I gasped and stepped back. The strange connection snapped.
The ringing in my ears continued, and heat still clung to me, burning my cheeks.
“Jane… love,” Reagan murmured, cautiously stepping toward me. “Have you done that before?”
My skin hummed. I shook my head.
Heat pulsed beneath my skin, as if something inside me was thrashing and sending searing currents through my blood, like—
Reagan took my hand, lifting them so I could see them. They trembled and shimmered.
My breath left me in a shuddering exhale.
Reagan’s azure eyes softened at the corners, his mouth curved into a crooked smile. “I do so love when I’m right.”
I had pinned him to the floor, had controlled his legs, his feet. I had accessed power unintentionally,withoutanyone siphoning it to me.
“Can you do it again?” he asked, expectation weaving through his voice. He stepped back, arms open, showing me the target.
“Hold you in place? I don’t know the charm for that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
But it made no sense. I was taught charms in every lesson.
“What you’re feeling is a living thing,” Reagan explained. “A natural power within you. The words for charms are the commands, but sometimes your will is strong enough that your access just understands. It’s not sentient but is alive. So will me to stay.”
My skin felt too warm, yet I nodded and focused on the faint beat of wings in the back of my mind. Not a ringing, but wings. An eagle took shape, and it already knew what I wanted.
Again, Reagan was pinned.
He asked me to do it again, and again, and a third time. The eagle vanished with the last attempt. Still, a choked sound escaped me. A laugh.
“It’s late tonight, but tomorrow you should ask Hildegard to measure you again,” Reagan said. “You might have finally unblocked yourself.”
“Why?” I asked under my breath. “Why now?”
He shrugged. “Who bloody knows?” A smirk curved across his mouth. “Perhaps your practice finally showed progress. Or perhaps you loosened that control you have and allowed yourself to feel what is natural to you.”
Allowed myself. As though I had been holding this access at bay until now, locking it down by trying too hard.
A quiet elation bloomed through me. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, and Reagan’s smile faltered, something more intent taking its place.
He stood before me with Mountheim’s mountains rising at his back. He reached for my wrists, lifting one to his mouth and pressing a kiss to the place where my pulse fluttered. Then the other. Tiny bumps rose all over my skin.
Something shifted.
No.
Everything did.
Chapter 44
Jane
“Does this change things?”
He studied my face with an intensity that made it hard to move, the quick bobbing of his throat the only sign he had heard me.
