Blake
Eight Years Ago
Marianna pants, gripping my arm to hold herself upright as we sludge through mud so thick it sucks my shoes into its murky depths. A layer of water runs over the mud, making what was once a dry dirt parking lot shimmer in the shadow of the festival taking place a few hundred yards away. Music drifts toward through the relentless sheets of rain hammering over our heads, and I stumble, nearly dragging her down into the mud.
“BLAKE!” she howls, laughing hysterically. I catch her around her middle and yank her upright, cursing under my breath.
“I’m never going to let you forget that this was your idea. I told you it was going to rain. Epically.”
“Maybe you should be a meteorologist instead of an architect? You have a knack for it. You’re never wrong.” Her giggle laces through me, sending a flush of warmth across my wet skin.
Her boots keep getting stuck in the mud. My car is still a quarter mile away, thankfully parked on a hill overlooking the absolutely swamped festival grounds, but this is taking forever.
“Get on my back,” I command, motioning at her to hurry up as lightning flares, followed by an enormous crack of thunder that makes my teeth rattle. “Come on!”
She heeds my command, wrapping her arms around my neck with her ankles crossed over my stomach. “I’m getting mud all over you, just so you know.”
“Oh dear, and I was so clean to begin with.”
“Was that sarcasm, Blake? That’s new! Have you been practicing?” She tightens her grip around my neck.
“You’re lucky I sometimes enjoy your presence, Anna.”
“I think you always enjoy having me around.” She rests her chin on my shoulder, humming a soft laugh. Her scent cuts through the rain, floral and warm. She nuzzles her face against my neck to shield her eyes from the spray of the storm, and her eyelashes fluttering against my skin makes me grunt with a sudden tightening in my jeans I’m struggling to ignore.
It takes twenty minutes of carrying her like this to reach my car, a sporty SUV low enough to the ground that it’s going to be impossible to cross the now washed out bridge leading back to the highway, which I realize in a matter of minutes after reaching the car and pulling into traffic, both of us wet and shivering as we watch warriors trying to direct festival traffic back to Moorn.
“What are we going to do?” Marianna asks, her soaking wet hair dripping onto her shoulders and running down her arms.
“There’s a grocery store nearby in a strip mall. We can park there. They might have dry clothing inside.” I whip the car around and drive back in the direction we came. It’s a mess everywhere. The sky is painted an angry black that splits with lightning every few minutes. All of the hotels are full for the night, which we find out as we sit in the front seat of my car, dressed in matching touristy T-shirts with a box of the worst pizza I’ve ever had in my life resting on the console between us.
Marianna busies herself by flicking through the radio stations.
“There’s no availability at any of the hotels nearby,” I breathe, gritting my teeth as I scan my phone. “Not a single fucking room.”
“So? We’ll just sleep in the car.” She opens the pizza box, frowns, and serves herself a slice. “At least you have a nice car. We can fold down the back seats and sleep back there. You’ll fit if you bend your knees a bit.”
“Barely,” I mutter. I don’t want her sleeping in a car overnight. I run my hand over my face, debating my next move. If only I had the ability to jump. I’m not quite there yet, and I’m not going to risk it with Marianna with me. I could hurt her, I’m sure. Accidentally pull her to pieces, lose her somewhere in the void–
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking how much I hate the fact that you’ll be sleeping in a car overnight.”
“Why? It’s not like I’ll get in trouble or anything. Mom knows we’re here. Also, I already texted her about the weather.”
“You deserve a bed, not the back of my car.”
“It’s an SUV,” she teases. “A luxury model, Prince Blake. It’s like camping but better. Less bugs.”
I eye her wearily, resigned to suffering, I suppose. I watch her take a bite of her pizza. “You should eat something.”
“You look like you’d rather be eating dirt,” I reply, and she laughs around a bite.
“It’s totally raw in the middle,” she admits, struggling to swallow. “But I’m starving.”
“You’re a mess.” I laugh, and she grins at me. She’s just… beautiful, even in a stupid shirt that says “I Love Moorn” and sweatpants two sizes too big for her. Her hair starts to dry in messy waves as she stares out the window at the somewhat empty parking lot. The store lights flicker out, and darkness descends.
I turn the car off.
“Did you have fun, at least?”
“I did. I had fun knowing you had fun.”
She gives me a knowing smile. “You know, Blake, you’re actually a really good guy. I wish you could see that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You act like you’re so–so unloveable. So different. It’s okay to be weird.”
“You think I’m weird?”
“You are weird. A total weirdo,” she teases, but her eyes hold mine a little longer than usual. “You’re a nerd, Prince Blake.”
“So are you.”
“I am fully aware of that, trust me. I’m proud of it.” She finally takes a bite but doesn’t break eye contact. Something shifts in my lower belly, an ache of want I’ve been trying to ignore since the moment I met her a year ago, and she totally, completely, upended my life.
We’ve been friends for months now. Sometimes I think she likes me more than that. Sometimes she… flirts with me, I believe. It’s hard to tell. Lately, the past couple of weeks especially, we’ve been… together most of the time.
