The Buried and the Bound by Rochelle Hassan

Author:Rochelle Hassan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

CHAPTER 22

LEO

THE NECROMANCER—TRISTAN—WAS OUT cold, so Leo carried him to the car. Without the coat, he would’ve weighed nothing. He crumpled in Leo’s arms as readily as paper, and his breathing had an alarming wet rasp to it. Leo maneuvered him into the backseat, where he lay on his side and did not stir.

“Why’d he help us?” he asked Aziza, after he’d started the car and she had filled him in on what he’d missed. He could hear that labored breathing over the hum of the heater.

“He didn’t say. Do you remember anything from earlier? It’s like—you were conscious, but you weren’t aware.”

“I was kind of aware,” he said. “There was a fog over everything. I could see and hear, but not clearly. And then there was this voice.”

Aziza scrubbed at a smudge of dirt on her cheek. “The Ash Witch mentioned a voice, too.”

He told her what the voice had said to him. How trustworthy it had sounded. How comforting and right it had felt, how desperately he had wanted to keep listening to it. He’d only managed to shake it off because it had started to remind him of the curse, and he’d had more than a year of practice in trying to fight the curse off.

Even then, it had been a back-and-forth, a stalemate, Leo’s resistance against the voice’s allure, equally matched. He had known he couldn’t outlast the voice. Sensed it, somehow, that it would wait until he’d exhausted himself and then it would have him. And he had thought: I’m never going to see you again, am I?

You, who Leo missed in this thoughtless, essential way—like breathing, like falling asleep, his body needing no instruction in the matter. You who Leo had sketched out in his mind like a contour drawing, just an approximation, an outline around emptiness—I don’t remember turning fifteen, so I must have spent that day with you, he’d think, or Maybe I snuck out to see you, that’s gotta be why I keep trying to sleepwalk out the door, or Pretty sure I’ve never seen this book before in my life, so what’s it doing on my shelf? Did you lend it to me?

And then, as he prodded at the gaps in his memory the way he could never quite stop himself from doing, the curse had swept in, hitting reset on his brain like Leo was a faulty hard drive, and that—that had given the voice some kind of a jolt. Kind of funny, when he thought about it. What was it like to experience someone else’s curse secondhand? Like the hot water shutting off when you were in the shower, maybe. Like someone sneezing in your face. A sudden, unpleasant shock. So then Leo had done it again, on purpose this time, triggering the curse’s mind-wipe response, and the voice got quieter and quieter until finally it withdrew. He’d pitted the curse and the voice against each other, Godzilla-versus-Kong style—“What?” he said, at the incredulous look Aziza shot him. “It’s true.

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