Page 28 of Bonds of Magic (Vesperwood Academy: Incubus #3)

“Cory!” He sounded happy to see me, which was a relief. “Thank God, I need your help. It won’t turn on.”

“What won’t turn on?” I asked, crossing the grass to join him.

As I walked, I saw a boulder in the center of the glade. It looked like an ordinary lump of gray rock to me, but Ash knelt and ran his hands over its surface like it contained the answer to a riddle.

“I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong,” he said, rolling the bolder left and right. “It should be working.”

The grass underneath the rock was a darker green, matted down from its weight, but nothing looked out of the ordinary.

“Can I… help?” I knelt next to him. I had no idea what was going on, but I didn’t like seeing my friend upset.

“I don’t know. I tried everything the book said, but I can’t make it work like it’s supposed to.” His voice climbed higher as he talked.

“What bo—” I began, but suddenly a book appeared a few feet away, lying open in the grass. Its aged pages gleamed in the evening light, and more of those dancing golden specks of light hovered above it. The book definitely hadn’t been there a second ago, but Ash didn’t seem to notice.

I nodded. “Okay, tell me what you did, and maybe we can figure it out.”

“I aligned the stone’s matrix. I invoked the glade’s power. I chanted its name, and I can feel it, it’s so close to opening, but it won’t .”

“What won’t open?”

“The door.” Ash’s voice was close to a wail now.

My heart thudded. He was trying to open a door? Like the one Erika had opened? Had Ash been enchanted too?

“A door?” I said cautiously, fear filling my gut. “A door to where?”

“ Home .” His voice was so plaintive it broke my heart. His fingers twisted together, his whole body shaking. I’d never seen him this visibly upset. “I don’t understand why I can’t go home.”

Something in the way he said it made me sure he wasn’t just talking about going back to wherever he’d lived before coming to Vesperwood.

Not that he’d ever been clear on where that was.

All I knew was that at one point, he’d spent some time in Ohio.

But I was pretty sure he was longing for something deeper than the Midwest.

“It should be right there.” He stabbed a finger at a cedar on the far side of the clearing. “The book promised. I finally found it, and I did everything right, and I still can’t go home.”

Tears brimmed in his eyes. I felt awful. Whatever this dream was, it was private. I felt worse than if I’d stumbled in on him hooking up with someone. This felt like something secret—a part of him he kept hidden for a reason.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” I took Ash’s hand. “Come here, it’s okay.”

I pulled him into a hug so that he was looking over my shoulder, instead of at that tree. I scrutinized its trunk. A door, huh? Well, could I influence dreams or not?

I imagined an old wooden door with a rounded top, set into the tree trunk. I pictured it as clearly as I could, the weathered grain of its wooden boards, the multi-paned glass of its small circular window, the wrought iron of its hinges. And I felt heat in my core.

Not anything sexual, but a feeling of power. It felt like I was drawing it from Ash’s body as well as my own. The heat flowed out from us, curling through the air. When it touched the tree, the whole scene shimmered, and suddenly, the door I’d imagined was right there.

“Look, look.” I pointed and pulled away from Ash so he could turn around. “The door is there. You did it right after all.”

“I did?” He stared at the tree in disbelief.

“Go on. See for yourself.”

Ash rose, first walking, then running across the grass, but he stumbled as he neared the door, stopping two feet away. His hand raised in midair, then froze, as if he were afraid to touch it.

“Something’s wrong.” He didn’t sound upset now. He sounded afraid.

“What? No. Nothing’s wrong.” I got to my feet.

“It’s the wrong door. Or something. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t lead back home. I can feel it.”

“Are you sure?” I joined him in front of the tree. I should have asked him for more details. But maybe I could still fix this.

“I don’t know where it leads.” He backed away in horror. “But it won’t take me home.”

“Tell me about home.” I took his hand. “Tell me what home is like, and I can help you find it.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He looked around the glade, his eyes wide and fearful. “I think you should leave. I think we should both get out of here.”

At those words, the clearing grew darker. It wasn’t just the sun setting further. The shadows among the trees were too deep for that. The air was thicker, somehow, and filled with menace, like the breath of a panther waiting to pounce.

“Ash, it’s okay.” I imagined what the glade would look like in broad daylight. Bright sun. Blue sky. The trees offering a cool respite of shade. Heat rolled out from my body again, and the scene brightened.

“Look, it’s fine.”

But Ash shook his head, over and over. “No, it’s not. Something’s wrong, Cory. We have to get out of here.”

He pulled free of my grip and ran to the far side of the glade, which had darkened again.

“Ash, wait,” I called. “It’s fine, I promise. You don’t need to—”

“Hurry, Cory. It’s not safe here.”

I sighed. Nothing I did could calm him down. And his fear must be powerful, if it was able to override the suggestions I’d made to the dream.

“It’s okay.” I waved at Ash. “You go. I have to stay and fix this, but you go.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“You have to. I can’t do the spell to fix this with you here.”

I was improvising, but he didn’t reject my words outright.

“Spell?” he asked. He still looked afraid.

I nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll just be a minute. But I need to do it alone. You should go meet Felix in, uh, the library. He was looking for you a minute ago.”

