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“Indeed,” Jadren drawled.“Quite the baby rebellion brewing in House Phel.”
Gabriel should’ve been aware of the El-Adrel wizard’s arrival.Would’ve been, if he hadn’t been so caught up in fretting over Selly.He should’ve put up the wards already.“Did I summon you?”he asked Jadren drily, not bothering to temper his tone.Sometimes Nic’s advice to play arrogant and brooding wizard-lord came in handy.
Jadren, however, remained undaunted, grinning cheekily at him.“A little birdie told me there was interesting wizarding afoot.”He stepped up on Selly’s other side, studying her with interest.“I’m here to learn, aren’t I?So here I am.”
“Fine,” Gabriel said, surprising everyone, including himself.He’d agreed before he knew he was going to say the words.That wizard’s intuition, perhaps.He pointed a stern finger at Jadren to make up for it, allowing a bit of sharp silver magic to leak through.“Be seen, not heard or felt.”
Jadren bowed low, managing to make it supremely sarcastic.“As you say, Lord Phel.”
“Shall we focus on the task at hand?”Asa inquired with silky irritation.“Before I have to resort to sterner measures to keep our patient sedated?”
“Show me what to do,” Gabriel ordered, not about to apologize to the healer for the delay—or for challenging his horrible Convocation attitudes.He glanced at Jadren.“Are you able to establish wards?”
Jadren raised a brow.“A first-year wizard can put up wards.”
“Then make yourself useful and ward the room.”
Asa had him sit beside Selly, placing one hand on her forehead and the other over her heart, Nic behind him with her hands on his shoulders.She always claimed she couldn’t send her magic into him, that he had to pull it, but he felt a steady flow from her, bloodred fire, rose-red love that steadied and filled him.
“You know how to tap Lady Phel’s magic,” Asa said, fully in neutral professional mode again.“But she is a highly trained and talented familiar.Tapping Selly’s magic will be like and unlike that.The process is fundamentally the same, but she doesn’t know how to yield to you.She may fight you.”
So much for familiars being naturally willing.But he restrained the words, as they truly didn’t have time for another argument.“Noted,” he said instead.
“You’ll have to assert your control over her,” Asa continued.“Your magic will function as the reins.Do not let her magic run away with you.”
Amusement flickered through the connection to Nic, and he swore he caught from her a visceral memory of them racing at breakneck speed on Vale’s back.His own mind went to the arcanium and the sorts of control they’d been practicing.So difficult to separate those erotic games from this painfully real extremity.“Understood.”
“Proceed at your own pace, then.”
In Gabriel’s peripheral vision, Asa took Laryn’s hand and moved to the foot of the bed—several paces back from it.Gabriel glanced at Jadren.“Wards established, Lord Phel,” he reported, dashing off a faux salute.
Gabriel tested the wards with his own senses, finding them solid.Impressively so.“You might want to move a safe distance away.”
Jadren bared his teeth in a not-grin.“I’m fine where I am.”
Not Gabriel’s problem, then, if Jadren got caught in some backlash.It might even serendipitously free them of the albatross of the El-Adrel wizard’s presence in their house.He took a deep breath, calming and centering himself, clearing his mind of all else.
Well… as best he could.Various worries continued to flit into his mind like disturbed bats, inserting themselves like snatches of overheard conversation, tugging at his attention.
“Think about the arcanium,” Nic whispered in his ear, brushing the shell of it with her soft lips.“When all is calm and silent, moonlight filtering through still water.How it feels when all the world falls away and it’s only the two of us.”
He did as she suggested, surprised to find that the image she evoked could be as restful as it was erotic.He had so many conflicting feelings about the arcanium, and his monstrous ancestors who’d built it, that it hadn’t occurred to him that one of those emotions was deep pleasure, even love.Nic was right: when it was only the two of them in that bubble of moonlight and water magic, when nothing else could intrude, that had become his ideal of perfect peace.
Taking action before he lost that bubble of silver stillness, he reached for Selly’s magic, sipping ever so lightly, like the lightest draw on Nic’s magic.Nothing.No channel opened with generous abundance.It was like taking a drink from a rock, his wizard senses snapping back bruised and stinging from the attempt.He tried again, pulling harder—and again rebounded.This time it was more like biting into an unripe fruit, the rind tough and unforgiving, the taste sour.
Beneath it, though, Selly’s magic, so like his own, water and moonlight, tumbled together with keening pressure.Honing his magic into a mental version of a silver spike, he jammed it through the rind of her resistance.
And broke through.
Her magic roared over him, a tidal wave of water both stagnant and churning, like the raging sea that had nearly decimated their barge on the Wartson coast.He choked on it, the foulness filling his lungs, drowning him and sucking him ever deeper.Flailing helplessly under the rancid onslaught, he suddenly remembered falling into a peat bog as a child.The plummeting panic of that first missed step, the desperate need to breathe as the stink filled his ears, mouth, and nose, even his eyes.The chill fear of death.
Only this time, he’d take Selly with him.The certainty came bone deep.You’ll have to assert your control.Do not let her magic run away with you.
He groped for the reins, for some semblance of control, finding nothing.Only dankness and an unsettling lack of any foundation.This was Selly’s magic, and her mind, a whirling cacophony of lightless, airless nothingness.If he didn’t find something to hold on to, a sense of the real world, they’d drown here together, trapped in this wild magic that held no mercy for them.
Then, something.A light permeating the tenebrous depths.Warm and rosy, the light filtered through, showing him a pathway.Not moonlight, but liquid heat, like a summer afternoon in a rose garden, red grapes bursting with juice, the embrace of family and the sweetness of safety.And Nic, holding out her arms to him in welcome, a sensual smile on her lush lips, a sparkle of mischief in her emerald-green eyes.
He stepped into the circle of her arms, bringing Selly with him.She held on to his hand, no more than a child, gazing up at him with trust that he’d lead her out of the trackless wilderness her mind had become.Firming his grip on her, he encircled her magic with his, taking it in.
It was like chugging sour wine, the volume choking him, the flavor foul enough to sicken.But he kept on, determined to siphon as much of this vile flood from her as possible.Like repairing the levee: first he must drain the water so they could see to work, to set the cement.
Still, the torrent flowed, unending.He barely retained control, his mental muscles straining, fraying, then snapping under the stress.With that same sensation of falling, he lost his grip entirely, dropping into the morass of chaotic nothing.
