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“Baz…”
“What?” he asks. I realize he’s been staring at me this whole time with a befuddled look on his face.
I point at the line. “Can you see this?”
He follows my gaze. “See what?”
“This.” I move my hand through the air between us, palm up. The line parts around my hand like water and reforms behind it. “There’s a line of light between us. Like a pale, electric glowing green.”
He looks at my face carefully, as if to determine how sane I am, then he looks at the space between us, which, to him, is empty. He breathes in and I watch his nostrils flare like he’s trying to identify something.
“I can’t see anything. But I can smell it.”
“Smell it?”
“Ozone. The air after lightning strikes. It’s not strong but,” he sniffs, “it’s there.”
“What is it then?”
He raises a brow. “I thought you would tell me, witch.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. I don’t think I’ve heard of it either.”
“Well, it’s definitely a connection of sorts. Between you and me. Maybe this is what happens after you bring someone back from the dead. Maybe you become…tethered.”
I get up and move across the room as far as I can go. The glowing green line falters just a little.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says. “Why are you over there? Do I smell?”
“I’m testing it. The color weakened a little. I’m curious because if I go close to you,” I walk back toward him and the color deepens, “then it gets stronger.” I then sit back on the bed and grab his hand. The color is as rich as it can get and I can practically feel the energy. “How do you feel now?”
He mulls that over. “Better, actually. Better than when you were across the room.”
“I have a theory,” I muse.
He straightens up. “Oh, I love theories.”
“You were worse when I came back from the washroom. I was gone, I don’t know, not long. Twenty minutes? You were on the floor and your breathing was bad and when I put my hand on you it went away. You went back to normal.”
“Baseline,” he says absently. He stares at me for a long moment and his mouth tightens into a thin line. “That’s not good. That means the further you are from me, the worse I’ll feel.”
“Mmhmm.”
“You were only down the hall and I practically fell out of bed.”
“I know.”
He cocks his head, worry creasing his brow. “How far do you have to go today?”
I had been pretending for the last several minutes that I don’t have a class with Renata later this morning.
“Renata’s history class. It’s on the second floor, about an hour or so. I can’t skip it. If I’m gone from classes the week you’re also gone from classes, it looks like something, does it not?”
He nods. “Then we need a plan.”
“I can probably leave early…”
