Epilogue
EMBER
Eyes closed, I watched the Vision like a silent film I absorbed through every nerve and pore, more palpable than any daydream I’d ever had.
I vaguely remembered I existed outside of the Vision.
Somewhere, in the way back of my mind, was the reality that, if someone were to walk into Leland’s room, they would see our foreheads touching, our eyes closed together, and Leland’s exhales becoming my inhales.
Leland, a king.
Wearing an eight-pointed crown, he sat on a tall, gilded throne, inside palatial, gold-paneled walls, under an ornate ceiling. Beside him, a second throne was empty. I sat loosely in his lap with my legs draped over his knees.
I wielded a tornado of darkness, hiding all but Leland’s face from anyone around to see.
Rippling layers of my shadows rotated up from the red-carpeted dais, covering Leland to his neck, and me entirely.
His Adam’s apple bobbed in time with his words as he spoke.
But Visions had no sound, so I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
We were safe from eyes inside the dark swirl I’d cast, and a few of my shadowy tendrils strayed from the cyclone to stroke his chest. Stroking, then slowly unbuttoning his pristine, white button-down, all the way down to his belt.
He skillfully kept a straight face, his features handsome and stately as he continued speaking to someone else.
My shadows retracted to the sides, and my hands took over, sliding inside his unbuttoned shirt, tugging it apart a little so I could see more of his skin.
I traced the line between his pecs and all the way down to the strip of soft hairs that disappeared below his belt.
Leland stopped speaking mid-sentence. He looked at me, his mouth forming a word, and while I hadn’t been able to decipher any other word he’d said in the Vision, I knew this one.
“Behave.” Spoken like a liar.
A current of my shadows flicked to open his belt, and by the time I finished slowly unrolling his zipper, his hands tightly gripped the gilded armrests. My lips twitched in a smile as I did nothing but rest my hand over him, savoring his hardness, his strained look, watching him lose all patience.
He thrust into my hand, and our eyes met, an understanding passing between us: Please keep going, Em. Please keep going.
Cruelly, I pulled my hand away and sent shadows in to lightly stroke him instead.
I was only mildly interested in the conversation he was having with the person on the other side of the shadows, until, abruptly, my shadows stopped teasing him. I sat up straight and pressed two fingers to his chest. Two, I pressed into him, my eyes demanding. Two. Give me two of them.
As suddenly as I’d asked it of him, Leland resumed his more official conversation. I closely watched his lips mouth my request. Two, but there was something else he said after it, another word at the end of the sentence I couldn’t detect. Two worlds? Two witches?
Whatever it was, it started with a W, caught me by surprise, and made me laugh into his throat. He gave a soft chuckle and took my hand, lifting it to his lips, kissing my fingers, and mumbling something that made my eyes close.
With no desire to watch the porno of our ensuing “nudity,” “foreplay,” and “intercourse,” I tapped Leland’s arm — the signal he’d told me to use when I wanted to end the Vision — and he instantly ended it.
Foreplay. Nudity. Intercourse. Words you hear in health class, designed to not be arousing, and most likely why Leland had carefully chosen them.
Now I was blinking back to reality, trying to suppress all signs that — even though I’d asked for the Vision to end — I was thinking about him moving inside me, wondering if he kept the crown on his head.
“You still in there?” Leland asked. Our hips were locked, along with our foreheads. His hands on my lower back were still.
I lifted my head and looked around, disoriented at first, but then I slowly came back to my senses. I was in Leland’s room, a room that smelled like a winter forest, with low music playing in the background.
“Barely,” I squeaked, my knees sinking into a cushiony couch I never wanted to get up from. And I was warm. Dangerously.
“Should I not have shown you that?”
“Uh . . .” Should he not have shown me what I’d always wanted? Our eyes alight with the same fire, our laughs bubbling out at the same time over the same things.
In the Vision, I’d asked Leland for two — of what, I had no idea — but I’d asked for two, and Leland said two, then the two of us laughed, together. Counterparts.
He waited for me to take a few seconds to swallow as I stared at the small triangle of white shirt peeking out between the drawstrings of his gray hoodie.
I pulled my face another inch away from his.
“Ember?” His hand tightened on my back. Don’t go. Talk to me.
What came out of me was a whisper. “Did it get warmer?”
Leland shook his head.
“But you cast fire in the lanterns?” Nope. “Water?” I scanned his room for cups. But there was no trace of elemental magic. No fire stirring my blood. Only him.
Only him.
I should have climbed off his lap then, but I didn’t want to, and his fingers locked against the base of my spine told me it was fine to stay, at least a little longer. He shifted me higher in his lap, and I dropped my head, resting it on his shoulder.
“You were wearing a crown,” I said, not saying what else I was thinking. The crown suited him, and probably, if we were like this on a couch, and I was on top, probably he could keep wearing it.
“I was,” he said back.
Focus, Ember. Focus.
“All this time,” I said slowly, not really surprised, although it was objectively surprising, “you’ve been hiding that you’re royalty?”
“No,” Leland said with a small laugh. “I haven’t. Everden doesn’t have kings and queens; we never have. I think it was a Sundering costume — a Halloween party for your birthday.” To explain how he knew this, he added, “We had cake after the intercourse.”
“Cake,” I said, for some reason touching his arm. “What kind?”
Did I care what kind? No. Not really. But was I trying to stop thinking about the act of sleeping with him? Yes. Very much.
“White,” he said simply, and he closed his eyes for a beat.
I stopped myself from running a hand through waves of his brown hair where that crown had sat so well on him.
