Page 75 of Bitten By the Fae
Well, that was an interesting detail.
“How did you do that?”
She nibbled her lip, then cocked a shoulder upward. “Honestly, I don’t know. It was a natural impulse to take the brunt of her assault and dismantle it.”
I considered her for a long moment. “Describe to me what you mean bydismantle.” Zeph had told me what she said about the cerulean flames earlier, as well as her comments about picking apart spells and putting them back together. Her comment about Elana suggested something else at play here. Something that had nothing to do with Shade biting her.
“It’s like a web.” She twisted her lips to the side, her gaze turning inward as if she were searching for the design inside her mind. “I can see all the strands and pick them apart to morphinto whatever I need them to be. Or, like today, I memorize how it was created and replicate it.”
Well, shit.“Have you always been able to do this?”
“Yes. No. Well, sort of.” She blinked, coming back to me. “I rarely had a need for it before, but I’ve always been able to think that way about power. It’s natural, which is why I reacted to Elana the way I did. And also today. I understood the magic in a weird way, crafting it to suit me, but I had no idea it would produce WarFire. I just released some of the flames burning under my skin.”
Her shoulders fell on a sigh, and I fought the urge to reach across the bed and pull her into a hug. I could see how troubled she was by everything that happened today. It marked her as an abomination, a threat to fae kind. Yet she clearly wanted to do the right thing. Unlike some fae in her position who would go after the power to use it to their advantage, to protect themselves at the cost of others.
Aflora wasn’t like that at all.
If I told her to wear that choker, she would, even if it killed her in the process.
And it had nothing to do with her need to survive and everything to do with her desire to lead properly.
“I want to try something.” I pushed away from the headboard to sit cross-legged on the bed.
“Um, okay.” She copied my position again, facing me with our knees almost touching.
“I’m going to release a spell—nothing violent—and I want you to try to manipulate it without using your wand or your voice. Just like you did with Ella earlier. But don’t use any fire.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Good.” I held my palms up and indicated for her to do the same. “This is a simple spell for creating an object. You saw Stiggis do it earlier with Shade. Ready?”
“Yep.”
“Ajameeapple.” A bright red apple appeared in my hand. I brought it up and took a bite, waggling my brows.
She frowned. “I thought the spell for creating food wasTareero Tamida.”
“Ah, yeah, that’s one way to do it for food.Ajameewill create anything you want.” I set my apple on my nightstand and opened my palm again. “Ajameedagger.” I visualized the knife I wanted, and it appeared a second later, glistening beneath the moonlight shining through my windows. “You have to envision what you want when you say it, and the object appears.”
“Zephyrus told me not to do this without a wand.”
“Well, I don’t want you to use a wand or your words at all. I want to see if you can make the magic work without uttering a sound, like you did today when dueling Ella.”
“But that was different because the magic was used on me. I can’t sense your spell at all like this.”
“Hmm. All right, we’ll go about this a different way, then. Lie down,” I said, a dangerous idea forming in my head.
I couldn’t touch her the way I wanted to, but I could use my gifts on her in an entirely different way. I had promised not to unleash a violent spell. I said nothing about erotic ones.
Aflora stretched out her long legs and laid her head on a pillow while I shifted to my knees to sit near her abdomen. “Okay, I want you to try to absorb what I’m doing, the way you did with Ella, and use it back on me.”This’ll be fun, I mused. “Ready?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
I hovered my palm over her midsection, noting the way her shirt had ridden up to display a taunting sliver of her creamy skin. I focused my energy there, murmuring a spell meant to induce heat in a sensual manner.
Aflora’s fingers dug into the comforter on either side of her hips, a sweet little sound catching in her throat.
“Do you feel that?” I asked softly, compelling the sensation to spread across her stomach and higher to her breasts.
