Page 24 of Harnessed in Gold

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

He shoots a skeptical glance at Rime.

“He was great,” I rush to say. “As soon as I started to freak out, he got me away.”

Rime shrugs, looking smug and unbothered with his back against the fence and his elbows propped on the top rail.

Leo asks me no more, but his concern and indignation say enough.Did he carry you like I did? Did he hold you while you cried? Did he promise he’d never let anything hurt you again?

Pulse racing, I look away.

“She’s fine, Hawthorn,” Rime says through a barely concealed smirk. “She’s tough.”

When I snort, both guys’ heads snap to me. Rime is still smiling, but Leo’s brows are so low and pinched I can barely see his eyes underneath them.

I don’t tell them what I’m thinking. That I have so much work to do, and no time in which to do it. I need to practice. I need to be as tough as Rime claims I am. This mission is only going to get harder and more dangerous the closer we get to that weapon. And when we finally find it?

I gulp.

I need to be able to face it.Withouta babysitter. Without someone to carry me away and let me cry on their shoulder. There’s no time for that. Not when there’s an entire realm to save.

I thank Rime for helping me today, and with a wave, start off for my dorm. Turning and walking backwards, I add, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to find any real answers.”

Rime shakes his head. “Don’t underestimate yourself, little psychic.”

For once, Leo agrees with him. “The information will prove valuable in the long run. I know it will.”

Maybe.

But willI?

CHAPTER FIVE

On Tuesday,I find myself yet again walking around campus, trying to pay attention to what I sense and subjecting myself to more confusion and frustration. After following a random rush of panic on my way out of Modern Grammar, I wind up in the basement stairwell, consoling a sobbing freshman who failed a Psych exam. In Brit Lit, during a discussion on the seven deadly sins inThe Canterbury Tales, I’m consumed by the homesickness of the girl to my left, and positively blasted by the desire of the guy behind me for the guy two rows in front.

It’s like now that I’ve let my clairsentience out of the gate, it’s running wild in the pasture, kicking up its heels and rolling in the grass. I can’tstoppaying attention to emotions, and I can’t focus on anything else. At this rate, I’m going to flunk all my classes. Is ‘helping find a faerie weapon’ a valid excuse for missing assignments and failing tests? Can someone write me a note for that? Leo and Rime insisted they and Topaz would be searching every second they had, and that Avery, Aaron, and I should carry on with our classes, but maybe more of us on the hunt is better? We could get them to glamour us doctors’ notes, take a few days off fromclass, and find this thing before Brier’s team even shows up in town.

Then Nàdar will be safe, the faeries will leave, and life will go back to normal.

Except, faeries or no faeries, I’ll still be psychic. There’s no normal to go back to. The thought has me staring into space yet again, my World Religions textbook lying open and neglected beside me on my bed. It’s pointless trying to do homework right now. I’m just wasting valuable time.

I hop up, and bracing myself, open my bottom desk drawer. Two weeks ago, I shoved everything that had to do with my psychic ability—and, I admit, with Leo—into that drawer and slammed it shut. Like I could trap the whole dumpster fire in there and keep it from ever leaking out. The problem is, my ability is inme, not in my amethyst and not in the witchcraft stuff Avery gave me. They’re tools to help me handle my ability, not the cause of it.

I dig under the notebooks and papers in the drawer until my fingers finally touch cold silver: the cage around my amethyst. I unearth it, the chain sliding out of the pendant hook and making a glinting puddle on the floor. First order of business: cleanse the crystal and put the damn necklace back on. At the very least, it will dampen those ‘white noise’ emotions I pick up all day long. Then maybe I won’t have to sit between those two guys in Brit Lit, feeling like the icing in an Oreo of lust.

I pull out Avery’s book,Protection Magick: Shielding, Warding, and Banishing for the Beginner Witch, and go to my favorite section, the one on crystals. Out of the collection of small stones she gave me, I pick out the hematite, two little obsidians, and best of all, a tiger’s eye. Almost as soon as I close my hand around that smooth golden stone, I fall in love. It’s soothing, like my amethyst, but also empowering. According to the book, it has the energies of earth and fire: protection and power. It’s like an amethyst with a kick.

Once all the crystals are cleansed and my necklace resting where it belongs on my chest, I go back to the book to scan the table ofcontents. What other techniques or tools can I use to mitigate the most dangerous emotions? The ones that assault me, drown me, knock me off my feet?

Because if the mill-workers and the riflemen were bad, what’s going to happen when I get close to the macguffin? A ring created to abuse nature and distort natural law? What isthatgoing to do to my feeble, newbie-psychic brain?

I read up on shielding cloaks again and try meditating a few more into existence. But on each attempt, my intuition takes me back to that wet, velvet cloak I imagined the first time. So I stop resisting and lean into it. Even though the velvet is damp, it’s warm, calming, and protective. And after practicing several times, I can conjure it in roughly one minute.

The lengthening slant of sunlight on the floor warns me that, at any minute, Liv will be back from class. Hastily, I slip the book under my pillow, then scoop up all the crystals, candles, and herbs and place them back in the drawer. By the time Liv bursts through the door, I’ve gone back to my World Religions chapter, and I even absorb some of it. Maybe all the meditating helps me focus.

Later in the evening, after a dining hall dinner of cheesesteak on stale rolls, I stretch out on my bed to read “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Liv sits at her desk with her earbuds in, dancing in her chair as she scrolls through diagrams of the molecular structure of god-only-knows-what. The Middle English on the facing pages of my edition ofThe Canterbury Talesis nowhere near as cryptic as what’s on her laptop screen. She plays down how smart she is, but one look at her coursework suggests otherwise.

While she’s distracted, I slide Avery’s book out from under my pillow and hide it between the covers of Chaucer like a kid watching YouTube on their phone during class. Curious, I skip straight to the final chapter, “Sigils and Servitors.” Next thing I know, I’m playing around with protection sigils in my notebook. I pass on the option to use symbols—planetary, alchemy, runes—and go for the simplest method. I’m no artist, but even I can draw letters, connecting themone to another in myriad ways. An L coming off the tail of a Y, a B with a G in its top bubble. This is doable. And once a sigil is made, it only needs a quick charging, like a crystal.