“Screw the water, and screw my body!” I snapped when I couldn’t take it anymore. “Just tell me what the hell happened to Abram.” I slammed my hand down on the table and sat back upright despite the nausea. “I need to know, Ramsey.” Blinking hard, I found familiar tears stinging the backs of my eyelids and did my best to keep them in check. “Is he… Did he die? You owe me the truth. Tell me.”
Ramsey sighed before turning the water off and taking his ever loving time moving the dozen or so feet between the rooms. I stared at him, venom in my eyes, as he sat down slowly and slid the water across the table.
I growled as he motioned for me to drink. There was a look on his face that told me he would answer my question only after I took care of myself and drank the offered water. Reluctantly, I grabbed the glass and took a gulp.
As much as I hated to admit it, Ramsey was right. The soothing way the liquid slid down my throat told me I was wrong. I needed water. It wasn’t until the glass was empty that I let myself acknowledge that he knew what I needed better than I did—at least when it came to the after effects of magic.
Setting the glass on the table, I looked at him and waited. I knew what I looked like. I could feel the muscles in my face pulled back in trepidation. Ramsey stared at me for a few long moments, and it wasn’t until I started tapping my fingers on the table that he spoke.
“I wish...” he finally said while eyeing my fingers as if he was afraid I would attack him with magic at any moment. “I wish he had died. That would be easier than the hell he’s going to live in for the rest of his life.”
I was all at once furious and concerned at that sentiment. What the hell? My heart fell. What on earth did that mean? What would be harder than death?
Who was I kidding? I’d been living an existence worse than death for the past year.
I wasn’t about to play guessing games with the man in front of me though, and I wasn’t about to let him know I was on the verge of begging at this point. I steeled my gaze and nodded for him to continue, hoping he got the point and just gave me the information I wanted without me having to punch him.
“The spell was going fine at first,” he went on as though there hadn’t been a long pause. “As I said, it’s complicated. There are a lot of intricate neurological pathways in the brain, and when that brain is tainted with and runs on magic, those pathways became literal landmines.” Ramsey took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair, obviously distressed by what had happened. “Still, I was working my way through them. The information I was gleaning from you came in as a stream, just as it was supposed to. I’m not sure what you were doing in your little pocket dimension of your own subconscious, but it worked. I had enough to rebuild him.”
“Okay,” I said, pushing down a blush as I thought of what I had just done with Abram in that pocket dimension Ramsey mentioned. “All of that sounds good. What happened to screw it up?”
“The landmines,” Ramsey said. “Whoever did this to him, whoever took his mind and twisted it into what it was when we ran into him the other day, placed protective measures there.” He shook his head. “God help me, I wasn’t expecting things to get out of hand like they did. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t.”
The man in front of me pretty much fell apart. All of the strength I was used to him carrying faded away, leaving nothing but a desolate and miserable shell where the powerful mage usually stood. Under normal circumstances, I would call Briar to have her make him feel better when something like this happened, but there was no way I was going to bring her into the middle of this craziness. The last thing she needed was to have her life thrown into chaos because of magic. Again.
“It’s all right,” I said instinctively, needing to offer him the same comfort that he’d offered me for the past year. “None of us knew what we were getting ourselves into here.”
I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder.
“It’s my job to know,” he snarled, blinking back tears of his own. “It’s my job, and I messed up, and now Abram is going to suffer because of it.”
“Suffer?” I asked, my heart leaping horribly. “What do you mean?”
My mind was already racing with the possibilities of what could have happened. While I’d been selfishly spending time with him in the pocket dimension, something happened and now he was going to suffer. Self-doubt filled my mind while I impatiently waited for Ramsey to pull himself together.
“When I hit the protective measure,” he said, “I’ll call it a landmine. It exploded before I could get around it safely.” Ramsey looked down at the table, and he fell back into the chair across from me, breaking the connection we’d had while he smothered his face with his hands in frustration. “It sent pieces of what I’d done scattering to the corners of his mind. All the information you sent me was out of position. A lesser mage wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it, and with that intel already inside Abram’s mind, there would have been nothing left to do. We couldn’t have replaced it there. The duality of such a thing would break his psyche altogether. It would have been over.”
“‘Would have’ means it isn’t,” I said, mentally chiding myself for the rush of hope that filled my chest, but relishing it nonetheless. “That means you did something to fix it. Or you could do something to fix it.”
I sat forward, and even though I wanted to pretend that I had my shit together, I didn’t. I needed him to tell me what he’d done.
“Oh, I did something,” he admitted, shaking his head. “And I regret it with every tiny piece of my soul.”
The desolation in his voice filled me with dread. “What happened, Ramsey?” I swallowed hard, afraid of what I was about to hear.
“I was able to get the pieces before they scattered too far,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “I placed them together, a full copy of Abram’s mind, a place for his soul to rest, and I encircled it with your magic. I thought it would be enough to allow him to take over, but the protective measure did more than decimate what I had built. It solidified what the person who did this to Abram did. It made the thing running his brain its default setting. I can’t undo it now, and that means that a fully conscious version of Abram is tucked inside of a mind and body he can’t control.”
