by Jada Fisher
Of course, Mallory was just fine and skedaddled over to the obstacle-course-like area and started to do a stupid amount of acrobatics. Granted, they were only stupid because I couldn’t do them, but still.
Eventually, I felt like I could move again, and I went towards my room to catch a shower. I figured after that, I could then check in with Sokhanya, maybe write to her a bit, then swing to wherever Krisjian was and see if it was time for us to hold hands so he could use my power to do whatever it was he had to do.
Except I never quite made it all the way up to my room. About halfway up the stairs, I was intercepted by Bronn, who looked clean-cut and dapper in a blue sweater and casual slacks.
I’d mostly gotten over my self-consciousness with him, but it struck again as I stood there on the stairs, mouth open. And how could it not? My face was beet red, my hair was up in a sweaty, messy ponytail, and I was practically sopping wet while smelling like the gym. All in all, it wasn’t a pretty picture.
“Davie, are you alright?”
“Uh, yeah. Just getting a good workout in, you know?” I wondered if there was a way that I could slip past him without being rude. Because I didn’t want to be rude to him at all…but I also didn’t want to be around his handsome, dashing self when I looked like a far too warmed-over bridge troll.
“I know what you mean. After so much time fighting and rushing from place to place, I feel a bit like I’m too big for my skin. All this waiting should be a good chance to rest up, but here I am, decidedly not resting.”
I laughed weakly. “Yeah. I know what you mean. But it’s all supposed to be over soon. Right?”
He nodded. “It is. It almost seems too good to be true.”
Now that was something I understood. “It’s the way of things.”
But his grin was lovely as he offered his arm. “Well, I’m sure you want a shower. Shall I escort you to your room?”
“Escort me to my room? What, is this where you tell me that you’re secretly a hundred years old and only look young?”
“What?” he said with mock surprise. “It was never a secret.”
I chuckled at that. “I’m not sure what Mickey would say about me dating a much older man.”
“Well, I am a prince. I can just order her to be alright with it.”
“Yes, because that’s how it works and isn’t totally a villain’s origin story.”
“Ugh, I would make a terrible villain.”
“You would.”
We were laughing by the time we reached my door, and I completely forgot about how gross I looked.
“I’m going to go grab Krisjian once I’m all cleaned up,” I said, my hand on the knob. “I’ll see you—”
I was cut off because suddenly he was right in front of me, his head dipping down as his lips claimed mine. I was surprised, my breath catching in a gasp, and he kissed me more intensely than we ever had.
I certainly wasn’t complaining, but I was surprised. Time seemed to stand still, with my body reacting strongly, and for a moment, I was dizzy from the rush. My hands came up to clutch at the soft, warm fabric of his sweater, and it was easy to feel myself rushing off with the deluge.
When he broke away, we were both breathing hard. He pulled away only slightly, one of his arms sliding around my waist and his other sliding through my hair.
“Sorry,” he breathed, leaning forward again to rest his forehead against mine. “You just… You just look really good.”
“Now I know you’re lying,” I said with a ragged sort of chuckle. “I look like a hot mess.”
“No… No, you really don’t. You also…” He cut himself off, and it was quite amusing to see the blush rising along his cheeks.
“I also what?” I asked, raising one of my eyebrows.
“No. It’s embarrassing.”
He pulled me tighter to him, and it was plenty thrilling to feel our bodies press firmly into each other. His form was all hard muscles and shifter power, while mine was softer, wider, with a magic that was so much different.
“Well, now you have to tell me.”
“Oh, do I?”
“Oh yeah, you definitely do.”
“You’re going to think it’s stupid. Or creepy.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What, do you have some sweat fetish or something?”
He seemed to blush even further at my choice of words. “No… It’s nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
He sighed, his eyes fluttering closed. “You… You smell really good.”
“I… Bronn, I’m covered in sweat from head to toe.”
“I know. But that just makes you smell like you.” He opened his eyes and his lips were nearing mine again. “And you just happen to smell amazing to me. All the time.”
“I… I guess it’s better than smelling bad.”
He nodded vaguely and we were kissing again, his weight pressing into me, pushing me into the door. It was pretty hot, I had to admit, and the sort of thing that little teenage Davie might have swooned over.
Actually, young adult Davie was swooning too.
His arm around my waist was a comforting bar of strength, holding me in place while we kissed. His other hand was still in my hair, but it slid down to rest at my neck. It wasn’t a threat, but more of a reassuring sort of weight that made me feel like I was floating.
Or at least I was, until a throat cleared from somewhere close to us.
We broke apart to see Mickey standing there in the hallway, looking at us with plenty of amusement.
“Am I interrupting something?” she asked, clearly trying to hide her smirk.
“You know you are,” I said, shooting her a look. She didn’t seem to mind it too much. I figured she was enjoying a part of being a big sister/parent that she had never gotten to before. I’d never really had a boyfriend or a partner, so there was a whole chunk of experience that we’d both missed out on.
