LIBBY
LIBBY SLAMMED THE APARTMENT DOOR SHUT, turning to find Ezra waiting expectantly in the living room behind her.
The unfortunate thing about Manhattan apartments was the incredible lack of having any other space to be. That,
and thin walls. Not being overheard by someone was
probably never going to be an option so long as she lived in this city. She’d ruled out privacy the moment she signed the NYUMA student contract, which was a fact that moving in with her first year R.A. three years later had not improved.
Funny that.
“I take it you were listening,” Libby said gruffly, and Ezra slid one hand in his front pocket, buying time before his response.
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, Lib—”
She knew what was coming next. For one thing, it wasn’t as if she’d come home to the promise of s*x and chocolates or whatever. The fight had begun the moment she walked in the door, and two days later, it still hadn’t been resolved.
The fact that he needed her to beat the same dead horse
was starting to feel inhumane to both of them (and the horse).
“I already told you,” she sighed, cutting him off, “I’m not going to tell you anything, Ezra. I can’t.”
“Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” he replied, too sharply, and then he grimaced, recognizing the combative undertones in his own voice. “Look, I don’t want to fight about it again—”
“Then don’t.”
She paced away from the door, suddenly desperate for motion. He followed, ceaselessly orbiting her until she thought she might choke.
“I’m just worried about you, Libby.”
“Don’t be.” A softer tone would help, probably. Not that she had one to spare.
“What am I supposed to do? You come back after six months without warning and you can’t even tell me where you’ve been. Now you have people knocking on the door upsetting you, and you’re trying to… to what? Hide them from me?”
“Yes. Because this has nothing to do with you,” said Libby, still brusque with impatience. “I’ve always known you didn’t trust me, Ezra, not fully, but this is getting out of hand
—”
“This isn’t about trust, Libby. It’s about your safety.” This again. “If you’re in over your head somehow, or if you’ve gotten caught up in something—”
She tightened a fist. “So you think I’m stupid. Is that it?”
“Libby, don’t. You’re my girlfriend; you’re important to me. You, for better or worse, are my responsibility, and—”
“Ezra, listen to me carefully, because this is the last time I’ll say it.”
She took three steps to close the distance between them, slamming the book shut on the last argument she planned to have today.
“I am not,” Libby said flatly, “yours.”
She didn’t wait to see if he would argue. The look on his face suggested that whatever came next, she wasn’t going to enjoy it. She thought about packing a bag, summoning her things. She thought about screaming or crying or
making demands; making a mess, in general.
But in the end, it was all so exhausting she simply turned and pulled open the door, planning nothing beyond the
certainty of walking through it.
Immediately: a coat would have been a good idea. She shivered in the dark, glancing up the block toward Nico’s apartment. A thought, definitely, but if there was ever
anyone to be unsympathetic—or even sympathetic, but in an enormously unhelpful way—it would be Nico, who had loathed Ezra on sight.
Not to mention that if she went to Nico, she’d have to discuss the visitor she’d just received.
“Elizabeth Rhodes?” the woman had asked in her Bronx accent. If not for the expensive scarf tied around her natural hair, she might have looked like one of those campaigners who stopped people on the street to talk about the
environment or veganism, or possibly the hazards of imperiling their immortal souls. “If I could just have a moment of your time—”
Libby shivered and turned left, heading for the train station.
She wondered why they had not been warned that other organizations might come recruiting. Atlas had mentioned
the Forum’s existence, fine, but he’d left out that for two days of their initiation period, they would be vulnerable to interception.
Was it a trial of some sort, as the installment had been?
Was her loyalty being tested?
“Miss Rhodes, surely you’ve thought about the natural elitism of the Society’s mere existence,” the woman, Williams, had said. “No one else in your family is magically trained, are they? But I wonder,” Williams mused softly.
“Could the Society have saved your sister if they had ever shared what they had known?”
It was a question that Libby had asked herself hundreds of times before. In fact, for a time it had left her sleepless, particularly when she was first approached by NYUMA. The thoughts, torturous and destructive, were always the same: If she had only known more, or if she had just been trained sooner, or if someone had told her earlier…
But she already knew the answer. For years, she’d researched at length. “There is no cure for degenerative diseases,” she replied, with the confidence of someone possessing dismal, intimate knowledge of the fact.
Williams had arched a brow. “Isn’t there?”
It was a trap of some sort. Whether it was a test or not, it was certainly a trap. Someone was toying with her personal history, manipulating her with it, and Libby didn’t care for it. If there was one thing she’d learned from working alongside Callum, it was that feeling too much or too fully only meant she wasn’t thinking with her head.
It wasn’t the Society’s fault, Libby had argued in response, that capitalism prevented medeian healthcare from being available to mortals. If medeian methods were priced according to empathy, then yes, fine, perhaps one
could blame the research for existing privately—but it would have gone through both the mortal and medeian corporations first; it would have come at so inflated a cost that even if a cure existed, it would have bankrupted her
family to try and use.
“So your sister deserved to die, then?” asked Williams blankly.
Which was when Libby had slammed the door.
She had not spoken about Katherine to anyone in years.
She thought of her sister from time to time, but only distantly, as something she kept at arm’s length. As a measure of sanity, she had ruled out wondering whether something could have been done; in fact, she had already driven herself half mad considering it. The idea that a stranger might have suddenly brought everything to the surface felt a bit manipulative, and certainly unwelcome.
Was this the Society’s doing? They would know about Katherine Rhodes, whom Libby had called Kitty as a child,
and whom her parents had rightfully adored. Katherine, who had died at sixteen to Libby’s thirteen, wasted away in a hospital bed at the whims of a magicless body that slowly
killed her. The administrators at NYUMA, when asked, had told Libby her abilities had likely not come to fruition until after the stress of losing her sister had faded away.
Katherine, they said, had been ill for years, requiring most of the attention from her parents, and thus Libby would not have focused on her abilities even if she had noticed she
had them. It would take work to catch up, they said.
“Could I have saved my sister?” she asked, because survivor’s guilt was sharpest in retrospect.
“No,” they told her. “Nothing exists to reverse the effects of her illness, or even to slow it.”
It had taken Libby two years of manic research to prove them right, and then two more to finally lay thoughts of her sister to rest. She might not have managed it at all if not for Nico; “Oh, buck up, Rhodes, we’ve all got problems. Doesn’t mean you get to waste the time she never got,” was his take on the situation—confessed to him at the height of finals delirium, and clearly a massive mistake—at which point Libby had slapped him, and eventually Ezra had intervened. Nico was placed on probation and Libby told herself she would beat him in every class if it killed her.
She kissed Ezra for the first time that same night.
The Society would have known all that, minus the inconsequential details of her personal life. They would have known about Katherine, so maybe this was a test, but it wasn’t as if the circumstances of her origin story weren’t
easily discoverable information for anyone who wanted them. A late-blooming medeian with a dead sister? Not terribly complicated to put the pieces together, particularly for an organization with comparable resources. Either the Society knew precisely what to taunt her with in order to test her loyalty, or the Forum had wanted to give her a
compelling reason to doubt the Society.
Either way, there was only one place Libby currently wanted to be.
She passed through the doors to Grand Central and took the stairs, finding the medeian transports to take her back to London. It was technically too early to return—they’d all been told not to do so until tomorrow—but she had helped build their security, hadn’t she? Twice over. Nothing in the wards sufficiently defended against her entry; for all intents and purposes, it had been more of a polite request than a mandate in any official capacity.
She passed the entry rooms, heading for the reading room, but stopped at the sound of voices; a low wave of sound, meaning hushed tones. She frowned, listening closer for the particularities, and turned swiftly, making her way to the painted room.
Ah, so she had not been the only one to come running back, then.
Parisa and Tristan were on the floor of the painted room, drinking a bottle of something with their backs to the light of the crackling fire. Parisa, unfairly beautiful as always, had her head resting on Tristan’s lap, dark hair spilling over his thighs; the slit of her fashionable slip dress had been drawn up so high the full length of her slender leg was fully visible, nearly to her hip, and likewise, Tristan’s shirt had fallen open, left half-undone to reveal the curve of his chest below the shadow of his clavicle.
A languid smile was curled over his lips, though it was partially distorted by the bottle he drew up to them. He
swallowed with a laugh and Parisa reached blindly upwards, the tips of her fingers brushing his mouth.
It wasn’t as if Libby hadn’t already known that Parisa and Tristan were sleeping together. Well—she hadn’t known, exactly, but she wasn’t surprised to find evidence of it now. It wasn’t as if they had many options within the house, and if Nico had already made it plenty clear that Parisa was his first choice, was it any surprise she’d be Tristan’s, as well?
Libby thought for a moment of Tristan’s hand on her pulse and swallowed, shoving it aside.
It wasn’t as if she cared what they did. After all, she had a boyfriend.
A boyfriend she had recently fought with. One she would rather not see.
But…
But.
A boyfriend nonetheless.
“Well, don’t you look distressed,” remarked Parisa drily.
She drew herself upright, taking the bottle from Tristan’s hand. “Perhaps you ought to join us.”
Libby blinked, caught off guard. She hadn’t realized they’d seen her.
“I,” she began, and faltered. “This is… this is obviously private, so—”
“Have a drink, Rhodes.” Tristan’s voice was a low rumble, his eyes darkly amused. “You clearly need one.”
“We won’t bite,” added Parisa. “Unless you’re into that sort of thing, of course.”
Libby glanced over her shoulder, still compelled to leave for the reading room.
“I was just going to—”
“Whatever it is, it’ll still be there in the morning, Rhodes.
Sit.” Tristan beckoned her with his chin, gesturing to the spot next to him.
Libby hesitated, unsure whether this was her precise choice of company, but the idea of not being alone was…
tempting. And Tristan was right, whether he knew it or not. Driving herself mad all over again could be easily ventured anew tomorrow.
She stepped forward and Parisa smiled approvingly, reaching up to hand her the bottle. Libby collapsed on Tristan’s other side, taking a sip.
“Oof,” she said, wincing as it burned. “What is this?” “Brandy,” said Parisa. “With a few more fermented
spices.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning absinthe,” said Tristan. “It’s absinthe.”
“Oh.” Libby swallowed, already a little bowled over by the effect of her single sip.
“Let me guess,” Parisa sighed, reaching over Tristan to take the bottle from Libby. “You don’t drink much?”
“Not particularly,” Libby said.
Parisa drew the bottle back to her lips, which were
stained a dark red. The dress was a navy blue, almost black, and Libby instantly wished she had the requisite sophistication to pull it off.
“You can pull it off whenever you’d like,” remarked Parisa, chuckling into the bottle.
Libby felt her cheeks flush. “I just meant I could never wear anything so…” She coughed. “I just don’t do trends very well.”
Parisa leaned forward, handing the bottle back to Libby.
The strap of her dress slipped blithely from her shoulder, draping against her arm and floating over what Libby now realized necessitated the absence of a bra.
“I meant it literally,” Parisa said as Libby brought the bottle to her lips, and while Libby choked on her swallow, Tristan laughed.
“You must have gotten a visit from the Forum as well,” he said to Libby, who had only just recovered from an
eruption of absinthe-tainted coughs. “What deeply personal revelation did they make about you, then?”
“You tell me,” Libby said, taking another swig. The last
thing she wanted to be for this conversation was sober; she already felt juvenile and inept as it was.
“Well, it’s all very dull for us, unfortunately. My father’s a crime boss, same old, same old,” said Tristan, adding to Libby’s look of confusion, “Nasty piece of work. Adequate witch, though.”
“Is he?”
“You’ve never heard of Adrian Caine?” asked Tristan.
Libby shook her head, and Tristan’s smirk cracked slightly. “I’m joking. I didn’t expect you to run in London’s seedy
underbelly.”
“Is he like the Godfather?” asked Libby.
“A bit,” said Tristan. “Only less paternal.” He took the
bottle from her hand, not bothering to wait for her to release it before he took a long swig. “He’d love you,” he added after swallowing, shaking himself like a dog from the burn.
Libby glanced sideways at him, waiting to see if that was supposed to be an insult. Tristan met her glance, arching a brow in expectancy.
It didn’t seem to be.
“And I, of course, am a whore,” remarked Parisa, as Libby choked on her swallow once again. “I’m sure there’s a better word for it, but at present I can’t be bothered to think of
any.”
“An escort, perhaps?” asked Tristan.
“No, nothing so professional. More like an exceptionally
talented philanderess,” Parisa said. “It started shortly after I
finished school in Paris. No,” she amended, recounting it in her head, “I believe technically it began while I was in school, though it was only a hobby then. You know, like how the Olympics only celebrates the achievements of
amateurs.”
