Flames, page 21
He sunk his hands into his hair. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you to the hospital myself.”
The couch was comfortable, but the world was spinning. It spun and spun into a blankness.
* * *
When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed and everything below my neck felt pleasantly fuzzy. I must have been given some good meds. The room was small, with only one bed and a window to my left. I was hooked up to an IV. At my feet, a door opened onto a tiny bathroom. To my right, Naelen was sitting in a chair.
“Clarke,” he said, sitting up straight. “You’re awake.”
I smiled at him. “Hey. I did it. I got you back.”
He seized my hand. “You’re going to be okay. They stitched you up and they gave you blood, and they say you have to take it easy for a while, but you’re going to be fine. I’m going to wait on you hand and foot until you feel better.” He swallowed, his expression gray. “That is, I mean, if you want me to.”
I considered. “Well, I don’t know how good of a nursemaid you are, but I think I can handle your inadequacies if you promise to work on improving them,” I said in a mock-serious tone.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. “That isn’t what I meant. After what I did… after all the things I did, not least of all to you. Clarke, you’re in the hospital because of me.”
I flashed on that moment, being stabbed and having to look at the face of my lover, because his body was being worn by a madman. Yeah, it was probably going to give me nightmares. “It wasn’t you,” I said. “It was Jacques.”
“Some of it was me.” He shook his head and he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I really thought I could stave him off. I wanted to cut off people’s fingers. I liked doing it.”
“It wasn’t you,” I said, struggling to sit up.
He stopped me. “Don’t. You’re on some pretty heavy-duty painkillers, and you might not feel it if you rip your stitches.
I stopped trying to move. “He was inside your head, Naelen. You don’t have to feel guilty.”
“I’m the one who let him out, though,” said Naelen. “I’m the one who did the ritual to release him. And besides, he wasn’t in the driver’s seat. I was making my own decisions for most of the time.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you like the idea of cutting off people’s fingers now? Does that sound like a great plan?”
“No,” he said.
“Even if it means that you don’t have the mating bond anymore?”
He cringed. “No, it’s not… it’s not worth that.” He rubbed his forehead. “Okay, I guess I see what you’re saying. If I don’t really think that, then it wasn’t me. But it felt like me. And I remember it. I remember all of it.”
“It wasn’t you,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
He was quiet.
“Where are the objects?” I said.
“Uh…” He furrowed his brow. “Back at the house, I guess.”
My eyes widened. “Are you serious? Go get those damned things now. And bring me some dice while you’re at it.”
“Clarke, really, maybe you should wait to try to mess with those objects,” he said. “You’re still weak.”
“The longer they sit around, the longer they’re dangerous,” I said. “Bring them to me.”
“Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s not safe for them to be sitting around in the house unattended like that.”
I snorted. “You think, dumbass?”
He stood up, shaking his head at me. “So, you’re mad because I didn’t bring the objects, but not because I stabbed you?”
“For the last time, Naelen, it wasn’t you,” I said. But Jacques’s sneer floated in my mind’s eye, his expression twisting Naelen’s features. I swallowed.
* * *
I was able to dismantle the magic in the objects pretty easily using the monocle. Naelen propped me up in the hospital bed using the hand controls and got me into a more or less seated position and then he handed me the objects one at a time.
It was a little tricky at first, because the magical threads of the objects were tightly wound. The threads made up the objects themselves—the objects were nothing but magical threads. There wasn’t a telltale loose thread in them as there often was with a something magical. So, I had to work a bit to get them to come apart, and my fingers were a little bit numb from the painkillers that I was on.
But I was able to do it. One by one, I unraveled each of them, and they disappeared into nothingness.
The monocle held on long enough so that I could finish the job, but afterward, when I looked around, the magical threads started to fade out. Eventually, they disappeared. Olsen Hunter had been right. That had been all the monocle was capable of doing.
They didn’t keep me in the hospital for too much longer. They just wanted to observe me to make sure that I was okay after losing all that blood, and then they released me.
We went directly from the hospital to the airport. The snow had stopped, and it was clear enough that Roger felt he could take off, so we got on board the plane and flew back to Sea City. Roger did seem a little bit confused by the fact that I’d been stabbed and all the other weird stuff that he’d seen, but he took the money Naelen paid him and left.
After that, Naelen wanted to find out what had happened with Gordon, but he wouldn’t take our calls, and had his girlfriend call us back to say that he wasn’t interested in working with us anymore. My compulsion—being the regular kind—had worn off once Gordon was out of my presence, meaning that he remembered everything. Frankly, we were lucky that he wasn’t pressing charges.
Naelen wired him an outlandish sum of money, and then he set about finding the names of all of the people whose fingers he’d cut off and making sure they got lots of cash too. It wasn’t going to make up for what had happened to them, but he said it was the least he could do.
As for me, I spent several days lying on the couch doing nothing but watching television and having Naelen bring me whatever I wanted.
Which was nice.
