Page 55 of At the Mercy of Midnight
He let go, stepping away.
She released a sigh of relief. “That felt easier.”
He nodded before quirking a smile. “You didn’t even fall this time.”
Amelia rolled her eyes, but a spark had returned to them. “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”
He shrugged, grin widening. “I guess time will tell.”
FIFTEEN
The days blurred together in a haze of research, exhaustion, and the ever-present threat of each looming midnight.
Silas marked the passage of time in his journal, each day meticulously recorded, and each midnight tallied with his irritable, sharp strokes of ink etched into the corner. For another four nights, they were yanked across whatever distance lay between them, crashing together with a mixture of pressure, pain and then finally, relief being close to her. So far, it proved a force that neither could resist, even with each test they concocted.
They’d tried a simple distance test, moving far from one another before midnight struck. He’d stood at the edge of the Lunarian district, while Amelia was beneath the farthest northern mountain at the opposite end. The relentless tugging sensation in his chest had grown with each step away, like they were magnets and his body yearned to be reconnected. When midnight arrived, pain flared behind his ribs and he was jerked to the centre of town, Amelia slamming into him with a force that had them slipping on the slick middle-of-the-night ice.
Amelia had pushed him away, groaning her annoyance. “Noted,” she said, brushing snow from her pants. “Distance doesn’t matter.”
Then they tested restraints. Which in hindsight, was a truly terrible idea. Amelia had even tried, albeit half-heartedly, to talk him out of it. Silas had wanted to cover all bases.
Silas braced himself in his room, secured to the wall by a set of runed bindings that should secure all magic. Amelia had fixed the bindings before midnight, standing back to admire her handiwork with a quiet smile.
“I don’t like that look,” Silas had said warily.
Biting her lip, she backed away, a hint of mischief there that had him shifting restlessly beneath the bindings.
“I like you like this,” Amelia admitted.
Silas narrowed his eyes. “Tied to the wall?”
That smile grew, a wicked edge to it as she reached behind for the door with a half-shrug. “Helpless.”
Her laugh as the door closed told him she was joking. Or at least, he hoped she was.
When midnight ticked over, Silas barely had a moment to take in a breath before being wrenched by an impossible force, magical chains snapping easily. He collided with Amelia in the hallway again, breaths uneven, pulses hammering in unison.
“Another bust,” she’d uttered, pulling away with a sigh.
During the day they’d conducted a series of tests on the blades, exposure to light sources, magical pulses, encumbrance materials. They had cut through and endured all without any noteworthy physical or magical reaction.
Silas had left notes for his mother every day, asking for her assistance. He knew Veralind was holding on to information, and that his father’s journals were somewhere on the Finley estate. She hadn’t responded to any, nor had they seen her since their first evening.
He had felt abandoned by his mother many times, but this felt deeply personal.
The bitter sting of betrayal was not soothed by the time spent with Amelia. Watching her work, with her diligent, steadfast nature had become the most difficult part of his days. He had always admired her, from afar. His current proximity and growing understanding of how she operated, it watered a seed within, and it grew wildly and out of control.
He would constantly glance up from his notebook just to glimpse her as she concentrated. If she met his eyes across the worktable, he swore she must feel how his stomach flipped. But she only looked away, returning to her work.
By the fourth day of his promised week in Lunarian, they were both exhausted. The long days and longer nights taking its toll.
They were busy crafting magical wards from runed copper plates to set between the blades, to note any nullification of the midnight pull. The runes were strong, inscribed for stability, strength, and endurance.
They’d spent the morning scouring texts on the connection theory between the Monoliths, to understand how it worked. One could not fix what one does not understand. Unfortunately, the information was speculation, nothing concrete.
Amelia sat on the lab floor, hunched over the notes sprawled around her, penning quietly. Silas was finishing the welding of two copper plates. Stiff in the shoulders, he set his tools down and reached for his pencil to make a note.
The skin of his hand buzzed oddly as he stretched out, and before he could brush his fingers over the pencil, it rolled a fraction away from him.
