Page 72 of These Dangerous Fates

Ellis gasps, and my head shoots up, the grasp on my magic failing. “What the hell was that?” she asks, voice trembling, as she stares at her hands with wide eyes.

I rush forward to kneel on the floor next to her. “What was what? Ellis, what happened?” I sense Sterling standing behind me, and I turn to look at him, but he shrugs and shakes his head.

“There were … sparks … purple sparks in my hands,” she breathes. Her face is drained of color and her lips are pressed tightly together.

I hop up onto the bed and grab her hands, looking at them closely. “Purple sparks? Like my magic?” Possibilities swirl through my mind, but none of them make sense.

She nods her head, eyes still wide. The bathroom door opens, and Kai emerges from a cloud of steam wearing only a pair of jeans. He frowns at us and climbs onto the bed.

“What’s going on?” His gaze bounces between us before settling on me.

“Ellis said she saw purple sparks in her hands.” When I look back at her, I’m not sure she’s breathing.

“It was like when you use your magic on me,” she says quietly.

“What do you mean?” Sterling asks. “Usually, when being healed, it’s like you’re being squeezed to death.”

She shakes her head. “No. Cade’s magic is always warm and light. I don’t know how to explain it.”

I pull my bottom lip between my teeth as my mind digs into everything I know of mages and soul bonded. I have never heard of anything like this happening. “Hold out your hands,” I direct her.

She does as I ask and I place mine in front of hers, palms up. My magic surges to the surface without me even thinking, like it knows what I want it to do without asking. Violet light glows in my palms and I coax it brighter, letting it twine up my forearms.

We all gasp when purple sparks light up in Ellis’s palms. They don’t last long before they flicker and die out. I urge my magic farther, up to my shoulders, and more sparks flicker to life in her palms. When these flicker out, I direct my magic to surround me, a purple glow that covers my whole body.

This time, there are no sparks. Instead, Ellis’s hands are wreathed in the same light that surrounds me. I look up at her face in wonder, only to see violet light dancing in her amber eyes.

“Cade,” she breathes.

“What the fuck …” Kai and Sterling mutter at the same time.

I let my magic settle back within me, the purple glow fading from around my body. The light in Ellis’s hands lingers a second longer before also disappearing.

I grin at Ellis. “Nothing can ever be simple with you, can it?”

She looks at me before a wide smile stretches across her face. “Apparently not.”

Malakai

“I can’t read one more fucking page,” I complain and rub my eyes.

We’ve been sitting in the library for the past three hours pouring through any book that looks like it might mention something about soul bonded sharing power, or a non-magical being bonded to three magicals. So far, we have found absolutely nothing.

Ellis, her head resting in my lap, lowers her book and looks at me. “Just a little longer and I’ll give you a reward,” she purrs.

I narrow my eyes at her. “What kind of reward?”

“You shouldn’t need any kind of reward,” Sterling says and throws a coaster at me, which, of course, I bat away. “You should do this because you want to help her.”

I snort. The bastard is going to be insufferable as he attempts to suck up to her.

“Fuuuck me,” Cade grumbles from his chair with his laptop perched on his knees.

“No luck?” Ellis asks and turns her head to look at him.

“I have hacked into just about every real estate company database in Altair,” he responds as he runs his hands through his hair, mussing up the brown strands. “I found a sale listed in one of their databases that has no information for seller, buyer, or even location. The price is listed, and it’s around the price I would assume a warehouse to be, but I can find no other information. It’s infuriating.”

For Cade, who is a master at all things tech, it’s probably more than infuriating. I close the book I’d been looking through rather uselessly, and contemplate the warehouse situation.

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