by Eva Chase
“Damn, that’s a messed up one,” Jude muttered. He spoke a few more casting words, his brow knitting with concentration.
“Conducting,” I said to myself under my breath, drawing even more of my thoughts toward the spot where Connar’s parents had lodged the spell. I could trace the shape of it with the magic I’d extended: a small raised mark like Banefield’s mole, hollowed in just the right way to contain and amplify the spell they’d placed in it, just like the traditional conducting pieces made out of stone or metal.
When I’d destroyed the spell on my former mentor, I’d only managed it by summoning up all the determination and frustrated emotion I had in me. My anger at Connar’s parents and my concern for him were already stewing inside me.
I thought back to the way he’d reacted the first time he’d seen me after I’d gotten back from California, to his violent reaction after discovering me in the lounge the other day, to his hostile disdain in Professor Crowford’s classroom. With each memory, I grasped onto the anguish that surged up, until my hands had clenched and my breath was coming short.
I sent my mind back to the little tour of the Fortress of the Pentacle that my mother had given me—to the cold satisfaction on Baron Stormhurst’s face, knowing the pain she was putting us all through. To my mother herself, abandoning me in the Desensitization chamber to face that pain and others expanded in horrifying brutality.
We would stop them. We had to stop them, here and in every other way they were tearing apart the things I actually supported in the fearmancer world.
Connar stirred. His arm twitched where the binding spell still held it by his side. “I don’t like it,” he said, an edge coming back into his voice. “Stop it—let me go.”
His parents’ magic hadn’t been only illusionary. My necklace wouldn’t stop the other factors from acting on him—and even the illusions would burn out the charm’s power if they kept rising up often enough. We might not have much time.
I willed all the fervor in me through the thrum of magic collected behind my collarbone and out with my voice. “Get out!” I commanded.
The words came out ragged. The spot of energy jittered but didn’t budge. I gathered myself even more and poured every ounce of my energy into the casting. “Get out! Break and deflate! Begone and get the fuck away from him!”
A crackle raced through that last demand. Through the blast of my magic, I felt the construct snap. Jude let out a victorious cry and intoned another hasty word. Malcolm was trying to talk Connar down, and Declan was murmuring his own spells, and the toxic magic that had possessed Connar spilled out of him like the breaking of a boil.
I had just enough time to enjoy one jolt of victory before Connar roared and magic blazed over us like a thunderclap.
He whipped around, faster than any guy that bulky had the right to move, socking Malcolm in the face and Declan in the gut before any of us even blinked. The aftershock of the spell’s destruction had split apart our own spells on him and, from the looks of things, enraged him twice as much as before.
All of us shouted out words to renew his bindings, stumbling out of his reach at the same time. He shoved the sofa so hard it toppled over onto its back and sent a kick into the shelf of video games that smashed one shelf. Then he hurtled toward Jude.
Panic lanced through me. “Stop!” I snapped out. “Block him.” Whatever I’d managed to conjure alongside the other guys, it made Connar’s stride lurch. He fell to his knees and then shoved forward again.
“Calm,” I said, pouring more of my magic into his body as well as I could. “Cool.” This fury couldn’t last without the conducting construct maintaining it—it had to burn out. But not necessarily all that soon if we couldn’t find a way to simmer it down.
The others must have been taking a similar tactic. Connar faltered in mid-stride, the ferocious light fading from his eyes. He wavered on his feet.
Slowly, he turned to look around at us. His shoulders came down, his hands drifting back to his sides. The others said a few more words, and the Stormhurst scion stopped moving completely, just staring at us.
As his expression softened and his gaze cleared, I saw the guy I knew fully there for the first time in over a week. My heart skipped a beat.
“Connar?” I said cautiously.
His attention shifted to me. In that moment, he looked so lost that tears crept up behind my eyes at the sight.
“Rory?” he croaked. “I don’t know what’s going on. What are we doing here? What happened to me?”
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead as if to push back a headache.
Malcolm grasped his shoulder. “It’s good to have you back, Conn,” he said, sounding a tad choked up himself. “Your parents cast a hell of a spell on you. You’ll need to take some time to rest and recover now.”
Connar glanced at the sofa, at the broken shelf, at the bruise forming on Jude’s jaw. “I was fighting you.” His voice came out hollow with shock.
“Thankfully, the four of us were just barely a match for one of you,” Jude said lightly. He motioned to Declan, and they righted the sofa together. At Malcolm’s nudge, Connar sank down on it. He touched his temple again.
“It’s all so muddled.”
His gaze sought me out. He opened his mouth and then hesitated as if afraid of how I might react to whatever he was going to say. I swallowed thickly and eased onto the sofa next to him, tipping my head against his shoulder and wrapping my arm around his torso. In the first instant as I touched him, my body braced, still expecting him to recoil. When he didn’t, I leaned into him, soaking in his warmth and offering my own in return.
