Page 52 of Wonder
“The... campaign? And what’s a District Monitor?”
He looked at me with shock. “You don’t know about the campaign?”
“No?”
“Oh, honey. Here, pull that chair over here. Have you at least been on the World Wide Web before?”
In minutes I was educated aboutDungeons & Dragons, and how the terms from the game were being used to allow Wonders and magic carriers to communicate more openly, particularly online.
“I’m not officially part of any of these chat rooms, but I like to keep an eye on them.” He shrugged, turning a little red. “It doesn’t make me any money, but it’s my way of helping the community. Every once in a while, something happening in one place will happen elsewhere, and I can put people in touch with each other.”
I sat there with my mouth open. The possibilities were endless. This could make my mission so much easier. I would bet my last coin that theluchd-òl foladidn’t have access to a computer or the understanding of how to use one. I could get ahead of them. Finally.
I turned to Davi. “Will you teach me?”
CHAPTER 14
SIMON
Reno wasglad I didn’t hate him. It had come through loud and clear. My bonded mate was glad I didn’t hate him.
I’d never been one to wallow in self-pity, but the only reason I wanted to get rid of this bond with Reno was so I could feel sorry for myself without him knowing.
He was glad his mate didn’t hate him, and I wished my mate would love me.
Gritting my teeth, I closed my eyes and examined the bond. It looked slightly better than it had right after we’d mated. Some of the magical tendrils tying the cores together were going through them instead of around them. The disparity between the speeds at which our cores were spinning seemed to be smaller too. It appeared that our magics wanted this bond to take, which didn’t bode well for me undoing it right now.
Tentatively I tugged at one of the tendrils of my magic tied around Reno’s core. My core threw out a new tendril to effectively slap me back. “Shit!”
I opened my eyes and gave Reno a rueful look that I hoped didn’t convey any of the relief I felt. “It’s fighting me. Our magics want to stay bonded.”
His eyebrows went up. “Huh.” Then he frowned. “I guess that makes sense. Our cores sent out the original mating connection after all.” He squeezed my hand. “Thanks for trying.”
“Of course.” Anything for you.
He stared at me for a beat, his cheeks turning pink. Shit, did he hear that thought through our connection? “Um.” He glanced around the room. “I must’ve left my phone in the kitchen. I’d like to research that Emiliano guy some more while we wait to hear from Cal. Are you ready to tell the others what happened? Or didn’t happen?”
I squeezed his hand back. “I’m ready.”
When we went downstairs, Jackson was in the kitchen getting snacks out of the pantry, and Tucker was helping Nicky get settled on a chair at the kitchen table.
“Whoa.” Reno, who’d been walking ahead of me, stopped in his tracks.
“What is it?” I could see over his shoulder, and I didn’t note anything concerning.
He pointed at Tucker. “His connections. I can tell which ones are friends and which ones are family.”
“You can? Fantastic. The bond is sharing some of my abilities with you.”
He turned slowly to blink at me. “That’s not the way it works.”
“What do you mean?” How else would it work?
Reno made an impatient gesture. “Bonding enhances the abilities people already have. Like once he got bonded, Cal could call visions and his geographic range is bigger. That’s what should be happening to me. I’ve never heard of anyone gaining their partner’s abilities.”
Vaguely I remembered reading about that in the compendium Cal had written. “For vampires, each partner’s abilities get combined with the other’s skills. Like, if one of the partners has more experience at manipulating connection magic, on bonding the other partner realizes the same level of skill.”
He raised his eyebrows at me, and I got a combination of astonishment and worry through our bond. “Does this mean you’ll start getting visions now?”