Libby left the follow-up questions to Tristan. “It started with a professor, I presume?”
“Yes, naturally. The academics are the most brutally deprived, or so they remain convinced. Really they’re all
equally obscene, only they live in such a slender fragment of reality they’d never come out of their offices to see who else was fucking.”
“Fucking you, you mean, or fucking in general?” “In general,” Parisa confirmed, “though also me.” Tristan chuckled. “And from there?”
“A French senator.”
“Quite a leap, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Politicians are the least discerning and the first to expire. But it’s always important to have one and get it out of one’s system.”
“Was it enjoyable, at least?”
“Not in the slightest. My briefest affair, and the one of which I am least fond.”
“Ah. And after the senator…?”
“An heir. Then his father. Then his sister. But I never liked the family holidays much.”
“Understandable. Did you have a favorite among them?” “Of course,” said Parisa. “I just adored their little dog.”
Libby glanced between the two of them, slightly dumbfounded. She was uncertain how they could speak so openly and so… flippantly about Parisa’s s*xual exploits.
“Oh, it comforts him, really, not that he’ll ever admit it.
Knowing the truth of my sordid nature only confirms Tristan’s deepest suspicions about humanity,” Parisa replied to Libby’s inner thoughts, catching her sidelong glance. “I’m confident Tristan could be stabbed mid-climax and still find the strength to groan out ‘I was right’ before succumbing to the cavernous embrace of death.”
“You’re not wrong, though from here on I’ll be checking for knives,” said Tristan ambivalently, which should have been confirmation of his involvement with Parisa, but
instead it only bewildered Libby further.
Were they something or weren’t they?
“We aren’t,” said Parisa, “and anyway, he likes you, Rhodes. Don’t you, Tristan?” she asked, turning to him.
Tristan held Parisa’s eye for a moment as Libby’s intestines twisted with silent discomfort, the rest of her unsure how to react. It was a joke, of course. True, Parisa could read minds, but it wasn’t that. It was obviously just teasing.
Wasn’t it?
“I like Rhodes well enough, I suppose,” was Tristan’s
underwhelming response, as Libby briskly determined that now would be a marvelous time for an immediate change in subject.
“So the Forum tried to… blackmail you?” Libby asked them, clearing her throat. “Extort you or something?”
“Something like that,” Parisa confirmed with a roll of her eyes. “I’d have considered it, too, only it was so very unpleasant the way they went about it. So brusque and
outright.” She shuddered, disapproving. “I’ve had torrid affairs with less indecency.”
“You actually considered it?” Libby spluttered through her swallow, somewhat unable to differentiate between the burn in her stomach and the one in her chest at the thought. “Seriously?” Her voice, much to her dismay, had gone shrill with disbelief. “But what if it’s—”
“A trap? I doubt it,” said Parisa. “That doesn’t seem the Society’s style.”
“But the installation—”
“Was them placing us out as sitting ducks,” Tristan supplied, “but not technically a trap.”
Libby supposed he was right, though she frowned to recall Parisa’s original point.
“Still. You considered taking the Forum’s offer?”
“Oh, of course,” Parisa confirmed, taking the bottle from Libby’s hand and pausing its path in front of Tristan. They exchanged a glance; Tristan’s brow arched. Then he tilted his head back, permitting Parisa to pour a little absinthe down his throat, and licked the excess moisture from his lips, choking up a laugh as she spilled it down his chin.
“Oops,” she said, smoothing it away with the pad of her thumb, and then drew the bottle to her lips. “Anyway,” she
said, taking a swallow and handing it back to Libby, “it’s not as if I have any reason to be loyal to the Society yet. I’m not initiated, am I?”
“Well, no,” Libby conceded, frowning as she accepted the bottle. “But still, isn’t it a bit—”
“Disloyal?” Parisa guessed. “Perhaps, though I’m hardly known for my fidelity.” She gave Tristan a sidelong glance. “What about you?”
“Me? I’m a one-woman man, Miss Kamali,” said Tristan, half-smiling. “Most of the time.”
“Most of the time,” Parisa echoed with approval. “But surely not all?”
Libby took a long pull from the bottle, suddenly feeling she needed much more of whatever poison it contained.
“Why, um,” Libby began, and Parisa turned to her. “Can I ask you—?”
“Why s*x?” Parisa prompted, as Libby’s cheeks burned again, heartily chagrined. “Because I enjoy it, Elizabeth. And because most people are idiots who’ll pay for it, and
existence in society costs money.”
“Yes, but isn’t it…” She trailed off. “Well—”
“You want to know if I find it demeaning to have s*x with people for money,” guessed Parisa flatly, “is that it?”
Immediately, Libby wished she’d said nothing. “I just… you’re obviously very talented, and—”
“And I use my talents well,” Parisa agreed, as Libby drew the bottle back to her lips clumsily, if only for something to do with her hands. “And it is attitudes like yours which make
certain I will never be denied. After all, if we could all have boundless, fulfilling s*x whenever we liked, why would we ever bother with monogamy? Stigma like yours keeps you subjugated, you know,” Parisa remarked, tipping Libby’s
bottle upwards to ensure a longer sip.
Libby felt the liquid spill around the sides of her mouth and closed her watering eyes, suffering the still-unfamiliar sting. The taste of anise marinated the thickness of her tongue, foreign and bittersweet.
“Don’t you ever detest the necessity of emotional attachment?” Parisa murmured, the tips of her fingers
brushing Libby’s throat before toying, idly, with the tips of her hair. “Men in particular are draining, they bleed us dry. They demand we carry their burdens, fix their ills. A man is constantly in search of a good woman, but what do they offer us in return?”
Flickers of Libby’s irritation with Ezra filtered through her mind. “On another day, I’d have a better answer to that,”
she muttered, and felt the reward of Tristan’s most disdainful laugh against her elbow. She shifted, leaning into his chest, and let the vibration carry through her bones. “But still, you’re a telepath, Parisa. Those are rare, and you’re exceptionally good, I know you are. I just…” Libby shrugged. “I don’t see what you gain from it.”
“You do things, don’t you, to make things easier for
yourself?” asked Parisa. “You don’t use your magic to walk up the stairs, but you defy gravity all the same, don’t you?”
“So?” asked Libby. Tristan leaned over for the bottle, his fingers brushing hers. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Well, because to you, s*x is purely physical, when in fact the mind opens along with everything else,” said Parisa. “To try to overpower someone’s mind, to make it subject to my own, is a waste of time. When he’s inside me I hardly
have to lift a finger to know precisely what he is, what he wants. He’ll tell me so himself without my asking. And why impress my demands unnecessarily, wasting energy and effort? I can make people loyal to me simply by offering them something they want above all else, which costs me nothing to give.”
That made a bit of sense to Libby. Tristan’s arm slid around her back as he adjusted his posture, brushing the
inch of skin between the top of her jeans and the hem of her sweater.
“So you use them,” Libby said, clearing her throat. “Your… paramours?”
“I enjoy them,” Parisa said, “and they enjoy me.” “Is it only men?”
Parisa paused to moisten her lips, half-smiling. “Most women are less in love with the partners they
choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion,” she said. “They want, most often, to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance.” She reached forward, taking the bottle from Libby’s hand.
“But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another—that we can experience rapture without being someone’s other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures—then we’re free, aren’t we?”
It took Libby a moment to realize that Parisa had set the bottle aside, forgotten. Instead Libby had been feeling Tristan’s arm against the small of her back, smelling the roses from Parisa’s long hair, draping like a curtain within reach. She could see the little gloss of alcohol on Parisa’s lips, and the strap of her silk dress she still hadn’t fixed,
slipping further down her shoulder. Libby could hear the
undertone of suggestion in Parisa’s voice, as spiced as the absinthe, as warm as the noisily crackling fire.
“You underestimate your power, Libby Rhodes,” said Parisa.
Libby held her breath as Parisa came closer, half- straddling Tristan’s lap to take hold of Libby’s face,
smoothing her hair back from her cheeks. Libby, paralyzed, sat perfectly still as Parisa’s lips brushed hers, warm and soft. Delicate and inviting. She shivered a little despite the heat, and meanwhile Tristan’s hand stole up her spine,
traveling carefully over the notches. She kissed Parisa back tentatively, lightly.
“You’re mocking me,” Libby whispered to Parisa’s mouth, withering a little in agony.
Parisa pulled back halfway, pausing to glance at Tristan.
“Kiss her,” she suggested. “She needs to be convinced.” “And you’re leaving me to do the convincing?” prompted Tristan drily, as Libby’s heart pounded in her chest. “I rather
thought that was your expertise.”
Parisa glanced at Libby, laughing melodically. “Oh, but she doesn’t trust me,” murmured Parisa,
reaching out to toy with Libby’s hair again. “She’s curious about me, fine, but if I do it she’ll only get up and run.”
She let her hand fall, sliding her palm around the slats of Libby’s ribs.
“I’m not mocking you,” Parisa offered Libby softly. “I’d be happy to have a taste of you, Miss Rhodes,” she mused, and Libby shivered again. “But it’s not simply that. You’re useful, Libby. You’re powerful. You,” Parisa concluded with another fleeting kiss, “are someone worth knowing well, and fully,
and—” She broke off, the tips of her fingers stroking up the inside of Libby’s thigh. “Perhaps deeply.”
Libby was startled by the sound from her lips, mouseish and yearning.
Parisa lifted a brow knowingly, turning to Tristan. “Kiss her,” Parisa said again. “And do it well.”
“And if she doesn’t want me?” Tristan asked, glancing at Libby.
The moment their eyes met, Libby tried to conjure Ezra.
She tried to think of something, anything, to remind her that she had left him at home, left him behind, but she could see only glimpses of her own frustration, her fury, her irritation.
She tried, fruitlessly, to see him, and saw only Tristan instead.
Helplessly, Libby felt the pounding of her heart the way she had once felt Tristan’s touch, ricocheting through her chest like tribal drums. She had stopped time with him, once. This was the problem: that within these walls she wasn’t Ezra’s, wasn’t one of his trinkets or possessions or pets, but entirely herself. She had stopped time! She had recreated a mystery of the universe! Here she had done as she pleased and she had done it well, fully, deeply.
She was powerful on her own. She did not need his oversight. She did not want it.
“You’ll have to tell me what you want, Rhodes,” Tristan said, and if his voice was gravelly with something, it might have been the absinthe. Or it might have been the fact that he was looking at her like he had already undressed her, already kissed her, already peeled her underwear from her hips with his teeth. Like he was already glancing up at her from the foot of her bed, his broad shoulders securely
locked between her thighs.
“Shall I tell him, or will you?” Parisa asked with a quiet laugh, giving Libby a knowing glance. She stroked Tristan’s cheek with the knuckle of one finger, teasing along the bone until she brushed his mouth, beside his lips.
Libby couldn’t decide what was more troubling; the thoughts she was having about Tristan, or the fact that Parisa could see them and still didn’t believe Libby was capable of taking what she wanted.
What did she want?
Libby glanced at Tristan and felt it again; that little sway, the pulse of time stopping. It had been so unlike her, so much more about feeling and instinct than anything she’d ever done before. Whether a result of her sister’s loss or her own psyche, Libby thought constantly, relentlessly,
perpetually wavering between states of worry or apprehension or, in most cases, fear. Fear of ineptitude, fear of failure. Fear she’d do it wrong, do it badly; be the
disappointing daughter who lived instead of the brilliant one who died. She was afraid, always, except when she was
proving herself to Nico, or letting Tristan lead her blindly, forcing her to trust in something she couldn’t see.
She took hold of Tristan’s face with one hand and pulled him close, dragging his lips to hers, and he let out a sound in her mouth that was both surprise and relief.
She kissed him.
He kissed her back.
It was enough of a thrill to have Tristan’s tongue in her mouth, his arm wound tightly around her ribs, but then
Libby reached out further, finding the silk of Parisa’s slip dress. Parisa’s hand slid over Libby’s hip and when Tristan
pulled away, catching his breath, Parisa kissed Libby’s neck, the tip of her tongue tracing a line across Libby’s throat.
Libby slid a hand gracelessly up Parisa’s thigh and Tristan groaned in Libby’s mouth; evidence Parisa’s other hand must have found an equally suitable location.
Was this actually happening? It appeared it was.
Remnants of the absinthe burned in Libby’s chest, sending her thoughts scattering. Tristan pulled her astride his lap
and Parisa tugged at her sweater, casting it aside to join the near-empty bottle.
