Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
LELAND
Jaxan D’Oron: I want a report on Ember in the morning. Friends, acquaintances, everyone she associates with should be included.
Leland Stray: On it.
Today, Lee,” Case groans. His voice, thick with annoyance, reverberates off the stone walls of the tavern’s cellar.
I have no clue how long I’ve been staring at my transmitter.
I shove it back in my pocket and strike the cue ball.
Scratch. I watch it roll toward the pocket like I’m walking toward death.
Breathing hurts. Loud music makes focusing impossible, and pretending I want to be out at a party right now is even harder.
I lean the cue stick on the wall as Vyra does a victory lap around the pool table.
“Don’t you just love when he lets me win?” she sings.
“I need a minute,” I say. “Keep playing without me.”
On my way to the washroom, I survey the stairs, a prickling sensation tricking me into thinking any minute she’ll walk down them, but they’re as clear as the short hallway I’m standing in.
My ears hum with the muffled chatter from upstairs.
I try to isolate her voice but can’t. Giving up on that, I turn into the tavern’s washroom to splash my face with cold water.
Ember went against Jaxan today.
Brave.
But it’s a game she can’t win.
I never did.
The washroom fades away, and I’m five years old again.
“It’s spicy.” I flip my spoon upside down and a soggy cluster of wheat flakes hits the bowl of room-temp milk with a splash.
“Uninhibitor isn’t spicy,” Jaxan corrects. “It’s bitter.”
Ven growls, and I tense. It’s a deceptively quiet sound he makes, his final warning. It sounds like a house cat, but Ven’s hulking proportions take up a quarter of the formal dining room, and he doesn’t growl for territory, he growls to kill.
“Eat your cereal, Leland,” says Jaxan. “And if you can’t teach your mountain lion to be docile, I’m Severing him.”
Ven can run away from Severing. Ven can run away from anything to anywhere he wants. But he won’t. He never leaves me with Jaxan.
I finish the cereal, gagging, spluttering bitter-tasting milk across the heirloom mahogany table. Jaxan’s eyes flash, and I clean the mess with a Vanishing spell.
“Nice to not have to tell you to do something for once,” Jaxan says quietly as he strolls to the wall of windows, entering the part of his morning routine where he gazes out at the Blackburn estate across the yard.
It’s another gray morning, the sun cast out by a misty rain.
He clasps his hands tightly in front of him. “How do you feel?”
“Loopy doopy.”
“Leland,” says Jaxan coldly.
“Un-hib-in-i-ted,” I say, squinting through the effort.
Jaxan slowly turns, blowing out a frustrated breath. “Tell me,” he says, “what is the gift you were born with?” There’s no subtlety in his question. Even at five years old, I know I’m not supposed to tell him, but I have to do what Jaxan says, and I think he wants me to be honest about it.
“Truth,” I say, and he becomes mildly interested. “I know when everyone lies,” I keep talking. “I hear it.”
“Can you lie?” he asks.
Ven nudges my leg. “No,” I say to Ven. Because when he makes his autonomy noticeable, when he isn’t docile, Jaxan doesn’t feed him, and then Ven has to hunt.
Jaxan commands me to my room, and I get a look of betrayal from Ven for listening. For the next few weeks, all I get for breakfast is Uninhibitor cereal, and Ven is never fed.
Two years later, Jaxan Severs him. He puts a golden collar around Ven’s neck and Siphons his magic. Severed Familiars don’t live. The devastation of being separated, the feeling that left me screaming for weeks — it kills them.
Jaxan unlocks my bedroom from the outside. “Why don’t you have furniture yet?” he asks coolly. I’m ten and so drunk there are three of him.
“I can’t focus,” I say.
It’s been a week without bedroom furniture, a week since Jaxan commanded me to Vanish it.
The closest I’ve come to casting a bed is a heap of splinters and wooden boards.
Jaxan hands me another glass of moonale and commands me to drink.
He returns with the next glass of moonale thirty minutes later.
I don’t pass the test for another week. Three years after that is the first time he allows me to leave Mortal’s Gate. He sends me to boarding school in Hartik’s Hollow, and that’s where I meet Case.
“If you need hemorrhoid cream,” Case shouts from down the hall, his loud voice reaching me through the swinging door, “I don’t have any.” Then he enters with an “Oh fuck” and has to step around the sink I tore from the wall. “What’d it do to you?”
I Vanish the broken sink and Create a new one identical to the one I destroyed.
“I don’t want her near him,” I say without thinking. The torchlight dulls to a soft flicker, and before I can tell Case to stop, my back’s against a stall. His arm is above my head, palm flat to the frosted-glass door. His breath smells like moonale. I used to hate moonale.
His lips hover less than an inch from mine as his knee nudges my thighs apart.
“Case,” I say, unclear if I want this or not. We’ve talked about friendship — that it’s all I want, but . . .
“You want Ember,” he says, and the flames lighting the washroom walls grow brighter. “I know.” His voice is thick with tension.
“I don’t.” I’m kissing his neck. Why the fuck am I kissing his neck?
“I want . . .” Quiet. Space to be sad. Someone good to hold me accountable.
But Case . . . Case is riling. Always ribbing.
Ninety percent of the time, he’s pissed off or starting shit, poking me about my problems so he doesn’t have to think about his, casting elemental spells when he knows I don’t have it in me to not get turned on by it.
And ninety percent of the time, I love it. There’s nothing I would change about him. Except that ten percent of the time, when I’m missing what he can’t give.
“Don’t lie to me,” he says.
I push him against the back wall, hating that I’m thinking about the Vision where I lower her to the bed. “I don’t know what I want,” I admit.
Right now, it’s this.
My lips throb with the need to be on his, and I don’t stop myself from kissing him. He kisses back, hard, greedy. With fire fueling our passion, I almost stop seeing her in the background of my head. Then I hear the door swing in, and I think I want it to be her until I realize that it is.