There was nothing costumey about his crown in the Vision, not to mention I’d been in a simple black slip dress, and while it was sexier than what I usually wore, I was still me — not pretending to be anything else.
And Leland, I could more easily see him as a true king than someone pretending to be one.
I twirled one of the strings at his neck and looked up at him. “Do you usually dress up for the Sundering?”
“No,” he said softly, and his face drifted closer to reclaim the inch I’d taken away from us, our noses a breath away from touching again. “But maybe I do with you.”
“Maybe,” I replied, then smiled at a tiny kernel of pink salt trying to disguise itself among the dots of his stubble.
Leland, a king. Me, a Dark Witch. And we were happy together. Happy on the Sundering. Halloween. My birthday.
His hands slid slowly up my back, his face tilting ever so slightly as he looked at my lips with a question in his eyes.
“This feels like you’re going to kiss me,” I said, uncertain and a little panicky as I pulled back from him.
“I wanted to.” He let his head fall back on the couch in a relaxed position, his hands still exploring my back, lightly. “Not if you don’t though.”
“I don’t think I do,” I said softly, unconvincingly.
“Agreed.” He stared at my mouth like he wanted to devour it. “Why?”
“You can’t agree and then ask why.”
“I just did.” His hands stilled on my hips. “I want to know your reason.”
“Tell me yours first,” I said. “Because the last time this came up, you said, ‘We can’t.’ Then you took a nap for four hours.”
Leland chuckled softly, looking downward.
“Is that why you pulled away? Because you don’t believe I’d want to kiss you?
Ember . . .” He sighed, then lifted his gaze to me.
“I felt you dying inside the temple. I don’t know.
It’s probably still not good for us. But I just want what I want right now.
” He caressed where my hair was bunched in the hood of his sweatshirt I was wearing, then lightly untangled my hair from it.
“Why did you change your mind? Do you only want to when your blood’s burning? ”
Really, he was going to erase my memory anyway, so my reason might not even matter.
We could do this, and I’d have no recollection of it tomorrow.
Except, sometimes, strong memories, even when erased, left physical imprints.
And if I remembered anything about tonight, it would be this. Leland holding me in his arms.
“I want this,” I said. “I want this constantly. I pulled away because I think it’s what’s right.”
He nodded. “Will you tell me why?”
“Because . . . I would forget.” My voice came out sad-sounding, and I shifted back a bit.
“I would forget everything else that’s out there.
” I gazed at the edge of his straight nose, remembering how close we had been to nuzzling, and what I was choosing, which was everything else on the other side of his bedroom door.
“The real reason I liked Gray so much . . . ?” I sighed.
“I was hiding. Having something to obsess over was a nicer place to be than out here, facing the world. And you” — I slipped my fingers into that white triangle of his cotton T-shirt — “you would be a really nice place to hide. I’d be happy there.
But” — It wouldn’t be good for us — “I think I need to be happy on my own.” I respected Leland.
I didn’t want to turn this into something obsessive and unhealthy.
I wanted to be secure. My lips, pressed together, quirked to one side before I went on. “You think I’m stupid . . .”
“No,” he exhaled. “No, Em.” His eyes closed. “I don’t. I never have.”
I don’t know who started it, but my hands had slipped under his sweatshirt, and his had crawled halfway up my back, finding no bra. I pressed my forehead to his sternum, hiding my flushing face in the crook of his shoulder, discreetly trying to breathe in his smell, his neck.
“Is that the only Vision you have like that?” I asked, a little out of breath. “Or are there more where we’re . . .”
“Having intercourse?”
“Please stop saying intercourse,” I groaned into his neck. “You sound like my health teacher.”
His large hand took my face, forcing me to look at him.
Gentle, the way he held my chin, but his eyes were hard.
“We can have a conversation about how you ride my cock if you like.” His emphasis on the last words lingered as his finger stroked under my chin.
“But I’m not sure that one ends with us not kissing tonight. ”
“Uhm . . .” My mouth popped open. There was not a single thought in my brain to complete the sentence.
His hand went back to my waist, and he looked smug and perfect and proud as I fought the warmth, a rush of blood, the blushing.
“They’re not all sex Visions,” he said, more serious now.
“We’re only together in one of them. I have others of you.
But I’m not there, and you’re not a Dark Witch.
I’m not sure we get to have both if you select light magic.
Pretty sure you do that, and I’m — ” He sliced a line across his neck and flopped his head backward, hitting the back of the couch and staying lifelessly down.
“Leland!” I hit him in the chest, not hard, but his eyes popped open, and I got to see his playful smile for a few seconds. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“I wanted it to be your decision,” he said.
“It is.” The longer we stayed like this, the more I wanted to throw everything I said out the window and kiss him. But I knew — I just knew — we weren’t supposed to start yet. “Promise you’ll tell me I said I want to be a Dark Witch?” I asked hopefully.
“I promise,” he said, and traced tiny circles across the waistband of my pajama pants, in the exact same way I’d teased around his belt in the Vision.
The tingling in the pit of my stomach was getting too warm to resist, and I knew then that we couldn’t wait any longer for him to cast the Memory Extraction.
I put my head on his chest and told him I was ready.
Soft and soothing, his hands raked through my hair, the pads of his fingertips making tiny pinpricks erupt across my scalp.
My eyes fluttered closed, and the rage that accompanied me everywhere, the restlessness in my legs that made me want to run, all of it quieted in the presence of his light touch.
Peace engulfed me. The very air around me was a pine-breeze hug I didn’t want to shrug away from.
Then everything went pitch black. And I remembered none of it.