He stopped me from stomping off. “You’ve seen the worst parts of my life.”
“That’s different. It got shoved in my face. But we don’t have to do this.”
“I do.”
“What are you even talking about?”
He gripped me by my shoulders. “It wasn’t all that hard for me to get those files for your Nanna,” he said. “When the Council decides they want to snoop into your past, I need to know what I’m in for.”
What he left unsaid was the reason the Council would do that. To prove that I wasn’t up to scratch. I tried to shrug him off.
“If it matters where I came from, then we shouldn’t be having this conversation.”
He wouldn’t let me go. “Come off it, Blue. You know it doesn’t matter to me. But I’d like not to lose my cool in front of the entire Council, both of them, if I’m faced with something I don’t like.”
I bit my lip. At the very core, I didn’t want anyone to see what my life had been like. I didn’t want to see it anymore. But he was right. If I wanted him to face up to his past and let it go, I couldn’t very well refuse to show him mine. “Promise me you won’t freak out about anything.”
“No can do.”
“Kai.”
He was immovable. I sighed. “Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Instead of leading him over the south bank of the Yarra, I turned left under the train tunnel and up to the Docklands. I showed him some of the places where I had slept rough on the nights when it was warm enough. We walked through what looked like a beautiful public garden during the day. At night it turned into my bedroom. I shuddered when I thought of some of the things I’d seen going on in the pitch of night.
Finally, after I thought I had put it all in the past, I flagged down a taxi and we drove to a nondescript building in the Western Suburbs. There were five guys sitting out the front smoking.
I wouldn’t let Kai get out of the taxi because I didn’t know what he would do. “Okay,” I told the driver. “That’s enough.”
He put his foot down and gladly drove us out of there. It wasn’t customary in this country to tip, but I doubled his fare amount when we got out. Kai hadn’t said a word. I had a feeling he was trying to memorise the location of the clubhouse so he could go back there later.
“There you have it,” I said. “My life in a nutshell. Unless you’re particularly keen on seeing the inside of Nanna’s cell again. For the record, I’m –”
He yanked me into his arms. We stood there on the sidewalk as he let go of whatever was eating him up inside. Eventually he let out a breath. But he wouldn’t stop holding my hand.
“Don’t tell Nanna,” I said. “You can’t say I don’t know how to celebrate a birthday, huh?” Even though I hated it, I really felt like getting a bit drunk. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough liquor on earth to affect Kai. My stomach rumbled anyway.
“Do you want to find somewhere to eat?” I asked him. The sun was already going down.
“I’m done with this,” he said. “So are you.”
He wrapped his arms around me and teleported me back to Bloodline.
29
We appeared inside the Grove. “Stay put,” he said. He disappeared in the blink of an eye. We would have to work on his inability to make a request without it sounding like a command. The nymphs came out to chastise me for not showing up this morning. And just like that, the last of those horrible memories from my childhood were banished to the back of my mind.
“It was one morning!”
I ducked the first missile, but the rest hit me in the back. “I’ll do it now, okay.”
They were slave drivers. The Arcana trees didn’t even need tending to anymore. The one I’d planted had caught up and was every bit as sturdy as the one that had always been here. I suspected they were just siphoning my hedge magic for their own gains.
I was standing there watering the tree when I felt a cold tingle run down my spine. Out of the corner of my eye, I swore I could see a shadow close to the Nightblood barrier. When I turned in that direction, there was nothing there but grass and trees.
“Can you sense anything strange?” I asked the purple nymph. She was busy working on what appeared to be another contract for some poor sucker.
She shook her head at me and made a motion to indicate I might be losing my mind. I frowned and allowed the insistent tug of the Ley dimension to take hold of me. This section of the Grove was now dangerously close to Nightblood. The barrier I had erected was holding steady. All around it, the lights of the Ley dimension were erratic. Something flashed in my periphery, but it was never tangible enough for me to get a clear picture.
I must have been twirling around like a crazy person when I felt something touch my shoulder. I shed the Ley sight to find Kai peering at me quizzically.
“What were you doing?” He had a backpack strapped to his shoulders. He’d traded his motorcycle jacket for a dark blue chequered shirt.
“Something’s off with my Ley sight,” I said. “Why the outdoor get-up?”
He searched my face for a second as though trying to decide whether he should push the issue with the Ley dimension. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “At least that’s what Professor Mortimer tells me.”
That seemed to be enough for him. “Come on,” he said.
The next teleport saw us appearing in a vast red gum forest. The evening light was only just beginning to wane. Something told me we weren’t in Australia anymore. I
