Page 37 of Mud

“I changed my mind.” And he kissed me.

It was…different.

His lips touched mine. I felt his warmth all the way down to my toes and my hands were on his chest and his heart beat against my palm.

Slowly, his hands closed around my cheeks, and his touch was just as gentle as his lips. My eyes were closed, but I saw the shape of him in my mind. I felt him in every fiber of my being.

We were connected, one.

And that was it.

He didn’t deepen the kiss. He didn’t take more. He simply tasted me and moved back, smoothed my hair behind my ears, traced his fingers on my beauty marks, then my freckles, and we just breathed there for a moment. A moment in which all my nervousness and embarrassmenthid away in the dark, and then I was perfectly comfortable being there. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

We sat down to eat after that, and at first, we were both very confused, breathless, overwhelmed. The kiss had affected him just as much as it had me.

But soon his jokes had me laughing until I had tears in my eyes, and the pasta could have been disgusting but I couldn’t tell you for sure, and I pretended to hate the wine as I drank with him, though we barely got through half a glass. We were too busy talking to remember to take a sip.

I was too busy falling for him to remember what I was there for.

And that’s the night when the best and worst six months of my life truly began.

Chapter 10

Rosabel La Rouge

Present day

Sweat dripped down my brows, even though it was May, the day pretty cool. The forest we were in was dense, too. I wore no helmet, only my leather jacket, my weapons, and my gloves to protect my anchor.

It was a ring with a thick golden band and a colorful obsidian in the middle. The band was way too big for me, so I kept it around my thumb and put biker gloves on to keep it in place because I refused to use any other anchor. This ring had belonged to my father, one of the few things of his that I had left. I would not part with it no matter what, especially since the more emotionally connected a Redfire mage was to an anchor, the better the flow of magic from her body, and into the world.

I was good at magic, always had been. That’s why when they tested me, fresh out of high school and having completed my first “undercover mission” successfully, theyimmediately deemed me ready for the IDD. Never-mind that my physical skills were lacking, that I couldn’t fight without tripping and falling on my face, had no aim, and no clue how to even hold a gun.

Training,David Hill had said.There’s nothing that training with the best can’t achieve.

So, I was put in the “intensive” program, nearly died for six whole months until my body learned the movement patterns by memory, and until I could shoot a moving target from fifteen feet away.

Then, they put me in Michael Perez’s team and sent me out in the world as if I had any fucking clue what the hell I was doing.

That was over a year ago, though. I’d learned a lot by almost dying in the field a couple dozen times. And the first and most important thing I learned was that magic was my biggest advantage, my strongest point. It was the most important thing about me, the reason why I was going to make it out of this place, out of Madeline’s clutches eventually.

If I didn’t die on the job first, that is. Because fighting skills or not, the world hid some pretty fucked up things, and I faced them regularly. I was the one they sent tostopthem—me, a twenty-year-old Redfire who was still scared shitless of her own grandmother.

Good thing I wasn’t alone, though. The IDD always sent out teams, not individuals, to deal with creatures like the catfairies.

It was one in the afternoon when we finally entered the ward that the IDD had put up to lock the woods that wasinfectedwith catfairies. The first two teams that came here this morning to find Ralf and the others had soon realized that they were not going to be enough, not even close.Apparently, there were fifty-two catfairies who’d made a home out of this place, had been feeding off humans—body and mind—and about half of them were as grown as an average human being. So, they sent us and Lauren’s team in right away, and another two teams were on the way, too.

Things were not looking good for us, even though nobody confirmed how many the catfairies had killed.

“Steady,” Michael said as he led us through the dense trees with his gun in one hand and his wand in the other. He was a Bluefire and they’d turned wielding wands into an art. No other anchor was more precise or faster than theirs.

All colors could do pretty much anything with the right spell and the right caster and the right amount of energy, but some covens were naturally better at some things than the others. But all of that became irrelevant when in situations like this, when dealing with actual real-life monsters that could come at you from anywhere and everywhere at once, and you couldn’t be sure what worked against them and what didn’t. Sure, we learned about all living things in school, and at the IDD Academy, but magic had a mind of its own, and it was in a constant state of change. Catfairies weren’t supposed to grow so big or a group this size to live together in the same place—but here we were. Lauren’s team had taken the south; we’d entered through the west of the forest. So far, we hadn’t encountered any of them.

“Do we shoot on sight?” Jam asked—or I thought it was Jam. He and his brother walked to my left slowly, their own weapons and staffs raised. They were so identical that the only way I could tell them apart was by their longish hair—one kept it tied back, the other kept it loose.

The thing was that I suspected they sometimes switched their hairstyles just to fuck with us, but I could never really be too sure.

“None are close to us right now,” said Michael, checking the small screen attached to his wrist panel that would pick up magical energy from the sensors the other teams had planted on the forest floor. “But, yes, if you see one, shoot.”

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