Chapter 24 #3
“I thought that’s what upset you,” he said. “Seeing me with him.”
The mountains were a dark silhouette in the distance.
I checked if Leland’s hand was still flat and open before me and spotted his small tattoo of a moon and stars over rocky mountains, realizing it was Creatus.
His fingers flexed a few pulses in quick succession like he wanted me to take it, but I left it there a minute.
“Thinking about you with anyone upsets me,” I admitted.
“But I don’t care if you’re bi or pan or whatever sexuality.
I guess I just want to know . . .” I fussed with my shirt and stalled uncomfortably.
“Does everyone know? I mean, the thing with Vyra, is it . . .” I cleared my throat. “Is Case a secret?”
“Case is not a secret,” he said softly. “Not as far as I’m concerned, but there are other reasons people don’t know about him.” Leland sounded different tonight. Sad, even as his fingers wiggled for me to take them again.
I thought about the way he’d said, I thought that’s what upset you and Does that change the way you look at me. In that moment, refusing his hand felt like rejecting him, so I lightly took it.
“Is it like a throuple?” I asked.
“Are you okay talking about this?”
His hand was dry, warm, calloused. Holding it felt like there was something solid under me for once, and my blood was finally content.
“I think so,” I said.
“They’re separate things. They both know how I feel about relationships. No one’s out of the loop about any of it. Case — we try not to go there, but he’s an Elemental, and we love each other, so it happens.”
Love?
I didn’t want to pry, but curiosity got the best of me. “You love him?” I asked.
Leland sighed. “I do.”
My chest ached, and I had no idea if it was in response to the bond or Leland laying there sad, closing himself off to a relationship with someone he was in love with. “Why do you sound not happy about it?”
“Because it stopped working.” He squeezed my hand and explained.
“I get tired. Case doesn’t. I don’t want to spar all the time.
Case likes to jab. Most of the time it makes me laugh, but there’s moments when I just want to be alone in the washroom and can’t.
” He rolled his head to the side and looked at me deeply. Actually me. My eyes. Not my forehead.
I stared back into his, feeling tiny flutters in the lowest part of my stomach.
“I think he’s fine with it, but it’s also a challenge, which he loves,” Leland said.
So unbelievably attractive, I thought, with the starlight flecking his eyes and his serious expression.
He opened up. He listened. He heard the ache in my voice and took it seriously.
No laughing it off, no challenges to stuff thirty marshmallows in my mouth or suck in a balloon full of helium.
I loved Gray’s levity, I did, but suddenly I found myself wanting more of this, more seriousness.
“I get it,” I said, thinking about how hard Belinda was trying to be friends. I liked her but couldn’t match her energy. There was something forced, tiring, something not connecting.
“Your turn,” he said. “You want to tell me about Gray?”
I blew out a long breath. “Hot topic today.”
“Perhaps because you called me his name.”
I had no memory of doing that. “When?”
He tried to smile. “Last night. When I came to your room.”
“Oh. I was daydreaming about him when you came in.”
“You want to get back together with him?” He asked it so casually I couldn’t tell if he was pretending not to care or if he really didn’t.
“It’s not really an option,” I said.
“If it was?”
We went back to not looking at each other, looking upward instead.
“I thought I did. When he was around, he was the one thing that could always make me happy, but most of the time — ” I blew out a breath.
“He wasn’t around. I just wanted to be good enough for him.
I thought, in time, if I did everything right, he’d realize I was. But he never did.”
Leland ran his thumb over mine, gentle strokes that made my heart skip several beats. “He realized it.”
My cheeks heated. I wasn’t sure I heard him right, until his gaze traveled down the length of my body like he was trying to burn a hole through my clothes, and he drew in a tight breath and turned away before I could lose control and do something stupid.
Abruptly, I released his hand. Leland did not look at me like that. He didn’t say those kinds of things. Not to me, at least.
I sat up. “Are you Uninhibited?”
