Page 148 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“Oh, not you too,” I sighed quietly. Cilia and the others were still helping her pack up her own stuff, and I didn’t want them tohear and feel sorry for me. “I’m sure Wren’s bed will be perfectly fine.”
I wasn’t sure, actually. Wren was probably the least cuddly person I’d ever met, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she made me sleep on the floor.
“I think I’d rather share a wall space with Bartytonight.” Willa wrinkled her nose. “And he sings opera in his sleep.”
I sighed and brought her up to my shoulder so I could begin packing an overnight bag on my hands and knees—a nightgown from here, a bar of soap from there. Anything I could find in the rubble that looked somewhat useful, I threw in one of the ransacked bags.
Was there anything else I needed? Anything I didn’t want the Good Council getting their hands on if they returned to investigate further? The pearls were safe, but…
“…and he doesn’t wash his tail and keeps shitting on your book.”
“What?” I asked Willa.
I didn’t need her to explain further, though. As soon as she’d said that last word, I could feel another memory dislodge itself in my mind and come to life in an explosion of mist that involved a request from Jagaros, a conversation with Ms. Pincette, and a map I’d stowed away in the wall behind the cuckoo clock in our foyer downstairs.
A map I was determined to never hide again.
Ten minutes later, with Willa safely deposited back into the walls and Ms. Pincette’s tome tucked away in my overnight bag,I poked my head into Wren’s room to find that I wouldn’t, in fact, be sleeping on her floor after all.
She and Gileon were slumped against the headboard of her bed side by side, their heads lolling against each other as they snored with a pawn-scattered board game between them. Their clothes were on, and nothing about their positions screamed romantic to me, but I still felt that same strange pang of homesickness at the sight of them together. Even Nuisance was buzzing in his sleep in Gileon’s lap, his shelled wings fluttering with every breath.
Well, now I knew why they hadn’t come running at all the Good Council commotion.
I eased Wren’s door shut again, hoisting my bag over my shoulder and gnawing on my lower lip.
The echo of my first night here at the Esholian Institute seemed to be closing in on me. Even though I still had holes in my memories, I could remember peeking into tent after tent and feeling more and more unwelcome and out-of-place as I went. The same deep-rooted loneliness I’d felt then was creeping over my bones now, twining around them and pulling tight.
Bascite Boulevard was shrouded in mist by the time I crept outside to trudge to that same tree I’d slept in once upon a time.
Everybody else must have gone home after the Good Council incident, because nobody passed me as I walked. No lights flickered through the fog, no music permeated the air. Even the usual background noise of nighttime animals—the chirping of crickets, the far-off hoots of owls, the clicking and screeching of bats—had dissolved in the haze.
Just one night, I told myself as I made it to the Wild Whisperer sector. I would take my second quarterly test tomorrow, get those pills from Nara, give them to Lexington, and then…. well, then there would probably be a lot bigger things to deal with than sleeping in a tree.
I almost ran into a thick wall of warm muscle before I saw him through the thickness of the mist.
Steeler was standing before that tree, his arms crossed.
“You can’t be serious, Rayna.”
My bones heated and shook off their restraints.
“I’m a Wild Whisperer,” I shot back, glad for the mist that hid the color warming my cheeks. The fact that he hadn’t gone back to the lighthouse, that he’d stayed here to make sure I found a bed safely… I cleared my throat to keep my voice steady and carefree. “Sleeping in a tree is, like, the one thing I’m good at.”
“I’d say you’re good at a lot of things, actually.”
His gaze didn’t flick down the length of my body, but I felt the weighted heat of it as if it had. As if he’d already memorized every part of me and devoured them whole.
“Just one night, little hurricane.”
Steeler’s voice was so soft, so achingly fragile, that I wanted to cradle it in my palms. When he offered his hand to me, something irrevocable shattered in the smoky quartz of his eyes.
“I know I don’t have any right to keep you,” he said on an exhale. “I know I don’t deserve to love you. But please, Rayna—give me one more night to be with you.”
My breath eddied away at the expression on his face.
He wasn’t asking to sleep with me—not in that way. He may have made certain suggestiveclaimsin the past, but I knew by now that he wouldn’t ever pressure me into anything physical.
But could I evensleep, knowing he was in the same room as me? Could I stand it, with no Garvis there to stand as a buffer between us? What if I wanted to taste him again without the excuse of a Mind Manipulating lesson? What if I couldn’t smother the hunger within me that was reaching for him?
