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The motion seems to knock Ezra out of his voyeuristic state and he smooths his hands over my back before carefully turning me away from the beat down that is happening and guiding me away, toward the alcove that had been my original destination.
Once there, he settles on a bench and pulls me onto his lap, still comforting me. “You okay?” he murmurs.
I let out a breath and nod. “Yeah, I just- I can normally handle shit like that better but he… He mentioned Gabe-” my voice trembles as I say his name, and Ezra hauls me closer. My forehead presses into his neck as I let out a shaky breath. “It just sort of made my whole body shut down.”
“I’m sorry, Ro.”
I don’t say anything. He’s apologizing for so many things, not just how I’m feeling in this moment, but I can’t absolve him of his guilt here. I don’t want to. He should feel guilty for twisting public opinion of me to the point where people around me, my peers, see me as trash, a slut, something to be used and abused and cast aside.
After a moment, I push away from him. His arms tighten, trying to keep me where I am, but I persevere, until I’m sitting straight up, though still on his lap. “I’m getting you all dirty.”
I frown down at the brown splotches on his white shirt. Some of the coffee even got on his cream-colored suspenders, staining it brown.
“Ro, I really don’t give a fuck about my shirt.” His hands slide up my arms to my shoulders until he’s cupping my face. “Tell me what I can do to make you feel safe.”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“There has to be something.”
I push all the way off him, slide onto the bench across from him. “Nope. There’s nothing. This is what my brain does now. I have moments where I’m pulled back to Halloween to that forest to feeling so fucking helpless and it takes a while for me to come back from that. But there isn’t a way to just fix it, Ezra. Unless you can go back in time and stop it from happening at all?”
He lets out a humorless laugh. “No, there’s no spell that would let me do that. Believe me, I looked.”
That has me pausing. “You looked?”
He nods, runs a hand down his face. “Right after it happened, we all looked for a way to undo it, to make it so that you didn’t have to live through that, but fucking with the past is dangerous. It could have turned out worse, with us not getting to you in time, or it might have altered the future so much that you…” He trails off, eyes running over me. “Well, we didn’t find a spell anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“But you tried to undo it?”
“It was the only thing we could think of to make it right.”
We stare at each other over the small space until the other three Consequences enter the space. Fielder takes the seat next to Ezra, while Gideon remains standing, blocking my sight out to the rest of the ferry, the rest of the students. Hardin slides into the space next to me, picks up my hand and laces his ring adorned fingers through mine, squeezing gently. I note his split knuckles, slicing through the roman numerals for thirteen.
“What do they mean?” I ask suddenly. I can’t believe I haven’t asked this before. It always sort of bothered me.
“What, love?”
My thumb smooths over his knuckles. “The numbers. What do they mean?”
“Strength and Death.”
Oh, I could face palm. Of course, I should have put that together. In the Major Arcana in Tarot, the eighth card is Strength and the thirteenth is Death. It should have occurred to me, especially since I now know that they are witches.
“What’s your thread of magic?”
Fielder cuts me a sharp look while Hardin slaps a hand over my mouth to keep me from saying more. “Hush, love.”
I frown and expect Hardin to let me go, but he doesn’t. Instead, he keeps his hand where it is, while Fielder mumbles something under his breath. My tongue darts out,trying to get Hardin to release me.
His blue eyes shoot to me, and something close to a growl rumbles out of his chest. “Don’t start something you don’t want to finish, love.”
I twist my head until my mouth is finally free from his palm, and suck in a long breath. “Don’t smother me, asshole!”
Fielder stops mumbling and lets out a breath. “You can’t just talk about magic like that, Sweeney.”
“How was I supposed to know that? We had a very candid conversation at the hotel. There’s no one around us.”
Fielder shakes his head. “At the hotel, I’d put up a silencing spell so anyone outside the room wouldn’t have heard a peep of what we were saying.”
