Page 149 of Mud

Taland was already squatting in front of me.

“As I was saying before, sweetness, you need my help. Accept it, or I will just have to kill every player in this game until we’re the only ones left.”

He wasn’t even kidding.

He carried me to Vuvu’s because the Whitefires hadn’t been kidding around either, when they said they meant to paralyze me—they’d almost succeeded. Everything below my hips had turned numb by the time they ran away. My legs refused to work, though I felt them just slightly, so Taland had to actually carry me in his arms.

Halfway there I was pretty sure the magic had faded completely and my legs would hold me if I took it very slowly, but…

Well, Taland had his arms around me, one under my knees, the other tightly around my waist. And I had my arms around him becauseI had to, because I’d have fallen if I wasn’t holding onto his neck and touching the ends of his hair with the backs of my fingers casually (no way could he notice). And feeling his strong chest against my side. And breathing in his scent (again, no way he could tell).

So, I kept my mouth shut and I let him carry me to that alley while I pretended to be too pissed off to speak when he asked me if I was okay every few feet.

The truth was that I wasn’t pissed off—just terrified that I’d sound like a deflating balloon if I tried to speak. My cheeks were really hot.

But Taland left me in the alley all alone with the instruction tonotaccept any food because Vuvu would not reveal the door of his inn if he stayed with me. He didn’t say that he’d be up there, sneaking in through the window, but he didn’t have to. By now I’d accepted that he wasn’t going anywhere.

I’d accepted that I maybe didn’t want him to.

Vuvu was happy to see me and refused to let me through the door without paying him his coin. My last one,and he said it would win me another tomorrow, as well as some (warmer, this time) meal. I said I’d eat later if that was okay with him because Taland saidno food for any reason, and Vuvu didn’t really care. Didn’t offer to help me upstairs even though he saw I was barely walking.

It was better that way, anyway, because even though it took me a good long time to take all those stairs to the third floor, I found Taland waiting by the open door to my room with his hands in his pockets.

“I can walk—”by myself,I wanted to say when he strode toward me, but he didn’t even let me finish. Not like I was able to do anything to stop him, so he grabbed me in his arms again and he took me to the room, pushed the door closed with his foot, and put me in bed. In one fluid motion.

Fluid—yes, that’s a word I’d use to describe him. Everything he did was so fluid.

“Did you eat anything?”

I shook my head. “I said I’d eat later.” And a good thing he’d warned me, too, because I was starting to feel a little sick now that I wasn’t moving anymore. Every time I tried to sit up a little higher, the nausea took my breath away.

“Good. You’re going to throw up now, sweetness. A lot. I’ll bring you something from the bathroom. Don’t try to stand.” He stood up.

“What? What do you mean?”

Only when I spoke did I realize that my words were kind of slurred together.

Fuck, when the hell did that happen?!

“Inflicted paralysis by pure Whitefire magic—remember? We learned about it in Healing,” he said with a grin.

I narrowed my brows. “I don’t rem?—”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t remember. You were trying really hard to keep quiet during that lesson.”

“What?” Again, the word came out aswaaa?

Something was definitely wrong here.

“It was that day you wore your extra short skirt so I had to sit with you and put my hand underneath it. Between your legs,” he calmly explained. “You were trying not to moan or scream—or both.”

Heat on my cheeks—or at least there should have been a lot of blood gathering on my face.

For some reason it didn’t, but I remembered exactly the class he was referring to. Mr. Bardo had explained to us how to use paralysis when we needed to work on a person’s nervous system slowly or to extract something from the body safely. It worked better than any anesthesia, with no side effects except you threw up a lot if you ate within the last twelve hours before the spell, and it left you drained for a couple hours afterward.

I hadn’t been focused on that lesson at all, but I’d read more about it in my dorm room because, like Taland said, he’d been doing things to me and I was trying really,reallyhard not to let the whole class knowwhat.

“You do remember,” said Taland, and another wave of nausea hit me hard. I closed my lips and brought both hands to my mouth, though they moved so much slower than I was telling them to.

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