And that’s when he finally says: “The second time that mark appeared on your skin, there were several fissures that came with it. And not just close to you, but in several places across the world.” He swallows hard. “You know that, right?”
I sit back down.
“I’ve heard stories,” I say quietly. “And the council came for me right after that.”
“Right. I was too young to remember it personally myself, but I’ve heard the stories, too. One of the places where the world split was close to my home.” He hesitates, absently knocking his fists together. “Do you know what an animaclepta is?”
“No.”
“A soul-taker—like the reapers of some local mythologies you’re probably more familiar with. Except they don’t just collect souls that are ready to die. They’re known to feed on them, too. To steal them. And there are legends that say they’re particularly drawn to those with magic in their blood; some even say they’re complete parasites that need the magic of other supernatural creatures to survive. They used to cross regularly into our world in their carriages, and they would seek out the people they wanted to steal—souls they wanted to feed on or take back to their otherworld and sacrifice to gain their power or whatever. All these animas had to do in this world was speak the true names of their targets, and just like that, those targets were dead and ready for gathering. And that night when your mark appeared and the fissures opened, one of these creatures escaped Canath.”
“And it came to collect?” I guess in a whisper.
He nods.
“I…”
“My mother made herself a target, really. She showed them exactly how powerful she was while she was trying to protect me and my sister and everyone else. So of course, they wanted her magic. They took her first. And then they took my sister, too.” His words are clipped, tense; but he still attempts to shrug, as if he isn’t bothered to talk about this anymore—like enough time could possibly have passed to make him feel okay about this.
The movement is, of course, unconvincing to us both.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
He lowers his gaze to mine. “We lost ten people that night. And I grew up hearing stories that blamed you and your kind for it. Everybody I knew, it seemed, at first just wanted to destroy you for the mess you’d caused all of us. So I blamed you too, before I really even understood who you were or what you’d done—and what you hadn’t done. I was just angry, and I needed someone to be angry at.”
I shuffle uncomfortably under his gaze. He looks almost like he’s waiting for me to say something, but what could I possibly say?
I can’t change what happened.
I can’t bring his mom or his sister back.
And even though I didn’t do any of this on purpose, I still feel desperately, crushingly awful about it all. My hands are shaking, my mouth too dry to speak.
“I stopped blaming you some time ago, for what it’s worth,” he says. “Because it wasn’t doing me any good. Particularly once I started to think about what I wanted to do about everything that had happened.”
“What you wanted to do?”
“Yeah. Which, I decided, was to make sure nothing like that night ever happened again. So I started to research, and I found out about the keys, and I decided that it made a lot more sense to see if you would help me, rather than to just keep blaming and being angry at you about things you didn’t have control over.”
I stare at him, speechless again for a moment—but not really because I’m uncomfortable now. It’s more because I…
Well, I’m not used to people so completely giving me the benefit of the doubt.
I’m used to most people—including my pack—tiptoeing around my feelings and trying to protect me at best, and being frightened and disturbed by my existence at worst. Even Liam and Carys and my own parents…they support me, and they’d probably go to the ends of the earth for me, but I’ve never really felt like they believed in me. Like they thought I could do impossible things.
But now here is this boy who should be my enemy, and he is suddenly looking at me like he has no doubt in his mind that I could—and would— save the world with him.
I wish I could get over my skepticism, but it’s so ingrained at this point that I can’t help but ask: “Why do you have so much faith in me?”
“Honestly? I didn’t at first. It had only been a wild hope.” He shrugs—the attempted casualness is much more convincing this time—and adds, “But then I heard that you’d volunteered yourself to go to prison to keep your family and your world safe. And, just now, I watched you march yourself toward a demon without flinching. So I guess you could say I’m now reasonably convinced that you’re worth having faith in. And so, no—I am not going to steal anything from you and run away, Elle. Because I think I’d rather we stay together.”
He gazes at the key clenched in my still-slightly-shaking hand for a long moment. Then he lays his hand over my trembling fingers, and I finally manage to hold them steady underneath his touch. Everything seems steadier under his touch all of a sudden; my head stops spinning, and the wolf in me settles and calmly curls up to rest, finally convinced that it’s safe to relax for a moment.
“I think I’d rather we did too,” I say.
He glances up at me.
His eyes are the most brilliant shade of green I’ve ever seen.
“Your eyes have changed again.” I’m past the point of being startled by the changing thing, really, but they’re so much bolder than the dark grey shade they were earlier that I can’t help but sound a little awestruck.
“Have they?”
“You didn’t do it on purpose?”
“Sometimes I…lose focus. And my magic slips, or otherwise gets a mind of its own.”
“Right. Like mine. Sometimes I can’t control my magic side either. The difference, of course, is that your uncontrolled magic makes things beautiful, and mine might destroy the world.”
He gives me a crooked smile. “We’re practically the same person, really.”
I start to laugh, but it’s cut off by a grimace of pain as I try to stand and I accidently put too much weight on my hurt leg.
“Still not healing?” he asks with a frown as he offers an arm to brace myself against.
