She was no Ruby Goode, sigilworker extraordinaire, but Atria could manage a handful of perimeter wards on their SUV. While they weren’t her field of expertise, every witch was taught at least a handful ofgo awayandtripwirewards from a very young age.
So while Kaz made a ruckus moving around the vehicle, his boots thumping on the concrete floor of the caravan parking space and the seats creaking as he lowered them to lay flat, she laid one spell on top of another, intertwining them until the roof of the car looked like a writhing mass of white lines.
Sitting back on her knees, Atria swiped a lock of hair out of her eyes and turned to Kaz, who lingered in the open driver’s side door. After transferring her pen to her left hand, she held out her right to him. “I could use a claw.”
His brow lowered. “Why?”
“I need a little blood,” she explained, gesturing to her work. “Just a drop will work, but I don’t have a knife or a pin handy.”
Kaz’s fingers tightened around the frame of the door. “Do it without blood.”
She didn’t drop her hand. “It’ll work a lot better with blood to bind it,” she argued. “We are being chased by people who haveguns,Kaz. A drop of blood isn’t a bad exchange for keeping them out for a few hours.”
What she didn’t say was that, though she was a gloriana and the highest a witch could rank on the power scale, Atria had always struggled with wards. Her magic did not mesh well with confinement — which was the defining feature of sigilwork. The sigils acted as conduits for magic, directing it to do the will of the person who laid them by distributing their energy in specific, repeatable patterns.
Unfortunately, Atria’s magic was as amorphous and slippery as the emotions she was so attuned to. It often resisted being bound, let alone directed, into sigilwork, making the use of blood unfortunately necessary.
Well, necessary only if we don’t want the wards to unravel in less than an hour.
Kaz stared at her for several seconds, his expression hard and his emotions a roiling mix of disgust, exasperation, and admiration. A deep, furious growl bubbled from his throat. He stooped down to fiddle with something before he popped up again, revealing a short, wicked looking blade.
He casually flipped it once and, holding it blade first, offered her the handle. “One. Fucking. Drop.”
Atria made a face. “Did you have that in your boot this wholetime?”
Gently setting the knife’s grip in her hand, he pressed, “Not one more drop, Atria. I’ll be counting.”
“Yes, yes,” she muttered, turning away to hide the way her lips curved.Stupid, pushy man,she thought, pressing the tip of the knife into the pad of her thumb.
Instantly, blood welled in the tiny indentation. Atria heard Kaz hiss but stubbornly ignored him as she rose up onto her knees to press her thumb into the center of the web she’d made.
A burst of light and heat scorched the air, blinding them both, before fading as if it had never been. When Atria blinked the spots out of her eyes, the sigils were gone. In their place, an invisible mesh of magic spilled over the contours of the SUV, protecting them from at least those people who did not know how to dismantle it — or for however long her magic would last.
Settling back on her haunches, Atria said, “Well, that should do it for a few hours— Hey!”
Her door had popped open with enough force to rock the vehicle. Kaz filled the empty space like a dark cloud. His annoyance rippled over her when he snatched the knife out of her loose grasp.
He grabbed her bleeding hand next. Hauling it in front of his face for a livid inspection, he gave her a dirty look — like the tiny, almost invisible wound had offended him personally. Muttering almost to himself, he complained, “I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I don’t want to see one more fucking scratch on you.”
“It’s just a tiny cut,” she squeaked, bravado gone. “I’ve done it a thousand times.”
Kaz’s expression only grew more thunderous. “No more.”
Atria shook her head. There were many ways in which that order baffled her, but she settled on what she felt was the most reasonable argument when she replied, “I need blood to do sigilwork.”
“Does itneedto be yours?”
She blinked twice. “I… no, I guess not. But where would I—”
Slowly, he drew her hand to his mouth. Kaz didn’t blink, didn’t break eye contact for a single second as he held her thumb against his lips and told her, “Use me.”
Glory save me.
That simple phrase should not have been so erotic, nor the feeling of Kaz’s hot tongue sliding over the pad of her thumb so pleasurable. After everything that transpired, Atria wondered at her capacity to continue to feel such mind-wiping lust.
Kaz slowly lowered her arm. Using his big, careful hands to maneuver her out of the seat and onto the concrete floor of the rest stop, he continued, “I’m not good for much, Atria, but I’ll give you everything I have. You need my blood? Take it.”
Reaching over her shoulder, he quietly shut the door. He didn’t move away, though. For a long moment, he stood there with his hand braced against the door’s window, his body only a hairsbreadth from her own.
