Page 22 of The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance #1)

The next day, Elethior’s stolen all my pens.

I check my desk for more, and he’s cast a darkness spell inside the drawers so there very well might be some in there, but I can’t see them.

He played a prank on me. Elethior, king of maturity, played a prank on me .

I can feel him at his workstation, reclined in his chair with his feet on his desk, watching for my reaction.

A tremor starts in the center of my palm.

I slam the drawer closed, leaving the darkness spell intact, and fire up my laptop. “You get that research done about Kojyngilla?”

Silence is thick in the air. Another abyss that tugs on me, beckons me to fall.

His feet smack against the floor when he sits upright. “Yeah. I did,” he says, voice stiff. “It’s worth testing. I can add it to the board.”

He stands to do that.

I throw myself out of the chair. “No, I got it.”

I wince. I’m being a dick. But I write his idea on my list, bringing us to a grand total of… two. Awesome.

I’m not sure what I’ll say to him when I turn around, but the awkwardness is taken away from me as a faint buzzing vibrates from his pocket.

He pulls out his phone and glances at the screen, back up at me—

—then does a double take at his phone.

The energy shifts. An undeniable narrowing.

His face pales and he answers, shoving the phone against his ear. “Hello?”

The responding voice is too low for me to hear, but I catch a caring tone, and it’s obviously someone Elethior recognizes; his eyelids flutter.

“It’s fine, Martha. I’m at school, but anytime, I told you. What happened?”

A better lab partner would step out, give him some privacy.

But I’m drawn closer to him, especially when his eyes stop moving and go glassy.

“Is she conscious?” he asks, and his voice cracks.

Martha responds.

“Yeah,” he says quickly. “I’m on my way.”

He hangs up, staring down at his phone again in a stupor.

Then he’s in action, grabbing his jacket off his chair. It gets caught on the leg and makes the chair roll toward him, but Elethior’s looking at his phone, typing with one hand, unaware that the sleeve is tangled; he’s shaking, I don’t know how he can even read whatever he’s writing on his phone.

“Elethior—”

“I have to leave. I have to— gods damn it .” He yanks his jacket and the chair slams into his knees with an audible crack.

Elethior buckles and curses but tries to free his jacket again. It’s still stuck, and he lets out a frustrated, heartbreaking cry.

I’m in front of him. My hands are on his upper arms. “Elethior. Stop. Look at me. What do you need?”

He hears me. Enough to meet my eyes, and I see him catch his breath.

“My mom,” he whispers. “She’s at a care facility. That was one of her nurses. She’s—” The muscles in his brow jolt. “She had a seizure. I don’t—I have to go.”

He tries to step around me, but I don’t let up my hold on him.

“Elethior, stop . Okay, you need to get to her facility. How are you getting there?”

He grunts in connection and looks back down at his phone. “That’s what I was doing. My car. My driver—I was texting my driver. Shit.” He mutters the last word to himself and tries to text again, his hand less shaky now.

I disentangle his coat from the chair and pass it to him before grabbing my own.

He frowns at me, at my coat.

“Making sure you get to your car. Where’s he meeting you?”

Elethior puts on his coat, his glassy eyes flicking agitatedly, like there’s something he’s trying to find. “Um, behind the building. He’ll be there in five. I need—”

“What else? You’ve got your phone, your wallet?”

He nods and spots the whiteboard. “We’re supposed to be working.”

“For fuck’s sake, Elethior.” I hook his arm and haul him toward the door.

He goes without a fight.

I drag him from the lab and through Bellanor Hall until we topple out in the rear parking lot. There are a few potholes from the dagger hail, and construction crews are hard at work on them. The sky is clear and bright blue, a jarring, too-cheery backdrop for the way Elethior’s still pale.

A car pulls up. He stares at it, not making a move to get in.

“This your car?” I ask.

He winces and seems to now realize we’re outside.

“Yeah.” He’s holding his phone in one hand and flexing the fingers of his other.

I open the car door for him. “Is there anyone you can call? Someone to be with you?”

His eyes meet mine, and I know before he has to say anything. I think I knew the moment the energy changed back in the lab.

“Get in.” I hold the door wider.

He folds himself into the car.

I nudge his calf with my foot. “Scoot.”

He obeys on autopilot and it isn’t until I’m plopping into the seat that he spins on me.

“What are you doing?”

“Going with you.” I shut the door and pat the seatback in front of me. “We’re good.”

The driver maneuvers out of the parking lot, jostling over blacktop rubble.

Elethior’s gaping at me. “Wha—why?”

