Chapter 24 #2
“Etherizing?” Leland asked from outside the stall.
My fingers hovered a centimeter above the left cuff’s clasp, my abdomen contracting as I braced to touch the metal, which I’d have to burn my fingertips to unhook.
“Burns,” I choked. My hand snapped back in stinging pain.
“I’m coming in.” He pushed into the small space, holding a small stone wastebin. “Wrists,” he said, and directed me to hold my wrists out over the bucket he was holding. The cuffs magically unclasped, hitting the bottom of the stone receptacle with a dense clang.
“Vanishing this,” said Leland. He placed a hand to my back and Vanished the silk blazer, leaving me agasp in a tight-fitting, V-neck, knit vest. “Let’s go to the sink,” he said. “I want to treat your burns before you start disappearing.”
I followed him to the row of three sinks, holding my bleeding wrists out, the thought of brushing them against my sides unbearable.
Leland put the wastebin in the left sink, and — with a hand on my back — steered me to the far right.
A second later, I understood why. The tap turned on with his magic.
My cuffs were doused in a cascade of cold water, and steam shot up like a geyser.
“Burn cream,” he said, and ripped the cap from the tube of medicinal ointment that had just appeared in his hand, then set the cap on the flecked granite counter.
“I don’t want to hurt you by putting my hands on your wrists right now.
” Healing, he meant, because he’d have to touch me for the tactile requirement of the spell.
“The cream will take care of it, but you need to do it quickly. Do you want help?”
I shook my head, and holding my breath, picked up the tube and coated my hands in a thick layer of the clove-scented ointment. An icy wave of pain rooted out the burn, then tingling followed.
In a minute, it was over. Treated. I stood in silence with no idea how to fix the rest of me.
“Better?” Leland asked, trying to catch my eyes in the wide mirror.
No. Not really.
My wrist pain was better, but I wasn’t. Heat continued beating down on me, my blood stirring in agitation now that I had no cuffs to suppress my withdrawals.
Pools of sweat bled through my clothes and left damp spots all over me.
Mascara smudged my lower lash line in a watery mess.
My bangs, the hair sticking to the base of my neck — all of it was soaking wet.
“Here.” Leland grabbed a handful of brown paper towels and set them down on the counter next to a flask of moonale. “Wash your hands and start drinking. Cuffs are done. You burned through them.”
I burned through a house, I realized, remembering how much gold they’d cost. But I listened, running the tap, stretching my fingers as cool water splashed my hands. Everything was working — the nerves were feeling, and the joints were functioning. But I was in shock and frozen. Burning. But frozen.
Having dried my hands with a paper towel, I blotted my chest with the rest of the stack, the paper towels unpeeling from my skin with sticky sounds. Leland Vanished my balled-up trash as sweat poured out of me faster than I could mop it, so he grabbed more paper towels, the cycle unending.
“Can I?” he asked and lifted my hair in the least romantic way possible, holding it to my head, pressing a bundle of ice wrapped in a cotton cloth to my neck.
A thrilling shiver ran up and down my spine at his touch as it occurred to me that the ice wasn’t from his pocket realm.
He held it in place, and if I could’ve spoken, I might’ve called him out on it.
But it wasn’t needed. A shift in him confirmed my suspicion.
The ice was him. Somehow, he’d cast elemental magic.
His eyes changed first, their hardness fading to a soft ache.
There was a noticeable difference in the rise and fall of his chest, and either he’d pressed into me, or I’d pressed back against him, but he was there.
Flush. Not moving. His muscles were solid, his sturdiness holding me up.
And I could hear — feel — his heart beating like mine did, like maybe if it beat fast enough, it would beat too fast to slow down, and then this feeling wouldn’t fade or stop or end before we figured out what it meant.
The bond? Or was it elemental magic? Or was it only another fantasy I was keeping alive in my head?
We breathed — or tried to. Both our breaths uneven and struggling to sync to the same rhythm.
He lifted the bundle of ice from my neck and pressed it to a spot slightly lower on my spine.
I washed my hands a second time, no reason — other than to blush down at the smooth, uncracked porcelain of the sink basin instead of through the mirror at him.
Leland pulled the ice away, gently smoothed out my hair, and backed up a step. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I nodded blankly at the drain. He’d only said sorry, but I heard the parts he didn’t say as well, the closest he’d come to admitting it — Leland could Heal. He could cast elements. He Scried. Who knew what else he hid.
