She hugged him back. “Of course we did,” she said, her voice wavering. “Didn’t doubt it for a second.”
When Felix let go, she punched him in the shoulder, hard.
“You were just supposed to close the thing,” she shouted, “not go gallivanting around inside it! Can you ever just stick to thebleedin’ plan? You should’ve seen the state of ya. I thought you were dead, Felix.”
He smiled, and a laugh tumbled out—an unhinged sound bordering on hysteria.
He wasn’t dying today. The words, usually a stubborn, self-imposed command, now struck him as a surprising revelation. After all that, they were still breathing.
He glanced back at August. The young guard was kneeling before him, uncomfortably close. Felix went still, the smile falling away. The guard’s face was set with the kind of dangerous determination Felix knew all too well.
He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off any of them.
He clenched his fists and called his magic.
This wasn’t over.
August sat on the cold ground, legs drawn in, head tipped back to the sky. The day was dreary and grey, but the darkness of the tear was gone, pulled back into a simple, harmless doorway.
He’d done it—though he still couldn’t grasp how.
What now? Where did he go from here?
“Auggie,” Lottie said, his name spoken like a warning.
He lowered his gaze, expecting to find her, but instead found Sebastian kneeling in front of him, close enough to touch.
Startled, August recoiled.
A gentle, boyish smile softened the guard’s angled features. August had forgotten how young he was. He couldn’t have been much older than Felix.
Sebastian removed his helmet and set it aside, and August stared in shock at the dark blue rings in his emerald eyes.
“You’re a listener.” The words sounded all wrong. His mother’s personal guard couldn’t be a wielder. She’d never allow that. Did she know? How could she not?
Sebastian ignored the comment. “I have something for you,” he said softly. “A gift from your mother.”
August instinctively leaned away. “I want nothing to do with my mother.”
“You will.”
“I don’t trust him,” Lottie said beside him. “I don’t trust any of this.”
Neither did he. Sebastian had rarely spoken more than two words to August. Why would his mother choose to sendhim? And why did she keep a listener as her personal guard?
“Before we proceed with the binding,” Sebastian went on, “it’s important you remember your training.”
August scowled, the words tangling up in his head. “What training?”
He thought of the strange memory. His mother and the woman and the body on the ground.
Sebastian didn’t reply. Instead, he pressed his fingers against August’s temples.
The torrent hit before August could react, sudden and violent, like a storm ripping through his mind. Walls collapsed, and charcoal memories sharpened into painful focus. A rush of images surged forward all at once—disorienting, overwhelming. He was drowning.
The physician, with his wiry arms and cruel smile. The cold steel of a blade slicing into August’s arms, his chest, his face. Torture disguised as science—the man watching, taking notes as August healed on the other side of the veil.
His tutor, with her deceptively kind features and her comforting lies. Ruby. He remembered her now. The endless sessions, the grueling jumps through the veil, the begging to stop, to go back to Lottie, to rest.
