“Hey.” Jessica scowled at him. “Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she wasn’t exactly who she needed to be. I thought you two were friends.”
“We were. In a manner of speaking. But the scryer had her own agenda.”
“Really?” Railen leaned forward. “Which was what?”
“I do not know.” Leandras lifted a hand toward his face and paused, clearly mulling over something that would’ve been really damn helpful to share with the rest of them right now. Then his silver gaze flickered toward Jessica with a renewed intensity. “But I’m beginning to believe they extended far beyond what any of us could foresee.”
Why was he looking at her like that?
Sure, Jessica had barley gotten to know the scryer witch before she was murdered, but Tabitha hadn’t completely disappeared from the picture altogether. She’d come back twice to give Jessica a few not-so-helpful tips after her death—once in a pre-recorded message-in-a-vial that had only felt like a conversation because she’d seen it all in the future, and a second time when her ghost or spirit or whatever they wanted to call it forced Marge the Necromancer right back through the doors of the bank to deliver a warning via possession.
Three times, if Jessica included the fun little secret note she’d found in her private safety deposit box in the witching vault.
And then there was the warning. “Promise me you won’t turn away when you hear them calling your name.”
Leandras seemed to think that was some kind of cryptic message from the past. He’d said his own version of those words in an attempt to convince Jessica she could suddenly bring people back from the dead. Or at least just one fae. He’d tried to tell her what he thought it meant, but that conversation had been interrupted again and again.
Until now.
“The agenda of a scryer Guardian.” Railen grinned. “Now that is something I’m really looking forward to exploring.”
The fae man swallowed thickly, still staring at Jessica like he thought she was supposed to be able to read his mind now too. “I believe we have waited as long as we have, Yafi-ít, because Jessica is the only Guardian to possess what we never knew was necessary. Perhaps even what some of us would have assumed impossible.”
Crap.
He was about to launch right into that same useless argument, wasn’t he? That Jessica the vestrohím could do what no other vestrohím should have been able to do; that she’d actually resurrected his dumb ass after Ati’ol of the Naruli had ripped open a portal underground, shoved them through it and halfway across Xahar’áhsh, and killed him with the force of her magic he’d said shouldn’t have affected him that way.
If this was what Ahárra wanted them to resolve, they’d never leave.
“Oh?” Railen looked back and forth between his two guests holding a staring contest across the table. A soft chuckle escaped him. “Well by all means, don’t stop now.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with this, and you know it,” Jessica warned. Even then, she wasn’t so sure herself.
“It has everything to do with this, Jessica. It changes everything.”
“No, it just means you’re completely delusional.”
But delusions didn’t bring very dead fae back to the very real world of the living, did they?
“Hmm.” Railen smirked and folded his arms, settling more comfortably onto the cushion he’d been sitting on for eternity’s version of at least five hours at this point. “I may have traded an exorbitant amount of my own dwindling supplies to watch all this play out.”
“Yeah, where’s the popcorn, right?” Jessica snapped.
The reference clearly went right over the mage’s head. “If you say so. Fortunately, Ahárra makes that completely...”
He sucked in a sharp, hissing breath and stared at Leandras’ face. The fae man still held Jessica’s gaze, his intensity unwavering even when their host’s surprise was apparently just one more source of aggravation for the Laen’aroth. “I really have never found even the slightest satisfaction in unfinished sentences, Railen. Was there more?”
“Your face.” The mage’s eyes widened.
“The effects of your draught most certainly should have run their course by now.”
“But Ahárra reveals,” Railen whispered. He slowly lifted his hand to point warily at Leandras. “Explain this.”
“That’s rather difficult without the details.” Leandras rolled his eyes. “To which part of my face, exactly, are you referring?”
“Jessica.” The mage crooked his finger in her direction without looking at her. “You see this, do you not?”
“Uh... Okay, I really hate to say it, but he and I are on the same page here. I don’t know what you—”
“Turn your head.” Railen motioned for Leandras to turn away, and the Laen’aroth begrudgingly complied, glaring at the ceiling.
When he turned his head away from the table to give Jessica a much better view of his profile, she understood instantly.
She hadn’t had the time to notice it before now. After running across this world like two lunatics hell-bent on getting themselves killed, she hadn’t had much time for anything at all, let alone picking up on the tiny details of her fae guide’s face. But now it was perfectly clear.
Railen had been marginally surprised during one of their previous rounds of Ahárra confession to hear Jessica Northwood was both the current Guardian and a vestrohím. So it wouldn’t have surprised him to see the black starburst marring Leandras’ cheek from when she’d lashed out at him during her nightmare struggle with the very real, very deadly Brúkii in her dream. It was the price he’d paid for pulling her from that nightmare and saving them both from meeting a disastrous end before they had the chance to step through the Gateway.
Only the mage hadn’t seen the mark of her destructive magic. Not until this moment.
The mark looked almost exactly the same—a dark burn in Leandras’ flesh with snaking black lines of vestrohím chaos spreading across his face. The affliction had been steadily growing since she’d left it there, threatening to consume him eventually with no actual timeline as to exactly when.
