Fruits in all shapes and sizes covered half of my dining room table. Some of them seemed to glow from within while others glittered in the candlelight that filled the room. Outside the windows, night still reigned.
Audrey eyed our stolen loot suspiciously. “We should probably get someone else to do this.”
“We need to know how it actually affects the person.” I flashed her a smirk. “But I can do it on my own if you don’t think you can handle it.”
Cocking her head, she leveled a sharp stare at me. “I would recommend choosing your words more carefully. Remember that I have my magic back now.”
“Nice try, sweetheart.” I huffed out a dark laugh and traced light fingers over her jaw. Tightening my grip, I tilted her chin up while I leaned closer. “But I already gave you your one free shot. Now, if you wanna come after me again, you’re gonna have to work for it.”
“We both know that I am perfectly capable of bringing you to your knees without your cooperation.”
“Big words coming from someone who used to be my prisoner.”
“Big words coming from someone who would have been trapped in an illusion in Grant’s gardens right now if it wasn’t for me.”
Oh I was very well aware of how easily Audrey could have just left me in there. All she had to do was walk out and she would never have had to worry about me again. Grant’s people would have found me trespassing, and that would’ve meant both me and Henry dead, which would have left Audrey the sole victor in our war. But she hadn’t. Instead of leaving me there among the hallucinogenic bushes, she had taken my hand and led me out, which I was immensely grateful for. However, I couldn’t very well tell her that.
“The deal was your life and your lands in exchange for helping me get Henry back from Malcolm, and so far, all you’ve done to hold up your end of the bargain is to pick some fruit.” I released her chin roughly, making her head snap to the side. “So let’s get on with it.”
Turning her head back, she shot me a glare rippling with challenge. “Fine by me.”
Silence fell. Winds whirled through the darkness outside, but the windows were firmly shut so the multitude of candles and oil lamps only continued burning with steady flames.
“But you can just kill the effects, right?” I asked, shifting my gaze between her face and the fruits waiting on the table. “Like you did with the dream foil?”
Her green eyes glittered in the golden candlelight, but a hint of regret blew across her features. “No. Dream foil is a plant that releases hallucinogenic pollen on its own.” Raising a hand, she motioned towards the table. “These have been infused with Grant’s magic. I can’t kill magic with poison.”
Heaving a disappointed sigh, I raked a hand through my hair and shrugged. “Then I guess we’re doing this the hard way.”
“Yes.”
I turned towards the two people lurking by the open doors. “Things are about to get really weird, so no matter what you hear, keep these doors closed until I say the password.”
Yuito and Paul exchanged a worried glance across the dining room, but both of them gave me a nod. “Yes, boss.”
The door that led to the kitchen had already been closed, and after one last nod from me, Paul and Yuito closed the final two doors as well. I had no idea how we were going to react, so it was best to do this in as controlled an environment as possible.
While my guards had closed the doors, Audrey had picked up a knife and cut two small pieces from something that looked like a massive blueberry. After putting the knife back on the table, she handed me one of the pieces and then held out the other in front of her.
“Ready?” she said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
As one, we brought the slice of purple fruit to our lips and ate it. A shudder coursed through me. It had looked sweet and juicy but it tasted incredibly bitter.
In front of me, Audrey’s nose scrunched a little as she swallowed.
That sight produced some kind of weird flutter in my chest and made me want to trace my fingers over her cheek to smoothen out her features again. Or maybe that was just a side effect from the piece of fruit.
For a while, we just watched each other warily.
“Anything?” I asked at last.
“No. You?”
I shook my head.
Maybe we had been wrong. We had just assumed that Grant was infusing the fruits in his garden with his emotion magic, but perhaps they only looked this weird because he had imported strange species from other places.
“Should we…”
The dining room disappeared and gave way to the dorms at the academy in Eldar. A flash of unexpected pain jabbed into my chest as I suddenly saw myself standing there in the corridor. I was thirteen years old, and I was wearing the loose dark red pants and gray shirt that I had been sleeping in back then. Snow fell outside the dark windows and only a couple of candles lit the hallway. I knew straight away what was about to happen even before the door was opened.
Three guys who were my age poured across the threshold as the front door was yanked open. It sent a flutter of large white snowflakes swirling into the corridor. The boys were laughing and shoving each other jokingly as they made their way inside. Snow covered their clothes and hair in large clumps, and their cheeks were red.
