Atone: A Fairytale (Fairytale Trilogy) (19 page)

“I’m not going to yell at you,” he said gently.

“You’re not?” She looked up at him in surprise from the leather couch. He wasn’t pacing the room like he usually did but was sitting quietly just a few feet away, gazing at her with a serious expression.

“No. I am, however, going to ask you very nicely to never do anything like that again.”

Becca managed a smile at his overly polite tone. “I appreciate that you’re asking nicely, but I really can’t guarantee anything.”

“I don’t want you putting yourself in danger for me.”

“Well, at the time I didn’t realize I’d be putting myself in any danger. These things always seem like a good idea until I try them. I can’t promise not to do anything completely stupid again because it doesn’t seem stupid at the time.”

“How could trying to break the curse on your own seem like a good idea?” He didn’t sound angry, just confused. Becca didn’t blame him. She confused herself sometimes.

“I don’t know. I once almost got sucked into a magic crown because…wait,” Becca glared at him, “how do you even know what I was doing? Were you spying?”

He shrugged, not looking in the least chagrined at being accused of spying. “Sort of. I knew something had happened to you; I wasn’t sure what. But last night I heard Alexandra and Lilia talking—I was down the hall. They couldn’t see me.”

“You were worried about me.” She wasn’t sure why that surprised her. It probably shouldn’t have. It also probably shouldn’t have created a warm sensation in the pit of her stomach.

“Of course I was worried about you!” he bit out, frustration finally seeping into his voice. “Have you seen the mirror?!”

“Yeah, unfortunately, I have.”

“Are you okay? I mean really. Not just ‘I feel fine, leave me alone,’ but are you really okay?” He leaned forward; he was so close to her now she could feel the heat coming off his body.

“‘Okay’ might be stretching it right now,” she answered honestly. Concern flashed through his eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

“How can you be sure? Do you think it would be a good idea to go see a doctor?”

Becca laughed. “What’s wrong with me right now isn’t going to show up on an x-ray. There’s just…my power…it’s different. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Different as in wrong?”

“I don’t know if it’s wrong. I just know I don’t like it much. I feel off-kilter.” Becca shifted in her seat. Off-kilter was actually an understatement. The new strands of magic in her chest felt heavier, as if they were actually gold—weighing down and drowning out her effervescent violet power. She didn’t like it. She felt physically out of balance. And whatever it was that was causing the weird pulsing was beginning to drive her slowly insane.

“Off-kilter how?” His heavy brows were pulled together. He looked worried and a bit helpless, and Becca was suddenly unsure of more than just her magical footing.

“What does it matter?” she asked, more roughly than she’d intended. “Do you want me to try to explain every little nuance of my magic to you?” He jerked his head back in surprise, and guilt flooded through her.
Guilty? Why should I feel guilty, when he’s the one…
“Won’t that make you just hate me more? To hear about how I’m magic? How I’m one of
them
?”

“I don’t hate you,” Nicholas replied gruffly. “I—”

“Why not? You hate everything magic. You hate me, my friends…” a small voice in the back of her head told Becca she was being unreasonable. That it wasn’t Nicholas’s fault she’d told an ancient spell she loved him and it had reached out and smacked her for it. She ignored the voice. “You hate the fae. Well, I’m fae! At least part fae. Maybe you should hate me.”

Nicholas remained very still; his navy eyes steady on hers for a long moment. “I don’t hate you, Becca. I was wrong to react to your friends’ magic the way I did. You—and she and Alex—you’re not why I became like this.”

Becca wanted to run away. She wanted to run back to her room and throw herself on her bed and cry. She tilted her chin and crossed her arms. That wasn’t who she was. She may have run off the other day when Nicholas had apologized to her, but once was one time too many. She wasn’t a runner; she was a fighter.

Of course, she had no idea if she was fighting him or herself. But not running seemed important.

“But you can change back. If we close the portal, you’ll go back to how you were. I’ll always be like this.” She focused her gaze on his chest. She wasn’t brave enough to look into his face, and yet she was too scared to admit it.

“Like what? Powerful?”

Becca shrugged one shoulder.

“Or maybe you mean headstrong and prone to putting yourself in danger?” Amusement rippled through his voice. Becca blinked back tears. “I’m teasing you,” his voice had changed, gotten harder. “You’re putting yourself at risk for me. That’s what I hate—that you’re in any kind of danger because of me. You shouldn’t be here. You should hate me.”

“I used to,” she whispered to the floor.

“I know. I wish you still did.”

Becca sucked in a breath. That hurt. Even if she knew, or thought she knew, why he was saying it. “You don’t have to feel guilty. I don’t want to be that.”

“What?”

“A source of guilt. Something for you to beat yourself up over.” She tightened her arms around her midsection as if somehow she could keep all the frustration inside of her.

“I can’t help but feel guilty,” he said softly.

“I’m here on my own; you’re not forcing me to stay. You’ve made it very clear that you wanted me to leave. There’s no reason to feel guilty.” She looked up at him, annoyed at how calm he seemed.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

“So that
is
all I am? Guilt? God. And here I thought we were becoming…” she trailed off, looking for the right word. There wasn’t a word that would mean what she wanted to say. “Friends.”

“You think we’re becoming friends?” His disbelief was palpable.

Becca winced, wanting to cringe away from that horrible disbelief. She tilted her chin up more. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Do you want to be my friend?” His voice was harsh and low. The disbelief had transformed into something she couldn’t quite understand. Becca’s vision shimmered and she blinked again. She wouldn’t cry. And she had no idea how to answer him.

“Yes,” she finally said. She looked up into his face, confused by what she saw there. Or couldn’t see there. Over the last several days she’d become adept at reading Nicholas’s expressions, and now he was a blank. “Can you be my friend? Even though…before, how we used to be?”