“What?” I asked, my chest tightening. I knew the words he was saying, I knew what he was telling me, but my brain wasn’t comprehending it. It couldn’t be true.
“He’s stuck in there, Charisse,” Ramsey said. “Like Huntsman with the bottle. He’s trapped inside a vessel he can never control or get out of. The only, and I mean only, bright spot is that the bastard is strong enough to break free every once in awhile.” Ramsey shook his head. “For a few seconds at a time, anyway, once, for almost half an hour while you were in that pocket dimension. During those breakthroughs, he’s back to himself. The true Abram takes over. Those moments are fleeting, though. I could tell when he did it that it was causing him excruciating pain.”
“My God,” I said, horrified.
“I know you already hate me for this, but that’s not the last of it,” he muttered. “That’s not the nail in the coffin on what happened to him. Of what Abram is going through, over and over again.”
I looked at him, not understanding what the mage was trying to say to me. “Spit it out. What is it?”
“There’s something else,” Ramsey said. “It’s the way I know he’s coming through, and that it’s not the replacement tricking me.” He looked down at his hands, and all of a sudden our entire conversation came rushing back at me.
The time, the way he kept talking about Abram and how he was able to fix it. Something wasn’t adding up, and as much as I wanted to wait, I couldn’t.
“Ramsey,” I said quietly. “I know that I’ve been gone for hours, but you’re making it seem like there’s been days. How long has it been?”
“Char,” Ramsey said stiltedly. “I don’t know how long it’s been. Honestly. I know that I found him, and that he’s able to come th
rough. That’s all I know. Well, that and the reason I know that Abram is able to break free of his prison.”
That wasn’t it, though. Ramsey was holding something back. Something more, something so much more powerful and important that I instinctively curled into a ball and held onto my legs for all they were worth. Even though I was afraid and didn’t want him to tell me, I needed it.
“What do you mean?” I asked once I was ready to hear the rest.
My heart was beating furiously in my throat. Things couldn’t get much worse than they were right then, but I had to know what was happening. I had to know, or I’d be nothing more than the girl who was afraid to leave New Haven. I couldn’t hide from this. I couldn’t run from what I’d had a part in doing to Abram.
“Right as the true Abram is managing to take over, he always says the same thing,” Ramsey answered. “Before he’s sucked back into oblivion.”
“What?” I demanded. “What does he say?”
“He says ‘Always, my love,’” Ramsey said mournfully. “Always.”
Chapter 12
With my heart in my throat and my mind basically in pieces on the floor, I tried to think of anything I could do to avert the disaster that lay in front of me.
The idea of Abram—my Abram—being trapped inside a body he could neither control nor escape was pretty much the worst thing I could imagine. Well, maybe except for death. Still, here we were. Things had gone wrong, as things always seemed to do when they involved me. The worst had not only become a possibility, but also the reality I would have to suffer through.
“He’s beyond that door,” Huntsman said, sidling up next to me inside the hallway of my apartment building.
“Thanks,” I said tonelessly.
Of course, I knew Abram was beyond this door. It was why I was standing here. It was why I had been standing at this door for nearly fifteen minutes now. He was calling to me. From somewhere deep down inside, the Abram that I could never really touch was begging for my help. Okay, so maybe I was imagining that part, but I knew Abram. He would hate being trapped anywhere.
No, Abram would want me to do anything I could to stay safe. He would be livid that I’d gotten involved at all, and now here I was. Standing here, not moving. No matter what I did, or which way I turned, I was going to change everything.
“Ugh,” I groaned.
Huntsman grunted at my side, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he let me get absorbed in my own mind, and in return I ignored him completely.
I had every intention of going into that apartment, of looking the man that had taken over Abram’s body directly in the eyes in hopes of being able to find a piece of my love in there and figuring a way of pulling him out. I had nothing but good intentions, and still I couldn’t move. I was being stupid, though, and I knew it. That’s what I was: some stupid girl who believed her love was strong enough to change something even magic could not.
That was why I couldn’t muster the courage to go inside. I knew the truth. I knew I would fail, just like the spell had failed in the first place. I knew my hubris had condemned the man I loved to a near endless lifetime of torment, and I wasn’t ready to face that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready to face that, quite honestly.
Nope. Maybe one day when I was more than what I am.
“I can inform you of the next time he’s acting like himself, if you’d prefer,” Huntsman said, almost sheepishly, as he shuffled beside me. “Perhaps that would be easier for you.”
I knew he was there, but in my contemplation, I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.
“You know,” I said, scoffing and almost chuckling bitterly at the idea of what I was about to say. “I think that would make it harder, actually. At least this way I can face him without the familiarity in his eyes when I tell him what I’ve done.”
I turned to Huntsman, taking in the weary and even guilty look on his face. Still, I had no tears in my eyes. I had cried enough for one day, it seemed. I’d probably cried enough for a lifetime in the past year, and now it seemed like I was done. Regardless of how upset, how devastated I was, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of tears behind my eyes.
