Infatuate (17 page)

He was so close to me, whispering, but he looked nothing like he had the night I’d thought I’d seen him at that party, when it had really been the Prince. He didn’t have that polish and sheen. Now he looked worn, weathered, beaten down. His dull gray eyes had lost that mysterious sparkle that used to be potent enough to be seen even in this kind of darkness. Those eyes that had always known how to lock on mine and reel me in now looked pained. He wore that same tuxedo he’d had on when I saw him last, on that dreaded night back in the spring when he had forced me to send him to the underworld, to push him through that door where he would face his penance for not having killed me. He had been too humane then to carry out his assignment and he had surely been suffering for it since then.

I couldn’t control my breathing; it heaved and echoed in my head so that I could barely hear his soft whisper. “Please listen, Haven. Be careful. Be on guard. They have you in their sights. And beware who you tell about me.” He looked away for a moment. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on my scars, which I had ignored that night in the garden. I didn’t think I could feel them stinging. “I shouldn’t be here now,” he went on. “But it’s the only place I can see you and I . . . I couldn’t stay away. I’m going to help you, but I need your help too. Please. Soon.” He let go of me and backed up, his footsteps making no sound, not even the slightest tap on the wood floor. He placed his finger to his lips, telling me to be quiet, then turned and stalked off. I watched, rooted in my spot. At one point he looked back over his shoulder toward me again and then I felt heat rise to my skin, like it used to back when I had just met him and knew nothing about who or what he was.

I heard a voice in the distance, in that murky way everything sounds from the bottom of a swimming pool. I forced myself back into the present.

“Hey there. Thought I heard someone. You’re lucky—almost locked ya in.” It was Lance’s boss. “They’re not here today, your friends. We should have ’em back next week. I was just closin’ up.”

I was almost too shaken to speak. “Oh, of course, I . . . I forgot. Thank you,” I stammered, and slipped out the door as fast as I could.

Outside, it was all I could do to keep from running. When I reached the gates to our house, I let myself clumsily drop to the ground, no strength left to stand. I had broken out in a sweat. I slicked back my wet hair and put my hands around my head, closing my eyes for a moment to keep the world from spinning.

Eventually, I gathered the strength necessary to return inside on unsteady legs. Connor intercepted me as soon as I came in.

“Haven! Come take a look at this,” he said spiritedly, gesturing for me to follow him down the hall. I hoped I didn’t look as shaken as I felt. Part of me wondered if I should tell him what had just happened, if perhaps I was actually endangering the whole group by keeping quiet. But it was just too soon; I wasn’t ready. I needed to hold it in, keep it close to me just a little longer until I could make sense of it. I wanted to believe that Lucian wasn’t a danger and I didn’t want anyone to convince me otherwise yet.
Lucian.
To see him again, the real him, confused my heart. It opened up that old wound, my old feelings for him stinging like salt.

“ . . . don’t you think it’s a great idea?” Connor was saying. I hadn’t been paying attention, so I simply nodded in agreement. He stopped before a room I had never been inside. “So I just finished and I think it’ll be a great place to practice,” he said, opening the door and flipping on the lights to a windowless room, every wall, floor to ceiling—floor
and
ceiling—padded in a layer of white cushion.

“Uhhh, how crazy do you think we are?” I asked, my fingers grazing the soft wall beside me. Opposite the door sat a basketball, dumbbell, boxing glove, and a couple books.

“Very funny.” He rolled his eyes. “C’mon now, this took a while. What do you think? Y’all needed a place to practice your levitation.”

“Ohhhh,” I said. “It’s . . . nice. But I don’t get it. Why the padding?”

“Trust me, when you’re learning, all sorts of crazy stuff can happen. I like to be prepared. Wanna test it out?”

“Well . . .” I scanned the few objects piled in the corner. No, I didn’t really want to. I wasn’t feeling particularly powerful at the moment.

Connor seemed to sense this from my slow response. “No sweat. Didn’t mean to put ya on the spot,” he said easily. “But it’s here, so use this room anytime you like.”

“Thanks,” I said, following him out.

