Page 59 of The Shadowed Oracle (The Bonded Worlds #1)

Chapter Thirty-Two

The silence between them wasn’t bland, nor comfortable. Impatience pushed Ingrid to think of ways to address the issue, apologize for distancing herself, to admit to her trepidation, apologize for not sensing he was burning himself out, but in the end, stubbornness kept her lips closed tightly.

She wanted—no, needed Dean to speak first.

Just as the sun poked over the islands in the distance, a dazzling mixture of burnt orange and faded purple dancing in the sky, he did.

“I know I already said this.” He turned to her, a welcoming levity in his voice. “But I’m sorry. I’d be pretty ashamed if Callinora heard what I’d just implied behind her back.”

“She’d get it.” Ingrid knew that with absolute certainty.

“Yeah, which makes it even worse,” Dean said.

“Here I am, in the heart of it all, while Callinora can sit at home and hope. Miles and miles away, while—well, you know.” Dean gripped the railing of the bow, lowering himself to sit just left of center, leaving room for Ingrid to join his side.

“I know she grew up differently,” he added.

“I imagine she can temper herself better than most. But still.”

“Diplomacy over everything,” Ingrid agreed. She eyed the spot next to him, hesitating a moment before sitting. “Do you remember that story about her alchemy tutor? Or the etiquette classes she talked about? Can’t imagine what her actual schooling was like.”

“Worse than yours, you think?” Dean said gently.

“Or yours?”

“Hey, it’s not a competition.” His voice had turned raspy, the post-outburst crash turning it harsh, but inversely making his mood softer, more vulnerable.

“Seriously, though,” he said. “Aside from the whole… knowing about another world stuff, my fear was almost normal for a kid. While Callinora was taught to fear herself.” He paused, glancing at Ingrid for a half-second before continuing.

“Have to admit, it makes for a great leader. Putting rationality over emotion. That’s something I’ve never been good at. ”

Ingrid scoffed, reacting almost involuntarily. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Right.” Dean turned to her, chuckling.

“And now you’re laughing at me?” Ingrid asked with a snort.

“A little.”

“Ridiculing my lifelong struggle. Great. Very helpful.”

Dean emphatically threw his nose up at that. “I’d hardly call your temper your lifelong struggle,” he said. “Plenty of things top that. For example, has anyone told you you’re too hard on yourself?”

“Someone has, yes,” Ingrid said. “ Me . I tell myself that all the time. It’s one of the thousands of things I don’t like about myself.”

“And the cycle continues.”

Now Ingrid was the one laughing. “So idiotic, really. It’s like getting mad yourself for getting mad at yourself.”

“I’ve actually done that before.” He winced, picking at a loose piece of thread on his borrowed pants.

The pants that were supposed to make him look more like a merchant and less like a fighter, but weren’t all that effective.

“I can’t remember what the lesson was that day,” he said.

“Maybe I was using throwing knives, or maybe it was grammar?”

Ingrid rocked her head up and down knowingly. “The two pillars of elementary education, of course.”

Flatly, Dean replied, “Either murder 101 or biology, can’t remember.

” He brought one leg up to rest on the dock, the other still dangling over the edge.

“Either way, I was fucking up. And I started to get mad. And I got madder because I was mad. And then I was just… total insanity. Or at least that’s what my mom told me when I woke up. I’d blacked out.”

There was another moment of silence, though comfortable this time.

Dean recalled, “The weirdest part, though, after I woke up, was that my mom was treating me completely different. Overnight, she became the nurturing, caring, overprotective mother. Her version of it, at least. She even gave me the rest of the day off, which never happened. Not if I was sick in bed, had a fever, throwing up. Never.” The details didn’t match his casual delivery, periodically looking up at Ingrid as if he were explaining something mundane.

“I found out a few weeks later that it was because she thought it was my power surfacing. That I’d used it unknowingly, and passed out from the magic flowing through me. ”

“That’s quite the assumption,” Ingrid said. “How did you find out?”

“I asked her. I had to. After a year or so, it was obvious that the magic wasn’t in me, so the training got worse. Much worse.” He brought his hand up to his chest. “That’s how I got my scars. She brought back a few of the tamer monsters from Peloria forest and put me in the jail cell with them.”