Nicholas’s expression didn’t change, and when he spoke his voice was strangely flat. “Yes. Of course I can be your friend.”

Becca tried to smile. She should have been feeling relief, but she felt strangely bereft. “I’m sorry I snapped at you about the magic thing,” she said. She felt like she should be responding to his acceptance of her offer of friendship. But she had no idea how. “I don’t even know how to explain it to Alex and Lilia, who understand the power. If I try to explain it to you, you’ll probably just end up realizing I’m insane.”

“I’ll listen if you want to try,” he said. Becca glanced up into his eyes. His expression didn’t change; in fact, it was carefully mask-like, but he seemed more distant. He looked less like an imposing beast and more like a puppy that’d just been kicked. And she had no idea why. He shrugged his large shoulders. “We’re friends, right? I won’t think you’re insane even if I don’t understand.”

“When I was trying to close the portal, well technically I was trying to break the protection spell on it, there’s two spells twined together. Magic has…threads, I guess, that get woven together. The spell seemed like it would break but it didn’t; it came at me.”

Nicholas flinched and Becca shot him a look. “No guilt,” she reminded him forcefully, and he nodded.

“And it kind of met my power and it all exploded all around me. I blacked out and when I came back to it felt like my power had changed. Like it wasn’t just my power in me—or
less
of me and more of it.”

“Of the mirror?”

Becca could tell he was trying to remain neutral, but she could hear the horror creeping into his voice. “Yeah, I guess. And you’ve seen it. It has…my flowers. I’m afraid that I gave a piece of myself to it or something. The power in me feels different; like it’s heavy to carry around. And there’s this pulsing coming from somewhere, this strange other magic that isn’t coming from me or the mirror, but I can feel it! Alex and Lilia couldn’t, but I can feel it all the damn time, it won’t stop...pinging over and over, and it keeps getting stronger.”

“Pinging?” he asked thoughtfully as he searched her face. “Like radar?”

“Yes.” Becca gaped at him, pieces falling into place in her mind. “Like radar. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You did,” the smile was back in his voice. “You’re the one who used the term, so you obviously thought it subconsciously.”

“It started after I did...well, whatever it is I did, with the mirror. I can only assume I’ve taken some of the mirror’s magic into me somehow…and now all of a sudden I’ve got a homing beacon inside me.”

“A homing beacon for what?”

She stared at him with huge eyes. “For what the mirror is missing.”

She could see the comprehension dawn in his eyes. “The gem that closes the portal.”

She nodded. Now that she knew what it was, the pulsing had ceased to be annoying. It felt like a rope she could grasp onto to pull herself up. “I wonder if there’s a way to follow it?”

“Can you tell where it’s coming from? How close it is?”

“As in, do I need to travel across an ocean, pinging the whole time?” She almost laughed. “No. I can’t tell. I wonder…” her voice trailed off as she focused on the center of power inside of her. She stopped fighting it, stopped resisting the deep, golden magic as something foreign to herself, and embraced it. Her eyelids drifted closed. She could see the power, bathing the inside of her mind, enveloping her whole body in its glow.

She reached out to the pulsing magic—the touch of it against her power—wrapping the threads of her magic around it, pulling it to her.
Tell me where you are. Let me find you.

The pinging never stopped, it never slowed down or sped up. But it felt as it came and then went that it pulled a thread of her magic with it. Becca had the oddest sensation that she had left her body, that she was flying down the hill and out over the city. Images flashed into her mind—ones that seemed strange yet familiar—buildings and streets, but all bathed in a deep yellow hue.

Her eyelids snapped open. Nicholas was still sitting in front of her, so close that her knees were almost against his chest.

“It’s here,” she gasped out.

“Here? In the house?” he asked in disbelief.

“No. Somewhere in the city. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You were glowing.” He sounded awed.

“Really?”

“Yeah, and I could see the…power…around you like it was in the mirror, except you’re right, more gold.”

“Sorry. Hope I didn’t freak you out.”

“Not at all.” He looked away from her, toward the window at the far end of the room. “But you said the stone is here in L.A.?”

“Yes, though why—” she broke off again. “Nicholas, are you sure you didn’t bring it back with you? When you told me about the mirror, you said there were other artifacts with it. What did you do with those? Did you leave them or take them?”

Nicholas’s eyes closed as he concentrated. “It’s all so blurry. I honestly can barely remember them, and I can’t remember a stone at all. But I must have taken it; why else would it be here? I must have—” He bounded up, his voice tight with excitement. “I sent them. I packed them all up in a box and had them delivered to my apartment.”

“You mean the house?” Becca asked, confused. “But it’s not here. It’s somewhere to the south of here—not far but...”

“Korea Town.”

She blinked. “Yeah, that’d be about right.”

“My old apartment. When I was in France I didn’t know if I’d be living here or there. I sent the box there. By the time I got back to Los Angeles I was so consumed with the mirror I forgot about it.”

“Are you telling me that there are priceless artifacts sitting outside your apartment? It’s not still going to be there.” But she knew it was there. If not at Nicholas’s apartment, then close.

Nicholas shook his head, his mane swishing around his face. “No. I sent it to the building manager. We were friendly. She would’ve put it in my apartment for me.”

“Oh, I’m sure she would have.” Becca couldn’t help the edge that slipped into her voice. Nicholas didn’t seem to notice. Or if he did he ignored it. “I’m going to have to go get it.”

He paced restlessly in front of the window, the late afternoon sun filtering through his mane, picking up the lighter strands. “I don’t feel comfortable with you going by yourself.”

Becca laughed out loud. “Sorry. I grew up here, Nicholas. I know how to get around the city.”

“It’s not the city I’m worried about,” he growled.