Chapter 11
Evelyn
Getting the words out was hard enough. The way Ambrose stared as I tried to assemble the sentence was unbearable. But once Lord Arctos had unceremoniously shared the information my brain was protecting me from, I could no longer avoid it.
I had bound us together with my stupidity.
It should have been obvious that something had happened last night given my reaction to his hand on mine. But no, I’d been convinced it was a useless crush. Well, apparently, it was both.
I tried to explain—the meal together, the cut, none of it came out right. I wanted him to know this wasn’t some reckless test. This was blood magic inferring intent, which I now decided it had no business doing.
His attention while I spoke left me hot and cold in equal parts, a problem not even Vesten fire magic could fix. After I blurted out the necessary information, he just continued to stand there beside his study carrel. Unblinking.
I’m not entirely sure how I decided what to do next.
Ambrose was no help at all. Somehow, I convinced him that we needed to discuss this outside of the library.
We needed a drink, maybe a few, and Parkview Tavern was the perfect option.
We could have selected a closer tavern, but I was comfortable at the Parkview, and hopefully, Ambrose would think twice about shouting at me in such a public setting.
It would keep things civil while we unpacked what I had done.
Or, at least, that was the plan.
His hand hadn’t stopped running through his hair on the walk. Well, it had stopped long enough for him to roll up his shirtsleeves and pluck his pencil and notepad from his vest pocket. He scribbled the rest of the way there.
Now we sat at a table as far from the bar and Seraphina’s prying ears as we could get. His gaze bored into mine like I was some kind of experiment. I guessed now I was.
How was I going to undo this?
Mina was working the floor, but Seraphina’s eagle eyes spotted us, and she slipped from behind the bar to approach our table.
“Evelyn. Ambrose.” Her voice was absent its usual warmth as she attempted to assess what this outing was exactly. The last time I’d seen her, I told her Ambrose was my rival for a promotion.
Ambrose startled at her voice. “Ah, Seraphina, hi.”
Her eyes narrowed in my direction. I shrugged helplessly. The words had barely come out when I confessed to Ambrose. There was no chance I could repeat them for her now.
“What can I get you two, then?” she asked into my silence.
“Ale,” I said.
Ambrose studied me. “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Seraphina arched an eyebrow at me, and I steadfastly refused to make eye contact. I barely caught her nod before she walked away to take care of our drinks. I knew we’d have words later, but right now, I needed to focus.
What were we going to do?
My unacknowledged suspicion had been growing in confidence all day.
Every time he left my sight, something in me ached.
It wasn’t enough to have eyes on him, like I usually did from my corner; the discomfort in my chest pressed for more.
It wanted proximity. It wanted connection.
It wanted a whole lot of things I’d rather not consider right now.
Then Lord Arctos put into words precisely what I’d been avoiding. He’d seemed rather giddy about it, too. I didn’t care what people said; the Vesten God was an unholy terror.
Ambrose’s hazel eyes stared into the middle distance. A flash of gold expanded and contracted across his irises before he dropped his attention to his notebook. The gold ring reminded me how his eyes had looked this morning in wolf form.
How off-balance was he? Was he going to shift in the middle of this tavern? I’d ask him, but he was still studiously taking notes.
For once, my veil cat kept quiet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was enjoying this.
Seraphina returned with the drinks. She wordlessly set them on the table, gave me another look that conveyed that we would be discussing this later, and sauntered back to the bar.
“Are you sure?” Ambrose asked, breaking from his stupor. He set down his notebook and pencil to reach for his ale.
I nodded.
“How do you know?”
I took a long gulp of my drink, considering my response.
It was rather embarrassing to discuss, but it had to be done.
I would lay out the facts, even if they were huge, embarrassing facts that made me seem like a stalker pining after Ambrose Yarrow.
“I first noticed this morning. Everything made me think of you. It was like I couldn’t get you out of my mind. ”
My cheeks heated. Maybe that wasn’t the best place to start.
Ambrose took a sip of his drink and swallowed as if bracing for terrible news. That’s what this was to him.
I sighed. This whole thing was uncomfortable, but it was blood magic. Sometimes, I felt like this particular magic reveled in discomfort.
No use stopping now. I continued recounting the morning.
“Then I felt … led—I think that’s the right word, led—to the woods where I ran into you.”
“How so?” he asked.
I was so excited to talk about anything other than my magical obsession with Ambrose, I didn’t think about my following words. “My shift. It’s new, and it was quite insistent this morning in my journey to you.”
When I realized what I’d said, I pressed my lips together tightly as if to keep any more information from slipping free. It was too late.
Ambrose’s eyes widened. “Your shift is new?”
He did not seem surprised that I had a shift, more so that it was a recent change. I guessed I couldn’t blame him for assuming after this morning. My cover story was weak.
“Yes,” I said, and grabbed my glass again for a steadying sip.
I’m not sure when it had happened, but at some point in the last exchange, his notepad and quill had made their way back into his hand. As I shook my head, I decided this, at least, was promising.
“When did the shift begin?” His pencil was poised to take notes. I should have been affronted, given everything going on between us at the moment—this magic, the research project, our general differences in opinion—that he wanted to study me and my shift.
The worst part was that I wanted to answer him. I had wanted to talk to another Vesten about this for months. But that wasn’t why we were here.
While in most situations, Ambrose was an academic first, in this particular scenario, I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t use my shift against me. The fact that I couldn’t control it was easy evidence that I was unqualified for the Vesten historian position.
“We’re getting off track.”
He set the pencil down and ran his hand through his hair. “Right.”
I cleared my throat. “Anyway, all afternoon, I could sense where you were in the library. It was uncomfortable when you left the room—”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I did, eventually.”
