Page 76 of To Crave Madly
I still couldn’t get used to the Sin Reaper being a part of me. Before, I could always shake off the demon and just be me, but now… Now I felt power running through my veins and it was beyond intense. I felt super-charged all the time. I always wanted to be doing something because being idle made me feel like I had an itch that needed scratching.
I was getting better at controlling my magic, and Elissa was teaching me all I needed to know for the neophyte incantations. I was almost ready. I could perform shadow blending and I could also manipulate a shadow to appear bigger than it was to give me enough space to hide in which was pretty cool. There were only two days left before the Gathering and I needed to master one more spell. Elissa said that I needed to perform three separate enchantments with my chosen element in order to become a new initiate in the Guild, and I wanted to master shadow leaping as my third. I was pretty excited about it. I had barely slept last night because of it and now I was just sitting, eating whatever I could get my hands on ready for my next session with Elissa.
The door to the common room swung open and Cassian strode in. He took one look at me, growled, and walked straight back out. I jumped off the sofa and followed him out of the room. I hadn’t seen him for days and I had been trying to talk to him and apologise, but that’s pretty hard to do when the person you want to apologise to keeps avoiding you. All. The. Damn. Time.
“Cassian!” I shouted as I ran after him down the corridor. “Wait!”
“Leave me alone, Lori,” he shouted back over his shoulder, refusing to even look at me.
“I just want a chance to explain—”
“Explain what?” he roared as he spun to face me.
I flinched and took a step backwards. I’d never seen so much anger and rage and I was instantly terrified.
“I’m sorry.”
He barked out a derisive laugh. I couldn’t blame him; my words sounded pathetic even to me.
“Sorry?” he snarled. He strode towards me, his long strides eating up the distance between us in mere seconds. One hand flew to the column of my neck, his long, elegant fingers wrapping around my throat. They felt rough against my soft skin and the friction as he squeezed my neck had moths fluttering in my stomach. He caged me in with his body, his free hand resting on the wall beside my head and my heart fluttered as his ice-blue eyes glowed maliciously as he stared down at me.
My pulse went wild beneath his fingers. Oh god, could he tell what he was doing to me? Did he know how much his actions made my body yearn for him?
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
“You think I care if you’re sorry?” His voice dropped to a whisper. It was low and menacing and the perfect cadence for a villain. A shiver traipsed along my spine as he leant closer still, bringing his lips to my ear so he could whisper his words of hatred intimately. “I don’t. I don’t care about you. About what you feel. About what you want to say. You mean nothing to me.”
His breath was hot against my skin and his dark, venomous voice was making me wet. I couldn’t care less about what he was saying as long as he kept talking to me. I craved his violence and the fact that I wanted him right now was a testament to the insanity Cassian inspired in me.
He pulled back from me, dragging his nose across my cheek before returning his cold eyes to mine. I felt their chill all the way to my core and I shivered under his icy stare. I tried to keep my breathing shallow. He was already too close, and I didn’t want any more of my body grazing his. I wasn’t going to be responsible for my actions if I lost control.
His pupils dilated and I could see a savage hunger burning brightly in them. Oh, god. His mouth was so close to mine. I wanted his brutal kiss. More than anything I’d ever wanted in the world.
He leant closer and hovered those luscious lips above mine. “Stay away from me, Lori. Or I swear to Jesus fucking Christ, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”
His words barely went above a whisper, but his threat rang loud and clear in my ears. He took one last scathing look at me before turning his back on me and leaving me alone in the hallway. I watched him disappear around the corner before finally releasing the breath I’d been holding. My entire body trembled after that interaction with him. How could a man like him leave me feeling breathless and terrified but still wanting more? I really must be insane. No one in their right mind would think that situation was hot, but it got me imagining what dark carnal pleasures awaited me behind Cassian’s door.
***
Shadow leaping was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But that might be because I was seriously distracted. My mind kept going back to the exchange with Cassian in the corridor. I still didn’t understand why he hated me so damn much. It annoyed me that he wouldn’t just talk to me. I think if I understood him, I wouldn’t mind so much, but I think his hatred of me went way beyond my stealing his precious Dragon Tears.
“Focus, Lori,” Elissa chastised. “You’ve only got two days left and you need to conquer this.”
Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one trying to transport herself across the room in shadows. Not only did I have to blend into one, I also had to will my body to move ridiculously fast so that supernatural eyes couldn’t detect me. Which meant I had to move faster than a vampire. Which was impossible.
“I can’t do this,” I moaned. “It’s impossible.”
Elissa strode over to me, hands on her hips and a defiant gleam in her eye. “You were the one who chose this skill to learn. You can do this. Or it will all be for nothing.”
Her words felt like a punch to the gut. She was right. Ineededto succeed. The entire success of this mission required me to get this right or we’d be thrown out of the party. And we needed to be there to see who was involved with stealing the witches and manipulating the mages. I still didn’t get why the person behind this required both the witches and the mages. It seemed like overkill to me. But then again, they had different types of magic. Was that the reason both were taken? I knew it had something to do with me and Lucifer. I knew this prophecy was bullshit but whoever was doing this didn’t. They believed in it enough to want to destroy Lucifer and me, and a zealot with blinded ambition was a dangerous adversary.
I knew witches were created by Lucifer, but mages weren’t part of the lineage of the Devil. Maybe this part of the reason? Were mages being used because Lucifer wouldn’t be able to exert his influence over them? I was missing something. There was a vital piece of information that we needed as to why witches were being used and I just hoped that we would find out at the Gathering.
Which meant I needed to learn this last skill, and I needed to learn it fast.
“Okay. Let’s try this again.” I stood on the edge of the shadow and stared at it. Such an unassuming thing. A dark blemish in a bright room. An absence of light. And the form of my magic. I stepped into its cool embrace and took a deep breath. Blending into the shadow was the easy part. I felt the hum and electric current of my magic drape over my body, starting at my core and expanding outwards I felt the shadow encase me as one of its own. My demon helped to balance the power of the magic. I knew I could consume any excess energy that my magic might create. They seemed to work together in a symbiotic relationship to keep my system from overloading and creating a magic electrical bomb which would kill everyone near me.
I looked at the spot where I wanted to end up. It was a shadow at the end of the hall made by the last pendant light. It was round and I imagined how it would feel. Elissa told me I needed to think about how the space would feel, the temperature, the smell, everything that made that spot unique.
