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She looks at me with those pitying eyes again, but no growl forms to warn it off this time.
“Ella, you’re asking me to duplicate something a master at vision has done. Slade literally narrowed his ability to only see things pertaining to you, and limited what he was able to see. He siphoned off the rest of the magic and somehow channeled it to advance his more offensive powers so he could grow stronger. Then he did it again,” she says like she’s explaining something crucial.
“You were a child prodigy visionary,” I remind her.
“And now the closest I get to a vision is a migraine,” she snaps.
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“I’m not asking you to see the future. I’m just asking you to use everything you know about the power you’ve thoroughly studied, and put it to use right now. Channel those memories to me. Just like he does when he shares memories.”
“You’re asking me to walk down a road that is intriguing me too much. I couldn’t stop reading that journal even as I begged you to. I’m already close to being obsessed with this.”
“Good,” I say, causing her to groan. “If you’re obsessed, then we’ll be on the same page. I need answers, Kimber. You’re the best person I know at getting answers, and there are answers here.”
I pat the back of the book again, emphasizing where here is.
“If you want my help, I need to know everything that got you to this point, Ella. Tell me what’s been going on, because you’ve been as much of a mystery to me as Slade since he first arrived all those months ago.”
I don’t hesitate to tell her everything, starting with how familiar he seemed from the very beginning, just his voice and his presence, even though I’d never met him before. I tell her a lot of things I shouldn’t, including Karma and Kya raising Dice from the dead, and how hungry it left the baby after the joining.
I tell her about ripping myself to pieces with my shifts, and how I’ve spent months thinking I was on the verge of challenging Mom, which results in her eyes almost popping out of her head.
“All of that was because of him,” I explain. “It was my instincts screaming for me to save him, but since I felt wrong for wanting that so much, my beasts rebelled against me, I think,” I go on in a broken whisper.
Angrily, she snatches up the book, muttering a few curses, and starts flipping through it.
“Who am I kidding? I’ve been obsessed since you said it was Slade’s journal, because we know nothing about him, and you’re getting your rocks off daily with him now,” she confesses petulantly.
It’s possible these equations might have the answer to restoring her own visionary side, but I don’t bring it up, because I’m worried that she’ll become fixated on it, even if it’s not possible.
She can fixate on things with answers and be okay, but not things that never end with anything but more questions.
She grabs a sheet of paper and starts writing.
“What are you doing?” I ask, confused as she scribbles over something and starts over.
“Science disguised as math, or so I’m told,” she deadpans, throwing my words back at me. “I’m recreating his formula with my personal specifications, hoping I’m doing something as delicate as transferring memories from those pages to our minds, a feat I never even thought possible before this moment. And the math has to be exact, or I could accidentally throw one or both of us into a coma for an indeterminate amount of time. And I’m doing this tedious, absurdly difficult task with you quite literally breathing down my neck.”
I glance down, realizing her neck is directly in front of my mouth as I peer over her shoulder, and I clear my throat while backing away and trying to give her some space.
I’m not sure how long it takes her. I’m not sure how long I simply stare out the window, envisioning what kind of man goes through something like this for a girl he’s never even met.
It’s not the man who introduced himself to us. Not the man who instilled fear and commanded dread. He reinvented himself into the man capable of what he is now with the partial purpose of shoving me as far away as possible, and I still had to fight with myself to stay away from him.
For so long I’ve been in denial.
In retrospect, it makes sense that my powers got wilder, stronger, and more unpredictable in his presence. It was all those buried instincts I ignored realizing what I didn’t want to see.
I thought I was a horrible person for wanting someone so vicious and cruelly unapologetic. Someone who openly stated how badly he wanted to kill two people loved by two other people I loved.
Someone who put Leah in a box and beat her until he almost killed her. Left her for dead. Someone who truly wanted me to hate him, so he only allowed in the rage for centuries so he could harness the power only anger and fear provokes the fiercest.
All along, he wanted the rage that consumed him to allow him to do whatever it took to ensure I stayed away.
I felt torn, and I felt like I was betraying everyone.
Now I feel like I’ve spent months betraying a man who literally let them cut him to pieces, and stayed conscious so he could only allow his body to heal enough to survive. He was so determined to live that he survived a death sentence over and over and over, all so he could die in my place.
