✧ ✧ ✧

It's already dark when Kadri, Ady, and I drive back to the apartment.

"Today went better than I was preparing myself for," Ady admits, pulling the car to a stop. I strangle my smirk when he rubs at his brow, and his fingers spattered with Gyoku's glitter smear the gold across his skin.

"Ruslan will kill you two when he finds you've spilled the glitter over his part of the room," Kadri says. She hasn't spoken a word about our bathroom conversation to anyone, but something's changed in her--she doesn't avoid looking into my face now.

"Who's the mysterious Ruslan I keep hearing about?" I ask.

"Mir's brother. They don't talk after their father died though, so you'd better don't mention him to Mir, you know?"

Another person pissed at Mir, why am I not surprised?

"I don't want to talk to Mir at all," I groan. He's lost my damn bones in four walls, the only thing that separates me from being swallowed back into an infinite abyss.

Pushing the car door open, I realize Ady and Kadri stay in their seats. "Aren't you coming to make sure I don't end the world while walking up the stairs?"

Adélard gives a small shrug. "I bet you can manage a dozen steps without burning the city."

I flick my eyes to Kadri and catch her staring. Upon meeting my gaze, she says the words I least expected to hear. "Thank you, Yara."

My mind goes blank. "For what?"

The corners of her lips drift downward, only to form a shy smile after. "For being you?"

For being me. No one's ever thanked me for that. In less than a week, I've accomplished more than in my entire life--I've met people who want me to be me, without demanding to prove myself, to change, to earn their love. If only I'd met them sooner...Maybe poets and dreamers are right after all, and we are never broken, we're always enough--all we need is the right people to see us?

"Good night!" Kadri and Ady's voices merge into one a moment before the engine roars.

"Good night," I smile, standing on the porch and watching the car take them into the night. They don't know I can't sleep. Yet they know I was a witch and a liar and a criminal, and they still choose me.

✧ ✧ ✧

I feel a little lightheaded as I walk into the apartment. "I'm back!" I announce, loud, because nobody's in the hall to scold me. Doesn't Mir always want to scold me? "Mir? Lav? Nilam?"

Silence.

"The witch is in the house! Light the torches, everyone!"

Stillness. Nothing moves, not a shadow.

A sense of foreboding settles over me. "Anyone?" Not the darkness again. Please, not alone. Mir won't leave me, not the Fire Girl, not in his precious apartment, not out of his sight.

Is this a trap? Is he waiting for me to let my guard down and retrieve my bones from where, as he believes, I've hidden them? Or maybe he's angry with me. Or tired of me. Damn, why do you even care about his feelings, Slavich? I shove the thought aside, trudging deeper into the murky hall. Yes, Mir's the one who brought me back to life, but he's also the one who promised to let me die again.

Darkness.

Darkness.

Darkness.

Why is the apartment so dark?

No, I don't need Mir. I'm perfectly functional alone, have always been. Still, this is the first time I find a place in the world where I want to stay, where I feel like I can belong.

A lonely lamp pours its dim light onto the windowsill in the living room, an old book open beside it. Running my fingers across the paper coarse with lines of letters, I lean over to read the first words:

I treated them as equals, and they neglected me. I treated them as wolves, and they claimed me their leader, said Leir Hellheith, the Broken King.

It's the very same book of tales Vlad once called unrealistic, the very same story where the king dies a hero and nobody saves him. Do you think heroes win here? Vlad asked the day we met.

Nobody would want to be a villain, Bogdan answered.

I would.

I click the lamplight off, and the dark sweeps over the story and closes around me, sending a slither of chill down my spine. Vlad is a villain now, but I'm not a hero either. Who's going to win then?

"Mir?" I call him again.

Nothing. Fear clings at me, cold and clammy. Please, Mir, don't leave me alone too. But he already has. I'm not his responsibility, I'm his implement. And he doesn't care for my feeling or my needs--or even my whereabouts since I'm wearing these humiliating bracelets so wherever I go and whatever I do, I can't use magic. I can't be dangerous.

I'm pathetic. I'll never belong here, not in his eyes.

The stillness tails in my wake and my trepidation grows stronger as I make my way to my room, shuddering at the darkness, shuddering at the thought of turning the lights on and seeing something that can't even be there.

A patch of moonlight stretches across the floor in my room, the balcony door ajar. I shrug off my jacket, and goosebumps cover my bare skin. Shivering, I cross over to shut the balcony with one of my jacket's sleeves still dangling from my forearm. The moonlight reflection shifts, following the glassy door, and falls over the escritoire, revealing what's on it.

My breath catches.

