Was he seriously making this about him right now?
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He could get his hands on the Gateway, then, with no Guardian working as the bank’s power source and no one to protect the one thing he wanted from her.
“Quite the contrary.” Leandras stood abruptly, swayed on his own weak feet, and staggered away from her. “If that binding is forfeit, so is my life.”
Jessica coughed and groaned at the renewed waves of pain the simple act lanced through her body. She could only stare at the wooden slats of the ceiling and try to focus on breathing. That was it.
‘Jessica, this is your only option.’
There’s never only one option, bank.
‘Yeah, you’re right. You can either suck your magic back up right now, or you can give up the ghost. That’s your other option. Why are you being so stupid?’
Because there was always a price for casting spells like the Shattering. She was especially aware of that now more than ever, even though she’d thought she’d already paid it. And there was most definitely a price for reversing that kind of intensely powerful spell on herself, and Jessica wasn’t willing to pay it.
From six feet away, Leandras growled and spat what sounded like another curse in a language she couldn’t pin down.
“This isn’t right,” he muttered. “I calculated perfectly.”
“My death?” She tried to make it sound like a joke, but maybe she wasn’t joking at all. This fae had motives, and she didn’t even know a fraction of them.
“Did anyone touch this vessel before you removed it from my home?” He whirled toward her, his face illuminated as a ghastly apparition beneath the pulsing glow of purple and silver light in his hands. His magic-box.
“Just the—” She sucked in another rasping breath. “Just the tip of an orc’s shoe. There was… nothing left after that.”
“You didn’t interrupt their ritual. You completed it!” The fae stared at the gúlmai in his hands and hissed again. “Why does this have to be so difficult?”
“You’re right.” Jessica clenched her eyes shut and let out an involuntary groan. “This must be so difficult for you.”
‘Tell him to bring you the box.’
No.
‘So you have a death wish, huh? Quit being so fucking selfish, Jessica! You know what you have to do, and the price of doing it is nothing compared to what will happen if you’re out of the picture!’
“Stop yelling!” Screaming it did nothing to help the state of her agony.
“I’ve done so no such thing.” With a groan of frustration, Leandras hurried to her side again and dropped to his knees. “There’s no other choice. We’ll just have to find an alternate route after this.”
He lowered the glass case buzzing with his purple magic onto his thighs and closed his eyes.
“What…what are you doing?” Jessica croaked. She tried to focus on the fae, but her vision was swimming again, dancing with dark spots.
“I’m about to use more magic than I can afford. Without you, Jessica, we’re all doomed.”
“No. I don’t—” She blinked heavily, trying to gather her thoughts. What had she been about to say?
‘Let him do it,’ the bank snarled. ‘Someone has to save you if you won’t.’
“I can’t…”
“You can and you will accept,” Leandras muttered, his eyes closed now as the purple light within the glass-like case grew brighter and flickered with increasing intensity. “Refusing will end us both.”
She clawed at his knee to get his attention, though it was a weak attempt because she could barely move. “I did not…steal that box for you so you could waste…your magic…on me.”
“It’s only a waste if it doesn’t work.” He cleared his throat. “But it should.”
‘All right. No one wants to listen to the bank, so listen to this!’
Jessica and Leandras both jolted when a terrifyingly loud hiss came from the back of the lobby. The glowing case of fae magic slipped off Leandras’ lap, but he caught it again and stared at something Jessica couldn’t see.
“What—” She could barely whisper at this point, the burning in her chest having spread now to her throat. “What is it?”
“The reptile.” He raised an eyebrow and grimaced, leaning away from Jessica and the back of the lobby as the clicking scrabble of claws across hardwood drew closer.
Confucius? Leandras was afraid of an immortal lizard?
‘Yeah, fear and jealousy tend to look a lot alike on fae.’
Jessica twisted on the floor, craning her neck to see the lizard zigzagging toward her. He looked incredibly large—way bigger than he should have, even at such a close range when he stopped inches from the top of her head. She could see the grains of dirt coating his scales.
As far as she knew, there wasn’t any actual dirt anywhere in the bank.
“Jessica, get rid of that thing right now.”
Yeah, Leandras was definitely afraid.
“What’s he—” She stopped when a fiercely glowing gold light bloomed inside Confucius’ open mouth. The lizard and the fae stared at each other, then the bank’s reptilian resident scuttled toward Jessica’s shoulder and climbed right up onto her chest.
The pinpricks of his thick black claws digging into her skin made her grunt in pain, but it wasn’t like she had the strength to toss him off of her. She barely had the strength to keep her eyes open.
Confucius tapped her chest with a claw, and the glowing light in his open mouth brightened. Heat and cold seared through her as the lizard took slow, deliberate steps up her chest toward her throat. His long tail felt like an iron rod dragging up her center.
The lizard’s sides heaved as he panted heavily, dragging himself farther up her chest.
Now it was just a matter of which magical fuckup would kill her first—the wounds she hadn’t addressed in time or the massive Halibus Racerback lizard suffocating her with his full weight.
But already, breathing was easier.
Or maybe that was just the lizard’s magic.
