Page 52

I waggle my fingers. “Sloth, baby. It’s what I do.”
She huffs, clearly trying to shake off the residual lethargy, and I swear I see her shiver.
Interesting.
She glares at me, and I know that look.
The one that says, You just made this a game.
She stares at me like I’ve just handed her a loaded gun and dared her to pull the trigger. I already hate whatever is about to come out of her mouth.
“Do it to the fire,” she says, her voice curled around amusement.
I blink. “The fire?”
She nods, lips twitching. “Yeah. Make it… sleepy.”
I scoff, shifting where I sit. “I don’t think fire sleeps, Moonbeam.”
She tilts her head, studying me like I’m an uncooperative experiment. “I don’t think you know that for sure.”
Gods. Why is she like this?
I exhale through my nose, glancing at the flames dancing in front of us. The campfire is bright, flickering with wild orange tongues, licking at the night air, hungry for more. Sparks crackle and snap, the wood hissing as it burns.
I roll my shoulders, stretching out my fingers before letting my power spill into the air. A ripple of slow, suffocating stillness rolls through the camp, sinking its claws into the flames. The fire stutters, its frantic hunger wilting under the weight of my gift.
The embers, once snapping and vicious, glowing, pulsing, but no longer burning with their desperate, unrelenting need to consume. The flames bend, stretching in lethargic waves, their movements sluggish, as if they’re floating in some deep, intoxicating haze. Smoke lazily curls upward, spiraling in slow-motion tendrils, as if the fire itself is sinking into a dream it can’t wake from.
Luna leans forward, eyes alight with something mischievous and delighted and slightly dangerous.
“Holy shit,” she breathes.
I grin, basking in my magnificence. “Told you, baby. Sloth can do a lot more than just put people to sleep.”
She doesn’t even acknowledge my flawless delivery, just studies the fire like she’s thinking too hard, like she’s already plotting something ridiculous.
I narrow my eyes. “Don’t.”
Her gaze snaps to me, all innocent mischief. “Don’t what?”
“You’re planning something. I can hear it. Your brain is making that weird, crackly, bad-idea noise.”
She snorts. “That is not a thing.”
“It is.” I jab a finger toward her. “You have an idea, and I can promise it’s the worst thing to ever be conceived in the history of bad ideas. You probably want me to slothify a whole-ass forest next or something.”
Oh, fuck me.
She flips over onto her stomach too fast, too eager, her hair falling over her shoulders in a way that shouldn’t be distracting but absolutely is.
“Oh, come on,” she says, grinning up at me, eyes bright with amusement, her cheek resting on her folded arms. “A forest. Can you do it?”
I try not to look at the strip of bare skin her movement just exposed. I really, really try. But my idiot gaze does it anyway, dragging over the smooth curve of her lower back, where her shirt has ridden up just enough to make my life difficult.
There’s something deeply unfair about the way she looks right now.
Carefree. Gorgeous. Completely unaware that I’m malfunctioning like a broken machine.