Chapter 22
DAVID
Morning training, afternoon library, and lots of insults and staring in between meant time passed swiftly.
It wasn’t terrible, this new life. Wasn’t great, either, but he’d had worse.
Within a week, David had learned more than he needed to know about Morgan and her bleak magic—empath meets mind control, but make it vampire.
Nauseating. He couldn’t keep reading about the good old days, when Morgan had roamed free, feeding on mortal blood and carousing through the realm without consequence.
At least she’d been exiled and forbidden to feed from the lavanié.
David briefly wondered whether she still lived but quickly decided he didn’t care.
He progressed instead to other pursuits—history tomes, instructional books, detailed encyclopedias.
Strangely, Anna Ainslan continued to meet him every afternoon, proving that, all evidence to the contrary, some people were still capable of surprising him.
He suspected her presence had more to do with stubbornness than anything.
She’d made her annoyance at the prejudice against him clear as the blue in her eyes, even going so far as to shove a guy when he’d yelled the familiar Go back where you came from!
at training one day. Watching someone come to his defense was both novel and thrilling.
Anna’s brand of loyalty mystified him, and he spent a great deal of time attempting demystification with little success.
She’d extracted a keen curiosity from the depths of his apathy, one that tiptoed right to the edge of fascination.
Needless to say, he didn’t hate her company. He sort of hated her on the training grounds, though that was another matter entirely. The woman reveled in pain, as did her idiot pixie comrades.
Pain leads to power, they said again and again, as if it made any sense at all. How had he gotten saddled with a trio of sadists as training partners?
He was glad to finally be rid of them after they’d forced him through a painful knife-play lesson earlier that morning. Settled into his usual table in the library, David pored over his latest—a slim volume describing the nature of Luster as well as ways to manipulate and transfer it.
From what he could gather, Luster was a mysterious physical phenomenon—both a wave hovering the border of the visible spectrum as well as a scattered constellation of discrete energy pockets.
It channeled into receptive beings, allowing them certain abilities according to their genetics, but it could also be tapped.
Or charged, as the natives called it. Here in this place, where the Light sparkled in the air, this crafty magic inside him could expand.
It could give him unlimited access to a person’s free will.
Daunting, really, the possibilities.
Did any of these people understand how easy it would be to make them all kneel?
His concentration froze in the middle of a page when a tidal wave of feeling crashed through his senses, inundating them all—honeysuckle scent in the air, sugar on his tongue, a blue mist in his vision.
David wouldn’t consider the emotion component of his magic the strongest, but it took no effort to sense Anna’s sea of feelings as it flooded the shallows of those near her. She lay waste to the emotional topography in her vicinity.
Once again, he wondered at that. The scope of her emotions floored him.
Why exactly did she know so much about Morgan’s magic?
The little pixie was hiding something. He’d tried to tease out the truth, but she’d perfected the art of playing dumb, blinking wide blue eyes at him, all false innocence and fake naivete.
Anna Ainslan might have been innocent, but she wasn’t naive. Not in the least. She was a puzzle box, and his fingers itched to find the latch. If she shared this magic, it would ease this sense of isolation gnawing at his bones.
She appeared before him in green pants and one of those sleeveless black pixie shirts that laced up the abdomen and left little of her shape to the imagination. She was a storm of blue eyes, roiling emotions, and damp raven hair that glimmered indigo and emerald where the light hit it.
“You sucked at training today.” She slipped into the chair across from him, arms crossed.
He shrugged, resigned to her state of perpetual underwhelm when it came to his training foibles.
But even the thought of hurting this woman felt like rubbing salt through his veins, so he refused to try.
Bruised and battered by her fists, sliced into ribbons by her knives, it was all worth it for a clean conscience.
Nothing a spae in the infirmary couldn’t—begrudgingly—fix.
Healing magic was weird, David thought, remembering the deep ache fading from his wrist with a simple touch of the healer’s hand. “I was really good at the falling-down part,” he said, shaking himself of the memory.
With a snort, she reached for a book from the pile. “Sylph,” she muttered under her breath.
“Do I detect a hint of judgment, pixie girl?”
Blue eyes flicked up, all sass, before returning to the book in her hand. “What are we learning today?”
