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The pillow is lumpy. Cassie waits it out for almost twenty minutes, trying not to count the time as it passes, but eventually she sits up and thumps the pillow. Cinnamon and denim balloon around her as she does so, and she blinks the sense-impression away. It’s getting a little easier to do that, at least. There. Now maybe she can sleep.
Still lumpy, and now the covers are tangled.
After the fifth time of trying to sort out her bedding, of brushing away welling impressions of leather and lemon and chalk and a dozen other things, she gives up and slides out of bed, pulling her robe from the back of the chair nearby. There’s been no sign of any prune-juice-like activity yet, but the possibility has been playing on her mind. Perhaps that’s why she can’t sleep. Maybe a mug of peppermint tea will help. Or some warm milk. Or a tiny, little sleep spell.
She grimaces at the lurch of guilt that hits her at that thought, and presses her lips together. There’s no need for guilt. There’s no need for the sense-impression of a snake’s hiss or of the cool metal of a sword hilt. Jake can lecture her, order her, all he wants, but he isn’t in charge of her and he doesn’t get to decide what she does. No-one does. Not anymore.
Having to cross the main room of the Annex to get to the kitchen has never made any sense, and Jenkins insists her room wasn’t there originally, but it is now and she’s almost used to padding through the darkened space full of books and tables and…warm light.
“Hey,” Jake says, looking up from whatever he’s reading and frowning. “What are you doing up?”
“What are you doing up?” she asks, pulling her robe more tightly around her. Not that he’s staring at her chest now, and not that he was really staring at it back in that hotel, when he was drunk and she was glowing. Not exactly. Still… “You should be in bed.”
“And you shouldn’t?” he asks. His frown grows and he pushes back from the table, his hands braced against the edge. “They had you tied down, Cassie.”
“And they had you strung up,” she says, drawing herself further upright. “You still have burn marks.”
He winces, an expression that moves his whole face, the way most of Jake’s expressions do. For someone who spent so much of his life hiding, Jake has trouble playing his emotions down. She can’t quite imagine him being all taciturn and shut down. At least, not until she sees him fight. When he’s training with Baird, something she’s peeked in at a time or two, he gets all focused and…and sort of tight, like it isn’t quite Jake anymore.
She’s wondered more than once what Jake might be turning in to. If she’s honest with herself, she wonders what she might be turning into. Sometimes, she thinks Ezekiel might be changing the best way out of all of them. Without meaning to, she finds her free hand rubbing at her chest.
“That hurt?” Jake asks, his own pain turning so quickly into concern over hers that she wants to snap at him. He always cares so much, about everything. “Here, come sit down.”
He’s off his chair and reaching out to guide her to a seat nearby before she can tell him to leave her alone, and the memory of him hanging from that rope stills her tongue. He was right, earlier: magic did get them into that mess. More precisely, she got them into that mess. She can let him have this moment to fuss over her.
“I just couldn’t sleep,” she says, stopping herself from rubbing over the spot again. “Why aren’t you in bed, anyway?”
He shrugs as he turns away, digging in a bag she hadn’t noticed. It’s leather and looks like something Indiana Jones should be hauling around with him, and Jake pulls out a couple of bottles and brings them to her.
“Here. Jenkins gave me these.”
“What are they?” she asks, taking one of the bottles and inspecting it. It looks just like a clear glass bottle, of the kind old fashioned lemonade was sold in. The liquid inside it’s clear, too. Or almost clear. There are silver ripples in it, and some blue. “It’s shimmering.”
“Yeah,” Jakes says, and settles back onto the seat beside her. “Supposed to restore energy or bring peace or something. He wasn’t real clear. But he said it would help on a night I couldn’t sleep.”
His thigh isn’t far from hers. Not that she notices.
“Magic? It’s magic, isn’t it?” she asks, and sees the way he looks down at the bottle instead of answering. “So it’s okay to use magic if Jenkins gives it to you, but I’m not allowed to use it?”
“I never said…” Jake stops and looks up, as though he might find an answer on the ceiling. “It isn’t that you aren’t allowed to use it-”
“No, because you don’t actually get to tell me what to do,” she says.
“Cassie.” Jakes says her name on a sigh. He doesn’t follow it up with anything. He still doesn’t look at her, either.
“You don’t, though,” she says, turning the bottle over and over in her hands. “So why do you keep trying to?”
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” he says.
“And you don’t trust me.”
He doesn’t even answer her this time. She nods, knowing she must look upset, or angry, or something else in that zone, and tells herself to get up and leave. After everything, she’s still being held to account for a decision she made years ago, back when she barely knew any of them, back when the fear of what was in her head outweighed everything else for one moment. She never meant for anyone to get hurt.
“You don’t trust me,” she says again, quietly.
“Yeah, I do.”
She has to wait for that to sink into her brain, and it pings an impression of warm sun on her skin and of dust around her, of a steady voice murmuring reassurance and of other things she can’t identify, but that feel a lot like home.
“You trust me? You…? You don’t act like you trust me.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Jake says, and taps at the bottle. It rings clear, like metal. “I don’t trust anything that powerful when it ain’t got guidelines. And you’re smart, Cassie. You are so smart. But you spent so many years being told you couldn’t do anything, that now? Well, now I think you want to do everything, all the time, no matter what. And it scares me.”
“It scares you that I want to make up for the time I lost?”
