Chapter 26
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
EMBER
The burning is not unpleasant.
— Hector Ambrosia, Echelon to the
School of Elemental Magic
He took slow steps toward his bed before stopping a foot in front of me and looking at the hole where I was, where there was nothing.
“Oh, Ember,” he said heavily.
I blinked at him, ghostlike and unspeaking.
“Do you know I can feel where you are in the room?” he asked.
We should have been flush and facing each other straight on. I should have felt him, his hard lines, his warmth, his breath, but I was no longer physical. I could see, think, and I had this spectral form, but there was no way for me to touch or communicate with him.
“Is it the same way for you?” he asked, clenching his hands briefly, then releasing them. “Can you always feel where I am?” He held in a breath and stared at the space where I was missing. “Will you stay if I explain some things?”
I didn’t know I had a choice.
I didn’t know how to leave. Floating, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. Plus, I felt safer with him, comforted by the quiet strength in his shoulders, his deep and steady voice, the power in his stance, and how every time his hands flexed, it emphasized the veins rippling through his forearms.
He talked for a while, explaining everything.
The first thing, I knew, or had guessed.
Leland was an Allwitch. He wasn’t supposed to be.
He was twenty-one, and if he’d followed the rules, he should only have one school of light magic right now.
He should be competing for a spot in fifth year to get the remaining six light magics, like the rest of the Aspirants.
That’s what he was getting from the Dark Deal — Leland protected me until I was Selected, and Jaxan protected Leland’s secret, guaranteeing him a spot in fifth year so Leland could live the rest of his life safely in Alchemia.
He told me how it happened. He was born at the Circle of Seven.
He wasn’t sure if that was the reason, but he was born with all seven light magics.
His mother, fearing what witches would think if they knew he was born with so much spellcasting magic without having to drink any sap, ran to Mortal’s Gate and asked Jaxan for protection.
He killed her for it — and everyone who knew — but he kept Leland.
The scrying orb that followed me was usually Leland.
He Scried to block Helen from doing it, and when he was at the palace and couldn’t, he used a Mentalist he trusted.
His orb was low on purpose — he said he wanted me to know he was watching, that it was the one courtesy he could give.
That if he had to spy on me, at least I should know about it.
The V on his ring finger was for Ven, his Familiar, a mountain lion Jaxan had Severed from him when Leland was seven.
He’d made my magic suppressants himself, the process costing him forty-nine of his fifty spells.
The transaction with Aila — he’d staged it.
In case I was discovered wearing them, in case the Echelons asked where they were from, in case I needed a starting place to ask about new ones after he was gone.
He also said he knew things about Helen and Ash but wouldn’t tell me what they were.
He told me not to trust him.
He told me he wasn’t good.
My lips parted to tell him to stop saying that, and my first audible breath was triggered. I felt the warmth of him, his chest flush against mine, and when I looked down, I saw my right arm was lightly there and blinking, as the rest of me began fighting to return.
Leland exhaled with relief, his thumb stroking the spirit of my hand. It was air to him, but I felt his whispery touch. A pleasant warmth lit me from within and more of me flickered back to existence.
As he gazed down at me, I had a thought that his hazel eyes were as grounding as the moss in the forest where I used to pretend trees watched over me. Then all of me returned, and I was corporeal again.
Leland backed up a step, still holding my hand.
“I should go,” I said.
“No,” he said softly. “Not yet.”
“I have to go drink moonale.” I pulled my hand away and cowered backward into his bed, ignoring every cell in my body hissing at me to hold on to him.
As he strolled toward a tall wooden cabinet on the opposite end of his room, he said, “I’ll get you moonale. You need to stay until I’m done making your new magic suppressants.”
I was dizzy, mesmerized by his sculpted arms as he removed two bottles of moonale from a fully stocked bar cabinet.
When he returned and pressed a cold bottle in my hand, the brush of our fingers elicited a pleasurable shudder from me.
He gave me a questioning look, letting me know he hadn’t intended it.
My body a shaking mess of emotions, I sank to the ground and folded in my legs.
“I’ll take your moonale,” I said, turning the cool bottle in my hand. “But I don’t want new magic suppressants. We tried cuffs. I burned through them.” I took a sip of moonale and studied the floor.
After a few swallows, I realized drinking was making my muscles loosen in a way they usually didn’t when I was in magic withdrawal.
Remembering how my discomfort had eased for a while after the last time I blinked dangerously close to the ether, I slowed down with smaller sips, taking bigger breaks between them.
I already wanted Leland more than I could explain, and getting drunk in his room, this close to his bed, wasn’t going to help me ignore the impulse to satisfy my need for him.
Leland stood over me, with one hand holding the bottle of moonale he was drinking while his other drilled into his mattress. His eyes were obstinate, and I knew what it meant. It didn’t matter what I wanted. He was making the cuffs.
