Adam hadn’t gotten around to icing over the Loft by the time we’d returned and settled in. In fact, I didn’t see much of anyone—not even Pockrus—for an entire day.
That unfortunately included Jasper.
He’d come with me up to Sawyer’s room to make sure I got healed. But once Sawyer’s glowing hands had started soothing the stinging bites of pain shooting up my back, I found Jasper had vanished.
“Did you see where he went?” I asked Sawyer. He’d merely shrugged.
Okay, Jasper needed time to unwind and settle in. I understood that. A lot had happened, the full ramifications of which I probably wasn’t aware of yet.
But once I’d mostly healed up, once I’d fit in six naps and a full night’s rest, once I’d triple-checked with Maxime about the Loft’s protective charms—so many times that Maxime had asked if I was bored—Jasper still hadn’t come out of wherever he was hiding…
That wasn’t going to fly with me.
I stomped up to the Gargoyle’s Roost after breakfast. I knew from experience that Jasper didn’t stay in his room when he was bothered with something. He needed to be proactive. To plan.
I popped my head into the room. Sure enough, he’d organized all the disarrayed papers and tables into some semblance of their original order. He appeared totally fine, yet he was avoiding me. And everyone else.
But mostly me.
I leaned back against the wall outside and took a deep breath. It wouldn’t do any good for me to go in guns blazing. He would shut down behind his iron expression and we wouldn’t get anywhere.
“I can hear you, Riley,” Jasper called.
“I know,” I said. “And…here’s me entering.”
I stepped inside. Jasper was scowling at a stack of important-looking documents, shriveled and illegible. “Do I want to know how…?”
“Adam did that,” I said. “The new elemental.”
“The new elemental.” Jasper shook his head. “Another problem. I still haven’t had the joy of meeting him.” Jasper carefully laid the papers down. “You’re pissed at me right now.”
“Yes.” I thought some more. “But mostly confused. What gives? We’re not in the clear yet but you’re back. You’re with the Outcasts. I took care of Valencia—”
“And made a bigger problem.”
I bristled. Oh, so we were going there? “That’s funny, I got the impression I was solving a big problem.”
“Why were you at the Shadow Man’s auction?”
“Why was I—Didn’t anyone tell you? We were trying to get the mortal coil for Kaia.”
Jasper finally looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “Not for any other reason?”
Ah…now I got it. “You think I was there just to try freeing you again.”
“Do you blame me, after that ridiculously stupid stunt you pulled in the Dead City? I mean, seriously? Do you know how close I came to killing you?”
“Yeah…well I’ve gotten a lot better at fighting than you realize. And you know what? Maybe you’re not as good as you think you are.”
He stalked toward me. I didn’t feel physically threatened by him in the least, but I dare anyone to see a massive, furious vampire with a glower hard enough to cut diamonds coming toward them and not feel compelled to take a few steps back.
All too soon I found myself pressed against the wall. Jasper braced one arm against it, boxing me in. “I’m exactly as good as I think I am, but that’s not the problem.”
My mind was scrambled. I couldn’t stop shooting looks at his lips, his hair, his chin, his chest, at his eyes and the concerned intensity I’d missed in them. I’d missed all of him. I swallowed. “Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that now you’re supposed to be dead, and killing Valencia made things a thousand times worse.”
“Killing Valencia was what freed you!”
“I had tabs on Valencia at all times. I knew what she was up to, where she was going, how big of a threat she was at any given moment.”
An enraged scoff escaped my throat. “You were her flippin’ puppet, Jasper!”
“And now that she’s dead, the Deathless are without a leader. They’re mad and lost. Lukas and Onora are going to use that anger and direct it wherever they want. Tricking Lukas into thinking you’re dead will throw him off for a few days, but he’s not an idiot. He’ll realize something’s up. Maybe he already does. He surely will the moment word reaches him that someone’s started casting fireballs again. And then we’ll be right back to where we were before, except nobody’s on the inside.”
“Except now we have you,” I insisted. Seriously, why wasn’t he getting this?
“And that’s the other problem.” Jasper dropped his chin to his chest. I pushed off the wall and leaned into him, carefully brushing the strands of hair from his face and lifting his face to meet mine. There was something wrong here. Something I was missing.
“Did I…do something wrong? I just wanted you back, Jasper. We all did. But you’re acting like this is horrible.”
