Page 29 of Moth to a Flame

I looked back down at my screen.

“But this last one is giving me issues. I’ve traced the glyph to its proto-Mayan roots, and the closest Indo-European root is lingua, like language or speech. But how can a language be nimble? Does that mean that word is wrong too?” I twirled my braid around my hand in frustration. “This is why I prefer alchemy.”

His gaze moved over the translation.

“Lingua…that also means tongue, right?”

I froze. “What?”

“Well, look at the whole thing. It’s talking about how the flower only opens for something specific, right? A lot of flowers evolved to suit a specific pollinator. So what if it means tongue here, like an evolutionary match?”

I read back over it three times. He was right. He’d looked at it for all of three seconds and figured it out. I gaped at him.

He watched me, and I felt wariness through the bond. “If I’m totally off base⁠—”

“No, that’s exactly right.” A small, careful pride blossomed in its place. “How did you know that?”

“The lengua thing? Let’s just say I learned it the hard way at a taco truck in North Carolina.”

“No, I mean the whole thing.”

He gave his wings a little flutter. “Part pollinator, remember?”

It was like I was seeing him with new eyes. Of course. Of course!

I’d fallen into old patterns. Extract the value and leave nothing behind. Stupid. I needed to work with the magic, not exploit it. I thought I’d learned that lesson a long time ago, but apparently, I was still thinking like my family. Had that…had the magic called him into my ritual on purpose, knowing I was on the wrong track?

Magic never does anything by accident.

That’s what Gertrude had said. And now here I was, sitting in my greenhouse with a man who looked like the Sims boyfriend I used to build for myself in my teens, whose very nature made him an expert in flora, and who was the first person who could understand me in years. Was he the answer to all of this?

Don’t hope, Lucia. You know exactly where that leads.

But the dried-out remnants of my soul caught like wildfire, and he must have felt it because he gave a shy smile.

“It’s just a theory. I hope it’s helpful.”

“It is. It really is.”

He liked the praise.

His blush spread, and he walked back to the greenhouse wall, loosening one last bolt. But this one snapped under his wrench, rotten to the core with rust. The panel came loose and tilted over him.

“Watch out!” I didn’t have time to think. My magic flared, and the nearby rosary pea shot out a vine that lashed around his wrist and yanked him back as the broken glass came crashing down, a large shard landing point-down exactly where he had just been.

“Are you okay?” I scrambled over to him and dropped to my knees, checking him for cuts, especially his wings.

He sat up. “Yeah…all good. Damn, is everything in this garden out to get me?”

I coaxed the vine off his wrist, revealing an angry red welt.

“I’m sorry. I should have been more careful.”

Again, I expected anger or annoyance. Instead, I was greeted by a flare of arousal as he rubbed his long fingers over the mark.

Did he…like that? Being tied up?

Immediately, through no fault of my own, the image of him on his knees in front of me in the kitchen that morning—the image I had been ignoring—clouded my mind. But now, my vines were wrapped around his chest, forcing his back to arch as they tightened around his wrists behind his back.