Page 140 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Jenia uttered my name, and Quinn and I jolted with horror at the same time.
I ran away before I could hear her response, following the echoes of another memory.
This one was even more jarring than the others. It started off as a giant gap, as if the beginning had been ripped away. But then Lander was there, in his panther form, snarling at her with such vicious, spitting rage that I knew this must have been the tail-end of her memory of that incident in the jungle last year. The part of her memory that Steeler had left intact.
A sob burst from Quinn’s throat at the look of such hatred on Lander’s shifted face.
She turned and fled.
Branches and brambles snagged at her clothes as she tried to tear through them. She could have used her wind to push them apart and create a path home for herself, but something peculiar was happening to her body: it was growing frost. A hue of blue was washing over her skin, as if her magic was trying to calm down her racing heart. To freeze her panic in its tracks.
Quinn didn’t fight it for long. When the jungle became too thick for her to wade through, she fell to her knees with a squelch in the mud that was slowly frosting over.
Ice burst from her chest, forming a wall of glittering, spiked barricades around her. A crystal-clear spire shot through the canopy above, and a mote of frigid water wove around it all.
In the middle of those barricades, Quinn wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth, trying to catch her breath as it fogged out in front of her. Long after she’d finally rocked herself into stillness, a familiar voice wormed its way toward her.
“Well, isn’t this an interesting display of magic?”
Quinn looked up to find Lexington’s face leering through her opaque walls of ice.
I continued on, chasing after other memories in search of a hint of Mr. Gleekle.
Parties, classes, one-night stands, drinking games, friends—the chaotic routine of Quinn’s life in the last year went by in a blur as I ran past those short, angular paths, merely glancing at their dead ends before rushing on—until I did a double take and turned back.
There, at the end of one, a castle-like structure of… ofshellscloaked what should have been the space for a memory.
I raced toward it, heart skittering, knowing that another Mind Manipulator had buried whatever this was—albeit clumsily, with their own magic rather than using Quinn’s mind to hide parts of itself.
I plunged my hand through the sharp fragments, tossing aside scallops, whelks, and disjointed ladybug wings, until it all came scattering down and the mist burst into life around me.
“Quinn Balkersaff?”
Kimber Leake had cornered Quinn in almost the exact same spot between Element Wielder classrooms… but now, Quinn turned to face Jenia’s older sister with fear and wariness knotting between her eyebrows, her fingertips frosting over with blue on instinct.
“Yes?”
I saw her eyes shoot to the little red dot in Kimber’s shoulder brand that marked her as an elite. This must have been sometime after Jenia’s exile, when Kimber had shown up for the Branding as a Good Council representative. Perhaps even when her parakeet had been spitting names at me on my house’s balcony.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Quinn added in a mutter.
Every ounce of Kimber’s polite demeanor seemed to snap away.
“My sister’s notdead!” Chest heaving, she tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear and said more calmly, “Look, I don’t have anyone else to go to. Jenia had a falling out with Dazmine Temperton, our family in Belliview would never even entertain the idea of helping adisgrace.” Kimber’s voice snagged on a choke with that last word. “And her boyfriend reallyisdead, by the looks of it.” She lowered her tone and leaned in close to Quinn. “I can break her out of the prison where they’re keeping her, but I need someone to hide her for me if I do—your homevillage is small, right? Alderwick, right? You could keep her safe there?”
Nothing about my house’s old Wild Whisperer princess looked sane right now. She was curling her fingernails into her fists repeatedly—open, close, open, close—and when a very familiar parakeet swooped into the alleyway to land on her shoulder, her body gave a violent tremor.
Quinn backed away, her fear hardening into crude distaste at the mention of how small our home village was.
“I don’t know what you mean byprisonunless that’s what you’re calling the pirate ships out there. But I can’t hide Jenia in Alderwick evenifI wanted to risk my ass to mess with the dome or run away from the Institute. Those are the rules, Kimber. And you, out of everyone, should know that.”
She eyed the brand, the dot in the middle, with such vehemence that it was a wonder Kimber didn’t tell her parakeet to rip into her face.
“You’re right,” she said instead, her own face hardening into smooth, lethal contemplation. “My mistake.”
And when she dove into Quinn’s mind to smother this memory, I knew my assumption had been correct. Kimber had been branded with a second power sometime during her years at the Esholian Institute: Mind Manipulating, just like me. And if Jenia’s earlier claim was true, she had been spying on my mind all of last year. She’d discovered what I was—a half-faerie—and apparently thought she could give her younger sister a shot at joining the Good Council if Jenia claimed that discovery for herself.
Little had either of them known that Dyonisia had known about me and the innate power in my blood all along.
