by Chant, Zoe
Scarlet had not expected it to be so difficult to make the request. “Will you take Tyrant with you?” She hastily added, “She should be with her sister, they grew up together, it’s not safe here and I don’t want her to get hurt...”
Conall, to Scarlet’s astonishment, stepped gently forward, took her by the shoulders, and gave her one swift, utterly unexpected hug before stepping back again. “I will do anything I can to help,” he said, voice clipped with embarrassment. “Anything you need.” He didn’t have the luxury of looking away, but he did look rather fixedly at her mouth rather than her eyes.
“Keep Gizelle safe,” Scarlet said quietly. “Gizelle and Tyrant.”
“You have my word,” Conall promised.
Scarlet left, feeling relieved, and stepped out into an ants’ nest of angry guests and flabbergasted staff members, all of whom needed reassurance and explanations that she couldn’t give them. The earthquake, at least, seemed to be an extra bit of motivation to convince them that leaving really was in their best interests.
Chapter 19
Mal felt Scarlet behind the door as she raised her hand to knock. He opened it with a spell as he rose to his feet and met her with a hungry kiss.
“How’s the evacuation going?” Mal asked, when he had his lips back.
“As smoothly as possible,” Scarlet said with great serenity, straightening her skirt as if she had not just made love to his face. “I think the timing of the earthquake was actually excellent, since it frightened a lot of people. The first flight has come and gone. Liam’s elders are safely off, and the most problematic of the guests.”
“Mr. scarier-than-a-dragon fire ant shifter?” Mal suggested wryly.
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Demanded to be on the very first flight out,” she scoffed. “Wanted a full refund of his expenses.”
She looked around, puzzled. “You did not come with this much luggage,” she said, observing the piles of books that Mal was cross-referencing.
“Portals,” Mal said dismissively. “This stack is from a library in London, these are from my personal collection.”
“Portals?” Scarlet looked at him in surprise. “You can do that?”
Mal took no small amount of pleasure in being able to impress her. “It’s fairly straightforward, if I’ve been somewhere before,” he said with a modest shrug. “The power required depends on the distance.” He wouldn’t need to start conserving energy for a few more days.
Scarlet gave him a narrow-eyed look. “That... would be very convenient. Guests would pay a great deal to bypass the hassle of traveling by airline and it would solve probably half of our new-guest complaints. Something about crowding people into tin rockets for several hours makes everyone very grouchy.” She looked excited about the idea. “Everyone says traveling would be more fun without that traveling part... could you teach me to do that?”
Mal smiled at her. Even now she was finding clever ways to improve her business.
They both sobered at the same moment, remembering the impending ruin of that business.
“I don’t know about your capitalistic goals for it,” Mal said carefully. “But I would like to do a little experimentation with your magic. I hesitate to try moving your tree, and that would take a larger portal than I’ve ever even heard of anyone making... but I think I can show you how to harden the earth beneath you, so that it doesn’t move when I battle the wyrm below the surface. You’re undeniably powerful, and you are a creature of earth like I am, so it should be simple for you to learn.
Scarlet gave him a quick glance, then looked down at the clipboard she was holding, the paper thick with notes. “We have about an hour before the next charter gets in for the next wave of evacuations. My people have things well in hand, for now.” She put down the clipboard and spread her hands. “Where do we start?”
Mal began by trying to get her to transform dirt to sturdy stone.
“How?” Scarlet asked.
Mal turned his forearms, showing her the runes. “Each of these has meaning, and a spoken word that accompanies it. Corbin’s acolytes—” he snarled the name “—only memorized chants and never understood a word of them, but there are layers of meaning, and a decent warlock can modify a spell on the fly, simply by changing the order of the runes.” He touched the symbols one by one. “Sleep, nurl. Help, ashenad. Build, yawen. Hinder, break, go, see...”
Scarlet touched one of them curiously and Mal had to tamp down the desire that even a casual a touch caused. “This one is on Breck’s wrist, from the engagement bracelet he shares with Darla.”
“Join, sheln,” Mal said and he said it more intensely than he intended. Scarlet eyes were hot and mirrored his own need. It would be entirely too easy to get distracted.
But as much as he wanted to lay her down and kiss her into filling the room with flowers, he needed to save her much more. “I made those bracelets with the purpose of helping soulmates find each other, at the request of Darla’s father, who very much hoped that she would find true love.”
Scarlet’s needy look turned instantly to irritation. “Do I have you to thank for that nightmare of a wedding, as well?” she asked in exasperation.
Mal grimaced. “I’m afraid so, at least in some small part. Though I am sure that Darla’s charming mother would have found something else to sue over even if everything else had gone to plan. You do not need to worry about the lawsuit,” he was quick to assure her. “The case will be settled quietly out of court. My treat.”
Scarlet didn’t look terribly mollified. She only frowned and touched one of the runes he had already pointed out. “Ashenad,” she said firmly, and she held out her opposite arm.
A gleaming rune, a perfect duplicate of Mal’s, appeared on both her arms.
He scowled to cover his surprise as she turned her arms to inspect her work. “It’s meant to be a painful ordeal. You have to suffer for every rune and gain understanding through trial.”
