Page 40 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

I yanked the bra off, smashing my elbow into the towel rack, but I didn’t care. Tiny cracks radiated from a spot between my breasts. Fuck, was the curse back?

No, this didn’t feel like the curse. The curse had been black and sludgy, and these were faint gold cracks, light enough to almost blend into my skin. I’d only noticed the first one because the metallic lines that cut across my chest reflected in the light. I blew out a slow breath. I wouldn’t panic. I didn’t have time to panic.

Quickly, I threw my mind back to when I’d felt that ache. After teleporting. After sparring. A hypothesis was forming, and I didn’t like it.

“Okay,” I said to my reflection. “Let’s be practical about this.”

I cast the first spell that came to mind, and a dozen little lights bobbed above my head. It was a simple piece of work, pretty much a baby’s first spell. Nothing. I slowly added more power into the spell. Nothing. I’d reached what used to be my limit before I took on my parents’ magic. Taking a breath, I pushed. More power, and I had to close my eyes as the lights flared so bright that the inside of my eyelids turned a hot orangey-pink. My chest prickled and stung. I dropped the spell instantly, and even though I’d had my eyes closed, the room felt incredibly dim. Was it just my imagination or had the cracks gotten longer? The longest was the length of my hand, but I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to measure it before I’d test my theory.

I gripped the edges of the tiny sink and stared at myself in the mirror. All right. So, I could use my old amount of power without causing any issues. Anything more than that was an issue.

I washed quickly and got dressed again, then practically stormed out. Downstairs, I found Gabriel holding a pair of hats. One was a green wool beret, the other a black fedora—the proper wide-brimmed ones, not the type that had haunted my junior high experience.

“We need to go to my apartment.”

To his credit, Gabriel didn’t question it and fell into step beside me. He held out the hats, and I grabbed the beret. The tingle of someone else’s magic crept down my neck as I put it on. Gabriel put on the fedora, and I was gearing up to make fun of him about it, even though the few times I’d tried to pull off a beret in the past I’d looked like the worst kind of former foreign exchange student.

As soon as Gabriel put the hat on, his features shifted. His angular jaw became squarer, and his cheekbones flattened out. His nose now looked like it had been broken at least once, and there were dark circles under his eyes. A blond five o’clock shadow sprang up, and his hair went pale and straight. The illusion didn’t stop with his face, either. His body was bulkier, his hands wide and scarred. His eyes were narrower but least his irises were the same familiar shade of purple-grey.

“Marcus made these disguises, didn’t he?” I asked. My voice came out higher pitched than I expected, and I put a hand to my throat, my nose wrinkling.

“He pulled them out of a very large box labeled ‘dress-up supplies’,” Gabriel said in a gravelly voice that had dropped an octave.

“You look like Dick Tracy,” I told him. Given how on-the-nose the fedora transformation was, I was a little worried I’d see someone with a pencil-thin mustache and a baguette if I looked in the mirror.

“I suspected I might,” Gabriel said. He nodded at a small mirror on the wall, and I took a peek. I didn’t look cartoonishly French, which was a great start. I had flawless waves of black hair, an oval face, and a wide mouth with perfectly applied red lipstick. A glance down confirmed I’d wound up with hourglass curves, mostly hidden under a fur coat. I tried to meet Gabriel’s eyes in the mirror, but of course, he didn’t have a reflection, so instead I glanced at him.

“Well, at least we match,” I said. “But I do feel like I’ve gotta point out that I’m the private investigator between the two of us, which makes you the femme fatale.”

“We could swap if you would feel more comfortable?” Gabriel offered without any enthusiasm at all.

“I think I’m good,” I told him.

“Homme fatal,” he said. “Or if you want to be technical, homme mort.”

I frowned, trying to parse that, then rolled my eyes. “Homme mort-vivant,” I said, doing my best with my high school French.

Gabriel laughed. “Shall we?” He offered me his arm, gentlemanly in a way that made me want to make fun of him to distract myself from the treacherous fluttering in my stomach.

“I was thinking we could walk, actually,” I said, thinking of the cracks spreading across my chest. “Don’t wanna get burnt out.”

“If you’d like.” Gabriel didn’t move his arm, and it took me a second to realize he wasn’t offering just for the utility of being able to teleport with me. He wanted to touch me. Heat rose in my cheeks, and I only hoped my blush wouldn’t be visible through the disguise. I tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow, and we set off.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk. It had that late-fall crispness, just cold enough for me to be comfortable in the fur coat without getting the dreaded transitional season ‘oh God, I’m wearing the wrong number of layers’ back sweat. Soon, we were out of the scraggly edges of the forest, and the buildings of Eldoria became denser and denser. The streets were eerily quiet. Every time the wind blew, it tossed eddies of crispy fallen leaves across the pavement.

It was nice, if you could ignore the looming sense of doom in the air. Gabriel and I stayed in step, and he’d put his hand on top of mine where it rested in his elbow. His disguise’s hands looked coarse, but I could still feel the cool smoothness of his real fingers against mine. We talked about nothing in particular as we walked.

“Lissa was being kind of weird earlier,” I told him. “Asking about my dreams. She was all casual about it, but she was definitely fishing for something.”

“Oh, she does that sometimes,” Gabriel told me. “Her particular skill is sensing dreams. She can’t see or hear their actual contents. From the way she’s described it, it’s more like synesthesia. A nightmare might be purple and sound like breaking glass while a dream about childhood might smell like buttercups and taste of shortbread. That sort of thing.”

“Weird,” I said. “But kinda cool. Wait. Oh, my God.” I abruptly remembered the types of dreams I’d been having lately. “Can she tell if a dream is… you know?”

Gabriel quirked an eyebrow. I was good enough at reading his expressions that, even though he was wearing a different face, I could tell he knew exactly what I meant but wanted to make me say it.

“I’m not sure that I do know,” he said innocently.

I pinched his arm. “A sex dream.”

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