by Ella M. Lee
“Fuck,” I said. I raised my voice. “Nicolas! Nicolas, get up!”
I went to the bedroom door and almost collided with him as he came out of the dark room. He was dazed and annoyed, but one look at Athena on the floor and he came to his senses.
“Fiona, top cabinet,” he said, pointing to the bookshelves with cubbies that stood next to his television. “There’s a small black zippered case. Get it for me.”
He knelt at Athena’s side and put his arms around her. “You are all right,” he said.
I found the case and unzipped it. It contained three needle syringes, all filled with a light-blue liquid. I offered the case to Nicolas, and he plucked out one of the syringes and uncapped the needle with his teeth. He pushed up the right sleeve of Athena’s sweater and injected the liquid into her upper arm.
“You’re all right,” he said again, his hands on her shoulders as she kneeled.
With a strangled whimper, she put her face in her hands, sobbing. Nicolas held her closer. She was mumbling. “I can’t… I can’t… I can’t… you can’t do this, you can’t, and we can’t help the sparrow… There isn’t time for all this…”
“Hush,” Nicolas said. “Fiona? Can you get Athena something to drink? Something with sugar in it.”
I watched the two of them warily as I went to the kitchen. I poured a glass of green tea from the fridge and mixed in several generous tablespoons of honey. By the time I kneeled at Athena’s other side, she had stopped sobbing. She looked dazed and frightened, but Nicolas was calm. He obviously had this situation under control.
“What is your name?” he asked her quietly.
She blinked. “Athena Delaney.”
“Where did you grow up?” Nicolas asked.
“Oakland, California,” she whispered.
“What is your age?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Where are you now?”
“Hong Kong. Water’s clan house.”
“Good,” Nicolas said.
Athena looked up at him for the first time, her eyes wide and pleading. “I’m not dead?”
“You’re not dead,” he said.
“I’m awake?”
“You are awake,” he confirmed.
She sighed, sagging. Nicolas took the glass from my hands and helped Athena drink from it.
“You are all right,” he said again.
“I am all right,” she said, her tone less blank and unsure. She took a shaky breath. “This never gets easier.”
“That bad tonight?” Nicolas asked.
“Worse than usual,” she said.
“Come sit,” he said, helping her up.
I went into the bathroom to get a wet towel. When I returned to the living room, Athena was seated on the couch, the glass of tea clutched tightly in her hands. Nicolas was next to her. She took the towel from my hands and wiped her face, cleaning off the blood.
She met my eyes, and I smiled at her. I liked Athena a lot, although we didn’t spend a ton of time together.
“Is everything okay?” I asked quietly, settling into a chair across from them.
Athena nodded, but her eyes were leaking tears.
“You remember Athena’s ability?” Nicolas asked.
“Of course,” I said. “You had a dream? Something about the future?”
Athena nodded again.
“Something bad?” I asked.
She put her hands over her face, wiping at her eyes.
“Do you need another injection?” Nicolas asked.
Athena shook her head.
“Are you out of injections at home?” he asked.
“Yes, sorry,” she said sheepishly.
I eyed the open case and the empty, discarded syringe on the table. I had no idea what it was for.
“Athena is allergic to her visions,” Nicolas said, following my gaze. “Her body reacts strongly and negatively to her dreams. I designed that serum to counteract the effects, much like giving epinephrine to someone experiencing anaphylactic shock.”
“You made that?” I asked.
He smiled absently. “Yes. It is well within my ability.”
Right, yes, his immunology background. One of his favorite topics was biology, and the only articles or papers he tended to read on his phone or tablet were related to science and medicine.
Athena looked slightly better now. She wasn’t shaking anymore, and her tears were slowly stopping.
I didn’t like seeing her like this. She was one of Nicolas’s fighters, confident in her movements. Right now, she seemed shattered. There were shadows under her hazel eyes that made her look years older than she was, and she was hunched over defensively.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Nicolas said.
He was being gentle with her, but his question wasn’t really a question. He wanted to know what she had seen, and as her commander, he would get an answer.
“Can I sketch?” she asked quietly.
Nicolas snapped his fingers. “Fiona, that top cabinet again. Get the sketchbook and charcoal in the metal case.”
I did as he asked, laying the heavy book on the table in front of her and opening the dusty charcoal tin. She flipped through dozens of filled pages to get to a clean one.
“Three visions this time,” she said. “The raven.”
Nicolas rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I know what you’re doing,” she said, giving him a concerned look. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
He rolled his eyes again. “I won’t hurt myself. I know how this works.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“In Athena’s dreams, I am represented by the raven. She is concerned about me letting my visions through unfiltered. It isn’t good for me.”
I watched Athena’s hands as she worked, drawing lines, smudging them to create shapes and shading, bringing out stark forms from the white paper.
“The raven perches on a wooden fence, set against the backdrop of a field of wheat,” she said, her hands moving to create that scene. “A storm rolls in, and it begins to rain. The raven cries out. The rain turns to blood, then to fire. The wheat crumples and dies. The raven falls to the ground and is burned to ash.”