He slid the volume he’d been reading toward her. “This is interesting.”
Anna opened it to somewhere in the middle. “An overview of Luster transfer.” Her brow notched, and she flipped the cover to read it. “What is this?”
“Just your basic magic book.”
She gave him a fake laugh, then read aloud, “Luster, like all energy can be neither created nor destroyed. When an individual’s reserves run low, they may be restored from one to another through touch. The process is such that… Did you know we could do that?”
“I do now.” He rested his head on his palm and offered her a hand. “Want to try?”
She pursed her lips. “Why? So you can pretend you don’t know what you’re doing and waste my time?”
A smirk wanted to pull itself to the surface, but he refrained. “Really bent out of shape about that, aren’t you?”
“It’s insulting.”
He almost laughed. “You’re insulted because I refuse to hit you?”
She snapped the book closed. “Yes.”
“You know,” he said, clasping his hands atop the table, “I’m not really in a position to be judging, but I feel pretty confident in saying that your priorities are all sorts of fucked up.”
“This is how we learn, David,” she said. “This is how we get better so we aren’t possessed and murdered by Indies in Viterra.”
David raised his hands, palms out, submissive. “I apologize. Tomorrow I’ll try to give you a concussion.”
The little savage’s mouth stretched into a smile. “Thank you.”
“I’m choosing to look past your bizarre masochism to remind you that I don’t actually need to fight. In a real fight, no one could touch me.”
Her eyebrow rose. “I could. You’re terrible.”
Anna said it with such confidence that a tendril of amusement sprouted, then blossomed with the brightest shade of temptation.
She flipped through a few more pages, ignoring him, but David leaned closer and lowered his voice, sugaring it with the right amount of bait.
“Pick up that book right there.” He pointed to a specific volume he’d planned to ask her about.
She pulled it from the pile, then blinked, a crease forming in her brow like she wasn’t sure why she’d done it.
“Turn to page forty-three.”
Blue eyes met his, suspicious, as she obeyed without argument.
He smiled. “Now read paragraph two aloud.”
A fire lit inside her as she tried to fight it, but she was powerless against his magic.
Her unwilling mouth opened, and she recited, “The pixies are a race interconnected via a neural network in the surface of their skin. This silent communication, called the Pixie Effect, is revered among the pixies as vital to their culture. The effect is propagated by receptors that activate at the physical touch of other pixies. Each individual responds to the network of another in differing ways, from small vibrations at the touch of strangers to orgasmic electrical currents between lovers. Due to this, bonded pairs are resistant to separation, and it is deeply frowned upon to mate outside the network. As such, the Pixie Effect has created an insular culture, difficult to penetrate by outsiders who cannot communicate their intentions and goodwill by touch alone.”
A riveting phenomenon, truly, and clearly the reason for the oft-repeated phrase Pixies stay with pixies, but David’s first thought upon learning about the Pixie Effect was of Sean.
Sean was a pixie, same as Lhynion. Would Sean, like Lhynion, forsake this apparently revered cultural experience for Isobel? What made her worth such sacrifices?
But Anna couldn’t know the answer to that question, so he had to ask something else. Something that would make her squirm to prove his point—that he never, in fact, had any need to use violence to win a fight.
His head quirked, and he injected more of the sugar straight to the marrow of his voice. “Have you ever experienced the Pixie Effect, Anna?”
“Yes,” she said, monotone, glaring at him.
“Tell me, was it the orgasmic electrical currents you experienced?”
The blue of her eyes darkened, and she spoke the next words through her teeth. “No. We don’t get those unless we’re in love. I’ve never been in love.”
“But you’ve had lovers,” he said. “Good ones, I’m sure.”
A pretty wave of pink blossomed in her cheeks.
He’d read the entire passage, so he already knew her answer. Pixies were practically asexual until affection blossomed, and often not until they’d fallen in love did they truly experience desire—as evidenced by the pixie bond. True monogamists.
If she’d never been in love, she’d likely never even experienced lust, much less taken a lover.
But David let his mouth form its practiced smile and pressed the magic deep into her psyche, wondering whether her own power—the magic she refused to admit to—would surface. “Come on, Anna. Tell me.”
Her voice emerged desperate. Loud. Tainted with magic. “Stop it.”