“It’s not horrible. It’s just…” He let out a long breath. “I’m not mad at you.”
Our faces were inches apart. It was totally inappropriate, but as upset as he was, I wanted to lean a little forward and connect my lips with his.
“Actually, that’s not entirely true; I’m mad at you for putting yourself in danger, but that’s normal. I’m mostly mad at myself for being so weak.”
“For not resisting the blood oath?”
“Like you said, Valencia controlled me like a puppet. Every dirty little job she wanted, every person she told me to attack—enemy, friend, you, I couldn’t do anything about it. It was degrading.” He pulled his hand off the wall and curled it into a fist. “If I’d just been a little stronger…”
“Now you’re starting to sound like Lukas.”
“Don’t.” He glared at me. “Don’t you compare me to him.”
“Well, you are! That’s exactly how he talked. You’re not weak, Jasper. It was a blood oath. Even the Charmsmaster said they were nearly impossible to break. And if you’d resisted it either Valencia would have killed you or the oath would have and then you wouldn’t be here. And I…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. Jasper turned away and I felt my annoyance flare up anew. “You’re here, we’re good. We can move past this and make things right.”
“All my life I’ve been weak. With my family, with Valencia. Always when it mattered most.”
“Sure, yeah, that’s your entire life,” I snapped. “Let’s just forget about all the good things you’ve done. You helped us with Valencia. If you hadn’t suffered through her then things could have been much, much worse, you know that, right?”
I stepped closer to him. Jasper wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Being strong doesn’t mean you have to be strong all the time, for everyone. You can allow yourself to be a little vulnerable.”
And just like that I could see him shut down, like a metal door sliding between us. “I need some space.”
“Don’t,” I warned. “Don’t just walk off. Let’s talk about this.”
“I don’t want to talk. I want to move and run and…do something.”
“Well I want you here right now!”
“I don’t want to be here right now!”
The words slapped me, and I stepped back, stunned.
Jasper searched my hurt expression. “That’s not—you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t know what you meant because you won’t tell me.”
He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead let out a growl and swept out of the room.
Oh hell no.
“Don’t walk away!” I yelled, going after him. “Would you just talk to me for five seconds?”
“You’ve already had around fifty!” he threw back. “I don’t want to talk anymore!”
“You’re an absolute dick!”
“I know!”
The door at the end of the hall slammed shut, cutting off whatever probably terrible retort I was going to come up with. With a frustrated snarl I punched the wall, leaving a crater in the wallpaper.
“Uh…”
Ari stood behind me. Her eyes flickered between my still-raised fist, the scorch mark on the wall, then to me. “I heard you two yelling. Having a bad time?”
I dropped my hand. “Yeah, actually.”
“In that case I’ll just…”
“That doesn’t mean I want you to go. I need someone to vent to.”
Ari considered this. “Guess I could do that. I’m not really that great with “girl talk” stuff, but I can try. What’s the problem?”
“Stupid boys and their stupid egos.”
“Fair enough. For me, “boys” and “problems” are typically the same thing.”
I was still too mad to properly collect my thoughts, so I gave Ari the abbreviated version. By the end I’d managed to cool off a little—at least enough to not put a real hole in the wall. Unfortunately, Ari didn’t look as mad about the situation as I’d have liked.
“He’s been through a lot. We all have. He just needs a little time to think things over and figure things out for himself.”
“I know. But I want to help him figure things out. You know, two people, working together to solve a problem? Doesn’t that make things easier?”
“Maybe…” Ari rubbed the back of her neck. “Argh! Told you I sucked with this stuff. Yeah, it makes it easier, but also it doesn’t, you know what I mean? He just needs space. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Sure feels like it does.”
“Guys are weird. We’re weird too, but they’re really weird.”
She was right. She did suck at this girl talk stuff. But I appreciated her for trying.
“Forget about him for now,” Ari said. “Jas can be a butt. Give him some time and he’ll eventually scrounge up some gratefulness. He always does.”
Another long sigh. “You’re right. You’rerightyou’rerightyou’reright.” I repeated over and over until I believed it. Even still, I knew, like Jasper, I needed to go run or punch something later to vent off steam. A small improvement, I supposed, to punching him. “Did you need something?” I asked Ari.
