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“I’m just trying to speak your language.”
“Ha ha. Seriously, I feel I should point out that you not listening to me on traditional methods for magic rituals is, at least in part, what has landed us in this particular problem.” She shouldn’t have said it, because his face and magic clouded with guilt. But before she could retract or mitigate her words, he shook his head.
“You are, of course, correct,” he replied, “but I wouldn’t change it. You and I accomplished something special between us, something that even that revolting, but obviously powerful and ancient oracle head couldn’t parse.”
“We don’t even know what we did, if anything,” she protested. “It could be just a faulty bonding.”
“It seems to me that the oracle head would’ve been definitive about a faulty bonding.”
She wanted to argue the point but couldn’t. “Maybe,” she said, giving the most ground she was willing to concede at that point.
“Does itfeelfaulty to you?” he persisted, wizard-black eyes full of glittering intensity. “Because I can feel you,” he continued when she hesitated, “in my head and in my magic, like you’re a fundamental part of me. Like I’d die without you.”
“Yes, well,” she temporized, a bit breathless from that declaration. “That’s because I’m indispensable.”
“Nic.”
“Fine.”Trust,she reminded herself.Behave as if you trust him and you’ll get there.“The bond is real,” she agreed. “There’s nothing faulty about it. Regardless of whether the Fascination comes from me or some… manipulation.” She shook her head when he squeezed her hand, a concerned frown on his face. “You’re right. We’re connected. I don’t know if the bonding feels this way to every familiar, but I know what you mean—in my head, in my magic. In my heart,” she added, giving him a tender smile, feeling kind of silly saying that, but rewarded by the warm glow of love surging between them.
“I’m sorry for the bind we’re in,” Gabriel said slowly, “but I can’t regret that our connection is something the Convocation and their tools don’t understand. It will make it harder for them to fight us if we’re an unknown quantity.”
“Unknown even to ourselves,” she remarked drily.
“We’ll learn. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? Practice and learning to work together.”
“I don’t recall mentioning making it up as we go along.” She had to smile, though, for his grand ideas. “Though if anyone has the ingenuity to do this, you do.”
“We do,” he corrected. “I know you’ve been going around suggesting radical ideas to other familiars, despite all your Convocation talk.”
That actually took her by surprise, reflexive guilt stabbing at her. “Quinn?” she asked hesitantly.
Gabriel nodded, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Sage spoke with me. Stop looking like you’re guilty of a crime. I’m proud of you.”
She had to roll her eyes at that. “I’m not a puppy.”
“Maybe you are,” he teased. “Maybe that’s your alternate form.”
Daniel the Spaniel.She grimaced at how they’d made fun of her awful cousin Jan’s pitifully cringing and puppyish familiar. The epitome of everything she never wanted to be. “Alternate forms are always adults,” she informed him loftily to cover the very real fear of that eventuality. “Never juveniles.”
He nodded, seeing more into her than she’d said. Always understanding more about her than was comfortable.Trust.
“We don’t have to do this,” he offered. “You know I understand any trepidation you might have about your alternate form. I’d understand if you’d never want to take it, to lose control of your very body to someone else, even me.”
Even him.Only him, more like. Funny to realize that because she apparently did trust him more than she’d known until this moment. “No, you were right to begin with. We do have to do this.”
He shook his head emphatically. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“We can’t stay in the arcanium forever,” she pointed out.
“Our bones will lie curled together, undisturbed, for eternity,” he replied solemnly, only a hint of a smile curving his beautiful lips.
Unable to resist that mouth, she kissed him. “Such a romantic.”
He returned the kiss, the emotion in it quickly turning urgent, and he cupped the back of her neck, holding her close as he drank of her like a man dying of thirst. Breaking the kiss with a gasp, he leaned his forehead against hers. “I will never make you do something you don’t want to do. But you’re right that we can’t stay in the arcanium forever, as romantic as our tragic death would be.”
“They’d write novels about us,” she agreed. “The new Sylus and Lyndella.”
“Spare me that fate,” he replied with a dry laugh. “Sylus doesn’t come off well in those stories.”