Maybe showing was his way of telling. Maybe he was Tongue Bound. Maybe this was the secret he’d made the Dark Deal to protect. But I was in too much shock over nearly losing my wrists to ask him about it.
“You’re not speaking to me,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that.
“Are you in pain?” he asked.
“No.”
“Upset?”
“I think so,” I answered quietly. I was calming down from the third-degree burns I’d gotten, but it was going to take a minute to forget walking in on him kissing someone who looked like he belonged on the cover of a motorcycle gang romance novel.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. I don’t know why I came to this.”
“Sit outside with me?” he tried. “Talk a bit?”
I stopped staring at the drain and nodded through the mirror at him.
* * *
The tavern’s fenced-in patio was ours, probably because Creatus was a toasty ninety degrees at night and known for sudden gales of wind. Near the door, I stopped in my tracks to gaze up at the stunning dark-violet sky, its bright stars sprawling in a purplish swirl and vibrantly twinkling.
Leland followed the direction of my head. “Want to lie down on a daybed?” he asked. “We can look up at them.”
I glanced around the patio at the wrought-iron tables bolted down to the concrete pad and the surrounding heavy black outdoor chairs. There were umbrellas, tied-up for the night, plus UFO-esque patio space heaters. But that was it. There was no daybed.
“Navy?” Leland asked, just as a section of seating transformed into a massive navy daybed, big enough for us to lay on opposite sides and reach our arms out without touching. “I’m not trying anything,” he said. “Talking means talking. I promise.”
“I know,” I said mildly, remembering how he’d jumped away from me in the washroom after snapping out of the lust spell his elemental magic had momentarily put him under. “I’m fine with the daybed.”
We sat down within an arm’s length of each other, semi-reclined against a backdrop of fluffy outdoor pillows.
To stop myself inching closer to him, I stared straight up at the sky’s nebula of dusky pinks and dark purples.
The Privacy around us seemed to shrink the world, brighten the stars, and bring them closer.
“What did you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Last night?” he suggested, angling his head. “Or the washroom?”
I sat up straighter and took a drink. “I don’t want to talk about the washroom.”
“I kind of do,” he said with a small wince. “You were upset. Do you remember who I was with?”
“Trying not to,” I said.
“What do you remember about it?”
I tossed the flask down on the thick navy cushion and twisted my hair into a low bun, giving him a sideways look.
“Is this a test to see if I disappear?” I plopped back down on the pillows with a new layer of sweat shining on my chest because now I was remembering Leland’s hand drilling into the wall by Case’s head.
“I would never test you.” He offered his hand as a tether, but . . . I didn’t want to touch him with my sweaty hand.
I knew what we were dancing around. I saw him kissing a man. But Leland had never brought up his sexuality, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing to him. I had questions. But Leland was mine in magic, not partnership, so it wasn’t like he had to answer them.
“I asked if you remembered him because . . .” He looked up, stopping, not able to get the words out.
“Because you like men?” I guessed, reaching for my flask.
“Well, yes. I was going to say something different. But yes. Sometimes I like men. I like men and women.”
I chugged so I didn’t have to look at him.
“Does that change the way you look at me?”
I pulled my flask from my lips. “Not really.”
I thought Ash was bi, maybe a lesbian, but I was thirteen when she’d left, and we’d never had the conversation.
The books in her room, though — the ones with the most cracked spines and least crisp pages — they were about women falling in love with women.
There were also all the guys who walked her to our door.
Once. Because she was never interested. And while Dad badgered me about homecoming and prom and why I couldn’t get a real boyfriend, with Ash, he never did.
I imagined having to declare your sexuality to anyone was as awkward and annoying as me running inside, standing on a chair, clinking a knife to a tankard, and randomly disclosing I prefer to be vaginally penetrated.
Maybe not. Maybe Leland was at ease with it the way he seemed to be at ease about everything. But it was unfair to him that his sexuality had to be a conversation while mine was accepted.
And I really wasn’t surprised by it. Ever since my realization about Ash, I’d gone about life thinking everyone was capable of attraction to everyone, regardless of gender, unless they wanted to specify and tell me otherwise. I laid back down and nestled the pillow under my head.