Page 2 of Anchor

Now, I was what they calledMud. The Drainage had messed with the energy inside me, the one that fueled the color of my magic.

I’d felt it, but that wasn’tallI’d felt.

So hard to explain to my own self now that I was thinking about it, while the boys sat me on a chair and Radock kept screaming his lungs out at me—words I didn’t much care to understand right now.

Hard to explain how I’dseenRosabel from before. How I’d been inside her head, had seen it all through her eyes, eventhe moment when she decided to hit me on the head with that candleholder. I saw it, though the vision was blurry. I felt her as if we were one. As if we were the same person for a short moment, but it was long enough.

Hands on my hair. The pain shot throughout me and the anger followed, twice as powerful.

My eyes were on the face in front of me—Radock with his jaws locked and his skin pale, forehead dotted with beads of sweat.

“What the hell were you thinking, going into the Iris Roe, Taland?” he spit—must have been the fourth time. “Do you have any idea what could have happened if you were caught? Do you want to fucking go back to the Tomb, is that it?Do you?!”

His loud voice made my ears whistle, but that wasn’t what concerned me. My focus was elsewhere still.

Was it because I gave her the magic she needed for that spell? Was that the reason why I’d seen into her mind like that?

Or was it because of the Drainage? Haditmessed with my mind somehow that I saw things that weren’t real? Maybe just wishful thinking, images my mind wanted me to believe to free me from the pain. The unbearable fucking pain of knowing the person I loved the most in life had betrayed me.

But no—it wasn’t it. I knew it in my bones that it wasn’t it.

What I’d seen was real. What I’d felt—all of it was real.

“Do you have a clue what I went through to get you out of there, you good for nothing piece of shit!” This wasn’t a question, and the slap that followed stung, but I still didn’t pay it any attention.

No, becausethiswas more important. Those images. Rosabel in my arms, barely moving. Rosabel in my armsthen,happy. Purely happy.

Rosabel in my arms now, begging me to stop. To go back. To not die.

Rosabel in my armsthen,whole. Fulfilled.

Was it because those colors of the Rainbow had done something to her?

Or was it because I was Mud now?

A small price to pay because she lived. She was out of that place, out of the playground of the Iris Roe. I vaguely remembered the darkness, then the light. The people, Iridians from outside the gates, rushing to us to help me up those stairs.

I didn’t collapse until we were out, until the magic of the playground was no longer around me. Until I knew for a fact that we wereout, and Rosabel was lying on the ground, chest rising and falling, alive.

It didn’t much matter what would happen to me then, but I should have known Radock would get to me. My brother was a very powerful man, and though I hadn’t counted on him to come to my rescuenowwhen I’d betrayed them, ran from them and went into the Iris Roe without them knowing about it, I was glad he had. I was glad I wasn’t in prison.

Very, very glad, because she was out here, and where she was, that’s where I’d be. Always.

“All those strings I had to pull. You know better than to put me in this position, boy,” said Radock, hands on his hips as he walked from one side of the room to the other—a room I’d never been in before. A dark room with a black ceiling and a desk and plenty of chairs.

“Way to go, dipshit,” Kaid muttered from behind, slapping me on the back of my head exactly like he knew I hated.

And I would have made it a problem for him if I wasn’t so tired, soimmersedin what I’d seen as I walked through the Drainage with Rosabel.

Those feelings, those images were real. She’d come to that school to spy on me, yes, but she’d never betrayed me. She’dsavedme. The whisper she’d heard from the agent’s earpiece—shoot on sight.The way she’d dropped her purse and I hadn’t heard because the agents had had spells about them. The way she’d slammed the door on them when I still hadn’t entered the Strongroom to search for the veler, and when she’d decided she’d rather knock me out cold than to allow those agents to shoot me…

“And whythe fuckare yousmiling?!”

Radock’s bloodshot eyes were in front of me, so wide they could pop out of his skull any second.

Well, fuck, I really had been smiling.

But how could I not?

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