The lizard’s magic?
Confucius lowered his head toward Jessica’s face, the golden light grew brighter, then he was breathing into her. Or she was breathing him in. Or maybe both, and she couldn’t tell the difference anymore as she stared with wide eyes at the light floating from the reptile’s open mouth into hers. She couldn’t have stopped it if she’d tried.
She almost tried.
But then the light faded, and a healing warmth raced down her throat and into every other part of her. This was far more powerful than any of the incantations Mel had grown so fond of using over the years. This was a healer’s magic.
Coming from a lizard.
When it was finished, Confucius blinked, looked her over from forehead to chin, then launched himself off her. Jessica broke into a fit of coughing, half in relief and half in surprise. The burning pressure in her chest was gone. The crippling ache in her bruised back and the slicing agony above her hip faded.
The lizard tapped the floor twice with a hooked claw, then hissed at Leandras again before scuttling away. He disappeared around the corner of the hallway with a thump, and that was it.
A fucking lizard had just saved her life.
“I must say…” Leandras let out a slow exhale, still staring at the hallway entrance where Confucius had disappeared. “Well, I’m not entirely sure what to say.”
“That makes two of us.” Catching her breath again, Jessica pushed herself up off the floor and gave herself a moment to sit there. Maybe it was only temporary. Maybe it needed more time to sink in.
‘You know, honestly, I think you’re good to go.’
She closed her eyes. Did you have any idea he could do that?
‘Nope. Then again, I’ve never had an owner who inadvertently kicked off the reckoning and almost got herself killed just by being stubborn and stupid. So, you know, there’s a first time for everything. Wait, you were talking
about the lizard, right?’
A small smile flickered across her lips, and she pointed at Leandras’ magic-box resting on his lap, all but forgotten. “Okay. Well, now you get to keep all your magic for…whatever happens next.”
“Indeed.” Holding the gúlmai with one hand, Leandras ran his other hand through his hair and blinked rapidly. “That does appear to be our next course of action. But I want to be certain you’re actually on the mend.”
“On the mend.” A wry chuckle escaped her. “I think I’m past that now, but—”
Jessica froze. No, she wasn’t quite past it. A thin pressure tickled at the back of her head, like she’d leaned back against the wall. A second later, it had spread to the sides, moving into her temples and behind her eyes. And with it came voices, fractured images, flickering threads of information that didn’t make any sense.
Something was wrong.
“Jessica?” Leandras scanned the lobby, then leaned toward her with a frown. “What is it?”
“I don’t…” Her eyelids fluttered, and she suddenly felt way too small for the size of everything inside her—even only half her magic. This felt like waking up from a dream. It felt like swimming for hours only to get out of the water and grow a million times heavier by comparison. Like opening a door that had been sealed shut and locked up tight for years.
‘Try eight years. Specifically.’ The bank let out a high-pitched, uncertain whine that floated around Jessica’s head with everything else that was about to burst wide open. ‘Yeah, this is the part where you’re gonna have to prepare for yourself.’
For what?
“Jessica? Tell me what’s wrong.” Leandras’ voice sounded impossibly far away and tinny. Powerless. “I can’t help you if you don’t say something.”
She was floating out of her body now, melting away into a thousand different pieces that had all once been sewn together so neatly as a whole. Floating, like the suspended animation before the next explosion brought everything crashing back down around her. Jessica tried to say she was still there, still herself, but all that came out was a rasping groan.
“Vinjít! By everything I’ve vowed to do, if you don’t fight this, Jessica, we’re out of—”
The second the fae clamped his hands down on her shoulders—presumably to shake her out of the trance neither one of them understood—a burst of dark light erupted from Jessica’s body. It blasted Leandras backward, and he slid away from her on his back, the gúlmai flying from his hand and skittering across the floor. Shimmering specks of golden light flooded through the dark energy blooming inside the bank lobby like a roiling storm cloud, and the energy coursing through Jessica made her forget herself entirely.
The lights flickered on the walls. Every item stuffed onto the shelves along the walls rattled and thumped, and a blinding burst of green light flared from the upstairs hall and bathed the lobby in its eerie glow. The floors shuddered. The walls groaned in their attempt to contain the burst of energy Jessica had unwittingly unleashed. And then it all sucked back into her like a giant vacuum had appeared to empty out the room.
Only Jessica was the vacuum. And what she gathered back into herself with a deafening crack and a burst of black light was a hell of a lot more than who and what she’d been seconds before. Including the memories she’d paid the Peddler in New Mexico to strip from her very core and scatter into the ether.
Every single one.
Chapter Eight
The blazing green light from the Gateway upstairs flickered and went out. Maybe the voice she’d been hearing behind that door actually did growl when another trembling shudder ripped through the physical structure of the bank. But Jessica only heard it for a second before her own raw, choking gasp drowned out all other sound and she leapt to her feet.
“What the fuck!”
“Yes.” Leandras weakly pushed himself off his back and frowned at her. “I should very much like to know the same.”
