#broken nails

Well, she wasn't going to do either of them any good just standing there staring. She hobbled over to her desk and sat heavily in the chair. She adjusted so she could sit cross-legged. Her knees jutted out over the sides of the chair, but at least her injured feet weren't touching the ground.

Tara drummed her fingers on the desk, using the pads of her fingers to avoid putting pressure on her broken nails. How could she figure out what was going on? The obvious answer was to ask Reth, but that had several complicating factors. He was reticent to answer, and she didn't know what questions to ask.

She didn't want to push him. Not unless she had to. Not with the image of tears dripping down his cheeks and the memory of his over-the-top thanks for the smallest things so fresh.

She filed those bits of information in her mind. They slid into place next to his horrible injuries and his quiet pleas for her to...

"Please don't. Please don't make me."

Don't touch him? Don't make him talk about what happened? That's what she'd thought at first, but was it something more than that?

This was too much to try to keep in her head. She needed to write this down. She could better organize her thoughts when she had them on paper. She grabbed a notebook and pen, her grip awkward with the gauze pad on her palm.

She began writing, left hand moving from right to left as she used the mirrored shorthand she'd developed for herself. She wrote down everything she could remember, all the strange actions and behavior that she didn't understand.

Writing her thoughts down helped. The physical action of putting pen to paper forced her to make her mind slow down to the speed of her writing. Seeing the events spelled out on plain ruled paper helped her organize her thoughts, and made the events feel more real.

Another piece of the puzzle came to her: the nightmare. Reth had said that the emotions in her dream had been… bleed-over? Unintentional emotional transference, from his own nightmare. She wrote that down as well.

Tara didn't have all the details, obviously. But the information she did have was starting to form a picture, and that picture wasn't pretty.

She frowned and flipped the page. As much as she wanted to understand what was going on with Reth, she also needed to understand what had happened to her.

On the fresh page, she started writing notes about her own situation. She started from the beginning, with everything she could remember Jordan saying about the ritual. Then came Reth's appearance and cryptic statements, and the circle not acting as Jordan had expected. She noted down the bond-mark, as well as everything she could remember Reth saying during his panicked apologizing.

Warlock. She underlined the word twice. She'd heard the term before, but that didn't mean she knew what it meant, especially with her earlier realization that her limited knowledge about demons and demon-related topics was flawed at best.

More than that, she didn't know what it would mean for her. Was she bound to a demon for the rest of her life? What were the consequences of that? What were the benefits, what were the drawbacks?

She didn't know. All her notes had shown her was just how many questions she had.

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