Page 63 of Threadbound

But he felt better with Bran as his aerial shadow, more grounded.

It should have bothered him. Jamie knew that—he should be more worried about the fact that he seemed to need Bran’s proximity in order to feel normal. Like he’d been cursed or something.

Up until a few weeks ago, Jamie wouldn’t have even thought such a thing—he didn’t believe in things like curses or magic or fairies, even if he found some small sense of superstitious comfort in repeating the rituals his momma had done. To his mind, they were things that provided psychological comfort—a kind of behavior-based psychosomatic effect. Nothing more.

And now he wasn’t so sure.

Fairies were clearly real. By extension, magic was real. It had to be. There was no other logical—if you could even call it logical—explanation for how Bran had moved from this world to his own. And if magic that could move a fairy between worlds was real, then why not other types of magic? Curses and spells and…

And the recipes and spells in the books he’d been studying.

On top of that, now Jamie wondered whether magic could be real inbothplaces—fairylandandthe human world.

If that was true, though, why had people stopped using magic? Had they lost the ability? Or was it a cultural thing, where people had stopped doing it because of oppression, like the church? Certainly, Jamie was familiar enough with the Scottish witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witch hunts that had ravaged most of Europe—although, weirdly, not England—and even spread into the Americas. He’d grown up learning about Salem andThe Cruciblein school.

What if witchcraftwasreal? What if Tituba and her husband John really had magical abilities, and later historians had just dismissed them as the result of rotten rye or group hysteria? Tituba herself hadn’t been killed along with the nineteen others, after all.

Jamie shook his head at himself a little as his stride lengthened out on the downslope of the crag’s pathway. All he could really do at this point was speculate—because the one person who might be able to answer his questions didn’t want to talk to him.

Bran obviously didn’t want to ignore him, but he clearly hadn’t reached out to Jamie. And while Jamie was glad that Bran was back—and alive—it kind of stung that the fairy didn’t actually want to talk to him. Which was completely ridiculous, given the fact that Jamiebarelyknew him—and he certainly didn’t know how much of what little he thought he knew waseven real. Maybe Bran’s name wasn’t even Bran. Or anything that Jamie was capable of pronouncing.

Jamie shook his head again, trying to dispel the intrusion of his own scattered thoughts. Bran being with him might have been calming his agitation, but it wasn’t really helping his insatiable curiosity.

It did at least make him feel a little better about the state of his own sanity, though. Since Bran wasback, that meant he wasreal…

Except that Jamie had no actual evidence that the oversized probably-raven following him was anything other than a really fat bird.

Nothing other than a feeling deep in his bones.

So either magic was real, or he was losing his grip on sanity and reality.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

Jamie had gotten in the habit of leaving out milk and honey whenever he left his apartment now—always on the ledge of the window that faced away from busy Nicolson Street, which seemed to be the bookas’ preferred location. The fact that every day when he came home it had been partially drunk helped to make him feel a little less like he might be hallucinating or delusional… although no one else had confirmed that the milk was missing.

And maybe he was actually dissociating or having a psychotic break and drinking it himself or pouring it in the sink or something.

Jamie didn’tthinkso, but it wasn’t like he had a camera in his apartment recording things. He couldn’t afford to buy one, either.

So he was operating on the assumption that he hadn’t gone insane and that fairies were real.

Even if it wasn’t the most reasonable choice, it at least made him feel like he could actually go about his daily existence without panicking.

He’d also calmed down a bit since Bran had reappeared in the sky several weeks ago—he didn’t see the big raven often, butevery now and then, Jamie thought he caught a glimpse of a black shadow behind him while he ran or walked to the museum, of a massive bird perched among the leaves of one of the trees with leaves shading to orange, red, and brown outside the library or on the slanted roofs of the city.

He no longer felt the constant, restless pressure tomove. He still liked running, of course, but he was back to his old habit of running every other day or so—not the punishing every day and sometimes twice routine he’d fallen into while Bran was gone.

It also meant he was less short-tempered with Trixie and Rob, and he’d taken them out for curry to apologize for being an ass. They’d been very good humored about it, although Jamie was pretty sure that they both remained skeptical when it came to Jamie’s taste in men. Even Trixie, who had been trying to get Jamie a steady boyfriend for years, had stopped trying to push him into the arms of various guys.

Not that Jamie wanted to be pushed. He used to appreciate her efforts to give him something of a love life, but now he just wasn’t interested.

He knew it was because of Bran, even though that was clearly impossible. Not only was Bran not even human and certainly not interested—the fairy wouldn’t eventalkto him—but Jamie didn’t even know if such a relationship was at all feasible.

Not that anyone was asking.

Jamie finished making a noodle dish—not quite casserole, since he hadn’t baked it, but cheesy pasta with veg on a pot on the stove—for dinner and took his bowl to his recliner so that he could watch a few episodes ofMidsomer MurdersorFather Brown.

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