And it was only magic that stopped her.
That heavy desire made it bloom within her. And when it did, she couldn’t help looking down. She stopped and stared at her hands in wonderment. At that bright glow gathered there, without even the need to cup or call or anything. It simply was—and it brought her back to her senses immediately.
This wasn’t the boy in the deck chair, making her feel so delicious.
This was the thing, lurking in the shadows.
This was Harker, and she was Mina.
And the moment she registered that again, she just let that magic burst out of her. She let it surge toward him, hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to burn him, before he could drag her any deeper into this nastiness.
He staggered back, wincing, shaking the hand she’d just singed.
Though she didn’t get the satisfaction of hurt or anger.
No—he laughed as he went. Curled his tongue up to his teeth, almost ruefully, before sinking his hands into his pockets. “There. Now you know what thralling feels like. And also exactly why I have never bothered to try it on you. Even when it’s something easy to persuade someone into, you apparently just flick it away, like a speck of dirt from your sleeve,” he said—all matter-of-fact about it. Like it was some sort of obvious given.
Even though it hadn’t felt that way to her.
Her whole body seemed like something ripening past the point it could stand, in the sun. Any second and she thought her skin might split. And he found it amusing. He found it sonothing. “I caught myself by the skin of my teeth, you absolute fucking nightmare,” she hissed.
And all he did in response was roll his eyes.
“Don’t be so dramatic. I wouldn’t have actually let you do it, even if I had somehow been wrong about your will being strong enough to deflect it. Which I wasn’t, by the way.”
“It was the magic that stopped me.”
“You wouldn’t have even been able to use the magic, if you didn’t have the strength of mind. But you did, and so now youcan understand. Whatever you do with me, you do of your own free will,” he said—as if her free will was important to him.
When of course she knew it wasn’t.
This was all just nonsense.
“And you couldn’t have justtoldme this?”
“Would you have believed me if I had? Would you have trusted it?”
“So that’s what this was? What it always is with you. Tricks and traps until I learn my lesson. Tests, everything tests, toward some end I don’t even understand anymore. I mean this dress, the dancing, the ball—did you really give me all this just so I wouldn’t be fearful of taking my place? Or was it something else?”
He didn’t speak for a second.
Almost like he couldn’t, like he was struggling.
Though that impression faded so quickly, she wasn’t sure she had really seen it. And his voice was cool and collected when he finally spoke. “I thought it might be an opportunity to plunge you up to your neck in something seductive, something that makes you look like you do right now—breathless, flushed, full of all the things you don’t know how to feel. On the edge of your own magic, ready to seize it. Then once you were, well. We could just see if you have the ability to use it, to compete for a prize,” he said, almost as soft and low as he had sounded for the thralling.
Only this time, she knew it wasn’t.
Even though she had to shake it off, all the same.
“Ah, so now comes the big reveal. Lure me here, and then suddenly plunge me into a fight to the death in some god-awful setting. Get me dispatched by every single person who just seethed with jealousy, to see me on your arm.”
“They were hardly seething. Most of them don’t even like me,for reasons they probably barely understand. And this isn’t a Gauntlet, bookworm. It’s not a Brawl. We just try to ring the bell, every All Hallows, at midnight.”
“Somehow, I don’t think a bell ringing is all it’s going to be,” she said.
Yet somehow, she didn’t try to pull away, when he lifted the curtain, and gestured for her to follow him through to the now empty ballroom. She just went, like curiosity and a thirst for understanding overwhelmed every sense she had.Even without thralling, he knows just how to get you, her mind warned her.
But she went anyway.
