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“Huh.” I nodded with grudging respect.
That was a pretty cool move, and it also said a lot about Trace’s character that when he’d slowly started manifesting magic, instead of freaking out and going insane, he’d taken it in stride and started learning how to control it. As terrifying as it was to have had my magic spring up all at once, I felt like that was actually easier to handle, psychologically. Like ripping a band-aid off.
“What else can you do?” I asked.
He shrugged. “All kinds of different things. There are spells I practice over and over, and then there are ones I just sort of improvise in the moment. It just depends on the situation. I’ve realized, at least for me, the magic and I are connected. We’re one. Just like everything else on earth.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Wow. For a rock star, that’s pretty deep.”
He glanced up at me before flicking his gaze to the other two men. They were both laughing at him as they cleaned themselves off from the fight. We’d found a small stream right before we’d been attacked by a bunch of oversized monsters. Maybe they’d been guarding their little watering hole.
“You knew I was a rock star?”
I smiled as I heaved myself up from the tree and crossed toward the stream where Lachlan and Merrick crouched. “Yeah, it was hard to miss you in all those fucking magazines. Your face was right on the cover.”
Surprisingly, Trace looked down at the ground, seeming to lose a little of his cocky enthusiasm. “Yeah. It was. I don’t miss that shit.”
“What? Not a fan of the spotlight?” I joked. “Is that why you chose a career where you got up onstage in front of literally thousands of people on a weekly basis?”
Trace scowled at me. “Hey, you don’t know my life, Snow White. Yeah, I loved performing. But that doesn’t mean I loved all the rest of the bullshit. The interviews and award shows and keeping the record label happy? That’s not why I started playing.”
“Yeah,” I drawled. “Must’ve been a really tough life. I bet you cried about it in your million dollar mansion every night.”
His expression hardened, and he didn’t respond. A sudden twinge of regret shot through me. I’d just been bantering mindlessly, but I seemed to have hit an actual nerve.
The truth was, I didn’t know his life. And it bugged the shit out of me when people judged me based on what they thought they knew about me, without bothering to find out the actual truth.
Fuck.
I kind of wanted to apologize, but I wasn’t sure how. The words were unfamiliar, and they didn’t come easily to me.
Before I could open my mouth, movement in my periphery caught my eye, and I turned just in time to catch the water bottles Merrick tossed at me. I shoved them both in the pack, studiously ignoring Trace, hoping the weirdness would just dissolve if I let the subject drop.
We’d found a satchel in the wilderness a few days ago with several reusable metal water bottles in it. And that was pretty much the only good thing that’d happened all week.
“Godsdammit. We need a new plan.” Merrick stood up, shaking the water off his hands. “We need to figure out if we’re going about this the right way. It’s been almost a week and a half since we read that fucking clue. We’ve fought off monsters, almost frozen to death, and we don’t even know if we’re headed in the right direction.”
Lachlan rolled one shoulder as if testing the joint. A ragged scratch decorated the front of his shoulder, visible through a bloodstained tear in his shirt. It was a testament to his fighting skills that he hadn’t lost the whole damn arm in the fight.
“We’re headed in the right direction,” he said determinedly. “Remember the compass on the scroll?” Then he hesitated. “But Merrick’s right about one thing—we don’t have much to go on. Water and fire? What the fuck does that mean? It sounds nice and poetic and all, but how do those things mix? They’re total opposites.”
I finished stuffing the bottles back into the pack and stood up, slapping my hands against my legs to knock the dirt off. “Well, I know it’s gonna be dark soon. We should probably set up camp. Let’s go upstream a little and camp there. There’s enough tree cover that we can use the tarp from my bag like we did a few nights ago.”
All the guys agreed, and we trekked about a quarter-mile upstream, leaving the dead bodies behind. Once we reached a good spot, we didn’t even have to talk about who would do what. We all just separated and started doing what we normally did.
We were actually starting to function pretty well together as a team.
I acted like it bothered me, making sure to keep my walls up around each of them, but the truth was, I sort of liked the company. These guys had been walking cocks inside the halls of Magic Blessed, but out here in the magical wilderness, they weren’t actually all that bad.
Tough. Strong. Capable.
Exactly the types of guys who are dangerous for my self-control.
Brushing that thought away, I grabbed a bunch of twigs, sticks, and branches and headed to the center of the clearing to make a fire. As a first-year, I was still behind the three men in magical ability, but my magic was really good at making fires, so I had been in charge of them since the third or fourth night.
As I set the kindling ablaze, Merrick walked up beside me. When the fire was burning steadily, he reached down, handing
me a bit of food. I crouched in front of the flame, eating slowly as Merrick surveyed the jungle around us.