Why is it here? How? A jar of raspberry varenye, my favorite one. Nobody knows I love varenye, Mom and Tanya are dead, Bogdan is dead, and--

"Vlad." My voice comes out in a shaking whisper.

Still holding my breath, afraid to look over my shoulder, afraid to speak, I stand still. And in this moment of perfect quietness of the night, I finally hear a barely audible, rhythmical murmur of another breath behind my back.

I'm not alone in the dark.

Didn't Mir mention he had the apartment spelled? Guarded? But since when do ancient demons follow the rules, even the magical ones? Fear spikes in my chest, leaving my mouth dry. I wanted to find him, I longed to see his face again, but now...

"Vlad?" I repeat, my heart hammering.

He doesn't reply.

Clutching the pendant hanging around my neck--though I know its magic is useless against a demon, its wooden crescent black and discharged--and gathering all the strength I have left, I will myself to turn around. To spin around, as swiftly as possible.

"Vlad?"

But he's not there. Instead, my heart skips a beat as I see another face, his features a picture written in starlight. Mir. He is not spying on me, he's not mocking me--he is sleeping. In my bed.

Suddenly exhausted, I let go of my pendant and release my breath. Fear retreats. So Mir isn't angry or bored or playing manipulative games with me, he is...What exactly? He doesn't wake up, doesn't react while I take an uncertain step toward him. Is he drunk? Otherwise, what good reason did his subconsciousness have to let him fall asleep in the bed I was supposed to be spending my dreamless night in?

Careful not to make a sound, I crouch on the floor next to him, sniffing the air. He doesn't smell drunk. He smells of long roads and earth and rain.

"What were you thinking?" I whisper, my recent trepidation fading into something new. Gratitude. Mir hasn't left me, and I'm not alone in the dark.

I study his face, and it's almost like seeing a different person when he's not awake. No mask of neutrality, no pretense. His lips are parted ever so slightly, and the scar on his lower lip is a narrow, pale line, too accurate and flawless to be once split in a fight or get cut in an accident. Someone gave him this scar on purpose, as a reminder, as a token, or--a punishment.

I wish he told me his story. Where is his sigil scar that grants him supernatural powers and why doesn't his magic work anymore? I can't strip him naked to search for the scar, can I? I smirk at the thought.

Regardless, it's not the scars that make me wonder, it's him. Emotions are carved in his face, those which he's so adept to hide in the daylight. And it's those invisible to the eye yet notable to a human heart changes in one's expression that reveal Mir's real emotions to me now. The sadness in the curve of his mouth, the distress between his brows. His pupils dart behind his closed eyelids, his lashes trembling. Yet the ease, the candor with which his palm rests against the edge of my pillow is what I haven't encountered before. He is defenseless, at my mercy, mine.

"I want to trust you." My fingers stop a hair's breadth from Mir's cheek. What if I touched him? Would I think of this touch tomorrow or never again?

Would Mir accept this touch?

It appears he's never dated Polina, so who does he see when he looks into my face? What did Vlad tell him about me? Who I am to you, Mir? If only we'd met sooner. If only it hadn't been Vlad who had put us in each other's paths.

If only.

Grabbing the jar of varenye, I retrace my steps back to the hall and into the kitchen. I wanted to feel it all, didn't I? To remember what it was like to be alive. Though on my way to this wish, I somehow failed to remember that being alive meant also dreading getting your heart broken. Because who am I lying to? I'm still but a hopeless dreamer in pursuit of the impossible. My sister has taught me nothing. Fire has taught me nothing. Death has taught me nothing.

And we all know the tale of our world:

Dreamers do not survive.

✧ ✧ ✧

By the time tangerine dawn kisses the horizon, the varenye is gone and my lips, sweet and sticky with sugar, are the only reminder of it. I hope Polina won't be very mad since it'll be her job to burn all those calories later.

I've found Mir's laptop in the living room, and even though all his documents require a password, I can still open a web browser and get access to all human knowledge available. Sugar has a funny effect--it makes your brain work faster, a mundane kind of magic I still possess--and I came up with an idea. If Jasna and Euklas could give us nothing, maybe we've been doing it wrong?

Maybe to catch a demon, I need to think like a demon?

And since a sorcerous problem needs a sorcerous solution, I've spent the night trying to figure out that part and avoiding all other feelings and thoughts.

It's well past noon when the door of my room finally groans open, and then uneven, sleepy footsteps resonate in the hall. I would have given up another bone of mine to see Mir's face the moment he woke up and realized where he'd slept. Nevertheless, I order myself to stay in my chair and stare into the screen when his figure lingers at the kitchen's threshold.

