Page 58 of At the Mercy of Midnight
“You’re doing it again,” she said from behind him.
He ceased his pacing, turning to her. “Doing what?”
“That thing with your hands.” She lifted her own fingers and wiggled them mockingly. “You’ve been doing it all afternoon.”
He scowled, rubbing his palms on his shirt. “I’m not,” Silas said, and when she raised a brow at him, he sighed. “Fine, perhaps I am. It just…feels like something’s there. Under my skin. It’s making me twitchy.”
Amelia tilted her head. “Do you think it’s the magic?”
Silas pondered that. “I can’t think of another explanation. Yesterday, I reached for my pencil, and it moved. Just a fraction. But it did.”
She looked at him, disbelieving. “That could’ve been coincidence, a draft or something.”
“Or it wasn’t.”
Amelia looked to the faint scar along her palm. The matching one on Silas’ hand had healed into a fine white line. Too small to hold the weight of what it had done to them.
“You want to test it,” she guessed.
“Don’t you want to? If we’ve been altered by what happened, if we’ve somehow…developed a connection to magic, we need to know what that means. What we can do.”
She hesitated. “What if it’s dangerous?”
He smiled faintly. “It’smagic, Winslow. Of course it’s dangerous.”
She didn’t smile back. “I’m serious. What if we trigger something we can’t control?”
“Then we stop. But we won’t know our limits unless we try.”
Amelia studied him, her face uncertain. Finally, she nodded. “Alright. But we start small.”
Silas exhaled, relieved that she had agreed. “Small. Got it.”
They mapped out an experiment before starting, agreeing the easiest beginning point was simply trying to move an object.
Silas stood near the centre of the room, brow furrowed in concentration, eyeing a small glass sphere placed carefully on a stool.
“This is ridiculous,” Amelia muttered, arms crossed and leaning against the chalkboard. “We don’t even know how this is supposed to work.”
“Instinct,” Silas replied. “It’s how mages learn. They feel it, then they shape it.”
She scoffed. “Except we aren’t mages.”
“We weren’t.” Silas sent her a smirk. “We kind of are now.”
He lifted his hand, fingers outstretched towards the sphere. Brow knitted with deep concentration, he tried to harness the restless energy writhing beneath his skin. Nothing happened.
Amelia sighed. “Should I start drafting your apology for how dumb this is?”
He ignored her, focusing intently.
The air shifted slightly with a strange hum, like the room inhaled for just a second.
The sphere trembled slightly for the barest moment before it stilled.
Silas’ eyes widened, heart rate spiking with exhilaration. “You see that?”
Amelia pushed off the chalkboard, a frown on her face, walking to him. “Go again.”