At least, it had been spreading the last time Jessica had seen it there beneath the fae’s silver eye. But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really looked, and now that it had been brought so conveniently to their attention, she couldn’t clearly remember having seen it since she’d pulled Ati’ol’s magic straight out of the Laen’aroth’s throat and accused him of being possessed by something definitely not Leandras.
“Tell me you see this, Jessica,” Railen muttered.
“Yeah. I see it.” The black stain of her magic that had all but marked Leandras Vilafor for death was nothing but a ghost of itself on his cheek—shimmering like a mirage and pulsing with light that definitely didn’t belong to either of them. It belonged to Ahárra.
This weird plane of existence they occupied revealed what needed to be revealed, didn’t it? Just like the surges of flickering light around Railen and Leandras when they’d gone through round after round of discussing each layer, Ahárra was bringing the ghost of what had once existed on the Laen’aroth’s flesh but no longer did—the proof of what Jessica still couldn’t bring herself to believe.
But proof like this was pretty fucking hard to ignore.
Clearly annoyed, Leandras gave up on humoring them and turned his head the other way to raise his eyebrows at Railen. “Now that I’ve indulged you, an explanation would be highly appreciated.”
“The mark,” Jessica muttered, gesturing absently toward her own face.
Quickly meeting her gaze again, the fae man widened his eyes. “What about it?”
It was apparently a rhetorical question, because he immediately lifted a hand to his face again, not in contemplation this time but to actually run his own fingertips across the complete smoothness of his cheek. The mirage of the black mark that had definitely been there when they’d arrived in this world shimmered when his fingers
passed right through it.
Leandras inhaled sharply and prodded more firmly at his own face, obviously searching for the wound there that would have packed one hell of an excruciating punch if he’d poked at it like that while it still existed.
Apparently satisfied with the knowledge none of them could quite yet voice, he slowly lowered his hand into his lap again and closed his eyes.
It looked a lot like relief, especially when the corner of his mouth flickered before he swallowed.
“Why are we seeing this?” Railen asked, still staring at the remnants of what would have killed the Laen’aroth far before his time. “That is vestrohím magic.”
“Yes,” the fae replied curtly.
“It should have overwhelmed you.”
“Well I do apologize for the disappointment, but I managed to hold it at bay.” Leandras opened his eyes again and immediately held Jessica’s gaze.
The brief flash of light behind that steady silver glow said everything Jessica needed to know. This was real.
What the hell did that make her?
“I don’t doubt your ability to draw out your own imminent demise, Leandras,” Railen blurted. “You’ve been doing it for so long already, I may as well call you thróm.”
Jessica cocked her head. “What?”
“I believe the closest Earth-world comparison would be to a cockroach, Jessica.”
She choked on a laugh and fortunately managed to contain it. Now just wasn’t the time for jokes, but Railen Conterium couldn’t have more precisely nailed that one on the head.
“But even a thróm cannot reverse the damage once it’s been done.” Railen swallowed, then finally looked away from the fae man’s shimmering cheek and raised his eyebrows at Jessica. “Not from a vestrohím.”
“As much as I would enjoy taking the credit for such an extraordinary feat, Yafi-ít, I’ve done no such thing.”
“Then tell me how it happened,” the mage demanded, the tendons in his neck poking out sharply now as he clearly fought to maintain control over his own bafflement and the urgency to alleviate it with answers.
Answers Jessica sure as shit didn’t want to hear again. Because it just wasn’t possible.
Leandras’ smirk returned him to his annoyingly over-confident self, and he dipped his head as he gestured with one hand toward their host sitting beside him. “Would you like to tell him, Jessica? Or should I?”
Chapter 6
No. This wasn’t happening. They’d already been through this. Vestrohím destroyed. They didn’t heal. And Jessica had not resurrected a dead fae with her magic.
“It has to be something else.” She shook her head. “There has to be a different reason. You know, one that actually makes sense.”
“This,” Leandras said, brushing his fingers against his completely healed cheek one more time, “does not lie.”
“Yeah, but you do.”
“Ahárra does not lie. You wished to know why you are the Guardian we’ve waited millennia to witness stake her claim and deliver Xahar’ásh. And the answer has been provided.”
“That’s not an answer, Leandras. That’s another hallucination.”
“Hallucinations merely reaffirm the absence of what exists in reality.” His smirk grew into a maddening closed-lipped smile that was literally the complete opposite of the feral grin he’d fixed her with so many times before. The grin said he was closing in on what he wanted, about to go in for the kill.
This smile didn’t hold any of his normal self-righteous satisfaction in being right or making his point. This was the smile of a fae man who’d been shoved through death’s door, ripped right back out of it again, and given a second chance.
It was the overflowing gratitude and excitement in that smile that made Jessica squirm.
“Only a vestrohím can direct a vestrohím’s power,” Railen said, shifting forward on his cushion in what was clearly burning curiosity and mounting frustration. “And I’ve never known the Laen’aroth to deny the opportunity to claim his own part to play in anything. So if he didn’t do this...”
The fact Leandras merely fixed her with that insufferably delighted smile made it that much clearer he wasn’t going to take the lead on this one. He had no desire to clear this up for their host on his own, because he wanted Jessica to do it.
