But I couldn’t leave. I stayed, scrolling through my transmitter and reading every past message from him, the last one I sentWaiting To Be Deliveredas of 4:35 a.m.
The silence and waiting was high school graduation all over again. I hadn’t wanted to go, but Gray said I had to. He said he’d come. So I went, only because he insisted he’d be there to clap for me. I sat in a cheap folding chair on a squeaky gym floor, squeezed between two people talking around me, wearing a stifling, polyester gown I’d paid eighty-five dollars for. The bleachers filled with smiling faces. Minutes went by. Then aquarter of an hour. Then a half hour. Every time the gym door swung open, I thought — imagined — it was him. But when they called my name, no one cheered. The next time I saw Gray, he had a girlfriend, or so I found out when I ran into him sitting outside with Lion.
Leland? I had twenty days of messages from him.At the palace. Be back for dinner. Errands in the city. What do you need?He replied to every message from me as soon as he could. He didn’t run away. He didn’t disappear. But now it had been hours, and I still hadn’t heard from him. It no longer felt like graduation. It felt like he was gone.
* * *
Mid-afternoon, Case messaged.
Case Hammond:Hey. Have you seen Lee?
Ember Blackburn:No. Have you?
Case Hammond:Not recently. We were supposed to do something this morning. Will you message me if you see him?
Ember Blackburn:Sure.
Ember Blackburn:Actually. Wait one second. I think I just thought of a way to find out where he is.
By the time I hit send, I was halfway to the library and striding toward Loree with a full orchestra of hope strumming in my chest. Her gift was finding people. Surely,sheshould be able to locate him.
I knew hope was bad. Over the years, I’d learned to dull my senses, quash my expectations. But I’d never been good at that when it concerned Leland. So I approached Loree on eager flapping wings, fully unprepared for crashing.
She closed her eyes for a minute to look for him, and when her eyes reopened, she shook her head. I asked her to try again, and she did, but her head was still shaking. Her red lips drooped in afrown.
I looked at my reflection in the glass top of the circulation desk. Deep, black circles marred my under eyes, the result of waking up too early after being violently thrown from the Lucid Dream. And from my reluctance to blink ever since finding Leland’s empty bed.
Loree laid her hand over mine, and I internally recoiled. The gesture wasn’t comforting. It only reminded me her gift for finding people didn’t work.
“I’m sure he’s only in another realm,” she said, gently lifting her hand as my fingers inched out from under hers.
“What if he isn’t?” I asked. “What are . . . ?” I took a steadying breath. “Are there any other reasons you wouldn’t be able to find him?”
Loree’s face, so full of optimism on any other day, currently held no light in it, the answer was written there in her dim and sorrowful eyes.
I couldn’t lie to a corpse, because gifts only worked on the living. Which meant, if Leland wasn’t in another realm, he was dead.
“He’s an Aspirant, dear,” she said. “It would make the most sense, if you really think about alllll that’s been happening lately, for him to be with all the others in the Shadowrealm.”
Leland. In the Shadowrealm.
Some part of me knew it was the reasonable explanation. A louder part of me remembered the blood. It was so much blood,toomuch blood. Even as strong and tall as he was, if his injuries last night were real, the amount of blood he’d lost wasn’t survivable. It just wasn’t.
“Go be with your friends,” Loree said. “I’ll keep trying.”
She guided me to the edge of the library as my chest was collapsing. I had no idea what to do. Numbly, I stumbled back to my room and retreated behind my bed curtains. I stared atthe ridges in the ceiling and thought about the time Nova’s tail got crushed in the door, and Skye screamed from a place I didn’t know a body had. What Skye felt then, it might’ve been gentler than the pain of my lungs caving in. Pain so overwhelming I couldn’t even scream for him. My Counterpart was missing, and it was my fault. Icausedit.
My transmitter vibrated.
Case Hammond:Been a second. You find him?
Ember Blackburn:No.
Case Hammond:He’s been preparing for this . . .
Ember Blackburn:No.
Case Hammond:So you don’t want to read the letter he left?
