Page 137 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
I didn’t let the stutter in my heart reflect as a stutter in my words.
“You just revealed yourself tofourstudents.”
“Yeah, and I changed their perception of my features,” he murmured, absentmindedly reaching out to tuck a rogue curl back over my shoulder. The skim of his callouses against my cheek had warmth pooling in my lower belly. “They didn’t see any ears or teeth. I promise.”
As if it would make me feel better, he flashed those teeth now.
God of the Cosmos, what I wouldn’t do to feel them drag down my neck, between my breasts, to the soft skin of my stomach and…
No. I shook my head. This smoky, sex-addled hallway was messing with my mind. I could literallyfeelit getting hazy in there, clouding my current mission.
“I don’t care that there are no spiders around anymore,” I whispered up at him. Even without the ears and teeth, hispresence seemed to swell throughout the hall, undeniably out of place. And though those four men back there wouldn’t have any memory of who he was, they were probably wondering what sector he was in, who he was, why he was here. “You can’t be here at theElement Wielder ballwhere anyone could see you.”
Steeler’s mouth hooked up in a half-smile. “Not even for a dance?”
For a moment, the offer hung in the air above his outstretched hand. A dance. Had we ever danced? What if this was our only opportunity to ever dance again?
Then footsteps clacked around the corner of the hallway, and I pushed against the unyielding planes of his chest.
“Go.”
Something snapped back into place in his face, a kind of hardening that tightened every one of his features. A rough, ragged return to reality that he’d been in too much of a haze to fully grasp until the moment I’d said that word.
Go.
My hands fell through thin air as he melted away, and—
Dazmine nearly ran into me from around the corner.
“Oh.” I let my hands fall. “It’s you.”
Dazmine blinked at me. “What are you—never mind. I was trying to find you. I did some good old-fashioned eavesdropping on a group of third-year Element Wielders and found out that Quinn went up to her room with some guy around the same time we showed up.”
Right. Quinn. I squeezed my eyes shut to clear the image of Steeler’s outstretched hand. “So her room is…?”
“On the third floor in the left-hand corridor, second door on the right.” Dazmine’s smirk broke through her continuous effort to look as if nothing and no one ever fazed her. “God, I’d make a good spy.”
“Maybe Rodhi will recruit you.” I opened my eyes again and almost snorted when her smirk turned to outrage at the mere idea of that. “Okay, let’s go.”
We stole up that spiral staircase again until we were creeping to a halt right in front of the supposed room next to a statue of a naked woman. From the other side, a mingling of deep and high-pitched noises had me wondering if Quinn was fucking or fighting with someone behind that door.
“Remember,” Dazmine breathed out, “I do the talking, you do the creepy mind-reading.”
“It’s not creepy,” I huffed. “But okay.”
I sank behind the shadows of the nearby statue, pressing my back against the wall. Even with Dazmine’s elegant dress, hairdo, and aura, the chances of Quinn opening up to her were low. They’d sink straight to zero if she knew I was anywhere in the vicinity.
Dazmine didn’t give me time to mentally prepare—literally—for the Mind Manipulating I was about to use against my childhood friend.
She just brought her fist to the door and hammered.
CHAPTER
41
Once, when Quinn and I were nine, her mother had tasked us with spooning out the seeds from a bowl full of pomegranates for her upcoming cocktail party. To keep us busy while she cleaned, she’d said.
As soon as Quinn had started chucking spare seeds at my head in fits of giggles, however, her mother had decided that busy wasn’t quite enough. She’d infiltrated Quinn’s mind right then and there and commanded her to be quiet. Keep her head down. Focus on the task.
