The Magus Chronicles

Octavian's Secrets

In Octavian's dream, he and Magdalena were sitting on a couch in her old trailer. Octavian was rolling dice, and all a variation of sizes and numbers. He let them fall onto the coffee table.

"Sixteen," she said, not looking up from her book.

He counted. "Correct." He made another tick mark on the paper.

She shut the book. "For someone with psychic powers of their own you are really very skeptical."

"I just want to make sure." He looked up a her. "You know there is a saying in my family that two psychics shouldn't even be in the same vicinity as each other."

She frowned. "Why not?"

"Because they go insane. Literally, they get inside each other's heads and everyone goes nuts and tries to kill each other or themselves." He started rattling the dice. "Again."

"Nope. You show me something now."

He put down the dice. "You won't like that."

"What do you mean?"

It was hard being his dream self. He could see this past scene so clearly, stand and walk around his own body, read his own body language. This was one of the first times he and Magdalena had been alone together - really alone, in an empty house. He felt afresh all the uncertainty and insecurity that had come with meeting Magdalena, and all the bottomless wanting - so desperately needing to confide in someone but also knowing that it could ruin things. Like it had done with other friends.

Being broken was not attractive.

"When I see things," Octavian said slowly, "it's not a party trick. Lots of the time I feel the worst things. The really bad, negative things. Secret things."

Magdalena tucked her book under her chin. "And you think I don't want you to see those?"

"I would understand if you don't trust me yet."

Magdalena shrugged her shoulders forward. "Are you going to pity me?"

"No."

"Can I trust you?"

"Yes."

Magdalena's face - the memory of that face - dissolved into mist, and Octavian woke with a start.

Octavian sat paralyzed by guilt for longer than he could bear to contemplate, his fingers dug through his curls. He thought he would stop breathing. For a few dire moments, he thought he could make it stop, just by thinking about it.

Finally, he got up and stood in the wreckage of his room, the darkness only partially hiding the mess he had made. He would have to pack it up. Go to Percy's. Figure out a plan to get him kicked out of whatever private school hell they sent him to this time, and possibly arrested. 

The family would probably maroon him on an island after that, a place with no humans much less and extradition treaty. It would be preferable, he thought to himself, finding a robe to put on over his boxers, to living in a house with Constantine Graves, Jack Fairchild and Livia Leroy.

God how he hated his family.

Alexei flung open the door to his room with hardly any preamble. "Get up, cousin!" he shouted. "Its full daylight and you need to eat something if you are going to deal with relatives all day."

"No, I need something stronger," Octavian said, grabbing a robe and going past Alexei into the parlor. Tatiana was already tucked into a corner of the couch, reading a newspaper in elegant silk pajamas.