It’s killing me, more so now as I watch her lips close around her pizza.
I want to tell her how I feel, but I don’t know how to even begin. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never had feelings like this before. I’ve never really had a friend outside of Brie and Liam.
I don’t want to ruin it with Marianna. She’s the only good thing I’ve had in my life since I returned from training with the Mystics. I’m not ready to risk falling into that darkness again.
“Blake?”
“Yeah?” My throat is entirely too dry. The word comes out in a rasp.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She licks her lips, tossing her pizza slice back in the box.
“Wait, you have–” I lean toward her and swipe a splotch of grease from her cheek, but my touch lingers against my will. Her eyes hold mine, searching.
She keeps her gaze locked on my face as she leans into my touch, and it’s…
“What did you want to ask me?”
“I like you,” she says, but her expression tightens, like she’s worried I won’t feel the same way. “I–I really like you.”
I almost laugh.
But I kiss her instead.
She kisses me back.
Enthusiastically.
***
Blake
Present
I pull out of her mind with a sharp sigh as tingles of memories flood my body, awakening a feeling I’ve kept guarded for a very long time.
“Marianna, that wasn’t–that happened,” I tell her, meeting her eyes as she looks up at me, slightly breathless. “That wasn’t a lie.”
“I tried,” she admits, her eyes glassy with my powers still swirling but fading around her irises. “I thought–if I changed how–”
“It has to be a completely made up memory,” I cut in, my voice low and strained as I try to banish the internal agony clawing at my heart.
“Try again. I’ll get it this time. I just need a minute–” Her nose starts to bleed. I quickly grab a tissue off the coffee table.
“No, we’re done for the day.” I rest my hand against the back of her head, tilting it back to blot the blood away. She’s woozy, which I expected. “Why did you choose that memory?”
“I was trying to think of something to–to guard it with.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s one of my favorites.” Her tone is soft as her weary eyes meet mine, finally returning to that vibrant blue I fell in love with all those years ago.
I flex my jaw, but I can’t find the words I need to convey just how jarring that was for me to relive. That night changed everything. Absolutely everything changed. I look at her, my hand still supporting her head. “A month ago, someone tried to break into my mind,” I tell her, releasing her slowly. I rise, discarding the tissue in a nearby wastebasket, and pace to the window overlooking the forest. “He got close to seeing you. I was guarding the same memory–memories, honestly, of you.”
“Why was someone trying to break into your head?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.” I close the curtains. Her head is probably hurting, and the light will make it worse, for sure.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“It’s not important,” I tell her, turning to face the couch. I sit on the opposite end, further away from her than before, and let the distance between us settle the familiar, absolutely choking feelings of desire still washing through my system. “Skye will need to go through this training as well, and to be honest, I’m thinking that I need my parents’ help with you both. My mom is like me. Her powers are… similar. There are a few differences, but at their roots, they’re the same. She trained me when I was a kid. She can help both of you.”
“Did you just change your mind about training me yourself?”
“Yes,” I admit. I can’t decipher the emotion playing behind her eyes, but my powers are itching to get back inside her head, to follow her tether to our world to see if it still… binds with mine.
But I glance at the scar on her neck then quickly look away.
“Why?”
“I don’t know if I can help you. I’m too close to you, too familiar. You don’t feel threatened by me. We have shared memories. I was watching that scene play out from my perspective, Marianna, not yours. We’re too close.”
She rises. “Are you already going to push me away again?”
“Anna, no, that’s not what I meant–”
“Why did you end things with me? After the concert?”
I stand, too. “I don’t want to have this conversation right now. I was just inside your head, and you’re not thinking clearly. My powers are still subduing–”
“Why did you break up with me? You never–you never even explained why.”
“Please–”
“I need to know. Otherwise, I can’t do this. I want to be there for Skye, but if you’re going to be picking through my head, I need to know that I can trust you not to fucking hurt me again, Blake. This is–this is incredibly intimate.”
Tears wet her eyes. I hate it. My entire body screams to get close to her, to fix this.
I can’t tell her the truth, the reason why I’ve done so many unspeakable things… in her name.
Things no one knows about. Things I’ve lied about, spun into some narrative that keeps her out of the equation.
All based on something I saw when I looked at her thread in the tapestry… which was… short.
Because of me.
Her phone rings. She doesn’t move to grab it from her purse. Her eyes hold mine, heartbroken, maybe even furious. The ringing dies out.
“Blake, please. Why did you end things?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“But you did–”
Her phone buzzes several times in a row. With a scoff, she moves to her purse and slides it free, but the look on her face as it falls makes my body tighten with concern.
“Are you all right?”
She grows so pale I can see every fine blue vein running beneath her skin.
“Marianna?”
“I need to go. I’ll–I’ll wait to see what our mediator says about the new contract.” Her voice is laced with vitriol as a single tear slides free down her cheek.
“Marianna!”
She disappears down the hallway. I hear a door slam shut in my office–and then silence.