Mir's hair is a mess, a pillow's left a mark on his cheek, and his eyes are red as though he hasn't slept at all. His gaze slowly grows sharper, traveling from me to the laptop to the empty jar. I brace myself for his grumbling, but he turns around and leaves without a word.

This is new.

His footsteps retreat, then another door flings shut, and water runs in the bathroom. He takes his time to wash and change and become the Mir I know, composed and serene, who once again leans against the kitchen doorframe.

"I don't recall giving you the permission to use my laptop," he says in a lecturing tone.

I smile inwardly. It's so much easier to tease him when he pretends to be serious. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Should I have asked for a notarized authorization before or after I found you drooling in my bed?"

"It's my apartment, I can sleep wherever I like. You don't need the bed anyway."

"Well, not for sleep..."

Surprise alters his features, but then he's quick to muster a scowl. Crossing over, he turns his back to me to make tea. "Where's everyone?"

"I am everyone."

"You returned alone last night?"

"Yep."

"Who's been keeping an eye on you then?"

A small laugh escapes from my lips. "You?"

He glances over his shoulder to search my face for a joke, and our eyes lock. I see his thoughts whirl behind his pupils, grasping and releasing explanations and finally finding the one. We were alone, which means I didn't just catch a glimpse of him sleeping--I watched him sleep, sat beside him, saw him when he let his walls down. But surprisingly, he's not angry. Something else flickers in his gaze, something...familiar. Honest. Warm.

And the warmth of his gray eyes slithers down my spine, folding this moment into something scary and real. Intimate.

I clear my throat, looking away. "Don't fret, I didn't strangle you, did I?"

Mir opens his mouth to counter, but his phone buzzes in his pocket. Mumbling something incoherent instead, he uses it as an excuse to leave for another room to talk. He's back in a few minutes though, having grown preoccupied. Silent, he pours himself a cup of tea and slides into the chair across the table from me.

Minutes trickle away, the silence between us thickening.

Mir doesn't speak.

I don't know what to say.

The awkwardness of this situation weighs on me, and I hate it more and more with every second wasted. I can't pretend to know what Mir thinks--or feels. And he doesn't know anything about me, except for the ridiculous rumors. I've experienced it before, this moment when you both share something but have no common memories to prove it's not an illusion. Unexpectedly, this is the very moment when I know I can use this silence to build something strong, a friendship. But I can also ruin it with a single wrong word.

Rapping my nails against the laptop, I stare at the paper where I listed the spell ingredients necessary for my new plan. There's one thing Mir and I have in common though. Magic. "I was thinking--"

"Have you ever--"

We both cut off, conflicted.

"So?" Mir frowns when I stay mute.

"You first."

His frown deepens. He finishes his tea in several gulps, then sets the cup aside. "Have you ever been to Lajariá's basilica?"

Now I frown, surprised. "No. Where is it?"

"Not far from the Northern Birch Park. The place used to function as a church, but then lightning struck one of the walls or something and the Angelic Order proclaimed the place unholy. Anyhow, that was many years ago, and now the basilica is used mostly for art venues. Do you think you can take a day off from hunting a demon?"

I tilt my head at him. "Is this a trick? Or are you inviting me to an art venue?"

"The only trick here," Mir sighs, leaning back in his chair, "is that I've forgotten that I promised to show up tonight. Nilam and everyone you know will be there too, and as much as I appreciate you stalking me in my sleep, I can't leave you alone."

I don't want to be left alone.

But I won't admit that out loud. "Can I add this day as an extra one to my year of freedom then?"

Mir rolls his eyes. "Yes."

I grin. "Yes."

Yes, I'm going to a party. In someone else's body, under someone else's name, and just for a night, but I'll live like a normal person. Should I wear a dress? Do my hair? Does Laverna have any blush for my skin tone? I want to look pretty.

"One more thing." Mir pushes off his seat, interrupting my galloping thoughts.

I watch him as he walks to the sink and fishes out a clean kitchen knife. The blade glints in his hand, and my muscles tense instinctively. Sharp objects never promise any good. Pressing the blade to his palm, Mir hesitates for a beat. Then he drives the knife down, wincing at a shallow cut. Blood drips down onto the floor.

Is it what I think it is? A spark of hope blossoms in my chest. I hold my forearms up, letting Mir smear his blood over my bracelets. Once the red liquid gets in contact with the metal, I feel soft tingling. My bracelets fade into smoke and dissolve in thin air, leaving my skin bare. Setting me free.

I look up at Mir, dubious. "Did you start trusting me?"

A ghost of a smile touches his lips. "You look nicer without restrains, Fire Girl."

✦ ✦ ✦