“Ha!” Nanna slapped her knee. “There you go. Appreciation at last. No more cursing!” She turned back to the door. “Or at least do it quietly.”
When she was gone, Basil leaned against the closed door. “I can certainly see how you’ve acquired a taste for bending the rules,” he said. “That wasn’t exactly a solid reprimand.”
“Maybe not but she’s right, I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
My sense of humour was way off at the moment. Nobody even cracked a smile. I made a motion for Sophie to give me back the food. She hesitated.
“It goes in your mouth,” she said. “Not on the walls.”
“Ha. Ha. Start talking.”
Astrid blinked slowly. She sighed. “I don’t know how much insight I can give you,” she said. “It seems I was unconscious most of the time. I remember attempting to teleport you here. Then we were in that room for a few minutes before I fell asleep. Next thing I knew I woke up here. Kai was losing his mind and we couldn’t get a lock on where you were.”
Basil chimed in where Astrid couldn’t. “You both disappeared off the face of the dimension,” he said. “No amount of scrying could pick up any trace of you. I had to scour the MirrorNet for two weeks straight before you made contact. We almost blew up the whole network when we only managed to grab Astrid. It was four days before she woke and could give us enough of an idea of where to find you.”
“But we were in there for less than an hour!” I countered.
“It’s like you don’t understand how magic works,” Diana said. “Whatever dimension that was, time moved much faster there.”
“Speaking of dimension, there were photos of you on the walls,” I told Astrid. She nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “From what I’ve managed to piece together with the First Order, it was some kind of astral projection room. A mixture of my thoughts, some of Chanelle’s, and something else entirely.”
The food turned to dust in my mouth. “Are you telling me that...that she...” I still refused to say her name out loud. Every time I thought about her, it was like a trigger went off in my mind. All I wanted to do was hit something.
“I don’t think even she is evil enough to have conjured up that thing that tried to kill us,” Astrid said.
“That’s not what I saw.”
“The First Order mages are looking into the disturbance in case it’s not an anomaly,” Basil said. “Anything you can tell us…them, would be helpful.” I smiled wanly at his Freudian slip. It made me wonder what Basil would have been like as a proper Order mage with a license to practice his craft with impunity.
I scrubbed at my face and recounted my experience. “You tried to curse the necromancer with an Angelical word?” Basil said.
“Not my brightest idea.”
“You can’t even master basic Fae.”
“I know! It’s a wonder I didn’t blow myself up.” We left unspoken the reason I knew Angelical words. It didn’t bear thinking about right now. “Did you recover the necromancer’s body?”
“What was left of it after Kai was done with him. He wasn’t anyone notable. It makes this whole thing even stranger.” Basil rubbed his eye. “I’ll report it to the First Order.”
After he left, Astrid tugged at a lock of her golden hair. It was the first time I’d ever seen her give way to a nervous habit. “I’m sorry,” she said. She looked at me with such a pained expression I almost burst into tears. “I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get the better of me. I just have a poor reaction to Chanelle.”
“Understatement of the century,” Diana muttered. “Yet nothing compared to how Kai went off after you disappeared.”
My nose scrunched. She tapped her chin. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Blue. He deserves a kick in the face for not telling you about the bond but –”
“No buts,” I snapped.
Sophie laced her fingers through mine. “I know you’re angry,” she said. “We are totally not speaking to him right now. But he’s had a rough time with both you and Astrid missing.”
I mimicked playing the world’s smallest violin. Done eating, I pushed the tray aside.
My lips had turned down. “Besides the obvious,” I said, “why do you hate her so much?”
Astrid hugged her knees to her chest. It was more than a little disconcerting to see someone as composed as her turn insecure. “She’s not a very nice person,” Astrid said. I snorted.
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. “But given her...situation, I’d have thought she would try and get along with you.”
“She doesn’t need to get along with me. If she bonds with Kai, she’ll be the woman who restores Raphael’s line. She’ll be the most important Nephilim besides Kai.”
“So what?” I seethed.
Astrid looked at me for a long beat. Her smile was sad. “Last time this happened, she made Kai stop being my friend.”
“She did what now?” Diana asked.
“She has a way of manipulating people to do what she wants. Kai was so angry back then. Our Council convinced him she was his last hope of restoring Raphael’s line. She wanted him to stop being friends with me. So, he stopped.”
Astrid was looking at the floor. One hand formed a shackle where she held her wrist to keep her knees in place.
“That can’t be true,” I found myself saying.
“It is,” she swiped at her face. “She’s very possessive. It wasn’t just me. She didn’t like how close Kai and Max are either. Or how protective he is of Cassie.”
Beside me, Sophie fisted a bunch of my blanket in her hands. As angry as I was with him, I couldn’t believe he would be capable of hurting his friends. “That just can’t be right,” I told her. “He’s stupid, but there’s no way he would cut you out just because