“Nope,” said Leland, his tone flat, his eyes distant.
“Then . . . drunk?”
“No.” He sat back on his elbows. Under the starlight, his face was half in shadow, his eyes glazing over with a dullness as he turned to look at me. “I’m immune to Uninhibitor. I don’t get drunk. I said what I said because it’s the truth.”
“Oh.” My forehead wrinkled in disbelief, just as his arm looped around my waist and pulled me down with him.
Our chests were millimeters apart. Our thighs were touching. I twisted my hands in my lap, not breathing.
Breathe, Ember. This is for practical purposes. He has to protect you. He doesn’t want you etherizing.
“Are you doing math?” he asked.
“No, I . . .” need to change the subject.
I blinked to clear the feel of his arms muscling me down to the daybed from my head.
It didn’t work as well as I needed it to, though, my heart beating harder than it did after an hour of running.
“Why did I need a Shield?” I asked, not meeting his gaze. “Is that how you got rid of my flu?”
Leland hesitated so long I had to look at him to make sure he’d heard me.
After a minute, he answered, scanning my eyes the entire time he spoke. “Do you still want to know if . . .” He ran a hand through his hair. “It has to do with Helen,” he said quietly. “Do you still want me to tell you?”
“Helen?” I fumbled with the flask at my side. How many times had I been asked for the medical history on my mother’s side without knowing the answer? Was the phantom flu part of it? A hereditary illness, some witch thing she’d passed down?
“Your nightmare,” Leland said. “It’s a mental magic spell called Dream Interference.
After you fall asleep, she puts an emotion in your head, probably fear.
Your brain fills in the rest and makes you dream about it.
Messing with brains is a sensitive area.
That’s why you’re getting flu and migraine symptoms. Dream Interference is one of those spells you can’t cast if someone is already casting something on your intended target, so my Shield blocked her from casting it on you. ”
I sat with that for a minute. Helen was making me sick?
I wished I could say I was more surprised, but this was also the woman who wore the Ring of Greatest Fear.
The most surprising part was that she’d spend any portion of her spell count on me.
That, and that this was my first time hearing about mental magic’s side effects.
I’d read her text on mental magic. That text, in particular, I’d read more than all the others.
Even if I hadn’t picked it up since I was thirteen, it had been just as long since I read Hector Ambrosia’s text, and I’d easily remembered what elemental magic did.
The arousing nature of it. If the mental magic text said anything about symptoms, I was sure I would have remembered.
“But I know about mental magic,” I said. “Helen sent Ash a text on it. There was nothing in it about flus or migraines.”
“Were pages missing?” An edge in his tone implied he knew the answer even before I nodded at him.
I thought it was just old . . .
I didn’t know why it had never occurred to me. Helen didn’t send those texts to educate us; she sent them to control how we were educated.
“You knew at the Blacklight.” My voice drifted off to the mountain cliffs. “You Shielded me then.”
“I didn’t know.” His fingers tapped in anger. “I only knew you weren’t sleeping. I’ve been on the receiving end of Helen’s mental magic before and didn’t feel a damn thing. She’s good enough to slip in and out undetected. She’s been doing this intentionally.”
“Leland?” Trying to understand Helen was like having my head unscrewed from my neck and slapped back on dented, scrambled, and missing pieces.
“You haven’t said anything about my forehead.
” I lifted my fringe for him to stare at the ugly blemish.
“No lecture? No ‘this is you staying out of trouble?’ ”
“You know how I feel about it,” he said. He turned his eyes to the sky, and that was the end of it.
I let my bangs fall, somewhat regretfully, because that had been my plan to shift the conversation away from Helen. But I think Leland knew that.
I worked on calming down, waiting for it to subside — the ache in my chest that happened every time I spent too long thinking about her.
A warm gust blew through the patio and flapped the folded umbrellas.
I squinted from the dust in my eyes, and Leland propped up on his side for me to lean into him and use him like a shield.
