Page 13 of Burdened Bonds

I wrap my arms more tightly over my chest.

“I was trying to take care of you,” he mutters, staring at the ground sulkily.

I decide to change the subject.

“How did we get here from Los Magicos?” That too is a blur. I remember Marcus Lowsky falling and then Renzo, Pip in his arms, above me. The next thing I remember iswaking up in my bed just now. If I was as unwell as he claims, I wonder how the hell he carried me through that battle, how he wasn’t stopped by Stone or Azlan, how he managed to bring Pip and me all the way to my old house, and all so quickly.

“Magic,” he says, looking up at me.

I remember him vanishing from the woods in the academy.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s something I can do,” he says, fiddling with the rings on his fingers. “Slip from one place to another.”

“Slip … what does that mean?”

He glances up at the ceiling. “If I concentrate real hard, I can hear, I can hear the vibrations of time and space around us. They’re like strings, each vibrating to their own note. And if I concentrate even fucking harder, I can bend those strings and slip between them. Move from one place in time and space to another.”

My brow crumples. The broth has helped, but I’m still dazed, struggling to follow his words.

“You can travel through time, go back in time?”

“Huh,” he says, glancing back down at me, “I never tried that.” He grins. “Bet that would be fun.”

“So what do you do?” I ask in annoyance.

“Mainly travel from A.” He walks to one side of the room, winks at me and then disappears from sight completely. I stare at the empty space and in a blink of an eye he reappears at the other side of the room. “To B.”

“You can make yourself invisible?”

He shakes his head. “I jumped. From one side of the room to the other.”

“And you jumped us from Los Magicos to my house, to here?”

“Yep.”

“Then jump us back,” I say, stepping towards him. “I need to find my mates and my friends and–”

“No.”

“No?” I say with indignation.

“We’re not going back to Los Magicos. It isn’t safe for you, little rabbit.”

I scoff. “How do you know? You have no idea what happened after we left.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not taking you back.”

6

Tristan

“Where’s Rhianna?”I repeat when no one answers me.

“We don’t know,” Azlan says, staring into my eyes.

“You don’t know?” I spit. “You don’t know?!”