Scarlet raised an eyebrow at him. “Yawen,” she said, and a second shimmering rune appeared at her wrist. “Is there one for protect?”
Mal showed it to her and told her the word. “You’re supposed to spend a week or more meditating over the order for your rune tattoos, because they will define you as a warlock forever.” He sounded sulky to his own ears.
“Do we have a week for meditation?” Scarlet asked scathingly as a third rune appeared on her fair skin.
“Probably not,” Mal admitted.
“I can rearrange them anyway,” Scarlet said, demonstrating by switching two of them and Mal couldn’t quite keep from sputtering in protest. “Is there a rune for turn-dirt-into-stone?”
“There is no single rune for that. You would build that out of words, like writing a sentence.”
“What other runes will I need to do this, then?”
Mal shook his head in wonder. “This one,” he said, rolling his arm over. “It translates as roots, though it can also mean ancestors. I think that’s particularly appropriate for you.”
They added protect, djek, and strength, rawen.
And at the very end, she whispered, “Sheln,” and when the join rune was on her skin, completing a circlet of her wrist, Mal felt a jolt of power settling into place.
This could work, he thought, full of optimism.
Chapter 20
It didn’t work.
Scarlet spoke the runes perfectly, touching each one, and... nothing happened.
“Is it because I’m touching them?” she asked, disappointed. “You just gesture a bit, should I also?”
“That usually comes with practice,” Mal explained. “I don’t have to touch them to activate them anymore, but I did when I was first learning.”
Mal walked through a simple shield spell that he’d started with as a young man and brought a flaring egg of glittering power around him to life. Scarlet tossed a pen at him curiously and it snapped and fell, charred, to the ground without touching him.
Scarlet rearranged her run
es, followed his steps, and mimicked his chant, with and without touching the runes directly... and still nothing happened. She couldn’t alter dirt, or move it at all, and she couldn’t bring up a simple shield.
Mal sighed in frustration. “I can feel the power,” he said, peering at her inert runes and stroking them with his thumbs, agitated. They were sitting together on his porch; they’d already set off the fire alarm once experimenting with Mal’s shields. “I can sense it. You’re saying the words correctly, I can even feel your will. By rights, this ought to work.”
“Who taught you?” Scarlet asked, putting her free hand on his shoulder. “How old were you?”
Mal’s strokes on her skin slowed. “My father taught me, when I was very young. He knew that I would be the next in line to battle the wyrm, and I spent my childhood learning to tap into my shifter power and fight.”
“You were close with your father,” Scarlet guessed.
Mal’s head bowed. “Yes,” he said simply. Scarlet gave him space and after a moment he went on. “I was a mage before I was a man, and I lost him shortly after that,” he said grimly, standing and walking to the porch railing. “But he taught me everything he... thought I needed to know. He was a brilliant teacher.”
“Don’t think for a moment that you aren’t, just because I can’t seem to wield power the way you do,” Scarlet said, aching to see him doubting himself.
Scarlet looked at the silhouette of him, gloomy against the brilliant sunset sky. When she’d imagined Mr. Moore, the lawyer, she’d pictured him as a shallow old man, set in his ways and stubborn, not willing to take her seriously as a woman.
Instead, he’d proved to be complicated, appealingly good, and dazzling handsome, with just a trace of silver in his hair to hint at his wisdom. And he listened to her, his brown eyes unexpectedly gentle, his hands warm and strong, his skin...
Scarlet shook her head and reminded herself to focus.
“Mal...” The idea had come to her some time earlier, but it was a wild gamble, a terrible risk.
“I’ve been looking at shield spells,” he said, voice determined. “Something I could set beforehand and don’t have to feed with magic while I’m fighting. I’ve done hoard locks before, and they’re complicated, they require a lot of setup. We still have a few days, so I could probably work something out.”
If she was wrong about him... If she was only blinded by her attraction, fooled by his flattery...
“Mal,” she repeated more firmly.
“I could solidify the earth below your tree myself, I think, too,” Mal said, thumbing absently through the book in his hand. “Make a safe place that wouldn’t be damaged. But it would take months to do it so that I don’t have to hold it together while I fight, and we have days, not months.” He had clearly hoped that she would be able to hold the spell herself and Scarlet felt guilty that she couldn’t manage something so simple.
She closed the distance between them and put her hands on his broad back, letting her head lean between his shoulders. “You could bind me.”
Mal went rigid. “Scarlet...” He shrugged from her embrace and turned to face her, shaking his head.
“I know what I’m asking.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking.”
“I’m asking you to save me,” Scarlet reminded him. “I have a certain amount at stake here, too.”
Mal’s mouth worked silently a moment and he stalked away, to the end of his porch. The book was tossed carelessly to his table. “What Corbin and his acolytes did, that was unconscionable. I couldn’t do that.”
Scarlet followed him. “But if you had my power at your command, you could meet the wyrm in his own domain, battle and defeat him.”
“At what cost?” Mal asked the porch railing tightly. “You’d lose yourself.”
