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My smile slipped. “Billy the opossum is dead?”
Rayna burst into a laugh. “No—I mean, he was, or so it seemed. A convincing act, on his part. Melle was picking him up and planning his funeral when he opened an eye. Asked us if we were going to eat him. We said no. Instant friends.”
I rolled my eyes, though my face cracked with a smile. “A little too trusting there, Rayna. You weren’t going to ask Billy if he planned to eat you before you decided he was a friend?”
“No. Billy’s about the size of my palm. It would probably take him two decades even if he wanted to.”
“Unless he invited his family over for dinner,” I said seriously. She wrinkled her nose and shoved at my arm, but kept her fingers locked around me as her expression fell into something slightly more serious.
“How did you sleep?” she whispered.
I knew she suspected I wasn’t doing great in that department, but she had enough to worry about without me relaying images of all the broken and mangled corpses with empty eye sockets that buried me alive in my dreams. So I just smiled softly and said, “Dreamt of you, as usual.”
The truth. The only consolation in my nightmares was her face, her hands outstretching as if to pull me out of the mountain of everyone I was destined to kill. I just always woke up before her fingers could fully lock around mine.
At that thought, I cleared my throat, feeling my Mind Manipulating power strain as I tried to balance my bubble of protection with what we were doing now. With half of my power running through Rayna’s veins and the scar she’d given me still marring the brand on my shoulder, I could feel myself shivering toward my limit.
“I’ve got to go.” I planted a kiss on her forehead and pulled back. “Tell Felicity I said hi.”
Disappointment jolted in those jade-green eyes, but she put on a brave smile—as she always did for me whenever I had to force myself to go.
“Of course. Tell Dazmine and the others I said hi when you see them. And don’t forget to bring me some more books.”
Another name seemed to hang on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it away. Neither of us had mentioned Garvis since I’d laid him to rest on a lonely isle shrouded in mist a few dozen miles to the east of here. Maybe we would one day—talk about him. Open up that wound again and try to heal each other.
But for now, we had the rest of the island to worry about.
And that started with researching the nature of oaths. I didn’t want Rayna anywhere near the queen of Sorronia regardless of her parentage, but Rayna herself had come up with another way she could help me research. A brilliant, devious way that solidified how much I would never deserve her.
“I will,” I promised, just as she plucked a star-shaped flower from the vines crawling up her wall behind her and placed it gently in the center of my palm.
I curled my fingers around it, then used all my willpower to withdraw myself from her mind.
Up on the mansion rooftop, I lingered for a few more seconds to get a last look at her, my hand still closed around the phantom touch of fragile petals. She was hugging her knees to her chest again with a deep sigh.
Fuck, how I wished I could feel that sigh against my mouth for real. Slowly, I uncurled my fingers, halfway hoping I’d find her parting gift still nestled in my palm, as if such a thing from her mind could actually materialize in the real world.
It was empty, of course.
Glaring at all the students who had begun to spill out onto Bascite Boulevard, making it impossible for me to sit here and watch her movements through the window all day, I latched onto the darkness of my second power and disappeared.
My Mind Manipulating abilities had been weakened over the last year, yes, but my Walking ones were stronger than ever. It hardly took any effort for me to cut through dark, fathomless space of thousands of miles in a few strides.
And reappear on the marble of my least favorite place in the world.
The floor at Queen Mydusia’s feet.
CHAPTER
2
RAYNA
Coen’s absence always left me feeling a little disoriented, like the world had released a long breath and sent everything spinning around me again.
As soon as he was gone, I squeezed my knees to my chest, gave out a long sigh, and…
A face dropped in front of my vision.
