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Trying a third time, I encountered a solid barrier, preventing my power from accessing him.
“Interesting!” I dropped his wrist and then repeated the entire experiment with the same results. “Very interesting!”
“What is interesting?” Nik asked, still in the same careful voice.
I burst into laughter. “Oh, Nik, you should see your face right now.”
He smiled back, responding to my happiness, but looking adorably confused in the process. It felt good to laugh with him again, even if he didn’t know the reason.
“Can I go now?” the youth asked, starting to edge away.
“Yes, yes, feel free.” I wiped tears from my eyes as the boy took off at a run.
He didn’t make it more than three steps, however, before he tripped over the discarded staff and went sprawling. Nik reached him in a single stride, reaching down to haul him back to his feet.
I stared at Nik, transfixed, as he thumped the boy’s shoulder, shaking free some of the dust that clung to him. The boy had been flat on the ground, and for a moment Nik had been bent over him—the tableau a stark reminder of the memory that plagued me.
But this time when the emotions of that moment rushed back, they were overlaid with something different. This boy had attacked me, as the Constantines had done, and yet even so, Nik had helped him. When he reached down, it had been in the role of protector, and for the first time, I could feel that truth wound through my old memory. My mind had repeated the truth a hundred times, but now my emotions had finally caught up.
I remained in place, frozen, as the boy muttered something in an embarrassed undertone and rushed away. He disappeared into the house, closing the door firmly behind him.
I had no idea what emotions were showing on my face in the wake of my realization, but some of them must have been visible. When Nik turned to me, his brows drew down, his earlier look of confusion deepening.
“The boy must think all the healing has driven me over the edge,” I said with a weak chuckle, worried it might be Nik who thought so, not the boy.
“It hasn’t?” Nik asked, but his look of amused long-suffering told me he still had faith in me.
“Not in the least!” My earlier elation came rushing back as I remembered my discovery. “Did you hear that boy’s responses?”
“He sounded about as confused as me.” Nik gave a reluctant chuckle.
“Exactly! He didn’t know what to think about the Constantines.” I gripped both of Nik’s arms and looked up into his face. “Do you know what that means?”
Slow understanding broke across Nik’s face. “The mesmerizations broke? How is that possible? Are they gradually fading away now that the ones who created them are dead? We haven’t seen signs of that in anyone else who was under their thrall.”
“No, we haven’t, because mesmerizations will last forever without evidence to break them. Not having the Constantines around anymore actually made them harder to destroy since there was no way to show they weren’t who they claimed to be.”
“So what just happened, then?”
I ran back over the sequence of events in my mind. “I was just checking my healing when something changed inside him. I think…I think I somehow activated his wall, and when it pushed my power out of him, it pushed out the mesmerizations as well—just like my wall does for me.”
“You made a wall in him?” Nik asked. “I thought you couldn’t do that. Didn’t you and Grey spend hours and hours trying?”
“Actually,” I said, “I was never trying to activate someone else’s wall for them. I was trying to teach them how to make their own. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to do it for someone else before. It never occurred to me it was even possible.”
“So what you’re saying,” Nik said slowly, finally realizing the full import of my discovery, “is that you can not only protect yourself from being mesmerized or attacked with healing power, you can also protect someone else?”
“As long as I have physical contact with them.” A grin spread across my face. “And I can purge mesmerizations that already exist in others like I do in myself.”
“Delphine,” Nik whispered. “That changes everything.”
ChapterTen
Ithought it might be hard to replicate, but to my joy it turned out to be much simpler than I expected. Like with my own wall, once I was familiar with the feeling, it was easy to reach for it again.
What wasn’t so easy—what turned out, in fact, to be impossible—was teaching anyone else how to do it. I tried with Hayes, then Luna, then Clay, and even with Isolde. But just like with Grey and his followers, no one else could repeat my accomplishment.
When we finally gave up, the disappointment in the air was palpable. I knew Hayes and Clay, at least, were thinking about more than the islanders. My wall was useful against more than just mesmerizations since it could also protect against an attack from a healer. And calling up a wall for someone else was even more valuable than being able to create one for yourself, since it allowed those with other affinities to also be protected.