“It wouldn’t be like that,” Scarlet reminded him. “I would be willing.”
“You might go into it thinking you were,” Mal said, turning to face her. “But that spell, that spell was made to control, to sap will and drain humanity. It wasn’t designed to let you retain your own self-awareness.”
“I’m not a shifter,” Scarlet pointed out. “There’s no reason to think it would affect me the same way.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” Mal said ferociously.
“It’s my risk to take,” she answered just as fiercely.
Mal gazed at her stubbornly and she glared back.
The cautious part of her wanted to claim that what she felt for him was mere attraction, a simple physical reaction to a smart, sexy man who checked off all her feature requests and had hands that could make her body sing.
But it wasn’t her body that was singing, she was reluctant to admit.
It was her soul.
Deep within her own chest, she could feel the mate-bond, like a shy bird fluttering in the cage of her ribs.
Mal, for all of his arrogance and irritating confidence, for every one of his flaws, was a kindred spirit. He was lonely beneath his beautiful veneer, isolated by power and position, and his heart was filled with a yearning so familiar that Scarlet could barely tell where her desire ended and where his began.
“Scarlet...”
“You are my mate,” she said, savoring the words as she faced them at last. “And I am already bound to you.”
Saying it aloud unleashed every last reservation. Scarlet closed her eyes and brought her hand to his chest, letting her power flow into him.
Mal made a strangled noise. She found her center and pulled back. “Did I hurt you?” she asked anxiously, but she knew she hadn’t.
He stared at her in wonder.
“You are more than I ever imagined...” he breathed. “I cannot fail—”
He stopped himself, then stepped closer. “We cannot fail,” he corrected himself, and when he brought his mouth to Scarlet’s, every tree within a hundred feet burst into bloom.
Chapter 21
Mal would have liked to spend more time experimenting with Scarlet’s power... or exploring her kisses with the new strength of their mate-bond.
But time was one thing they didn’t have.
She drew back reluctantly. “I have to go. There are angry guests gathering, and I can’t leave Graham and Wrench to deal with them alone.”
“Do you always know what is going on, everywhere at the resort?” Mal had to ask.
Scarlet, leaving one last kiss along his jaw that he knew was going to burn for hours after she left, shook her head. “Not always, everywhere. I have to think about someone to know where they are, or think about a place and know what is happening there.”
She closed her eyes and showed him, and it was a weird and dissociated feeling, like he was looking down at the courtyard by her office using some kind of heat vision. Someone was snapping with anger and fear, another was a tangle of anxiousness, another frustrated and confused. What he saw was much more about what they were feeling than what they looked like.
“I have to go,” she said apologetically. Before he could ask when she would be back, or any of the hundreds of questions that were crowding his mind, she vanished from his arms.
Mal wondered if he’d ever get used to the sense of loss when she did that, but was comforted by the feel of her inside his chest. He would never lose her, they would never truly be apart.
Our mate, his dragon sighed happily. Forever.
He looked at the book he had tossed on the table and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. Trying to very specifically draw only on the power through the gleaming mate-bond inside, he muttered a short spell and gestured.
The book shot open, flipped through every page like a crazed fan, and violently shut again, nearly bouncing off the table.
What are you doing? Scarlet demanded in his head.
Sorry, Mal laughed helplessly. I was experimenting, did I bother you?
I’m trying to evacuate my resort and that’s very distracting, Scarlet said impatiently. Then she softened. It tickles.
> I’ll keep it to a minimum, Mal promised.
She gave him a parting caress of her mind, like a kiss on the cheek, and Mal refrained from disturbing the mate-bond again.
He cleaned up the books he’d brought in, returning the stacks to the library through a portal that he had to consciously not draw from Scarlet’s abundant energy. If the library was alarmed by the swift return, they were professional enough not to comment by his unexpected arrival.
As full as he was, with her bright power, and the warm presence of her, Mal became aware that his body was hungry. He considered using a portal to obtain a meal, but steeled himself to have dinner at the restaurant instead. He was, after all, paying a considerable amount for gourmet food, and whatever else he was, he was not too cowardly to face Scarlet’s staff again.
The glow of Scarlet’s mate-bond also helped him admit to himself that he also wanted the companionship of the restaurant. He was tired of solitary meals and isolated studies.
Breck gave him a curious look when he arrived at the restaurant, but led him to a table without comment. It was the same table that Mal had seated himself in the morning before, and he guessed that wasn’t a coincidence.
Breck poured him a tall glass of cold water. “Our dinner menu tonight is your choice of a halibut with cream sauce and dill, served with either a baked or mashed potato side, or a Mediterranean lamb roast with young root vegetables and a reduced olive glaze.”
“Lamb,” Mal selected mildly, and both of them pretended that there was not any more important conversation they could possibly have than the choice of drink to accompany it, even though Breck was clearly dying for more information.
It was quiet; most of the guests had already been evacuated, and several members of the staff were murmuring and watching him not at all surreptitiously as they helped themselves from the buffet.
Mal was not unaware of the entrance of Alice, Amber, and Mary, but he was surprised when Alice led them in a beeline directly to his table.