Page 64 of Contested Crown

“No,” she said fiercely, her tone sharp. “Of course we’re powerful. We just don’t go for that barbaric way of handling excess magic. What a waste, pouring it directly into a werewolf, where its only use is as muscle mass.”

Cade stopped, turning with a frown. “What a waste?”

His tone wasn’t sharp, more probing. Cade had told me that the excess magic went into werewolves because it would soon be replaced as a mage’s power grew.

“That is… I just meant…” She swallowed, looking back and forth between us anxiously.

“So then whatdoyou use the excess magic for?” I was beginning to have an inkling, but I wasn’t even sure it made sense, and Cade and I hadn’t tried to speak alone since I had been injured. All our conversations had been ones we would have had in front of Elizabeth and Phelan.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She laughed nervously, looking around, although I had no idea how a listening spell would even work here on the cliffs. I thought the entire point of the nanny was to keep an eye on us, to keep ears on us where Phelan couldn’t manage spellwork.

“It’s a simple question,” Cade said. “Miles asked what you’re using the excess magic for.”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “We cut it off, and it disappears into the ley lines, the same as every other mage. It’s so old school to force it on a consort. Inhumane.”

She glared at me, sneering her disdain.

I couldn’t even argue with her. Itwasinhumane. What House Bartlett did to wolves, how they treated them. Cade had claimed me as his, his property.

He had been doing it for the listening ears, but the reality was that was how Leon and many others in House Bartlett saw werewolves.

“And you’re doing it because you believe in the werewolves’ humanity,” Cade said. Each word might as well have been carved from salt, sucking the moisture out of anything that came close, burning invisible cuts you hadn’t even been aware of.

“We should get back to the house.” Our nanny refused to answer any more questions on the walk back, and then we were in our room again, nowhere to go, nothing to do.

“I’m not sure what’s worse: being the only wolf here or the fact that no one will give me a straight answer as to why. It’s enough to give a man a complex.” I lay back on the bed, picking up one of the books on the bedside table. I thumbed through it, finding my place.

Cade walked back and forth, stretching a bit of magic between his fingers like taffy. It expanded until it was as thin as a thread of silk, and when he crushed it back together in his palm, it was the size of a marble.

“You need to relax,” I said, looking up from my book. I followed his path across the room with my eyes.

“Oh, and I suppose you have a suggestion,” Cade snapped. He winced, looking at me apologetically.

“I mean, if youwant, I know a few good ways to relax both of us.” I quirked up my lips, making it clear the words were a joke. “Take a shower or something before dinner.”

“Yeah.” Cade smoothed the magic back onto his skin, and it became a circle of thorns around his wrist, as thick as a manacle.

He walked into the bathroom, stripping off his shirt and revealing his back, decorated with thick lines of tattoo. We had been practicing more and more, until he could give me a spell and I could use it in one smooth movement. Each time the magic returned to him, the tattoos on his body grew.

I watched through the open bathroom door as he turned on the shower, his shoulders slumping for a moment, head hanging down. Something in me stirred.

For the first time in days, I felt a hint of my wolf. I wanted to protect him. I wanted to keep him safe. My pack was in danger, and I wasn’t doing anything.

But it was less than that, a stirring, an echo of a wolf howl across a massive canyon.

I had recovered after my first dose of whatever Leon had been developing within a couple of weeks. This had been over a month, coming close to two.

And I felt like the wolf was getting further away, not closer. Back at Dos Lunas, my werewolf had been so close to the surface that I had almost tried to take on an alpha and her pack by myself. Now I could barely feel it, only the occasional twinge like an old injury that had long ago healed.

Abruptly frustrated, I put aside my book, placing my hand on my knee and flexing my fingers. I willed claws to come out, willed myself to grow hair and muscle mass, to shift into a creature from Cade’s nightmares.

Nothing. Not even a hint of it, not even a burn under my skin like my wolf was being held back.

I turned, watching Cade in the shower, watching him shut his eyes and raise his face to the water.

“Protect him. Protect your mate.” I closed my eyes, trying to drag the wolf out. But I was reaching into an empty void, nothing there to pull out into the light.

Frustrated, I stood and paced around the room.