see him again. Hmm…That was weird.
He paused, considering what I’d asked him. “Eventually, yeah.”
Chapter 8
As Alex patched the bite on my neck, his words lingered in my head. Eventually. Eventually, he’d be back, but when? Did he even know?
I was sitting on the kitchen table, with my feet up on one of the chairs, as Alex stood in front of me, patting my neck with a cotton ball.
“What exactly do you mean by eventually?” I asked him, flinching from the pain. “’Just how long are you talking about? And why will you be gone? Can’t you just break the promise?” I mean he was good at breaking promises to me, so why not to Dyvinius.
He gave me a funny look. “You know, you ask more questions than anyone I’ve ever known.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, if you’d just tell me things, then I wouldn’t have to ask the questions.”
He shook his head, trying not to smile. “Well, I’m not sure when I’ll be back—there’s no time frame for what I’ll be doing. And I won’t break the promise because I can’t. It’s binding because I made it in the City of Crystal. It’s how things work—promises are unbreakable when made there.”
“Well, can you at least tell me what you have to do while you’re be there?” I asked as he pulled out a square piece of gauze.
“It’s better if I didn’t.” He peeled off the wrapper from the gauze. “Trust me, you’re better off not knowing.”
It was bad—I could tell. “Well, if it’s that bad then why are you doing it?”
He took the roll of tape out, looking very uncomfortable. “Because…as of right now it’s the only way I can think of to get some answers.” He ripped two pieces of tape off and tossed the roll back into the first aid kit. “And also because…” He struggled with his words as he taped the gauze to my neck. “Because I’m hoping if I do, then maybe you’ll start…trusting me more. And perhaps…” He closed the first aid kit, picked it up, and headed back toward the cupboard where he’d gotten it from. “You’ll forgive me.”
He said it so quietly I wasn’t sure if he’d actually said it. Before I could get around to asking him to please repeat himself, Laylen entered the kitchen.
“So I’m assuming you need a normal Foreseers crystal ball to get this Ira crystal ball,” he said to Alex as he slid onto the table beside me.
Alex shut the cupboard and nodded. “Yeah, does Adessa have one?”
Laylen nodded, and we followed him out of the room to go get one. I couldn’t help but look at Alex, thinking about what I thought he said—that I’d forgive him. The more I thought about it, though, the more I was convinced I’d misunderstood him.
After we got a regular old vision-seeing kind of crystal ball from Adessa, we went into the now cleaned up living room. Evidently, Adessa had used magic to clean and mend up Laylen’s and Alex’s mess. The shelves were back up on the dark blue walls, the knickknacks standing on them. The apothecary table was no longer broken and the black candles were topping it once again. And the crack in the wall had miraculously been fixed.
It was really early in the morning, and Adessa had decided she needed to do some inventory in her store. Alex had suggested to Aislin that she should go help Adessa. I think he did it so that Aislin would be distracted from the fact that when Nicholas showed up, he would be taken away to the City of Crystal. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to tell her, but there was no use trying to argue with him. Whatever the promise was, he wanted to keep it a secret from her.
While we had been getting things set up, Alex had informed me that he still wasn’t sure if this was going to work. All he knew was that Foreseers did have a Ira crystal ball, which allowed them to travel to and from places that people normally couldn’t travel to—like say for instance The Underworld—but he wasn’t sure how it would work exactly. All we could hope for is that we’d be able to get Nicholas to tell us. For some reason, I had a feeling that this was going to be tricky. Faeries were tricky after all, so getting information from one seemed liked it would be tricky.
The violet ribbons swirled and danced inside the crystal ball,