I complied, letting the darkness sweep over me, a stillness I knew well.
“Forget everything else. The room. Me. My plans for this evening.”
How could he call possibly killing someoneplans?
“Forget about Erisandra. Find that sly power and control it. Then, if you can do that, you need to reach out with yourself. Not your hand, but your will. Feel for where her spell is clinging to the book, where it’s weakest. Recognize the thing that doesn’t belong, and you can peel it back and expose what’s beneath.”
I frowned, focusing on the individual pulses of power swirling around us. It took time, but I felt more than saw it, a faint, jagged wrongness threading along the outskirts of the room, like the insistent prickling of static after a lightning storm.
“Do you feel it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That imbalance? Keep track of it out of the corner of your mind's eye, but don’t grab it yet and don’t look directly at it. Let yourself get used to the texture of it, the way it doesn’t fit with the rest of the power around it.”
“It feels sharp,” I said. “Not fluid like what I use to control shadows or fire. It’s spiked, jagged.”
“Yes.” Satisfaction rang in his tone. “The power that commands nullification isn’t soft or subtle. It’s rough. Uneven. It belongs nowhere. Even the air resists it. Do you see how it moves? Skipping, restless?”
I nodded. The tendrils of wrongness shimmered, darting here and there like frayed threads.
“Yell at it to come to you. Don't try to coax it, not this nasty stuff. You need to make it obey. Claim it.”
In my mind, I snarled at it, told it to listen to me, to come to me.
It gouged toward me like a bolt of lightning, hitting me squarely in the chest.
25
Reyla
“Reyla,” Lorant growled, his voice full of desperation. It felt like I was lying on a smooth, soft surface with him kneeling beside me. His fingers traced across my brow. “Wildfire. Wake up. Please. I can’t—” His words choked off.
Hearing the pain in his voice made me shove aside the drowning feeling and rise to the surface. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the blankets this man had crafted and given me. His hand on my face felt good.
“I’m alright,” I croaked.
“What happened?”
“That power’s nasty. It came when I told it to, but it wasn’t happy about it.” I frowned, remembering. “It hit me.”
“You froze, and your eyes rolled back. I caught you before you fellto the floor.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Only a short time. Not long.” His concerned gaze met mine. “Don’t do that again. I wouldn’t be able to go on without you.”
“And here you think there was no kindness in your soul,” I said, overcome with both the heady feeling his words gave me, plus the realization that he cared. Truly cared. Not just in his snarly, growly way. “You like me.”
His eyes closed, and when he opened them again, they sank into mine. “Without you, I have no reason to exist. Where you go, I will follow, and the fates help whoever tries to stand between us.”
“Lorant.” I stroked his face. “I don’t know what to say.”
He eased off the bed, his tortured gaze gliding down my frame. “You don’t know what I felt when I saw you collapsing, knowing that something had attacked you. I needed to kill, but there was no one and nothing in the room to slay.”
“I’m not hurt. I’ll be more careful next time.”
“There won’t be a next time. You don’t need that book. All you need is—” He swallowed hard. “You’re going to remain here while I take care of this issue. When I get back, we’ll sit and talk. I’ll tell you more stories from when I was young.”