Athena flipped the page and began a new sketch.
“Second vision. The passage of time. The full moon set against a dark sky. Clouds roll past. It wanes and then waxes several times over, in time lapse. At the end, it turns red, then purple.”
Another page flip.
“The third and last vision. The sparrow.”
“Again?” Nicolas asked.
“Again,” Athena confirmed. “She stands on the railing outside of a brick building. There is a large glass window behind her. She flies into it again and again, until she’s bleeding and hurt and can’t fly anymore. She falls to the ground and struggles to get up.”
Athena’s sketch depicted a very classic-looking brick building, like a library or university. The windows were divided into nine panels. The railing lined a wide porch. She had drawn the sparrow on the ground, its wings bent awkwardly.
I looked at Nicolas. “If you’re the raven, who is the sparrow?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“Athena, you keep saying ‘she,’” I said. “How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I just know.”
“You’ve seen her before?” I asked.
“She’s appeared several times over the past year or so,” Athena said.
“Do you have more sketches of her?” I said.
Athena flipped through the sketch book. “Back in the early summer,” she said, tilting it toward me.
The sparrow was standing in a ring of fire. There was a snake watching her from outside of the ring, ready to strike.
“A few weeks before that,” Athena said, flipping back further.
The sparrow sat atop a stack of books, all their bindings torn to shreds. Behind her were rows of desks and chairs. Far back, you could ju
st barely make out a large clock face. Under the clock was a seal of some kind, with most of the left-hand side cut off. There were words, but all I could make out were the ends of them: “…ata” and “…bus.”
I didn’t need the rest. I looked up at Nicolas with wide eyes.
“Literis Dedicata et Omnibus Artibus,” I whispered, running my hands over the half-finished seal.
“Dedication to letters… and all arts?” he said, translating the Latin.
“This seal and this motto both belong to my school, the University of Nebraska,” I said. “I’m the sparrow.”
Nicolas opened his mouth, about to speak, when Athena collapsed into a sobbing mess on the floor.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “The sparrow is no good. We’ve never known what will happen… Things won’t go well. No, no, no…”
Nicolas kneeled once again beside her. He cupped her chin, trying to get her to look at him, but she was completely hysterical.
After a moment, he sent a tiny bit of his magic into her, knocking her out, and she collapsed into his arms. Carefully, he lifted her and laid her out on the couch.
He sighed. “Mon Dieu.”
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I merely don’t have the strength right now to handle someone else’s nervous breakdown. She always comes off her visions very hard. She’ll be better in the morning.”
He flung a blanket over Athena. Her sketches were still laid out on the table, and I wondered what she had seen about my life without knowing it.
Nicolas wrung his hands in front of himself. “You and Athena should speak tomorrow. I’m interested in whether her visions of the sparrow do indeed align with your life.”
“You never suspected it was me?” I asked.
His lips twitched into a frown. “Interpreting Athena’s dreams is always difficult. We usually rely on what we call ‘key points’ to identify people and places—points in the visions we can unambiguously connect to real life. The seal you identified is one such key point, although we didn’t know it before tonight. None of us recognized any other key points for the sparrow.”
I had moved to Nicolas’s other couch, and he joined me, sitting heavily.
“Does Athena see everyone in the group?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Her visions are rudimentary and fledgling and often completely random. We’ve only correlated perhaps twenty people in total. The rest is incomprehensible.”
“Can her visions be changed? Like how yours can change when different decisions are made?”
“Yes. Her visions are merely overarching thematic guides to the future. They can be wrong, or different, or irrelevant.”
“So… I shouldn’t be worried yet?” I asked hesitantly.
His beautiful gaze met mine. “No. Let’s not worry quite yet. When Athena is feeling better, we can analyze her visions further and discuss.”
Every time Nicolas blinked, he twitched, his visions annoying him.
I waved toward the bedroom. “Go back to sleep. I’ll stay up and watch Athena.”
Nicolas took my hands and brought them to his lips, kissing my knuckles gently.
“Mon coeur, mon bonheur,” Nicolas said. “Mon ciel étoilé.”
I didn’t ask him to translate. I didn’t need it. I knew those were terms of endearment, and I could tell from the desperate relief in his eyes that I meant the world to him.
No one made me feel the way Nicolas did, like I was a sun that rose just for him.
“Sweet dreams,” I said, kissing his forehead.
We both laughed. That was a joke between us, because Nicolas hadn’t had a single dream in fifteen years. As I watched him make his way to the bedroom, I was immensely glad we could still share our strange sense of humor.
It had gotten me through my first days here, and I hoped it could get me through the hard days to come.
Chapter 25
Around dawn, Athena sat up with a start.
“Are you okay?” I asked, going to her side.
She had a wide-eyed, alarmed expression, but she nodded. “I think so.”
“Do you remember last night?”
“Yes,” she said. “My dreams always stick with me. They are very vivid.” She hesitated. “Did I bother Nicolas?”
