Page 43 of Soul of Shadow
None of this explained the lightness that fluttered in her stomach.
“I… know what it’s like,” Elias said at last.
Charlie looked up at him. “What what’s like?”
Pain crossed Elias’s eyes—subtle but undeniably there. Helooked quickly away. Several seconds passed, during which time he seemed to wrestle with several competing thoughts. Finally, he said, “Losing a sister.”
Pain and empathy twisted together in her chest. “Before I found you in this house,” she said, “Mason told me that you lived with a foster family.”
Elias’s lips twisted up in a humorless smile. “That’s my usual cover story.”
“Does that…” She swallowed, not wanting to say it out loud. “Are your parents also…”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, echoing his words from before. There was little else to say. “Can I ask how they died?”
The flames danced across his face—orange light on pale skin, highlighting the deep cuts of his cheekbones. He looked beautiful. Ethereal. Charlie found herself transfixed with his face, realizing—for the first time—how devastatingly handsome he truly was.
After several long, silent moments, he spoke to the fire. His words were soft, almost inaudible. “They were murdered,” he whispered. “Them and my sister, too. I was the only one who was spared.”
Charlie stared at him in horror, her body going cold.His entire family?Losing a sister to illness had nearly broken her; she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose so many loved ones at once, and in such a brutal way. It was enough to destroy a person. Enough to burn them to the very ashes of themselves.
Enough to create a monster.
Elias blinked, as if emerging from a trance. He looked at Charlie, face twisting into a pained version of a smile. “Enoughabout that,” he said. “I hear from your brother that you can do magic.”
Charlie was stunned by the sudden change in conversation. “What?”
“Notmykind of magic,” he said. “The kind you watch on stage.”
“Oh. Right.” After a day spent seeing what real magic was like, she had forgotten about sleight of hand entirely. “Yes, I can.”
“Do a trick for me.”
She didn’t like this. She didn’t like the falseness of his smile, how he seemed to teeter between emotions the way performers walked tightropes in her circus classes. He was already a volatile individual; she had no idea what it would take to push him to violence.
And yet she also understood. She understood his pain and grief. She understood the deep-seated need for distraction, anything to take your mind off the well of sadness buried within you.
So, instead of protesting, she asked, “Do you have a deck of cards? I always carry a pack with me, but they’re definitely soaked after our dip in the lake.”
“I do.” He popped up off the couch, apparently delighted that she was willing to play his game. He dug around in the drawers of an old wooden writing desk for a bit before holding up a battered deck of cards lashed together by a rubber band. “Here we go.”
When he sat back on the couch, he set the deck in her open palm. His fingers brushed her skin. It wasn’t the first time they had touched, but it felt different this time. New. As if a strange current ran through Elias’s body, and he had passed it on to her.She drew her hand quickly away, eyes down on the cards as she unwound the rubber band and shuffled twice.
“Now,” she said. “Tell me what card tricks you know.”
“I don’t see why that matters.”
She glanced up at him. “You’re anotherworldly being, Elias. I’m not going to show you something you’ve already seen. My magic will be boring enough as is.”
Dark lashes fluttered as he held her gaze with unnerving intensity. “I highly doubt that.”
When it came to close-up magic, Charlie had two main rules: move quickly, and ensure the audience’s attention is on the wrong place. Misdirection was the key to all magic. If you could draw their focus to something irrelevant—the snap of your fingers, the waving of a handkerchief, the nonsense you were babbling—you had a thin window of time in which you could do theactualwork: switching two cards, moving a ball between cups, the like. Every one of her tricks operated on this principle.
Elias was going to be a difficult viewer to fool. He was naturally critical and had witnessed feats of magic far beyond her reckoning. He wasn’t going to fall for something as obvious as snapping fingers or waving handkerchiefs. Her best bet was to distract him with her words.
She splayed open the deck. “Pick a card.”
