
“What the hell just happened?” he asked, remaining right where he was. His eyes were fixed on me, in what was not quite a ruthless scowl, but definitely threatening.
I braced my hands on the ground for leverage. More pressure was applied to my legs in response.
“Tell me what happened after the last tree bent,” he said. “Why this crack opened in the ground. Why your hands are covered in the divine soil.”
It was too much. I had to look away from him — down and away to his strong forearms.
“I need to know you didn’t mean to do this,” he said.
I couldn’t answer, let alone think. “Leland?”
A wide and bruising pain was lighting up my back, and something rushed through my veins, something so hot and unbearable I nearly screamed. Again, I attempted to squirm out from beneath him, determined to muscle him off, but that just created friction.
I looked away, stretched my neck to its limits, and screamed into the dirt.
When I turned back, panting, I found him examining my hands.
All around me, soil was upturned and clumped in messy piles.
A wide crevice ran jagged across the clearing.
Then there was me. Dirty. Messy. Caked in mud.
A thick layer of dirt was shoved deep beneath my nails.
I’d ruined Leland’s sweatshirt. My shoes, which I couldn’t see around the wall of Leland’s chest, were probably ruined too.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked. “I feel . . .” Hot. Restless. Burning with a need so insatiable it hurts. “I feel . . .”
“Ripping? Burning? Like you need me to drive you into the ground?”
Like I needed him to drive me into the ground was exactly how it felt, that need a demon, my blood a boiling whirlpool. The ache between my legs was even worse.
“I forced you down because I thought you were digging up the roots. It looked like you were. I couldn’t let it go on. I couldn’t stand there, watching you destroy Everden’s magic source . . .”
“Please get off,” I begged.
He must have felt sorry for me, because he did, backing off just enough for me to sit. Though his muscles stayed tense, a threat that if I tried to run, I wouldn’t get far.
“You need to drink this,” he said, indicating the silver flask in his hand.
Yeah, no, I thought, and turned my head. I would not be drinking any liquids from him.
“Moonale,” he said. “It’s alcohol. Doesn’t taste very good but it helps with withdrawal.”
“Withdrawal?” I asked, not that I even wanted an answer from him. Even if he was telling the truth about it helping with whatever this was, I didn’t want alcohol. After the Fourth of July — after finishing a warm bottle of champagne alone in my room — I was never drinking again.
“Magic withdrawal,” said Leland. “Something every Seven goes through. I would’ve handed you the flask sooner, but you’re — ” He didn’t seem to have an answer. “I didn’t know what it would feel like for you. If you’d feel anything at all.”
If I would feel anything at all? I was feeling everything, all at once.
Leland jiggled the flask in what was supposed to be an enticing gesture. His fingers were folded around its curves, his hand miming an up and down and sliding motion. And just to get him to stop doing that, I snatched the flask from him.
Clearly, I wasn’t myself. My thoughts were out of control. There was a new, desperate need that worsened every time I looked too long at Leland, and I had to get rid of it.
I took a small sip from the flask, warning with my eyes that this better not be a trick.
The bitter taste burned my tongue. I forced myself to swallow it and immediately regretted it.
My throat was on fire. It was so bad, I pushed my hand against my chest to keep the moonale from coming back up. What was this? Jet fuel?
“Your body got too close to magic — a lot of magic — and your blood liked it. Now it’s seeking whatever magic it can find in the ether. Traces, magnifiers. When it searches, it feels like your blood’s being pulled out of your skin. It’s why you felt — ”
Don’t say it, my eyes warned him. I was able to hear my own thoughts now.
I didn’t need to be reminded that it had felt like I’d die if he didn’t touch me.
There was still an uncomfortable burn in my blood and a warmth on the surface of my skin, but the unmanageable combination of lust and rage I’d felt when I first woke up was fading.
I passed the flask back to him, but he wouldn’t take it.
“I’ll get my own,” I said, holding it out.
“You’ll keep it,” he countered, “until I find a better solution.”
It was probably a sign I was due for another sip, how badly I became irritated, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I decided to empty the flask out on the ground.
Moonale hit the dirt and splattered. Splashes of mud stained my clothes and skin, but I kept pouring, careful to keep the spray away from my shoes.
After a full minute of this, I realized the flask was as full and heavy as when Leland had first given me it. An entire moat flowed around me before I put together that the flask was spelled to refill.
Leland just laughed.
“I don’t — ” I tossed the flask to the ground. “This is really the solution? Me being drunk?”
“Yes. For now. Your blood will burn off the moonale about as fast as you drink it, so you’ll never be drunk. It’s not a cure. Selection will help, somewhat, once you pick a school of magic and get it in your system.”