He wanted her to admit that what shouldn’t have been possible had absolutely happened—to say out loud within the spiraling wormhole of Ahárra that she had tried to consume the Naruli woman’s magic and had healed him of its damage instead. That in doing so, she’d brought him back and cleared all remnants of the magical blight she’d inflicted on him.
That it really had been her voice somehow, calling his name, and he hadn’t turned away because they still had so much more work to do and neither one of them could accomplish it without the other.
That she was...what? Some kind of freak?
Or that she apparently had some incredibly rare advantage now, if not never-before-seen in any witch like her, which they could somehow use to their advantage.
Both of those options seemed outrageous and still plausible at the same time.
Whatever it meant, Jessica literally couldn’t hide behind it anymore. If she didn’t grow a pair and own up to what she’d done—no matter how impossible it was—she’d be sitting here for the rest of eternity with these two Xaharí magicals who stared at her and said absolutely nothing.
“I did,” she whispered.
“What was that?” Railen cocked his head. “I didn’t quite—”
“I did it.” Jessica lifted her chin, fixing Leandras with a ‘look what you’ve now’ glare, then forced herself to address the mage directly. “I didn’t even notice until you just brought it up. Or...I guess until this place brought it up for us.”
“You removed the affliction of your own power from the Laen’aroth.” The mage gaped at her. “Leandras, is this—”
“You don’t need to ask him just to believe what I’m telling you.” She took a deep breath. “I put that mark there, and apparently, I took it away too.”
“Jessica...” Railen’s raw chuckle sounded more like a groan. “You’re not the first vestrohím I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in my unfathomably long life. Not one of them has shown the ability to retract the effects of their magic. You know this, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know.” Jessica folded her arms and couldn’t bring herself to look at the fae man forcing her to own up to this at a truth-sharing party in a different plane of existence. “Apparently, I’m the only one who’s figured it out.”
That wasn’t technically true. Not completely.
She might have been the only vestrohím who could do this, but she hadn’t “figured out” how to do anything. When Leandras’ had choked his last breath beneath her hands half a mile outside Ryngivát’s city walls, she’d been operating purely on instinct. And it hadn’t been to save his life.
The only thing she’d been trying to do in that moment was consume the remnants of Ati’ol’s spell and fuel her own destructive inner fire.
Did the leader of the original Order of Laenmúr need to know that one tiny detail? Not really.
“A reversal on its own would be reason enough to suspect an unraveling, Railen.” Leandras straightened, his smile flickering again as he turned away from Jessica to look the mage in the eye. “But it’s far more than that.”
Their host had composed himself enough to now look surprisingly grim and calculating as he urged the conversation forward. “Is that so?”
“You’re seeing the proof of healing.” The fae man dipped his head, and his eyes flashed with a violet tint as he added, “Resurrection.”
Well, that was a hell of a way to wrap up an entirely mind-blowing revelation into two short, equally mind-blowing sentences.
For a moment, Railen looked like he’d been struck dead and his body just hadn’t figured out it was supposed to drop yet. Then he cleared his throat. “I want to believe you. Really, I
do. But what you’re telling me is... It’s too big, Leandras. It changes too many things.”
“It changes everything.” The Laen’aroth’s treacherous grin made its astounding next appearance.
Jessica couldn’t tell if it was the tonic’s last few aftereffects sending the rippling shudder down her back and arms or the thought that Leandras still had so many tricks up his sleeve—and even a timeless stint in Ahárra wouldn’t be enough to flush them all out.
“It might change everything,” Railen corrected. “It’s far too early to jump to conclusions.”
“You’ve spent thousands of years trying to avoid conclusions, Yafi-ít.” The fae swept his hand toward Jessica, and trails of rippling opalescent light stretched behind his fingers.
She blinked, trying to get rid of the visuals.
The last thing she needed was to drop all the way back to hallucinating-newbie status, especially when they had to be close to the end. What else was left for them to resolve? They’d covered literally everything.
“And now the answer has walked right into your sanctuary to join us here. Ahárra reveals, does it not?”
When Railen narrowed his eyes and turned his dark gaze on Jessica again, he finally seemed to catch on to the fae’s insinuations. He shifted again on the cushion, jerking away from the table in an awkward rigidity. Under any other circumstances, Jessica imagined he would have leapt to his feet and skittered backward across the tent, but Ahárra kept them all rooted to their seats.
“Ahárra reveals,” he muttered, then blinked furiously. “I’ve never seen her equal.”
Jessica huffed out an uncomfortable laugh. “That’s going a little too far over the top, don’t you think?”
“Not when I see you like this.”
“Like this? Okay, I might be able to...do what he said.” She nodded toward Leandras. “But I’m pretty sure I can’t shapeshift. So quit staring at me like you’ve never seen me before.”
“I haven’t.” The corner of his mouth twitched, his upper lip briefly sticking to his top teeth in an attempt to either smile or snarl at her. “The Guardian restored sits at my table in Ahárra. Vrestí...”
The Spellcast Gate (Accessory to Magic Book 5) Page 6