“I don’t even know why it matters. He’s no more mean than you.”
Come on, she thought.Explain yourself. Admit the ruse behind your concern and your almost sorries. And of course, he gave her nothing. “It was Sebastian, then. Or his friend, Jude. The one without a chin.”
“There’s now a chinless guy out to get me?”
“Everybody is out to get you. It’s honestly exhausting keeping up with them all. I almost knocked out that boyfriend of your little buddy this morning, when it seemed like he was getting in good with her to get to you.”
“For god’s sake, stop acting like you care.”
She didn’t mean to say it so loudly. Or slap the table when she did.
It just happened, and to the point where everything went suddenly quiet.
They all stared in a way she didn’t think they’d dared to at first. Harker St. James did whatever he pleased, and you didn’t act like you were paying a gossipy sort of attention to him, unless you wanted trouble.
Yet somehow, she had managed to overcome that.
And it made his face turn cold. Dead looking, it seemed.
“I think blood loss is making you read too much into things. Now eat your food. You’re going to need your strength for our next lesson—how to avoid being set on fire. See you at six tomorrow, bookworm,” he said, tone so smooth and icy she could have skated across it.
Then he stood and walked away.
After which, she cleared her plate.
Chapter Nineteen
She tried to practice, before she went to her next lesson. Mainly because of the air of threat to his words, over breakfast. But there were other things in there, too. Frustration that it still wasn’t coming easy. The feeling that other threats were closing in on her. A sense of time racing on, and every challenge that would bring with it.
Practical lessons began after Christmas.
And practical lessons would not wait for her to catch up.
She would either fly when pushed, or fall. Defend herself while dueling, or get cut down. Contain a fireball, or be incinerated. There was no in between when it came to things like that. So instead of readingHow to Navigate the Underneathfor the seventh time, she stood up. She closed her eyes. And she tried to summon the right sort of feeling, without falling back on any recent situations.
Like him lifting her. The look of him on that bed. His mouth—
Think of something from before all this, she ordered herself.Something that is not him and all the ways he is obviously poisoning you. Because heispoisoning you. Making you think he means any sweet thing he says and does, making you sleepwalk into sympathy, and then telling you your sympathy is dangerous just to fool you even further. He is smart, and you have to be smarter.
But when she tried, nothing came up.
It never came up. There wasn’t anything there.
The best she could do was things she’d read in books, about swooning maidens being haunted by fiends. Most of which had never really inspired a whole lot of anything. And the stuff that had was pretty much useless to her now. Every time she tried to fall back on some story that had produced the slightest spark in her, the story simply reminded her of him.
Like she’d been primed to fall for this.
There was just no way out.
Desire for him was deadly.
But only desire for him would do.
And that was a very bad thing, indeed, when she had to walk into that theater knowing he was most likely waiting with a fistful of snakes. She had to let herself think of a nightgown being slid over milky thighs, just to make some sort of shield before she went inside.
Though she knew it wasn’t a very good one.
She brought it up the moment she set foot through the door, and it actually seemed to wink out for a second. She watched that silvery blue dissolve, just as she felt magic rushing toward her. A knife of some description, she thought it was and tried to duck. To lurch to the left.
