Chapter 28 #2
“Not really,” he clarified, though still lying. “I tried not to look at them. The perspective in dreams is — ”
I pushed off the chair and headed back to my room.
“Now where are you going?” he asked, getting up and following.
I couldn’t even deny it. Him following me — this was what I wanted. I was warm with the memory of his minty breath, the pine on his clothes, the feel of his scruff nuzzling the sensitive skin below my ear. If he said Come. Here. like that in real life, I knew I would do it.
He reached for my wrist to stop me from going into my room, and his light touch took the strength out of me. I lingered there, my skin tingling and on fire and desperately wanting more from him.
“How about you change?” he suggested. “And we go for a run before it gets hot?”
Of course, I thought about him as I put on the Creation Academy shirt he’d infused with cooling magic.
And thought about him as I deliberately avoided the leggings I’d once looked over my shoulder to find him staring at, putting on unflattering gray shorts instead.
And, of course, I was aware I’d gone straight from fantasizing about what could have been with Gray to losing myself in the thrill of whatever was happening with Leland.
And I hated that. But that didn’t mean I could stop doing it, even as I tried. I really, really, really tried.
We left the academy quietly, and once outside, I had to focus, concentration necessary as I stumbled over the rocky slopes and dips of the academy’s pedestal.
The second we hit the flat stretch of dust-covered ground, we started running toward the city.
I thought of Belinda as we passed the field of purple ivy and sprinted a few paces ahead.
Under the rising sun, rays of golden light bounced off tall, silver buildings, and I marveled at millions of tinted windows, hundreds of skyscrapers, their birds-eye views. How many buildings had Leland —
Nope.
We turned, and there was nothing to see to force my thoughts onto, the sun blinding, my eyes contracting in a squint.
My pace slackened as my thoughts started spinning around him again, and Leland took it as a sign to rest. He found us some shade near the portstop to Conventicles Crossing, reminding me of Hartik’s Hollow, the palace, the Allwitch temple, and Belinda, the latest Seven to go missing.
Leland braced his hands on his hips, breathing in and out quietly. “Is this helping?” he asked between breaths.
Why did I like listening to him breathe?
“No,” I said definitively. Shade wasn’t helping. The run wasn’t helping. A lobotomy wouldn’t help me.
Leland pointed at a table under an umbrella. “Want to sit?”
We ordered smoothies from his transmitter, not saying much at first. Leland and I switched cups halfway through drinking our smoothies: strawberry banana for apple blueberry.
I liked having something to do with my hands.
A straw. Condensation on the clear plastic cup to play with.
I traced the shape of a cat’s head out of an accumulation of water droplets, its ears more rounded than Nova’s, its face wider for some reason.
Because it wasn’t a house cat.
Because it was a mountain lion, like Ven, Leland’s Familiar. The corners of Leland’s mouth pulled in a knowing smile, and I pushed the cup away.
“What’s going on?” he asked, right to be concerned. “We can talk,” he said, casting Privacy, looking around at the city street where we were comfortably hidden in the bustle of a fast-paced weekday morning. “What are you thinking?”
“Do you think Jaxan’s the Shadowrealm?” I asked suddenly. It was the first thing I thought of that wasn’t him. “Do you hear his footsteps in the shadows?”
Leland’s fingers twitched on the black tabletop. “No.”
“No, you don’t hear them? Or no, it isn’t him?”
“It’s not Jaxan,” he said, his eyes serious. “I asked after the Blacklight. He said it wasn’t him.”
“But there are loopholes around your gift,” I said. “Maybe what he said was technically true, but maybe that’s because it’s a them. If Jaxan works with other people, if there’s a group, he could say it wasn’t him, and it would still sound like the truth, wouldn’t it?”
“I asked if he was involved. He isn’t.” Leland closed himself off, clearly not wanting to talk about this, which, unfortunately for him, only made me want to find out why.
How could he be so sure? Jaxan was a master manipulator, Leland had said it himself. Yet Leland really believed Jaxan had nothing to do with it. Did that mean he knew who did?
“Leland, I hear him. It’s his shadows. It has to be him.”
Leland Vanished our empty smoothie cups from the table then cast Privacy again as my eyes tracked a convent of clouds peacefully floating over distant red mountains.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t even have to be a Dark Witch.” He loosed a breath. “A good Illusionist could copy Jaxan’s Shadowcurrent, and no one would know the difference. A good Mentalist could convince you you’re seeing things you aren’t with a Mind Trick. It isn’t him.”
