“It wasn’t us you had to prove yourself to.” She crosses one leg over another. “It wasyou.”
I shake my head. “No. That’s not what this was about.”Inever lured myself into a locked park at night or asked for the Space Needle to be shut down or insisted on digging up a cemetery in the middle of nowhere.
“Sure it was,” she says casually, taking up the magazine where Brennan deposited it and stacking it neatly with the others on the ottoman. “Look at you, how you’ve changed. Last night you defended yourself with a fireball you conjured from nothing but willpower. You stood up to the twins.” She cocks a brow at this. “No easy feat. You danced until your feet wouldn’t hold you up any longer and slept beside a beautiful sylvan nymph in a bed dressed in silks. You are finally beginning to live the life you deserve. That isn’t for my sake or benefit, Jude. It’s for yours.”
I want to argue, but somehow she’s twisted the story, distortedmy reality, so that I can’t quite pick out which thread to pull to fix it. Instead, I ask, “So, we canalldo this?”
She smiles. “If by ‘this’ you mean…” The fire in the fireplace roars suddenly and sends up a trail of sparks.
“What else can you do?” I ask her, but it’s Brennan who responds.
He steps out from around the island as the magazines Arla just stacked neatly leap from the ottoman, flying across the room to smack against the windows at dizzying speed, where they fall in a heap of pages on the floor.
“You’ve made your point,” she says dryly, twirling a finger, and the magazines restack themselves where they fell.
“Can everybody do it?” I ask as Brennan makes himself comfortable on one of the barstools.
“Everybody can dosomething,” she says, but there’s a falter in her voice, nearly imperceptible, that makes me wonder.
“But Arla can do it all,” Brennan finishes, cracking a sly smile. Again, beneath the words, an acrid connotation lingers.
“Brennan has been with me the longest,” she says, ignoring his well-dressed jab, “so his skills as a catalyst are naturally the most developed next to mine.”
“Acatalyst?”
“Telekinesis,” he clarifies. “Moving things without touching them.”
“Twig and Rock have come a long way in their respective abilities as well,” Arla praises. “As a boy, Rock learned to torture the bullies who hounded him with terrible illusions until they wet themselves in fear.”
“Dream spinner,” I repeat from last night, more than a little alarmed by his history.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s right. And Twig is a night bearer. She learned to cloak herself in shadows when she didn’t want to be beaten by her parents anymore,” Arla continues.
I feel a twinge of sympathy for the scary pair. Butonlya twinge. “And Cadence?” I ask, curious about the woman I stillhaven’t been properly introduced to but have already shared a bed with.
“Cadence is Cadence,” Arla says with an unimpressed shrug. “She came to me after Brennan. She’s an oracle, but she’s a little…irregular.”
“She’s psychic?”
Brennan nods.
“What do you mean by irregular?” I ask Arla.
“The rest of us have improved in our abilities since coming together,” Brennan explains. “But Cadence seems to get more jumbled by the day.”
“You’ll see,” Arla says without volunteering anything else.
As if on cue, Cadence emerges from the bedroom sans headphones, a satin sheet wrapped around her ample body. “Someone talking about me?”
Brennan walks over and offers her a cup of ristretto, which she gladly accepts. “We were just filling Jude in on our little family.”
“Could you hear us from the bedroom?” I ask, thinking this place is much too large for sound to carry that far.
“No,” she says. “Not audibly. But I felt the tickle.”
I cock my head over a shoulder. “Thetickle?”
“Sometimes Cadence picks up psychic information in unusual ways,” Arla explains.
