Page 79 of Research with Rivals
I folded my arms across my chest as if to hold myself together while fixated on the precise spot where he’d disappeared. Moments, maybe hours later, that warm, reassuring hand was at my lower back.
“He isn’t like me,” I said.
Ambrose huffed an acknowledgment.
“He doesn’t have the answers I need.”
“Is it possible that you put too much expectation on that missing piece? He wasn’t there for you when you needed his help, so you assumed he took all the answers with him?”
I lifted my palm to wipe a tear from my cheek, but Ambrose’s was already there, his hand warm against my cold skin. He brought his finger with the captured tear to his mouth and licked it.
A giggle bubbled up inside me. “You are so odd.”
“I’m not fond of your tears,” he said. “But I’ll need to make a note that they taste like sunlight.”
I shook my head in stunned disbelief. “What does that even mean?”
He dropped his hand from my lower back, and when I turned to look at him, he had his secret notebook and pencil out.
“Are you?—”
“I told you, I’m taking notes.”
Then I snorted with laughter, and he smiled.
It was so easy—just this. Ambrose knew I would tie my mind in knots with what-ifs. So, he’d picked a ridiculous way to distract me from what I couldn’t change. Just the two of us here felt nice. It felt like something I could get used to. I wished we had the luxury of exploring what was between us, without complication, for a while longer, but that wasn’t the case. The fae leaders and gods needed their problem solved. The answer felt within our grasp.
Ambrose tucked his notebook back into his pocket and regarded me. “You think location is why we couldn’t burn the rope connecting us?”
Of course he knew where my mind had wandered to. I nodded.
“The Vesten Library in Sandrin, then?”
“The Vesten Library,” I replied.
We explainedourselves to Lord Arctos, who waved us away and said he’d meet us in Sandrin to check if it worked. It seemed like further proof that Lord Arctos had indeed been meddling, though I wasn’t sure how. Our presence here had not been required. He had wanted us here for something, not necessarily to test our theories on him and the Vesten Point. It was a mystery, but it wasn’t my biggest problem at the moment.
Carter was nowhere to be found, but ageless magic hung thick in the air around Vesten House. I hypothesized, with no small amount of disbelief, where he might have disappeared to.
He couldn’t have gone beyond the veil, right?
For the first time, I wondered if I was actually asking my veil cat. If I was asking a question to which I already knew the answer. The veil cat that lived within my thoughts stretched deep on her front paws, as if she couldn’t be bothered to participate in this internal discussion.
Ambrose and I had no reason to wait. We knew what we had to do next, so together, we walked toward the treeline behind Vesten House.
“You lead, I’ll follow,” he said.
I smirked. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘I’ll run, you chase.’”
His ears pinkened, and his gaze darted away from mine as a low rumble emanated from his chest.
“I think your wolf likes that.”
When he glanced at me again, gold cascaded across his eyes. “We’ll give you a ten-minute head start.”
A shiver shot down my spine, and I ran into the forest before I could think better of it.
Fire burned through me with each step. I didn’t need the candy to shift. My veil cat and I might not have fully understood each other, but in this, we did. As I jumped, I shifted. The move was seamless, like I’d seen Lord Arctos do. One step, my feet left the earth; the next, my paws landed back on it.
