I sent Alek out of the room after asking him, in Russian, to ward it off for sound. I didn't want the details of the conversation I was hoping to have to reach my friend's ears before I could digest whatever information Tess could give me. Alek looked as though he would protest, but in the end all he did was sigh, set the silvery ward that would soundproof the room, and then he left.
Tess watched me with tired eyes as I sat on the edge of the bed.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
"Like something ugly tried to bite me in half," she said, a ghost of a smile playing at her mouth. She was beautiful even with smeared makeup and exhausted circles under her eyes. The effect made her look delicate and ethereal.
"You followed me," I said, then winced. I should have said something like "thank you for saving my friend," but the words came out way wrong.
"I told you, I have nowhere to go. I thought maybe if I stayed I could help somehow, convince you I'm not going to kill you." Talking looked like it hurt her and she closed her eyes.
"Thank you," I managed to say. "You saved Levi. How did you move so quickly?"
"I wish I'd moved faster," she said. "It looked like you would be okay so I hung back. I'm sorry."
"But how did you do it?"
"Time," she said. She opened her eyes, seemed to have trouble focusing on my face, and closed them again. "My powers mostly revolve around manipulating time. I can slow time down or speed it up, sort of. It is very localized, but I can make myself quick or someone else slow. It's my specialty, like elemental magic is yours."
Elemental magic was my specialty? That was news to me. I was good at throwing around power, good with fire and ice, or just pure magical force. I could do a lot of other things, however, like shields, basic wards, finding things and people. Even breathing underwater now. I'd been trying lately to teach myself to fly, but it was difficult to wrap my head around the "whole defying gravity for long periods" thing, so I hadn't managed more than a few feet of gliding so far. Samir had always encouraged me to use as much power as possible, to do the flashy, showy stuff like using fire or turning water to ice. Elemental magic, now that I thought about it.
I had never brought up the DnD spells I'd practiced and learned to control my magic with. The book was a game for children and I had wanted Samir's approval, had wanted so badly for him to love me and respect me and see that I wasn't just any girl, that I was mature and worldly. I shook my head over how ignorant he had kept me. Hansel in the cage, being fed sweets until slaughter time.
Tess's breathing evened out as she seemed to lose consciousness. Feeling like a creep but doing it anyway, I gently pulled back the quilt and peeled up a corner of the huge gauze pad across her abdomen. The wound was ragged still, but not bleeding. The edges were pressed closed as best Vivian could manage without sutures. From the clear beads around edges of the wound, it looks like she might have used glue. I looked around the room and spied a half-used tube of Super Glue on the dresser.
"Making sure I'm really wounded," Tess said.
"Sorry," I muttered. I pressed the bandage back down as gently as I could. "Why aren't you healing faster?"
"I am too tired to speed up time around myself," she answered. "I'll start tomorrow. Even with that, it'll be a couple weeks before I'm whole again, at least. So I guess I'm not much threat now, huh." Her chuckle ended quickly in a grimace of pain.
Alek wasn't in the room to tell me if she spoke the truth or not, but I had a feeling she did. A week until she was whole. I would have healed that wound in a day or three at most. My ignorance settled on me like a cloak I hadn't realized the weight of until just now.
"So you can't use magic other than the time stuff? What about what you did to the necklace?" I asked, trying to get more information without seeming as stupid as I felt.
"I removed it by making myself be elsewhere in time for a moment and letting the necklace remain," she said, as though it were perfectly clear what she meant.
Okay. Yeah. Not helpful. I filed away what she'd said for later examination.
"I can do small things. Power is power, after all, but it does not want to flow in ways we are not naturally inclined," Tess continued. "Have you never tried to do something very different from what you are good at, and failed?" Her eyes were open again and she stared steadily at me, her gaze intense, serious.
I thought about the time I had tried to heal Alek. Healing is apparently super hard. "Sure," I said, trying to nod in what I hoped was a sage manner. "I can't heal for shit."
"Who healed your leg?" She looked at my thigh, where my jeans still sported a bloodstained hole.
Well, fucktoast. I couldn't dodge that question gracefully. "I did," I said. "I mean, it healed on its own."
"You left a scar on him, on his arm," Tess said. "It never healed. He hides it with illusion and sometimes even make-up. He doesn't know I have seen it."
I knew she meant Samir. "It never healed?" I asked, pushing back the tide of memory that came with her words. My last meeting with Samir. My doomed charge to try and kill him after my family had blown themselves up rather than be used to torment and trap me. I'd thrown so much power at him, but it was all a blur in my memory. Wolf had come, had bitten him, the only time I'd seen her affect the physical world like that.
Turning my head, I looked toward where Wolf lounged on the floor. I hadn't even realized she was here, but somehow in that moment I knew she was and that if I turned my head, she would be there. Life was getting weirder. My guardian perked up her ears and lifted her head. The slash of white down her chest where Samir had wounded her showed starkly against her pitch-black fur.