Rustling from behind one of the otherworldly sized trees stole a second of his attention.
I tracked his gaze, but just as soon, he relaxed.
The rustling had ended. Perhaps it was only a priestess, on their way to tell the Echelons what I’d done to their forest. That the Goddess had blessed me with as many schools as She had.
“The Echelons . . .” I twisted my mouth to one side. “They’re not going to like this . . . that I got all eight schools of magic. And I’m a half witch.”
The face he made was by no means reassuring. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked, a bit like a counselor.
No, not really. Though I could deduce from the results of my Blessing, along with my surroundings, that it wasn’t good.
“After the dark magic tree bowed,” I started, then paused to survey the upheaval, trying to remember, “the ground shook. It was opening. I held on to a root, but then I heard you yell, and I let go of it. I didn’t — ” But what if I did?
My fingernails certainly ached like I did, like I was the one who’d opened the earth. “You think I did this on purpose.”
“No,” Leland answered honestly. “At first, yes. I thought you wanted this. It looked like . . .” He exhaled tightly. “It looked deliberate. And, before I came to get you from the human realm, I was told you were dangerous.”
I plucked a wet twig from the ground and chucked it in the deep groove that exposed the creation tree’s roots. This wasn’t the first time Leland had mentioned me being dangerous. He’d also asked me at my house.
In my heart, I never wanted to hurt anything or anyone.
But now that I was here, with blood roaring in my legs and nowhere to run, and Leland forcing me to confront, for a second time, if I was, it was hard not to wonder.
Was I the reason Helen left us? Was Leland here, assigned to me, because there was something about me to be afraid of?
I picked up another piece of the mess, this one a bark chip, and was about to pitch it in the gouge with the twig when Leland said, “I know you think you’re helping, that you’re trying to clean up, but anything you do right now is going to be misinterpreted. It would be better if you did nothing.”
I let my hand fall without argument, then sighed down at the mud.
“I’ll tell them you didn’t mean to do it,” Leland murmured.
“Will it make a difference?”
Leland looked at me with a pained expression. “You were blessed with eight schools of magic. You could cure the Witch’s Limit, and it wouldn’t make a difference.”
In a way, it was like someone knew this would happen. My Blessing was scheduled early, specifically before the rest of the Echelons woke up, like Jaxan anticipated he’d need time to smooth it over and cover it up.
“Why did they assign you to me?” I asked. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Babysitting? I thought it was because I was a half witch, but . . .” I flicked a clump of mud off my shoe. “Ash wasn’t watched like this. Was she?”
Leland slid down to my feet. Everything he did, he made it look easy. His arms moved like paddles skimming a lake. His hands fell on the toes of my shoes, his fingers cupping them. “I can’t even tell your hair is gold anymore, there’s so much dirt in it, and you’re worried about your shoes?”
I guess he’d noticed me frowning at them.
Lifting his hand off the first one — now as clean as it had come in its shoebox — he moved to the next.
The sweatshirt I was wearing had been restored to its original condition as well, though he didn’t need to touch it to manage that, since it was his.
I caught him studying my pants — tasks to kill time and avoid answering my question.
“Leland.” I held a hand up to stop him. “You don’t seem to enjoy being around me, yet you do all this.
Someone told you to get me. Someone told you to watch me.
Someone told you I was dangerous. So, if there’s something wrong with me, and you know about it, I think I have a right to know what it is. ”
His jaw worked, and he didn’t answer for several minutes.
“I’m still figuring out what the Echelons are interested in.
As far as why I’m helping you, it’s because I made a Dark Deal when I was a kid.
I needed protection. Jaxan offered it, but I had to make a Deal with him.
See that you make it to Selection — that’s what it is.
And no. I don’t know why it’s important to him. ”
So he was here because of a bargain.
Because he’d promised to look after me. A promise that, if he broke it, meant he’d owe Jaxan a debt.
He had to look after me until Selection, for three more weeks, and then I would be free of him.
Every kindness he’d shown me — the protein bar, the shoes, the flask.
Any time concern had crept into his voice, and he wasn’t hostile for a second. It was the Deal. An obligation.
Leland’s fingers twitched against his knee, and my eyes dropped to his hand where his ring finger had a V on it.
“You don’t want to be here,” I realized aloud, and something about the way I said it, or perhaps the way I was shutting down, set him off again.
“No, Ember, I don’t,” he said. “I had no idea — at the age of five — how much it would seem I don’t enjoy being your babysitter.” He stood, ready to go. “I’m here because I have to be.”