Glimmers of Thorns Read online

  “Have you seen her lately?” Lucas said. “Imogen, I mean?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s stopped coming to school. Teachers said she has mono.” I didn’t even bother to roll my eyes, the lie was so obvious. Glims didn’t get crap like mono. “Her parents said she’s prepping for her fancy Glimmering university.”

  “Oh,” Lucas said. He cleared his throat. He didn’t want to talk about Imogen. I didn’t want to talk about Imogen. And neither of us could get her off our minds. “Anyway.” He drummed his hands against his mug. “Aubrey knows something’s going on.”

  “She probably just thinks Portland is weirder than she thought,” I said. “Or she’s just trying to sound interesting so you’ll get back with her. Obviously—”

  “She knows something,” he said, his voice just sharp enough that I shut my mouth. “She said, ‘I think something weird is going on here’ and then she asked if I believed in paranormal phenomena.”

  “Probably thinks it’s aliens.”

  “I think we should be aware,” he said. “You said the Oracle is getting more and more obvious about these Humdrum attacks. Don’t you think she and her followers might be getting more and more obvious about the Glimmering world, too?”

  “She couldn’t do that,” I said. “She might try to scare the Humdrums away with their own superstitions, but she’d never—”

  “How do you know?” he said. “I don’t know what all the rules in your world are, Liv, but she’s not following them anymore, is she?”

  I should have been ready to argue back. His eyes flashed at me and he seemed more than a little worked up. But I couldn’t focus on that, because I was too busy turning into a useless puddle.

  He’d called me Liv, just like he used to when we were kids and just like Imogen used to before she turned into a crazy person. It meant we were the kind of friends who could use nicknames and get into arguments and still be chill with each other at the end of the day. I resisted the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. I tried to collect my stupid twitterpated pieces. “That’s a good point.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I made it.”

  He tried to look serious, but a little smile poked at the corner of his mouth.

  God, he was cute.

  Even if he did have the bad habit of talking about his multiple ex-girlfriends with someone who wished she was his current girlfriend.

  This was too complicated.

  “Keep an eye on her, then,” I said. A second later, I realized I’d given him an order to keep talking to Aubrey. Rein it in, Feye, I ordered, and added, “I’m not saying to, like, stalk her or anything. Just if she happens to say anything out of the ordinary, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m not getting back with her, just so you know.”

  It was my turn to get hot, and I did, brilliantly and completely. I could almost feel my cheeks giving off steam.

  Why was it so hard to keep my cool around him? Neither of us had anything to be embarrassed or nervous about. We were just two people having a conversation.

  “What about with Imogen?” I said.

  Instantly, I wanted to kick myself, but I forced myself to hold still and wait for his answer. We were friends. It had to be okay to at least ask.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know?” he said. “I mean, I’m not planning on getting back with her, either. But I didn’t like the way it ended.” He stared into his cocoa, and we both watched his fingers tap against the edge of the mug. “Like… Sorry, I don’t really know to explain it without getting all feelings-y on you.”

  “You can get feelings-y,” I said, much too quickly.

  He smiled a little, though it wasn’t the kind of smile that came from anywhere happy.

  “I feel like I didn’t get a lot of closure, I guess,” he said. “Everything was really sudden.”

  For the first time since everything had happened, calm settled between us like a pocket of fresh, clean air.

  “She broke up with me and I discovered magic exists in almost the same moment,” he said. “We’d kind of been fighting, but I didn’t expect her to dump me, not then. And then all this.” He looked around the room, his dark eyes still drinking everything in. “I feel like I’m running but I can’t catch up.”

  “It must be overwhelming,” I said. “Probably more than I realize, huh?”

  “Probably,” he said. His gaze settled on me. “And then there’s you.”

  And, in a second filled with total panic, I completely lost my powers of eye contact. I stared into my cocoa like someone was paying me to do it.

  “What’s going on with us?” he said.

  I shrugged. It was an impossible question to answer. “We’re friends,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The seconds dragged by. I heard a genie on the other side of the room squeal with laughter, but didn’t look over to see why.

  “Friends isn’t a bad thing,” I said.

  “No, it’s good,” he said quickly. “I just… I don’t know. I thought there was more.”

  “There was,” I said. “I don’t know if there is, though. You know?”

  It was only a fraction of the truth. I forced myself to look up, and then I couldn’t tear my eyes from the way a lock of his dark hair fell down onto his cheekbone.

  I pressed my tongue against the back of my front teeth, feeling the smooth curves of their enamel.

  I liked him, but I didn’t like that I liked him. Aubrey and Imogen had liked him, too, and he’d liked them back. If I got involved the way they had, what would that say about me? And yet, it was impossible not to want to get involved when my stomach leapt every time I looked his way. My thoughts chased each other in circles.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not good at this kind of thing.”

  “Could have fooled me,” I said, before I could think about the words.

  He chuckled, but it was like he was laughing at himself, and not in a nice way. “I know how I must come across,” he said. “New girlfriend every two months.”

  He was like the dude version of Imogen. No wonder they’d hit it off.