“Did you have a snowball fight?” my thirteen-year-old self asked uncertainly.
The three guys finally noticed me. They stopped laughing and pushing each other and instead exchanged a long glance. The one in the middle drew his hand through his messy brown hair, dislodging some of the snow so that it fell down to splat against the floor behind him.
“Aw shit, sorry,” he said. “Yeah, we forgot to invite you.”
My younger self forced a smile. “It’s alright. I had other stuff to do anyway.”
“Of course.” The three of them exchanged another look before they split up, drifting towards their own rooms. “Night, Cal.”
A wave of irritation washed over me. Cal. I had always hated that nickname. But they had still insisted on using it.
The vision blurred and changed. I blinked as I watched the four of us walk down another corridor in the academy. This time, pink flowers bloomed on the trees outside the windows and spring sunlight shone in to illuminate the hallway. I was younger this time. Maybe eleven. Or twelve. It was difficult to know exactly when this had been because it had happened so frequently.
The corridor was empty of people. Based on the location, we looked to be heading towards one of our theoretical classes. Bitterness coated my tongue as I watched the scene. The hallway was only wide enough for three people to walk side by side, but instead of us splitting into two pairs, the three of them walked in a row together, leaving me walking alone behind them.
Yet again, the scene blurred and changed.
The darkened streets of Malgrave appeared around me. I was fifteen years old in this memory, and I was on my hands and knees on the dirty street. A dark-haired guy who was a few years older than me touched his palms together and sent bands of metal wrapping over my calves and around my wrists, trapping me to the stone street in that position.
“Force magic, huh?” the guy said. “And you’re pretty good with it too.”
“Pull back your metal and I’ll show you just how good I am with it,” my fifteen-year-old self spat back.
“And you’ve got a spine too.” He touched his hands together once more, and a flat metal pole rose from the ground until it reached my chin and pushed it upwards, forcing me to crane my neck to meet his gaze where he stood above me. “However, no one trespasses on my territory and gets away with it.” A wolfish smile curled his lips. “But if you answer my questions in a satisfactory manner, I might let you live.”
Another wave of bitterness rolled through me. After leaving Eldar, I had sworn that I would never take orders from anyone else again. Audrey believed that I had left the academy at fourteen and gone straight out into the hills to claim a mansion, but that wasn’t the truth. I had gone to Malgrave first, and there I had been forced to bow to someone else’s authority yet again.
The scene disappeared, making way for another one. I knew that I was still in my dining room, so I reached out until my hand brushed against one of the chairs next to me. Curling my fingers over the backrest, I squeezed the wood hard while more bitter memories were replayed before my eyes.
When the visions at last faded enough for me to see the real room around me again, my fingers ached after the hard grip I had kept on the chair. Shaking my hand, I flexed my fingers and blew out a sigh before turning to Audrey.
“Not that one,” I said in a slow voice. “Let’s try another.”
“Yeah,” Audrey replied hoarsely.
Pain and regret swirled in her eyes when she turned to look at me. When her gaze at last focused on my face, those emotions were replaced by a flicker of surprise. Too late did I realize that I hadn’t been able to fully wipe the lingering hurt and bitterness from my own features. Twisting away from her, I snatched up another fruit and forcefully cut off two small pieces.
It was shaped like an oval, and the color was a red so dark that it looked almost black. The knife sank into its firm flesh and revealed that the inside pulsed with a faint red glow. I already had a bad feeling about this, but we needed to find something that would work for the plan we had in mind, so I just straightened again and handed one piece to Audrey.
Just like me, she had used the time to wipe all traces of emotion off her face again.
“Let’s get this over with then,” she said before popping the piece of glowing red fruit in her mouth.
I did the same.
For a while, nothing happened. The candles throughout the dining room burned steadily and cast a golden glow across Audrey’s face as she just looked back at me in silence.
“Maybe this one is just some kind of regular fruit,” she said when a few minutes had passed.
Raising my eyebrows, I gave her a disbelieving look. “What kind of regular fruit glows red?”
“How the hell should I know?” She crossed her arms. “I’m not an expert on fruit.”
“Given the number of plants in your house, I would expect you to be.”
“Plants and fruits are not the same thing.”
“Fruits grow on plants.”
She rolled her eyes. “As always, you dazzle me with your brilliant intellect.”
