“What hurts?” Torin asks, immediately concerned. “Your side?”
“No, how happy you both are.”
That stuns Torin into silence.
“Ignore him. He’s still unable to call out his undead, so he’s being… spicy,” I say.
Torin pats Mickey’s head, and Mickey takes that as an excuse to hug him. Torin cheerfully hugs him back while Vero is now the one looking disgusted.
“I feel empty inside. Like someone cut me open and gutted out my insides,” Mickey says. “And then I cried myself to sleep questioning what I’d do if they never came back. Ha. So stupid, let’s go.”
I hesitate as I look at Mickey. “Hey, they’ll be back,” I assure him. I can’t fathom how terrifying it would be to suddenly lose all of the people closest to you. I know that his undead aren’t seen as true people to many, but they mean the world to Mickey. He never talks about his childhood, but I have the feeling that they were the only people he had growing up.
Mickey nods and gives me a tight-lipped smile. “Of course.”
“They really will,” I promise. “And then you can boss them all around.”
He nods again but he doesn’t look overly hopeful… or well. I hug him to me while Vero stares at us like we’ve lost our minds.
“I told you it only lasts a few days,” Vero says. “You’re so dramatic.”
“Thank you,” Mickey replies. “I would feel better if you told me I was your friend.”
Vero looks disgruntled as he hurries toward the Door, like he’s trying his best to get away from Mickey’s friendship. He quickly disappears through it while I laugh.
“I think you were denied,” I say.
Mickey grins. “I’ll break him down.”
“I’ll break him if you’d like,” Torin says as he cracks his knuckles.
“That’s not how you make friends,” I remind him.
“You’ve never tried it, so how do you know?” he asks before passing through the Door, and Mickey and I follow. I realize that maybe I could have put Mickey in a better state of dress before we headed through the Door that leads into his house. Or maybe we should have made a different Door because the moment he sees his desolate living room, his face turns pale.
“I bet everything will be back to normal by tomorrow,” I tell him. He nods, but he truly doesn’t look the best. He almost looks faint as he hangs on me. I really don’t think it’s Mickey’s normal dramatics, so I usher him over to the couch before he passes out on me.
“Hey, why don’t you sit down? Or do you want to go back and lie down in bed?”
“I’m fine,” Mickey says as he sinks down on the couch while we wait for Imani, who is bringing someone who might be able to help me reach Conquest.
I kneel in front of Mickey, concerned that whatever they shot him with is affecting him more than we thought. He actually seems worse than yesterday when he was shot. I push up his shirt and check the wound to make sure he doesn’t have some raging infection or something that’s making him feel like this, but everything looks clean and healthy. “Mickey, what’s going on?”
“Nothing. I just… feel weird.”
“His magic is quite significant. It might be his body adjusting to the lack of magic,” Vero explains. “I’ve seen people become anxious or sick, but not to this extreme.”
I set to work buttoning his shirt right before there’s a knock on the door. Torin lets Imani in, who immediately looks over atVero and takes note that he is scowling at the two newcomers as though they’ve come to take his life.
“Why don’t you go lie down in bed?” I urge Mickey.
“I’m fine here,” he says as he hugs a cat-shaped pillow to his chest.
I nod uncertainly before turning to Imani and the woman she brought.
“Okay. I don’t know if this will work, but it’s the best I could come up with,” Imani says. “This is Raya, and she’s a seer of sorts. Her magic lets her connect to a person if there’s a reflection in the room. So hopefully he’s somewhere with a window or something similar.”
“Sometimes even a glass of water will work,” Raya says. “So we only have to touch for your magic to work?”