Her smile wilted a little. “I wanted to apologize.”
“About what? If it’s about the auction I know I screwed up, but Valencia was onto us—”
“It’s not about that. Well it’s a little about that, but mostly about everything. I…” She took a deep breath like the words were being dragged from her. “I don’t like it when you do things without thinking. I’m used to being in charge and able to keep tabs on everyone. Jas and I have taken care of the Outcasts for a while. I know it’s not an excuse but before you came along I got used to things being…not perfect, but stable. Each of us did our own things, and sometimes those things were a little dangerous, but at the end of the day we always made it back all right. There wasn’t any stuff about a throne or titans or psychopaths trying to kill us all the time.”
“And then I showed up,” I said, knowing where this was going.
“And then you showed up,” Ari agreed. “I don’t blame you, Riley, you know that, right? But after so long of being able to watch over everyone I cared about, suddenly losing that power, and nearly losing you and Kaia and the others, that really started to mess with me. It’s like holding a cat.” She mimicked holding something that I assumed was supposed to represent a furry feline. “The tighter you squeeze the more it fights.”
“To be fair, I think that’s most animals.”
“You get what I’m saying.”
“I get what you’re saying.”
“I wasn’t used to that,” Ari said. “Even though I knew you had to be in danger, I still didn’t like it. Honestly, somedays I feel like if I could keep everyone locked in here and do everything myself I would.”
“But you know that’s not possible, right?”
“Oh yeah. I know.”
She rubbed the back of her neck again. “I just want things to stay the same. But they won’t. They can’t. I just have to get used to them changing forever.”
I knew that sometimes change was for the better, but I didn’t say that to her. How could I express that the thing she’d taken solace in for years was going away and that I was totally okay with that because it might lead to something better.
“I’m sorry for being a brat,” I said. “I didn’t always fill you in on everything I did and I’m sure that stressed you out more than it needed to.”
“You have no idea,” Ari mumbled.
I grimaced and opened my arms. “Hug it out?”
“Eh…” Ari eyed my arms. “I’m not a big hugg—okay,” she said as I wrapped her in one anyway. “Guess we’re doing this.”
“Good talk. See, you’re not so bad at talking things out.”
“I still feel like I need to punch something,” Ari said into my shoulder.
“Me too. I wonder if Jasper is still around?”
Ari lightly smacked me on the back of the head.
Pockrus was making it hard to concentrate. He made everything hard to do—that was his job, I guess—but the day after my fight with Jasper, I wasn’t in the right mindset to be doing any fancy tricks with magic.
“Are you ill?” Pockrus said as I lost the hold on my inner magic again.
I flopped into an exhausted heap on the floor. “I’m not ill, I’m tired.”
Pockrus’ oppressive presence, which had pressed down on me from the moment I’d begun today’s lesson, relinquished and I could breathe properly again. We’d done our usual running, but not to complete exhaustion this time. I’d reached the point where I could call on my powerful magic almost at will and even keep it summoned outside my body for a short period of time without growing totally drained. But the combination of the training and everything else going on in my life left me feeling like a frayed piece of string, ready to snap at any moment.
“Tired of what?” Pockrus said.
I waved my hand to the air. “This. That.”
Jasper chose that moment to enter the sparring room. He stopped when he saw me. I stared at him, refusing to drop my gaze. After a moment he crossed to the sparring dummies and chose one.
“And other things…” I finished.
Pockrus watched Jasper as he began smacking the dummy. His crisp movements were still oh-so-perfect as always. It’d been less than a day, and while it seemed he was okay with making an appearance for the rest of the Outcasts, it didn’t seem like he was any closer to opening up to me. I believed he wasn’t mad at me—not entirely—and I knew that whatever he was dealing with was something he needed to work through, but I was starting to feel like we were strangers, back to square one.
“I believe I understand,” Pockrus said.
“Doubt it,” I said.
“Is this the boy who has taken over your thoughts and replaced the training I’ve prescribed?”
Oh no. There was no way I was going to talk about this with Pockrus of all people. “I’m ready to start again,” I said, pointedly turning away from Jasper.
But try as I might, I had to admit Pockrus had a point. Whether it was because I was tired, strung out, or the constant smacking of Jasper punching a dummy was reminding me that he was close, I couldn’t seem to concentrate enough to draw out my tiger for more than a few seconds.