“It can’t be a light witch,” I argued. “There would be spelltracks and the Echelons would know who it is.”
“Dark Witches are hired all the time to erase them.”
“Then what light witch?” I asked, though my stomach, turning queasy, seemed to know already.
The note. The Aspirants will be freed when you leave Everden.
Deep down, I knew who wanted me gone. Who never wanted me here in the first place.
Still, I asked, “What light witch would do this?”
“Ember.”
“I want you to say it.”
“Taking Sevens,” he started, “is purposeful. She wants discontent. She wants Everden to believe the Allwitches are enlisting Sevens and assembling in Alchemia. She wants the realm focused on how to prevent another war with them to distract from the fact that the Echelons are no longer serving us well.” After a pause, he said, “After the Blacklight, after the tavern, did you have a headache? That’s a Mentalist.”
I racked my brain, trying to remember what I’d felt after the Blacklight. Shock, mostly. Then I’d gone home with Skye and sat on the floor for a few hours, my head pounding between my hands. After the tavern was the same. My head had hurt so bad, I didn’t even try to fall asleep.
“She wants you gone, she knows you’re afraid of Jaxan, and she started the Anti-Human Initiative and told Farrah to frame you in the papers, so no one takes your side on this.
Someone’s opening a portal in those shadows, and she’s in a secret relationship with a Quantum Witch. And what she did to your dad . . .”
“What do you mean what she did to my dad?” I asked, my teeth clenching. But I knew. I’d known it since I’d read about the Ring of Greatest Fear in The Blackburn Artifacts.
“Ember. I know you don’t want to believe she would do this . . .” He wouldn’t finish, always cautious when speaking to me about Helen, perhaps because the result of attempting it was often me shutting down.
“How long have you known this?” I asked.
“Not long,” he said. “I’m still looking into it.”
“Still looking into it?” I was trying not to be mad about the fact he’d hidden this from me.
I knew Leland, I knew he had reasons for everything, but how could he not tell me?
“What more answers do we need? You have to report her. The Echelons won’t listen to me, but if you say it, maybe you can bring back Trist and Belinda without me having to leave Everden.
She can’t just — ” My throat ached, and it hurt to breathe. “Helen should be stopped.”
“I can’t,” Leland said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how many Echelons are in on it, and Jaxan ordered me to leave it alone.”
“So don’t listen. Everden doesn’t want this — ”
“Ember.” He looked at his forearm laying heavily on the table. “One of these Deals is to follow orders. These are my options. Jaxan or death. I have to listen to him.”
“Well, did he order you to ensure I stay out of it?”
“No.” Leland gritted his teeth. “No, he didn’t. I think he wants you to — ” He didn’t finish the thought.
“Wants me to what, Leland?”
His transmitter buzzed, and he stood after checking it. “Let’s head back. I have to go to the palace.”
On our way back, it only took me a couple more tries asking him what he meant before I realized Leland was never going to answer.
* * *
Later, Leland messaged before he left for Odessa Hall, asking me to stay indoors.
But I couldn’t.
After he was gone, Helen messaged she needed to speak with me outside the academy, Echelon’s orders.
The moment I stepped outside the hatch, I was struck in the head. I stumbled and fell and when I opened my eyes, a black camera was the first thing I saw in my blurred vision.
* * *
“I’m sure by now you realize that message was from me, not the Echelon.
Though I did message what she told me to send, in proper accordance with her instructions.
You see what is so unexplainable to us” — Farrah kicked a pebble at my head — “and warrants investigation based on how ridiculous your behavior is — is how an Eight, who should be sick to death with withdrawal symptoms, is rarely seen drinking the moonale that has been proven — factually proven — to alleviate those symptoms.”
I cradled my head at her skull-shattering voice, intense pain flooding the space between my eyes.
Who’s helping you? Farrah asked without moving her lips. I know it’s an Allwitch.
I rocked back and forth, screaming, the smell of thickly perfumed iron filling the air with heavy toxicity.
I didn’t know how to separate my thoughts from my responses, or whether Farrah could hear all of it, so I thought about the splitting pain, the nausea, the feeling of a rusted scalpel jaggedly carving through my brain matter.
Is it Ash? she asked. Has she been Contacting you?