For a moment, half a lucid thought flashed through Libby’s mind before reverting to base sensations: hands, tongues, lips, teeth. Somehow Tristan’s chest was bare, and she dug her nails into the fibers of his muscle, his skin
sparking where she touched it.
Things progressed hastily, drastically, euphorically. She tasted from them both like sips from the bottle, and they each had her like the last laugh. If she would regret this, that was for tomorrow to decide.
“Don’t let me wake up alone,” she whispered in Tristan’s ear, and it was quiet and fragile, crystalline, like glass breaking, the splinter of a hairline fracture that crept up from an unsteady base. Her vulnerability was misplaced
among the multitude of sins, but she didn’t care. She wanted Parisa’s hair wrapped around her knuckles, she wanted Tristan to put her in positions she’d undeniably
shiver to recount, but she wanted this, too. To be connected to someone undeniably, even temporarily, at least until the first garish rays of light came through.
Fleetingly, at the back of her mind, Libby knew things would always be different between them now, irreversibly so, and a saner piece of her wondered if that had been
Parisa’s intention from the start. She’d practically spelled it
out already, that s*x was a means of asserting control—of creating strings, chains of obligation, where there had been none before—but whether Libby was being used or maneuvered or devoured, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care. It was enough to taste, to feel, to touch,
instead of think. Enough to be that free of feeling.
Enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else.
CALLUM
SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED to Tristan.
It was immediately apparent upon Callum’s return to the Society’s London house. He had arrived in the late afternoon after spending their compulsory two days in Mykonos (he
had no intention of going back to Cape Town, where the chance he would be expected to work was unfortunately much too high to risk) and begun scouring the house,
starting with Tristan’s two most likely places in the morning: the library for tea, or the reading room for research. Callum had counted on the appearance of a particular version of Tristan upon sharing some significant news; namely, that someone, and in this case everyone, had left out a very important caveat about the Society’s initiation process.
Instead, though, he found Tristan in the door frame of the painted room, staring blankly at the floor.
“I presume you’ve had a visit from the Forum,” Callum began, and paused. Tristan looked more haggard than usual, as if he’d been up all night, and there were fumes of
remorse and nausea coming off him in waves. “Christ,” said
Callum upon closer inspection, taken aback. “What on earth did you get up to while we were all away?”
“Nothing. Just a bit knackered,” was the mumbled response, only half-coherent. Tristan’s voice was rasping and low, and the look of thorough misery on his face was enough to give Callum a second-hand migraine.
“Sauced, too, by the looks of it.” Normally Tristan was better about holding his alcohol; it was one of the primary reasons Callum liked him. There was much to be said about a man who habitually remained upright.
“Absolutely fucking bladdered,” confirmed Tristan,
pivoting slowly to face Callum and holding his hand to his head. “I’d do something about it, only the prospect of
managing anything at all sounds positively exhausting.” Understandable. Most people struggled with a hangover,
and medeians even more so. Alcohol was a poison, after all, and magic was easily corrupted.
“Here,” Callum said, beckoning Tristan towards him and pressing his thumb to the furrow between his brows.
“Better?”
It didn’t take much to alleviate a headache. Even less to make the headache feel as if it had been alleviated.
“Much.” Tristan gave Callum a fleeting look of gratitude. “Did you enjoy the opulent shores of Greece, Your
Highness?”
“You were invited, as you may recall.” “Yes, and I should have gone, clearly.”
“Well,” Callum said, “next time. In any case, there’s
something very interesting I thought you ought to know.” “If it’s about the Forum, I received a visit as well. From a
rather unpleasant sort of bloke, if I do say so myself.” “Actually, no,” said Callum. “Or not entirely, anyway.” He
gestured outside. “Fancy a walk? Fresh air might do you some good.”
The gardens, which accommodated roses of all varieties, were always a tolerable temperature, despite the presence of snow. Inside the house, a clatter indicated Nico had returned along with Reina, and, presumably, Libby.
“I suppose now we’ll have to hear endlessly about Rhodes’ beloved inamorato,” sighed Callum.
To his surprise, Tristan became rapidly uncomfortable,
going blank. “I suppose,” he mumbled, and Callum frowned.
It wasn’t the discomfort that eluded him, but the obvious deflection; Tristan was magically keeping him out,
preventing himself from being interpreted. The others did it often, sending up intangible shields whenever Callum approached, but never Tristan, who would have considered it a waste of effort.
Odd.
“Anyway,” Callum said, “this Society has an interesting little mechanism. The ‘elimination,’ as they call it? Is perhaps too true a term.”
It had not been very difficult to find the truth at the core of the Forum recruiter’s intentions. It seemed that although
the contents of the Society’s collection remained a secret, its true nature was not.
“One candidate,” Callum said, leaning closer, “must die.”
Immediately he anticipated Tristan’s posture to stiffen, or his dark gaze to narrow, as it usually did. Perhaps Tristan
would even confirm that he’d had suspicions, which he nearly always had. He was a man so beloved of his own misanthropy that he would surely express less horror at knowing the truth than he would a lack of surprise at
uncovering it.
“That’s madness,” said Tristan, without any particular feeling.
Callum’s jaw tightened, irritated. So Tristan already knew, then.
“You didn’t tell me,” Callum observed aloud, and Tristan glanced up, grimacing.
“I only just found out, and I’d forgotten for a moment.” “You’d forgotten?”
“Well, I—” Tristan fumbled, his wall of neutrality
momentarily slipping. “I told you, it was… a strange night. I haven’t quite finished processing.”
If this version of Tristan was anything, ‘unfinished’ was certainly the right word.
“Care to postulate aloud?” prompted Callum. “After all, you’ve ostensibly become aware that one of us will have to be murdered.” He bristled with irritation at not being the
one to reveal that trivial little tidbit of information. “Who told you? No, don’t answer,” he grumbled as an
afterthought. “It was Parisa, wasn’t it? You were with Parisa last night.”
Tristan looked moderately relieved. “I… yes, I was, but—” “How did she know?”
“She didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ask?” Unfathomable. Under any circumstances Tristan would have made demands.
“I—” Tristan stopped, wavering again. “I was distracted.”
Callum stiffened. Of course Parisa had taken the
opportunity to secure her alliance with Tristan the one way she knew how. Callum had been Tristan’s primary confidant for months; surely she would have suffered that loss by now and tried something to repair it.
“You know,” Callum remarked, “there is no fate so final as betrayal. Trust, once dead, cannot be resurrected.”
Tristan glanced up sharply. “What?”
“With the Society,” Callum clarified smoothly. “They’re lying to us, or at least misleading us. How shall we
respond?”
“I imagine there has to be a reason—”
“You,” Callum echoed, and then scoffed. “You imagine there to be a reason, really?”
“Well, is it any wonder?” Tristan said defensively. “And anyway, maybe it’s another trick. A test.”
“What, making us think we have to kill someone? Clearly you don’t understand the damage of such an exercise,” Callum said gruffly. “There is nothing so destructive as thought, and especially not one that can never be
rescinded. The moment a group of people decide they can be rid of someone permanently, what do you suppose happens next?”
“You’re saying you wouldn’t do it?”
“Of course not. But succumbing to the demands of a Society whose precursor for entry is human sacrifice? You
can’t tell me you’ve simply accepted it without question.” Callum was sure of that much. “Even Parisa wouldn’t consider it unless there was something significant in it for her. As for the others, Reina wouldn’t care, and perhaps Varona could be persuaded, but certainly Rhodes would—”
Callum stopped, considering it. “Well, by that measure, I don’t see the elimination falling to anyone other than
Rhodes.”
“What?” Tristan’s head snapped up.
“Who else would it be?” Callum prompted, impatient.
“The only person with fewer friends than Rhodes is Parisa, but she’s useful, at least.”
“You don’t find Rhodes useful?”
“She’s half of a set,” said Callum. “Varona has precisely Rhodes’ talents, only in a less obnoxious package.”
“Varona is not Rhodes,” Tristan said, the edges of his shield flickering a little. “They are not interchangeable.”
“Oh, stop. You only can’t imagine killing Rhodes because it would be like drowning a kitten,” said Callum. “She’d fuss the whole time.”
“I—” Tristan turned away, sickened. “I cannot believe you’re actually discussing this.”
“You’re the one who seemed entirely unfazed by the idea we’d be asked to commit a murder,” Callum pointed out. “I’m simply trying to sort out how you expect it to take
place.”
“Varona will never agree to kill Rhodes,” Tristan said. “Nor will Parisa.”
“They’ll have to choose someone, won’t they?”
“Maybe they’ll choose me,” Tristan said, blinking rapidly. “Perhaps they should.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tristan.” A little fuse of Callum’s temper sparked. “Must you be so very small all the time?”
Tristan cut him a glare. “So I should be more like you, then?”
This was obviously going nowhere.
“Have a nap,” Callum said, pivoting away in annoyance. “You’re a terrible bore when you’re unrested.”
He had hoped they’d have some sort of strategy session, determining which of the others they could most stand to lose, but it seemed Tristan was currently handling
everything with exceptional ineptitude. Callum stalked through the corridors, returning to his room when he nearly collided with Libby.
“Rhodes,” he said gruffly, and she glanced up, face
draining of color, before hurrying past him without a word.
If there was one thing Callum loathed about himself, it was the prison of his deduction. So, Libby and Tristan were suffering the same intolerable human illness of shame and
alcoholism. Wonderful. Clearly something had happened between them, and Tristan had not told him.
Again, Tristan had not told him.
Callum reached the corridor of private rooms and pushed open the door to Parisa’s bedroom, shutting it behind him.
“No,” said Parisa lazily. “And don’t bother with Reina, either. Well—no, on second thought, that I would very much like to see,” she mused, lifting her head to prop it up with
one hand. “I suspect she’d bite your dick if you even tried it. Shall we have a wager and find out?”
Parisa, unlike the others, reeked of nothing. None of
Parisa had come loose. She did not even seem particularly dehydrated. She seemed…
Smug.
“What did you do?” asked Callum bluntly. “What I do best,” said Parisa.
“What did Rhodes have to do with it?”
“You know, I rather like Rhodes,” Parisa hummed thoughtfully. “She’s very… sweet.”
Her smile curled up thinly, taunting, and Callum understood he was being toyed with.
He relaxed a little, relieved. Finally, someone who could play.
“They’re idiots,” he said, prowling over to recline beside her on the bed. “All of them.”
“Everyone’s an idiot,” Parisa replied, tracing mindless patterns on her duvet. “You should know that as well as anyone.”
“What did you do?”
“Changed them,” she said with a shrug. “Can’t reverse that sort of thing.”
That was the peril of thought. Thoughts were so rarely
dismissed once they’d been picked up and toyed with, and a mind successfully altered could rarely, if ever, revert.
Worse were feelings. Feelings were never forgotten, even if their sources were.
“No, you can’t,” Callum slowly agreed. “But why would that matter to you?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” She shrugged. “It’s a game. You know it’s a game.”
“No matter the stakes?”
She blinked with surprise, and then her expression fell away.
“Did you kill them this time?” she asked tightly. “Kill who?”
“Whoever it was. From the Forum.” “No, not particularly.”
She stared at him. “Not particularly?”
“Well, if he dies later on, that’s really not my doing. They’re his feelings,” said Callum, shrugging. “How he chooses to process them is not my responsibility.”
“My god, you’re an absolute psychopath,” said Parisa, sitting fully upright. “You don’t feel any empathy at all, do you?”
“An empath with no empathy,” echoed Callum. “Surely you hear how foolish you sound?”
“You can’t just—”
“And what did you do, hm?” prompted Callum. “You can hear their thoughts, Parisa. You can change them, as you’ve just willingly confessed. By default you are no less interfering, and was your cause any more noble than mine?”
“I don’t destroy people—”
“Don’t you?” Callum asked her. “From what I just saw, Tristan and Rhodes look severely devolved. They are not who they were before.”
“Devolved,” Parisa said, “is hardly the word I’d use. And it’s certainly not the same as destroyed.”
Callum shifted an inch closer to her on the bed, and she leaned away, repulsed.
“You hate me because we’re the same,” he told her softly. “Haven’t you come to that conclusion yet?”
She bristled, distractingly lovely in her fear. “We are not the same.”
“How are we different?” “You feel nothing.”
“Whereas you feel sympathy but act regardless. Is that it?”
Parisa opened her mouth, then closed it.
“We are not the same,” she said, “and what’s more, you overestimate yourself.”
“Do I?”
“You think you’re more powerful than I am, don’t you?” “You have to work much harder to accomplish the same
result. If I am not more powerful, I certainly have a more
extensive vault from which to draw.” “The others know better.”
