Page 90 of Bitten By the Basilisk

Alice

Alice could only speculate how much Silas had paid to ensure they would have a private lesson—and with less than twenty-four hours’ notice.

While skimming the details of the beginner class, including the price per person, she had noted that each session accepted four to six people. And yet, once Silas stepped out to handle some serpent-folk business, she had become Justin’s only student.

The way Silas had handled Justin’s behavior had been heart-stoppingly attractive. She had been worried his territorial instinct would make him into an overly possessive asshole, but he had been unfazed the entire time, at least until Justin made his move. Even then, Silas had remained composed.

And the kiss he had laid on her before leaving… The pang of embarrassment she’d felt, knowing that Justin was watching, had been nothing compared to the rush of pleasure Silas had evoked. His was the sort of possessiveness that made her core clench and her knees weak.

When the lesson resumed, Justin was awkward at first, no doubt still recovering after his failed attempt to hit on her, but he knew better than to handle molten glass while distracted, so they quickly got back on task.

With his supervision, she made a translucent ornament marbled with orange and pink glass. The loop she formed on top ended up being larger than necessary, but she was confident she’d get it right the next time.

Then they moved on to flameworking—using a blowtorch atop a steel workbench to melt and shape rods of clear or colored glass to make smaller pieces like marbles, beads, and palm-sized animals.

Watching closely as Justin demonstrated creating a marble containing a bit of rainbow dichroic glass, she learned how to remove any scuff from the ends of the rods and how to heat the dichro in the torch flame without destroying the metal oxides within.

As she prepared to make her own marble, her skin rippled with excitement, the sensation like static electricity. The torch was currently turned down, its flame like an ever-shifting orange flower that she could almost feel in her hands.

Before she could give in to any intrusive thoughts, Justin adjusted the flame until it was a light-blue rod, but the rippling sensation in her hands only grew as he walked her through the steps he had shown her.

By the time she had a perfectly smooth clear glass sphere containing an iridescent swirl, she swore she could sense the residual heat inside as she carried the marble to cool down in the kiln, so much so that she imagined she could manipulate the still-warm glass—even heat it back up.

Justin then demonstrated how to shape a simple seahorse using various tools to press, roll, twist, and pinch sections of translucent blue-green glass.

“Would you like to make a seahorse or something else?” he asked once the time came for her to make her own animal, the last piece she would make as part of the beginner class.

Silas had been gone for only an hour or so, and she already missed him. When Justin had asked how serious she was about him, her immediate thought had been that she was surprisingly serious, never having connected to someone so quickly and so deeply.

She was frankly getting scared, as the prospect of returning to Chicago in two days made her chest hurt.

“I’d like to make a snake,” she told Justin, wanting to give Silas something in return for his thoughtful courtship gift.

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” he said, nodding. “I could even show you how to use a stamp to create the scales. Do you want it to look kind of zigzagged?” He traced his finger through the air in back-and-forth curves.

“What I’m picturing is a loose sort of knot. Do you have a pencil and paper?”

Once she had the implements to draw her idea, she sketched a snake that could be worn as a pendant, its body coiled in an artful tangle, the head emerging at the bottom.

“You’re…really good at drawing,” Justin remarked. “I think you can handle this level of complexity. What color do you want?”

They discussed her options for a moment, and she settled on a translucent medium-amber glass that she would overlay with gold foil.

The materials were more expensive than what the standard beginner class made available, but not so much that Alice couldn’t easily afford it, especially when she hadn’t even touched her wallet for the past few days. Justin offered to give the materials to her free of charge, but she declined, certain that Silas would prefer not to receive something another man had gifted her.

She first used the glory hole to heat the glass rod, rolled it across a sheet of gold leaf that the glory hole fused to the glass, then shaped it to the thickness she wanted, which made lovely breaks and cracks in the gold.

Justin stayed with her, instructing her as necessary, but while she could hear him and follow his directions, her focus narrowed upon her task as intensely as the rodlike flame of the blowtorch, which she used to reheat sections as she formed the snake’s head, evened out its body, tapered its tail, and stamped scales along its length.

After one more trip to the glory hole, she began bending sections of the snake into its tangled shape, referring often to the sketch she’d made, her sense of time and space fading far into the background. She was aware of the tools in her hand, but she was even more aware of the intense heat trapped within the relatively cool outer layer of glass.

When the next step required bending a section of the body to go underneath another and over the next, she could feel that the material needed more heat just as easily as she could see it.

Without meaning to, she moved her hand closer and…essentially pushed more heat into the snake. The hot glass even glowed a bit brighter. Once there was enough, she bent the section into place with a sturdy pair of tweezers.

Her heart raced as she did it again nearer to the snake’s head, which she maneuvered through the lowest hanging loop of the body.

Was this really happening? Was she really manipulating the heat in the glass with sheer willpower? With magic?