Page 154 of Caelum

How much did they have to come to terms with before they just walked away from me?

I couldn’t,wouldn’tblame them if they did. I was a disaster waiting to happen.

Nestor whispered, “If you wish for something?—”

“No. It doesn’t work like that. I get nothing. It just happens.”

“Does the wish drain you?” Frazer questioned, stepping closer to Nestor’s bed. When he reached for my hand, I didn’t pull away. If anything, when his fingers enfolded mine, something deep inside me shuddered with relief.

They weren’t pulling away.

“No. Not really. When it happens…” I winced. “There’s a kind of power surge. It hurts. Gives me a little headache, but nothing else.”

“How are you so calm?” Nestor asked, his voice shaky.

“I’m not. But I’ve been waiting for this to happen. When Reed wished for his key ring, I knew it would wash up, and it did. I expected it to take longer, considering it had to be somewhere down at the bottom of the ocean.” I gnawed on my bottom lip. “The wishes… I don’t know if it’s likeAladdin. I don’t know if there’s a finite amount. In fact, there’s so much I don’t know, it’s ridiculous.

“What I do know is that the wishes take time. And the more complicated they are, the more time they take. I can’t grant myself wishes, and… that’s pretty much it.”

“We have to watch our words from now on,” Samuel stated, his remark breaking into the next bout of silence that fell as the boys processed my declaration. “If the wishes aren’t finite, we don’t want to waste them. We have to store them until desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Frazer nodded. “You’re right, bro. But that’s going to be hard. Most of us just say it because it’s a throwaway statement…”

“Tough,” Samuel retorted grimly. “We need to make sure we don’t use them up. Fuck knows if we find ourselves in a shitty predicament and we wasted them all…. That would be disastrous. Look at what happened to Nestor. If Eve was there, we could have saved him?—”

“Is that right, Eve?” Dre interrupted, and I turned to look at him. “Is it?” he pressed when I didn’t reply. “If he’d been close to death, could you have spared him?”

“It’s never been wished before, so I don’t know, but I assume so. It just depends on how bad the injury is. As I said, these things aren’t instantaneous. If someone is bleeding out like in the movies we watch, the wishmight not work in time,” I told him honestly, and something flickered in his eyes that I wasn’t sure boded well or ill for me. Who the heck knew where Dre was concerned?

“What has been wished?” Reed questioned softly, and he approached me as Frazer had, but he scooted down so he was on the ground next to me. He rested his forearms on his knees, looking up at me like I was more interesting than a movie on the TV.

Mouth dry, I licked my lips again as I thought about the handful of times I’d granted wishes. At first, I hadn’t thought I had anything to do with it, but after a third time, when my brother had commented that I was a good luck charm—a statement that had my father clipping him behind the ear—I’d taken note. Of the words, the phrasing, and the acute pain I experienced in the aftermath.

“Once, someone wished she could get pregnant.” Inside, I froze at the memory. “If wives couldn’t carry children at the compound, they were considered no good.”

“She feared for her life?” Nestor asked, his tone dark.

I nodded. “Yes.” Gulping, I continued, “She wished she’d have a boy to make her husband proud, and a few weeks later, it happened. My mother said it was a miracle because Sister Sarah had never had a proper monthly—” My cheeks burned at that. “Then, it just happened. She never carried again though.”

Nestor sat up, settled higher on his pillow, and, as though he were rapt, asked, “What else?”

Blowing out a gusty breath, I admitted, “There was a little boy who was very ill.” My lips twisted. “They were going to ‘send him to Heaven,’ but his elder sister wished they could play together like the others their age could.” Tears pricked my eyes. “It took a long time for that one to come true, but it worked. He got better, strong enough to play with her, but he did die though. About five years after they were going to deal with him.”

The guys released a collective breath, stunned by my admission. Eren strode across the room and, cupping my shoulder, whispered, “You have the power to save people, Eve.”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Jesus.” Dre’s voice was stark, then he bit off, “No one can find out about this. No one.”

A round of nodding moved around the room in a circle.

“She’d be in danger if people knew,” Frazer confirmed. “Christ, this is why—” He shook his head and staggered slightly as he sat down at Nestor’sside. The mattress jerked and Nestor winced at the movement, but I knew Frazer was genuinely bewildered by what he was thinking. “This is why you need all of us, Eve. We have to keep you safe.”

I blinked at that. “We don’t know?—”

“Of course we do,” Dre snapped. “You can barely look after yourself here in Caelum, never mind in the outside world.” He stormed to his feet and began pacing. His steps were a fast clip as he tried to burn off his energy, but something strange happened. My hand began to burn where his mark was, and deep inside, I felt it. Felt him again.

It wasn’t an aberration. Wasn’t something that had happened as a one-off, something that was potentially tied to his wish for his knee to be healed, something linked me to him. Our souls were connected. I half wondered if my soul was linked to the others and knew it was likely, but the truth was, I’d only noticed it with Dre before. Recognizing it with the others would be harder because I was sure I only recognized him because of what I’d done to somehow bring his bear out.

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