Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
On Tuesday, I find myself yet again walking around campus, trying to pay attention to what I sense and subjecting myself to more confusion and frustration.
After following a random rush of panic on my way out of Modern Grammar, I wind up in the basement stairwell, consoling a sobbing freshman who failed a Psych exam.
In Brit Lit, during a discussion on the seven deadly sins in The Canterbury Tales, I’m consumed by the homesickness of the girl to my left, and positively blasted by the desire of the guy behind me for the guy two rows in front.
It’s like now that I’ve let my clairsentience out of the gate, it’s running wild in the pasture, kicking up its heels and rolling in the grass.
I can’t stop paying attention to emotions, and I can’t focus on anything else.
At this rate, I’m going to flunk all my classes.
Is ‘helping find a faerie weapon’ a valid excuse for missing assignments and failing tests?
Can someone write me a note for that? Leo and Rime insisted they and Topaz would be searching every second they had, and that Avery, Aaron, and I should carry on with our classes, but maybe more of us on the hunt is better?
We could get them to glamour us doctors’ notes, take a few days off from class, and find this thing before Brier’s team even shows up in town.
Then Nàdar will be safe, the faeries will leave, and life will go back to normal.
Except, faeries or no faeries, I’ll still be psychic. There’s no normal to go back to. The thought has me staring into space yet again, my World Religions textbook lying open and neglected beside me on my bed. It’s pointless trying to do homework right now. I’m just wasting valuable time.
I hop up, and bracing myself, open my bottom desk drawer.
Two weeks ago, I shoved everything that had to do with my psychic ability—and, I admit, with Leo—into that drawer and slammed it shut.
Like I could trap the whole dumpster fire in there and keep it from ever leaking out.
The problem is, my ability is in me, not in my amethyst and not in the witchcraft stuff Avery gave me.
They’re tools to help me handle my ability, not the cause of it.
I dig under the notebooks and papers in the drawer until my fingers finally touch cold silver: the cage around my amethyst. I unearth it, the chain sliding out of the pendant hook and making a glinting puddle on the floor.
First order of business: cleanse the crystal and put the damn necklace back on.
At the very least, it will dampen those ‘white noise’ emotions I pick up all day long.
Then maybe I won’t have to sit between those two guys in Brit Lit, feeling like the icing in an Oreo of lust.
I pull out Avery’s book, Protection Magick: Shielding, Warding, and Banishing for the Beginner Witch, and go to my favorite section, the one on crystals.
Out of the collection of small stones she gave me, I pick out the hematite, two little obsidians, and best of all, a tiger’s eye.
Almost as soon as I close my hand around that smooth golden stone, I fall in love.
It’s soothing, like my amethyst, but also empowering.
According to the book, it has the energies of earth and fire: protection and power. It’s like an amethyst with a kick.
Once all the crystals are cleansed and my necklace resting where it belongs on my chest, I go back to the book to scan the table of contents. What other techniques or tools can I use to mitigate the most dangerous emotions? The ones that assault me, drown me, knock me off my feet?
Because if the mill-workers and the riflemen were bad, what’s going to happen when I get close to the macguffin? A ring created to abuse nature and distort natural law? What is that going to do to my feeble, newbie-psychic brain?
I read up on shielding cloaks again and try meditating a few more into existence.
But on each attempt, my intuition takes me back to that wet, velvet cloak I imagined the first time.
So I stop resisting and lean into it. Even though the velvet is damp, it’s warm, calming, and protective.
And after practicing several times, I can conjure it in roughly one minute.
The lengthening slant of sunlight on the floor warns me that, at any minute, Liv will be back from class.
Hastily, I slip the book under my pillow, then scoop up all the crystals, candles, and herbs and place them back in the drawer.
By the time Liv bursts through the door, I’ve gone back to my World Religions chapter, and I even absorb some of it.
Maybe all the meditating helps me focus.
Later in the evening, after a dining hall dinner of cheesesteak on stale rolls, I stretch out on my bed to read “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.
” Liv sits at her desk with her earbuds in, dancing in her chair as she scrolls through diagrams of the molecular structure of god-only-knows-what.
The Middle English on the facing pages of my edition of The Canterbury Tales is nowhere near as cryptic as what’s on her laptop screen.
She plays down how smart she is, but one look at her coursework suggests otherwise.
While she’s distracted, I slide Avery’s book out from under my pillow and hide it between the covers of Chaucer like a kid watching YouTube on their phone during class.