  “It’s not my business,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean, you know.”

  This was the worst conversation I’d ever had.

  I let all my air out in a long, silent sigh, until I was completely empty. My energy fizzled and relaxed. I took several long breaths in and out before I was ready to talk.

  “Why do you get into relationships so quickly?” I said.

  I forced myself to look at him like this was a normal conversation. And then I waited.

  He was silent. I heard him shuffle his feet under the table. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know,” he said.

  I kept waiting.

  The bell on the door jingled and a burst of cool air swept in, along with a naiad wearing a Portland State University backpack over her pea coat. Instantly, all my attention was on her. Water creatures were not in my good graces right now. But she didn’t have the single-minded energy the Oracle’s sprites usually carried with them. Sprites were loyal to the point of being cultish; this naiad’s energy was scattered and she instantly started complaining to one of the baristas about her economics class. I kept one eye on her and turned back to Lucas.

  “I don’t know why,” he said. His voice was quiet, his shoulders hunched like he wanted to cave in on himself. “I know it’s dumb.”

  I pressed my fingertips against the hot side of my mug. “It’s not dumb,” I said.

  “Maybe I just take after my mom,” he said. “She goes through relationships pretty fast, too.”

  He was trying to make a joke, but I was a faerie, and I knew full well it wasn’t funny. I put my hand on the table, palm up toward him.

  “Can I?” I said. Butterflies flew in circles around my stomach. “I’m an empath. Kind of a good one, to be honest. Can I just, like… feel what you mean?”


  Some emotion pulsed off of him, something white and sparkling and scared. “You can really do that?” he said.

  “Dude,” I said. “You would not believe what I can do.”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked across the room, where a genie was spinning clouds of glittering pink smoke into elaborate sculptures to entertain her friends. I laughed, and he put his hand in mine.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  It was easy to focus all my attention on his skin against mine. His palm gave off gentle heat, and if I followed the heat I could trace a line through his arm and right to his core, to that weird place that was heart and stomach and sternum all at once, where the strongest emotions took root.

  “Think about everyone you’ve ever dated,” I said. “Just kind of remember what it was like to be with them and what it was like when you broke up.”

  And then I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the feelings.

  Buried and insulated in the stillness of our soft breathing, I tumbled headfirst onto a roller coaster. Heat and cold came at me in shifting waves, images of red hair or brown eyes or a ballerina’s ankle, tense with the weight of supporting her body as she stretched into a long, perfect line.

  With each glimpse of a girl came thrills of excitement or the warmth of trust, broken up by cool gray valleys of sadness and loss. And always, threaded through everything, like the thick string at the center of a pearl necklace, I could feel him.

  I stretched my mind and tried to encompass every bit of the Lucas at the center of things. I reached out into cool air and wide spaces, and endless, flat walls of gray stretching out in every direction. Beneath my feet, the ground dropped away to a thousand miles of nothing.

  Lucas, at his deepest, most constant core, was the loneliest person I had ever felt.

  I squeezed his hand tighter, tethering myself to the warmth of his palm as the vast emptiness stretched out inside of him. Inside, where no one else could see, Lucas felt like nothing at all.

  It was too much. I brought my focus back out of him, traveling up out of that cavernous loneliness and into his emotions and memories and muscles and skin until finally, I was back to his palm, then back to mine, and then back inside myself, where the lay of the land was messy and broken but familiar. I opened my eyes to see him staring at me.

  I stared back.

  “Damn,” I breathed.

  “That was…” he said, and then he couldn’t seem to think of anything that could come next.

  “Could you feel all that?” I said. Did he always, or was he numb to it? I’d felt Lucas; I wasn’t sure what it was like to be Lucas.

  He frowned and kept staring at me. “I’m not sure,” he said slowly.

  Our hands still rested together on the table, palms cupping one another. I noticed, but I didn’t pull away.

  “Dude?” I said. “I don’t want to date you.”

  His face fell. A wave of the same gray emptiness whooshed off of him, and I shivered. It felt exactly like someone had opened the Pumpkin Spice door again and let the cold in.

  “I figured,” he said. He forced a smile and looked down at his drink.

  I squeezed his hand. “I want to be your friend,” I said.

  He looked up.

  “I really like you,” I said. “But if I try to get into a relationship right now, I’m just going to screw it up. And I don’t think you need another girlfriend.” I watched him, fighting the urge to wrap him in my aura and keep him close. “If we get together, it’s going to go great for a little while, and then we’re going to start failing to live up to each other’s expectations and we’re going to break up and it’ll suck. If we’re friends, though, we never have to break up.”

  I thought about Imogen and bit my tongue. But whatever I had with Lucas would never be as intense as what I had with Imogen.

  Anyway, it was worth trying this friendship thing again. Lucas was worth the risk.

  “You idiot,” Elle shouted from behind us. I twisted around in my chair in time to see her hit Kyle on top of the head with a dishcloth behind the counter. It made his already unruly hair stand up in little peaks. “That’s Star Trek, not Star Wars.” She grabbed his shirt and pulled him in until their noses were almost touching. “I raised you better than this,” she said, in a low, way-too-intense voice.