“Do they? Perhaps not.”
He could feel pieces fitting together for her, melting smoothly into place. An effortless joining. Her process of
thought was so elegant, so pleasing. It was so satisfying to watch her make decisions, unlike other people. Normal
people were so messy and unkempt. Parisa poured out her thoughts like honey, and though Callum couldn’t read them the way she could, he could intuit other things far more
clearly.
For example she thought, rather foolishly, that she could win.
“Shall we prove it?” Parisa prompted him. “Maybe you’re right. After all, you clearly think we’re the same, so for all intents in purposes, so must they. Thoughts, feelings, this is all the same to them.” Again they were conspiratorial in their agreement. Even safely out of Callum’s reach, surely Parisa could feel the way they were bound by similar circumstances. “They ought to have a chance to know the truth of what each of us can do.”
“A battle of wits?” Callum replied.
“Of course not,” she said. “Why do battle when we could simply… play a game?”
He slept well that night, untroubled. In the morning, they persuaded their referee.
“We do have a specified lesson for the day,” said Dalton in his stuffy academic’s voice. “And I hardly think this is
necessary.”
“The present research subject is thought,” said Parisa. “Is there no value in observing a practicum on the subject?”
Dalton glanced uneasily between them. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate.”
“Oh, go on,” said Nico, who was intensely bored by the subject matter as usual. “We’ve got to eliminate someone eventually, don’t we? Seems worth knowing what the other magics can do.”
“Yes, Dalton, we will be eliminating someone quite soon,”
Callum agreed smoothly. “Why not allow us to determine who has the greater capability now?”
Dalton, out of anyone, would know the difference between Callum and Parisa’s talents. After all, he was busy keeping her out of his head and holding Callum at bay as well, preventing either from being able to manipulate his moods—which meant Dalton was frequently overworked when they were in the same room, allowing things to slip between the cracks.
That Dalton had been sleeping with Parisa for months was, if still a secret among the others, not a very well kept one, and certainly not to Callum. More than once Callum
had witnessed Dalton experiencing Parisa within every parapet of his being without touching her, with only the
silhouette of former senses; muscle memory for lovers. At arbitrary times throughout the day, Callum could taste and feel and smell her anew, like the ghosts of someone else’s aching.
He wondered if that was something to use against Parisa.
Would she care for one amorist to find out what she’d done with two of the others…? Likely not, Callum thought with disappointment. She seemed the sort of person one only
loved at one’s own risk, and he doubted she had ever made (or kept) a promise.
“Well,” Dalton said uncomfortably, “I suppose it needn’t take long.”
“One hour,” said Parisa. “But no interference.”
That, Callum thought, was quite an interesting request. Perhaps even a stupid one.
“What’s the purpose of a referee if there can be no interference?” prompted Tristan gruffly. He, Callum thought, would be a challenge for later. Already he had glanced
furtively at Libby twice; he would need to be reminded how to choose his allies well.
“Just someone to stop us when the hour is up,” Parisa said, glancing pointedly at Dalton. “No more, no less.”
“No astral planes, either,” said Callum. “Dull for the audience.”
“Fine,” said Parisa. “Corporeality only.”
They shook on it, taking their places on opposite sides of the room.
“Rhodes,” Callum said. “Turn your anxiety down.” Across the room, Parisa’s mouth quirked.
“Don’t worry about him, Rhodes,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”
Warily, the vibration of Libby’s unceasing agitation faded somewhat.
They waited in silence until the clock met the hour. “Start,” said Dalton.
“Why are you here?” asked Parisa promptly, and Callum chuckled.
“You want to do this as a debate? Or an interrogation?” “Varona,” called Parisa to Nico, not taking her eyes from
Callum’s. “What do you not do at the beginning of a fight?” “Most things,” replied Nico ambivalently.
“And why not?”
“Don’t know the traps,” he supplied, shrugging. “Have to learn the other person’s rhythm first before you deal the
heavy blows.”
“There,” said Parisa. “See? Even Varona knows.”
Callum scoffed. “Is that what we’re doing? Sparring? I thought the purpose was to differentiate ourselves from the physical specialties, not conform to them.”
Parisa’s smile twisted upward. “Answer the question,” she said.
“Very well. I joined because I had no other pressing
plans,” said Callum, “and now, I believe, it’s my turn to ask you a question. Correct?”
“If you’d like,” said Parisa obligingly.
“Marvelous. When did it occur to you that you were beautiful?”
There was a twitch between her brows, suspicious.
“It’s not a trap for your modesty,” Callum assured her. “Not much of one, anyway, when surely we can all confirm it for a fact.”
“My modesty is not at issue,” Parisa replied. “I simply fail to see the relevance.”
“It’s an opening swing. Or, if you prefer, a control.” “Is this some sort of polygraph?”
“You asked me why I was here in order to gauge some sort of truth from me, didn’t you? Given your own parameters, surely I can do the same.”
“Fine.” Parisa’s mouth tightened. “You’re asking when I knew I was beautiful? I’ve always known.”
“Well, surely that’s true in some sense,” Callum said, “but you’re not just ordinarily beautiful, are you? You’re the kind of beauty that drives men to warfare. To madness.”
“If you say I am.”
“So, when did you first understand it? Your power over others. Men, primarily,” he said, taking a step towards her. “Or was it a woman first? No,” he determined, catching the motion of her bristling in response. “Of course it was a
man.”
“Of course it was a man.” She echoed it with a smile. “It always is.”
“You have a loneliness to you, you know,” Callum said, “but it’s a bit… manufactured, isn’t it? You’re not an only child; that would be a different sort of loneliness. Like
Rhodes,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder, “she’s lonely
and alone, but not you. You’re lonely because you choose to be.”
“Perhaps I simply loathe other people,” said Parisa. “What’s your sister’s name?” asked Callum, as Parisa
blinked. “You were close, of course, until you weren’t. Your brother has some sort of strong name, I suspect; masculine, difficult to fracture. He’s the heir, isn’t he? The oldest, and then your sister, and then you. He favored you, your brother, and your sister turned you away… and she didn’t
believe you, did she? When you told her what you saw inside his mind.”
He could see Parisa faltering, forced to relive the shadows from her youth.
“Let’s see,” Callum said, and snapped his fingers,
populating the walls with images and tones from Parisa’s past. “Money, that’s easy enough.” It would be false, a painting, unlike something she could do from his head, which would be a photograph. It was an inexact science, being an empath, but the important thing was to identify
the proper sensations. For example, the golden light of her childhood and privilege. “Obviously you were well educated. Private tutors?”
Her jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“That stopped after a time. You adored your tutor, of course. You love to learn. But your brother, he didn’t like you paying so much attention to someone who wasn’t him. So
sad! Poor little Parisa, princess of her family, locked inside her vault of riches like a sweet, caged bird. And how did you
get out?” He considered it, splashing an image of her former self onto the wall. “Ah, of course. A man.”
The hazy illustration of young Parisa was swept away, carried off on the wind.
“Walk with me,” said Callum, and immediately Parisa’s knees buckled, lacking the strength to fight him. The others, he was sure, would follow, equally entranced. “More room this way. What was I saying? Ah, yes, someone saved you— no, you saved yourself,” he amended, “but you made him
believe it was his doing. Was it… your brother’s friend? Yes, his closest friend; I can feel the betrayal. He expected
something from you for his efforts… eternal devotion? No,” Callum laughed, “of course not. He wanted something much more… accessible.”
He paused, glancing at her, and the image of her
following them along the walls as they walked was pulled into a darkened room, the light around it suddenly extinguished.
“How old were you?” he asked.
He watched Parisa swallow, her mouth gone dry. “Eighteen,” she said.
“Liar,” he replied. Her lips thinned. “Fifteen,” she said.
“Thank you for your honesty,” Callum replied. He turned to the stairs, directing her up them. “So, you must have been what, eleven when you knew?”
“Twelve.”
“Right, right, of course. And your brother was seventeen, eighteen…?”
“Nineteen.”
“Naturally. And your sister, fourteen?” “Yes.”
“So troubling. So very, very troubling.” Callum reached out to brush her cheek and she shrank away, repulsed. He laughed. “So it’s me you hate, then?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t want to hate me,” Callum replied, “because you suspect me of committing terrible crimes with such silly things as hatred.”
He stepped into the ballroom, holding out a hand. “Shall we?”
She glared at him. “You want to dance?”
“I want to see if you can keep up,” Callum assured her. She rolled her eyes, but took his hand.
“I assume you think you’re winning,” she remarked,
beginning an uncannily perfect waltz once he set his hands upon her waist, though he would have expected no less.
Somewhere, music was playing. He assumed that had been her work.
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re the one who can supposedly read my thoughts.”
“You spend most of your existence in the singular belief that you’re winning,” she said. “To be honest, Callum, there’s nothing so very interesting to read.”
“Oh?”
“There’s not much going on in there,” Parisa assured him, her neck beautifully elongated as she carried out the waltz’s steps. “No particular ambition. No sense of
inadequacy.”
“Should I feel inadequate?” “Most people do.”
“Perhaps I’m not most people. Isn’t that the point?” “Isn’t it just,” Parisa murmured, glancing up at him. “You’re so very guarded with me,” Callum told her
disapprovingly. “It’s rather starting to hurt my feelings.”
“I wasn’t aware you had any feelings available to hurt.”
He spun her under his arm, conjuring a little flash of color to marinate the walls.
“Was this it?” he asked, gesturing to the crimson. “I’m not quite sure I have the precise hue.”
“For what?”
But he could feel her stiffen in his arms.
“Your wedding dress,” he replied, smiling politely, and for a moment, she froze. “How is your husband, by the way?
Alive, I assume. I imagine that’s why you changed your name, went to school in Paris? You don’t strike me as the career-oriented type, so I assume you were fleeing something. And what better place to hide than within the walls of a magically warded university?”
He felt the low undercurrent of her rage and felt keenly, acutely blissful.
“Oh, it’s not the worst thing,” he told her. “Plenty of teenagers have run from their tyrannical husbands before.
Did your brother try to stop it? No, of course not,” he sighed to himself, “he never forgave you for turning from him, and this was your punishment.”
Parisa stepped back, dazed, and Callum held out a hand to her.
“You’ve been running a long time,” he murmured to her, brushing a loose curl from her cheek. “Poor thing.” He pulled her into an embrace, feeling the low swell of her misery greet him like a wave inside his chest. “You’ve been running for your life since the moment you were born.”
He felt her sag against him, drained slightly, and he
angled her shoulders beneath his arms, guiding her out of the ballroom.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” he told her, adjusting his arm to fit her waist as he led her up the stairs, up past the bedrooms and to the terrace on the top floor. She was
gradually deflating, sentiment beginning to bleed out of her as if he’d sliced a vein. “People think beauty is such a prized thing, but not you. Not yours. Your beauty is a curse.”
“Callum.” Her lips were numb, his name slurred. He brushed his thumb over her bottom lip, half-smiling.
“Do you hate them?” he whispered to her, lightly kissing her cheek. “No, I don’t think you do. I think, quietly, you suspect you deserve this, don’t you? You drive people to madness; you’ve watched it happen. You see them set eyes on you and you know it, don’t you? The way it looks, the
way it feels. Perhaps you consider yourself a monster for it. It would explain your fear of me,” he told her softly, taking
her face in his hands. “Secretly, you believe yourself to be far worse than I have ever been, because your hunger is incurable. Your wants are insatiable. You never tire of
making people weak for you, do you? The perversity of your desire scares you, but it’s easier to think I might be worse.”
They reached the terrace, Callum nudging the doors open for their entry. Parisa’s feet met the wet marble, nearly slipping as the London rain fell. It splashed over the Greco- Roman farce that was the Society’s decor, droplets sliding like tears from the marble cupids, the white-washed nymphs.
Callum tucked one of her hands in the crook of his arm, leading her around the rooftop’s perimeter.
“You must wonder sometimes if it would be easier not to exist,” he commented.
Parisa didn’t answer, staring instead at her feet. Her shoes, fashionable as always, were suede and ruined, soaked through from the rain within minutes. Her hair fell lank over her shoulders in the wet, though of course her beauty was undiminished. He had never seen a woman’s
eyes shine so dully and still remain so bright. The haunted look in them heightened her beauty, in his mind. She had never been so lovely, so broken. She made devastation look like riches, like jewels.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked.
She dragged her gaze up, sickened. “Who?” “Everyone.”
Her eyes shut briefly, and she swayed. Her lips parted to mumble one word.
“Yes.”
Callum stroked the drops from her cheeks, her lips. He pressed a kiss to the furrow between her brows; comforting, tender. Sweet.