“And Haven . . .” He paused, as if debating whether to continue with his thought. “I hope you keep at it, okay? You’ll get it.” He smacked my shoulder in a brotherly way. “And when you do, they’d better watch out. Trust me.”

“Oh, yeah, right, thanks.” I tried to appear nonchalant. I knew Connor intended to sound comforting but for some reason I felt worse. I didn’t like being the one who couldn’t keep up with the group, someone in need of extra attention. I watched him wander the hall toward his room and, thinking for a moment, I turned back around, slipping into that odd padded room alone. I hopped on the cushioned floor. It felt like jumping on a firm mattress. Then I stood in place, my stance strong, and I focused a laser-like gaze on the boxing glove, hopeful. It shook for a second or two as though it might launch, but then it stilled just as quickly. My heart fell. I tried a few more times with no luck, then returned to my room.

I must have watched that house next door for a good hour until Dante returned home, breaking only once to glance at that stash of printed photos (finding nothing new) and to discover a new text message on my phone:

You no doubt have many questions in light of recent events. You have done well on many fronts, even if you don’t feel it. Be patient with yourself and your progress while still pushing forward with all of your strength. You will see that, physically, the results will come fast. Throw yourself fearlessly into your training and you will reap swift rewards. The power you seek will manifest in no time, and when it does, it will be almost overwhelming.

I had to pause at that. Overwhelming? I couldn’t quite imagine that. But there was more. I scrolled down.

A note on the matter of trust. You are, no doubt, having difficulty knowing who is worthy of yours these days. You are right to wonder and to worry. As always you will need to find answers for yourself, but I will offer you this much to start, out of necessity: You can trust Connor, despite his methods. And Mariette. She is on your side. You may not like what she has to say, but she has your best interests at heart. Let her in.

That was all. I wanted more, though. Connor and Mariette weren’t the ones I was most concerned about right now. Why couldn’t I get answers on the one I really wanted to know about? But there was never any use in getting upset at these messages. It seemed they would always be riddles, prompting so many more questions for every answer they gave.

Before long, the group had returned. Lance gave me a kiss on the cheek and offered to take Dante’s place on night watch, but Dante, perhaps sensing my need to talk, refused him. I considered for the briefest of moments whether to tell Lance about Lucian. Each minute that I didn’t tell him felt more and more like this was a weighty, poisonous secret. The longer I waited, the harder it got to mention it. We reached his door and I decided I would let it be just mine for now. I wondered if he could tell how distracted I was as we said good night.

And so, with all that batting around in my mind, Dante and I had begun our rounds, walking the hallways together, upstairs, downstairs, and then ducking out onto the balcony to monitor the courtyard. Once or twice, to test ourselves, we steadied our jittery feet upon the wooden railing of the balcony and leapt down to the ground as Connor had instructed us to do as often as possible. Cool air whipped through my hair, giving me the illusion of flying, but I landed every time with an ungraceful, ankle-crunching thud, falling forward and scratching my palms. Dante had no better luck, but he didn’t seem to mind—he was too engrossed in stories of Mariette.

“So she’s starting me on the easiest ones: love spells,” he said after we’d climbed the stairs back inside.

“Those are easy? Really?” I had to ask.

“I know. Who woulda guessed, right?”

“It could have drastically changed our entire high school experience.”

“You’re telling me,” he said. “So I’m working on this one. It’s basically a mixture of these wild ingredients—you saw that pantry!—to make another one of those little bags, you know, a gris-gris bag? And apparently I have the power to transform that stuff into something that can actually rock someone’s world.”

“Well, I mean, you do that anyway.”

“What can I say.” He laughed. He thought for a moment. “It’s sort of like the flip side of what I was learning from, you know, Etan . . .” He said the name with a heaviness and was quiet for several long seconds, his eyes fixed somewhere far away. I could only imagine he was thinking about the devil at the Lexington who had wooed him, almost stolen his soul, and nearly killed him. In some ways, Dante had endured even more than Lance and me. We had had to survive a battle against them all, but Dante had really been submerged in their world, fighting it from the inside out.

He piped up, upbeat once more, “Anyway, all I have to do is stash this thing in the intended’s room, hidden somewhere in his stuff, and it should do the trick.”