I shook my head. “He’s fine. Sleeping.”
Athena stretched her arms over her head and twisted her neck from side to side. “Thank god for his serum. I used to end up with a splitting migraine and rashes and a two-day-long nosebleed after my dreams. Now I’m just a little groggy.”
“How often do you get these dreams?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes twice a month, sometimes twice a year. I don’t think there’s a pattern. It’s frustrating.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Can I help you home? You should get some more sleep.”
She leaned over to collect the sketchbook from the living room table. “I can manage. I’m going to enter all this into the database while it’s fresh.”
“Text me later, okay?” I asked. “Nicolas wants us to figure out if I really am the sparrow.”
She frowned. “Yeah, I can show you all the notes.” She stood and headed for the door. “Thank Nicolas for me.”
“Of course,” I said, waving.
My gaze wandered out the windows. The sun was rising over the mountains. Tears flooded my eyes. I loved this place, and I hated that we would have to leave it so soon.
I hated that my life had changed so much recently and wasn’t going to stop. I was exhausted, and I couldn’t do anything except put my hands to my face and cry.
When I had finally calmed down, I rinsed my face and went into the bedroom. The blackout shades were pulled against the light, and Nicolas was sound asleep. I was glad; he didn’t need the added stress of listening to me break down.
I flopped down next to him on the bed and allowed myself a few moments of brushing my fingers over his warm skin before closing my eyes and falling asleep.
When I woke, Nicolas wasn’t in bed with me. The blackout shades were still pulled down, and the bedroom door was closed. My brain had a mushy, fuzzy feeling that told me I hadn’t slept nearly long enough given that I had stayed up all night.
Regardless, I groped around on the nightstand for my phone and squinted at the bright screen. 11:43.
Yeah, definitely too early.
I dragged myself out of bed and flinched at the glaring sunlight that poured into the room when I opened the door. I rubbed my eyes and made out Nicolas sitting at the dining room table. His elegant tea set was laid out in front of him, and he was working on his laptop. He looked rested but still tense.
“Hey,” I said groggily.
“Bonjour, lamb,” he said. “Daniel sent over soup for us.”
He pointed at the stovetop, where a blue cast iron pot sat. I grimaced. Nothing Dan cooked was bad, but his soups were weird to my Western palate. They usually included strange ingredients like goji berries, cashews, bitter melon, and mushrooms that lacked names in English. Nicolas had thankfully explained to Daniel that I hated pork-based soup broth, and he had started making me chicken-based soups. This one was on theme—chicken, lotus root, some sort of yam, and a fungus that Nicolas had once referred to as “cloud ear.”
I ladled myself a bowl anyway and sat across from Nicolas, picking at my food. Ryan had taught me ages ago how to draw on Water magic to give myself strength and make myself feel better in these situations, but after my first experience overextending my magic, I was always loath to try. I’d rather feel tired than risk vomiting for a week straight, unable to keep my eyes open for more than a few minutes, hooked up to an intravenous line.
“Where is Dan?” I asked.
“With Keisha, I believe,” Nicolas said. “They are sorting out some details of the Osaka property. I texted him about what happened last night, and he thought it best to let you sleep.”
“Dan would rather stretch himself thin than burden an
yone else,” I said.
“True,” Nicolas agreed.
“I wonder where he got that from,” I said, pursing my lips and giving Nicolas a significant look.
Nicolas gave me a strained smile in return. “I’m all right, lamb. This is temporary. I can deal with anything as long as it’s temporary.”
I got up and walked around to his side of the table. Gently, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, leaning in, pressing my cheek into his tangled hair. He was tense and still flinching occasionally, and I hated seeing him this way. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t do anything except say nice things to him.
“You know what isn’t temporary?” I whispered. “Us. We are in this together, and I need you to take care of yourself. I love you.”
His gorgeous eyes met mine, affectionate and adoring. “I love you,” he echoed. “There is no one I love the way I love you, and if you still love me after everything that has happened, we will survive anything.”
“How about we do better than just survive?” I asked. “I’d love to relax and have fun and enjoy the fruits of my labor at some point too.”
“In time,” he said, reaching up to touch my cheek. “We will get there, I promise.”
I wanted to see Athena as soon as possible, but I didn’t want to barge in on her if she still needed rest. Nicolas told me she recovered quickly from her visions, but I couldn’t forget how broken she had seemed last night. Nicolas wasn’t as concerned; he had seen her like that before. Hell, he had been like that before himself, or so I had gathered from his journal.
Although Nicolas had told me to go see her, I sent her a text first.
Can I bring you a latté?
I headed up to Menagerie and was just stepping into line when I got a text back.
Yes, please. Almond milk and extra hazelnut.
When I arrived at her apartment, Athena was fresh from a shower, her dark hair a messy halo around her. She looked slightly better, but the purple circles under her eyes and hunched shoulders told me she probably hadn’t gotten much sleep. She pushed up the sleeves of her baggy black sweater and took the paper cup from my hands.
