Page 49 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
When I only stared down at the tin, she rattled it again.
“Go ahead! You said yes, right? Pick the shape of your new brand.”
Gingerly, I reached out and took the container, sifting through the items inside: a bent spoon, a copper coin, an old key, a broken bell.
“What’s this?” I asked, lifting a pendant by its chain, letting the firelight wink against its intricate engravings. Swirls and loops and lines.
Steeler’s hand jerked forward, surprise lighting up his face, just as Felicity said nonchalantly, “I stole it from Coco’s underwear drawer.”
He dropped his hand, his expression dwindling into unreadable hardness again. I raised my eyebrow at him.
“It’s just a little something my mother left for me. She died before I could remember her,” he added with a shrug before I could ask, “so it’s not sentimental or anything. You’re welcome to use it if you want.”
I rubbed the pendant between my fingers, studying the engravings—words, it seemed, in another language. Bordering the words were the silhouettes of three female faeries wearing crowns. Princesses, maybe?
“What does it say?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“It’s Sorronian for ‘the heart does not falter.’”
The heart does not falter. Such a beautiful saying coming from such a heartless man’s lips. I flicked a look at those lips once before blurting out, “You’re sure you’re okay with me using it?”
Why? Why did I have to give him a splinter of… of anything other than hatred when he was the one who’d brought me here against my will? When he still hadn’t denied the single memory I had of him?
“Of course you can use it,” Steeler answered immediately, either oblivious of my thoughts or choosing to ignore them. “It would probably look better than a spoon. Not that we’ll brand you where anybody can see it, of course.”
There was something about the way his eyes dipped down my body, as if imagining all the places a forbidden brand could hide, that made that damnfeelingflop in my belly again.
But then he was asking the others “Ready?” and when they all nodded, clambering to their feet, I didn’t have time to try to push the feeling away.
Steeler turned to retrieve something from the mantle behind him.
When he pivoted back, two things were flashing in his hands: a pair of tongs and a crude, pointed knife even smaller than the extra ones in my sheath.
Quick as the lightning that blazed outside, he pressed this knife against the underside of his arm, took a quick breath, and—
“What are you—?” I jolted forward.
—sliced.
Blood gushed from the wound. Steeler refocused his gaze on the twins beside me, who stood in peculiar offensive stances.
“Remember,” he told them, hardly even panting. “Just the Mind Manipulating bascite. Don’t let her have an ounce of the other kind.”
I was too bewildered to even take offense to that. For some reason, when he’d said he could share his Mind Manipulating power with me, it had never occurred to me that there would be blood. Lots of it, more than when I’d nicked his jaw or cut hisshoulder—splashing onto the rug at our feet where that tea had splashed minutes earlier.
Sasha and Sylvie were already focusing, their hands outstretched, eyes closed. From the lifetime I’d spent growing up with Fabian and Don’s Summoning magic, I knew it usually didn’t require this type of concentration. This… this was advanced magic.
I stayed silent, hardly daring to exhale…
As something rose from Steeler’s wound: a whirlwind of what looked like sparkling, silver dust.
Bascite.
From the original Mind Manipulating faerie who was still alive and locked up under Dyonisia’s rule.
I begged myself not to faint, not to let my knees tremble, as the twins sent that cloud of bascite straight into the pendant in my hands, merging the two metals together with a flash of silver.
And now Terrin stalked toward me, holding out his own hands.
