We went back to not looking at each other, looking upward instead. “I thought I did. When he was around, he was the one thing that could always make me happy, but most of the time — ” I blew out a breath. “He wasn’t around. I just wanted to be good enough for him. I thought, in time, if I did everything right, he’d realize I was. But he never did.”
Leland ran his thumb over mine, gentle strokes that made my heart skip several beats. “He realized it.”
My cheeks heated. I wasn’t sure I heard him right, until his gaze traveled down the length of my body like he was trying to burn a hole through my clothes, and he drew in a tight breath and turned away before I could lose control and do something stupid.
Abruptly, I released his hand. Lelanddid notlook at me like that. He didn’t say those kinds of things. Not to me, at least.
I sat up. “Are you Uninhibited?”
“Nope,” said Leland, his tone flat, his eyes distant.
“Then . . . drunk?”
“No.” He sat back on his elbows. Under the starlight, his face was half in shadow, his eyes glazing over with a dullness as he turned to look at me. “I’m immune to Uninhibitor. I don’t get drunk. I said what I said because it’s the truth.”
“Oh.” My forehead wrinkled in disbelief, just as his arm looped around my waist and pulled me down with him.
Our chests were millimeters apart. Our thighs were touching. I twisted my hands in my lap, not breathing.
Breathe, Ember.This is for practical purposes. He has to protect you. He doesn’t want you etherizing.
“Are you doing math?” he asked.
“No, I . . .”need to change the subject.I blinked to clear the feel of his arms muscling me down to the daybed from my head. It didn’t work as well as I needed it to, though, my heart beating harder than it did after an hour of running. “Why did I need a Shield?” I asked, not meeting his gaze. “Is that how you got rid of my flu?”
Leland hesitated so long I had to look at him to make sure he’d heard me.
After a minute, he answered, scanning my eyes the entire time he spoke. “Do you still want to know if . . .” He ran a hand through his hair. “It has to do with Helen,” he said quietly. “Do you still want me to tell you?”
“Helen?” I fumbled with the flask at my side. How many times had I been asked for the medical history on my mother’s side without knowing the answer? Was the phantom flu part of it? A hereditary illness, some witch thing she’d passed down?
“Your nightmare,” Leland said. “It’s a mental magic spellcalled Dream Interference. After you fall asleep, she puts an emotion in your head, probably fear. Your brain fills in the rest and makes you dream about it. Messing with brains is a sensitive area. That’s why you’re getting flu and migraine symptoms. Dream Interference is one of those spells you can’t cast if someone is already casting something on your intended target, so my Shield blocked her from casting it on you.”
I sat with that for a minute. Helen was making me sick?
I wished I could say I was more surprised, but this was also the woman who wore the Ring of Greatest Fear. The most surprising part was that she’d spend any portion of her spell count on me. That, and that this was my first time hearing about mental magic’s side effects. I’d read her text on mental magic. That text, in particular, I’d read more than all the others. Even if I hadn’t picked it up since I was thirteen, it had been just as long since I read Hector Ambrosia’s text, and I’d easily remembered what elemental magic did. The arousing nature of it. If the mental magic text said anything about symptoms, I was sure I would have remembered.
“But I know about mental magic,” I said. “Helen sent Ash a text on it. There was nothing in it about flus or migraines.”
“Were pages missing?” An edge in his tone implied he knew the answer even before I nodded at him.
I thought it was just old . . .
I didn’t know why it had never occurred to me. Helen didn’t send those texts to educate us; she sent them to control how we were educated.
“You knew at the Blacklight.” My voice drifted off to the mountain cliffs. “You Shielded me then.”
“I didn’t know.” His fingers tapped in anger. “I only knew you weren’t sleeping. I’ve been on the receiving end of Helen’s mental magic before and didn’t feel a damn thing. She’s good enough to slip in and out undetected. She’s been doing thisintentionally.”
“Leland?” Trying to understand Helen was like having my head unscrewed from my neck and slapped back on dented, scrambled, and missing pieces. “You haven’t said anything about my forehead.” I lifted my fringe for him to stare at the ugly blemish. “No lecture? No ‘this is you staying out of trouble?’ ”
“You know how I feel about it,” he said. He turned his eyes to the sky, and that was the end of it.
I let my bangs fall, somewhat regretfully, because that had been my plan to shift the conversation away from Helen. But I think Leland knew that.
I worked on calming down, waiting for it to subside — the ache in my chest that happened every time I spent too long thinking about her.
A warm gust blew through the patio and flapped the folded umbrellas. I squinted from the dust in my eyes, and Leland propped up on his side for me to lean into him and use him like a shield. We stayed like that even after the air calmed, my head toward his chest, eyes pointed upward and watching the stars. Until the stunning view stopped being so captivating, and my eyes drifted to his forearm.
