All I can do is nod, feeling small in my little infirmary gown coupled with being almost a foot shorter than him.
“Here goes nothing.” Uri says and almost immediately I feel his skin start to warm.
Uri doesn’t ignite any real fire. It’s all in his skin. Before long his hands are hot to the touch. I wince, but keep my hands still in his. His skin heats up with every second that ticks by. After a few minutes his skin is uncomfortably hot. Instinct has me pulling away.
“Amara,” Bastian warns me.
I push past instinct and let Uri take my hands back. Judging by the shear scorching touch of his skin I expect my own to burst into flames, but no actual flames come, nor does his steaming hot skin chase away my chill. It does nothing, but burn.
“I can’t.” I cry when it starts to become too much.
“You have to, Amara.” Bastian sneers harshly.
Finally I can’t take it anymore and I rip from Uri’s grasp and turn into Keenan, who immediately wraps me up in his arms. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” I cry into his chest.
“It’s enough.” Keenan hisses at Bastian. “It’s not doing anything, but hurting her.”
“If she doesn’t try she’ll die.” Bastian bites out cruelly, to scare me. It does. I flinch in Keenan’s arms, tears hitting his dark blue shirt.
“We’ll figure out another way.”
“Of course it didn’t work.” Suddenly Haven is there. I turn when I hear her voice and find her standing beside Bastian, looking at me as if she’s the one who’s just been burned. “The ice was in her blood, inside her. It’s not frostbite. Warming her skin isn’t going to do anything for her. It was a stupid idea.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Keenan argues. “It was a good idea. It just didn’t work.”
“I wanna go back to my room. I don’t wanna stay here anymore.” I say.
“I’ll take you.” Keenan responds.
“She isn’t going anywhere.” Bastian challenges Keenan, but Keenan barely lets him finish.
“The doctors can’t do anything for her anymore! I’m taking her back to her room. Let’s go, Amara.”
When we get back to my chambers Keenan waits in my bathroom while I fish through my dresser for a nightgown to change into.
You know he’s watching you, don’t you? Tristan’s voice startles me and I drop the gown in my hands back into the open drawer.
I glance up at the door to find he’s right. Keenan turns from the crack in the door. Tristan’s been gone for weeks, ignoring me the whole time I was in an entirely different country, never knowing what danger could come, but Keenan watching me dress is what brings him back?
You can’t trust him, Amara. You can’t trust anyone.
I ignore him and grab a little black nightgown and go over to my bed. I think Tristan must be surprised when I strip out of my infirmary gown and pull on this one. Are you listening to me? You can’t trust him.
For the first time I answer him aloud. “How do I know I can trust you? You won’t even reveal yourself to me.” I hiss irritably. “And now I’m talking to ghosts.” I slam the dresser drawer shut and call to Keenan. “You can come out now.”
Keenan emerges from the bathroom and raises an eyebrow at my suddenly irritable mood. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I force a smile. “I’m just trying not to let other people’s opinions get inside my head.”
Keenan comes over to me and takes my hands into his. “Don’t listen to Bastian, okay? We’ll find another way out of this, I promise you.” The warmth in his words warms me like Uri’s fire never could.
That’s when it hits me, thanks to Tristan, Keenan, and Haven.
“That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“Haven said that Uri’s fire wouldn’t work because the chill is inside me.” Yet just Keenan’s kind words sent a rush of warmth through me. I told Keenan I was trying not to let other people’s words get inside my head. Perhaps letting someone else inside my head is exactly what I need.
“Right. But his magic can only touch you physically.”
“Exactly.” I say, smiling widely.
“What am I missing here?”
“Kara is a fire user, Keenan.”
“True. And that matters to us why?”
“Because we share a Psychic Echo.”
“Holy shit, you’re right. And with that Psychic Echo—”
“We can share powers!”
“You can share powers!” he echoes back to me. “You’re brilliant. You’re fucking brilliant.” Without thinking he runs up and kisses me.
I think he expects me to pull away, but I don’t. I lean into the kiss, letting it warm me like the last. When he releases me he catches me in his electric gaze. I stare up at him, trying to gauge his reaction. “I’m sorry.” he whispers.
“It’s okay.” I whisper back.
“We should tell Bastian.”
“Yeah, we—we should.”
“I’ll go find him. Why don’t you—put something else on and meet us in the parlor? The one near the throne room.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Okay.” He awkwardly takes a step back. His jaw tightens, like he’s fighting against something I can’t see. He dips his head and presses a kiss to my cheek. “Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes.”
Once he’s gone I expect Tristan to come back and taunt me further, but if he’s here he stays silent. I change into a pair of stretchy black pants and a fitted black top with long sleeves.
I rub my hands together as I make my way to the parlor room. My room seemed warmer than these palace halls. My skin feels brittle, like it’s liable to break any second. I hope this works because if not I may not have to worry about finding Talvinder to get answers on this prophecy. I might be dead before I ever get the chance.
Bastian and Keenan are in the parlor arguing when I arrive. Keenan steps back from the king and comes toward me the moment he sees me coming. “Hey,” he says, much gentler than the way he was speaking to the king just now.
