Page 31 of Pawns of Fate
Rose brought her hand to his face and softly cupped his cheek. She kissed him lightly on the lips.
“It isn’t the right thing to do. We can’t hurt our family like that.”
“Ourfamily?” Rose didn’t miss the tenderness in Nicholas’s eyes.
She nodded. “Ourfamily.”
Nicholas responded by kissing her deeply. The headache that had been building since she’d seen the Ojoh leader step out of Nicholas’s office began to melt away. Rose was swept up in his gentle touch; he held her as if she were some sort of precious treasure.
“You always surprise me, Rose,” he murmured against her lips.
“You always surpriseme, Nicholas,” she said, then peppered his face with light kisses. She could feel Nicholas’s smile against her cheek. Warmth flooded her body, pooling at her core, andshe lost control of her senses, tethering with the aural plane for a moment.
But before she could break the connection, Nicholas whispered, “Don’t. Don’t hide it. I want to see every part of you.” The shiver that sent down her spine made her lose complete control of her aural magic and invited in a host of strange, though not unwelcome, sensations.
Until she noticed a life force surrounded by malignant energy in the oak tree’s branches. How could she have missed such a thing before?
“Rose?” Nicholas pulled his face back, probably in an effort to check on her. Her physical body must have gone deathly still as she focused on identifying the energy in the tree. The longer Rose concentrated on it, the more worried she became. She’d never seen anything, plant, animal, or human, like it—like someone had stolen a furious piece of the night sky.
Nicholas shook her shoulders. Her sense snapped back to the physical plane.
“There’s something in the tree, Nicholas!” Rose pointed to where the swirl of dark energy had been just seconds before, but there were only shadows.
Nicholas looked at the spot. “Syzman, if you’re spying, come out now.”
Only the rustle of the tree branches in the wind responded to Nicholas’s command.
Rose reconnected her senses to the aural plane. The creature, whatever it had been, was gone.
NICHOLAS
Nicholas leafed througha few of the documents that littered his desk while waiting for Syzman and Lyla to appear. He’d called for them almost immediately after his talk in the garden with Rose.
She’d tried to explain what she’d seen, but it was hard for him to understand. Only aural magic users could access the aural plane, so Rose’s descriptions didn’t always make sense to Nicholas. But whatever Rose had seen scared her. He’d never seen fear in her eyes before and never wanted to see it again.
A soft knock at the door, and Lyla entered his study, followed by Syzman. Nicholas sometimes wondered why they bothered to dress Lyla in a maid uniform. From the way she carried herself to her lavender hair and sharp gaze, a person would have to be clueless to mistake Lyla for anything but a powerful mage.
Syzman and Lyla positioned themselves in front of his desk, standing rather than sitting. Nicholas wasn’t sure he’d ever seen either of them sit down for more than a moment or two.
“Yes, little lord?” Syzman said with the barest hint of mocking.
Gods, he hated it when Syzman called him that. “I’m not in the mood, Syzman.” He slapped the papers onto his desk. “Were either of you spying on Rose and me in the garden?”
The shadow mages exchanged a concerned look so quickly that Nicholas would have missed it if he hadn’t worked with Syzman for years.
“No,” they answered at the same time.
“I’m not angry,” Nicholas said, letting out a puff of annoyance. “I just need to know. Rose saw a strange shadow in the garden. I’m hoping that it was just one of you.”
Syzman’s usually apathetic expression melted. “What did you say?”
“Rose and I were… Rose was showing me her aural magic. She saw a strange darkness? An energy? I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t access any magical planes. Whatever it was, she could see it in that dimension, but it didn’t exist inthisone. I wondered if it was one of you in your shadow form.”
Color drained from Lyla’s face.
“Are you sure there was nothing on the ordinary plane of existence? Where did she see it?” Syzman’s voice carried an edge of concern that Nicholas had only heard a handful of times before. Nicholas felt his blood pressure rise. Why couldn’t they just give him a simple answer?
“It was sitting on a tree branch!”
