Or maybe I just failed that badly, Riya thought as the thick, cloying smell of chocolate and pistachio wafted through the air, making her stomach lurch. It reminded her of Kian’s sickeningly sweet smile.
“But that’s not the most pressing issue right now,” said Mel suddenly, reigniting with energy. “Youneed to explain what it is I saw because my brainliterallycannot comprehend it! And don’t you dare spare any details because I swear toGod, Riya, you tell stories like mydad.”
Riya sat on her bed, rubbing at the knot forming between her brows. “There’s nothing to tell,” she muttered. The lie left an ache in her chest.
Lying, hiding her feelings from her family—she’d learned to live with that. But lying to Mel, whose default setting was always 100 percent honesty, felt different.
“Nothing totell?!” Mel shrieked. “RiRi, he gave you abouquet. The boy’s in loooove!”
Riya squeezed her eyes shut.Not real. Not real. Not real.
There was a pause. Then Mel continued more hesitantly: “. . . Okay, I have to ask,” she said. “You know, since the timing of it is pretty wild—do you think this could be some side effect of the spell? Like, I don’t know, some magicalbacklash or misfire or something? What if the spell hit the wrong target and—”
Riya froze.
“W-what? No!” she blurted quickly. Too quickly. “That would be absurd. I mean, magic is messy, but that would be—” Her voice cracked. “That would be next level.”
Mel was silent for another beat.
“...Okay,” she said finally, her voice light but laced with something else. “You’re right. That would totally be next level.”
Riya swallowed, trying not to wince. She hated the distance in Mel’s voice, but she had to push past it—had to fix what she’d done to Kian before she could admit anything to anyone.
She cleared her throat. “Actually, out of curiosity, could you—could you tell me what you know about Kian?” she asked. “So I can, you know, figure out how to deal with him.”
Mel scoffed, thankfully taking the bait. “No one knowsanythingabout Kian Kho. He’s rarely at school, and if heis, he keeps to himself. I’ve heard... rumors, though.”
Riya felt a prickle down her spine. “What kind of rumors?”
“Not good ones, I’ll tell you that.” Mel hesitated. “Some kid—Jake Townsend?—claimed Kian jumped him in the field behind school for no reason, end of middle school. Broke Jake’s wrist; he had to stop playing ice hockey for a while. Kian got suspended.”
The world spun. Riya’s grip on her phone tightened, her fingers going numb.
Jake Townsend.
One of the three boys from the Incident, whose face still went paper-white whenever he saw her in the hallway, even if he no longer rememberedwhy.
She forced herself to listen as Mel continued, but her thoughts had already unraveled, caught in the snare of memory:
A younger her, telling an uninterested Mr. Davis, the recess supervisor, what she’d seen.
Jake and his friends were hurting someone, I saw it. You have to do something—
I will, he’d promised. He never did.
A younger her, a week later, flipping through notes from her lessons with Sirahkhala. If no one else was going to stop them, she would. Not with a love spell, but emotion magic—turning their guilt up tenfold.
A younger her, seeing Jake the next day, gray and hollow-eyed, twitching at every bell, retching on the blacktop. He looked up at Riya.You—I saw you in my nightmare. What did you do to me? You monster. You’re a monster!
She hadn’t meant to hurt them. Only scare them into stopping. But she’d pushed the dial too far, too fast. She hadn’t been ready, Sirahkhalahad told her afterward—when she unbound Riya’s mistake and, in the unbinding, blurred the edges of the boys’ memories.
After that, Riya kept her distance from magic—kepteverything under control—so she’d never become a monster again.
Until now.
She took a slow, measured breath. “Go on.”
Mel obliged, blissfully unaware. “So Kian gets suspended, right? Then he starts high school the next year with a shaved head, stops talking to anyone. Some days, he doesn’t come to school at all. And when he does, the counselor’s office calls him in. People say he has anger issues—he’s, like, a human matchstick of a boy—but I don’t know. That’s not my place to say. Although I guess hedidbreak my mousetrap car.”