“Huh. Would you like me to leave and come back? Or do the two of you want a chaperone?”
I rolled my eyes, giving Bronn’s very pink cheek a kiss. “We’re fine. I’m going to go take a shower. I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Yes, that sounds like a solid plan.”
“Are you sure that you don’t want to invite him in, maybe conserve on the water bill?” Mickey asked, her expression wickedly gleeful.
Bronn let out a sputter as an answer, which I had to admit was amusing, but I just finished opening the door and headed in. Mickey followed, and to her credit, she managed to wait until she closed the door before she broke into giggles.
“Oh. My. Goodness. I’m not going to lie, I’ve always wanted to do that.”
I wasn’t really mad, but I knew it would be funnier if I played aggravated. “It might have been more appropriate if you didn’t do it to your sister in her twenties.”
She crossed the space between us to reach up and ruffle my hair, although she made a face when she made contact. “Ew, gross. You really do need a shower.”
“Karma,” I taunted in singsong before heading to our bathroom. But I couldn’t help but wonder, as I did my thing, if what I experienced was just a little slice of what my life could be like if we actually managed to head off the elders and end the fight once and for all.
If I was honest, it wasn’t half-bad.
Not half-bad at all.
8
The Dreams that Haunt our Sleep
Helping Krisjian thwart the elders by making people not see luggage, have to go to the bathroom, or valets lose keys was certainly entertaining, but also utterly exhausting. Unsurprisingly, it took quite a lot of energy, and by the time I collapsed into bed, I was feeling a lot like a boneless bag of flesh.
It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep, sinking deep, deep, deep into the black. I wanted to stay there forever, but it seemed entirely too soon when I was being drawn into some sort of watery image.
I broke through the haze like it was water crashing down around me, leaving me er
upting into an entirely new scene.
Except it wasn’t a new scene. I was in the kitchen of the manor, a place I had visited plenty of times. And yet… I wasn’t actually there. It felt like I was on the wall, looking at a room like in a video game.
The door opened and one of the kitchen aides walked in, arms full of dishes collected from around the house. I watched her, something curious about the entire scene, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
In fact, I couldn’t move at all. I was stuck in place, only watching as she set the dishes in the place where the washer was supposed to grab them later. But then she turned and started walking towards me, startling me from my intense observation.
But she didn’t seem to see me. Even as she came closer, and closer. And then…she leaned in to fix her hair?
It was utterly bizarre as I watched her spruce herself up like I wasn’t even there. Even though I knew I wasn’t actually present, I couldn’t figure out why she was doing some—
Is she picking her teeth!?
I reeled back, finally able to move, but when I whirled around to catch my footing, I was somewhere else entirely in the manor.
The gym, I was in the gym, looking across the entire room, which only had a couple people in it. Probably the mid-shift workers who slept through most of the earlier day. Once more, they didn’t acknowledge me, which was par for the course in a vision.
But just like the other time, eventually, one approached me, but instead of picking his teeth, he started lifting the dumbbells, looking at his form with a borderline narcissist intensity.
“Come on,” I said to myself with a sigh, turning away only to end up in another room.
A… a bathroom?
But I was on the completely wrong side of it. I was standing with the sink right below me, a shower to my right, and the entrance right across from me.
Oh.
That was when I finally understood it.
I was in the mirrors.
The door opened, and I saw one of the military figures I wasn’t that familiar with come in. There wasn’t any way I wanted to stick around for that, so I rushed backward again.
I didn’t get it. Why was I in the mirrors? What kind of strange vision was I supposed to be seeing? Was my vision trying to suss out the mole via some weird sort of Peeping Tom mechanism?
My brows furrowed, but all of that came to a pretty abrupt halt when my back crashed into a familiarly squishy and rotten side.
The void I was in rippled away, another building itself in its place. I suppose that it said something that I could recognize the carnage and destruction around me. The skeletons of buildings and the large chunks of debris, the melted road signs and the like.
“There you are, my friend. It’s been a while.”
I struggled to lurch forward, but it was like his flesh had enveloped me, sucking me into his rotting, corrupted body.
“I’ve missed you. You’ve been up to quite a lot, haven’t you?”
I bared my teeth, tempted to bite him just for spite. But the thought of having any part of him in my mouth made me want to retch even more than being connected to him did.
“You found the little seedling, I heard. The one who paved the way for you to set up the dominoes as you have. I saw you even helped her kill that little princeling. You really are having fun, aren’t you?”
“Let me go. You can’t do anything to me here. I’m not actually in your world. This is just a vision.”
“Oh, I know,” he murmured, his voice so oily and honied that I felt it cling to me just as much as his flesh was. “But you haven’t visited in so long. It’s like you don’t even want to hop dimensions anymore.”
“Considering the last time I did, I died, yeah. I’m not too hot on the idea.”
“Well, never matter. You’ll be seeing me soon enough.”
“You sound confident.”
“That’s because I am, little one. Soon I’ll be in your world and we can do all sorts of fun things together. It’s been far too long since I’ve had an entire realm to play in.”