Curious, I skip straight to the final chapter, “Sigils and Servitors.” Next thing I know, I’m playing around with protection sigils in my notebook.
I pass on the option to use symbols—planetary, alchemy, runes—and go for the simplest method.
I’m no artist, but even I can draw letters, connecting them one to another in myriad ways.
An L coming off the tail of a Y, a B with a G in its top bubble.
This is doable. And once a sigil is made, it only needs a quick charging, like a crystal.
I’m in my own world, writing and rewriting my intention, simplifying it as best I can, when my phone shimmies at my elbow.
I snatch it up, foolishly hoping it’s Leo or Avery calling to tell me they found the weapon and this whole saga is over.
But it’s neither of them. Nor is it Aaron or Rime.
I have to blink and look twice, the name on the screen not quite registering in my head.
Zander? My ex, Zander? But that was years ago, wasn’t it?
No, it was three nights ago. A mere seventy-two hours since his hand was up my dress and my tongue was down his throat. I shudder as regret and anger draw the blood from my extremities to my face. I want to ignore him. Badly. But that would be throwing yet another log onto my bonfire of wrongs.
I answer, “Hey.”
“Betts, ba…” He cuts himself off. “Hi.”
“What’s up?”
“Oh, I… I was just making sure you’re okay. I mean, Liv said you got home from the hotel alright, but, you know, I wanted to make sure.”
“I’m fine.”
“You took an Uber?”
“Yep.” With a very long stop in Breakridge.
“Betts.” He sighs. “Come on. Are you really that pissed off?”
“No.” Not so much now. “I mean, yes, I was. But whatever.”
“I’m sorry.”
He’s always sorry.
“I thought it’s what you wanted.”
“You planned it before we even left,” I snap. Apparently, I’m still a little indignant. “How could you have known what I wanted?”
I glance over at Liv who’s not even trying to hide her interest in the conversation. She mouths, “Is that Zander?”
I nod and mouth back, “I’ll go,” and duck out of the room. As I make my way to the nearest lounge, I say to Zander, “Sorry. Liv was asking me something. What was that you said?”
“I said I was trying to surprise you.”
Was he? Or was he simply paving the way for me to do what he wanted?
Like everyone else does?
God, why do I let them?
In the lounge, there’s a guy working on his laptop who appears to have been temporarily abandoned by his study partner. Beside him sits another computer covered almost entirely in Pusheen stickers.
Too lazy to go upstairs, and figuring the guy can’t hear me through his earbuds, I perch on the chair closest to the door. This conversation is almost over anyway.
“Come on, babe,” Zander urges. “Just come to the house on Friday. We’ll talk it out.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Just talk. That’s all.”
Like I would consider doing anything else with him. Look where it got me a few nights ago. I sought comfort in him and came away more wounded than I was before.
“Look, I shouldn’t have gone to the masquerade at all,” I admit. “That’s my fault, and I’m sorry. I’m just dealing with a lot of complicated shit right now.”
“Complicated shit, huh?” He snorts. “Yeah, well, I told you to stay away from Hawthorn.”
Seriously?
I groan, “Can we just not?”
“Whatever,” he mutters, no doubt with a roll of those bright blue eyes. There’s a we’ll-talk-about-this-later tone to his voice that I don’t have the energy to disabuse. He shifts gears. “By the way, you might want to talk to Liv. Braden’s being a whiny bitch about the Sweetheart thing.”
My stomach lurches and I shoot to my feet. “Hell, no! No way.”
The guy trying to study jerks and looks up at me with big, scared eyes.
“No take-backs!” I yell into my phone. “He asked her. It’s official. He can’t change his mind now!”
“Betts, Jeez. Chill.”
Chill? I whored myself so Liv could be Sweetheart. If the brothers take that away from her, each and every one of them is going to have to answer to me. I’ve never punched someone before, but I want to right now. I eye the guy cowering behind his laptop. Yeah, dude, you’d better be scared.
Zander uses that tone he always does when he thinks I’m being irrational. “No one’s taking Sweetheart back, babe. Relax. I’m just trying to tell you that Braden’s losing interest in—you know—”
Oh, I know all right. He’s losing interest in pretending to be Liv’s boyfriend while he’s screwing her and any other hot girl who comes along.
“Yeah,” I bite out. “I get it.”
I’ll talk to her and warn her to stop being ‘clingy,’ but not for Braden or for Zander. They can go fuck themselves. The only person I’m worried about is Liv, and if there’s anything I can say or do to soften the blow, I’ll do it. Because it’s time for both of us to stop moving backward.