Page 17
I should apologize for asking. Assure him that he doesn’t need to tell me if he doesn’t want to.
He speaks before I can.
“After Salvatore, my emberlink partner deserted me. He could feel what was living inside my mind, and it repelled him.” His thumb presses into the ring again, and he winces slightly before dropping his hand to his side. “We haven’t spoken in years.”
My own emberlink scar aches behind my ribs. It’s the way old wounds ache when someone describes a hurt that mirrors yours, and you realize the shape of their absence fits the shape of your own.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I wish I could be more helpful, and I hate that I can’t. Oliver would be. He’d know exactly what to say to make Tobias comfortable and ease his pain. Meanwhile, I’m just standing here, clawing for the right response and coming up empty.
“Don’t be.” He shakes his head, his eyes far off. “He made the right choice.”
The lie sits between us, and I don’t challenge it. After all, I understand lying to bury your emotions. I did it every day for the past three years.
“I’ll go to the Circles as soon as I can.” He holds my gaze, and the air in the room feels like it’s pressing in, trying to close the space between us. “Now, you should go. There are students who need me for actual counseling, and I can’t help them if I’m—“ He stops himself, swallows, then starts again. “When I have answers, I’ll find you. I promise.”
I nod, because if I open my mouth, I’ll tell him that the hour before the silver entered his eyes was the only time in months I felt like a whole person instead of a girl holding herself together with a performance so convincing that everyone bought it except the man who’d been inside her head.
So I turn, pull the door open, and step into the hallway.
Tyler looks up and stands when the door clicks shut behind me.
“You doing okay?” he asks, just like he did the night I ran into him in the Hydra Hall common room.
“I’m hanging in there,” I say, which is closer to the truth than fine, but still miles from honest. “Are you?”
“Everyone keeps asking me that, and I keep saying yeah, and none of it means anything.” He pauses, his eyes flicking to the closed door behind me. “You probably still get that, too.”
“Yeah. I do.”
He reaches for the door handle. Then, he stops.
“That offer still stands, by the way.” He shrugs one shoulder, the gesture so close to his old, easy self that my chest aches. “Sitting. Not talking about it. Whatever.”
“I might take you up on that,” I say, and then he disappears through the door, leaving me alone with Oliver’s warnings about Revenants and the Crown, and the awful feeling that if Tobias and I don’t get answers soon, whatever Oliver died trying to warn me about is going to happen before we can stop it.
9
EVIE
New Orleans hits my heat sensing before my feet meet the ground.
The fire travel deposits me and Kieran in a narrow alley between two brick buildings, and the city unfolds across my awareness in layers: the warmth of the November afternoon, the thermal bloom of dozens of bodies moving along the street at the mouth of the alley, and the slow pulse of old magic buried beneath the pavement.
Kieran reaches for my elbow to steady me, and the contact sends his heat straight through the sleeve of my sweater. I brace for a spike that doesn’t come—his temperature is his normal level of hot now, not his demigod level of hot—and I hate that I braced.
“You okay?” he asks.
“All good.” I straighten and step out of his grip before the warmth of his hand starts interfering with my ability to form sentences. “The Aldridge house is about six blocks from here.”
“How well do you know these people?” he asks as he scans the alley.
“My parents and the Aldridges have overlapping circles.” I re-do my bun, making the pencil in it as secure as possible. “Lenore Aldridge—Nina’s mother—leads their coven. We visited every summer since before I can remember.”
The mention of summers in New Orleans pulls a memory loose before I can stop it.
Oliver and me on the Aldridges’ back porch, nine and eleven, legs dangling over the railing while Nina showed us how to make sparks dance between our fingers. Oliver kept making bright, wild bursts that singed the magnolia leaves and made Nina’s grandfather Leroy laugh from his rocking chair. I made small, precise flickers arranged in rows, because even at nine I organized things into data sets.
“Yours are prettier,” Oliver said, nudging my shoulder with his. “Mine just blow stuff up.”
