I laugh. It rattles out of me, half-hysterical, pushing me right up to the threshold of unhinged, like Orok had been worried about.
I’m done with his bullshit.
His words set off other voices in my head, a swelling, overlapping symphony.
Is that all you’ve got?
Pathetic.
This was wasted on you.
I shove Orok off, and he lets me go. I’m not sure why. Maybe he can sense the dip in my rigidity.
“I’ll happily leave you alone after tomorrow,” I tell Elethior. “They’re going to award that grant to me, then I’m never going to think about you or your family again.”
“Oh, baby boy,” he coos. “We both know every bit of that’s a lie.”
I spin away from him, seeing red, seeing flashes of things that slither along my arms and creep across my body and—fuck.
My skin is too tight and my chest hurts and I try to unbutton my collar, only to remember I’m wearing a T-shirt and can only ineffectively tug at the cotton that’s trying to suffocate me.
I trip on the rug in the entryway, wrench open the front door, and plunge into the night.
The autumn-chilled air stabs into my lungs. It smells like damp leaves. Dying, mildewy rot, but in the comforting way that promises the season’s changing so you can change with it.
Orok follows me. Crescentia, too. But it’s Orok who grabs my arm and tugs me to a stop, and I spin on him.
He gets it. He gets it instantly, and he lets me go.
“Unclench your hands, Seb,” he tells me.
I obey, flexing my fingers, but it’sbullshit. It doesnothing. Several therapists got me on exercises like this—in the throes of anger, focus on relaxing tense muscles; breathe deep; get yourself back in your body—but these techniques only make me more pissed that I need help calming down at all.
I don’t want to calm down.
I don’t want to let it go.
No one else had to calm down, so why do I?
“Fucking Tourael,” Crescentia says. “Right? Blood-money rich rat bastard.”
That, in spite of everything, makes me laugh. A real laugh, not the bitter, harsh thing Elethior got out of me.
I rip my glasses off, scrub them clean, and shove them back on.
Crescentia turns to Orok. “Think Seb can handle a few rounds of Blast Off?”
He doesn’t get a chance to answer. I groan, head thrown back, it’s damn near pornographic. “Gods yes.”
Blast Off is a rawball training game Orok complains about doing every few weeks. It involves a fire-blasting machine, and the only way to shut it down is to get it to burn to a certain temperature which, for wizards, means one gloriously destructive and explosive spell: fireball.
With my head still thrown back, I turn my groan into a mewl of unease. “Wait. Are you asking me togo raw,thenblast a loadwith you?”
I tip a cheesy grin at Orok and Crescentia.
They share a long-suffering look.
Orok holds up a nonexistent watch on his wrist. “You went almost half an hour hanging around my teammates without making a rawball joke. I’m pretty proud.”
