Chapter Twenty
She didn’t know what to make of what had happened. It had felt like a dream—like before, when she had felt Lilibet’s ghostly
hand on her shoulder. Only so much more intense and vivid that it had almost seemed as if she was living it. She was still
mired in it days later, and to the point where she could hardly concentrate.
All she could think about was the kiss from someone safer than him. The feel of her skirt sliding over her thighs. The freedom
of doing something so lewd and knowing it would be accepted. And then that glorious sensation of someone’s mouth on her. Soft
and greedy, all at the same time. Good, good, good, and so much so that she found herself waking, with her hand between her
legs.
She almost let herself go further.
And she only stopped when she realized something, in a great rush:
Her back wasn’t on the bed, somehow.
It was on something harder. More solid. Like the stone of that table he’d put her on, it felt like, and she panicked a little.
She tried to push herself up, thinking she’d sleepwalked to a dangerous place. But once she had, she could see where she actually
was.
That was her bed, down there.
Her bed was beneath her. The floor was beneath her. She could see her shoes on the rug by the dresser, and the top of her chest of drawers, and her stack of books on her windowsill. Like everything had turned upside down.
Though of course she knew it hadn’t.
She had done this. She had put herself on the ceiling, in the night, using magic she had barely been able to access before. It
flowed through her now, so strongly that she had actually drifted up there. She had flown somehow. She had done what she had
only looked up to the sky and dreamed about, before.
And more, there was more.
She made herself float down, with absolute ease. Like it had always been in her—and so deep she didn’t even need some of the
tools she saw others use. No broomstick, no vaulting pole, no tree branch or chair or upturned table. Just her body, so tightly
controlled that she touched down on tiptoes. She stood like that, for a second, before dropping to the bottoms of her feet.
Then she saw her lamps, unlit for all these months, and snapped her fingers. She made fire spring to the tips and was able
to flick it to where it should be, no problem at all. And once she had, a bluish glow filled the room.
For the first time, she was able to get dressed in something other than near darkness. She worked on a pair of woolen tights
without snagging them, and found the exact clothes she wanted to wear with ease. Her black corduroy pinafore, the blouse with
the neat little curved collar.
It filled her with a kind of peace she hadn’t yet known in this place.
So of course she couldn’t try to resolve the feelings that were making that possible. She had to simply endure the simmering beneath the surface of her body, as she made her way through the morning dorm bustle and out into the crisp November air. This will cool me off, she told herself.
But it didn’t.
Her cheeks and throat and chest were still flushed when she got to the main building. Like he had mentioned, the day before.
Like he had murmured to her, in between a million other things she really didn’t want to be thinking about right now. She
wanted to be cool and calm and collected.
But then she saw him, across the hall. Talking to a couple of older students she didn’t recognize—most likely players on the
Harrowhall Gauntlet team. And this time he didn’t even pretend to not notice her.
He looked the moment she did. His eyes met hers, full of the same strange, unfathomable emotion she’d seen in them as he started
talking her through that fantasy of how things could be. And once she saw, all those feelings pressed on her, even more fiercely.
They stopped her breath. Her legs almost buckled.
It was all right, though.
He was there to catch her.
He crossed the hall and took hold of her arm—just her arm, nothing more than that. Yet the contact seemed to sear through
her blouse. She yanked away like she’d brushed against an oven door. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine, fine.”
Even though she knew she wasn’t.
And she felt even less so when he urged her into the shadowy space under the east wing staircase and spelled the doors into
disappearing. She watched them dissolve with dismay, heart hammering. Trapped with him now, in a way that should have been
terrifying.
Yet somehow didn’t seem it.
It seemed like something else.
Something thick with words she wished he hadn’t said to her, and feelings she should have made go away that morning.
If I had just, she thought. Only there was nothing that came after that just. She barely knew what she was doing on any level, when it came to sex and lust and all those kinds of things.
It was most likely why it was throwing her so much.
Why he was throwing her, even though he was barely doing anything at all.
He just stood there, looming over her with his big body. Chest going up and down like hers was—most likely because she had
annoyed him. In fact, that was definitely what was in his eyes. They were like black sparks, like burning embers. Heavier
than usual, but not beyond the bounds of how he usually looked while angry.
