“Because he’s the one that helped me.” She plays with the bracelet on her wrist. “Well, he brought me to Mildred.”
I sink into a chair next to her. “W-what?”
He did, and he didn’t tell me?
Why?
It makes no sense. Especially, considering how close we have gotten.
Well, before my fingers turned black and he left me to sleep alone.
“I had to tell you, Sol.”
A part of me wants to lurch from my chair and run from this conversation. The other part of meneedsto listen to her. After all, she is my friend, and she deserves for me to be open with her.
“Everly…” The rest of the words escape me.
“Hector gave me this.” She lifts her hand, showing off a red bloodstone. “He’s going to make it into a necklace soon.”
I blink, but it doesn’t disappear. None of this disappears.
It cannot be true.
None of this is real.
I’m still sleeping.
I sink my thumb into my left palm and wince at the sting of pain.
It is real.
I take a deep breath and try to approach this calmly. “What type of magic do you have, Everly?”
Her brow creases as she traces a long scratch on the table. “I can alter time.”
That’s possible? Altering time?
It never occurred to me that someone could do something like this.
“How?”
She continues tracing the lines in the table. “I can go forward, but only a little. I can pause time too, and Hector thinks I can also go back in time.”
Hector thinks?
Hector. Hector. Hector.
I’m going to stomp his foot so hard when I see him.
“So…” I begin as I try to make sense of everything, “…you would have been born with this ability had the gods not taken Bloodstone magic forty summers ago?”
She nods. “Yes.”
I rub my aching temples and internally rage a war against Hector. How dare he keep this from me? How dare he make me think I had to go to the cave with him? How dare he make me fall for him all over again?
She keeps talking about him. “Hector doesn’t want me traveling in time. He says it would be catastrophic to mess with Fate.”
I throw my hands wide. “Then why would he encourage your magic?”
