Page 149 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I had to say no.
It was for the best to say no.
It hovered on the tip of my tongue to say no.
“Yes,” I said, stepping toward him.
And that pang of homesickness inside me melted away.
CHAPTER
44
“Raynie!”
A bright voice greeted me as soon as the darkness dumped us into the middle of the lighthouse cottage.
No sooner had I stood up than Felicity bounded into my arms and wrapped herself around my neck. “I didn’t think you’d be here until Sunday. Come look at what I’ve been learning to make.”
She bounced out of my arms again and tugged on my dress until I stumbled, laughing, toward the kitchen table.
There on the gnarled wooden surface sat a variety of glass jars and containers filled with swirls of different-colored wax and topped with wicks made of twine. I leaned in to smell them, inhaling a mixture of caramel and lavender and vanilla.
“Candles!” Felicity announced proudly. “I made the wax from palm leaves, melted it over the fire, and mixed in all the oils. My favorite is the lotus blossom one, by the way. Did you smell it yet?”
I lifted the jar with the cream-colored wax to my nose.
“I could just eat it up. This is amazing, Felicity.”
And I meant it. The proud smile on the monkey’s face, the fire crackling in the hearth, the soft breeze that floated in from the ocean outside the window—it was all like a pocket of deep calm before an oncoming storm. I wanted to sink into this warmth and never let go.
But there was one last thing lingering on my mind.
I waited until Felicity had busied herself with her candles again to say it.
“Did you know?” I whispered, my back still to Steeler.
“What?”
“Did you know that the Good Council is recruiting people when they’re only students? That Mr. Gleekle is giving them a second brand?”
I couldn’t fathom how else he would have known to give me one, and by the intake of silence behind me…
“Yes,” Steeler said finally, and I rotated to face him. “When I was a first-year at the Institute, I came to realize that my Mind Manipulating power was… stronger than my peers’—all my peers except for Garvis. We figured our faerie blood gave us a heightened ability to wield it, but I didn’t realize until I was messing around in an upperclassman’s mind just for the hell of it and saw that he’d been double Branded how dangerous that heightened ability could be.” Steeler looked down at his hands. “I knew if Mr. Gleekle got ahold of any of us, he’d discover our true identities, so the others and I… we held ourselves back. That day that you first arrived in the courtyard…” He looked back up at me. “… it was the first time I ever flexed my power, just to see what it was like. And I regretted it instantly.”
My gaze snapped up to his.
“Why?”
He gave a sad smile.
“Because I got a taste of what I was missing out on and knew it would consume me, if I let it.” He held my gaze. “I never expanded my power again until the end of last year, when I erased everyone’s memory of me at the Institute and found that it was scraping my limit.”
When his face twisted with self-revulsion, I knew he didn’t just think I’d never forgive him; he didn’t think of himself asforgivable.
He didn’t think he was worthy of it.
The words I should have said lumped in my throat as I set my overnight bag down on the floor and watched Felicity absentmindedly set her homemade candles on various surfaces around the room. The coffee table. A side table. The mantle. A windowsill.
