Page 32

Chapter thirty-two

A Lesson in Combat

I shouted a curse as I hissed and shook my hand to clear the stinging from the blow I’d just been dealt.

“Eyes up,” Gemini snapped. “Keep your focus.”

I gritted my teeth and refocused, resuming my fighting stance and preparing to strike again.

Lark knew what he was doing, lazing about in that armchair, nibbling on fruit as he watched me train, that dazzling smirk ever present on his lips. If I were intended to focus, he could try a bit harder not to be such a distraction. Though at present, I wasn’t sure which was more distracting. Him or that peach in his hands. My stomach grumbled as my gaze flicked back to Gemini in time to see her lunge forward.

I protected myself, sidestepping her attack and coming up with one of my own. She blocked it, of course. She always did. But at least I’d delivered some sort of blow before she swept my legs out from beneath me and I went crashing down onto my backside with another curse.

Lark chuckled and I cut him a glare as I got back to my feet.

“Don’t laugh, boy,” Gemini snapped, “or I’ll come for you next.”

My glare turned into a grin as I stuck my tongue out at him. He smiled, raising a brow as he licked peach juice slowly from his thumb. My heart raged against my chest but then Gemini thwapped me on the side of the head and my gaze snapped to her.

“Enough of this,” she barked. “If the two of you are going to behave like love-struck teenagers, you can work out that tension on the mat. Come on then, boy.”

Lark licked his lips and stood, wiping his hands off on his trousers as he strode forward and positioned himself in front of me.

“Wide stance,” Gemini was coaching me from nearby. “Balance on the balls of your feet, not flat, floating, like dancing. Okay, watch him now. He’s got a tell.”

“I do not,” Lark argued, annoyed.

“His hands,” Gemini told me. “He fights with his hands as much as he talks with them.”

“What does that mean?” I asked but Gemini didn’t have time to answer as Lark swung out and I slid sideways, narrowly avoiding the collision of his fist with my shoulder. My eyes widened as I faced him, stunned, and leveled my accusation. “You tried to hit me.”

“I want you to live,” he told me. “If I have to kick your ass to make that happen, so be it.”

My gaze narrowed. I took up my stance again, readied myself for the blow.

It took a few swings from Lark and a few dodges from me before I realized what Gemini had been trying to tell me. Lark gesticulated more than anyone I’d ever known and there were hints, little tics, sudden flexes of his fingers, that told me when he was preparing to strike. Once I noticed them, I could anticipate the punches better. I could duck and roll away from them. He wasn’t much for defense, choosing instead to keep me so busy avoiding his blows that I couldn’t even attempt to land any of my own. We circled one another for so long that I was starting to believe I was actually getting the hang of this, that I was maybe even a quick learner, catching on so fast that I could already keep pace with the prince of the Bone Court. But then Gemini hissed another command, this one to Lark, and I realized how wrong I was.

“Quit playing with her, boy,” Gemini scolded. “Your enemy won’t.”

Then, in one quick fluid motion so fast I hadn’t seen it coming at all, Lark swept my feet out from under me, catching me before I could fall and holding me in his arms only inches above the mat. He leaned over me, that dark gaze penetrating my own, and grinned.

“Not bad, mortal,” he drawled.

I pushed away from him, scrambling away and getting to my feet, turning to face him once more.

“Again,” I growled and it was the first time I’d seen Gemini smile.

Time and time again, Lark knocked me to the mat. Sometimes he caught me, sometimes he pinned me down, sometimes he let me go tumbling down on my own, earning myself a bruised ass along with my bruised pride. Every time I fell down, I got back up even madder than before, tried a little harder, lashed out a little more. But he had been training for centuries longer than me and it showed. I could tell he was holding himself back, even as we spun around each other, evading and attacking, and that only made me angrier.

Gemini called out instructions from time to time, suggestions about how to dodge his more critical blows, where I might land my own, but I never even so much as touched him. He was too strong, too fast, and too smart. I failed time and time again but still; I tried.

I was sweating through my pants, my shirt. My hair was damp and stuck to my forehead. I took a moment to catch my breath, using the time to toss my hair up into a ponytail and pull my shirt up and over my head. I couldn’t fight with the material clinging to my sticky body so a sports bra would have to do. I turned back to Lark to find him grinning like a madman.

“If you’re trying to distract me,” he drawled, his eyes flicking down to my breasts, “it won’t work.”

That comment earned him a smack on the back of the head from his circling aunt. He hissed in a breath, rubbing the back of his head and shooting her a glare as she made her way back to me.

“Don’t be disgusting,” she warned and I couldn’t help but grin as she made her way to my side and lowered her voice. “You’ve figured it out by now. He won’t hurt you. Use that to your advantage.”

I raised my gaze to meet hers and nodded. Then I wiped my sweaty face with my shirt and tossed it aside, cracking my neck, my knuckles, as I resumed my position in front of Lark. Annoyingly, he hadn’t seemed to break a sweat at all and I couldn’t help but feel disgusted by the break I had needed to attend to my very mortal stamina.

I raised my fists and he lowered himself into his stance. I attacked with all I had, getting in close so that he couldn’t simply bat me away. He actually had to fight back. He blocked the first punch, then the second, but the third landed squarely on his jaw.

He stumbled back a step, raising a hand and rubbing his jaw in surprise. When he looked back at me, his gaze darkened.

“Alright then,” he said simply and strode toward me.

I swung again and then immediately with my other hand. He grabbed the first wrist, then the second, yanked me toward him so that the only thing between us were my hands, pressed against his heaving chest and my own. His gaze narrowed and flared, his face just inches from my own. His eyes flicked to my lips and a heat surged through me. I pushed out with all I had and a tremendous force of wind blew through the apartment, sending him skidding away from me. He braced himself against the counter to stop and I lowered my hands, taking shaky breaths and staring down at my twitching fingers.

