A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)(83)

I wondered how many times in the past my “silence” had been me lost in thoughts like now. I pushed the thought away to look at it later and tried to really be present for my friend. I needed to be here and now.

The timer on the microwave sounded. “Tea’s ready,” I said, and got up to get it.

He smiled, but he was staring at his hands on the tabletop, so I wasn’t sure if he was smiling at that or at his own inner thoughts. One of the things that had made us friends was that he was almost as introspective as I was. Surrie was cautious, but even she told us, “You think too much, sometimes you just have to do things.”

“Whatcha thinking about?” I asked, using the phrase that we’d used when the three of us were younger, before everything went wrong.

“It feels like Suriel should be here to say that, and get us talking instead of just brooding,” he said. His smile somehow was sad now.

I put the tea bags on the spoon rest and said, “She stopped saying it by the time we were fifteen or sixteen.”

“When we all finalized our specialties,” he said. He was staring at his hands now, smile gone.

I added sugar to both teas and real cream to his, and set it down in front of him. “Tea just the way you like it,” I said, smiling, hoping for one in return.

He warmed his hands over the steam like it was a fire and the day had turned cold. The sunlight was still warm; it was Southern California, it wasn’t cold.

“Talk to me, Jamie, please.” I sat down at the table not across from him, but in the chair facing the window so I could be closer. We weren’t eating now, so elbow room wasn’t an issue.

“Levi, my name is Levi now.”

“Okay, Levi, sorry but it’s going to take me a little bit to get used to the new name.”

“Like it took for you to finally call me Jamie.”

“You had been Levanael since we were seven. I didn’t even remember your birth name by the time we were nineteen.”

“Nor I yours.”

He was somber again, almost sad.

“You look great, Jam . . . Levi,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and chase the shadows away.

“I look a lot better than I did two weeks ago.” He took his first sip of tea and closed his eyes as if he was letting it melt on his tongue like it was his favorite candy.

“What happened two weeks ago?” I asked, my voice soft, tone neutral like I’d learned in interrogations when the victim was potentially fragile.

He opened his big brown eyes and looked directly at me with that burn of intelligence and insight fully behind them. It sent a thrill through me that was somewhere between sexual and scary. I’d wanted this for so long, but I didn’t trust the change to last, and I didn’t know if I had another crushing disappointment in me. I wasn’t sure I could take it if he reverted. I prayed, prayed that this would last, that he was cured, well.

“I woke up,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do either, but did you ever have a dream where you think you woke up, but it’s just another kind of nightmare, so that you keep dreaming you get out of bed, but you’re actually still trapped in the dream?”

“Yes, I guess everyone has them sometimes.”

“Maybe, but everyone else wakes up. I’ve been trapped in a nightmare for over thirteen years.”

“Do you think the last fifteen years have been just dreams and nightmares?” I tried to study his face, to see his answer there, but he was looking down at the tea so I saw mostly the top of his thick brown hair and a rim of face. His hands looked so much darker as he lifted his cup to drink more tea. They were tanned and weathered more than his face, as if the beard and wild hair had protected him like fur, but his poor hands . . . they looked like they belonged to someone older. Someone who’d worked outdoors their whole life maybe, but not the soft, smiling boy I remembered. He’d been the best of us all, the gentlest soul, the kindest heart, and the highest scorer on all the tests for psychic ability, as long as it was pure power being tested and not control of that power.

He sipped the tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. His eyes looked very dark for a moment, almost black, the way they’d get the few times he got truly angry.

“Maybe I just want to think of it as a nightmare so I don’t have to think too hard about everything I did while I was sick.” The voice was deeper, not a hint of laughter in it; this was how he’d sounded on good days over the last decade.

“I can understand that.” I finally sipped my tea and it was good, but I’d let it start to get cool. I didn’t want tea, I wanted Levanael, I wanted to undo the shadow in his eyes and the tone in his voice.

“I can feel your questions hanging like something heavy around you.”

“You can’t hear them?” I asked, and took another sip of tea.

His eyes held that bitterness I’d come to dread, but it was better than the rage, or the terror. That was the worst. “Not right now. I told you my head is quiet, quieter than it’s been since I hit puberty. You know the theory that God doesn’t let our full powers hit while we’re too little to cope with them?”

“Of course, that’s why they recruit so early for the College. They want to train us to control our powers before they are fully fledged. Untrained psychics and witches who suddenly grow into their power as teenagers are dangerous to everyone, including themselves.”