Page 107 of A Song of Air
“That’s such a shitty answer.” She sat up again, turning towards him. She made him out in splotches and glared at him. “You don’t even know me. I could be the world’s worst mate in the history of mates. And yet you risked a lot to go in after me. Why?”
“It does not matter.”
“Oh, I think it does.” She scooted closer so her knees touched him. The brief bit of contact lit every nerve, and she knew he’d felt it too by the way he shivered. “You don’t know me, why do you even want me so bad?”
“On the contrary, I know you rather well. I know you better than anyone in the entire world, living or dead, has ever known you.”
There was a sudden thickness in her throat that made it hard to swallow. “How much does your mind magic allow you to see, anyway?”
She felt, rather than saw, the way his lips curved. She felt his stare penetrate her. She felt the phantom touch of hands glide along her back as if he were caressing her, but he hadn’t moved, so it wasn’t him. That she knew.
“Everything,”he purred in her mind.
She swatted near her ear like one would a pesky fly. “Stop doing that. It’s invasive.”
He huffed and poked at the fire with a stick. “Everyone is always so quick to tell me to leave them be, but tell me, little mate, if you had magic such as mine, would you be able to control the urge, the need, the curiosity, to see what lives in another’s heart?”
When she didn’t reply, he shoved the stick fully into the fire.
“Exactly.” There was a smile in his voice. “Everyone loves to keep secrets. Everyone wants to know everyone else’s secrets–until their own are on the line or being threatened.” His long fingers lifted near his face. He stared at them, flexed them, before dropping his hand to the grass. “Everyone has a use for me until they do not like what I discover.”
His voice had lowered, and while she didn’t detect a single hint of sadness, she felt empathy for him. She dared a few inches closer.
“Fine,” she said. “I admit, I would be a bit curious. But doesn’t it get tiring being in everyone else’s head all the time?”
“No.”
Bryson rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why wouldn’t you? I like my magic. I like picking at secrets. I like knowing things no one else does. I like to hold it over their heads and watch them squirm like fish at the end of a line. I take great joy in blackmail. Why should I be ashamed of that?”
“So, you do it for fun?”
His eyes burned as they found hers. They scorched a path down to her soul. “Yes,” he hissed. “I do it for fun. Because I fucking can. Because I fucking want to. Because it makes me feel powerful. Is that so wrong, little mate?”
He asked like he truly wanted to know the answer. And Bryson’s answer came immediately.
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
Predator or prey, her familiar had told her. She’d been prey many times and would kill not to be that again. And if using his magic to invade the minds of others made him feel the power he deserved to feel, who was she to reprimand him for it?
He flashed his canines at her. She caught the gleam of them, heard them snap together. Like he wanted to lean forward and take a bite out of her neck.
“I knew you would say that, little mate.”
“Because you cheat and use your magic.”
“I didn’t need to that time. Don’t forget that I already know everything there is to know about you. I know what vortex lies within you. I know you fight hard to keep it tamped down, but I know the truth.”
She felt her breath catch. Her heart pounded. Suddenly that vortex he spoke of seemed to come alive and she had to shove it back into place. So much anger, so much feeling and nothing to turn it into, nothing for it to become, nothing but wish she could do something, anything, with it.
“What truth?” she found herself asking.
He chuckled against her mouth. She hadn’t even felt him move closer yet there he was, his breath blowing warm against her lips, and she wanted to swallow his essence down like Fae wine she never imbibed in, if only to feel what she never let herself feel.
“That you want to watch the world burn just as much as I do.”
In that moment, Bryson knew she hated him. She hated him so much for pulling out of her chest the words she was never brave enough to face on her own. Words that had haunted her for so long because she knew that if her mother, if her father, if they heard what ran rampant through her mind, they would be so ashamed. She had garnered darkness for years. Anger, hatred, bitterness, it grew within her and coalesced into that current that she wanted nothing more than to unleash upon the world that had wronged her.
