Page 49 of Witchlore
“Oh, yeah, me, when I was about fourteen and a right goth.” I can’t help smiling at the drastic use of black paint and wild brushstrokes. “I wanted to be a selkie.”
“Really? That’s adorable.” Bastian grins. Something flutters inside me. I wonder if he’s being sarcastic but it doesn’t sound like it. Could he genuinely find me adorable?
“Here.” I open the wardrobe, reaching into the wicker basket inside that I know holds spare pajamas. I hand him a soft baggy blue T-shirt. “Don’t sleep in your dirty T-shirt.”
“Okay.” Bastian pulls off his damp T-shirt and I look away. No one needs to see all that perfectly sculpted skin, but I can’t help noticing, out of the corner of my eye, a broad scar, a mangled mess of puckered skin across his chest and shoulder, climbing up to his neck. It looks like it would feel textured and bumpy under my fingers.Don’t think about touching Bastian’s chest!I tell myself firmly. Once I’m assured that he’s climbed into the other side of the bed, I turn around. He’s on his phone, frowning.
“Do you have a spare charger?” he asks. “I’m on two percent.”
“Use mine, I’m on eighty.” I pull it out of my bag before plugging it in. “Give me your phone.”
I ignore how warm his hands are as I plug his phone in. I can see the photo on his home screen. It’s him and a man who looks a lot like a young Eric Chevret, but with glasses and longer, curlier hair. It must be his brother, Shasta. Bastian’s smile in the photo is so broad, so genuine, he looks like a totally different person. It’s almost too personal, as if it’s something I shouldn’t see. I setthe phone down on the nightstand and climb into the bed, too nervous to take my hoodie off in front of him but too warm to sleep comfortably in it. He turns out the small lamp on his side of the bed and we are plunged into mutual darkness, the only light the amber glow of the streetlamp through the wispy, veil-like curtains.
“’Night,” he whispers.
“’Night,” I whisper back. I lie in the dark as the bed moves and he rolls over onto his side. I wait for his breath to even out before carefully stripping off my hoodie and dropping it out of the duvet, trying not to pull the edges or wake him. I don’t have the privacy to do my postshift routine of looking at myself naked, so I just sort of awkwardly run my hands up and down my body, trying to learn its new shapes and textures.
“Are you okay?” Bastian whispers suddenly. “You’re fidgeting.”
“I’m fine.” I stop moving, flushing with embarrassment, wondering if he thought I was wanking or something awful. I bury my red face in the pillow and instead concentrate on telling myself what I always tell myself.I am more than my body, I am more than a label, I am Orlando, I am Orlando, I am Orlando.…Then my mind drifts into dreams.
“How is he?” I ask, pressing on the wheels of my wheelchair as my mother guides me to his bedside.
“Fading,” she whispers. I look down at him in the bed, his aged face. Like most shifters, he has aged appropriately. Unlike me, who lives my youth over and over again. Now his time is coming and nothing has prepared me for this, not even seeing my friends lose their limbs and lives in the mud of Ypres.
“My dearest child,” he whispers, reaching for my hand. The skin on his knuckles is so soft, so friable. It has spent a century changing, stretching, and shrinking and now it is nearly over. His cloudy eyes feast on my face and then drift to my wheelchair. Dribbles of tears leak from the corners of his eyes, seeking the creases in the folded skin.
“My poor darling, my precious one,” he whispers. “Promise me you will not go back.”
I close my eyes, fighting back the grief inside me. On the inside of my eyelids, I see the stretchers, the miles of churned earth, the hollow-eyed men squatting in the mud. I cannot lie to him.
“If I can, if I am able, then I must.” I squeeze his hand, my tongue too heavy to ask for absolution, my heart screaming for it. He closes his tired eyes and turns his face away from me, for the first time in my life. A chasm of grief opens up inside me that nothing can fill.
“Then I hope you never walk again,” he whispers.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
“Lando? Lando, wake up. You’re crying.”
I jerk awake. Bastian is leaning over me, his cheekbones sharp in the blue shine from his ring. He’s clearly using some kind of lighting spell to enhance its glow and the air smells lightly toasty.Elizabeth,I think and I shuffle back, instantly anxious. I’m quickly aware of how close he is and that I’m topless, and I immediately yank the duvet up to cover my naked chest.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I sniffle, wiping my eyes as I lean against the headboard. “It’s just a dream.”
Was it just a dream? It felt so real, so unbearably painful to see that man, the man I felt sure was my father. How could I feel the emotions of the person who wrote the diary inThe Witchlore of Bodies? If my own father was dying, I’d probably feel a bit relieved. Bastian closes his fist so the spell ends. I instantly feel a little bit calmer.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have used magic around you without asking,” he says quietly. “Especially in this house.”
I’m distantly touched that he has been noticing.
“It’s fine,” I say, kicking my legs out from under the duvet and pulling my knees in close to hug to my body. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” he says. “It was the same as when you were in the water.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t a dream; you were all rigid and muttering and you glowed a bit.”
“I glowed?” I stare at him. Bastian taps something on his phone screen.