His arm slid around my back, and then he was hugging me to him as if his life depended on doing so. I closed my eyes, drank in his smoky scent, and fought back a sob for what might have happened if we’d failed. For the state the spell had left him in even though we’d succeeded.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Connar
Nothing had ever felt quite as right as having Rory in my arms. Her body was soft but solid against mine, each rise and fall of her breath coming with a faint rasp that showed the exertion she’d put herself through, her familiar caramel-sweet smell washing over me.
Everything about her presence was so perfectly real compared to the chaos flitting this way and that in my head. I might as well have been seeing my own memories through an insight spell rather than directly, a mishmash of impressions I couldn’t make sense of.
Rory was in some of them. I’d been angry with her, for reasons I couldn’t decipher now. From the glimpses that came to me of her face, I suspected I’d thrown that anger at her in awful ways.
At my friends too. They’d all come together, they’d snapped me out of the hazy nightmare of my recent existence, even though I couldn’t remember being anything but antagonistic or suspicious around them in… in however long it’d been.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice partly muffled where I’d bowed my head by Rory’s. My lips grazed her hair. I might not know exactly what I was apologizing for, but I was sure there were plenty of offenses. I’d sworn to myself I’d never hurt this woman again, and I—and I— My throat closed up as I tried to fit the fragments of memory together.
Rory hugged me tighter. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t you. I knew that the whole time, even if it was hard. I’m just glad we managed to break the spell.”
They had. Of course it’d been magic. My mother—
I winced at the pain that stabbed through my skull when I tried to remember that specific detail. “Thank you,” I said to Rory, and then raised my head enough to take in the guys. “Thank you.”
Malcolm tipped his head, the corner of his mouth curled with a relieved smile. “You’d have done the same for any of us.”
Jude shifted on his feet, his hands tucked awkwardly in his pockets. Declan glanced at the other two and made some gesture I couldn’t quite catch but that made the others pull straighter. He turned back to me and Rory.
“It’s you two who were pushed apart the most. We should give you some time to talk. If you need anything, just give us a shout.”
They headed out, leaving me alone with Rory. I pressed my face to her hair and just held her for a while longer, not able to bring myself to do much else. She seemed happy enough to stay right there too. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my shirt as if to make it harder for me to detach her, if I’d even wanted to.
What had I done to the woman who owned my heart?
As much as I tried to escape into our embrace, that question kept niggling at me. Finally, I pulled back enough to look into her eyes.
“Will you tell me what happened? All of it, even the bad parts? I can— There are bits and pieces in my head, but they don’t really connect, and it’s all kind of a blur.”
“That’s not surprising. You had a lot of magic coloring your thoughts and memories. Mostly illusion, but probably some persuasion in there too.” She touched her glass dragon charm, which I abruptly realized was hanging against my chest rather than hers. “I can’t feel the spell Professor Burnbuck imbued it with anymore. Tackling all the illusions you were being hit with must have drained it.”
She’d used up her summer project prize on me. A fresh wave of agony rushed through me. “I’m—”
Rory touched her finger to my mouth. “Don’t say you’re sorry. I’m not sorry. I’m glad I had a tool like that to help us save you. I can’t think of any better use I could have put that prize to. So don’t you dare tell me I should regret it.”
I swallowed the rest of my apology. Instead, I reached back to open the chain and tucked it around her neck where it belonged. The broken base of the dragon’s body reminded me of other times I’d failed to save her from pain I should have prevented.
“Declan says your mother came by campus the night after I left,” Rory said, nestling her head against me again. “He mentioned her presence to you, and then he didn’t see you again until you turned up a couple days later. Do you remember anything about that?”
I reached farther back in my mind to where my recollections were steadier. “I remember that conversation with him. I found her at her car, and she said I should get in so we could talk. She brought up my relationship with you.” My jaw clenched at the memory. “She wanted me to break up with you in whatever way would be the most painful, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise, so I… I told her I wanted to be with you and she didn’t get to have any say in it.”
Rory let out a sputtering sound. “I’m sure she was just thrilled to hear that.”
I couldn’t stop the upward twitch of my lips at her dry sarcasm. “She didn’t congratulate us, that’s for sure. She—I tried to get out of the car, and she cast a spell to stop me—I couldn’t move—” I frowned. “That’s where it gets hazy. We drove somewhere, and my dad came, and they were working magic, but I think she must have put me in some kind of stupor. And then everything’s really distorted after that.”
“They embedded a spell on you so that it would sustain its power after you came back to campus,” Rory said. “That was a little more than a week ago. It… It made you believe that I’d been trying to sabotage all the scions, that I’d lied to and manipulated you and was still doing that to the others. You couldn’t stand to be around me. We tried to tackle the spell more peacefully, but as soon as our magic touched theirs, you had an awful reaction. The only way we could help you was by force.”
“I yelled at you a lot. Said horrible things.” I closed my eyes, my stomach knotting. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“I know. But like I said before, I also know it wasn’t you. That spell ran deep. Your mother was using you like a puppet to mess with the bond we’ve all formed. But it didn’t work.” Rory paused. “There’s also—there’ve been some developments at school to do with the Nary students.”
