Caius lifted his hands with a wince. “I’m sorry. It seems to take any statement as a command.”
“Well fix it,” Max hissed. “You promised I wouldn’t be your prisoner.” He’d felt the bond before, as a shiver of suggestion in the back of his mind, but it had always been something he was willing to do. His body moving without his will controlling it was an experience he never wanted to go through again.
Quinn cleared his throat, throwing his own hands up when Max spun around to glare at him. “Why don’t you dial back the pyromania, and then after we eat, we can experiment with the bond and see how to control it better?”
Max blinked and looked down at his hands to see bright white and blue flames surrounding them. With a yelp, he tossed his tablet on the table before shaking his hands out, which did nothing but make a whooshing sound as the flames sailed through the air. He closed his eyes with a groan, forcing his breathing to steady before he could panic.
He was safe here. He didn’treallywant to burn the house down, or Caius or Quinn.
Reaching inside himself, he found the spigot on his magic and imagined turning it from full blast to a trickle. The swell of flames in his hands flickered and lessened, and when he opened his eyes, the flames had turned from blue to orange, until they fizzled out with the faint scent of smoke.
“Your tablet looks fine,” Quinn said, offering it to him.
True enough, there was no melted plastic or any sign of heat damage at all. Max sighed and set it aside before sinking into a chair at the dining table. He glanced at Caius to make sure he hadn’t caught fire, relieved when there was no sign of damage on him either.
Caius sat beside him at the head of the table. “We’ll figure something out. Unless you’re in danger, the bond shouldn’t be needed.”
Max sat back and crossed his arms. “There has to be some kind of guide on how it works. People have been binding mages for centuries.”
“Yeah, and most of those were done with every intention of keeping the mage under someone’s control,” Quinnsaid dryly.
Max made a face, but that was easy enough to believe. He didn’t even want to think what would happen if his father managed to put a binding on him. He picked at his salad, feeding pieces of lettuce to Aradia between bites.
They ate in a tense silence, before Quinn bumped their shoulders together. “Come on, let’s figure this out.” He slung an arm around Max and tugged him towards one of the overstuffed chairs in the living room. “Sit.”
Max sat without thinking, only realizing afterwards that he’d felt the bond at work. He tipped his head back with a glare, a faint curl of satisfaction in his gut when Quinn backed away with his hands up. Maybe being a mage wouldn’t be so bad, once he learned to control it properly. Once the people who were after him were dealt with and everyone else learned he wasn’t worth the risk of messing with.
Caius sat on the sofa across from him. “Lift your right hand.”
He grabbed his right hand with his left to keep it in place, but it still lifted of its own accord. “I don’t like this,” he hissed, managing a deep breath only after he dropped both hands again.
What followed was a long, strange session of Simon Says. The silver lining was that, after about twenty minutes, his limbs moving on their own was more an annoyance than panic-inducing. Eventually, he grabbed his tablet to finish his assignment and tried to ignore his left arm’s acrobatics.
It was late in the evening when Quinn told him to pat his head and Max stopped with his arm in midair.
“Fucking finally.” Max sat up and leaned forward. “Do it again.”
“Stick your tongue out.”
Nothing. Not even a twitch of magic.
“What’d you do?” Caius asked.
“Honestly, I just thought, ‘I don’t care if he does that or not.’”
“Seriously?” Max eyed him in disbelief. “All this time and that’s all it took?”
Quinn shrugged. “I’ve been trying not to put intention into the words, or pretending I’m talking to no one.”
“Stand up,” Caius said.
There was a brief pulse of magic, and Max’s muscles tensed as if to push to his feet, but then it fizzled out. He jumped to his feet anyway, not missing the frustrated pinch of Caius’ eyebrows before Max threw his arms around Quinn. “Thank you,” he said, pressing a kiss to his cheek before dropping into Caius’ lap. “Bed. Now.”
Quinn snickered. “You’ve turned him into a nympho.”
“Excuse you,” he said, as Caius stood and carried him to the stairs, “it’s satyromaniac for men.”
“How do you even know that?”