I smirked. “I take it you have your target picked out.”

“Well . . .” He hesitated. “I suppose . . . I was thinking maybe . . . Max,” he said, like it was no big deal.

“Personally, I don’t think you and Max need it. I think you guys look like you’re on your way already.”

“Really?!” He perked up at this, looking at me with wild eyes. “You’re not just saying that?” I shook my head.

“Mariette said she sees good things for us, Max and me. She was saying . . .” He went on as we patrolled the property, but again my mind wandered.

“ . . . and then she’s working on this thing that’ll basically let a person disappear and . . .
Hav!
” he shouted at me, so loud in the still hallway as we passed Connor’s room that I worried he might wake up, thinking we were in some kind of trouble.

“What?!” I jumped. “What, Dan? Sorry.” I shook my head. “You were saying?”

“Please, you haven’t heard a thing I’ve been saying. What aren’t you telling me?”

Dante always knew when I was holding back—that was the danger of being around a true best friend—and I felt him glaring at me for answers. I turned slowly to face him, staring into his eyes, and took a deep breath.

“I saw Lucian today,” I said with the weight it deserved.

His jaw dropped.

By the time I finished telling him the story, we were outside again, on the balcony, leaning over the railing and surveying the grounds below.

“I don’t like this at all, Hav,” Dante said, shaking his head. “He wants your help? I just don’t like it at all.”

I breathed in the cool night air. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I needed to defend myself. Before I could, the murmur of other voices floated up from below, quieting us for a moment—it sounded like Tom and, could it be, River? They appeared to be curled up on the chaise below. It never ceased to amaze me how people paired off—there was just no guessing sometimes. I gazed up at that corner window of the house next door. Pitch-black right now.

My mind replayed each moment of my encounter with Lucian. It came in flashes accompanied by feelings, impulses, all spinning out of sequence: his whispered words in my ear; that parting glance as he walked away; the pain in his eyes; that firm hand gripping my shoulder; having him so close to me again. That feeling was what I most wanted to relive over and over again, and what I still had trouble believing. This figure that had been living only in my mind for months had now appeared before me again, in the flesh. Even in that poor lighting, I could sense a newly withered quality about his presence, a frayed spirit. I figured it was probably akin to what you might find in a soldier returning from a war zone. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he had been enduring in his time below, and it killed me to know that he was there because of me; I had had to send him there to save myself. So now the light that had once radiated from his eyes—so powerful that it would just seize you and not let you go—had dimmed.
I tried to search for it in his gaze in those fleeting min- utes we were together, and thought I found it, or the memory of it—just enough for my pulse to race and my stomach to flutter once again.

But now I forced myself to cut through all of that and focus instead on what he had actually
said.
And when I dissected those few words, it seemed that he was on my side. Didn’t it? Didn’t it seem that, despite whatever he might have had to brave below, he hadn’t entirely let himself be brought back into that fold? He had been trying to warn me about something. Why bother otherwise? If he had wanted to hurt or kill me tonight, he could have. His powers were so far beyond mine. But still, I had to watch myself. Much as I wanted to believe the best about him, I had to keep an arm’s length away until I knew for sure, just to be safe.

A cackle below broke me out of my introspection. I leaned over, squinting, and caught sight of two figures emerging from the darkness of the carriageway into the twinkling courtyard, laughing and giggling so loudly that I probably would’ve heard them even if I’d been inside my room. Dante smacked my arm, gesturing toward the duo, home hours after curfew. They clung to each other, arms entwined, heads thrown back in hysterics, and they stumbled, their heels clicking against the cement patio. It was Sabine and Emma.

Dante and I continued our rounds until nearly five a.m., when Connor would be taking over, as he did each day. When we finally said good night, Dante had opened up the door to his room, ready to get a few hours’ sleep before reporting for duty at the food bank, and there was Sabine. Sprawled on the floor, my roommate was fast asleep in their room, still wearing her dress from last evening. My heart blackened; I felt instantly ill. That Lance was tucked into bed, dozing peacefully, did little to settle me. A look of concern, frustration even, flashed in Dante’s eyes when they caught mine.