“It’s weird,” I said. “All I’ve wanted since the second he left was for him to come back to me. Now, I don’t know that I can face him even if he’s not really there. I think it would be easier to look at the thing that took his place, to look in his eyes and not see my Abram looking back at me.” I cleared my throat. “I failed him. Worse than that, I’ve harmed him, and I don’t want to have to sit down next to him and explain the things that I’ve done while trying to save him.”
“Are you sure he’d see it that way?” Huntsman asked, blinking hard. “While I’ll admit there were times we didn’t always see eye to eye, I found Abram to be a fair person. What’s more, I found him to have the capacity to forgive anything, especially when it comes to you. Do you really think he wouldn’t forgive you for this?”
“I don’t want him to have to forgive me for what I’ve done,” I said defiantly. “I want him to be with me. I know Ramsey told me it was a longshot. I know he said the likelihood wasn’t in our favor. But the truth was, deep down, I believed it was going to work. I don’t know why I believed that.”
“I do,” Huntsman said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The two of you have been beating the odds since the moment you met. You’ve gotten through things that even the stories of old couldn’t compete with when it comes to trials of love. It only makes sense to me that, somewhere along the way, at least part of you would begin to believe you were invincible, the exception to all of the rules the rest of the world faces.”
“I guess rules like that don’t have exceptions,” I muttered mournfully, thinking about the past as well as what the future might now hold for all of us, since I’d torn away any chance of redeeming Abram.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “I’ve watched the two of you before. I’ve seen you down and out, and I’ve witnessed you come back from things that would have crippled lesser men, You have left me astounded on more than one occasion.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Sometimes, we think we’re at the end of our story only to find out it’s simply a bump along the road to finding a happy ending.”
I looked up at the man, grateful for what he was trying to do, but I knew the truth. Not all stories had happy endings. If that were the case, my mom would have beat her fight with cancer. I swallowed back the tears pinching my throat. That seemed like a lifetime ago now. I knew I wasn’t meant to have a happy ending. Everything I touched was cursed.
“I’m not sure that’s something I would expect to hear coming from a warrior’s mouth,” I said, deflecting from what I was really feeling and doing my best to get a handle on the emotions simmering under the surface.
“I suppose this warrior has changed, Charisse Bellamy,” he answered softly, and I could practically feel the weight on him as his shoulders slumped down.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head and kicking myself for being so damn self-centered.
While I was going through my own crap, I had completely forgotten that Huntsman had his own issues to deal with. Like the fact that we currently had less than three days to help him get out of being stuck in a lamp for the foreseeable future.
“Don’t be sorry for me Charisse Bellamy,” he said. “It’s perfectly reasonable to think of those closest to your heart first.”
“You’re close to my heart, too,” I said honestly. “I’d have been dead a hundred times over if not for you.”
“Then, I guess that makes the both of us warriors,” he answered plainly.
“We’re going to find a way to get you out of this,” I said, motioning back away from both of us. “Even now, Ramsey is working on a spell to find that damn genie. We might not have Abram back in the way I want him, but he’s here nonetheless. We have access to his powers, and that means we can use them to get to this genie, maybe even force her back into that bottle.”
“To what e
nd?” Huntsman asked, surprising me so much that my mouth dropped open.
“To the end of you not spending all of eternity trapped in some brass prison. I thought that much was clear.”
“But she will, right? The genie?” he asked, and I could see the pain as it flashed across his perfect features. “She’ll be trapped in there again.”
“I think that’s the way it works,” I said, narrowing my eyes as I tried to decipher what he was getting at. “Are you saying you don’t want her to have to do that?”
It would be just like Huntsman, though. To have feelings and regret for giving the curse back to the one who gave it to him in the first place.
“If I am a victim in this, then it only makes sense that she is, too,” he said logically. “Who knows what sort of devious djinn trapped her in there and how long she was actually suffering before she was released?” His words brought forth a vision of torment and curses, much like the one Abram had been forced to endure for a lifetime before he met me.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “All of that’s very sad, but it’s no reason to throw yourself on a sword for someone you hardly know.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Huntsman challenged.
I looked back at the door that stood between me and the man who used to be Abram. “That’s not the same, and you know it,” I said, a spike of anger rising in me that I was useless to quell. “That might not technically be the Abram I knew, but he is still Abram.” I pointed at the door, unable to help myself or the temper tantrum I’d started. “That’s the person I love.”
“Of course he is,” Huntsman soothed without even a hint of sarcasm. “But he’s not who I’m talking about.”
“What?” I balked. “If not him, then who?”
“The men, women, and children you see walking along on the sidewalk,” he said. “The person out there working in the deli down the street, or the people you find selling pirated mixed tapes out of the trunk of their car in a mall parking lot. And whoever else you’ve spent these last months trying to protect without them knowing the sacrifice or danger you’re facing.”
Granted by the Beast: A Steamy Paranormal Romance Spin on Beauty and the Beast (Conduit Series Book 4) Page 9