I sit back with an air of nonchalance I sure as hell don’t feel. My palms are sweating and tension wraps in a thick band across my chest, squeezing slowly.

But hey, this car’s nice. Like, really nice. Plush seats, leather, probably.

“Who would you call to be with you?” I ask. The black upholstery on the roof of the car is fascinating.

Elethior’s quiet. For too long.

He says nothing . Not one single name.

He has friends, right? I’ve seen him at parties with people. And yeah, Arasne was an asshole, but the Tourael family is huge—surely there’s someone in his lineage who isn’t a prick?

I swallow the implied answers he gives me to those questions. If I let them linger, they’ll choke me.

“You’re not going alone,” I tell him. And I do look at him now, through a forced, overly confident smile. “Okay? This isn’t a thing you do on your own.”

He gasps like he hasn’t breathed since he answered his phone, and when he exhales, it’s in a self-deprecating huff.

“Fantastic,” he mutters. “This is how you want to be spending your day.”

“Well, this sure as hell isn’t how you want to be spending your day.”

His eyes are still glassy, and that worsens until his feeble attempt at a shield disintegrates.

“She’s been having seizures on and off the past few months,” he whispers. He taps his palm on the seat as his jaw works. “They’re trying to work out a new medicine for her. But they haven’t figured it out yet. And each seizure she has—”

He stops talking.

Leans back against the seat and pinches the skin between his eyes.

That band of tension around my chest clamps painfully, leaves me winded.

He inhales another gasping, anxious breath before he lowers his hand from his eyes and works his tongue against the inside of his cheek.

“Thank you,” he says to the back of the driver’s seat.

I plant my elbow on the door, curling up as far from him as I can get in this admittedly spacious luxury town car.

So. This is happening.

Casually accompanying Elethior to where his mom might be—

Nope. Not gonna think that.

It takes about twenty minutes in stop-and-start traffic before the driver pulls up outside a building not far from the Center City neighborhood, a sign out front declaring it the Blooming Grove.

Elethior’s been glued to his phone but Martha hasn’t called again, which is good, right?

Although, she knows he’s coming, so she wouldn’t want to deliver bad news via phone call.

The moment the car stops, I pop open my door, climb out, then bend back over, knowing Elethior won’t have moved.

As expected, he’s still staring down at his phone, tugging on a strand of his hair.

“Hey,” I say. “We’re here.”

Elethior startles.

The driver has the stoic, I’m-used-to-working-for-people-with-money thing down pat, because he has almost no emotion when he says, “I’ll wait here.”

But he looks back at Elethior and adds, his voice tempering, “For however long you need.”

It’s unnecessary, since that’s the guy’s whole job, but Elethior manages an unsteady smile. That smile transfers to me, and freezes.

“He can take you back to campus,” Elethior offers, nodding at the driver. “You don’t have to, um, come in. This is enough.”

I step back onto the sidewalk. “No. Get out of the car.”

“Sebastian—”

“Get out of the car, and don’t make me say it again. If I do have to say it again, I’ll call you a dumbass, and decorum frowns on calling anyone a dumbass in a family emergency.”

He smiles.

It’s small and real.

The cold winter wind is the reason I can feel my face reddening.

Elethior peels himself out of the car and pockets his phone.

He looks up at the building, a four-story stone facade right against the sidewalk.

It’s… pretty. Pretty in a this is definitely a care facility in a city but we worked with what we got; ignore the sterile feeling and the metropolis vibes and focus on these ornate buttresses way.

Elethior heads for the stairs by the front door, his movements automatic. I follow, watching him closely, my muscles wound to spring to any action he might need.

We stop by the doors, and after a beat, a buzzer sounds before they whoosh open. A security camera above catches my eye; they must’ve recognized Elethior.

We step inside a reception area. There’s a desk off to the right before the space opens into a hallway, the white paneled walls and polished wood floor at odds—one feels appropriately bleak and clinical, the other cozy and nice.

A middle-aged half-elven woman sits behind the desk, and she looks up with a smile full of recognition and sympathy.

“Thio,” she says. “Martha’s waiting—she’s in with your mom and Dr. Chrosk.”

Elethior comes to an abrupt halt. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, and I watch from slightly behind him as his mouth opens, closes, everything about him grasping and unsure.

“Is she okay?” I ask for him. “His mom?”

Elethior makes a noise like a muffled whimper. Like—relief. That I asked so he didn’t have to.

The receptionist looks at me, then Elethior, and her smile softens. “They’ve got her stabilized. She’s a fighter, your mom. Why don’t you go on in and talk to Dr. Chrosk?”