With an exhausted groan I lay back onto the sparring mat and squinted up into the lights of the ceiling. “Why am I doing this?”
“Pardon?” I watched Pockrus float closer out of the corner of my eye. “Earlier, I believe I explicitly explained the purpose of my being here. If you don’t feel your training has any use I could always call on Adam…”
“Not that,” I said, raising my head to glower at him before dropping it back down. “And stop using him as a threat. What I mean is, out of all the things you could be teaching me, why only focus on my inner magic? I get that it’s important, but couldn’t I also be learning how to cast bigger fireballs, or bigger flamethrowers, or…or…”
“Your imagination is very limited.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Because your inner magic is just that: important.”
I waited for him to go on. He didn’t.
“Just because it’s important,” I repeated in a flat tone.
“Lots of things are done solely because of their importance. I don’t see how this is any different.”
As much as I wanted to press him for more, there wasn’t much I could argue. The technique I’d learned from Pockrus had already come in handy against Valencia. It was the reason I was still alive. And yet this still seemed odd. There were a dozen other things about my magic and powers of an elemental I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to learn, but we’d focused only on this one.
“When the time is right, you’ll thank me for learning this power,” Pockrus said. “It will play a large part in the fight to come.”
“Of course it will,” I said. Swallowing a groan, I pushed myself to my feet. The sound of Jasper’s smacking punches had ceased. I risked glancing over at him, only to find him standing on the outside edge of the mat. My palms started to sweat for no reason.
“You’ve gotten a lot better,” Jasper said. “When you first got here you had trouble even summoning a flame. Glad you found a good teacher.”
“I am too. My last one was kind of a butt.”
Jasper snorted. “I just wanted you to know that I thought you’d gotten better.”
“Thanks.”
I could tell he was waiting for me to keep talking. I waited for him instead.
“I’m sorry about yelling at you earlier,” Jasper said. “I was wrong, you didn’t deserve to take the brunt of that. No matter what I said, I’m happy you saved me.”
“I sense a “but” coming.”
“No buts. That’s it.”
Why wouldn’t my palms stop sweating? This was getting ridiculous. This was just Jasper, and Jasper was…I mean I hadn’t seen him in a while, but…
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “You want to talk about the rest of whatever you were mad about now?”
“No.”
“So, never then?”
“I didn’t say that. What is it with girls and wanting to dig into every little thing? Can’t you just let some things be?”
“No,” I said proudly. “I can’t.” I turned away. “Come back when you want to talk for real.”
Jasper let out a frustrated growl. “You are so…gah!”
I smirked, glad he couldn’t see it. His normally light footsteps stomped off until the gym door slammed.
“That was very mature,” Pockrus said.
“I don’t need any condemnation from you, too.”
“I was being completely genuine.”
“You suck at lying.”
Pockrus gave me a smirk, not unlike the one I’d just given Jasper. It didn’t feel great to be on the receiving end, but the one good thing about our encounter was that it’d lit a new fire in me, pun intended. I spent the next twenty minutes drawing my inner magic up into the rest of my body, shuffling it around, and sending it back down, getting slowly better at the entire process.
“Your boyfriend was not lying,” Pockrus said. “You are getting better.”
“He’s not…we’re just dating. Kind of. It’s complicated,” I said, my cheeks heating.
The gym door opened. I snapped around, ignoring Pockrus’ chuckle, expecting Jasper.
It was Adam.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought…Never mind. What’s up?” I looked over his shoulder for Pockrus’ double that always trained Adam, but he was nowhere to be found. “Is something wrong?”
“I want you to spar with me,” Adam said.
I shook my head with a little laugh. “Definitely not. I’m tired and I don’t want to.”
“But I want to. I’ve been getting better and I want to test my strength. Spar with me.”
This time I didn’t hold back my venomous glare. “I said no. Pockrus, tell him that it’s stupid.”
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Pockrus said.
“What?”
“What better way to show your progress than to test your limits?”
I didn’t like the way Adam was suddenly smiling at me, like he’d planned this entire thing. “Let’s do this.”
“For the last time I said—”
My feet were suddenly frozen to the spot. I looked down to find them encased in ice. The temperature in the room dropped about a hundred degrees. I tried to yell at Adam to stop but he was already running toward me, bringing down a hammer of ice.