Page 33 of Wolf Mate

When Slade held my hand for a moment too long, I took a small step back, needing to break contact. It felt weird and wrong to be holding his hand. That didn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t shake the sensation. “How did you learn to control your magic?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pick up on my changing the subject.

He frowned a second before forcing a smile. “Everyone has a trigger. You have to figure it out. My mom has to pull the magic from the ground.”

“What?” My jaw dropped. “Witches kill nature to perform spells?”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t actually pull it from the earth, but that’s how her magic manifests within her. My magic is like a void in my chest that I have to yank on. The amount of magic I release depends on how hard I yank.” He tapped his chest right above his heart.

Weird.

“Mine feels as if it’s in my blood.” I paused, searching for the words to describe it. I never had before. “There are like three phases it goes through, though sometimes it can skip a phase, depending on what’s going on.”

Pursing his lips, he furrowed his brows. “What do you mean?”

“I’m assuming it’s equivalent to your tug, but I can’t control it … not yet.” I wrung my hands. “The first phase, which I consider a warm-up, feels like there’s an extra jolt running through my blood. Sorta like adrenaline, but it doesn’t make my heart pound.”

He tilted his head. “Interesting.”

“The second phase is what I consider a fizz. It’s stronger than a jolt and reminds me of pop rocks—but in my blood.” That was the best comparison I could think of. It started out with a few pops, but as the intensity increased, it was like pouring a whole damn bag into your mouth.

When disgust or confusion didn’t cross his face, I continued, wanting to get this off my chest. “The last stage is when my blood hums. That’s when things happen, like the desk in the room—it shook in sync with my blood. Sometimes I feel as if my body is shaking too, but it could be my imagination.” Iwouldn’t know. I ran to get away from people, and the one time Mom had witnessed a meltdown, I’d been too afraid to ask what she’d seen. She’d left the room, and we’d never discussed what had happened. I’d been five years old, and she’d looked at me differently after that day.

“That’s what it feels like, but whattriggersit?” He steepled his fingers.

Lungs seizing, I murmured, “Emotion.” Of course that was my trigger. Every time I got upset, scared, nervous, or whatever negative, intense emotion that flooded me, my blood responded. “The negative kinds, like how Raffe made me feel earlier today. I’ve tried breathing exercises, but I can’t stop it.”

“It’s resistant to positive emotions?”

“I … I think so.” Now I doubted myself. Most of the emotions I felt were negative, so maybe positive emotions didn’t occur often enough for me to notice their impact.

“Your magic thrives on defending you.”

That was not what I would sayat all. “More like it makes my life harder and gets me labeled a freak and weirdo. I wouldn’t call that defensive.”

He bobbed his head. “Fair, but what I meant is, when you feel something negative, your magic thinks you’re in danger. It sparks to ward off the threat, or that’s what it’s intended to do. It’s just not trained yet.”

I liked that idea. “It did react more powerfully than ever when that Edward guy attacked me.” I understood what he was getting at, not that I fully agreed with him. If my magic was meant to defend me, it’d been doing a shit job overall. “But how does knowing that help me?”

“Think about something that upsets you, and we can take it from there.”

My mouth went dry. Purposely doing it might put me more in control, but I didn’t know how to channel the magic or pull itback. “I don’t think we should experiment until we learn more from the priest’s twilight book.”

“Book of Twilight.” He chuckled. “Not like the shimmery vampire romance that was so popular years ago. For now, let’s try to get it to jolt and not go straight to fizzing or humming.”

The fact that he’d used my descriptions warmed my heart. He’d truly been listening to me and not just being polite. “Okay.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to think about something that would upset me just the right amount.

Raffe’s face popped into my brain along with the stunt he’d pulled in statistics. My blood fizzed at the memory, taking it a little further than I’d meant to go. “I didn’t mean to, but it’s fizzing.” I gritted my teeth, already feeling like a failure. I couldn’t do one simple task, and the fizzing escalated to a near humming.

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Now think a happy thought.”

That caught me off guard. “I thought we were trying to control it.”

“We are. If you can think of a happy thought and calm yourself down, you’ll have a way to get it to work when you want it to and go away when you don’t.”

A happy thought. I didn’t have many of those. I closed my eyes and imagined the deer I’d seen here in the woods. I imagined their large brown eyes staring into mine, and just like that, my blood lowered to a jolt. “It’s working.”

“You calmed down?” he asked hopefully.

“Not fully.” I remembered how I’d put my hands on the ground and how the coolness had covered my skin. I took in a deep breath, smelling the woods around me.

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