Page 150 of Golden Queen
"What do you want to know about it?" he asked.
"Well, for starters, what can you do?" I asked, excitedly. "Like, how do you extinguish a lantern with your finger?"
He smiled. "That's just a little push of air."
I sat up, resting on my bent knees. "Show me something."
He sighed, but he sat up and held his hand out, palm up. A droplet began to form in the center until it was a pool of crystal-clear water.
When it was nearly overflowing, the puddle exploded into a thousand drops that spread out across the room. The air chilled, freezing the droplets into fat snowflakes that began to fall all around the bed.
I smiled, watching the flurry around us.
In an instant, a warm wind kicked up. The snow disappeared into little clouds of vapor as sparks of fire danced in the air. Objects around the room began to lift; a cup, one of my boots, a tin of soap, the unlit candle on the nightstand, my shirt. They all rose and slowly circled the room above us.
I looked at him, narrowing my eyes. "Show off," I teased.
He laughed, and the objects clattered to the floor.
"What else?" I said.
He gave me a look as though to sayis that not enough?But I only waited, knowing his little tricks were the tip of the iceberg of power that lay under his skin.
"Well, that was fire, air, and water. There is earth, but that’s not something you want to play around with when you're on the second floor of a ramshackle little brothel. Life, you've seen. It allows me to heal, and I can make things grow, revive dead plants and make them whole again."
"I did that once!" I said excitedly. I told him about the faint memory I had of the flower I brought back to life in the vase.
He looked thoughtful as he toyed with the cuff on my wrist. "I look forward to seeing what you can do, Sera. If my sense of what's behind these damned things is right, you might just put my own abilities to shame."
"So, is that all of them?" I asked, somehow embarrassed by his assertion that I might be more powerful than him.
"No," he said, looking down at his hands.
And then the room went entirely dark. In the blink of an eye, the light was simply gone. Even the window, with its bright white snow beyond, had disappeared.
My heart raced as I reached out for him. That maelstrom of darkness from my dream came back to me, and I was almost convinced my hands would glide through him. But my fingers found his shoulder, and it was solid and real. Relief flooded through me even as I told myself I was being silly.
The shadows retreated in the same instant, the light returning the room to its former muted glow.
His features were pained as he slid his hand under my hair, cupping the back of my neck. "I'm sorry, Sera. I didn't know that would scare you.”
I shook my head. "It didn't," I lied. "It was just disorienting."
He gave me a tight-lipped smile to let me know he knew I was lying. I felt incredibly guilty for the way I reacted when I knew how much it meant to him that I had never been afraid of him.
I smiled and motioned for him to continue. “What else?”
He sighed, sliding his thumb down to the pulse point on my neck. "And then there is the blood."
"That sounds rather ominous," I said. I'd heard of blood magic before. It was something Alumbrian witches were famous for, but as with all other forms of magic, I knew very little about it. Aside from the fact that it involved drinking blood, of course.
"I'll show you that one later," he said with a grin that promised something slightly more than snowflakes in our room.
"Why not now?" I asked, my heartbeat already kicking up a notch.
"Because blood magic, shared between two blood mages, is something best experienced when Aben and Britaxia aren't likely to pop in at any moment."
"What do you mean two blood mages?" I asked.