“They don’t have to hurt you anymore,” he said, and stepped away, leaving her to stand alone.
She was burning on low now; a simmer that threatened to flicker, a glimmer poised to go out. Funny thing about rain, really, how it always made things seem so dismal.
London did that naturally, of its own accord. The foggy grey was so spectacularly akin to loneliness, which Parisa was
inescapably awash in. She was so saturated in it that she was the only thing that shone.
Callum watched Parisa turn her head, gazing out over
the gardens, taking in the view of the city from where they stood. She was still staring, half-unblinking, when she
reached out for the railing, closing her hand around it and
settling into the breeze with a shiver. She was so empty now he doubted much would ignite her. Perhaps a spark, but then nothing.
Isolation was a powerful weapon. Forced isolation more
so.
He did her the honor of watching, at least, as she
climbed onto the railing. To her credit, she took little time to decide; she wasn’t one for second-guessing. He was proud of her, nearly, for being so strong that way, for taking things
into her own hands. He kept his gaze on hers, reassuring. He would not be revulsed by her choice.
When she fell, Libby gasped.
Unfortunate, Callum thought internally. He’d forgotten the others were there, being focused instead on Parisa’s emotions, which were engulfing. She was so lovely, her
sadness so pure. Her anguish was the most wonderful thing he’d ever tasted.
“No,” sputtered Libby, half-hysterical. “No, you can’t— what—”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Nico demanded, rounding on Dalton, who shook his head, numb.
“It hasn’t been an hour,” he said, visibly dumbfounded. “Are you mad?” Tristan spat, seeming to fumble for
words. His eyes, Callum observed, were widest, though it was difficult to tell which emotions were uniquely his.
Callum could feel a variety of things from Tristan: sadness, disbelief, and then, at the tail end, distrust.
Ah, he thought with a grimace, and looked up, catching Parisa’s eye as she smiled at him.
“Time to wake up,” she said, and snapped her fingers. In an instant, they were all back in the painted room,
standing still, clothes dry.
As if they had never moved.
“I said no astral planes,” Callum said, irritated, though he had to give her credit. He hadn’t noticed anything; not one detail of the house had been amiss, and the rain had been a nice touch.
“So I should be dead, then?” she scoffed. “And anyway, we weren’t on an astral plane. We were in someone else’s head.”
“Whose?”
“Nico’s,” Parisa said, as Nico blinked, startled. “Sorry,” she added insincerely, turning to him.
Retroactively, Callum realized why she had begun with such a simple question, electing to misdirect him while she addressed Nico within the first minute. Clever girl, he thought grimly.
“You were rather an easy target, Varona. Guileless,”
Parisa offered to Nico in explanation. “Fewest impermeable walls.”
“Thank you?” Nico said, though he was staring at her, still unconvinced that she was real.
“That’s an hour,” said Dalton, exhaling with relief as he glanced at his watch. “Though I’m not sure how to declare a winner.”
“Callum, of course,” said Parisa. “He did the most magic, didn’t he? I could hardly even fight back,” she said, turning to him.
“Did I?” he echoed, and watched her mouth twitch. “Yes,” she said. “I may have put us somewhere you
couldn’t actually harm me, but you beat me nonetheless. You broke me, didn’t you? So you’ve won.”
But he could feel the triumph radiating from her; it was sickening and putrid, rancid and rotting. She was overripe
with it, devolving to decay. She was deadness taking root in fertile soil, resurrecting in the abundance of his loss.
He had genuinely broken her, that much was undeniable.
Her death, even in noncorporeal form, had been real. But still, there was no question she’d let him find the pieces to break, knowing he would do it. Nothing she had revealed to him was a lie, but in taking advantage of her weakness,
he’d revealed far more of himself. She, after all, understood thought: specifically, that something, once planted, could never be forgotten.
Now Callum’s mistake was obvious: he had thought to prove himself strong, but nobody wanted strength. Not like his. Strength was for machines and monsters; the others
could not relate to faultlessness or perfection. Humans
wanted humanity, and that meant he would have to show evidence of weakness. He could see Tristan failing to meet his eye and knew it, that Parisa had beaten him, but this
was only a single round. For his next trick, he would have to let the smokescreen of what he’d been today disappear.
“Callum, then,” said Dalton, turning to the others. “Would anyone like to review what we saw?”
“No,” said Reina flatly; speaking, for once, for all the others. She turned to Parisa with something like sympathy, which Callum observed with a grimace.
He would have to make them believe he could be weak.
Perhaps only one person would be willing to believe it of him, but Parisa had already proven that to be considerable enough.
There was no stopping what one person could believe.
TRISTAN
IT HAD STARTED with a question.
“What do you think we should do?” Tristan had asked, summoning the bottle of absinthe and raising it to his lips.
He should have known Parisa would have an answer. For every question, but specifically that one. She would not
have come to him empty-handed.
“I say,” she replied, cleverly undoing one of the buttons of his shirt, “we should make our own rules.”
That night was a blur to consider in retrospect, which was something Tristan wished he could have said at the time. Unfortunately he had been perfectly clear-eyed and conscious when he slid his tongue between Libby’s lips,
knowing both who she was and what he ought to have been
—which was, ideally, able to prevent himself from stumbling into depravity and, quite probably, doom. Regrettably, he wasn’t.
Parisa may have been the reason this all started— cleverly, and with what Tristan assumed to be centuries of atavistic female guile—but he had made no attempts to
stop, and there was no recovering from what he now understood he craved.
And truly, it was a craving, nothing so intentional as wanting. Some chemical reaction was responsible, or
demonic possession, or some tragic malformation that other people wrote books about surviving. The absinthe had
certainly encouraged him, spreading like warmth through his limbs, but whatever it was Tristan suffered, he was
faintly aware he’d been suffering it already. The symptoms preempted the condition, or perhaps the condition had
existed (blindly, deafly, and dumbly) all along.
That Libby Rhodes was primarily a physicist was never to be discounted. Even now, her touch rumbled through his bones like the tremors of the earth itself.
Not that she seemed to be fixating much on what had passed between them.
“Electrons,” Libby said without preamble, startling Tristan. He had recently begun trying to fiddle with the dials of his magic while listening to music, or otherwise disabling or distracting one of his senses. At the moment, he had been filling his ear canals with ambient noise while thinking about the taste of her mouth.
“Sorry, what?” he said, relieved that only Parisa could read his mind. (Fortunately, she was not in the room.)
“How small can you see?” asked Libby. That wasn’t much clearer. “What?”
“Well, you seem to be able to focus on the components of things,” she said, still not addressing any of the more
obvious things, like how they had slept together somewhat recently.
He had woken up in bed with her—with her, not Parisa— and had expected to find something more similar to the usual Libby Rhodes. Apprehension, regret, guilt, any of the above. Instead he’d awoken to Libby reading a manuscript, glancing at him as he sat up with difficulty.
“We don’t need to talk about it,” had been the first words out of her mouth. “In fact I’d prefer if we didn’t.”
Tristan had managed somewhat miraculously to straighten, squinting at her. His mouth was inconceivably dry, his head pounding, and he was being treated to merciless flashes of things he’d recently done and felt and tasted.
“Fine,” he managed, though she paused, clearly hitting some sort of internal snag.
“What were you doing back here with Parisa last night, anyway?”
Dehydration wasn’t going to make this conversation any easier. “She asked me to come. Said she had something to discuss.” He could hear the coldness in his voice and paused, unsure whether it was worth getting into what
Parisa had revealed about the Society under these uniquely troubling circumstances.
“Oh.” Libby glanced away. “Well, if you don’t want to tell me—”
For fuck’s sake. He would have to now, wouldn’t he? “Rhodes,” he began, and stopped.
There was no way she would take it well.
Though, keeping it from her would be morally quite worse, given how he had spent the previous evening. There was something about waking up naked in someone’s sheets that made Tristan quite unwilling to subject her to secret group homicide.
Where to start, even if he could? Parisa had told him that in order for five to be initiated, one had to die. They had never been choosing someone to be eliminated; they were responsible for choosing someone to eliminate. The whole
time they had been led to believe this was civilized and fair, but really it was primitive and shameful and, if Parisa was right, then they were possibly under the thumb of an organization that killed and had been killing for thousands of years.
But Tristan expected some form of panic, and so determined perhaps a half-lie would be best.
“Are you familiar with the trolley problem?” he asked
Libby instead. “Where you find yourself at a lever in control of a runaway trolley—”
“And you either kill five to save one, or kill one to save five. Yes, I know it.”
What a miraculous coincidence it was, that he would be having this conversation with her in her bed during the
study of thought. Of course, where it came to magic, thought was less about philosophy than it was about the compulsions of it, and how it could be read or toyed with or interpreted.
In this case, ethics would have to do.
“Would you?” he asked, and when Libby frowned, he clarified, “Kill one to save five.”
“Parisa summoned you here for a thought experiment?” “What?”
Libby waited, and he blinked.
“Oh. No, she was—Well, it was about the Forum.
Apparently—” More hesitation. He had never been so hesitant in his entire life, and wished desperately that he were clothed for this. Or that he had not known it to begin with.
Parisa was right. Thoughts, once planted, could not be forgotten. He could not unthink the way it felt to run his fingers over the bone of Libby’s clavicle, his thumb hovering above her throat like he could slice it or adorn it, or both.
“Apparently,” he attempted again, “Parisa’s visit from the Forum rather made her… think.”
“About the Society, you mean?” “Yes. Sort of.”
“What does that have to do with the trolley problem?” “Well, someone gets eliminated, don’t they? In this case
you kill one to save yourself. Not literally, of course,” Tristan rushed to add. “But… conceptually.”
“I never cared much for thought exercises,” said Libby warily. “And besides, the experiment does hinge a bit on who the people are, in some cases.”
“Suppose the one person was me, then. Would that change things?”
He attempted a lightness to the suggestion, though of
course the reality of knowing what he knew rendered things immensely more disconcerting than Libby could possibly guess. Then again, she wasn’t exactly Parisa. He doubted
Libby would inform him she’d be rid of him while they were still in bed together, and he was right.
“You don’t really think I’d eliminate you, do you?” she asked, frowning, and went on to say something entirely not what he’d expected: “Your potential is fully unrealized. If
anyone needs the Society, Tristan, it’s you. I think even Atlas can see that.”
That, Tristan thought, was both extremely helpful while being thoroughly not helpful at all.
Never had he known someone so positively bewildering.
How could someone catastrophize the mundane at every possible turn only to readily assert her stance on such serious moral transgressions? She made him feel mad,
insane, unstable. True, she was somewhat uninformed about the details (his fault), but there were markers of sensible
logic here: she would not eliminate him because his power retained the most potential. Not because of who he was, or even what he was, but what he could be. That hadn’t been anywhere near the top of his concerns, nor even counted
among Parisa’s, as far as he had known. She merely wanted Tristan because she trusted him on some level, he suspected. Perhaps it was a circular sort of thing, the way his usefulness to her was what proved him useful.
Meanwhile, there was no predicting where Libby Rhodes might find solid intellectual ground. Tristan, naturally, was so unsettled as to topple at every possible juncture. Did he want this so badly he would kill for it? Sometimes the answer was unquestionably yes. What was being human except to crave things unreasonably? Parisa could build
worlds inside a person’s mind. Tristan knew now—though he hadn’t then—that Callum, for better or worse, could destroy a person’s soul without lifting a finger. He had thought Libby and Nico were powerful—that Reina was leaking raw magic, overflowing with it to the point of near-irresponsibility—but knew nothing of himself, or where he fit among them.
Admittedly, Tristan was not the most useful now, but the return on his investment might be greatest of all.
Did he even understand what existed at his fingertips?
Did any of them?
Morality, what little Tristan had of it, tugged him between schools of thought, forward and backwards. “I do what’s
necessary,” had been Adrian Caine’s take on most of his sins, and while it was (academically speaking) a legitimate philosophical standpoint, it was rather repugnant when left unconstrained by things like ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ or even ‘guilt.’ Worse, if there was one thing Tristan had always aimed to be, it was well to the left of whatever his father was.
Of course he could not kill someone; certainly not over access to a few books. (Rare ones. In the hands of the most
powerful medeians he’d ever known. As part of a custom that had existed for centuries, so therefore wasn’t it…?)
(Never mind.)
In any case, if he did this—or even accepted it as a thing he could do—would he ever be able to forgive himself?
