I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I was beside myself crazy,” Eli said, not quite meeting my eyes. “You were hurt so badly, unconscious. I thought you might be dying. And when they came to take you to the infirmary I freaked out. Didn’t want you out of my sight.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Really?”
He grimaced. “Yeah. Made a bit of an ass of myself.”
I pressed my lips together, wanting to smile but afraid to at the same time.
Eli exhaled. “So Lady Elaine told me the truth, that our attraction toward each other is connected to our dream-seer powers. We’re literally drawn together in every way. That’s why you and I share all the same classes. We have to get close to strengthen our powers. But if we get too close that power backfires. She told me all the stories of the dream-seers before us. Most of them died really young, except for Marrow and Nimue, of course, but they spent years battling each other before she finally managed to imprison him in that tomb. Then she condemned herself to the same imprisonment. It’s pretty awful when you think about it.”
I nodded. It wasn’t just awful, it was cruel, like dangling the cure over a sick man, holding it just out of reach while watching him die. I sucked in a breath. “Isn’t there a way to break the curse?”
Eli shook his head. “Not according to Lady Elaine. She said it can’t be broken, only avoided.”
“But how do we know that’s true? We don’t know that will happen to us. There has to be some kind of choice about it.”
“No, Dusty. There’s not.”
I felt like screaming. “How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen it.”
I glared. “What, did you dream about it or something?”
“No, Lady Elaine had a vision of what might happen. She showed it to me with some kind of mind meld like what you’ve been doing with Deverell.” He drew a long, shaky breath. “It was awful, Dusty. And I don’t ever want that to happen to you and me. I care about you too much.”
I inhaled, the gesture painful. It was just what I’d always wanted to hear from him. Just what I’d hoped for, but it was never going to happen. The idea made me feel like I was being wrenched apart from the inside out.
Refusing to cry, I put as much steel in my voice as I could. “Why didn’t Lady Elaine tell me? Why did she only tell you?”
Eli frowned. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt about that, I’m sure. But I think I have a right to know.”
“She thought, given your tendency to rebel, that if she told you that we couldn’t be together it would just make you seek it out even more.”
A burst of anger went through me, hot and quick like a firecracker only to sizzle out a second later. It hurt to hear it, but I also knew deep down that it was true. Marrow had exposed that truth to me. The more someone told me I couldn’t do something, the more I wanted to do it. Even now I felt that rebellious nature screaming at me to stand up and kiss him again. Forever.
I gave in to it. At first, Eli didn’t seem to know what happened as I rushed over to him, cradled his jaw in my hands, and pulled his mouth down to mine in a kiss hot enough to incinerate us both.
For a few seconds we were nothing more than mouth and tongue, taste and heat. But then Eli wrapped his hands around my wrists. I knew what was coming and I fought against it, kissing him harder, trying to express all my feelings in that one act. For a moment, it almost worked, but then he pulled my hands away from his face, breaking the kiss.
Breaking us.
“We can’t,” he said. “I won’t do this.”
I pulled away from him, a flush washing over my body, my heart wrenching. I turned my back to him as I fought back tears. Eli didn’t try to comfort me, as I knew he wouldn’t. But he gave me time, several long painful minutes as I struggled to regain my composure. I had to regain it. I couldn’t let him see how much I hurt, and I couldn’t be selfish and let this derail us from the task at hand—stopping Titus Kirkwood.
Finally, I wiped the moisture from my lips then turned to face him, making my tone and expression as hard as possible, a difficult task considering how soft and broken I felt on the inside. “So let’s call Culpepper, and see if we can’t get into Corvus’s office.”
“Right…” Eli said, a thousand unspoken things in his voice. But then he accepted the farce I had presented him. He walked over to the table where his wand still lay. He picked it up, reapplied the glamour, and placed the ring on his thumb. Then he went to the desk and slipped on a thick leather bracelet I’d never seen him wear before. Under different circumstances I might’ve asked him where he’d gotten it—a gift from his dad perhaps. But not now.
Finally he turned and faced me. “I’m really sorry, Dusty,” he said, and the longing in his voice, the sadness, made the broken pieces inside me shatter a little more, some of the breakage as fine and thin as dust.
“So am I,” I said. I tried to block out the hurt, to bury the loss deep inside me. I knew if I didn’t, the rest of me would break in ways impossible to repair.
Only, who was I kidding. I already was.
31
The Crow King
The sound of jangling keys greeted us as Eli and I came down the third-floor hallway of Monmouth Tower toward Room 337. Faustus Culpepper stood in front of the door, his hellhound sitting beside him.