Then, on the fourth day we were back home, Gina showed up.
Naelen brought her into the living room, where I was sprawled out. She looked awful. She had dark circles around her eyes and she was wearing dirty clothes and she looked as if she hadn’t slept in a while.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said when she saw me.
I did my best to carefully sit up on the couch. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?” I asked her.
“You look awful,” she said.
“Same back at you,” I said. “I got stabbed. What’s your excuse?”
She sat down on the coffee table and hugged herself. She was barely a foot away from me. “Do it again. Whatever you did to me before, do it again. I didn’t want the dice after we talked, and then… days ago… out of nowhere, I suddenly wanted it again.”
I cringed. “Oh, crap. I guess when I destroyed the objects, it undid the compulsion I did on you.”
“Compulsion?” She raised her eyebrows. “It was magic?”
I nodded. “Yeah, we had powerful magic. But it came at a price, and there were risks, and we had to get rid of it.”
Her shoulders sagged. “I got back in touch with some of the people from the Magnolia Group. They’re not doing so well either.”
“Well, we kind of compelled them too,” I said.
Gina rubbed her face. She stood up from the coffee table and began to pace. “Damn it, Clarke. So, you can’t do it again?”
“No,” I said. “But I only compelled you to believe in yourself. You can do that on your own. Now that you know what’s possible—”
“I’m not Dumbo,” said Gina. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, the feather wasn’t magic after all,’ and expect me to be cured.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have compelled you in the first place.”
She didn’t say anything. She just kept pacing.
“Have you taken any dice?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I bought some. I was going to take it, but I thought I’d come to you first, see if you could do whatever it was you did.”
“That’s awesome,” I said.
“It’s not awesome. You can’t do anything.”
“You resisted taking the dice, Gina. That’s amazing.”
She glared at me. “I only did by telling myself I was going to wait until I saw you. I only resisted it for that amount of time.”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘one day at a time’?” I said.
She rolled her eyes.
“I’m serious,” I said. “In rehab programs that aren’t thinly veiled cults dedicated to worshiping madmen, they teach you stuff like that.”
“I’m going to take it after I leave.”
“Then don’t leave,” I said. “Stay with me and fight it. You can do this, Gina. You really can. I swear. You want to say that it was the Magnolia Group or it was me that helped you, but the truth is, you’ve done all this on your own. You’re the one who was strong enough to kick your addiction. Not anyone else. Own that. Be proud of yourself. And recognize you can keep going.”
She settled back down on the coffee table. She chewed on her thumbnail. “You really think that?”
“I really do,” I said.
She sucked in breath through her nose. And then she pulled a baggy out of her pocket and handed it to me. It had two dice capsules in it. “Here.”
I grinned at her, taking it. “Awesome.”
“I could just go buy more, you know,” she said.
“You won’t,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
So, then it was Naelen, me, and Gina all in his house for a while, and Gina was actively working on keeping herself from doing dice again, which wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been when she was compelled or when she was with the Magnolia Group. But she managed it.
There was one close call, when she actually went out one night and bought some more dice. But she didn’t end up taking it. She ended up going and throwing it into the ocean.
And after that, I would say she really turned a corner, and she began to have more confidence in herself. She started talking about the old Magnolia Center building, which had been abandoned after the death of Merida, all the current patients dumped out on the streets unceremoniously. She said that it would be cool if someone could buy the building and then she and some of the others who’d worked at the Magnolia Center could get it back up and running, and Gina could continue helping people, which she really liked doing. She hinted strongly that this person should be Naelen.
Since Naelen was on a kick of trying to do penance, he agreed pretty quickly.
By this time, I was up and around more, and since I was more independent, I said that Gina and I would go back and stay at my place. Naelen said that was a good idea. I wanted to stay with Gina because I didn’t think she was completely ready to be on her own yet. Naelen wanted me out of the house because he was still punishing himself for what had happened. He felt so guilty about stabbing me and cutting off people’s fingers and everything that he’d done while Jacques had been in control of him that we hadn’t even really done more than kiss since coming back home. Of course, Naelen kept blaming that on my stab wound too.
Still, he was pushing me away, and it was out of guilt. I didn’t know what to do about that.
Well, I had assumed it was out of guilt, anyway. But one afternoon, Gina and I came by Naelen’s house to get some things settled with the sale of the Magnolia Center building, and when we did, I noticed that there was a car parked out front of Naelen’s house.
Inside, I found Naelen and Juliet Ellis in the kitchen, standing on either side of the kitchen island.
When Gina and I walked in, the two dragons looked up at us with stunned expressions on their faces.
Man. I should have known there was more to Naelen’s standoffishness than guilt. I felt like an idiot. I had hardly given the mating bond much thought recently. It hadn’t seemed very important. After all, the struggle with Jacques had really put my battles with the mating bond in perspective. What had seemed really horrible paled in comparison to everything we’d been through. But it was obvious that the mating bond had come back when we’d killed Jacques, just like Gina’s compulsion had worn off.