Could he live with whatever remained of his conscience? Funny how quickly humans could adapt to things. He had once believed he could marry Eden Wess*x and serve her
father dutifully, never questioning whether he wanted more; or, as the case may have been, whether he craved it. He was starting to think his solidarity with the person he’d once been had been a much more stable time, and perhaps much healthier. It had been like regular exercise, productive diet habits, broken by a blissful, gorging binge. Now he had
everything he could want; power, autonomy. S*x. Christ, the s*x. And all it took was killing one person, but who would it even be? It wasn’t as if they could all agree on someone.
Unless.
“What if it were Callum?” he asked. (Purely for the sake of argument.)
Libby frowned. “What, you mean kill Callum to save… me? The rest of us?”
“Yes.” It made Tristan anxious even to think of
suggesting it, though luckily Callum wasn’t in the house. Callum’s presence, like Reina’s, was readily identifiable by excess traces of magic. With all Callum’s illusions, though, it was difficult to discern what was actively in use and what wasn’t.
“Say it was Callum on one side of the tracks, and the rest of us on the other.”
“Oh.” Libby blinked, and her eyes widened. “Well, I—”
Tristan waited, bracing himself. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted her answer to be. It was, to her, a hypothetical question, so it wasn’t as if this was enough to really determine her stance.
Still, he was rather taken aback when she said, “I’m not doing that.”
“What?” had been his gut response, delivered so sharply it rattled his entire aching brain from the depths of his many upsetting thoughts. “What do you mean you’re not doing
that?”
“I’m not killing someone,” she said, shrugging. “I won’t do it.”
“Well, suppose you won’t have a choice,” he said. “In the thought experiment, you mean?”
He hesitated, and then said, “Yes, in the thought experiment.”
“Everyone always has a choice.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, tapping the manuscript in her lap to the wave of something he probably couldn’t hear. “Would you?”
“Would I what?” “Kill Callum.”
“I—” He blinked. “Well, I—”
“Or me.” She glanced at him sideways. “Would you kill me?”
“No.” No, not her. What a waste it would be for anyone to rid the world of her power, her capability. What an absolute crime against humanity. That was an easy conclusion, even if s*x were not part of the equation. “No, of course not, but
—”
“What did Parisa say?”
It occurred to him that Parisa had said something
precisely the same, only drastically different: I’m not doing that.
“I think,” he said slowly, “Parisa would plot some sort of mutiny. Take over the train.” He managed a grim laugh that hurt his throat, stinging. “Kill three and save three, somehow, just so she didn’t have to do precisely as she was instructed.”
“Well, there’s that for choices,” said Libby, shrugging, as if anything he’d said were a plausible option. Tristan blinked, attempting to formulate thought, but was interrupted by the motion of Libby carefully marking her place in the manuscript, turning to face him.
“I should probably talk to—” A pause. “I need to, um. My boyfriend is,” she began, and then faded into silence. “I
should probably tell him.”
“You aren’t going to…” Fuck. “What are you going to tell him?”
She chewed her lip. “I haven’t decided.” “You’re not going to—” Stay.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” A pause. “No.” “So…”
The fact that Tristan could neither fully speak nor fully keep from speaking was a rather upsetting one. He longed for the presence of mind to say nothing, to wander out of
here like someone who did this sort of thing all the time, but at the moment he suffered only pinpricks of dehydration
and total, unfettered stupidity.
“So you’re just going to tell him, then? Straight out?” “I don’t know. I need to think about it,” she said.
Clearly she meant alone, which was fair. This thought exercise, unlike the previous one, was not designed for peer review. The impulse to ask think about what? temporarily flooded Tristan’s consciousness, but muscle memory kept him from lingering overlong. Bad enough that he’d done what he’d done; he did not want to suddenly become the sort of person who lingered. He had limbs accustomed to
impassive distance, and to his relief, he put it between him and Libby Rhodes with ease.
Weeks later, he had still heard nothing from her. Their first few interactions had been slightly awkward, with occasional averted glances and one truly precarious collision that involved his palm inadvertently skating her hip as they passed each other between tables in the reading room, but there had been no further discussion. There had been no deliberate contact of any kind, nor anything outside of hello or good evening or please pass the bread.
Until, of course, “Electrons.”
“What do you mean electrons?” Tristan asked, feeling groggy and stupid. Ironic that the research spent on thought
would leave him so utterly bereft of any, even after nearly two months. Their current topic of precognition (and its
study of history’s most famous precognitors, like Cassandra and Nostradamus) had done absolutely fuck-all to prepare him for this sort of interaction, which could only be
described as nightmarishly unexpected.
“If you could break things down as small as an electron, you could alter them chemically,” Libby said. “Conceivably, that is.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, it seems a bit more of a… later topic, doesn’t it?”
“What, chemistry?”
“We’re still on psychokinesis.”
“Well, that’s not unrelated to thought in general,” she said. “I actually thought of it when we were discussing the mechanics of the future. By the way, have you thought any further about time?”
She had such a ceaseless way of making him wonder what on earth she was talking about.
“About… time?”
“About whether you can use it.” She, unlike him, seemed blissfully unaware that this was the first time they were
speaking to each other privately since he had woken up in her bed. “Precognition is proof the future can be accessed through thought, so why not physically as well? Not to mention that time is a dimension none of the rest of us can even imagine the shape of, much less see.” She fixed him with a direct, unnerving glance. “Unlike you.”
“What, you think I can—?” His misdiagnosed illusionist training was failing him. Magically speaking, he hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of language could be used to
describe what she was suggesting. “Traverse time?”
“I have absolutely no idea, Tristan,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you. It just seems as if you probably have some way to use it, don’t you?”
“Use what?” “Your specialty.” “What about it?”
“Well, it’s yours, isn’t it? So presumably you’re the one who should be using it, not me.”
Foggily, he produced an argument, plucking it from somewhere. “Plenty of magical specialties are designed to be used together. Most naturalists work with—”
“I’m not saying that.” Libby tilted her head, brushing her fringe to one side. She had grown it out; now it was nearly
long enough to tuck behind her ear, a fact of which Tristan was troublingly assured. “There’s nothing wrong with it not being yours to use. I simply suspect otherwise.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why suspect otherwise?”
“Truthfully, it’s really more of a guess than a suspicion.
What does Parisa think?”
“I—” He stopped, taken by surprise yet again. “What?” “Actually, speaking of Parisa.” Another abrupt change,
just as Tristan thought he’d managed a grasp on the
conversation. “Do you suppose she’s changed her mind?”
Rather than continue asking the same question, Tristan folded his arms over his chest, waiting.
“About the whole… elimination thing,” Libby clarified,
intuiting correctly that he hadn’t the faintest idea where she was going with any of this. “Seems like she might have
changed her mind after the whole Callum thing. You know, the trolley problem?”
“Oh.” Right. The small issue of Parisa’s death by Callum. “Yes.” Tristan fought a sudden chill. “In fairness, I think she always knew that about him.”
“Well.” Libby cleared her throat. “I suppose there might be some merit to the whole thing.”
Tristan arched a brow. “Some merit to… killing Callum?” “You saw him, Tristan.” Libby’s mouth was a new, grim
form of determination he’d never seen from her before. “He didn’t know it wasn’t real, did he? He had no idea he was in some sort of… augmented reality in Varona’s head,” she
said with a frown, “so Callum’s reality is that he could be rid of Parisa at any time, and easily. So maybe that’s something to consider in the experiment.”
“That some people should die?”
“That some specialties shouldn’t exist,” she said conclusively.
That, Tristan thought, was certainly a jarring realization to come to.
“It’s a moral dilemma for a reason, Rhodes.” His mouth was dry again, though for what reason, he wasn’t entirely
sure. Perhaps because she’d just unintentionally decided which of them she’d murder, which she might one day
actually do.
Precognition. Terrible. He spared no envy for Cassandra. “There isn’t a correct answer,” Tristan said slowly.
Libby’s smile twisted slightly, eyes drawn up to his.
“I suppose not,” she observed, mostly to herself, and then, astoundingly, began walking away.
Suddenly, Tristan felt a bit mad with disbelief at the concept that Libby could wander over, suggest to him that he was capable of doing something utterly impossible, and then wander off again without addressing the thoughts that had been plaguing him for weeks. Could he kill someone?
Could she? Had they signed over their souls the very moment they set foot in this building? Had they become something they would not have been otherwise, now
contorted beyond recognition from what they’d been? Were they not yet the deformities they would ultimately be? What the fuck was he supposed to do with electrons—how could he possibly use time?—and had she broken it off with her
boyfriend or not?
Tristan’s hand shot out before he could stop himself. “Rhodes, listen—”
“Ah,” came Callum’s voice, cutting in just as Libby
whirled around, eyes wide. “I thought I felt some lingering distress. Is Tristan pestering you again, Rhodes?”
“No, of course not.” She cleared her throat, glancing at Tristan’s hand, which he removed from her arm. “Just think
about it,” she said quietly, “would you?”
Then she gave Callum’s shoes a wordless glance and ducked her head, leaving the room.
“So skittish, that one,” said Callum, glancing after her
and turning back to Tristan. “She doesn’t know, does she?” “No.” He still couldn’t bring himself to tell her. “And
anyway, suppose it isn’t true?”
“Suppose it isn’t,” Callum agreed, falling into the chair beside Tristan’s. “How do you imagine they make that announcement, I wonder?”
“It could be a trick,” Tristan said. “Or a trap. Like—” “The installation? And the Forum?”
Tristan sighed. “Suppose they just want to see what we’re capable of.”
“Suppose it’s real,” Callum mused alternatively. “I don’t suppose you have a lead, do you?”
“A lead?”
“A target would be the less sensitive term,” Callum said. “Or a mark.”
Tristan bristled a little, and Callum’s perpetual smile thinned.
“Do you find me callous now, too, Tristan?”
“A cactus would find you callous,” mumbled Tristan, and Callum chuckled.
“And yet here we are,” he said, summoning a pair of glasses, “two peas in a pod.”
He set one glass in front of Tristan, pouring a bit of brandy he procured from the flask in his jacket pocket.
“You know, I don’t remember the first time I realized I
could feel things other people couldn’t,” Callum commented anecdotally, not looking up from the liquid in the glass. “It’s just… always been there. I knew, of course, right from the start that my mother didn’t love me. She said it, ‘I love you,’ just as often to me as she did to my sisters,” he continued, shifting to pour himself a glass, “but I could feel the way it lacked warmth when she said it to me.”
Callum paused. “She hated my father. Still does,” he
mused in an afterthought, picking up his glass and giving it a testing sniff. “I have a guess that I was conceived under less than admirable circumstances.”
He glanced up at Tristan, who raised his own glass
numbly to his lips. Like always, there was a blur of magic around Callum, but nothing identifiable. Nothing outside of the ordinary, whatever Callum’s ordinary even was.
“Anyway,” Callum went on, “I noticed that if I did certain things; said things a certain way, or held her eye contact
while I did them, I could make her… soften towards me.” The brandy burned in Tristan’s mouth, more fumes than flavor. “I suppose I was ten when I realized I had made my mother love me. Then I realized I could make her do other
things, too. Put the glass down. Put the knife down. Unpack the suitcase. Step away from the balcony.” Callum’s smile was grim. “Now she’s perfectly content. The matriarch of
the most successful media conglomerate in the world, happily satisfied by one of the many boyfriends half her
age. My father hasn’t bothered her in over a decade. But
she still loves me differently; falsely. She loves me because I put it there. Because I made myself her anchor to this life,
and therefore she loves me only as much as she can love any sort of chain. She loves me like a prisoner of war.”
Callum took a sip.
“I feel,” he said, blue eyes meeting Tristan’s. “I feel
immensely. But I must, by necessity, do it differently than other people.”
That, Tristan supposed, was an understatement. He wondered again if Callum were using anything to influence him and determined, grudgingly, that he did not know.
Could not know.
“I,” Tristan began, and cleared his throat, taking another sip. “I would not wish to have your curse.”
“We all have our own curses. Our own blessings.” Callum’s smile faltered. “We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.” He raised his glass, toasting Tristan where he sat, and slid lower in his chair. “You’re angry with me.”
“Angry?”
“There’s not a word for what you are,” Callum corrected himself, “though I suppose anger is close enough. There is bitterness now, resentment. A bit of tarnish, or rust I suppose, on what we were.”
“You killed her.” Even now it felt silly, inconceivable to
say. Tristan had been numb at the time, only half-believing. Now it felt like a distant dream; something he’d invented when his mind had wandered one day. The call of the void,
that sort of thing. Gruesome ugliness that danced into his thoughts and back out, too fleeting and horrid to be true.
“It seemed like the honorable thing at the time,” said Callum.