“Most of my kind just switch to their wolf selves when they need to heal something as bad as this.” I try to mask the frustration in my voice as best I can. “Our supernatural healing ability is even more accelerated in that form, so a cut this deep would fare a lot better if I was a wolf.”
“But that’s not an option.”
“Nope. So pain it is.” I glance down at my leg, wrapped in the makeshift bandages made mostly from Liam’s jacket. I expect it to be stained with fresh blood; but luckily, it’s mostly dry—it looks no worse than it did before I trudged my way up to these rocks. “At least the bleeding hasn’t started back.”
“I can try to help with the pain, if you’d like.”
“Help? How?”
“There are spells that are technically powerful illusionary magic…things that alter a person’s state of mind, so that even a little bit of say, elemental healing magic ability, feels amplified. More effective.”
“That sounds…scary.”
I think of the night of my last test, of how completely taken I was by all of the illusions around me; it was because Maric had gotten into my mind somehow, too, wasn’t it?
Do I really trust Soren enough to let him do the same?
“It is,” he says. “Very complicated stuff, and I’m not saying I’m an expert at it. Not many are. I just wanted to mention it…” He hesitates, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, those beautiful green eyes commanding my attention again as he finishes with, “I guess I don’t like seeing you in pain, is all.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I still need your help. And we can’t afford to waste time waiting for you to limp to our next target.”
“Right.”
“So hold still for a second, maybe?” His voice has dropped to a whisper, one that’s almost more to himself than me. He hesitates, waiting until I give a slight nod of permission. Then his hands reach up and cup my face, same as they did outside of the prison cell he broke me out of on the night we met.
Physical contact with the object you’re trying to illusion helps.
I remember him saying that.
I don’t remember his touch lingering quite as long that last time. And that touch wasn’t as daring as it is now, as he’s tracing a path down to the hollow of my throat with one hand, while the other one pushes back into my hair. I feel warmth radiating through the fingers he’s curled through those locks of my hair. It spreads over my skull, tingles down my neck, and an image falls into my mind; blurry shapes of blue and green tumbling and rushing over one another in a way that reminds me of the ocean. It’s soothing. My eyelids flutter, and my breathing rises and falls with the wave of blue I decide to focus on.
“Is that helping?”
I can’t find the words to answer his whisper, but I have a thought: that I should be panicking at his closeness, afraid of the way he seems to have rendered me so dull and useless. But that thought is distant. Almost as distant as my own movements; I’m only vaguely aware of the way my body slumps toward him, finally giving in to the collective exhaustion of the past week.
I don’t know how much time passes, but eventually, the soothing thoughts and the humming that had accompanied them both begin to flicker and fade. I blink several times, trying to bring the scene back into focus.
That’s when I realize I’m curled up practically in his lap.
And that his hands are moving over the inside of my thigh and inching dangerously far up—because he’s unwrapping the makeshift bandage tied around it and inspecting the wound underneath in a very doctor-like manner. Nothing sensual about it, really. But that doesn’t stop the blush from burning its way across my face.
“It seems to have helped the healing along, even if that relaxation spell didn’t last very long,” he comments.
I laugh. Nervously. “I kind of feel like I need to make a joke about your inability to last longer. Are we at the stage in our friendship where I can make sex jokes? I don’t really know about your kind; shifters can be a raunchy bunch, but it kind of seems like you sorcerers are all the easily-offended type.”
He makes an amused noise deep in his throat; more of a grunt than a laugh. “Why would I be offended by you insinuating something that’s not true?”
“Touché.” My face burns a little hotter, and I pretend to cough to cover up fact that I can’t think of anything clever to say. I’m not sure why I suddenly care so much about looking clever in front of him.
I give my head a little shake and try to calm my racing pulse, try to center my attention back on my wound. He’s right; it’s mostly healed now, the edges of it already looking like a scar that’s several months old. The sight of my dried blood around it doesn’t seem to be grossing him out as much as I would have expected it to; but then, it doesn’t really gross me out either. I guess we’ve both seen our share of violence and gore.
“You could probably stand to relax for a few more minutes, to let the center of this finish healing up,” he says.
The suggestion has the opposite effect on me. I can’t help it. Something about that low tone of voice he’s still using makes my pulse start pounding again.
“I’m finding relaxing a bit difficult at the moment,” I mumble, squirming a bit beneath his lingering touch.
“Oh? And why would that be?” His gaze flickers up to me, and I swear there’s a hint of a wicked little grin on his lips. It goes infuriatingly well with that latest shade of his eyes.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Play stupid. You’re not convincing as a stupid person.”
He laughs. And damn if it isn’t a beautiful, intoxicating sound.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says. “But I wasn’t trying to be stupid; it was an honest enough question. I want to know why your heart is pounding like that.”
“Because you’re a shameless flirt.” I wave a frustrated hand over his too-perfect body. “And this? Every time I see you something’s changed, but I swear somehow you’re making yourself increasingly attractive, and I’m not convinced you aren’t actually some sort of demon trying to seduce me and—”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re an incredibly paranoid person?” His smile wilts a bit. “My eyes are naturally this green, if that makes you feel any better. Not everything is an illusion.”