Ingrid took a moment, biting back anger, tears and nausea all at once.

“Did she ever speak to you about it?” she asked finally, “Did she ever… I don’t know, try to explain herself?”

Explain how, in a sick and backward way, she might’ve done it out of concern for him. Seeing him as disadvantaged, maybe she pushed him harder so that he would hold his own, become a true warrior in a world full of killers.

“I don’t think it would’ve mattered to me at that point,” Dean said.

“I was a kid. And kids rarely make the distinction between protectiveness and harshness. But, no, she didn’t explain.

” He tried to stress his distance from the pain with a laugh.

“She gave me some truly diabolical guilt trips when I was older, about all she sacrificed for me, all she did for me, but she never accepted criticism. Never showed weakness.”

He trailed off, palming the back of his neck and taking short breaths.

It was almost painful to watch. Ingrid searched for another question, some casual segue or a story of her own to lighten the load, but whatever comforting words occurred to her all turned to mush before she could speak them into existence.

She was nervous. To strain like this, to hurt just by seeing him hurt, and to be so wary of saying the wrong thing to him—she hadn’t felt that in so very, very long.

Don’t complicate it, she thought. Just say something. Anything. We need him. And right now, he needs me.

A small gesture. Match the vulnerability he’d shown.

It was the least she could do. Since that impossible task of telling her what she was and where she came from fell on him, Dean had a way of putting her at ease.

It was one of the first things about him that enthralled her, that scared her.

Her world had doubled, she’d clashed with very monsters from her nightmares, and still her worst fear was the basest level of connection.

She had to make another leap.

She sent microscopic search parties into her hazy memory, shot past the blockades built to keep the younger versions of herself locked away in darkness, and then dove recklessly into those hidden places in the crevices of her mind.

Places that, Ingrid quickly realized, she never should’ve gone back to.

The first thing she saw was faces. A never-ending shuffle of them. Tortured faces. Faces made hideous by hatred. Faces twisted in despair. Faces she’d worked so hard to forget.

Then came the fleshed-out memories. Things she’d set fire to inside herself, turning it into fuel.

Things that had been ignored and forgotten even as they ate away at her.

She saw a dark apartment. She saw her father passed out in a stupor.

She saw the group home and the sinister sister who’d left bruises on her backside so deep she couldn’t walk without limping for days.

Then she saw the pretty girl with the black ribbon in her hair—remembered her name, even.

It was Francesca. Her first friend. The first girl to look out for her, teach her, be kind to her.

Francesca, that was her name. The first innocent soul she had witnessed being swallowed up by a cruel, unforgiving world.

Her body tensed breathlessly. She couldn’t so much as shift her gaze to Dean, to ask for help, alert him—anything.

Her body remained in the present, but her senses were fully transported back to that large old home full of crosses and idols, back to that cold room she shared with the youngest of the orphans.

Then she saw herself. As clear as Dean had been in front of her just seconds ago, her younger self appeared.

She was alone, sitting on the floor of her room.

Her hair was a mess, and her eyes were tired, yet intensely focused.

She had a pencil in her hand. All around her were crumpled-up and discarded papers encasing her like fresh snow.

Her sight, her present-day self, moved in closer to examine the contents of the drawings. She had a pounding headache, a spinning stomach, an aching desire to go back, back to her body, to her present, to Dean, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of them.

They were depictions of her nightmares. Crude, childish renditions of them, but no less frightening. In some ways, they were more frightening. A ten-year-old’s innocence giving the macabre figures a sickening juxtaposition.

It was enough to break Ingrid completely.

Despite not remembering what happened next, what her vision was trying to show her, she knew why her younger self was drawing them.

She remembered it so clearly now. This late-night scribbling was an attempt at curing herself.

At ridding herself of the visions poisoning her mind.

Putting them on paper so they could finally be removed from her head.

She had worked tirelessly at it, trying so hard to get it perfect.

For if it was wrong, if one line was crooked, one detail not captured, it wouldn’t work.