“No,” I choked. I needed to get inside where she couldn’t get to me. I tried to stand, but the pain sharpened, and my nose started to bleed.
Then it’s the Truth-Teller. You know, you without your flask isn’t the only thing we’ve been witnessing. She spread her hands like a banner. Most Eligible Bachelor in Everden Under Half Witch’s Spell. Is that correct?
No, I said, deciding then and there to lie for the first time in nearly nine months. Leland isn’t helping me. He hates me. Why would he help?
The words tasted like bile on my tongue. I wiped the trickle of blood leaking from my nose and rolled onto my side, coughing up the effect she was having on my stomach.
Then the hatch opened. Slippered feet scuttled across stone, and the strongest iron I’d ever smelled filled the air. I felt the sudden relief of a Shield cutting off the intensely sharp pain of Farrah’s magic.
“Hello there, Farrah!” came the grandfatherly voice of Charley Starvos.
“Nice to see you enjoying this beautiful desert evening. Do you know, I don’t often prosecute witches in my jurisdiction — they don’t often break rules that require it.
But I do believe, for that spell, Farrah, if one of my Creators asks you to leave her head, you must oblige her request. So, assuming Ms. Blackburn hasn’t agreed to be interviewed like this, I guess I’ll have to go dig up my law text and look up the appropriate punishment for the crime you’ve committed. ”
“She never asked me to leave her head,” Farrah said, sounding like a brat. “If that’s what she wanted, she should’ve asked.”
“Perhaps she couldn’t,” Starvos suggested. “Have a nice night, Farrah — in Hartik’s Hollow or Silverstone or anywhere else you desire, so long as it’s far, far away from here.”
She left promptly, and as I was slowly getting to my feet, Starvos invited me to dinner.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you a few questions,” he said as I fought to hear him over the ringing in my ears.
“The most pressing” — he held the three hatches open (at least, that’s how many I managed to count before I went green and my stomach turned) — “how does one eat the bacon? Are there dipping sauces for it?”
He prattled on the whole way to the cafeteria as I battled to keep the contents of my stomach down. Mercifully, Rayne found us in the arcade and insisted on taking me to the academy’s Healer.
Leland asked about it when he returned, but I shook my head.
“I just want to go to bed,” I said.
Only, sleeping was no longer a solo activity, Rayne had already lost one night of sleep for me, Dream Interference was out of the question, and because of all of that, I agreed to a Lucid Dream spell that allowed Leland to sleep with me inside my head.
* * *
I fell asleep before him, in my bedroom and under the assumption he was falling asleep in his.
It was his first time casting this kind of Lucid Dream, the kind that could only be shared between a Mentalist and their Counterpart.
I knew the exact moment he entered the dream space because a box the color of the backs of my eyelids appeared and expanded into limitless dimensions, then Leland was inside the dark-gray infinity, standing right in front of me.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I looked up at the ceiling that had no end. “Is this what we do?” I asked.
“It can be. Or you can take over. Build a room and shut the door.” His hand suddenly had a book in it, and he lifted it to show me. “I usually read. Sometimes I practice spellcasting.”
Part of me wanted to get it off my chest. I lied today. I lied to Farrah Prolix for you, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Instead, I just said, “How do I make a room?”
“Just picture it. It will appear.”
Following his instruction, what I made was essentially an extra-large cubicle, the bed I put inside it inspired by the one in my room. “Yours would look better,” I commented.
“I’m used to Creating things,” he said with a polite half smile. “But I won’t here. It’s your space. Use it how you want.”
“And you’re just going to” — there was a desert of gray behind him — “sit in the abyss?” The thought of him alone in the dark all night wasn’t a happy one.
Leland shrugged. “I like the quiet.”
I rose up on my toes to make something in the distance for him, envisioning another cubicle with another bed, the same as my own, because I hadn’t memorized the design of the one he slept in.
“Hey, Leland?” I said, walking into my room as he stood outside of it, peering down from over top the five-foot-high gray wall. “Why did we do Dream Interference first if we could’ve done this?”
“Because this is intimate, Ember,” he said. “Because this is intimate.”
“Oh.” I climbed into bed. “Well, goodnight, then.”
He let go of my cubicle. “’Night.”
I was beyond tired. I knew I could’ve dreamed of anything, but all I wanted was to dream of sleep. I pulled the covers over my head, and in the dark, for the first time in a long time, I found peace, warmth, and safety in my dreams.