“Developments?” I said, and she gave a quick explanation of the plan the barons had approved, the way a select group of fearmancer students was using the Naries to boost their power—and how I’d inadvertently supported that effort. Her horror at the new policy rang through her voice, her body tensing as she described the effects.
“And I’ve given them more justification,” I said, bile rising in the back of my mouth.
“Just the once, and only a little. I’m sure we can still turn it around. It’s just a matter of figuring out the best approach. And not being too overt about it. I—”
She cut herself off with a pained press of her lips.
“Rory?” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about that part right now. I just want to enjoy the fact that you’re back with us the way you should be.”
I wasn’t going to push her if there were things she wasn’t ready to say. Instead I held her close, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I won’t let it happen again. I promise you that. I wasn’t cautious enough with my mother—she’s not going to get the jump on me that way again.”
“Good,” Rory said. “And even if she does, we know we’re stronger than her.”
They’d been stronger, not me. The queasy sensation stayed with me as my gaze passed over the broken video game shelf, the altercation we’d just had here in the lounge coming back to me in disorienting flashes. The room felt abruptly too small, too constricting, too harsh with the beaming of its artificial lights.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I said. “We could go for a walk. I think I could use some fresh air.”
“Of course.” Rory leapt up, so quick to do whatever she could to help me that it brought out a renewed ache in my chest.
I had to make this past week up to her one way or another. She might not blame me, but I’d still been a part of it. It would still be my face and my voice in her memories.
The lights in the hall upstairs were dim, the space quiet. The library never officially closed, but anyone who wanted to keep studying into the night generally took the books back to their room. We slipped past it and out into the night.
A couple of students were just ducking into Killbrook Hall, their animated voices carrying briefly across the green, and then we were alone out there too. I turned instinctively toward the eastern woods, the stretch of forest that held both the Shifting Grounds and my cliffside haven.
The grass whispered under our feet as we crossed the field. I clasped my hand around Rory’s, and she eased closer to me as we stepped into the thicker darkness between the trees.
We hadn’t gone very far when I realized a walk on an autumn night might not have been the wisest idea ever. A chilly breeze washed over us, and a shiver ran through Rory’s body. Her dress fell to mid-calf, but her legs below it were bare, and the jacket she had on over it was thin. She hadn’t anticipated this excursion.
Before I could say anything about that, she nodded to the forest around us, keeping her voice low. “Did you want to go out to the Shifting Grounds?”
The possibility would have been more tempting if my parents hadn’t used that spot once to badger me about my involvement with Rory. That memory soured all the good ones I had there.
“No,” I said. “I feel more like rambling around. It’s more peaceful out here than it is most of the time on campus.”
“Especially lately,” Rory agreed with a short laugh. She squeezed my hand tighter and then shivered a second time.
I stopped and tugged her around to face me. “You’re cold. We can go back.”
She shook her head. “It’s all right. I don’t really want to go back just yet.” She hesitated, and a coy smile crossed her face even as a tremor of anxiety rippled off her. “I’m sure you could figure out a few ways to warm me up.”
Hell yes, I could. But her nervousness dredged up a flickering of images: my hand on her breast, the taste of her skin on my lips, her gasp, and… Malcolm’s cajoling voice?
We’d done something while my mind hadn’t been my own. Something that might have left her even more uncertain of my reactions than the cruel comments and the shun
ning had. If it would write over that moment, I’d show her every bit of affection and desire I had for her.
I touched her cheek and bent down to kiss her. She looped her arms behind my neck, her body swaying toward mine, and I already felt twice as warm as I had a second ago. She kissed me back like she’d been waiting years for me to come to her. This past week might have seemed like that long.
With a few careful steps, I walked her backward until her shoulders came to rest against a nearby tree. I left one hand at her waist, tracing a curving pattern on her belly with my thumb, and slid the other up beneath her jacket to caress her breast through her dress. Rory hummed encouragingly against my mouth.
I eased back just far enough to murmur a quick spell to heat the air. A giggle escaped Rory as the warm current wrapped around us. “Exactly what I needed,” she said, and drew me in for another kiss.
She felt even more right with her arms twined around me, her hips arching toward me to brush my groin. I was already hard, drunk on her scent and the sweetness of her mouth. I wanted to tumble into her, to reach that place where there was no telling where one of us ended and the other began, but I reined in my longing. Tonight had to be for her first. I owed her that much.
In the warmed air, I eased down the zipper of her dress so I could tug the neckline lower. As I slipped my fingers under her bra, I dipped my other hand to tease over her inner thighs. Rory let out a little growl and kissed me hard enough that her teeth nicked my lip. The spark of pain amid the pleasure only inflamed me more.
She tugged up my shirt and reached under it to trace my bare chest, every sweep of her fingertips making me hungrier for her. When she tweaked one of my nipples, I let out a growl of my own. Unable to resist, I cupped her right between the thighs. She arched into my touch with a sigh.
I gripped the soft fabric of her dress to pull it higher, but the rasp of her jacket against the tree’s rough bark made me pause. I didn’t want to see that delicate skin scraped.
We didn’t need the tree at all. I could take care of her in every possible way with my own power.
