It felt good to hold her. To celebrate the fact that I had battled not only a pain-gifted mega-sol, but also a magical room. A magical damnroom!Hugging my almost-sister seemed like the best way to celebrate, and she didn’t seem to mind. Until she realised that I was crying.
“What did they do to you?” She jerked back, pressing a palm to my cheek, her murderous eyes flicking over my shoulder.
“Happy tears, that’s all,” I choked out, mostly lying. Her gaze narrowed, clearly disbelieving, but I started to move past her. “I need to find the Abcurses. This pain is killing me, and I don’t mean that in the way I usually mean it, because I’m pretty sure it’sactuallykilling me.”
I let my body drag me in the right direction, and Emmy trailed behind, occasionally tossing a glare to whomever dared to get in our way.
“Are you skipping some kind of cleaning duty or something right now?” I asked her, concerned. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she would drop everything if she thought I was in danger, but I didn’t want her to jeopardise her future just because I seemed to have a gift for trouble.
“No, I finished everything early, and then I came looking for …watch out!”she suddenly exclaimed, but it was too late.
I smacked into another body and the sounds of silver serving dishes and cutlery clattering against the stone made me wince.
“Willa?” a familiar voice questioned, before hands steadied me.
“Oh, hey, Atti.” I crouched down, helping him gather up his stuff … except that I wasn’t really helping, because he wasn’t doinganything. He was staring at Emmy with the weirdest look on his face.
“Thanks for coming to get me earlier,” Emmy said softly, returning his weird look with a weird look of her own.
What the hell? When did that happen?
“Did you get to the arena in time?” he asked, stepping around the fallen crap that I was still trying to gather, and looking down at her, the absolute picture of gentlemanly concern.
Maybe I should just leave all of his stuff and give them a bit of privacy, except … well, it was kind of hard to look away. Besides, I was right there. Right in front of him. Sosheobviouslygot to the arena on time. Seriously.
My chest throbbed again, distracting me from Emmy’s answer. I dropped the platter I had been holding, glancing at Emmy over Atti’s shoulder. Emmy and Atti.Hah. Even their names rhymed. That was so lame. And cute. I clearly had mixed feelings about it. Emmy wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were stuck on his, pink rising in her cheeks. I quickly turned, hurrying down the hall in the direction of the five idiots who had accidently stolen my life-force.
Fifteen
Istormed backthrough the castle like some kind of wild buckhorn, with the huge, cumbersome antlers that topped their deer-like heads. Except that my antlers were my arms, and they kept swinging out and accidently whacking all kinds of people and things. If I didn’t already know it to be impossible, I would have said that my clumsy-curse had suddenly gotten a whole lot worse, but that really was impossible, because it was already about as bad as clumsy-curses got.
After another run-in with a dweller, I found myself covered insomekind of sudsy water. I didn’t even want to know what they were using that water to clean. I just didn’t. I disentangled myself from the ground and the bucket and the girl, taking off at a run again, barely sparing her an apology. It was lucky that night seemed to have fallen, and so all the sacred little sols were tucked up in their sacred little beds.
By the time I crashed into the circular common area that headed their dorm level, my chest was heaving, and the water had evaporated a little bit, leaving my fresh—albeit already ripped from Yael’s manhandling—shirt all uncomfortably squishy and soapy. The boys were all standing around the common area, the only sols still out-and-about on their floor. They didn’t turn when I clamoured into the room. They were all facing inward. Facingsomeone. I frowned, creeping around to the side, shock slowly dropping through me as the female became visible.
It was me.
Except it sure ashellwasn’t! Because I was standing right where I was standing, and not over there!
“What are you trying to say?” Rome growled, taking a threatening step toward the pretend-Willa, who was even wearing the same clothes as me, sans soap.
“I have to leave,” Fake Willa replied, her voice deeper than I had expected. Almost husky. I supposed I sounded different when I wasn’t hearing the words as I spoke them. “Iwantto leave,” she added.
“Like hell you’re leaving.” Coen’s scowl was dark, a shadow passing over his face.
Fake Willa swallowed, her hands trembling behind her back as she eased a few steps away from him. Those idiots! They should have known that the girl wasn’t me. When did I tremble? Okay, maybe when one of them touched me for too long, or when Rau turned up … or those few other times that I had almost died … butnot the point. I rarely trembled like a scared child.
And fake Willa was looking a hell of a lot like a scared little girl, with that wild mop of curls surrounding a face that was dominated by the tawny pools of her eyes. I kind of wanted to punch her in the face.
“What the hell did you say to her?” Siret demanded, bearing down on Yael, who immediately decided to do a little bearing-down himself. Okay, now I understood why this was taking them so long to get. Men were stupid. Too much testosterone had fried their brains and they were completely useless to me.
Although, surprisingly, Yael halted the attack, managing to use his mouth instead of his fists. “I didn’t say anything. She just … decided this, all of sudden. We were having dinner, everything was fine—I mean, a few sols tried to start some shit, but I headed them off, and then I took her for a walk, because I knew you guys needed to cool off for a bit. Then she came out with this nonsense …” he cut a glare to Fake Willa. “I brought her straight here. Straight to you guys.”
This was getting weird. Too weird for me to stand back and watch. I marched up, tapping Aros’s back. He turned around, his golden eyes passing right over me as though he didn’t see me. His eyes narrowed, for a moment, and then he was facing Fake Willa again.
What. The. Hell.
I tried again, and this time he swung around with a scowl, his golden eyes darting all around the room as if he was trying to discern what had just happened. I jumped up and down in front of him, waving my hands. No reaction. I pulled up the hem of my clean-once-upon-a-time shirt, outright flashing him.
