The Order Academy, the school on the surface, raised and taught the students how to be the worst kind of monsters.
My mate took a deep breath.
"I haven't ever done this before," he said. "But I'm going to try to cancel the spell."
I returned to my seat, letting the heat fill the space between us with warmth. I put my hands on my knees and waited.
Kyle put his hand over his arm and closed his eyes. He took slow, deep breaths.
I could smell the scent of Order magic drifting up from his arm, like a freshly struck flint.
Then Kyle's smell changed, and I understood.
Chapter
Seven
Kyle
Ifinished pulling the magic out of the spell on my arm. I coiled it up inside my core, storing it back inside of me to be used on something else. Magical energy was a resource like any other, and resources were best when they could be reused. The best thing that came out of going to this school was learning how to manipulate magical energy. It was something that could be directed by thought, but the more active the thought, the less effective it was. Magic was best cast with a quiet mind. I liked to think of the space between my thoughts as the listener, the part of me that could take the energy and shape it into reality. The more I could tap into that quiet space, the more power I was able to gather and release.
I opened my eyes to a furious-looking minotaur.
Durom had pulled his head back and up, no longer leaning towards me in that comfortable, affable fashion he had been before. His spine was rigid and straight, his nostrils flared as wide as his eyes as he let out a ragged snort. One of his hooves dragged back across the stone floor before he stopped it, asif he was holding himself back from launching to his feet and charging.
I made a mistake.
I'd gotten so caught up in the idea that maybe I could escape down here, maybe there would be a place for me that was safe, away from the trials and tribulations of the trap on the surface that masqueraded as a school. Durom, through both his blunt actions and his lack of them, had managed to make me hope for the first time in a long time that I could be open with someone.
He made me want to show myself.
Now, he looked like he was going to gore me.
But I was good at surviving, and even when I made mistakes, that wouldn't stop me. My mind rapidly whipped through the worst-case scenario of what the next few moments could be, what he could do, what I would do. I slowly reached out for my bowl and placed a hand on it, as if I were going to eat soup. If he lunged at me, I would throw the remainder of the soup in his face, then scoop up embers and repeat the gesture. Then I would rush towards him, not away, grab the pouch from his belt, and get through the vines, trapping him on one side with me on the other, with his only way out of the room.
Then I would run.
"I am not angry with you," Durom said, as if he could read my mind as I made a playbook of what I would have to do to survive his rage.
He wasn’t?
He sure looked like he was angry, and I had been around monsters pretending to be men long enough to recognize barely suppressed rage.
"Then why are you angry?" I asked, keeping my voice soft and low, avoiding antagonising him with my tone.
"Because I understand," he said, lifting his head up to look at the ceiling, exposing the long lines of the musculature that madeup his neck as he gazed up at the vines overhead. "I understand, and therefore I am angry. Not at you. At them."
My shoulders relaxed. He acknowledged his emotions, while also stating I wasn’t the cause of them. Not that I was responsible for his anger in any case. The only one responsible for fury was the person feeling it, though that wouldn’t stop them from taking it out on everyone around them.
People who took responsibility for their feelings instead of blaming them on others were significantly safer to be around.
I lifted the bowl and began to eat again. It was still hot, kept warm by the fire.
If he wasn't going to attack me, then my next order of survival was eating more food. Good nutrition was essential for a functioning mind, body, and heart.
"What do you understand?" I asked.
I didn't know what he was going to say. Was he angry because I no longer had the mate scent on me? I didn't know exactly how the spell altered my smell. Maybe the spell mimicked the scent that was most likely to cause the hostile person to calm down and not attack me. Maybe he was angry because he just got smell-related blue balls. If that was the case, it was important for me to know that now. From my experience, guys could be great at saying or doing all the right things for a little while, but the moment something bothered them, the mask would slip and reveal their true nature. It was better to let someone speak and betray themselves than assign meaning with your own assumptions.