“Everything alright?” I ask, flicking my gaze from him to Bastian.
“Everything’s fine.” Keenan answers quickly. “Bastian says that you need to tap into Kara’s head before you can try and tap into her powers.”
“It only ever happens when one of us is scared or hurt. I can’t do it on command.”
“Well you’re gonna have to.” Bastian sneers. “Because if you don’t you’re as good as dead.”
“Yeah?” I challenge him. “And that fear your every word drips with, is it because you actually feel badly about what you’ve done or are you just afraid you accidentally damned your pretty little weapon to death?” I shout it, letting my own fear guide my words.
Bastian stumbles, for once at a loss for words. “Can’t it be both?” He releases a breath and turns his blue eyes away from me, ashamed of what I might find there.
“Get Missy in here.” I say after a stretch of silence.
“What?” Both men glower at me, hating what I’m implying.
“If I need to connect with Kara we’re gonna need me to be afraid and the only thing that’s going to do that is getting near her ice again.”
“Not gonna happen, Amara.” Bastian objects. He can’t hide his reaction this time though and I see the truth in his eyes. He’s afraid for me, not what he might lose if I die on his watch.
“It’s the only way I know how to get into her head.”
“You can do it on your own, Amara. I know your line of communication has always been one-sided, but if you concentrate you’ll both be able to talk to each other at the same time through the bond. All you need to do is concentrate.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Come here.” Bastian gestures to the couch and I go over and sit. He sits with me. “I want you to close your eyes and do the opposite of what I tell you to do when you’re trying to get out of her head.”
“Listen to your voice
?”
“Yes. Instead of focusing on what’s happening here where you are I want you to push all of it out. Block all of us out and your mind will have no choice but to enter the only other place it knows. Kara’s mind.”
“Okay. I’ll try.” I clear my throat and close my eyes. In the background I can hear Keenan moving to come closer. I hear Bastian’s breathing. I hear the arms on the clock across the room ticking.
I do as he says and I block it out. I push out Keenan’s movements, the clock, Bastian. Everything that’s been making noise in my life from the moment I fell into this palace.
Noise starts to push its way in, but this noise is different. The parlor room disappears before my eyes and another scene forms. It’s night in Llìria. Kara’s asleep, which is a first for me. Whenever I get sucked into her head it’s because she’s in pain or I am and there’s no way for either of us to sleep through that.
“Are you in?” Keenan asks.
“I’m in.”
—CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN—
KARA
MERGE
“Kara?”
Amara’s voice wakes me up out of a dead sleep. I stir, twisting in the three tons of blankets I piled on in the middle of the night due to the odd chill—in the middle of August—and turn to realize she’s just in my head.
“Amara?”
“Holy shit, it worked!”
“Amara,” I say again, this time a bit more anxiously. “Amara, it’s been so long. I thought something might have happened. And how the hell can I hear you right now?”
“It’s a long story, but something did happen, Kara. I need your help.”
The desperate sound of her voice makes me nervous. “What is it?”
“I need to tap into your powers.”
Tap into my powers? That’s one thing our Echo allows that neither of us have ever had any interest in. “Why?”
“Because I’m sick, Kara. We think the only way to fix me is with your fire.”
Sick? I’d thought I was getting sick myself judging by the way I’ve been sleeping with three or four blankets every night, but maybe it’s her. “Is this why I’ve been feeling so cold lately?” I’m a fire user. I’m never cold.
“Yes.” Amara says hesitantly and because we’re connected right now I can feel her emotions like an extra limb. Whatever this is, it’s killing her. Slowly.
“He did this to you, didn’t he? He used that girl to torture you and he made you sick.” The thought makes me sick myself.
“Kara, I need you to focus.”
I try, for her. There’s only one problem. “I don’t know how to let you tap into my powers, Amara.”
“I—I know. That’s why I need you to ask Theon. He’s the one who told us about our Echo, about how we can share our magic. He may know how we’re supposed to go about doing it.”
“I—okay.” The last thing I want is to see Theon right now given the last time he actually talked to me he was scolding me for trying to murder his hellbaby. But if Amara is sick he’ll want to help her.
Theon’s chambers aren’t far from mine, and like mine, it’s guarded by no less than two guards.
“His Highness is asleep, Lady Kara.” The taller of the two tells me. I can practically feel Amara’s eyeroll from hearing the words His Highness.
“I know, but it’s important. I need to speak with him right away.”
The two share a look and then one of them goes in to inform Theon that I’m here. When he returns he gestures for me to go inside.
I halt in my place when I enter to find Theon rising from his bed, his chest bare. I’ve never seen him without a shirt before. Well, not since the night we conceived his hellbaby, but I’ve blocked that night out as best I can. He has a tattoo of a feather with black birds exploding out of it. It’s unique and it makes my palms slick with sweat.
“Holy shit,” Amara seethes in my head. “Are you attracted to him?”
“Shut up, Amara.” I hiss under my breath. Theon stands and his quilt falls back, revealing a pair of black sleeping trousers hanging off his hips.
