Chapter 5 #2
“It’s all right anyway,” I muttered, snuggling the rabbit close, aware that my pale skin was probably blushing stupidly.
I shouldn’t have said that about him being beautiful, but it was true, and she was irrationally insecure about her husband.
Or she pretended to be insecure about her husband.
Either way, everyone knew you got better results from Healer Anna if you humored her.
And she had offered me sushi after this.
I’d been working in the shop and baking for hours. I could use a dinner break.
We pulled up outside The Cat’s Pause, and Anna narrowed her eyes at the shop next door. “Huh. It’s hard to notice the place.”
“Yes. I’m still working on that.”
“Baking magic, you say?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t really say.”
She hmphed and got out, heading for the front door while gathering swirls of magic in her hands.
I scrambled after her, almost dumping the bottle of ointment in the process.
I followed her into the shop in time to see the standoff between my father holding a match in his fingers over the mountain of macarons and Anna holding a ball of destructive energy in hers.
“Can we not burn down the shop?” I said, edging between the two.
My dad frowned at me. “I’m not burning down the shop. I soaked the cookies in the most potent anti-curse accelerant you can craft. The tiles are anti-curse and anti-burn.”
“What about the ceiling?” Anna asked with a raised brow.
We all looked up. Some of the plaster was falling down. Correction, half the plaster had already fallen, but not recently.
“Definitely have to fix that,” I muttered.
“The floor is solid,” Anna said, stomping her foot. “Good work. How about you do your curse burning while I turn the smoke into a strengthening spell that should reinforce the structural integrity?”
My dad gave her a hard look. “What’s in it for you?”
“The sushi shop next door is essential to my health and happiness. That’s where we have all our girls’ nights. Unless they’re somewhere else.”
He nodded and dropped the match on the pile, muttering dark spells in goblin, producing noxious green smoke that Anna took and made into crazy shapes and pictures. Was that a gargoyle? And a squirrel? Was she just messing around?
I sat down cross-legged on the floor, opened the jar of ointment, and started rubbing it into the rabbit’s skin while the two worked together.
I didn’t see my dad work magic very often, because most of his magic was pretty dark and my mother had been negatively affected by it.
Was I? Yes, but I was negatively affected by light magic, too, so it was all even. I hummed as I rubbed in the ointment.
The rabbit bit me, drawing blood. I froze for a second while my hand throbbed and the rabbit gave me a dull stare that felt like judgment.
Then I sighed and went back to putting ointment on his sores, trying to be gentler.
Poor thing, being cursed when he’d just wanted to eat a delicious and adorable macaron, then the dark-magic charcoal vomiting, and now my dabbing at his wounds.
I rubbed it all over until he was greased up then sat there, leaning against the wall.
I held the rabbit and watched Anna and my dad make smoke dance, but then exhaustion hit me.
How long had it been since I’d slept? My dad could go days and days without sleep, but me?
Not so much. I was more delicate than both my parents put together.
I blinked sleepily and found myself sliding sideways.
I’d just close my eyes for a second. I tucked the rabbit under my arm, my other arm under my head while I dozed.
I woke up when someone touched my shoulder. The surface of reality was so far away as I slept, tangling into dreams. For a second, I thought I was at the pool with a Prince Charming, come to wake me with a kiss.
“Miss Charles, forgive me for waking you, but that can’t be comfortable. Allow me to carry you to your bedroom.”
I blinked until he came into focus. Luminous eyes, sharp cheekbones, soft lips, and hair like spilled ink falling around his unearthly face.
“What?” I asked slowly, stupidly.
He hesitated then picked me up, his touch like warm silk sliding over my arms while he tucked me against his chest. I didn’t remember the devil’s chest being so broad, all of him being so warm.
“I’m carrying you to the bedroom. Your father’s passed out next door with the Grand Sorcerer.
It seems they drank too many elixirs. Happily, her bodyguards are watching over them. ”
“I hope her husband isn’t as jealous as she is.”
“He isn’t. He’s fifty times more jealous. But he can smell grief and love, so he’ll know your father’s heart is eternally engaged elsewhere.”
Because he’d always love my mom, and she was dead.
I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, but there was nowhere to go because I was in his arms, going steadily up the stairs, the scent and feel of the masculine creature all around me. “They say that true love is beautiful, magical, but the end is not. Is there anything worse than love that dies?”
He laughed, low and melodious, a sound that went through me like rippling golden honey. “There is always something worse. That’s one thing I know very, very well. However bad something seems, it could always be worse.”
I stared at him, at that fairy-tale face, then kept staring while he lowered me carefully to the bed, arms around me, body so close, the scent of him, the feel of him as bewitching as a dream. Maybe this was a dream. If so, he’d lower his lips to mine.
I blinked as he pulled back, not anywhere close to kissing me. Of course not. What kind of idiot was I? Everyone knew how gorgeous and tempting he was. That was what he was: temptation. I was just a weird impossibility people liked to stare at.