  He cracked up and kissed her, and she melted into him for a second before spinning around to wipe up the counter.

  I loved what they had. And someday, if I was really lucky, I’d find it for myself.

  In the meantime, I wasn’t going to fill in that gap with a lot of halfway attempts. I deserved better than that. So did Lucas.

  “I think you just need friends, dude,” I said. “Like, real friends. Without expiration dates.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked. “Why are you calling me ‘dude’ all of a sudden?” he said.

  “Because we’re friends, dude. We’re bros.”

  He laughed. I still didn’t let go of his hand.

  “I think you keep trying to find The One, and then you get really lost when people turn out not to be her,” I said. It was the last time I was planning on getting all sappy with him, so I pushed ahead before he could say anything. “And I think it makes you lonely. And I don’t want you to be lonely. So, I guess, what I’m saying is, I’m here. And it’s not because you’re going to bring me flowers or because we’re going to live happily ever after. It’s just because I think you’re cool and I want you in my life.”

  He smiled, a real one this time that made the corners of his eyes start to crinkle. “I’m okay with that,” he said.

  “You should be,” I said. “Because I’m kind of a badass friend. I bring fairy-dust cookies on your birthday.”

  I finally let go of him. My hot chocolate had cooled, so I waved my hand over it and watched as steam curled up from the cup. He held out his mug and I did the same for his.

  He raised his drink.

  “Cheers,” he said. “Dude.”

  Chapter Six

  “They’re building new fountains,” I said, my voice a low, urgent whisper. “I flew Daniel to a friend’s birthday party in Oregon City yesterday on a magic carpet and saw them installing a new fountain right down by the river. The entire crew was Glim.”

  Isabelle pursed her lips and glanced over at Daniel, who’d come to the rose garden with me to get out of the house. He was sitting on a bench down the walkway from us and playing a game on his phone, which I thought wasn’t quite dramatic enough an activity to justify the suspicious look on Isabelle’s face.

  “You’ve got to chill out,” I said.

  “There’s a war on, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “It’s not a war,” I said.

  Though if the Oracle kept spreading her reach like this, it might become one sooner rather than later. The fountain in Oregon City was one thing, but I’d heard rumors at school that the Oracle was expanding her personal reach down south as far as Medford, clear down at the bottom of the state. After Oregon, she’d move into the next states, and after that, who knew?

  Isabelle groaned and leaned back on our bench. A strand fell out of her loose black braid. “Haidar says I’m too high-strung about all this. He thinks your Faerie Queen is on our side too, by the way.”

  “I still don’t get why you don’t,” I said.

  “I don’t trust anyone who can’t be bothered to put her boots on the ground,” Isabelle said. “While all this has been going on, I haven’t heard a peep from our queen. That’s not a good sign. But Haidar doesn’t agree. And maybe he’s right. He’s known her for years, you know.”

  My stomach flipped over every time she mentioned the queen. Amani still hadn’t contacted me. I’d told her about the fountain in Oregon City, and all I’d gotten in response was a single-word text: Thanks. It wasn’t much to go on.

  “If they’re friends, can’t he just, I don’t know, call her?” I said.

  Restless, she tapped her feet against the pavement beneath us.
The ground was dry, though clouds hovered overhead.

  “They haven’t talked in a long time,” she said. She glanced over at me. “They’re still on good terms and he still thinks she’s worth trusting. It’s just, Haidar’s past is kind of… complicated. He doesn’t talk to other Glims much.”

  So much for that.

  “Lucas thinks some of the Hums are getting suspicious,” I said. “His ex-girlfriend saw some Glim kids by the Oracle’s Fountain, and they weren’t being discreet. Like, at all.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Isabelle said. “The Council had to glamour a bunch of memories last year when sprites burst out of one of the fountains downtown. The Oracle called in a few Council members on special assignment and fed them some story about the sprites’ population growing so quickly they outgrew their fountains. Load of crap. She’d let them off the leash too much and they got overexcited.”

  My ears perked up when she mentioned the Council. At “special assignment,” I remembered why: My parents had gotten into a nastier-than-usual argument last year, something about Dad accepting a special assignment from the Oracle and Mom not thinking it was a good idea. I wished now I’d paid more attention to the content of the argument, not just how sick it had made me feel.

  It might be worth talking to Mom to talk about it, but I barely saw her these days. She seemed as fed up with our family life as I was.

  “What’s going on with you guys, anyway?” Isabelle said.

  “With who?” I said.

  She nudged my foot with hers. “Lucas,” she said.

  I considered claiming there was nothing there. But Isabelle was a witch, not an idiot.

  Instead, I settled for a truth that didn’t get anywhere near how I felt. “Nothing’s happening,” I said. “He dated my Oracle-loving ex-best friend, and the girl before that—the one who saw those kids at the Fountain—is not the nicest person I’ve ever met. I like Lucas, but he has horrible taste in women. I don’t want to be next on the list.”

  “I respect that,” Isabelle said.