“Kara, what is it? What’s wrong?” He approaches me and I take a cautious step back, fighting against how good he looks without a shirt.
“You’re so gross!” Amara calls out in my head.
“Shut up, Amara!” This time I shout it. Theon raises an eyebrow at me. “Amara…she needs your help.”
“Is she in your head right now?” Despite his knowledge of our bond he seems bothered by it, like she’s intruding on an intimate moment. Don’t I know it?
“Yes. Even dying she’s finding ways to tease me.”
“Dying?” Theon demands. If he was a fire user his skin might have caught on fire in his rage. “What’s wrong with her? What did that king killer do to her?”
“He used a Borderline with ice magic to torture her and now she’s slowly freezing to death, from the inside. She thinks that if we utilize our ability to share powers that my fire might…fix her. But we don’t know how to do that. She’s hoping you do.”
“Tell him to put on a shirt.” Amara grumbles.
I look up at Theon, unable to pull my eyes away from his chest, his tattoo. I bite my lip.
“What is it?” he asks. My face is an open book. One of my greatest weaknesses.
“Amara said to put on a shirt.”
Theon’s blue eyes flash to his bare chest as if just realizing he’s half naked. He grabs his shirt at the end of the bed and tugs it on over his head. “Ya know, I never realized how truly creepy that Echo of yours is.” I laugh when Amara laughs. “What?”
“She’s laughing.”
“Lively dying girl, aren’t you, Amara?” he says to her through the Echo.
“So how do we do this?” I lift my gaze to Theon. My insides cringe at the sight of his nervous expression. “Theon,” I prompt because his silence always hurts more than his words.
“You know what this will mean for you.” It’s not a question, though it should be because I don’t know what he means. “As soon as the two of you merge your powers you’ll have all the power she has, which means…”
“Which means my touch will be as deadly as hers.”
“Only she knows how to control it. You won’t. You’ll have to learn, just as she’ll have to learn to control your fire. In some cases the powers merge into one.”
“Like a Borderline?”
“Yes.”
My breath catches in my throat as the fear ripples through me. What will Amara’s death touch feel like? Who might I hurt because of it? Who’s soul might I rip away unintentionally? The thoughts cease me in their iron grip and as much as I’d like to turn them away before they can get ahold of me, I can’t. But Amara needs my fire, to live, so I’ll take her death magic so she can.
I swallow hard. “I understand.”
Theon watches me, waiting for me to change my mind, or vomit maybe. I do neither. “Alright.” he says, like a final nail in my coffin. “Come sit. We’ll get started.”
Theon leads me over to the sitting area across the room, taking both of my hands into his. “Now I don’t know how well this will work with the two of you so far away, but I assume if the pair of you can see into each other’s minds whole countries away like you do then you should be able to share your powers as well.”
“Okay. How?”
“Amara, are you with us?” he asks awkwardly.
“I’m here.” Amara says in my head.
“She’s here. She’s ready.”
“Alright. You’re both going to close your eyes and you’re going to let the magic in. Your own magic. Let it course through you. It’ll only work if you’re connected the way you are now so you need to hold the connection. Don’t let it go or we’ll have to start over.”
I nod, eyes closed. Theon sets my hands on my knees, pulling back from me. “You got that, Amara?”
“I’ve got it.”
I concentrate on my fire. I feel my body heat rise higher than it n
ormally is while my fire courses through my veins like blood. It bleeds into me, a spark wanting to ignite, but it won’t. Not until I command it to. I can feel the chill in my bones warm already, just at the feel of my fire magic. My body radiates heat.
“How are we doing, ladies?”
“What do we do now?”
“Your magic is connected to your emotions and you can feel each other’s emotions through the Echo, so you’re going to reach for those emotions, like you’re holding hands. And then I want you both to conjure all the magic that you can, like you’re in battle. Let it take over, and you’re gonna push it into one another.”
“That sounds hard, Theon.”
“Just trust your magic, Kara. It’ll get you where you need to go.”
I reach out for Amara. It’s all I know to do. I let all her emotions in, one by one. Feeling her emotions doesn’t allow me to read her thoughts like most people think, but it gives me insight to her world. She’s terrified, terrified she’ll die before she sees Aaric again, or me, or Roman. Especially Roman. She misses him like no one else. But there’s another that’s wiggled his way back into her heart. My brother. Her heart aches for him in a way I don’t understand. Again, I don’t get details, but her emotions are loud enough for me to understand most of it.
I know when she’s tapped into my emotions too. I feel her inside, pulling them to her, one by one. She feels my yearning to see her again, to hug her, to cry with her. She feels my rage for the unfair trials I now face with my children. She feels the emptiness I feel toward my little boy, the fear I feel for my little girl. The doubt, the confusion, the loneliness. The suffocating loneliness.
We run through each other’s crippling emotions like a storybook, and once we’re finished we call to all the magic we can muster. I call to my fire until even Theon flinches away from my blistering heat. It ripples through every limb, scorching the air itself.
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