“What took you so long?” he pressed.
“I didn’t see you asking about it earlier. What have you been experiencing, by the way? Maybe it’s time you shared.”
That straightened his spine almost like a slap across the face. “You said you were sure that this was evidence of a magical connection. What made you so certain?”
He was evading my question. Heat flooded my body, and I reached for my glass. Maybe his symptoms weren’t as bad as mine. Maybe he didn’t feel anything at all. How would I explain this if it was one-sided?
No, he hadn’t hesitated when he said he’d been looking for me. He admitted it was abnormal. Why else would he admit something like that unless magic was involved?
“Lord Arctos confirmed it.”
That finally reassured him. He’d probably been raised with a reverent respect for the Vesten God. He probably accepted everything the god said as fact. Although … that wasn’t quite right. He had challenged Lord Arctos in Gabriel’s office on my behalf.
I shook my head. That was beside the point.
Some part of me was waiting for Ambrose to jump in like he did on every other project I hadn’t asked his opinion on. I wanted him to press for every detail I knew and challenge every fact I stated.
He didn’t, and I found it incredibly disappointing.
This whole thing was a lot, I understood that, but I hadn’t thought anything could stop Ambrose Yarrow from his methods. Maybe I’d broken him.
“Our question is now the same as our project for Lord Arctos. How do we break a blood magic connection?” I returned to the facts. Hoping for Ambrose to jump in only reminded me that it was useless to want things. It always left me feeling empty.
He glanced up at my words. “Remember when we worked on the inn?”
The question was out of nowhere. Of course I remembered. “What does that have to do with—”
“We found a loophole in the intent.”
Something in me warmed as he leaned forward to explain. A glimpse of that inquisitive mind making itself known, even though the idea of being magically bound to me seemed to be sending all his usual processes into chaos. He tapped his finger on the table in thought. “What if we did the same here?”
I was a little embarrassed that I hadn’t considered it.
The way we solved the problem at the inn had been my idea, but I hadn’t considered it in relation to this yet.
Ambrose’s brain loved history. I imagined it was like a file cabinet, with labels for each subject, ensuring ease of access when he needed it.
If we could pinpoint the intent we used, maybe we could fulfill it, and the connection would release.
“Do we know the intent of the magic we used?” he asked.
These were the words I’d been unable to get out correctly at the library. I’d made it this far; it wasn’t worth shying away from the fact that this was all my fault. Ambrose would scold me, he’d point out that this was the danger of blood magic in practice—that I never should have been so careless.
I swallowed and prepared to face his reaction to my mistake. “I know the intent.”
Confusion crossed his face as his brow furrowed and his nostrils flared. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, a head of brown hair with two silver streaks at the front lunged for me, and Luna’s arms wrapped around my shoulders.
“Evelyn! I’m so glad to see you.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Luna’s boyfriend, Vincent, walked up next to Ambrose and patted him on the shoulder. He had a sly smile on his face.
“I knew you would finally work up the nerve,” Vincent said conspiratorially.
Ambrose’s ears turned red, and he mumbled something under his breath.
Vincent’s words seemed to mean something to Luna, and she glanced back and forth between me and Ambrose.
“What are you two doing here?” Luna’s tone was much more cautious than Vincent’s.
I sighed. We needed to finish this, or I would lose my nerve. “We’re discussing something for work. I don’t mean to be rude, but we need a few more minutes, then maybe Ambrose can come join you.”
Luna shot me a look that said I was crazy if I thought I was getting out of the tavern without speaking to her.
“Fine,” I said on another sigh. “Please. We only need a moment.”
Ambrose didn’t help with the explanation. Luna at least understood that something was happening and ushered Vincent toward the bar.
The ring of gold in Ambrose’s hazel eyes expanded again as they fixed on me. The veil cat in my mind purred at the attention. I shook myself free of the connection as I remembered the last thing I’d said to him before Luna and Vincent’s interruption—the conversation we needed to finish.
“As I was saying, the intent is the same as the plants by my desk. The goal is for the rose and the morning glory to grow together. They usually don’t.
The morning glory strangles the rose’s resources.
” I cleared my throat, remembering that Ambrose had warned me off the experiment.
He’d told me it was dangerous and could cost everyone in the library.
At least the scale had been incorrect, but the overall spirit of his lecture felt accurate at this point.
I slouched in my chair, defeated as I finished.
“I was thinking about them, about the experiment. And I thought it was … I don’t know …
an interesting allegory for our work together.
I guess I wondered what it would be like if we grew together instead of getting in each other’s way. And then I bled on you.”
My hand reached for my glass, only to find it empty. Figured.
When I finally brought my attention back to Ambrose, it wasn’t clear if he was breathing. Something finally shook free, and he scratched the back of his neck. “You were thinking about that when you bled?”
His voice was almost soft. He didn’t look like he was about to explode, and his tone didn’t hold the telltale sign of an impending lecture. His resignation might have been worse. I nodded and let my head hang.
“I need another drink,” Ambrose said, glancing down at his empty glass. This conversation had apparently been stressful for both of us.
The awkwardness was unbearable. Ambrose had given me a good idea.
I could fix this. I’d done what I needed to and alerted him to the issue.
Working to dissolve our bond would significantly set me back in my research for Lord Arctos and Gabriel, but this was my mistake. It would be my priority to correct.
“I’ll get out of your hair, then.” I stood.
Ambrose blinked slowly as I spoke.
“The loophole is a good idea. I take full responsibility for the mistake. I’ll start work on this immediately and have more ideas first thing in the morning.”
I didn’t wait for a response. The coins ready in my palm clanged onto the table as I dropped them and turned to flee the tavern.