The most spectacular feature, though, was in the center of the room.
They called itWorldglass,which had been a joint creation by Velra and Ketheron.
It was a magical experiential immersion chamber. It sat on a circular obsidian platform with purple and gold vertical lightin a sort of mist-like form streaming upward. And when you stepped inside, you could visit loads of landmarks and locations throughout the supernatural world without actually being physically present. It had intense sensory immersion, where it looked, smelled, and even felt like real places. It had been made as a really cool way for Win to experience the world without actually, you know, experiencing it in-person. It was both sweet and fucking sad.
I ground my jaw and blinked back to my video game, grunting when my character took a massive hit yet again because my mind kept wandering.
“Z.”
I jolted, a gasp escaping me.
I swung my head to see the last person I’d expected to be walking in.
“Win,” I breathed.
He swept a wave of his magic around the immediate area. It was his amber magic, but with a film of his frost encompassing it. “They can’t sense this combination,” he said, off my confused look.
“They? Your family?”
He nodded, but didn’t speak more to it.
I tossed my controller down on the carved wooden coffee table in front of me as he walked over, stumbling and wavering in his step.
I moved to get up to help him, but he held up his hand.
It wasn’t only his unsteadiness on his feet that was concerning.
It was that he’d just put up some sort of very specific spell to keep his family from knowing he’d just woken up.
And he was shuddering while dressed in navy pajama pants and two robes—one cobalt-blue, the other a soft white.
He couldn’t actually feel environmental or physiological cold like that, so it was either something presenting like physical cold, or he’d put all that on to comfort himself from the trauma of the kidnapping. Kind of like when people in distress shivered but not from anything actually temperature-related.
He rounded the couch, slapping his hand to the top a couple of times for support before he slumped down right beside me.
I turned to face him. “Win? Maybe you should—”
“Is everyone okay?”
“What?”
“I know my family. And the three of you. The lines that might’ve been crossed to find me, the dangerous things that might—are you all okay?”
“We’re fine. Everyone is. It’s all okay. No dangerous lines were crossed either. It was handled well. Pretty fucking sanely, considering.”
A trembling breath escaped him, and he rested his head back against the cozy couch.
He craned his neck a little to look at me and had me hella surprised when he raked his gaze over my pink zebra-print boxer briefs and then my inked arms on display with me only wearing a black tank. He was eye-fucking me. Now. After what he’d just been through. Yeah, this wasn’t a good sign. At all.
Before I could speak to it, his eyes flicked back to my face and he said, “I felt Vax and Evira’s magic in the house. They’re here sleeping over like you?”
“That’s right.”
I wanted to ask him what had happened with Ruxnoth, what had been done to him. I needed to know. How could I act in the right way without that? What if I said or did something that made things worse for him? But the fact he’d cut me off when he’d first walked in, and even erected a spell to ensure nobodyoutside this room would clock him being awake made it clear he was avoiding doing that. Like, actively. At least for right now.
He sidled closer and turned into me so he was pushing right up against me, all that softness from his robe and fuzzy pajama pants brushing against my bare legs and arms, and slamming all my focus to the sensation of it.
“Winter?” I uttered, my voice coming out kind of raspy.
