Zekia had given her orders and they were circling through the creature’s mind over and over and over, like a melody.
The door to the room—to the cell—creaked open and Wesley didn’t need to look to know it was her. It was always Zekia and never Ashwood, as though the Kingpin could rarely stand to see his prodigy so weak and useless.
“You look less tired today,” Zekia said. “Did you sleep? I couldn’t sleep a wink with all those people out there.”
By people, she meant the dead.
Wesley turned to her. “It’s not like you don’t deserve to be haunted a little bit, kid.”
Zekia laughed, like Wesley was very naïve and she found it very funny.
“They’re not haunting me, silly,” she said. “Just letting me know that they’re there. Clogging up my head with all the futures they could have had and the things they wanted to be before they died. I don’t mind it so much, but the worst of them are the ones who think they should have lived. Like anyone deserves to die.”
Wesley thought lots of people deserved to die.
Probably both of them included.
“You’re not a Spiritcrafter, kid. You can’t talk to the dead.”
“I didn’t say I was talking to them. They’re talking to me. Or just existing around me and getting their alternative futures all muddled in my brain. Don’t they bother you?”
“No,” Wesley said. “But then again, I’m not crazy.”
Zekia’s smile twitched, but she swallowed whatever emotion she didn’t feel like feeling at that moment and walked toward him. Her dress bounced up and down with her steps.
Zekia always wore a white dress, just as she always dressed Wesley in suits—like he was a doll she’d been given and that she cherished as her favorite toy.
“I could teach you,” she said.
She knelt down next to him.
“Teach me to be crazy? I’ll pass.”
Wesley kept his eyes on her hands, waiting for her to snap her fingers and let the silver slivers of her magic trickle around his wrists and loosen his restraints.
But she didn’t.
Instead she put her hands on her hips and shook her head admonishingly.
“I could teach you to master your magic like Amja was helping me to do,” she said.”When you learn, you can help me and all the other Crafters we’ve found be safe again and for always. The new realm we’re going to build will be so much stronger with you, Wesley. Two Intuitcrafters to lead them would be the best thing they could hope for.”
Zekia really did think that by telling Wesley who and what he was, she’d endear him to her and make him think that they were cut from the same cloth. But telling Wesley he was a Crafter had only reminded him that nobody, not a single soul in the realms, was made of the same dark thing that he was. He was uniquely Wesley Thornton Walcott and the fact that he had true magic just made him even more of a force to be reckoned with.
It made him think of new ways to bring Dante Ashwood down.
Zekia sighed when Wesley didn’t answer.
She tucked her hair behind her ears and then snapped her fingers with a loud huff, like just talking to him was exhausting.
Wesley watched as her magic snaked around his wrists, until he felt a small jolt and the string that bound him dropped to the floor. Almost immediately he felt his magic stir inside of him, nervous and also eager.
It had been starved for so long and, finally, it could sense the time to strike was near.
“Remember how I said you were crazy?”
Zekia nodded. “You say that a lot. It’s a little mean.”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “Well, it turns out I might be crazier.”
And then his hand shot out and Zekia flew backward into the shadow demon. The two of them collided with each other and then the wall, the demon’s smoky limbs tangled into Zekia’s like some kind of an awful jigsaw.
Zekia made to stand, but Wesley kept his hand firm, pinning her to the floor. He pushed every wish and hope he had inside of him toward her in a tunnel of gray magic.
Just like the one she had tried to use on Saxony back on Ashwood’s hidden island.
The one Wesley had jumped in front of that nearly cost him his sanity.
Wesley summoned every single thought he could muster and launched them at her in a tirade. All of his wants and desires. And then futures, things he hadn’t even realized he knew. Possibilities of what