It took drastic measures not to gape at him. “How?” Callum shrugged. “When you feel someone’s pain,
Tristan, it is difficult not to want to put them out of it. Do we not do the same for physical pain, for terminal suffering?
Under other circumstances it’s called mercy.” He took another sip from his glass. “Sometimes, when I suffer
someone else’s anguish, I want what they want: for all of it to end. Parisa’s condition is lifelong, eternal. Degenerative.”
He set the glass on the table, empty now.
“It will consume her,” he said, “one way or another. Do I want her to die? No. But—”
Another shrug.
“Some people suffer bravely. Some clumsily.” He glanced up, catching Tristan’s look of uncertainty. “Some do so quietly, poetically. Parisa does it stubbornly and pointlessly, going on just to go on. Just to avoid defeat; to feel
something more than nothing. It is, above all, vanity,” Callum said with a dry laugh. “She is like all beautiful things: they cannot bear the idea of not existing. I wonder whether her pain will grow sharper or more dull after her beauty fades away.”
“And what about those of us who don’t suffer?” asked Tristan, fingering the lip of his glass. “What worth do we have to you?”
Callum scrutinized him a moment.
“We all have the exact curses we deserve,” he said. “What would I have been, had the sins that made me been somehow different? You, I think, have a condition of smallness, invisibility.” He sat up, leaning forward. “You are forced to see everything as it is, Tristan,” Callum murmured, “because you think you cannot be seen at all.”
Callum slid the glass from Tristan’s fingers, leaning across the table. He smoothed one hand over the bone of Tristan’s cheek, his thumb resting in the imprint of Tristan’s chin. There was a moment just before it happened where Tristan thought perhaps he had wanted it: touch.
Tenderness.
Callum would have known what he wanted, so perhaps he had.
“I feel,” said Callum, “immensely.”
Then he rose to his feet, long-legged and lean, leaving only the glass where he had been.
It went without saying that for days after, Tristan was quietly in torment. Callum, at least, was no different in his intimacy. They were friends primarily, same as ever,
accustomed to their evening digestifs by the fire. There was a companionship to Callum, an ease. There were moments when it seemed Callum’s fingers twitched towards Tristan’s shoulder, or skated reassuringly between the traps of Tristan’s scapulae. But they were only moments.
Libby, meanwhile, kept coolly away, and Tristan’s thoughts of time with her meandered inevitably to the
matter of time itself.
As spring began to break unseasonably early, creeping out from beneath the winter chill, Tristan found himself
repeatedly outside, approaching the wards that surrounded the Society’s estate. Magic at its edges was thick and full, identifiable in strands as voluminous as rope. There were threads of it from other classes, other initiates, which made for a fun, sleepless puzzle. Tristan would toy with the pieces, pulling at their ends like fraying thread, and watch for any disruption in the pulse of constancy.
Time. The easiest way to see it—or whatever of it Tristan could identify—was to stand there, nearly out to the street, and to exist in many stages of it at once. It wasn’t a normal activity, per se, but none of this was. Their supervision
seemed to have decreased over time; coincidentally or not, none of them had seen much of Atlas since they had each been confronted by the Forum, which led to an odd sort of tiptoeing among the Society’s residents. Each had
developed their own odd habits, and this was Tristan’s. He
stood in silence, twisting dials he only partially knew how to use, and hoped—or, rather, assumed—that something
would happen if he only looked long enough.
The trouble was his imagination. Libby had said it: hers was too small. Tristan knew the falseness of geometry, the idea that the world contained other dimensions that they were not yet programmed to understand. But he had
learned shapes as a child, so naturally he looked for them now. To stare into the familiar and somehow expect to see
something new felt so frustrating as to be thoroughly impossible. Yes, Tristan could see things other people could not, but he didn’t believe his own eyes when he saw them. A child told habitually of his worthlessness was now a man bereft of fantasy, lacking the inventiveness to lend him a broader scope. Ironically, it was his own nature that crippled him most.
Only once did Tristan run into someone while he did this. He looked up, startled, to suddenly see a young man facing him, staring at the house as if he couldn’t quite see it, or perhaps like he was looking at something entirely else.
“Yes?” asked Tristan, and the man blinked, adjusting his attention. He wasn’t particularly old, probably Tristan’s
same age or a bit younger, and had slightly overlong black hair, plus a general look of rare untidiness. As if he were the sort of person who didn’t usually spill coffee on his collar, but he had done so today.
“You can see me?” asked the man, incredulous. Tristan supposed he might have been using a cloaking illusion, but was interrupted before he could ask. “Well, never mind, that’s obvious,” the man sighed, mostly to himself. He was not British; he was extremely American, in fact, albeit different from whatever sort of American that Libby
happened to be.
(Tristan wondered why she had come to mind, but hastily dismissed it.)
“Obviously you can see me or you wouldn’t have said anything,” the man remarked in something of a continued
amiability, “only I’ve never actually encountered another traveler before.”
“Another… traveler?” asked Tristan.
“Usually when I do it everything’s a bit frozen,” said the man. “I knew there were other kinds, of course. I just always thought I was existing on a plane that other people couldn’t see.”
“A plane of what?” asked Tristan.
The man gave him a bemused half-frown. “Well, never mind, I… suppose I’m wrong.” He cleared his throat. “In any case—”
“What are you looking at?” asked Tristan, who was academically stuck on the point at hand. “Your
surroundings, I mean.” He hoped to determine whether they stood in the same place physically, or only temporally. Or perhaps neither, or both.
“Oh.” The man glanced around. “Well, my apartment. I’m just deciding whether to go inside.”
“I don’t think I’m on the plane you’re on, then. I think I can just see it.” Tristan paused, and then, because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted the encounter to end, “What are you deciding?”
“Well, I’ve just not entirely made my mind up about
something I’ve got to do,” said the man. “Actually no, it’s worse. I think I’ve already decided what I’m going to do, and I just hope it’s the right thing. But it isn’t, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he sighed, “because I’ve
already started, and looking back won’t help.”
That, Tristan thought, was certainly relatable.
“I won’t keep you,” Tristan said. “I’m just… playing around a bit, I think.”
Calculations had started, albeit unhelpfully. It seemed
They were somehow existing on the same plane of something—likely time, as it was the only explanation that made sense—but how had Tristan ended up here? Either it had happened so subtly that he didn’t notice (meaning it might have happened before, or could happen again by accident), or he had done something to trigger it but failed to record the details. He should probably start keeping track of everything—his meals, his socks, each step he took—just in case one of his actions was the key to transporting him to another corner of reality.
“Yes, well, play responsibly.” The man gave Tristan a crooked grin. “I’m Ezra, by the way.”
“Tristan,” he replied, offering his hand.
“Tristan?” Ezra echoed, his brows twitching as he shook it. “But you’re not—?”
Tristan waited, but Ezra cut himself off, clearing his throat. “Never mind. Good luck, Tristan,” he said before striding forward, slowly disappearing into the thick fog that blanketed the house’s lawn.
Once Ezra had vanished, it dawned on Tristan that he had done something. He had no idea what, but it was something. Turning sharply, he marched into the house and bounded up the stairs.
He could tell Libby. She would probably be even more excited than him, which would allow him the chance to roll his eyes and say things like, “Calm down, it’s nothing,” even if he didn’t believe it. But she would also ask a million questions, trying to piece everything together like she always did. Libby was a master of details, constantly in the trenches of construction, wanting to see how things worked and what pieces fit together. And Tristan wouldn’t have a single answer. She would look up at him, wide-eyed…
and say anything else? and he would say no, that’s all he knew, sorry he even brought it up at… three.
In the morning.
Tristan sighed, stepping back from Libby’s door and shifting to face the frame beside his own instead, knocking once.
Callum arrived at the door shirtless, his hair mussed.
Behind him, Tristan could see the rumpled sheets, still warm from where Callum had lain there moments before,
breathing deeply in solemn slumber.
It was strange how Tristan did not know how Callum looked to the others. He wished sometimes that he could venture inside someone else’s head the way Parisa could, just to see. It was a curiosity now. He knew Callum did
something to his hair, to his nose. He could see that enchantments were used there, but could not piece together their effect. Instead, Callum appeared to Tristan as he always did, with hair that wasn’t quite blond and the forehead that was noticeably high; the jaw that was so square it looked perpetually tensed. There were things
available to fix, if one were in the business of fixing.
Callum’s eyes were close-set and not as blue as he could make them if he tried. Possibly Callum could even afford the enchantments that made them permanent; even mortal
technology could fix a person’s eyesight. Medeian charms afforded to the son of an agency of illusionists meant that even Callum might not remember the way his face looked undone.
“I see you,” came out of Tristan’s mouth before he had decided fully what to say, which was probably best, as it
might have been ‘I don’t want to be alone,’ or worse, ‘I don’t know what I want,’ both of which Callum would know by looking. What a terrible thing it was to be so tragically exposed.
Callum shifted away from the door, beckoning him in with a motion.
Wordlessly, Tristan stepped inside.
NICO
NICO SLIPPED TO THE INSIDE of a right cross and missed a hard incoming hook, running directly into Reina’s fist and
swearing loudly in a mix of highbrow Spanish and rural Nova Scotian slurs.
(Once, Gideon had taught him how to say something in Mermish—which was a blend of Danish, Icelandic, and
something Nico classified as vaguely Inuit—but had also warned him that, pronounced incorrectly, it would summon a sort of half-ghost, half-siren sea-thing, so it hardly seemed worth it to use. Max was not particularly helpful with profanity, as he was stubbornly prone to overuse of the
same one: “balls.”)
“You’re out of sorts,” remarked Reina, wiping sweat from her brow and eyeing Nico as he stumbled back, dazed.
It took a moment, but eventually his eye stopped watering.
“Maybe you’re just getting better,” mumbled Nico half- heartedly.
“I am, but that was your mistake,” Reina observed with her usual regard for his feelings.
“Yes, fine.” Nico slumped down to sit on the lawn, sulking a bit. “I suppose let’s call it, then.”
Reina gave the grass a derogatory look (it may have
insulted her; she had mentioned once that certain types of English lawns had a tendency to be excessively entitled) but eventually sat uncomfortably beside him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Reina. “Nothing,” said Nico.
“Fine,” said Reina.
It was, in nearly every sense, the opposite of the encounter he’d had shortly before this one.
“You’re lurking,” Parisa had called to Nico from inside the painted room, turning a page in her book without looking up. “Stop lurking.”
Nico froze outside the door frame. “I’m not—”
“Telepath,” she reminded him, sounding bored. “You’re not only lurking, you’re pining.”
“I’m not pining.”
(Okay, so maybe it wasn’t totally different from his conversation with Reina.)
“Just come in here and tell me what’s bothering you so we can move this along,” said Parisa, finally glancing up from what Nico was surprised to see was a vintage copy of the X-Men comics.
“What?” she prompted impatiently, following his line of sight to the comic with a look most closely described as
exacting. “Professor X is a telepath.” “Well, I know,” said Nico, fumbling.
“You don’t think he’s based on a medeian?”
“No, I’m just… never mind.” He paused, rifling the hair at the back of his head with a grimace. “I’ll just—you’re busy,
I’ll—”
“Sit down,” said Parisa, shoving out the chair across from her with her foot.
“Fine. Yes, alright.” He sat heavily, clumsily. “You’re fine,” said Parisa. “Stop fretting.”
“I’m not fretting,” Nico said, bristling a bit from the wound to his manhood, and she glanced up.
It was really so desperately unfair she was so pretty, Nico thought.
“I know,” she said. “That’s my origin story, if you’ve been paying attention.”
Immediately, Nico faltered again. “I know,” he said, more to his feet than to anything. Was this what it was like to be
Libby? He was almost never so oafish, nor so concerned with his own oafishness. He’d met plenty of pretty girls, and certainly a handful of attractive mean ones. He should have been prepared for this.
“I’m not mean,” Parisa corrected, “I’m brusque. And before you facetiously blame a language barrier,” she added, pausing him once he opened his mouth, “I am also conversationally trilingual, so that’s not an excuse.”
“A toast to your linguistic superiority, then,” grumbled Nico, stung.
Parisa glanced at her page, flipping it.
“Sarcasm,” she remarked, “is a dead form of wit.” Reference to mortality of any sort was enough to make
Nico flinch, and Parisa glanced up at the motion of it, sighing.
“Just say it,” she suggested, tossing the comic aside. “I can’t have you tiptoeing around like this, Nicolás. If you go soft then I’ll have to be soft, and I can’t begin to tell you how little time I have for pretense—”
“You died,” Nico said, “in my head.”
