Page 47 of The Scarlet Ball

With nothing but a sliver of air between us, I could feel him shiver. He was learning flesh and what it might want. I would have guessed before this moment that he found it a poor weak cousin to what he knew as the storm. Now I could see, I could feel, that they were equal, and the world shifted on the most subtle of levers.

“What have you got?” I whispered. “What do you have for me?”

“I—”

“Show me. Impress me.”

He ran his tongue out over his teeth like he’d forgotten which mouth he was wearing, and to my surprise, he looked hesitant. I laughed straight in his face, because who could imagine a nervous storm?

The darkness dropped like a curtain, and my teeth came together with a hard click, the cold so sharp it stabbed straight through my clothes. Sebastian hadn’t moved at all, but it seemed as if he had grown in a space of seconds, swelled to where he stood taller than the trees around us.

No, it’s not that he’s bigger, it’s only that now he’s letting me see it.

The thought should have been terrifying. It often meant trouble when men decided to show you what they really were, but he was not a man. He was a storm, and I stood at the heart of him.

“Come on,” I repeated, and without thinking, I slapped him. “Show me, or are you—”

I shrieked as I was thrown straight up into the air. Somewhere above us was the sun, but I couldn’t see it, and the tempest assured me that I would never see it again unless it wished me to do so. Lightning lit the air around us. I shrieked again, this time with the thrill of it, my body convinced I was going to die, the storm promising me I never would.

Close your eyes.

The words were shaped out of the rumble of thunder, manipulated with painful precision until it was something like a whisper in my ear. I got my eyes closed just in time for the lightning to strike so close I felt as if I had been singed without heat. My entire body jerked in the air, nothing but pure sensation racking me. It was revenge perhaps for the slap, and like the slap, it was a challenge and an invitation.

Impressed yet?

“No,” I gasped. It was a lie, of course I was, but I wasn’t sure that I would ever tell him that.

“Give me more. Give me everything.”

The ground found my feet, and when I opened my eyes, it was to the hazy no-color of mist and air so thin and cold it hurt to breathe. Before me stood Sebastian, his clothes torn by the wind and singed at the edges, his eyes wide as if to drink in all the light he could.

“Everything,” he repeated. “All right.” He drew back and lifted his hand. It seemed to me as if the air grew denser, and then I saw them, sparkling white grains dancing around his fingers, multiplying until they swarmed around him, frosting his hair, clinging to his clothes. They were ice crystals, I realized, and my teeth chattered as the temperature dropped even further. Sebastian spun the crystals around and around until the glittering multitude stretched out in all directions and far above our heads. They flew so fast that when I moved unexpectedly, a sliver of ice grazed the side of my throat. The sudden sting and trickle of blood down my neck made Sebastian shudder, but he didn’t move toward me. He spread his hands, and I stifled a scream as the ice fell down upon us. For a single heartbeat, I couldn’t breathe, the very air frozen so it could not sustain me, but then it lifted again, the cold pulled back to Sebastian like an unruly dog.

He stood straight with his hands held in front of him, and then he clasped them together, palm to palm. With his head down, he looked as if he was in prayer or perhaps in pain.

“Sebastian,” I whispered, but when his head snapped up, the thought came: How stupid it is to give a storm a name. Why should he ever need it?

He was not looking at me. Instead, the ice spooled from his fingertips, and he began to weave.

That was the only word I could put to it, how his fingers moved with utmost confidence in his direction, how the ice and the wind obeyed him as if they could never do otherwise.

From the ground there rose first a foundation encircling us, and then I stumbled as the very earth shifted. When I breathed, grains of ice fell from my lips, but somehow I didn’t feel the cold. I laughed as a promontory of ice took shape beneath us, carrying us up with it. I might have fallen, but my feet sank into the ice, and I was held fast.

I should have been terrified, and perhaps I was, but as the walls rose to surround us, as we crashed up through the sheltering tree branches into the sun, the terror changed. It became wonder and pleasure, and I could hardly breathe as the light broke against the ice to turn it to diamonds.

By my side, Sebastian uttered a ragged laugh, as thrilled as I was. Did he know he could do this? Had he ever tried to impress anyone before, or even imagined the need to do such a thing? I thought not, but what a magnificent first try this was.

Almost gently, the ice holding my ankles receded, leaving me beside Sebastian on a vast crystal floor. We stood under a vaulted ceiling of deepest blue, ice so thick it looked like rare marble. It was, I realized belatedly, a ballroom with space enough for fifty couples to dance without ever touching each other. It was a kind of beauty that was almost difficult to bear, hard to look at.

“It’s not real,” I murmured, and Sebastian shook his head.

“It is real. How else should I impress you?”

I had walked in the halls of palaces before, an invader, a thief, stealing glamour even if I wasn’t stealing the silverware. The memory of those places lived deep in my head, and now Sebastian was offering them back to me, something to play with, something to break if that was what I wanted.

He offered me his arm, and I took it, allowing him to lead me beyond the open double doors to a balcony that ran the entire length of the ballroom. It was no colder outside of the hall than it was inside, and when I stepped into the sun, I looked out over an enormous forest, surely the mother of the forests I’d sped through in my old life. The trees crooked their sharp branches as if they would like to tear the very sky down, and it would be dark things they did to it indeed when they pulled it into their depths.

Beyond the branches of the mother forest, I saw distant shapes, so faint at first that I thought them only shadows, tricks on my dazzled eyes. Then they resolved further and I recognized them, the spire of Trinity Church, the loom of the World Building finished just this year. They were breathtakingly distant. They might as well have been in another country, or, I realized with a thrill, in another world.