Page 73 of Witchlore
I push past him, out into the living room, moving faster than I know he can, desperate to get away somewhere I can finally let myself cry.
“Wait, Lando, you can’t do the spell on your own,” Bastian calls. “You don’t have the skill, it’s not safe—”
“Like I care what you say.” I stab the button for the lift.
“It was real,” Bastian says urgently, leaning a hand against the wall. He looks like he needs to lie down. Then I ask myself why I care. “Everything I felt for you, everything I feel for you, it’s real for me. I know it’s real for you, too.”
“You don’t know me.” I step into the lift. René tries to follow me and I use my boot to block his path. He tilts his small head at me as if worrying why I’m leaving so soon, and that sad, curious face shatters me completely. “I don’t know you, either. We’re just two people using each other to get what we want, but I don’t need you anymore. I have everything I need.”
“Please don’t try to do that ritual alone… please.” Bastianslams his hand against the lift doors to stop them from closing. “You could die.”
I want to believe he cares, but I can’t. After all, I don’t.
“Good,” I say.
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
I hate myself for being one of those clichéd people who cries on the tram, but as soon as I sit down, I weep, turning my face toward the glass and trying not to sniffle too much. The worst thing is how guilty I feel about betraying Elizabeth. It was all for nothing. It wasn’t moving on, it was just being played, being preyed upon because I’m a shifter. I wonder bitterly how many times in one life I can make the wrong choices about people, first Carl and now Bastian. Yet despite everything, I can’t think of them both in the same sentence. I remember Bastian saying,I think you’re brilliant, Lando,and I feel a rough, clenching sensation in my chest. For a second, I can’t get in enough air, panting and huffing. If this is what actual heartbreak feels like, it’s more physical and brutal than I’ve been led to believe by rom-coms. It has much more in common with grief, the wearying woundedness of it that seeped into my bones after Elizabeth’s death. All the rest of the way home, I think about the bathroom.
When I put my key in the door at Beryl’s, I find her standing on the other side of the door, holding Mr. Pebbles like a baby. He hisses at me and I hastily wipe my eyes.
“There’s a friend of yours from college here to see you, pet,”Beryl says, gesturing to my bedroom. “I signed them in and let them sit on your bed. Also, I changed your sheets. Mr. Pebbles did a piddle on your pillowcase.”
“A friend?” My heart races. I wonder if Bastian has jumped into his Mini and scurried round to Chorlton to beat me home off the tram, but when I open the door, it’s Kira Tavi sitting on my bed. My disappointment is like ash on my tongue. She is the last person I want to see. She might have had good intentions, but right now, all I can think about is everything she’s taken from me. Kira seems to know it, because she holds up her hands placatingly.
“I’m not here to fight again. I just want to show you something.” She reaches into the pocket of her duffle coat.
“No, get out.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” she says, her voice quiet. She’s holding something in her hands, a photograph, with the picture turned away from me. “Please, just look. Then I’ll go, I promise.”
I stare at it. I wonder what terrible picture she has to show me. Maybe it’s Bastian and Cameron together, proof that they were friends. If that’s the case, it can’t possibly hurt more, and she’ll be gone soon, so I nod wearily.
She hands it to me. It’s a black-and-white photo of two women, both standing next to an ambulance, wearing green uniforms and tin helmets. They have their arms around one another in a friendly way. One I recognize from my dream with a painful pang. The same dark skin, the same infectious smile. The woman my shifter loved. The woman who died in the cathedral bombing.
“How did you—”
Then I catch sight of the ring on the woman’s finger, the ring I saw in my dream/vision but didn’t truly notice until now. It’sthe same ring, that distinctive silver setting, as the ring on Kira’s finger.
“That’s my great-aunt Bisan, Bisan Tavi.” Kira presses her finger against her face. “My ring used to be hers.”
B for Bisan.
“Bisan,” I whisper. I move a trembling finger over to the face of the person standing beside her, holding her so fondly with a wide smile and knowing eyes.Could it possibly be?
I glance uncomfortably up at Kira, running through every time this term that she has messaged me wanting to “chat” and I’ve ignored her. Answers about my visions were literally walking around college and I was so scared of what Kira might tell me about Elizabeth that I didn’t even consider listening to her. I am once again caught up in a well of self-recrimination against my past shortsightedness—Lando, you absolute twat—until I remember that I listened to Kira today and look what it’s done to me. My suspicion and anger rise back up like a volcano.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because of them.” Kira points at the face of Bisan’s companion with a determined expression. “My great-aunt Bisan was in a relationship with them at a time when it was taboo in our world, and even in the human world. Aunt Bisan chose them, even though they were white and they presented female. Even though she was a witch and they were a shapeshifter.”
I can’t speak. I stare into their eyes, a different type of emotion pushing through the sadness of my fight with Bastian. A gentle recognition, a warming in my heart that seems to say,I know you. Hello again.
“I told you I’m not against shapeshifter and witch relationships,” Kira goes on. “I didn’t have it out for you and Elizabeth andI don’t have it out for you and Bastian. Telling you Aunt Bisan was in love with a shapeshifter was the only thing I could think of to prove it to you.”
I nod soundlessly, but I can’t take my eyes off the photo of the shapeshifter, like they’re an old friend I’ve been missing. It’s staggering, this beautiful truth that they were real. That they lived.
“What happened to them?” I ask, trying to hide my urgency.