“Finally,” Gemini huffed from beside me and I swiveled to face her. “I’ll admit, I thought pairing you two off would call that out of you a lot sooner. We’ve been at this for hours. But finally, some progress.”

“This—this wasn’t about fighting at all?” I asked, looking over to where Lark was smiling at me from where he now leaned against the counter. He had known.

“Who needs to use their fists when you can use magic?” Gemini asked, shrugging. “It’s good to know how, in case you need it. But if you have magic, use it. Remember where you are, girl. This is not the mortal plane.”

I fought to catch my breath, looking down at my hands, still reeling from what I’d done. I looked back up at Lark.

“I could have hurt you,” I said, breathless.

“You never would,” he replied, his voice low, soft, so sure that it made me certain myself and I smiled back at him, grateful.

“Enough celebration,” Gemini snapped. “We’re not done here. Back on the mat, boy.”

We spent the next hour experimenting with what emotions brought out my physical magic. I didn’t tell anyone what they were; I didn’t identify them. But I was pretty sure Gemini and Lark could have guessed as, from that point on, every time he touched me an invisible force shot out from within me. Gemini taught me to channel it, to shape it. And when I had formed a passable shield, Lark and I faced off once more. But this time, as he stood across from me, I saw the dense white mist snaking around his wrists, his legs, waiting to be used. My eyes widened and I turned to Gemini.

“You must learn to fight magic with magic,” she explained. “A big step, but a necessary one. No one you face here will fight you without it.”

I nodded my understanding, taking a deep breath and turning back to face him. He flexed his fingers, letting that mist coil between them, writhe around him in a way that was almost a caress. I imagined what it might feel like to let the power caress you. Then I imagined what it might feel like to let Lark caress me and suddenly I was on fire, burning from the magic within. I flexed my own fingers and felt it there, hovering but invisible, ready to protect me.

He shot a spray of mist outward and I remembered the feel of his hands on mine, the smooth muscle of his chest beneath my clenched fists, his warm breath on the shell of my ear.

The mist hit an invisible barrier a few feet from me and dissipated.

“Well done!” Gemini exclaimed, clapping her hands together in approval. “Now me.”

I didn’t have time to ask what she meant before she sent that dark ink of hers outward. It filled the room around me, blotting out the sunlight streaming in through the windows, so dark and so complete that I could see nothing at all. Not her, not Lark, not my own hand in front of my face. I whirled around, searching for something, anything, that I could see, but found nothing. How did I protect against this? How did I defend against something that was everywhere, permeating the very air around me? And then it was in my lungs, choking me, suffocating me. I wheezed, gasping for air as tears sprang to my eyes and I fell.

Lark’s arms were around me before I hit the mat. I couldn’t see him but I could feel him and that was enough. I summoned that magic within me, that power that responded to him, but that I would teach to answer me as well. I collected it all within me and then pushed it out, pushed it against that smoke that surrounded us. My lungs cleared first and then my eyes. I could see him now, his face hovering inches over me as he held me aloft.

There was so much adoration in his eyes, so much longing, so much that we had never said. And it filled me with something so potent that I couldn’t have stopped the magic exploding out of me if I had wanted to. In a second, the smoke was gone, replaced by clean, crisp air that was even brighter than it had been before. Lark breathed it in, inhaling my magic, inhaling me, and smiled.

“You did it,” he whispered in wonder. “You’re incredible, Ren. You know that?”

I couldn’t help myself. He was so close and I felt so happy. With the magic coursing through my veins, touching on that connection, our connection, I wanted to show him how I felt about him. I wanted to take away any doubt in either of our minds that whatever this was between us wasn’t meant to be.

So I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his.

The magic around us intensified, my wind blowing his mist about. They danced together, tangled and entwined, as he kissed me back, pulling me closer and holding me tightly against him. His lips worked against my own, devouring me, my very soul, with that single kiss. And I felt it coursing through him as well. This absolution, this answer, this completion. We were together and so we were whole. It was like coming home, like finding the calm amidst the storm, like peace and passion all at once. It was everything. And it was so powerful that it pulled me completely, entirely under and I never wanted to resurface again.

“Seems like we’re interrupting,” a familiar voice said then.

It was the only thing that could have pulled me away. I pushed back, my head swiveling to the center of the room where Rook and Cass were standing, both of them with raised brows and smiles on their lips. Lark was smiling too, broader than I’d ever seen, as he cleared his throat and helped me to my feet.

“I was just starting to think I was intruding myself,” Gemini said, that tone of hers always bordering on scolding, as she crossed her arms and tilted her head in our direction.

“I used physical magic,” I blurted and they burst out into a chorus of congratulations as Lark raised a thumb to wipe the lip gloss from his lips, still smiling.

Cass ran forward to hug me while Rook thumped Lark on the back, grinning like a fool and legitimately believing I hadn’t seen. Lark shook him off with an unconvincing shake of his head.

“That’s fantastic, Ren, really,” Rook told me with a smile. “But if you think we’re not going to talk about that lip locking we walked in on a second ago, you’ve lost your damn mind.”

Everyone laughed as my cheeks flushed pink and Lark met my gaze, still smirking as though he genuinely couldn’t wipe the look from his face.

“I wondered when you two would arrive,” Gemini huffed into the joviality. “Never far from this one, are you? I suppose you’re going to tell me where you were?”

The chuckling stopped at once as Rook, Lark, Cass, and I all exchanged a glance. Cass broke the silence and answered her first.

“You might want to sit down for this one, Aunt Gem.”