“Well, whoever you are and whatever you really look like, I just don’t want…”
I trail off and stare at the safety of the ground, because in that moment I realize what I do want. And there’s no way it’s going to happen. It’s a bad idea. There are a million reasons why it’s a terrible idea.
“We’re business partners, remember?” I say. “Mission first and all that.”
“Of course I remember. I’m the one who said it first.” There’s a strange hint of thoughtfulness in his voice, and I can’t help but look up at him again when I hear it.
Mistake.
Such a mistake.
The way he’s looking at me makes that heat in my cheeks spread over my entire body.
He leans a little bit closer. I’m frozen in place. I have to fight to remember my reasonable side—all my very sane excuses as to why I can’t do this. “I’m just not a fan of that whole star-crossed lovers trope, you know? My pack would still freak if I brought home a sorcerer, even after we’d saved the world together. And I feel like I’ve freaked them all out enough already.”
“Who said you had to bring me home?”
I open my mouth to reply. Nothing comes out. My breathing is shallow, quick with growing desire that I can’t really deny, however hard I might try. I shuffle a bit, ungraceful and so very aware of his nearness. I expect the movement to cause pain. But the pain in my leg is gone. I can’t help but think of how he’s the reason for that, and about how tenderly he’d touched me, and the warmth and comfort of him and his spell…
Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve leaned toward him. One of his hands falls back to my leg, fingers resting just as gently as before. The other finds the small of my back in a bolder, more possessive grip that he uses to pull me even closer, eliminating almost all the space between us.
Our noses bump.
His warm breath tickles my skin. Our lips brush once, twice—
The sound of footsteps squishing through the mud reaches us. We pull away from each other and turn to see Liam walking toward us.
“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t realize I was interrupting something.” His voice is flat, even though he attempts to give me his usual carefree smile.
“You weren’t,” I say, jumping to my feet and putting a little space between Soren and myself. I do my best to crush the rebellious desire still shivering through me. Taking a few more steps away from Soren helps. Sort of.
“Well you weren’t answering me or Carys. So I have to assume you were too…busy.”
“I didn’t hear you,” I say, frowning.
Liam gives up on his attempted smile and mirrors my frown instead.
“The spell’s fault, probably,” Soren says, under his breath and more to me than Liam—though, of course, Liam can still hear it.
“What spell?” He gives me a dubious look— like he can’t believe I could possibly have been stupid enough to let my guard down and willingly let a sorcerer cast a spell on me. And now that I’m not distracted by pain or the closeness of Soren’s body, my brain insists on reminding me that Liam is right. That I knew I was being stupid. I knew it was a terrible idea.
But that hadn’t stopped me, and it’s not stopping part of me from wishing we could have had just a few more minutes to finish what we’d started.
Still, I fumble for an answer, an explanation to make
myself look less reckless and dumb and to try and alleviate that exasperated look on my best friend’s face.
“I was just trying to help her relax,” Soren says, his voice smooth and suggestive in that way that just seems to come naturally from him, but that also does nothing to make Liam look any happier about finding the two of us together.
“It was a harmless spell,” I insist.
Liam stares at me for a moment—almost glaring, really, which is a weird look on him—and then through thoughtspeech he says, (There’s no such thing as a harmless spell.)
(Your prejudice is showing,) I think back. (Just because he’s—)
“Anyway,” he interrupts out loud, “We got what we came for, right? And the lake seems to be back to normal now. So we were thinking it’s probably time to pack up and get out of this dreary country. Preferably before we attract anymore unwanted attention.”
I nod, holding back a sigh as I safely pocket the key before moving to his side.
One down, two to go.
And that is what I should be focusing on.
Chapter Twelve
“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”
Liam takes another sip of his water and leans away from the table, rolling the tension from his shoulders as he squints toward a couple walking a dog on the sidewalk across from us. “Mad? No. I was never mad at you to begin with, stupid.”
“Just disappointed, right?” I say with a half-hearted grin, because we both know that sounds like something his mother—or mine— would say.
“I’m not your parent.”
“And yet your gee-I-wish-Eleanor-wouldn’t-do-such-dumb-things look is scarily similar to my dad’s.”
He cocks an eyebrow, but says nothing to that, just leans back in his chair and closes his eyes as if he’s really into the Romanian pop music that this café is serenading its customers with.
“It’s been three days,” I say, “I figured you would have dropped it by now.”
Three days of traveling from Ireland to this quaint little village in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, and the two of us have hardly spoken. Every attempt at our normal sort of interaction that I’ve made, he’s managed to deflect, usually by dragging Carys into the conversation and finding some way to get her to start talking about the things she’s been researching in our attempt to zero in on our next target. It isn’t exactly hard to get her to talk about those things, either. We decided on the general location of the next key, and over the past few days, Carys has essentially downloaded an entire database of Romanian mythology into her brain, hoping to give us an edge on discovering and fighting whatever nasty guardian might be in store for us next.
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