It just happened, the second she saw what was coming. Something terrible, something she couldn’t stand. Words she could never let him speak—not while she was like this. Caught in between the possible danger, and all the ways he didn’t seem dangerous at all. The whispered words in her ear holding one side of her good sense, the countdown to the chase, in the other.
There couldn’t be anything like that to tip the scales.
Nothing seductive. Nothing that made this surge of something go through her.
Not even when she already knew what it had done. She felt it, even before she looked down at her hands. The silvery wash of magic filling her body. The bloom of it in her hands, without her even having to cup them. Like he had been right, about theforms and the wands and the beads just being a thing to focus and shape.
Unneeded if you could focus and shape with a feeling.
If you could call magic to you, just by letting it in.
It was just unfortunate that letting it in involved him.
“There,” he said. Voice suddenly flat and normal.
That shaky, exhausted look back, quick as a flash.
It made her throw up her hands.
“You said all of that just to make me spark?”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t trying to seduce you.”
He rolled his eyes.
While she tried to be angry, instead of dying inside.
“I didn’t... I wasn’t imagining... It was just a lot to say to me, all right.”
“It worked, though, didn’t it? Now you can do whatever you want with it.”
“I told you what I wanted to do. To make a set of manacles. Foryou.”
“Even though you’re incredibly close to doing more. A knife would besoeasy now.”
He touched his tongue to one sharp incisor.
Like a different type of temptation altogether.
See how dangerous I am, it seemed to say. Big teeth, seductive words.
Not that teeth and seduction helped him, in this sense. “And what would I do with one now? Stab a defenseless man? I want to be able to make weapons so I can fend you off at your full and rabid strength. Not get you when you can barely keep your own head up. Now, shut up and let me concentrate,” she said—as if she really needed to.
When she didn’t at all.
It took almost nothing.
She put her arms together, to signify something defensive. Then down, hands forming two circles, thumbs and forefingers touching. Before finally, she pulled them apart. Fast and without letting herself think about it too much.
And there they were.
A set of manacles, so ghostly looking she could hardly believe they had a thousand times the strength of any metal. But she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they did. She could feel the power in them, built out of all those far too intense things he had said. They still sung in her, as she held them out to him.
Though the worse part was, he seemed to know.
“You can’t, under any circumstances, make contact with me,” he said. As if he thought things were so conflicted inside her that she might be tempted to touch him. That she might like to or enjoy it when she did.
“Don’t say that as if I want something like that.”
