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He’s shivering. “With Sindri away, it feels as if… a part of me is missing.”
“I feel the same way. It’s as if something happened when we slept together. When we…” Heat rushes over my skin.
“When we fucked.” Even winded as he is, he manages a fanged grin that has me grinning back.
“Yeah. As if the magic between us clicked together.”
Again I wonder why Ophelia isn’t doing it that way. Maybe what she wants is different. She’s sucking them dry. This click isn’t draining. It connects the magic, it doesn’t pull it all into one person.
It had felt good and right when we’d done it and every time our magic connected. I also didn’t seek the connection consciously and I don’t have any specific goal in mind when it happens—except to help them, vague as the idea may be.
“We have to get Sindri back,” he rasps. “We’re wasting time, waiting for his clan to return him, time in which he’s probably hurt.”
“Why would they do that, though?” I climb to my feet slowly, helping Ashton up. “If they don’t want to grant his requests, why not just ignore him?”
“Maybe his requests are deemed dangerous.” Ash walks stiffly beside me as we make our way toward the cover of trees, away from the crowd of students. “This is on me.”
“Ash, no.”
“I asked him repeatedly to request an audience with the elders, see if they know anything about what is happening here. He didn’t want to at first.”
“If anything, it’s on me,” I whisper. “He asked for money to pay for my fees, keep me here at the Academy. But it’s also on him.”
“Why?”
“The magical desk said that he wanted to press the elders for information on what happened to his mother, why she was at your court, why she died.”
“Then that is on me, too,” Ashton says bitterly, “because I’m the one who should have answered this question.”
“Yeah, you boys are real chatty about your pasts,” I mutter. “You never shut up.”
It earns me a low chuckle.
“It’s not funny, Ash.”
“I know. Doesn’t matter. I’m fucking pissed at myself for not seeing the danger before. Not until now when it’s too late.”
“But you think we can leave the Academy to get Sindri?” In the late afternoon, the shades of the trees are dense and deep and we step underneath a pine, the scent of resin enveloping us.
“I never thought I’d want to visit one of the fae courts, but wouldn’t he have done the same for us?”
I nod, a lump in my throat. “I’m so…” I wave a hand. “So happy that you’re saying these things, especially now that Jason and Emrys are under Ophelia’s spell and seem more like emotionless robots most of the time. Sometimes I feel like I imagined it all—how we were all together, how it felt like webelongtogether.”
“We do,” he says firmly, sliding down the trunk to sit on the bed of pine needles, pulling me down with him. “I don’t know why or how, and it makes no fucking sense to me. Before you, I’d never had a relationship that lasted longer than a week. And now I can’t imagine myself with anyone else.”
“What if it’s the magic? Like…” I swallow hard because it’s a day of harsh truths. “What if you want to be with me and the others because our magic somehow fits together? What if this isn’t real?”
“Mia. This is the most real thing I have ever experienced in my life.”
“But—”
“Our magic fits together, that’s true, but girl… This is so much more than that. You know what I mean. We care for each other. We help each other. We have each other’s back. We want each other. It’s physical and emotional and all the shit…” He shakes his head. “All the shit I never thought was real.”
“What shit?” I whisper.
“Love,” he whispers. “This is love, and I’ll be damned if I don’t fight for it. I can keep beating myself over for not having been able to save Sindri’s mom or Jason when I was younger, but now I’m practically an adult, and I’m not under my parents’ thumb anymore. Now I can fight and nothing will stand in my way of getting us all back together.”
I slide my hand over his jaw, cradling his beautiful face. “We will fight. Together. Now feed, you will need your strength. And then we will decide on a plan of action.”