“Watch that mouth.”
“Or wh—” Sucking in a sharp breath, she leaped away while whipping her head to the side. “What the fuck is that?”
I turned and looked towards the empty wall that she was staring at. “What’s what?”
“Oh fuck, it’s coming closer.”
After squinting at whatever it was that I couldn’t see, I shrugged and turned back to towards the table.
My heart leaped into my throat.
Jerking back, I sucked in a sharp breath between my teeth and stared at the… thing that had appeared behind me while I’d been looking in Audrey’s direction.
It looked like some kind of grotesque doll made of twisting dark threads. It was an entire head taller than me, but the proportions were off. The arms and legs were too long, almost to the point where the hands dragged across the floor as it moved. When it cocked its head, its eyes rolled a little.
Ice spread through my body.
The thing was standing so close that I could have touched it if I raised my hand. Slowly tilting its head from side to side, it leaned closer as if it was studying me. I fought down a shudder.
A small whimper came from behind my back. Audrey.
“What does it look like?” I asked her.
“I don’t want to describe it.” She drew in a ragged breath. “Fuck… there’s more of them. They’re coming closer.”
Her back pressed hard against mine as she flinched back another step.
“They’re not real,” I said in an effort to persuade myself as much as her. “They’re just an illusion created by Grant’s emotion magic, so they can’t touch us.”
“I know but… Fuck!” She pushed up harder against my back. “Just looking at them is bad enough.”
The thing before me reached out with long spindly fingers. I involuntarily ducked to avoid its hand even though I had just told Audrey that it couldn’t actually touch us. Not a lot of things scared me, and this shouldn’t have been one of them. It wasn’t even real, I knew that. But there was something about the creature, or maybe it was the fruit in itself, that summoned an intense feeling of terror that almost paralyzed me. My heart was beating wildly in my chest and my hands felt cold and clammy.
Audrey whimpered behind me again as if she was feeling the same irrational emotions.
For some reason, I couldn’t stand hearing her make that kind of sound, so even though it went against my every survival instinct, I turned my back on the nightmare creature. Grabbing Audrey by the shoulders, I spun her around too.
She let out a small panicked noise and tried to push me off so that she could keep the monstrous things in view. I just wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tightly to my chest.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
She tried to fight me for another few seconds, but I was a lot stronger than her so there was nothing she could do. Instead, she drew her arms around my body and pulled me harder against her. Pressing her cheek against my chest, she squeezed her eyes shut.
While resting my chin on the top of her head, I closed my eyes too.
Through the fabric of our clothes, I could feel her heart pounding against my chest. Or maybe it was my heart pounding against hers.
Her hair smelled faintly of jasmine. I drew in a deep breath, trying to anchor my mind to that scent. Warmth from her body spread into mine, seeping all the way to my bones. Just holding her like that made a steady sense of calm wash over me.
She tightened her arms around my back, pressing herself harder against me. I could feel her every breath as her chest expanded slightly against mine.
Oh what I wouldn’t do to be able to hold you like this every day.
The thought had shot through my head before I even knew what I was doing. It was followed by a sharp pang to my heart.
Why was I torturing myself like this? I should be doing everything in my power to smother my feelings for her. Not adding to them.
But as she blew out a long calming breath and shifted her cheek against my chest, I couldn’t bring myself to push her off. After all, we needed to do this so that we could rescue Henry. So I had to do this as part of our plan. Yes. That was it.
Keeping my eyes closed, I just listened to her breathe and savored the feeling of her arms around me.
“Callan,” Audrey said, far too soon. “They’re gone.”
It took more willpower than I wanted to admit to release my grip on her. Clearing my throat, I raked my fingers through my hair and stepped back.
Audrey brushed her hands down her clothes. It made her hair slide across her shoulder and fall down in front of her. While hooking it back behind her ear, she looked up and met my gaze. Embarrassment blew across her beautiful features.
“So…” She cleared her throat. “That was…”
“Terrifying,” I filled in.
“Yeah. Except that dark mages don’t show fear.”
“No, we don’t.”
Silence descended on the candlelit room as we watched each other for a while. Understanding passed between us.
“This never happened,” Audrey said.
I nodded. “Agreed.”
We watched each other for another few seconds before we abruptly turned towards the table.
“Alright, which fruit is next?”