My lips parted, and I didn’t know what to say. Now, after everything, I didn’t feel angry anymore. I only felt sad.
“Clarke,” said Naelen, eyes wide. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”
I gave him a wistful smile. “I’ll call from now on. And you don’t have to hide this from me. After everything we’ve been through, if you and Juliet want to stop fighting the bond, I completely understand.”
“The bond?” said Juliet. “The bond’s been gone for ages now. What are you talking about?”
My heart skipped a beat. “I don’t know,” I said, feeling confused. “The bond is still broken?”
“Yeah,” said Naelen. “I didn’t think it would be either, so I was avoiding her like the plague. But she came by to donate some money to the Magnolia Center, and I saw her, and… nothing.”
“Why would it have come back?” said Juliet, who also looked confused.
“Well, the compulsion we did with the objects wore off,” I said.
“Yeah, but that was the objects,” said Naelen. “I guess Jacques was stronger than the objects. His magic held.” He reached out his hand for me. “Come here.”
I went to him and he folded me into his arms. We grinned at each other like idiots.
Gina and Juliet exchanged a glance.
“Should we give you two some privacy?” said Juliet.
“Oh, no,” said Gina. “You two are not running off until we get Naelen to answer our questions. That’s the whole reason we came by.”
* * *
But after Juliet left, and Gina had all of her questions satisfactorily answered, Naelen and I were alone.
“You know,” I said, running my fingers over the table in the dining room, “it occurs to me that there are a lot of rooms in this house that we haven’t gotten busy in.”
He grinned at me. “That’s something I’ve contemplated as well.” He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me. His voice dropped in pitch. “But you’re not completely healed yet.”
I put my hands on his chest and stared into his blue, blue eyes. “You’ll have to be gentle with me, then.”
“Clarke…” He kissed my forehead. “Not yet.”
“If not now, when?” I said, and I pulled my shirt over my head and let it drop to the floor.
He sucked in his breath, his gaze greedily moving over my bare skin. But then his eyes settled on the puckered scar under my ribs. It was mostly healed at this point. The stitches had all fallen out, but it still looked pretty nasty. A shadow passed over his face and he turned away from me.
I reached out for him. I took his hand and I placed his fingers against the scar tissue. I peered up into his eyes.
He gazed back at me. His voice was a rasp. “I can’t.”
“You can,” I said, and I kissed him.
He tried to pull away.
I urged his hand higher to the underside of my breast.
He shut his eyes.
“We’ve been to hell and back, Naelen,” I murmured.
“And it’s my fault,” he said.
“You were doing it for us,” I said. “It was stupid, sure, but you did it because you love me, and I know that. And I forgive you.”
His fingers strayed back to my scar. “This is never going to go away,” he breathed.
“And neither am I,” I said. “It’s like Penny said. We wanted to make our own destiny, so we fought for it. And we won, Naelen.” I kissed him again. “Yes, there were consequences,” I whispered against his lips. “But we won.”
He groaned. He pulled my body tight against his and tangled his hands in my hair. “I love you, Clarke Gannon.”
“And I love you, Naelen Spencer.”
We didn’t talk a lot after that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I snuggled into the crook of Naelen’s arm and shoulder. “So, you’re going to have to figure out what it is you want to get rid of.”
“Get rid of?” he said, and his voice rumbled in his chest. We were lying together on the bed in one of Naelen’s guest rooms, which was where we’d ended up after various interludes on the dining room table and the kitchen counter and a few different couches.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Because when I bring all my stuff over here, you’re going to have to make room for it.”
He furrowed his brow. “Why are you bringing stuff over here?”
“Um, a while ago, you invited me to move in. You’re not rescinding your offer, are you?”
He grinned at me. “Seriously? You want to move in?”
“Mmm hmm,” I said. “And I’m thinking that my couches will look great in—”
“Wait, you want to bring those ratty couches? Really?”
I pushed up on one elbow, feigning insult. “You think my couches are ratty?”
“Uh… they are ratty,” said Naelen. “Look, I paid someone an obscene amount of money to decorate this place, and—”
“Relax,” I said, giggling and lying back down against him. “I’m just teasing you. I’m thinking I’ll ask Gina if she wants to take over my lease. She’s already staying there anyway.”
“Oh,” he said. “You were joking.”
“Yup.” I traced a pattern on his chest with one finger. “But I am going to want a closet, maybe two closets, because you keep having people buy me clothes, and I’m going to need space for them.”
He kissed the top of my head. “As many closets as you want. But, um, listen, if you do want your couches, that’s fine. I don’t want you to feel like you’re just being…I don’t know, subsumed into my life. I love you for you, Clarke, and I know you didn’t want to move in before—”
“That was because I was afraid,” I said. “I thought that loving you made me weak, because I’d be devastated if I lost you, and I wanted to guard against that weakness. Especially since I was afraid you were going to leave me.”
