“Did he listen?” I put my chin on my knee, trying to hide the chattering of my teeth.
“He teleported,” Leland said, sighing. “Ven’s gifts — teleporting across dimensions. Killing people. They’re not conventional. I keep circling around what I saw in the Memory Share we did at the temple. Helen shouting he’s not a Familiar. I don’t know if she was lying or if she knows, but Ven shouldn’t be able to do the things he does. I’m glad I got to see him again, but . . . I’m more glad Dashell removed him before he could hurt you or anyone else.”
I gave Leland a look.
Ven’s gift was killing people?
Either Ven really wasn’t Leland’s Familiar or Leland couldn’t see himself the way I did. Leland had said it himself:Familiars fill in the gaps an Allwitch is missing. Leland kept trying to tell me he wasn’t nice, but he was. He was. He was.
“What?” Leland asked.
“Saying nothing.”
“In that case — ” He got up and opened the middle drawer of his dresser. “I’m running out to get food and find out what’s going on with the climate control. Pick whatever you want from my dresser.” My lips parted in protest, but Leland said, “Your lips” — his eyes lingered there — “are blue. The way you’re staring at my sweaters has me concerned for them. Yourdress,while it might be my favorite thing I’ve ever seen you in, hasn’t managed to convince me it’s not actually a shirt, plus it leaves your wrists exposed.”
I sort of floated to his dresser after he left, remembering his breath on my ear, the back and forth, the compliments and long looks. We were flirting. Well, he was; I was embarrassing myself. Buthewas definitely flirting, and I wanted to act on it, or at least part of me did. The other part was still recovering from Gray Fallsdown. Not in terms of feelings. Feelings for him were dead. But I didn’t trust myself.
From the bottom of his drawer, I picked a gray Creation Academy sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants, and while he was still gone, I briefly slipped upstairs to use the third-years’ washroom, then snuck back into Leland’s room and headed straight for the chaise part of his couch and curled up. He found me there when he returned ten minutes later, changed into sweats, his dress shoes switched out for running ones. In one hand, he held two Sunset Moonales. A plate of grilled cheeses was in his other.
“Belinda paid an Elemental to make it ‘cuddly cold’ in here,” he said, slightly annoyed, and set our food and drinks down on the walnut coffee table. It didn’t seem wise to acknowledgewhyshe took it upon herself to do that, or if cuddling was an option worth resorting to. “I’ll fix it after you go to bed,” he sighed. “Or if we start to die. Moonales are nonalcoholic.”
Had my frozen ab muscles been able to relax, I would have sighed at the sight of the crisp, buttered toast, the American cheese perfectly melting the two slices together. Grilled cheese wasn’t one of the French words on Belinda’s five-course menu, but it was my comfort food, and I took my first bite without questioning it.
We ate slowly, and I finally started to relax as we talked about what really happened the night he claimed to hit Farrah Prolix,and eventually, came back around to the topic of me being a Dark Witch.
I still hated the idea, but Leland said the allergy was serious, and my other option was not selecting anything, which would kill him and result in me deteriorating like Sabrina.
“I don’t want to select dark magic,” I vented. “Jaxan,” I huffed out as the first reason. “I hate Dark Deals. I hate Death Bonds.” I shook my head up at his ceiling. “I don’t want to start over in a new jurisdiction. In Gnarlton?”
I was warmer in his sweatshirt, but we’d somehow crept closer to each other. We were side-by-side on the lounge side of the couch, with our legs touching under soft blankets. I kept my hands where he could see them, flat on top of a silky layer of chenille, so I wouldn’t accidentally brush his lap.
“It grows on you,” he said.
Absently, I reached for my neck. “Gnarlton?”
“Yes . . .” His eyes assessed why I was acting weird. “But I meant dark magic, and you, specifically. I get Visions sometimes. There’s one where you’re a Dark Witch. You look happy in it.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We both do.”
“You never told me this.”
“Didn’t want you asking to see it.”
Sharing memories was intimate, and I figured that was why he didn’t want to. We’d done it before, gone forehead-to-forehead in the Allwitch temple, but under those conditions any intimate feelings that might have arisen from the closeness required for Memory Sharing were impossible.
“But if it’smyfuture . . .” I said.
I felt him tense.
“If you asked to see it, I would show it to you,” he said, the words contradicting the rest of his demeanor, which was stiff, urging caution. “There are risks. Showing a person their future can cause them to act in ways preventing them from ever gettingto it. I don’t want that. I want this future for us. Our other fates — they’re not as good. So I can show you. And I can tell you your reaction to it tomorrow. But if you want to see it, afterward, you’ll have to agree to let me extract the memory from you.”
“I want to see it,” I said.
Leland took my hand, and his fingers lightly scraped down the outside curve of my thumb. “Before we do this,” he said slowly, still caressing. “I need to tell you what you’re going to see in the Vision so I know you’re okay with it.”
I nodded and grew increasingly concerned as he proceeded to tell me, in no uncertain terms, what I was about to see in the exact order I was going to see it. My skin tingled, and I was embarrassed, but my mind was unchanged.
“Still want to do this?” he asked.
“Yes,” I croaked.
