Page 107 of Malcroix Bones Academy

“It’s just I don’t see thatI’mgetting much out of this deal, as of yet,” I said. “Other than dive-bombing psychopaths scaring the crap out of me in the middle of the night. I thought you were going to help me find out who’s trying to kill me.And,incidentally, who killed my parents. So far you haven’t done a bloody thing to help me with either thing?”

“Shadow?” he warned.

“Fine! Do it,” I snapped, folding my arms between us. “At least get it over with, so I can go to bed.”

He took his weight off his left hand, and reached for me. His hand slid carefully under my jacket, and wrapped around my right shoulder where it met my neck. As he maneuvered his fingers to reach my bare skin, he glanced down at my low-cut top, and the short skirt I wore under it. His eyes fell lastly on my high-heeled boots. His eyebrows went up.

“Pretty scant clothing for a night at the pub, mongrel,” he muttered.

“Fuck off,” I said, glaring up at him. “I didn’t ask your opinion.”

“I like your necklace,” he commented, his eyes fixing on the crystal.

I scoffed, and refolded my arms.

He frowned slightly, then closed his eyes.

I found myself tensing, in spite of myself. I was nervous, I realized. My yelling at him was part of my nerves, maybe even a form of stalling. Everything about what he did to me with his magic lit my nerves on fire, making it hard to breathe, to even think. It felt so strange, so completely overwhelming every time we were together like this, yet I could scarcely explain to myself why when it was finished. Or maybe I simply didn’t want to.

Not only that, my reactions to it, and to him, were growing more intense. Each time, it was worse. Each time, I felt more uneasy afterwards. I knew I was lying to myself about some key component of what this was. I was lying to myself about how I felt about it, too.

His magic reached me subtly at first, as always.

He always seemed tentative in the beginning, as if testing me, testing my magic.

Or maybe like he knew we were doing more than we were talking about, too.

I felt him, though, even in those first careful probes.

His presence gradually flooded into me, filling every pore of my skin, every cell of my blood, every muscle, every organ, every bone. It felt disconcertingly intimate. It felt like having him lie naked on top of me, his hands all over me, his breath in my face, his skin touching mine all the way down to my feet. Why weren’t we talking about this? He had to notice how fucked up this was, didn’t he? Was he deliberately ignoring it as much as I was?

Gods.

Had it been that way the very first time? Before I’d agreed to make it a regular thing?

I didn’t remember being this off-balance, or so completely unable to control my body or breath. Maybe I hadn’t known him well enough to tell which parts actually felt like him, and which felt more mechanical. Maybe since I’d had him in my mind in other ways, I had a better idea of what he felt like in general? Whatever the reason, it confused me, disturbed me, made me want to both touch him and shove him off?

“Ra’s stiff cock, you think loudly,” he muttered.

Anger and horror made me flinch, then shut down my mind. Trust him to find a way to shamemein this, to embarrassme,when it was his bizarre compulsions that had us here.

He grunted over me, but I felt a whisper of annoyance off him, too.

“Don’t shut down too much, mongrel,” he said, a little out of breath. “I need you to take this.”

“You are such an absoluteprickof a human being, do you know that?”

“Not a human being, love,” he reminded me.

His magic abruptly went from a trickle to a tsunami-like wave.

The change happened so fast, I couldn’t adjust. His gold, black, and green magic slammed into mine, washing over my skin, and my breath caught before I could stop it, and before I could finish my thought. I felt him connect with some part of me, roughly almost?urgently, at least. The sun over my head and that hot, liquid pool of magic in my chest flared gold and green in the same instant.

I saw his chest glow gold through his dark shirt.

My vision whited out.

I let out a sound before I could stop it, and his fingers clamped down on my neck and shoulder and tightened until they hurt.