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He walks to the center of Emrys’s room, with its dark furnishings and the weapons hanging on the walls by way of decoration—whips and scimitars and daggers and bows, and not to forget the whips and floggers—and stops.
“Rys!” I check his bathroom. Empty. The pain still tugs on me, fainter now. “He’s moving,” I say.
“Were you always able to sense us like this?”
I shake my head mutely.
“Can you tell which way he’s going?”
“Not sure.” I wince. “Maybe… toward the dunes?”
“The mounds? Come.” He grabs my hand and we’re running out of the room, down the stairs and out into the night. I try to sense the other two boys but all I get is a sense of pleasure and calm that makes me think of sleep. They’re asleep?
And I can sense that? Since when?
Reeling with the newness of all this, I jog after Sindri who has no right to have such energy after almost dying—and I squeeze his hand because I don’t want to think about that anymore, that chilling fear I felt thinking that I might lose him.
We slow a little as we walk the lit paths that wind between the dormitories and the other buildings. Voices drift down from some windows, melodies, a peal of laughter.
“This way,” he says and leads the way to the hillocks where the fires burned the previous night, boots thumping lightly on the solid ground. It’s quiet out here. Even the birds seem to have fallen asleep. Grass rustles as we slow down.
His hair shimmers blue in the dark, as if the stars in the sky bring out the color. His hand tightens around mine. “There.”
Two forms stand at the base of a hillock, both familiar, a boy and a girl.
Emrys and Ophelia.
I dig in my heels. “Oh no. No, Sin. I made a mistake. We should leave, like, right now.”
But he’s not budging. His hand is like a vise around mine. Pulling on him is like pulling on a boulder. “Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what? She’s kissing him!”
“If you’re feeling jealous, then close your eyes,Almaya, and use your other senses.”
“I’m not jealous,” I say, indignant. “No way.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a matter of… privacy. And discreetness.”
“Really.”
“God.” I tug again, trying to free my hand. “I don’t want to watch them kiss, Sin, don’t you get it?”
“Think I want to?” He shudders and I feel it then, through our clasped hands—the pull on the magic. The pain. The fear. The cold. The sting of invisible blades, the relentless siphoning of magic.
Oh crap.I gasp, lean against Sindri. “Is she, like… feeding on your magic like a psychic leech or something?”
He grunts in reply and I realize he’s fighting it.
“We should go,” I say again but this time I don’t even move. “You should go. I have to stop her.”
“No.”
“Then stay here.”
“No fucking way. I’m going with you.”
