Page 57 of Out of My Flocking Mind

“Sorry for worrying you. How are you even here, though?”

She held up her phone. “I track Harrison’s phone. He used to get lost a lot when he was younger, so I like knowing where he goes. When I saw it here, I was terrified you’d gotten hurt.”

“Nope, I’m okay.”

“Which means…”

“Someone hit Harrison with a stick.”

“You mean you did, right?”

“How does everyone know that? I’ll have you know that I’ve hit very few people with sticks in my life.”

“More people than the average, I’d bet.”

“I wonder what the average is.” I tapped my finger against my bottom lip, grateful for the distraction.

Ignis sat in the chair beside me, then took my hand in hers. “What really happened?”

I could sense the gentle waves of her power, as clean as they always were. I could have fought them, but I didn’t really want to, not right then. Instead, I allowed it to ease me as I told her the events of the night. My realizing that the power felt the same, me running away from Harrison, me getting attacked near the park, the appearance of a man who looked exactly like Harrison. I spilled every detail, holding none of it back. If anyone could understand it all, it would be Ignis.

“Ryder,” she said, her voice soft and knowing.

“That’s what Harrison called him. Who is he?”

Ignis released my hand, and the loss of warmth bothered me. I knew better than to think of it as some rejection, rather than her not wanting to transfer any of her feelings to me by accident. “Harrison was not a single birth. Twins are rather common for Spirits, but identical can be troublesome. Harrison and Ryder are a good example of it.”

I frowned as I pieced all the tiny bits of information together into a coherent thought process. “I heard a rumor that Harrison had stolen his power from someone else.”

Ignis let out an annoyed, sharp breath, as though she’d dealt with this pesky rumor enough times already. “People like to talk when they don’t know the specifics. Harrison didn’t steal Ryder’s power.”

“Didn’t I?”

Ignis and I both turned toward the door, where Harrison stood, his eyes locked on the floor instead of at either of us.

“No, you didn’t,” Ignis pressed.

Harrison came into the room and shut the door, then sat on the exam table again. “You have always said that, but the facts fail to support it. I have power that no others have wielded, more than any one Mind should have. On the other side, my twin, Ryder, was somehow born with no power, something unheard of when a Spirit has two powerful parents. It leads to a single obvious conclusion, does it not?” His words had that flat quality, as though they didn’t bother him, but the fact he hadn’t met my gaze yet suggested otherwise.

“You can’t blame yourself for something like that. You didn’t choose to be born the way you were any more than Ryder did. And you’ve always done everything you can to help him, no matter how much he screws it up.”

“Did you know Ryder was behind this all?” I asked Harrison. He had to, right? If he knew about his brother, he had to have suspected him.

Harrison waited a long moment before he answered, and that told me the truth. “I suspected it, but I wasn’t sure. Ryder, see, he is…different. He doesn’t have any powers.” He sighed, slowly, then added softly, “I created Cloud about a decade ago to help him. I felt so guilty over having powers and the idea that I’d stolen his that I wanted him to feel normal, to feel accepted, so I figured out a way to create Cloud as a way for him to have powers.”

Ignis didn’t show any surprise at that. She must have known that little tidbit already.

It also told me something else. “That’s why his power felt just like yours, because he used your blood to create it…”

Harrison nodded. “When we were first creating it, I emptied a lot of power into a crystal so he could make it on his own. He has been making it from that ever since. Others have backwards engineered from our version, to replicate it, but this all is my fault. I was the one who brought it into the world.” He slumped his shoulders, looking worse than he had even after getting whacked by a stick.

It went to show just how heavy this burden was, and how he struggled to hold it himself. He still failed to meet my gaze.

“I’m going to step outside and check with the doctor,” Ignis said, her tone gentle, as though she really didn’t want to be part of this conversation.

When she left, Harrison sighed and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, appearing to sink even more, like without Ignis there he couldn’t keep up the appearance of nothing bothering him. It seemed he even kept that up around his own sister, which was crazy given he was closer to her than anyone else that I’d seen.

Did that mean he showed me a side of him no one else ever got to see?

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