CHAPTER 5 #3
A small hint of amusement rolled off of him. “So you’re not a completely ignorant country bumpkin after all?”
“Keep insulting me. It makes cutting you easier.”
He chuckled, but the sound ended in a strangled growl as I sliced another rune free.
“I was kidding,” I said, my voice soft. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. Every time I cut you, a little piece of my soul withers and dies.”
He heaved out a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry.”
I’d sliced away over half the runes, but as I lifted my gaze to take in the rest, I felt like I was staring up at my own personal Everest. Fingers trembling, I raised my knife and made another cut.
“Tell me more about your life up there,” Michael said.
I indulged him, digging deep for all those stories from my past that were horrifying at the time but hilarious now.
Like when I was still a half-feral six-year-old who had a habit of killing squirrels and burying their corpses in shallow graves all over the backyard so they’d be easy to dig up in winter when food was scarce.
I managed to get another chuckle out of Michael with that one, but then his amusement fell away, replaced by concern, and I knew that we were both thinking about how screwed-up my formative years must have been that I felt I needed to hoard squirrels for my family.
Thank the Goddess I barely remembered my time in the MacKenzie pack.
Michael started twitching against the pain while I talked.
Each time I slid the knife in, he jerked a little, his body trying to save him even as his mind forced him to stay in place and take it.
By the time I had ten runes left, we were taking minute-long pauses in between them.
It felt like I’d been horsewhipped. At rune eight, I experienced a particularly strong stab of agony and felt warmth slide down my back.
The smell of my blood hit my nose, and we took an even longer pause as I stripped my clothes off.
Apparently the bond wanted to punish me for torturing my mate, and as I cut into the fifth-from-last rune, my blood mingled with his beneath our feet.
Good thing the tile was a dark gray color, and someone had the good sense to fill it in with black grout.
“Last one,” I told him.
Michael only grunted in response. He’d stopped talking several minutes ago, and from the ache in my jaw, he was clenching down as hard as he could to keep from vocalizing his pain.
I took a deep breath and cut the final rune free, and the last of the spell locking in Michael’s magic fell to the shower floor.
A full-body shudder ran through him. He pushed off the wall and swayed in front of me.
I tossed the knife away and lifted my hands, ready to catch him, but he steadied himself.
The sound of his ragged breathing echoed around us.
Another shudder passed through him. He rolled his heavy shoulders as if shrugging something off, and the air inside the shower stall gained weight.
It was like being outside in the middle of a field on the most humid day of the year with the sun baking down on me.
My arms felt heavy. Each breath became a burden.
He lifted one of his hands and turned to stare at it as if mesmerized.
The bars caging his power rattled ominously.
He’d kept his magic imprisoned in the same way he had his wolf form.
I should have realized something bad might happen when it was finally let free, but my ability to think ahead had been neutered by stress and fear.
We’d faced so many emergencies this week that I’d become more reactionary than proactive, and I didn’t like it.
I needed to learn how to think past this constant level of danger, see things like this coming, so they didn’t keep catching me off guard.
Remembering the way Michael’s humanity had drained away after he shifted, I took a measured step back. Was there a magical equivalent of lunacy? I really hoped not. A rampaging wolf I could deal with; I had no such defense against a rampaging mystic.
He flexed his fingers, and I caught an almost imperceptible nacreous sheen flare between them, like he’d brushed his hand through a spiderweb still sparkling with the morning’s dew.
“Um… Michael? How we doing?”
He turned to me, hand held aloft, wearing the most beatific smile I had ever seen.
His smiles were so rare that I hoarded each and every one like a dragon with its gold, but this was something else.
His entire face looked lit from within by his joy.
I felt an answering giddiness come through the bond as he shifted his eyes from his hand to my face.
My breath left my body in a whoosh as I looked into them.
They were no longer the amber of a wolf.
Nor were they his typical rich brown. Now they were so dark that I couldn’t pick out his pupil from his iris.
They had become an unfathomable, ancient black, hinting at some deep well of power on the verge of boiling over.
Uh-oh.