“It’s not going to happen. We’ve almost got the entire anti-humanists defeated. Once that’s done, I’m going to seal off the entire prison that you’re in and make sure you can’t even reach me in dreams.”
“Such confidence. I hope we can both look back on these conversations with affection once we’re face to face.”
I was done arguing. I yanked myself forward with all my might, gripping onto my reality and launching myself into it. With a nauseating sort of sucking sound, I managed to peel myself free and wrest myself away from the dragon.
“…gross,” I whispered to myself once I realized I was free. I could still feel him clinging to me, trying to get into my ears and still snaking around my joints. But I wasn’t out of the vision yet, and I looked up to see that I was in some sort of…car?
Wait, no. Not a car. A limo. Why was I in a limo?
“Have you learned anything new?” I knew that voice. I’d heard it before. Recently.
“They’ve set a trap for us. I’m trying to find the exact details. It’s not clear.”
Oh.
Oh really?
It was the elders. It took hearing both the man and the woman, but I placed them. But for some reason, I wasn’t at a place where I could look at any of their faces. Instead, I felt like I was sitting at about chest level, somewhere small and confined.
“What is the point of using the boy’s amulet to scry if you can’t find anything useful?”
“I found out that they were herding us, is that not enough for you? Do you need more? I don’t see your failsafe helping us subvert them. If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t even know that they were aware of our arrival.”
“Yes, yes, Valirie, you’re amazing and we’re forever indebted to you, we get it.”
My stomach dropped right out from under me, down past anywhere my visions could be. They… They could see us. That was what the vision had been trying to show me. Any mirror, any reflective surface probably, and they could see us.
That…was really not good. It was only luck that she hadn’t managed to reveal our full plan.
But one thing was certain: I needed to warn everybody.
If it wasn’t too late already.
I jolted upright from my bed, retching a few times and only barely managing to not vomit over the side, but I didn’t give myself time to recover. I vaulted to my feet, grabbing my blanket to throw it over my mirror.
My sheet was next, and that went over our bathroom mirror before I woke Mickey.
“Whoa, what’s going on?” she asked, blinking groggily at me. I hated jolting her like that—she was always hazy after taking her nighttime meds—but she needed to be conscious.
“There’s no mole,” I said in a quiet pant. I didn’t know if covering the mirrors would stop them from being able to hear, so why chance it? “It’s the elders. They’ve got some sort of…of…scrying spell or something that they’re channeling through Baelfyre.”
“What?”
She sat up almost as fast as I did, although she had far more sway to her movement. I couldn’t blame her, considering some of the things she had to take to remain healthy.
“Come on, we need to cover them all up! Hurry!”
Then we were both out of our beds and into the main sitting area, where Krisjian and Mal were both still out on their cots. Mickey went to rouse them while I went about throwing things over the TV, the mirror, and even took down all of the frames that had glass over the art inside. I wasn’t taking any chances considering I didn’t fully understand the limits of scrying.
Next, we were out the door and into Sokhanya’s medical room and attached sitting area. It helped that it was right after ours in the hall. What wasn’t easy was writing out the whole situation to her while the others struggled to cover everything reflective enough to maybe pass as a mirror in her room.
Turned out, a lot of medical equipment was real shiny.
&nbs
p; “Hey, shouldn’t one of us be alerting the prince?” Mal asked from right beside us. “The whole palace?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want her to know that we know. I just want her to think that something has gone wrong. If she sees the entire palace rushing to cover every mirror, that’s another card out of our hand.”
“They know our plan, don’t they?” Krisjian asked with no undue amount of disappointment.
“Not all of it, just some. Enough for it not to work and for us to maybe walk into a trap.” I patted Sokhanya’s head and stood fully. “I think I can tell what rooms are safe. We blitz this place one by one, going into every room we’re allowed. Once we have all of those covered, then we’ll alert the prince and go from there.”
“Alright, let’s go then,” Mal said, wresting all of the towels from the linen closet. “Krisjian, come get these sheets I can’t reach. You tall ones see if there’s anything useful on the higher shelves.”
We did, and within moments, all our arms were full of coverings. Then it was out into the hall, where I closed my eyes and spread my magic out.
When I was younger, I would have just called it concentrating, stretching out my mind after it might have quelled or buckled under a demanding task. But now I knew better, knew that it was loosening the tight rein I had on myself and letting it…drift a little.
“I… I don’t feel anything. I think it’s safe.”
“You think?”
I shrugged at Mickey. “It’s not like this exactly comes with an instruction manual. It doesn’t feel like her, so I don’t think she’s using any of these right now.”
“Good enough for me,” Mal said, striding forward and throwing a towel over a stand-like thing in the hall with a glass top. “You lot can get the mirrors. It’s not like I’ll be able to reach.”
I nodded and hurried after her. There was a stupid number of mirrors to take care of, one in the center of each hall, and then I knew there was one per wall surrounding the large staircase leading down to the lower floor. We were probably going to have to raid another linen closet.