I took another small sip, then pressed the bottom of the chilled bottle to my collarbone, relishing the feel of cold glass on my warm skin.
When I looked up, Leland was staring at a fixed point on the pale-red wall behind me, the same avoidant stare he’d had the time I’d put on Ash’s tube top, and the time he’d been assaulted by an orgy of lingerie on my bed.
I suddenly remembered how thin my white tank top was, how, after sweating through the night, the thought of strapping into a bra was unbearable.
Now, cotton stretched tight across the ache in my breasts, and the cold moonale bottle — so seductively cool to my touch — was not helping. I needed relief, friction.
“Leland?”
His gaze slid down, his chest moving almost as hard as mine was. “Yes?”
One of my straps slipped off my shoulder, and I left it. I would have let it be more; I would have let him —
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Ember. Please get up.”
I allowed him to pull me to my feet, leaving the half-drunk bottle of moonale behind on his floor.
Cupping my jaw and brushing his thumb along my cheek, he said, “Please don’t look at me like that. I don’t know what to do with it.”
My cheeks burned with heat, and warm tingles licked up the back of my thighs as his thumb traveled down to my chin. Unable to help it, I kept looking at him exactly as I had been, like I wanted him to see all of me, like I could look at him like this forever.
“Why?” I swallowed. If we stood just one inch closer, with a deep enough breath, my chest could brush against his. “It won’t seal the bond, will it? This isn’t your deepest need.”
He gently grasped my chin and tipped my jaw back, then lowered his eyes to my chest. “It could be.”
He maintained his gaze on my neckline as his hand trailed lower, his fingertips skimming down my neck, then to the base of my throat — where he paused.
I let my eyes close, and his exploratory hand trailed down my arm and gradually stopped.
He pulled away slowly, then walked across the room and planted his hands on his desk.
I fixed my top, staring at his back, mentally tracing the hard lines beneath his white shirt. Unsteady, I had to lean back on his bed for support, my fingers lacing into the soft folds of his cool bedspread.
“We can’t,” he said, and I heard him trying to convince himself. “We can’t. We can’t.”
“Because of the bond, or because — ”
“Because I could have your back hit that bed in two seconds, Ember,” he said, jerking his head to the bed across from him. “Or I can wait and see if you’re still interested, after you get to know me.”
“I feel like I do know you . . .”
“You don’t.” He angled his head downward, like he was looking at his legs. “If you did, you wouldn’t have looked at me that way.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “I can’t help it. It’s this stupid Counterpart bond.”
Leland’s knuckles went white on his desk.
“No, it isn’t. Bonds can be like this. The fact that you don’t have spellcasting magic yet certainly adds to it.
But bonds have nothing to do with physical attraction.
It’s a magical pairing. Doesn’t have to be a physical one.
There are plenty of Counterparts who don’t date.
Possibly, because we’re around each other so much, things have gotten more intense. But this isn’t only about magic.”
I couldn’t hide my shock. If it wasn’t the bond, that meant . . .
Was he saying these were his real feelings? Were these my real feelings?
“For both of us?” I asked.
“Ember,” he said, and put his head in his hands.
“Forget it,” I said quickly. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get the cuffs from you later.”
Leland shook his head. “We need to do it now. Maybe just” — he went to his dresser and pulled out his beige sweatshirt — “put this on and try not to move.”
The brush of his fingers against mine as he handed me the sweatshirt was excruciating, but I resisted the urge to look up at him and stepped toward his door, putting on the sweatshirt.
While he went back to his desk to make the cuffs, I read the spines on the texts in his room. Teaching Exceptional Students, An Emissary’s Account of the Human Realm, Quantum Calculations, The Biography of Leda Blackburn.
I stared at a cactus in a terracotta planter, then counted the holes in the leather belt balled up on his dresser. And after running out of ways to avoid looking at him, or maybe just running out of willpower, I looked up and saw he was done casting.
The new cuffs were smaller than the first pair, delicate iron bracelets perfectly sized to my wrists. He’d even dusted them in a coating of 22-karat gold. They were beautiful, but they must have taken all his spells. He looked exhausted.
He staggered back against his desk, shoulders slumping, his hand clumsily grasping for something to hold. “I’m — have to . . . sleep.” His eyes closed.
“Standing?” I asked.
No response.
I walked over to him to help him to bed, and he woke up enough to make it the twenty feet across his room before falling flat on top of his covers, but he was still in his jeans and T-shirt and shoes. I went down to the end of his bed to help him get his shoes off.
Leland flinched.
“No.” He drew his legs in close and mumbled, “Asleep with them on.”
I was pretty sure he was unconscious and talking in a dream, but with his legs folded up where they were, I would’ve had to crawl across his bed to reach them, so I let him be.
After, in the privacy of my room, I slipped off the cuffs to admire them up close and discovered something. I glanced at Nova, wondering what he’d meant by the phrase he’d engraved on the interior.
There’s no one worth burning for.