"That is why I came to you," Tess said. "You got away. You hurt him, hurt him so badly that even after decades it has not healed but remains puckered and red, as though freshly closed."
"I can't remember what I did," I said, which was partially true. He'd nearly killed me, and Wolf had dragged me away. I took a deep breath and got to the topic I was dreading. It had to be talked about, or I could never even start to trust her. "Do you have anything to do with what is going on? You show up in town, terrible things start happening in the woods. I don't believe in coincidence, Tess. I can't afford to."
"Not directly," she said. "I think I know who might, though. I think it is partly my fault. I'm so sorry." She shivered and I realized I'd left her half uncovered.
"Samir followed you here?" I asked, helping her pull the quilt back up to her chin.
"No, not him, I don't think. Clyde, his other apprentice."
"There's two of you?" Samir apparently had been busy.
She nodded. "Clyde has been with him for a while. He's awful. All of Samir's cruelty, none of his reserve or finesse. I would have killed him years ago if I could, but the idea of eating his heart makes me sick."
"You ever eaten someone's heart?" I asked. She seemed to know what it entailed, at least, which made me think she had.
"Only once," she said, her eyes leaving mine and staring off into the middle distance that was memory.
She did not elaborate, and I found myself unwilling to ask more. I knew firsthand what a weirdly intimate experience it was, having done it twice now. And I understood what she meant about not wanting to repeat it with someone she loathed. The first heart I had taken had been of a serial-killing warlock and his evil, sickening memories still gave me nightmares sometimes.
I asked her questions about Clyde and the picture she painted was a bad one. His specialty was in raising spirits, warping them and infusing them with his own cruel and twisted desires. It made me think of Not Afraid and Tess confirmed that as far as she knew, Clyde had been involved in that, though mostly she thought it was Samir's doing. She claimed she hadn't been, that Samir didn't seem to include or trust her as much as he did Clyde. Apparently she was pretending to be very young and inexperienced in the hopes that Samir would continue to believe her not worth harvesting yet. She was tiring quickly, I saw, and I decided the rest of my million questions could wait.
"One last thing, just in case," I said. "What does Clyde look like? What does his magic smell like?"
"Smell like?" she asked, her face a picture next to the word confusion in the dictionary.
"Magic has a smell, a feel, a taste. I don't know how to describe it," I said, waving my hands in the air. "Your's is cool, crisp, like a frosty morning."
She blinked up at me and her tongue flicked over her lips. "I cannot smell or taste someone else's magic," she said. "I can see the effects, see the obvious things like you throwing fire. I have never heard of anyone who can sense another without taking their power first."
I racked my brain. Surely this was something Samir and I had discussed. I couldn't remember it ever coming up and I wasn't willing to take a super in-depth trip down memory lane to find out if it was something he knew about me or not. "Huh," I said.
"Clyde is blond, looks mid-twenties, and is very pretty," she said, her eyes keen but her voice fading almost to a whisper with exhaustion. "He's a little taller than you, but almost as thin, and his voice is nasal, whining. He's also completely devoted to Samir and a total idiot about what Samir will do to him when he finally tires of Clyde."
"Thank you," I said. "Rest. I have to go away in the morning to help hunt down those hound things, but you'll be safe here, I think."
"I can stay?" she said and the hope in her face broke my heart all over again.
"Yes," I said, because I no longer had it in me to say no.
Max, Ezee, and Harper were arguing in the living room when I emerged.
"What? I'm totally Oona!" Harper said.
"I called dibs on Jack already. I mean, I totally helped save Lir, both times," said Max.
"I think that makes us Screwball and Brown Tom," Ezee said with a tired grin.
"So wait," I said, figuring out after a moment what the hell they were talking about. "I'm Lili, right? I look good in black."
"That would make me Jack," Alek said, rising from beside the door where he'd stationed himself and coming up behind me to wrap his arms around my waist. "But I'm far too tall and blond to play Tom Cruise."
"Wait, you showed him Legend ?" Harper asked.
I looked up at Alek, impressed. "Nope," I said. "He got this reference all on his own."
"In Soviet Russia," Alek said, smiling down at me and playing up his accent, "references get you!"
When everyone had stopped dying of laughter and shock, we regrouped in the living room. Aurelio had left to check on his pack and Rosie had gone to bed.
"Is she staying?" Harper asked me.
"Tess? Yeah. I think so. I am going into the woods with Alek and Yosemite tomorrow. We might not be back for a couple days. If she tries anything, just cut her head off and stick it in the freezer and I'll deal with her when I get back."
"I'd laugh, but one, my sides hurt already, and two, I think you are like totally serious."
"Mostly," I said, smiling at my friend. "She's pretty damaged. Just… Be careful."
"We'll keep an eye on her for you," Ezee said. "But seems like she could use friends, too."