He didn’t ask what had happened, only uttered my name, his hand slipping beneath me. It was ridiculous that he could lift me with one hand, but apparently he could, because he repositioned me atop him, my entire body curling around his torso with my legs tucked up against his side. He pulled the blankets more securely around me, brushing his fingers through my hair until the movement lulled my sobs into sniffles, and my sniffles into nothing. I drifted off to sleep as he pulled the muck from my head as easily as he tugged the tangles from my hair.
I was grateful that he could put everything aside, even if only for a night. He wasn’t going to get angry at me for the stunt I had pulled in the lecture hall and he wasn’t going to question me on my visions of Silas or my interactions with Noah and Cabe. He wasn’t my solid, steadfast mentor anymore—no, that foundation had been ripped away at some point. But we could pretend. We could pretend that there was nothing more between us than comfort and understanding and support. We could pretend that the kiss hadn’t happened, and that the future didn’t seem so dark and full of agony.
We could pretend… for now.
I wasn’t surprised to find the bed empty when I woke up in the morning, and I braced myself for an awkward exchange with Quillan over breakfast, only to find that he had gone to work early, along with Noah and Cabe. Since it was so rare for me to only have the two men—Jayden’s men—following me around instead of the usual five, I took full advantage of the morning to spend some time with Tariq that didn’t revolve around me and my problems. We played his favourite videogames over breakfast, and he attempted to show me a plethora of clips on his phone while I tried to drive him to school without getting distracted and killing the both of us. It lifted my heart a little to see him smiling as he exited the car, and I resolved myself to spend more time with him. I had thought that things would change between us drastically, especially after it was revealed that he had known about the Zevghéri long before I had, along with my fake parentage. But it hadn’t. He was as steadfast in his role as my brother and my friend as he had ever been. He refused to act any differently, and that prevented me from feeling the awkwardness and the betrayal that I should have felt.
Did I trust him as I once did? No. No, I didn’t.
Was he still my family? Yes. Yes, he was.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been as simple as that, but it was. He had kept secrets from me, but that didn’t overshadow all the years that he had spent struggling through life stuck to my side. He had taken things into his own hands to try and protect me, and it hadn’t been the right thing to do, but that didn’t overshadow the fact that he had done it out of love. Out of love for me, and our dead mother. He had hidden the existence of my own people from me, but that was only because he considered me one of his people, instead of one of them. I was strangely grateful for that.
An old pickup was pulled over on the side of the road as I began the drive from the high school to the college, and I could see the driver hunched below the raised hood, his body-language stiff with frustration, trying to lean away from the slight misting of rain that was floating in diagonally behind him. There wasn’t any phone signal for me on the drive to Mount Baker, so I assumed that he didn’t have any either. The least I could do was offer him a lift out of the rain. I pulled over behind the pickup and jumped out of Quillan’s Porsche, tugging the arms of my jacket over my hands to ward off the chill as I hurried to where the man was now hidden behind his raised hood. The dewy grass brushed against my sneakers, seeping into the worn fabric to numb my feet as chills burst out all over my skin.
“Hey!” I called, my speech manifesting in an icy fog before my mouth. “Do you need a lift or any—”
He suddenly appeared in front of me and I reared back a step at the sight of him—bundled into a too-big jacket, with the padded hood pulled so far around his face that I couldn’t actually see any of his face. A nervous laugh misted from my lips. I was still feeling embarrassed about my jumpy reaction when he surged forward in two long strides and grabbed my head, smothering the lower half of my face with a cloth.
“Sleep,” he whispered, the ghost-like quality of his voice stemming from the fact that I was rapidly losing consciousness.
I obeyed his command.
In the forced trap of unconsciousness, I began to slip into a state of quasi-reality where I knew that I should have been awake, but the dreamland of sleep clutched at me anyway. I slid into a nightmare—and I knew that it was a nightmare, because suddenly, I was the Voda.