“He was?” Ash sounded relieved to have somewhere else to go.

“He still is. He’s waiting for you at the first table, the one by the stained glass window of the solar system.”

I didn’t want to try conjuring that dream out of thin air, since Ash had reacted so badly to what I’d done so far tonight. But maybe if I were specific enough, his brain would create that new dream for him? I hoped it worked like that.

I had questions for Noah when I got back, that was for sure. None of this was what I’d expected.

Whatever Ash was afraid of, it was powerful. In waking life, he would never leave me somewhere dangerous by myself. Which meant that whatever fear lurked in his dreams scared him more than anything we’d faced in the real world.

“Go,” I shouted, and with a final look, Ash turned around—and disappeared.

He didn’t walk away, didn’t run. He simply ceased to be present in the dream. And as soon as he was gone, the dream dissolved around me. Moments later, I sat up on Noah’s couch with a gasp, my mind still reeling from what I’d seen.

I looked around the cabin, reminding myself of where I was. Back home. Back at Vesperwood. Firmly ensconced in the waking world. And Noah was sitting there watching me from a safe distance across the room. As always.

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”

“Success?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I’d call it that. I found the dream I was looking for, but it still felt really shitty being there. I don’t know if I made it better or worse.”

“It’s okay,” Noah said placatingly. “It was only a dream. Whoever it belonged to, they may not even remember it in the morning.”

But I had a suspicion this dream would be hard for Ash to forget. It had felt time-worn, like an old pair of corduroy pants, the grooves beginning to go smooth from repeated washes. It felt like a dream he’d had more than once.

“Did you succeed in changing the dream the way you wanted to?” Noah asked.

“Yeah. But I don’t think it helped.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say.” I swung my legs off the couch and stood. “You’re not the one who was there.”

I paced across the cabin. There wasn’t much room for it. I could manage about six good strides before I had to turn around. But I felt too unsettled to sit still.

“I could feel it,” I said as I walked. “Feel everything he felt. I thought it would feel different from the other dreams. Since I wasn’t trying to—well, since I wasn’t as involved . But it almost felt like I was the one dreaming it.”

“You were, in a way,” Noah said. “Part of you is a dream.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel right, being in someone else’s head like that. I could feel his fear. And I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t make it better.”

Noah nodded slowly. “Was it a nightmare? Those can be particularly powerful. Harder for the incubus to influence.”

Was it a nightmare? It had started out so innocuous, so pleasant. There hadn’t been any monsters. Nothing scarier than some dark-looking trees. And yet—

“I think it was, for him. And I think I made it worse.”

“You didn’t.” Noah stood up and put his hands on my shoulders the next time I passed, stopping my pacing. “I promise.”

He didn’t ask whose dream it had been. Didn’t push for more details. He just stood there, so confident. Confident in me . Why was he so convinced I’d ever amount to anything?

“How can you be sure?” I looked up into his hazel eyes, the flecks of gold picked up by the soft lamplight of the cabin. They glowed like embers.

“Because you’re good. And I’m not talking about dreaming. You’re a good person. You didn’t make things worse.”

His answer was so quick, his voice was so solid that something inside me broke. No one had ever called me good before.

I looked up at him, my lips parting.

“Cory,” he said, his tone a warning.

But I was past any chance of listening. I stood up on my tiptoes and kissed him anyway.

Noah froze, just like he had last time. I kept kissing him, my lips moving on his, waiting for him to respond. But he didn’t. He stood there like a statue until I pulled back, feeling worse than I had all night.

“I told you we couldn’t do that again,” he said, dropping his hands. He sounded more tired than angry. “Nothing has changed since then.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t feel something.” I said it like a statement, but really, it was a question. A question I was desperate for him to answer.

“What I feel has nothing to do with what’s right.”

“So you’re not denying it.”

“I’m not denying anything, because that’s not the point. The point is we’re not doing this.” He shook his head. “For all we know, you’re only attracted to me because we’re both incubi.”

“But you’re not one anymore. And even if you were, so what? I don’t care if this is because of that. I’m fine with this just being physical attraction.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Noah said chidingly. “You deserve to be with someone who can take care of you. Someone good.”

“You’re good.”

“I’m not. You don’t know me at all.”

“So let me get to know you.”

“No.” His voice was iron. “Even if I were a different person, Cory, I swore a long time again I’d never do this again. I don’t do relationships. I don’t do emotions.”

“Maybe I’m okay with that. I don’t need emotions.”

“Don’t be stupid. Everyone does.”

“Everyone except you?”

Noah grunted, then picked up my coat and shoved it at me. “This conversation is over. I need to get you back to your room.”

“What if I don’t want it to be over?”

“Then you’re only proving my point as to why this can’t work.”

He didn’t come out and say, ‘ Then you’re only acting like the child I can’t help seeing you as ,’ but he didn’t need to. I got the message.

“Fine.”

I took my coat. Zipped it. Let him walk me back up to the manor, drop me off at my room. I was fine. And I would let Noah think he’d won. Let him think I was cowed. Let him think whatever he wanted.

I knew the truth. Noah wanted me. And he was good. I just needed to find a way to prove it.