Leland’s knuckles went white on his desk. “No, it isn’t. Bondscanbe like this. The fact that you don’t have spellcasting magic yet certainly adds to it. But bonds have nothing to do with physical attraction. It’s amagicalpairing. Doesn’t have to be a physical one. There are plenty of Counterparts who don’t date. Possibly, because we’re around each other so much, things have gotten more intense. But this isn’t only about magic.”
I couldn’t hide my shock. If it wasn’t the bond, that meant . . .
Was he saying these were hisrealfeelings? Were thesemyreal feelings?
“For both of us?” I asked.
“Ember,” he said, and put his head in his hands.
“Forget it,” I said quickly. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get the cuffs from you later.”
Leland shook his head. “We need to do it now. Maybe just” — he went to his dresser and pulled out his beige sweatshirt — “put this on and try not to move.”
The brush of his fingers against mine as he handed me the sweatshirt was excruciating, but I resisted the urge to look up at him and stepped toward his door, putting on the sweatshirt.
While he went back to his desk to make the cuffs, I read the spines on the texts in his room.Teaching Exceptional Students, An Emissary’s Account of the Human Realm, Quantum Calculations, The Biography of Leda Blackburn.
I stared at a cactus in a terracotta planter, then counted the holes in the leather belt balled up on his dresser. And after running out of ways to avoid looking at him, or maybe just running out of willpower, I looked up and saw he was done casting.
The new cuffs were smaller than the first pair, delicate iron bracelets perfectly sized to my wrists. He’d even dusted them in a coating of 22-karat gold. They were beautiful, but they must have taken all his spells. He looked exhausted.
He staggered back against his desk, shoulders slumping, his hand clumsily grasping for something to hold. “I’m — have to . . . sleep.” His eyes closed.
“Standing?” I asked.
No response.
I walked over to him to help him to bed, and he woke up enough to make it the twenty feet across his room before falling flat on top of his covers, but he was still in his jeans and T-shirt and shoes. I went down to the end of his bed to help him get his shoes off.
Leland flinched.
“No.” He drew his legs in close and mumbled, “Asleep with them on.”
I was pretty sure he was unconscious and talking in a dream, but with his legs folded up where they were, I would’ve had to crawl across his bed to reach them, so I let him be.
After, in the privacy of my room, I slipped off the cuffs to admire them up close and discovered something. I glanced at Nova, wondering what he’d meant by the phrase he’d engraved on the interior.
There’s no one worth burning for.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
EMBER
The farthest a Quantum Witch can hope to go is in-realm, and even then, there are limits.
— Dashell Eldridge, Echelon to the
School of Quantum Magic
The floaty aftereffect of being in Leland’s presence was short-lived. Not long after leaving him, guilt returned to swallow me, along with the reminder of what I now understood about my phantom flu — Helen was making me sick. I wanted to close my eyes and go somewhere else to escape the weight of it, but slipping into a daydream wasn’t an option with Skye in our room.
I threw off my covers and went to the library. Time for another round of trying to figure out what was so wrong with me that Helen needed to stay awake all night to punish me in my dreams.
Loree, standing behind the circulation desk, had the same earnest look on her face that Dad got after I’d return from a run. I stopped by her desk to say hello, knowing if I didn’t, she’d come up with a reason to reorganize the entire mental magic section the second I started to look at it.
Eventually, we came around to the point of what texts I waslooking for, but I couldn’t ask her outright what I was really wondering.How had Helen gotten in my head in the human realm?My phantom flu had started eight months ago, after my birthday, while Helen was still in Everden. I asked Loree if she knew any texts on spells that worked between realms.
