“It was locked!” Laurel said. She had turned her key into the deadbolt not thirty seconds ago.
“Human locks? Please,” Tamani said. “May as well leave the door open.”
“You really shouldn’t be in here without permission,” she muttered, refusing to give up her anger so easily.
“I apologize. Again,” he said, the tiniest hint of tension entering his tone. “I hardly ever come in here unless I need to deliver something like”—he gestured almost aimlessly toward her table—“you know. It’s not like I stalk you or peek in your windows or anything.”
“Good.” But she couldn’t think of anything else to say. So she grabbed the only homework she had — a Speech assignment she hadn’t planned on even looking at until after dinner — and sat at her desk, pretending to read it.
“Are you upset?” Tamani asked.
“Am I upset?” Laurel asked, slamming her hands down on the desk and turning to face him. “Are you kidding me? You ignored me all weekend, picked a fight with David in the hall, drugged Ryan, and had stupid Yuki hanging all over you every chance she got. I’m not ‘upset,’ Tamani, I’m mad!”
“Drugged Ryan? What happened to Ryan?”
Laurel held up a hand. “Don’t even try the innocent act on me. I am so sick of it.”
“What happened to Ryan?” Tamani repeated.
Now Laurel threw both hands in the air. “Someone hit him with a memory potion. There’s a twelve-hour block he just simply doesn’t remember. Convenient, isn’t it?”
“Actually, yes,” Tamani said.
“I knew it,” Laurel said. “I knew it! I told you never to use those potions on my family and friends again. I was very specific!”
Tamani just stood silently, looking at her.
“But no,” Laurel ranted on, feeling as though something had burst inside her and now that everything had started coming out, she couldn’t stop it. “No, you have to be Tamani with the plan. Tamani manipulating the stupid worthless humans. Tamani going behind my back and lying to me!”
He met her gaze and held it until it was she who had to look away. “You’re not even going to ask?”
“Ask what?”
“If I did it.”
Laurel rolled her eyes. “Did you do it?” she asked, more to placate him than anything.
“No.”
She hesitated only a moment. “Did one of your sentries do it?”
“Not as far as I know. And if they did, it was a violation of a direct order and I will see them relieved of their position here and sent right back to Orick.”
She looked up at him in shock now. His voice was too firm, too steady. He wasn’t lying. Mortification washed over her. “Really?” she asked softly.
“Really.”
She sank down into her chair, feeling the grudge she’d been nursing all day start to melt.
“I suppose I should be used to it by now,” he said quietly.
“What?” Laurel asked, not sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“The way you still don’t trust me.”
“I trust you,” Laurel countered, but Tamani just shook his head.
“No, you don’t,” he said, laughing bitterly. “You have confidence in me; in my abilities. If you’re in trouble, you know I’ll save you. That’s not the same as trust. If you trusted me you’d have at least asked me before assuming I was guilty.”
“I should have asked,” Laurel blurted, feeling unbearably small. But he wasn’t looking at her now; he was staring out the window. “I was going to ask, but you were avoiding me! What was I supposed to think?” She stood and walked over to him, willing him to turn around and look at her. “I’m sorry,” she finally whispered to his back.
“I know,” he said with a heavy sigh. Nothing more.
She laid a hand on his shoulder and tugged. “Look at me.”
He turned and when he met her gaze, she wished he hadn’t. Pain radiated from his face — pain and betrayal. He placed his hand over hers and the pain turned to longing.
Desperate to be looking anywhere but Tamani’s eyes, Laurel studied the hand covering hers, at once so familiar and so foreign. Tamani’s hands weren’t like David’s, thick and strong. They weren’t much bigger than Laurel’s own, with long, slender fingers and perfectly shaped nails. She spread her hand under his, moving ever so slightly to allow his fingers to fall into the hollows between hers. She could feel Tamani’s eyes on her as she stared at their hands, wanting this so badly.
And knowing she couldn’t have it.
Unwilling to go forward, unsure how to go back, Laurel looked desperately up at Tamani. He seemed to understand her silent plea. Disappointment clouded his expression, but with it, determination. He lifted his hand from hers, leaving a glittering print on her skin. Then he slid her hand slowly down his arm, pushing it from him until it once again hung by her side.
“I’m sorry,” Laurel whispered again, and she was. She didn’t want to hurt him. But she couldn’t give him what he wanted. Too many people needed her now, and sometimes it felt like she was letting them all down.
After a long look Tamani cleared his throat and turned back to the window. “So we know I didn’t give Ryan anything,” Tamani said, a little stiffly. “And I’ll make sure none of the other sentries did either. But if that’s the case, what are we left with?”
“Yuki seems like the most obvious answer.” Laurel went over to her bed and sat with her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. “And if she can make memory elixirs, she must be a Fall.”
“Yes. If.” Tamani paused thoughtfully. “But why give him the memory elixir at all? He didn’t remember anything.”
“But he did see the trolls, at least for a second. Maybe it was a precaution? In case he remembered later?”
“It just seems… sloppy. She had to know we’d notice his memory loss.”
“Unless…” Laurel hesitated. “Unless she doesn’t think we would notice. If she doesn’t realize I’m a faerie, she might assume I wouldn’t know about things like this.”
“Which takes us back to ‘if Klea’s actually telling the truth,’ which none of us really believe,” Tamani said, shaking his head.
“I don’t trust Klea, but other than giving us guns and showing up at convenient moments, she’s never done anything suspicious. She’s saved my life almost as often as you have. Maybe we should stop being paranoid and just… trust her,” Laurel said, trying to put some enthusiasm behind it.
Tamani shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt it.” Circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough — if only they could know for certain that Yuki was a Mixer. “What about your experiment this weekend? Did it work?”
Laurel flopped backward onto her mattress, arms flung wide. “Depends. Did the cells stay alive under the globe long enough to process the phosphorescent? Yes. Did I learn anything useful? No.”
“What happened?”
Laurel stood and walked over to the experiment she still had set up at her desk — two small glass dishes with clear, sticky residue in them and a closed light globe sitting nearby. “This is Yuki’s sap. This is a little of mine. I didn’t want to dilute it in sugar water… I wasn’t even sure it would work with the phosphorescent. But it did, and both samples glowed. Mine only glowed for half an hour. Yuki’s glowed for forty-five minutes.”
“But Katya said she glowed for a whole night!”
Laurel nodded. “But she also said they would drink whole vials of this stuff, and it makes sense that most photosynthesis would take place in our skin. I’m not sure a difference of fifteen minutes rules out the possibility that Yuki’s a Fall.”