The black pack was in my hand before I knew it. I made my way to the bed. Peeled off my coat. Pushed up my sleeve. My arm pulsed. Hungry.
I stared at the owl on my wrist. It stared back.
I was alone. But then I was always alone and probably always would be. So what did it matter? I wasn’t a drug user. I wasn’t looking for some recreational high. I was a student, a scholar. But I was so freaking tired of it all. I simply needed a break.
I opened the pack and drew up a raindrop of liquid. It looked like a pearl in the needle. I mixed it with an equal-sized pearl of the second substance. I pushed it into my arm and my shoulders relaxed. My vision blurred slightly. I hadn’t taken enough to see ghosts. Everything was shadowy. Insubstantial. I knew Dec would strongly disapprove of what I was doing, but that didn’t matter. For once, nothing mattered. Not my mom. Or Dec. Or the Guild. Or anything. There would be time to worry about all of that tomorrow. I didn’t have to be at my meeting with the Guild for another twelve hours.
I didn’t remember the last time I’d felt so unburdened. Almost free. I smiled. Smiled.
I lay back on the bed. The room spun pleasantly. Nothing mattered.
* * *
“Are you done deliberating? Do you need a Magic 8 ball or something?”
The room was middle-of-the-night dark. Even the light of my clock was missing, so I assumed there’d been a power outage before I realized I could still hear the whirring of the ceiling fan. I squinted and realized that something was blocking my view of the nightstand. Someone.
I blinked. Then blinked again. Everything flooded back. Tristan. Annie. Dec. The Guild. Ian. Shit, Ian. “No. Not tonight. You are not doing this to me tonight,” I whispered both because my throat was ripped and because I didn’t want to wake my father.
Ian bent over and smoothed down my hair until I batted his hand away. He said, “I’ll go away if you tell me to. Permanently, if that’s what you want. After you hear what I have to say.”
I struggled to sit. I could see the clock now. 1:00 a.m. I had to be up at eight to get ready to meet with the Guild. I closed my eyes, but Ian was still there when I opened them. “You have five minutes.”
“Funny,” Ian said. “You never seemed the type for a quickie.”
“Make that four.”
Ian sighed. “Fine, I’ll skip the foreplay. But, I have a teeny bit of a confession to make.”
Of course he did. My right arm ached where I’d taken the shot. Everything ached if I was honest. Something in me longed for a repeat, if I was being even more honest. “Then go find a priest.”
“My. You do wake up grumpy, don’t you?”
“Ian. I have to meet with the Guild. Just say what you have to and then leave.” I looked at the clock again. Three minutes. I could endure anything for three minutes.
I glared at him until he sat and bent forward, arms on his legs, his back toward me, his eyes on some unknown point in space. “You need to talk to me about that night in the woods.”
I froze. “No,” I insisted. “I’m not doing this. Not today.”
“Chill, Russ.” Ian’s voice was strange, raw. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
It was the first time I could remember Ian using my first name, and it twisted inside me, this presumption that I’d let Ian close enough to do any damage.
I buried my face in the bedspread, hoping Ian would be gone when I came up for air. The room was heavy with silence; certainly more than three minutes had passed. My thoughts tangled with my feelings. All of them felt jagged. New. Like something being woken.
“I know,” I said. It had never been pain that scared me. Not exactly.
“Then trust me long enough for one conversation. Trust that maybe you’re the best that St. Hilaire has, but that I know things you don’t. Trust that I want to help you.”
Perhaps Ian was telling the truth about helping. There was no doubt he’d helped Tristan. The thing with Ian was, he always meant what he said when he said it. Sometimes, though, that only lasted until the next time he opened his mouth.
“Tell me about that night,” Ian repeated.
Whether I wanted to or not, I knew I couldn’t answer Ian’s question. There was a dark hole in my memories. I stared down at my comforter until my vision blurred—the blue swirls that I’d often watched until I lost myself inside their movement weren’t working this time. “You tell me,” I said, looking up at Ian. “You tell me what happened that night.”
Ian’s blue eyes opened wide. For a minute, I was sure he was working on some snarky reply. But his voice was soft when he replied, “We met in the woods. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, we were…” I struggled to remember what we’d been doing there. My brain gifted me with the smell of moss, the sound of the rain, the prickle of my skin when my arm had brushed against Ian’s. Nothing useful.
“You were looking for some of the plants in your grandmother’s book,” Ian prodded.
“Artemisia absinthium,” I said mechanically as parts of the memory fell into place.
“That wasn’t…”
“Wormwood,” I translated. “I was looking for wormwood.”
“Right, that’s it.”
I shuddered under the weight of Ian’s gaze and attempted to remember, attempted to picture us traipsing through the wet fields in the woods, looking at plant after plant. “You tried to stop me.”
Ian nodded. “That stuff’s illegal for a reason.”
I stared at him silently. Not like Ian had ever cared about things like legality, and I was still unsure of the point of this conversation.
“You weren’t ready for it, Griffin,” Ian continued, his voice still careful. “And you proved my point by trying to punch me.”
Now that he said it, I remembered finding the plant. Silvery-green, the fronds grew outward from a tight center. I hadn’t had time to think or to process the collection and treatment of the leaves. My grandmother had written about smoking them, but Ian was there pulling at me, and I’d had to act quickly.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. In truth, I hadn’t tried to punch Ian. What I’d actually done was succeed in smashing my fist into Ian’s sternum, forcing him back long enough to give me room to grab a handful of bitter leaves and swallow them.
“You stripped naked in the woods and said you were being chased by stars,” Ian said, ignoring the apology. Gone was the tentative tone, the cautious approach. This was the Ian I knew. “It was either my lucky day or you were losing your mind. Much as I didn’t want to, I assumed the latter.”