Page 54 of Baneful Magick

I looked over at him, eyebrows raised. “Talk about…?”

“The greenhouse,” he replied. He turned his body so that he could look out at me and the quad at the same time.

“Ah yes,” I replied ruefully. “I remember magick rushing through me when I touched the door then waking up on the ground with Echo.”

“That’s it?” he questioned, leaning forward.

“Yup,” I answered. “What happened?”

Wells searched my face for a minute, and whatever he found there made him lean back a bit. I could feel Cassius homing in on Wells, also waiting to see what the witch would say.

“When the magick filled you, you spoke a prophecy. Some of it seemed to linger in you, though, at the end.”

‘Lingered?’Cassius asked, and I found myself saying it aloud at the same time. At least Ithoughtit was me asking.

“I told you I’m a weaver.” He waited until I nodded in acknowledgment. “I can see the flow of magick around people and sometimes even places. Whatever used you to share the prophecy is different from your innate magick, and some of it still lingers inside of you.”

“You can see magick? What does mine look like?” I asked. The idea of someone else’s magick invading my body was too much. It was so violating to even contemplate.

“Green and black twined together,” he replied softly, his eyes shining with unspoken emotion. The moment sat between us, heavy, until he roughly cleared his throat.

“How much of the other magick is still there?” I asked.

Wells stared at me, and something in his gaze shifted. I could feel the weight of his magick. The air was thick with his gift, and his fingers began to move as if he were pushing something out of the way. Maybe it was a thread of magick only he could see.

“Glimmers of it, but most of it is you. There is… something else, but I can’t tell what it is.”

Cassius let out a relieved huff of breath before he faded into the background. Whatever information clicked for him wasn’t something he was going to share with me yet. Completely in character for him.

Wells blinked a few times, then he scooted further away from me, looking out at the quad again. His face heated, the blush covering his cheeks and neck as he purposefully avoided my stare.

“Why do you pull away?” I asked, unable to help myself. I hadn’t wanted to be the one to bring this shit up, but the best laid plans often went awry.

“I wasn’t the only one to pull away,” he countered. Okay, so that wasn’t the most helpful answer, but at least he wasn’t going to dodge the subject change.

I licked my lips, knowing he was right. I had stepped back at the library and before with Echo. “We just got here, and I’d hate to ruin friendships by making things complicated. Besides, my last relationship… It wasn’t the best.”

“Did they hurt you?” he practically growled, and I shook my head vehemently.

“No, no, nothing like that. I guess the best way to put it is that I was the person who carried the entire relationship. If we went on a date, I planned it. I asked him out. The only times we texted were if I messaged first. Hell, even initiating sex fell on me.” I shrugged. “It was exhausting and doing that again isn’t going to happen. I can communicate, but it’s a two-way street from the beginning, or the relationship just becomes a fucking dead end.”

Wells didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Half of me wondered if I had made him uncomfortable, but the other half didn’t care.

“Witches have multiple partners, at least they almost always do,” Wells said softly. “The person I dated at my academy wasn’t good at balancing that, and in the end, she dumped us all right after graduation. She claimed she wasn’t ready for anything serious.”

“We are young when we graduate from academy,” I ventured. I couldn’t say I liked how she’d handled it, but I also understood it.

He nodded in agreement. “True. But then I found out she’d only dumpedme. She’d kept the others. Apparently, she didn’t want to make me feel bad, but it was so much worse finding out the truth through someone else. It made me feel like they were all just laughing at me.”

“All of them?” I asked, shocked that even the others in the coven had been so cruel.

“Yeah,” Wells replied, and there was a catch in his throat that implied he was trying to keep it together.

“Having one partner is hard enough. I couldn’t imagine having to deal with multiple.” I shuddered at just the thought of it. “I mean, I know that probably won’t stay that way forever. Like you said, witches have multiple partners… It’s just that a relationship with only one person is complicated enough.”

He barked out a rough laugh and rubbed his face. “That’s an understatement.”

Just as I was about to say more, a hint of smoke hit my nose, then I heard the whisper of fabric against concrete.

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