Parisa paused for a moment, possibly to dip a toe inside the head in question. She was barefoot, he realized,
observing the petal-pink of her toenails where they rested on the chair beside his. He focused purely on the observation, hoping it would be less telling than anything else she might find running through his thoughts.
“Don’t concern yourself with the me in your head,” Parisa said eventually. “She doesn’t exist, Nico. Only I do.”
Good advice, theoretically. In this case, it barely applied. “I feel responsible somehow,” he admitted, “which is—” “Ridiculous,” she supplied.
“—I was going to say possibly unfair,” he corrected, “but still. Why—?”
He stopped.
“Why did I choose to use your head and not one of the others?” Parisa prompted. “I told you, Nico, because you’re the least capable of guile.”
“Sounds like an insult.”
“Why?”
“Makes me sound… I don’t know.” He was mumbling, half-shamed. “Naïve.”
“What is this, machismo?” Parisa sighed.
Nico shifted in his chair, glancing at her toes again. “For what it’s worth, it’s you I’d most want in bed,” she
remarked, subjecting him to untold decades of trauma
simply by holding his gaze while she said it. “It’s rare that I’m selfless enough to keep my distance, truthfully, and rarer still that I summon any restraint. Unfortunately I find myself with such a pressing desire not to ruin you.”
He slid a hand to where her feet were idly sat atop the chair beside his, stroking a finger along one arch. “Who says you’d ruin me?”
“Oh, Nico, I would love for you to be the one to ruin me,” she said flippantly, shifting to rest her feet in his lap, “but much to my own detriment, I wouldn’t allow it; and anyway, you do things much too openly, with far too much of yourself. You’d fuck me with your whole heart,” she lamented, “and I can’t put you in that sort of danger.”
“I am capable of casual s*x,” said Nico, wondering why he felt the need to make it true. He curled his palm around her heel, drawing it up to the bone of her ankle and
caressing her calf slowly, molding his hand to the shape of her.
“For you, it can either be good or it can be casual,” she said. “And I can’t take the chance of having one without
both.”
She dug her toes into his thigh, sliding down in her chair. “What do you do in your dreams?” she said, and then,
“You speak to someone,” she answered herself, drumming her nails along the wood of the table. “I can hear you doing it sometimes.”
“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “I… it’s really not my—” “Not your secret to tell, I know, only I already know it, so
there’s very little telling involved. His name is Gideon,” Parisa produced matter-of-factly, like a familiar character she had plucked from the pages of a comic book. “He worries you constantly. Gideon, Gideon, Gideon… he is in
your thoughts so often I think his name sometimes myself.”
She sighed a little as Nico continued to work his palms
mindlessly into the slender muscle of her calf, strumming the tender fibers of her. “He’s a traveler, isn’t he, your
Gideon? Not a telepath.” She closed her eyes, exhaling again when Nico’s fingers brushed the inside of her knee. “From what I can tell he operates in dreams, not thought.”
“Actually,” said Nico, and stopped.
Parisa eyes opened and she shifted her leg again, this time adjusting so the arch of her foot sat perilously atop Max’s prized vulgarity of choice.
“Actually?” she prompted.
For once she wasn’t smiling coyly. She didn’t intend to
seduce him into an answer. She meant to crush him if he did not.
Nico liked her more for that, which was troubling.
“Don’t be troubled,” she assured him. “You may be the only person who likes me for the right reasons.”
He rolled his eyes, taking her foot in his hands again. “Do you think there’s an intersect between dreams and
thought?” To her pause of expectation, he clarified, “I’ve been trying to do research on it but it’s no use, really. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“What is he?” she asked him. “Gideon.”
He kneaded the bone above her arch, stroking it with his thumb.
“A creature, technically.” “Hybrid human?”
“Well—” Nico bit the inside of his cheek. “No. Half mermaid, half satyr.”
“Oh.” Parisa’s smile twitched, and then broadened. “Human-shaped? Where it counts, that is.”
He glanced up at her. “Is that meant to be funny?” “Yes. A bit.” Her tongue slid over her lips, rendering her
faintly girlish. “I can’t help my appetites.”
“He’s got a dick, if that answers your question.” He
switched gruffly to her other foot, tugging punitively at her pinky toe. “Not that I—” More hesitation. “I’m just saying,
I’ve lived with him for a long time. Things happen.” “So you’ve seen it?”
Nico glanced up, defensive, and she shrugged.
“I’ve seen plenty,” she told him. “I wouldn’t judge you.” “It’s not like that,” he muttered.
“Fine, machismo again.” She nudged his knee with her heel. “Don’t be cross.”
“I’m not, I’m just—”
“So Gideon can travel in dreams, then?” “Gideon… can,” Nico said slowly. “Yes. Sorry, yes.”
“Oh.” Parisa sat up, abruptly removing both feet from his lap. “You’ve done it too?”
“I—” He felt his cheeks flush. “It’s a private question.” “Is it?”
No.
“Fine, I do it,” Nico said with a grimace, “but don’t ask me how I—”
“How do you do it?”
He gritted his teeth. “I told you, it’s—”
“Describe Gideon’s penis,” Parisa suggested, and in the pulse of panic that followed, she had clearly plucked
something from his head. “Ah,” she said, “so you transform, then? Well, that’s certainly impressive. More than.” She
nudged him again, delighted. “Brilliant. Now we can never
fuck,” she said, seemingly content with that conclusion, “as I make a point never to sleep with people who are more magical than me.”
“That can’t possibly be true,” said Nico, gently devastated.
“I,” Parisa replied, “am very magical. The Forum must
have been especially eager to get their hands on you,” she added as an afterthought, which meant nothing to Nico. He frowned, bewildered, and she tilted her head, apparently
recognizing his blankness for what it was. “Did you not get a visit from the Forum while you were in New York?”
Nico thought back to that weekend, trying to recall if anything had been out of place.
“Oi,” Gideon had said at one point, “someone’s trying to get in.” Nico, who had been in his customary form of a falcon, said nothing, but gave a brisk little flap of his wings to suggest they could well and rightly fuck off. “Right then,” said Gideon, “that’s what I thought.”
“Well,” sighed Parisa, dragging him back to the point, “never mind, then. You wanted to know about dreams and thought?” she asked, and while Nico had until that point been highly insistent on keeping what he knew of Gideon’s condition a secret, he recognized the motion of a rare door opening. Somehow, he had earned a key to Parisa Kamali’s sincerity, and he did not plan to waste it.
“You read a book,” Nico said, “about dreams. Reina told me.”
“Ibn Sirin’s book, you mean?” asked Parisa. “Though it’s said he abhorred books, so probably a lesser medeian wrote it.”
“Yes, that one. I think.” He fidgeted. “I wondered if you had any—”
“I do,” Parisa confirmed. “One theory, mainly.” She paused, and then, “What do dreams look like when you’re in one?”
“They have a topography,” Nico said. “They’re in… realms, for lack of a better word.”
“Like an astral plane?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Nico, “seeing as the only one I’ve ever been on was the one you created in my head, and I didn’t know I was in it.”
“Well, you remember how it looked and felt,” she pointed out, and he considered it.
“Indistinct from reality, you mean?”
“Pretty much,” she agreed. “Our subconscious fills in the blanks. If anyone, particularly you, had looked closely at any of the details, you would have known we were not in reality. But most people do not look closely unless they are given a reason to look.”
“Well, then yes, dream realms feel the same,” he said. “Like reality.”
“I suspect dreams are their own astral plane,” Parisa said. “Only they are absent time.”
“Absent time?”
“Yes. Are you ever aware of time when you’re traveling with Gideon?” she asked, and Nico shook his head. “Is he?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“Well, perhaps your theory is close. Dreams may well be the intersect of time and thought,” Parisa said thoughtfully. “There are plenty of studies to show that time moves differently in dreams, even to a calculable extent. Possibly no differently than how time moves in space.”
That was an interesting theory. “So time could move faster or slower in dreams?”
“Instinctually it follows,” she said, shrugging, and added, “Gideon must have quite a lot of control to be able to pull himself in and out at will.”
Nico had never considered it that way, but Gideon did have a keen sense for when to return. Nico, always in bird form, just assumed Gideon wore some sort of wristwatch.
“Why do you worry about him so much?” asked Parisa, interrupting Nico’s internal pondering. “Aside from the matter of your friendship.”
Nico opened his mouth, hesitating, then closed it.
Then, gradually, opened it again for, “He’s… very valuable.”
He didn’t want to get into detail about what Gideon’s mother regularly asked him to do. Steal things, usually, and typically on behalf of medeians. She was something of a con woman, as far as Nico could tell. With ocean ecosystems
changing and the increasing privatization of magic, the modern mermaid evidently could not be counted on to limit herself to the usual exploits of the sea.
Equally unclear, in Nico’s view, was whether Gideon was or wasn’t a criminal. Gideon certainly considered himself one, hence Nico’s careful secrecy on his behalf, but Nico
had never liked the thought of it. When Gideon was a child he had simply done as his mother asked, not understanding the details of what he’d been tasked with or who they’d been contracted for, and once he became aware of the consequences, he had stopped, or tried to. People, Gideon said, were inclined to go mad when something was stolen
from inside their thoughts, and he no longer wished to be part of it.
But it hadn’t taken Gideon long to realize that hiding from his mother (and her employers) was far more easily said than done.
“Ah, yes,” Parisa murmured to herself, “I suppose his abilities would be easily monetized. Plenty of people would pay to take ownership of something in a dream if they knew such power existed.” She stared off for a moment, thinking. “So what exactly is it you’re looking for in the archives?”
Confessing the truth was something of a difficulty, but it didn’t seem worth keeping to himself. If anyone was going to be able to help him—or to have no particular agenda in knowing what he knew—Nico supposed it was Parisa.
“What he is, I suppose,” Nico admitted. “What his powers are. What his life span is. Whether anyone has ever existed like him before.” A pause. “That sort of thing.”
“He craves a species, I take it?” “In a sense.”
“Pity,” she said. “Very human of him, to long for a collective.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Nico had a feeling Parisa was in her own thoughts rather than his at the
moment, which was an interesting observation. She seemed to revolve within a solitary orbit, the energy in the room
suddenly collecting around her in tendrils of curiosity rather than expelling outward, as other people’s contemplation
tended to do.
“You should have something,” Parisa said after a moment. “A talisman to carry with you.”
Nico blinked, looking up. “What?”
“Something to keep with you. Something you keep secret. So that you know where you are,” she explained, “and whether you exist on a plane of reality. Your friend Gideon should carry one, too.”
“Why?”
Nico stared in puzzlement as Parisa rose to her feet, stretching languidly.
“Well, you haven’t identified it yet, but the reason you can’t let go of what you saw inside your head is because you didn’t know you were inside it.” She turned to look at him, half-smiling. “It’s a favor, Nico. You ought to have a talisman. Find one and keep it with you, and then you’ll never have to wonder what’s real.”
She turned to leave, expressing every intention to exit the room without further discussion, but Nico leapt to his feet, catching her arm to pause her.
“You don’t think Callum would really hurt you, do you?” he asked, his voice more urgent than he would have preferred it to be. An hour before, even five minutes ago, he would never have attempted such a spectacular display of vulnerability, but now he needed to know. “In real life, I mean. In actuality. Whatever that means.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly in calculation.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and turned away, but Nico tugged her back, imploring her.
“How can it not matter? You can see inside his head,
Parisa. I can’t.” He released her, but kept the pull of
conspiracy between them. “Please. Just tell me what he really is.”
For a moment when she looked at him, Nico thought he saw uncharacteristic evidence of tension in Parisa’s face.
Vestiges of a secret soon to be known; a truth wanting out. She made the decision in the second her eyes met his, but even with the improbability of the conversation they’d just had, he couldn’t have prepared himself for how her answer would shake him.
“It doesn’t matter whether Callum plans to hurt me,” she said, “because I’ll kill him before he does.”
Then Parisa had leaned closer and said something that Nico had taken like a blow, still reeling even after hours had passed.
“What is it?” Reina asked again, startling him back to their conversation. She was normally comfortable without speaking, but presumably he had been silent for too long.
Nico tugged at a blade of grass, plucking it free. He wondered if Reina could hear it scream when he did so, and flinched at the reminder that the universe had some voice he couldn’t hear. Another detail among many he couldn’t un-know. A blissful piece of foregone ignorance, belonging
to a person he would never be again.
“Would you kill someone to have all of this?” he muttered to Reina, though he regretted having asked the
question as soon as it fell out of his mouth. Would she ask him why, and would he be able to answer if she did?
But he needn’t have worried. She didn’t even spare a breath.
“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes, warming silently in the grass.
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