We stayed like that even after the air calmed, my head toward his chest, eyes pointed upward and watching the stars.
Until the stunning view stopped being so captivating, and my eyes drifted to his forearm.
His sleeves were pushed up to show his five darkened Death Bonds, and the others — the lighter ones — for other lives he’d pledged.
I’d double-checked and confirmed what Jaxan said was true, that Unselected witches really couldn’t offer their own life as collateral.
But Leland also had magic a fourth year shouldn’t.
I didn’t know what that made him, if he’d ever technically been Unselected.
He caught me staring. “Did you want to ask me a question about them?”
“I — yes. I’ve wanted to know what you’re bound for,” I told him. “But you don’t have to answer, if you even can.”
“I can,” he said calmly. “I didn’t want to, but I think we’re past that now. Remember when you said you didn’t go home because you didn’t want to kill someone I cared about? You wouldn’t have. It’s me you would’ve killed.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, my mind leaping to when he’d knocked on my door at the Creation Academy the day after my trial.
When he’d sat in a chair by my bed, and told me not to make decisions because of him.
He’d thought the right thing for me to do was to go home to the human realm, but that . . . would’ve killed him?
I shuddered at how close of a call it had been.
“It’s okay,” he said, making comforting eye contact. “It wouldn’t have been your fault.”
Leland pointed his Death Bonds out one-by-one, working his way up from the underside of his wrist to the bend at his elbow.
One to protect me, whatever it took to keep me alive.
One to ensure I was Selected. One to answer Jaxan’s requests for information.
One to obey his orders. All four were tied to the single Dark Deal he’d made with Jaxan.
Not just one Death Bond to secure it, but four.
“The last one’s the only one I made wittingly,” he said, “with a different Dark Witch I work with sometimes.” He didn’t say what it was, or who it was with. I figured this was on purpose, so I didn’t press him on it.
“Which one’s the worst?” I asked.
“All of them.” He’d said it like a joke, but his features were tight and serious.
“I die if I violate the terms of my Death Bonds. If that happens and we’re bonded, both of us will.
Once our bond seals, every magical consequence that happens to me will also happen to you.
It’s the reason I don’t want to bond to you. ”
“You don’t?” I joked, because it couldn’t be more clear to me that he didn’t.
In addition to him flat out telling me as much, there were very obvious shifts in his moods.
The day we’d had calzones, the way he’d sprinted off after my trial, his recent breakdown with Rayne in the cafeteria.
I looked at his arm again, and, figuring I needed a reason better than that I just liked looking at him, I asked, “There really isn’t one you hate the most? ”
Leland bit his lip, taking a moment. “Maybe this one.” He tapped the rose closest to his wrist. “The one that says I have to protect you.” I was about to say something in protest, thinking he was trying to tease me about it, but then he continued on in a serious tone.
“Every time I look at it, I remember you calling me your babysitter.”
He exhaled a sigh, and it sounded so heavy I wanted to place my hand on his chest, right over the spot that looked the tightest, resting it there until he breathed more easily.
But I wasn’t a Healer, or anyone he wanted touching him, so I stacked my hands and sat on them to prevent me from acting on my impulses.
Quietly, I said, “I won’t say that anymore.”
“It would be nice if . . . if you bel — ”
The wind kicked up, howling, and I had to draw my arm over my nose and mouth to keep flying grains of dust out.
With a sudden jerk, Leland stood and pulled me off the daybed. It’s not the wind, he said into my head by way of mental magic as he dragged me around the corner.
The patio door banged open.
“Emberrrrr?” Belinda called over the tempest. “You’ve been gone over an hour.”
A Shadowcurrent lunged. I recognized it — the same one from the Blacklight, the same cadence of footsteps driving the swirling shadows forward and spurring them on.
I tried to yank free of Leland’s grip, but his hands were tight around my waist. Then his fingertips flared with blue light, Teleporting us away from the tavern before Jaxan’s Shadowrealm could swallow us.