“It doesn’t matter what you think of me. It matters that you do not ever hesitate. Because I willnever. I will see my opening and seize it,” he said, and as he did, the whole room revolved, so violently she thought she might be sick. Bile rose in her throat; she got that buzzing in her teeth that usually meant her dinner was coming back up. And then she felt something against her back, and all motion stopped.
But absolutely nothing got better.
Because somehow, she was in the maze again, laid out on that stone plinth, like some ancient sacrifice to a god she didn’t believe in. While he crouched above her, just like before, caging her body in. Only worse, god, it was so much worse. He still had hold of her wrist, and now he had it pinned above her head. His body seemed closer, his face even more familiar.
“This time, Iamgoing to drop you into the Underneath,” he said, low and heavy. It wasn’t the sound of his voice that disturbed her, however. It was the words. The words. Like he had known exactly what had been in her mind, when he had done that to her.
“So youarein my head, somehow,” she said, as she strained against his grip.
It wasn’t a comfort, however, when he shook his head.
“No, Mina. I don’t need to be, to know your worst fear.”
“But that place isn’t it. Not even a little bit. Not at all. It’s—” she tried to say, thinking only of him. Just him and all the wayshe made her feel. Everything he did, everything he said.You are my every nightmare and all my torment, she thought, but somehow, she couldn’t get it out.
She looked up into his face, and saw only the long grass.
Felt that shadow behind it all. The slow sink into losing herself in it.
And it must have shown all over her, because his seemed to change.
“What connects you to magic,” he finished for her. “Whatever it is you have to feel, you are afraid of feeling it; you hide from it. You hide it from yourself. One hand acting, to distract from what the other does in secret.”
Then before she could say no, he reached up. Like he was about to strangle her, she thought, and tried to escape it. She struggled, her free hand going to protect her throat. Body bucking against his, suddenly half mad with the need to escape. But all it did was make the long, heavy length of him roll against her. All it meant was feeling her own pulse, thrumming between her fingers.
He would kill you if he could, she thought desperately.
Just as he used that hand to find the curve of her cheek.
And then he stroked over it, so slow and barely touching that it almost seemed like a dream. Like something she would wake up from, and tell herself she didn’t really feel.
Even as it sent a wave of warmth through her, so intense she didn’t know how to speak because of it. She went to say stop, and all that came out was a great bloom of light, between their bodies. It filled the hand she had on his chest, so strong and sure she couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t even use it. Didn’t know what to do with it now that she had it. Or at least, she didn’t know what to do with it, at first.
But then he said two last words.
“It’s desire,” he whispered.
And when he did, she just couldn’t help it. She used that magic to send him into the sky, in one violent rush. All the way up to the barrier above, so far she could hardly see him.
Then she simply didn’t hesitate.
She scrambled down from the stone table and fled.
She ran, with the sound of him falling, falling, falling far behind her.
Chapter Thirteen
She didn’t want it to be desire. Or at least, not the kind of desire he had definitely been talking about. The kind that went with words likesensuousandseductiveand made her feel so unsettled she couldn’t even talk to Anaya about it. Even though it was kind of something shecouldmention, if she wanted to. She didn’t have to hide that from her friend. She could just say she unearthed it in a book, or overheard other students whispering. It’snot clear thoughts, or intense focusing on what you want to appear, or the exact right hand gesture or wand movement—it’s emotion, she imagined herself saying, on more than one occasion.
And especially when Anaya seemed to be hitting a wall now.
During Professor Yates’s class on preliminary applications, she managed to light a candle. But she couldn’t turn the candle into a key, even though wax and iron were supposedly the easiest of materials to alter into each other. “Look, it says here that they are resonant, yet I can’t even do that,” Anaya said, as they lounged together on Mina’s bed on some freezing cold Thursday free period, books piled between them, her friend’s thumb holding openSimple Transmogrification Pairings for Foolish Beginnersat the right series of diagrams.
Then once Mina had squinted at the tiny drawings of wax shapes, she flicked to the harder stuff. Stone into organic matter,that sort of thing. “Never mindthisone,” she said and pointed to a pebble pictured next to a doughnut.
“Nobody can do that one. Yates said that the less pure an item is, the harder it is to turn it into something else and vice versa. A doughnut is twelve different things; you’ll end up with some sort of flour and butter rock monster,” Mina pointed out. Then for good measure she mimed what this poor unfortunate creature would look like. A hand coming out of its head. Body half melted. “Killlll meeeeee.”
“Stop it. Just because Damien Farweather turned his foot into a depressed chair doesn’t mean it’s not possible to do it right. Or that we shouldn’t be aiming for it. I know for a fact thatyouare aiming for it, even if you’re keeping how a secret.”