And he sounded it when he spoke, too.
“What happened? Did someone hurt you?”
Yes, she thought. You did, somehow.
But she couldn’t say it. Because he hadn’t, really.
“I just felt hot, that’s all,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“Tell me why. Tell me why right now.”
“Calm down, the why is good. I woke up, and I was on the ceiling.”
“So outside your bed? That doesn’t seem positive to me. That seems like something that is going to get you eaten by wraiths
or goblins or the hands that start sprouting under your bed the moment you sleep outside it.”
“Hands? Are you serious? What do they do to you?”
“They drag you down to the City of Sudden Silence,” he said, voice rough with exasperation. Just exasperation. And he definitely hadn’t moved closer, she was sure. It just felt like it, as he cut her subject change dead. “But that is not the point.”
“No, the point is that you are getting mad at me for doing exactly what we both wanted me to do. Magic put me up there. Without
me even calling it or gathering it or anything. I just did it. I just flew,” she protested.
It didn’t really feel like a protest, however.
And had she gone up on tiptoe?
Maybe. Maybe.
Her face was suddenly closer to his.
“I’m not mad about that, Mina.”
“But you’re not happy. And you should be.”
“Because you can avoid being flung out of a sky door?”
“No. Because now you probably don’t need to give me lessons anymore.”
There that settles it, she thought. Only somehow, he didn’t pull away. Instead, his eyes seemed to search her face. They trailed all over it, as
if trying to find a crack in her certainty. Before they met her gaze once more.
“Really,” he murmured.
So she lifted her chin. Tried to seem confident. “Yes.”
“All right, then. Make a knife.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean make something that can kill me, before I kill you.”
“So you still think you could just murder me in cold blood, then.”
The light in his eyes shifted. Bright to dark.
Then they dropped to her throat. Her fluttering pulse.
“It isn’t a matter of could. It’s a matter of being unable to stop myself.”
“Fine. Fine. Give me a second, and I will. I just need to concentrate,” she said, only even as she did, she knew it wasn’t
going to happen. The second she tried to let it, her whole body just became so much more aware of him. Her skin bristled;
she felt her back arch away from the wall he was coming close to pressing her against.
She had to stop.
So of course the magic didn’t bloom.
“Nothing seems to be happening,” he said. And not even smugly. His voice was soft; his gaze had drifted down between them.
It made her think of him looking at other things—like the fact that her dress had ruffled just a little. She could see a lot
of her own thigh, when she followed his eyes.
Which only added to the issue.
“Because you’re distracting me,” she burst out, as that gaze roamed back up to her face. While she kept her own on anything
but him. The floor to their side, the door that wasn’t there anymore. Please, god, let him stop, she thought.
But he didn’t.
“Or you’re still avoiding fully giving in to the feelings you need to.”
“I’m doing nothing but give in. I’m barely anything other than that.”
“And yet you still can’t make a blade. So I hardly think stopping now would be a good idea.
In fact, I think we should do the same thing we did yesterday; we should try to build on the foundation we made, explore things that you like slowly, more deeply, and in a way you could never deny—” he said, one seductive word tumbling after the other until she just couldn’t take it.
She had to cut him off.
“Stop. No. I can’t do any more of that, I can’t. Please, I’m just not used to it. I’m not used to hearing things like that, and
feeling things like this. I swear I don’t want my magic to disappear, but god if all of this heat doesn’t die down just a
little. Just enough that I can breathe,” she burst out, far louder and more frantic sounding than she really wanted to seem. It came out like a scream, in word form.
And she couldn’t help trying to get away from him, at the same time. She jammed her hands up, between their bodies, so close
to shoving at his chest that she felt the cold heat from him radiating against her palms. In fact, the only reason she didn’t
go the whole way was that he got there first.
He saw those hands and stepped away.
Yet somehow, once he had, all she wanted to do was pull him back.
Even as he poured more sultry things into her ear. “Mina, your magic is not going to disappear if you stop giving in to desire.
But at the same time, it’s not likely to do you any harm if you simply explore. If you simply take what you need,” he said,
in a way that turned that one word—take—into something that almost made her moan.
She had to fight to stay reasonable.