She wants to tell him that isn’t fair. He’s making up for the time he lost. His own names is on dozens of papers now, even though he still uses some of his other names for the reputation they’ve built up. Before she can, though, he does look at her, and she sees sadness and…and loss in his eyes. Loss?
“What exactly are you afraid of?” she asks. “That I might put other people in danger?”
“I’m worried we all might do that, without meaning to,” Jake says. “How many times have we walked into something and not known what we’re dealing with? Does that ever help?”
“No,” Cassie says. “No, you’re right. Knowledge is power.”
“Knowledge is safety,” Jake says, and he delivers it the way he delivers the words of all those writers he reads. The way he delivered her own words back to her as she lay beneath those ropes. “Knowledge keeps you free, and whole, and here. Ignorance will get you lost.”
“Maybe getting lost is an adventure,” Cassie says. “Maybe it’s just another kind of freedom.”
“Cassie,” Jake says, and this time he leans in, closer to her, the fingers of one hand twitching on the bottle. “Cassie, just… I get that I…I don’t have the right to tell you what to do. Hell, I don’t get to tell Ezekiel what to do, and that kid’s way younger than either of us.”
“Okay,” she says, letting the age comment slide. He isn’t wrong. Ezekiel is much younger, even if he’s been in this game as long as they have. “That’s good. That you know that. So…why do you keep doing it?”
At that, he shakes his head and twists the top off the bottle. She watches as he tips his head back and takes a long swallow, and tells herself she isn’t interested in the way his throat works. Jake is like a brother. He is. Except for how he really isn’t, no matter what she said back at that hotel.
Even so, being attracted to someone doesn’t give them the right to order you around.
When Jake’s done drinking he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and looks like he might be considering escaping.
“You started this conversation,” Cassie tells him.
He slumps.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Drink up, okay? I tried one of these a while back and I fell asleep about ten minutes later. I think. I woke up in bed, anyway.”
That does not sound as appealing as he seems to think it does, not when Cassie had a friend, years back, who was slipped something in a drink, but he doesn’t appear to have any bad memories from it, so she does as he says. This time. Whatever it is, it tingles on her tongue.
“So we have about ten minutes?” she asks.
“About that.”
“You got anything you want to say to me in the next ten minutes?” she asks. It’s most of the way to being a challenge, and she knows it is. She also knows how Jake tends to respond to a challenge.
She sees his gaze dip from her eyes to her lips and sees him swallow again. She must have got some of that drink on her lips, too, because there’s a ghost tingle there. When he meets her eyes again, it’s closer to regret she sees.
“I don’t want you getting you hurt,” he says. “I worry you’ll get excited and rush in, and get hurt. And I’ll be so busy reading I’ll miss it.”
“You’ve been doing a lot more hitting things lately,” she says. “Pretty good arm. Even Baird says so.”
That’s a flush on his cheeks, right there. It seems suddenly very important she leans in and brushes her forefinger over the patch of pinker skin on his right cheek, so she does. Jake’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t say anything about it.
“Yeah, I have,” he says. “Maybe I can get good enough to keep you safe. Didn’t manage it today.”
“You did,” she says. “We kept each other safe. Safe enough, anyway. We got back.”
She trails her finger along his cheek and to his jaw, just because now she’s started she doesn’t see any need to stop. Which is exactly what Jake’s been talking about, but he’s right here to keep her safe, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Except for how he shouldn’t think it’s his job to keep her safe.
“You do know you aren’t a Guardian, right?” she asks. “You don’t have to put yourself at risk to keep me safe.”
“You do know you’re a Librarian?” Jake shoots back, but he does it in a softer tone of voice, sounding almost entranced. Must be the magic water. “You don’t have to rush in without learning about something.”
“Flynn does,” she says.
“Flynn does a lot of things,” Jakes says, and his eyes slip closed.
The water must be making him sleepy already. Strange. Cassie doesn’t feel sleepy. She does feel more relaxed.
“And I wouldn’t mind,” Jakes says, his eyes opening just enough she can see the blue of them.
“Mind what?”
“Being your Guardian. Seems wrong, only having one and four of us.”
“So you want to switch jobs?” she asks.
As Jake leans a little more to the side she spreads her fingers and curves her hand over his cheek, holding him up. He was more steady than this when he was drunk.
“Maybe,” he says, almost into her hand. “No. No, I wanna be a Librarian. But I want to keep you safe, too, even though I know you can keep yourself safe.”
“Why?” she asks, leaning in a little to hear him better.
His next words are felt as much as heard, and they dance bright blue and silver in the air.
“Because I care about you,” he says. “And I do trust you. I just don’t trust all of magic. And you’ve already had to go through enough, what with…what with everything. I wish I could take some of that away.”
“But you can’t,” she says.
When Jake sits up, pulling away, it hurts. She feels the empty space and it’s painful.
“I know,” he says, darting one look at her before he stands and turns away. “I know that. I don’t…” His right hand clenches into a fist and he heaves a breath, his shoulder lowering as he breathes out. “Maybe we should just leave this. You should be able to get to sleep now. Night, Cassie.”
And he leaves her sitting in that pool of warm light, thinking about the dangers and the joys of freedom, and whether she knows enough about what he’s saying to take a risk. It feels like a long time before she stands and makes her own way out of the room, a lot longer than the ten minutes Jake said she would have. But then, she really is done with being told what to do.
She maybe wants to hear what he’d like her to do, though. That isn’t the same thing, not at all.