“That’s not…this isn’t…” She whirled around and stared at the cluttered shelves, trying to fight off the suddenly overwhelming bout of claustrophobia pressing in on her.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was impossible. Her memories were gone, and they shouldn’t have been able to come back. Ever.
‘Until now,’ the bank whispered. ‘Told you to prepare yourself.’
“No, no, no…” Jessica staggered toward the desk, the searing pain in her body completely gone. She’d been healed by the lizard, sure, but now the pain had been replaced by the kind of panic she hadn’t felt since she was sixteen. The kind of panic that had driven her to find a damn Peddler in the first place.
‘Yeah… There’s a lot we’re gonna have to unpack here. Your head’s a mess!’
“Shut up,” she hissed. “Just shut up and let me think.”
“Would you care to explain what just happened?” Leandras asked as he pushed himself to his feet. “Because it sounds like you’re talking to someone. Or yourself. Honestly, Jessica I’m not certain which would be more concerning.”
She pressed her palms against the chipped, worn wood of the desktop and forced herself to breathe slowly. No fucking wonder she’d paid to have all these memories removed. How the hell had she lived with all this chaos in her head for two years as a kid?
‘Hmm…if I had a gut, I’d say it’s telling me you survived because of what you are,’ the bank interjected. ‘You know, with all that magic in a box you really need right now!’
Jessica gritted her teeth and focused on the grain of the wood beneath her hands. Time to make her mind go blank. Time to turn it all off, just until she had a moment to herself to go through everything and pin down what the hell she needed to do next.
Stooping to retrieve his gúlmai from the floor, Leandras grunted, then tried to straighten the front of his silver suit jacket. His frown settled on her like a heavy weight, but she couldn’t look at him. Not yet.
“Jessica?” He took a few steps toward her then stopped, gazed around the lobby, and brushed a hand over the top of his purple-glowing magic case. “Should I be worried?”
“Ha.” It burst out of her—harsh and without amusement—and she raised a trembling hand to her forehead. “Should you be worried? No, Leandras. This has nothing to do with you.”
“I beg to differ. That…eruption was prompted by my hands on your shoulders. Don’t bother trying to convince me otherwise, whatever that was.”
‘Listen to this guy. So full of himself, he thinks he’s the one with all the power.’ The bank snorted. ‘You know what you have to do, Jessica.’
The only thing I’m doing right now is going to bed.
‘Yeah, good luck with that.’
“I’m sorry.” The fae raised his voice in frustration as he headed toward her again. “Am I inconveniencing you so much that I can’t get a straightforward answer?”
“I gave you an answer!” Jessica slammed her palm down on the desk and whirled to face him. “No, you shouldn’t be worried. And no, this has nothing to do with you. So drop it.”
“You were at death’s door, and now your wounds seemed to have received exactly what they needed at the perfect moment. But at this moment, Jessica, I’m more concerned with the state of your mental—”
“If you say mental health, I swear to whatever power I hold inside this bank that you will never see that stupid fucking box again. Got it?” She stared at the glowing gúlmai in Leandras’ hands, clenching her teeth until her temples hurt.
The fae seemed remarkably unaffected by her panic dressed up as rage. Instead, he turned slowly toward the shelves beside him and nodded at the floor. “What about that one?”
Shit. Her magic-box.
“That’s not for you.” Jessica stalked across the bank toward the dented metal box of her extricated magic and pointed at Leandras. “Ever. Don’t bring it up again.”
“Then at least tell me why you look so horrified to be alive.”
That made her stop. She couldn’t tell him why.
No one else could know why, because that would only strengthen the bond she’d just unburied with all her memories back in place. That would only bring him chasing after her that much faster.
Jessica took a deep breath and met the fae’s fully silver gaze. “It’s way too late to be talking about anything right now. You have your magic and didn’t need to use it on me. And I’m not dead.”
“That’s hardly the full summary.”
She stooped to snatch the dented metal box off the floor and scowled at him when she straightened again. “Well that’s all we need to cover tonight. I’ve put up with your bullshit half-answers for two weeks. You can deal for a night. We’ll cover the rest tomorrow.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she stormed across the lobby toward the hallway into the back, cradling the tin box and forcing all her willpower into keeping her mind as blank and empty as possible.
Before she entered the lobby, Leandras cleared his throat. “One more thing, if I may.”
Scrunching up her face, she paused and set a hand on the doorway but didn’t turn around to look at him. “What?”
“Thank you, Jessica. You took an incredible risk tonight on my behalf, and I won’t forget the favor.”
She started to turn around but couldn’t bring herself to look at anyone right now. “Thank the lizard. He’s the reason we both still have what we want.”
Leandras didn’t say anything else as she hurried down the hall toward the stairs, but the click of the charred office door closing on the other side of the lobby echoed behind her.
Good. At least he wasn’t trying to push the terms of their binding. For now, that office was the only room in the whole building he was allowed to inhabit when she wasn’t downstairs. She just wished she had more than four hours until she had to wake up, open the bank at 7:00 a.m., and pretend like it was just another screwed-up day in her new role as the owner of Winthrop & Dirledge. But now it was so much more than that.
The Secret Coin (Accessory to Magic Book 3) Page 7
