Page 47 of Ensnared
“That I should follow the string and call Jack or Ty if anything happened to you?” Skye blows out a long breath, and it fogs in front of her face. “Yeah.”
“Good.” I stride right up to her. “I want you to try and take the magic from me.”
She gapes at me. “Are you insane?”
I grasp her hand and slowly remove one bracelet. “No. You’ve learned to connect with your own power, only you can’t make it influence anything but tech.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, I think you might need an additional source of power if you want to perform spells that aren’t connected to electricity. Like…a magical battery.” I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but if this hunch proves to be true, our problems might be solved. “And you said that you’ve never had issues with humans, right?”
“What?” Skye is silent for a long moment, thinking. At last, she nods grudgingly. “I only ever drained Jack.”
“Well,” I continue, “if you learn how to do it consciously, you could control it in other situations as well.”
“But I don’t want to drain you.” She takes her hand away from me. “There’s a really simple solution to this. I’ll just wear my bracelets any time I’m not actively working tech magic.”
“And if someone surprises you?” I insist.
She throws her hands up. “Then it would serve them right to get their phone fried.”
“There’s another reason I want you to learn this.” I put my hands in my pockets, hating how exploitative my next words will be but seeing no other way around the issue. “You said you probably weren’t powerful enough on your own to perform the barrier spell, right?”
She stills completely. “Right.”
“What if you could harness my magic?”
Skye stares at me as though I’ve lost my mind. “It’s too dangerous. I could kill you.”
I shrug. “We’d have someone watching us to pull the plug if I passed out.”
“Gods.” She hugs herself, shivering. “This is a crazy idea, Aiden.”
I can’t help but grin. “I know. But imagine if it worked.”
This earns me a grudging smile. Skye takes off her other bracelet and puts it in her pocket. “We should call someone to be with us right now.”
I shake my head. “We’ll be careful. You’ll only take a pinch.”
“Shit,” she swears. “Okay. Okay.”
She shakes out her hands and jumps up and down a couple of times like an athlete relaxing before a sprint. I laugh at her, and she glowers back, though I can tell she’s not really offended.
“Come on.” I hold out my hands. “We don’t have all night.”
Slowly, she approaches, skittish as a doe. “You have to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
I say it quickly, without thinking, but it’s true. In that intimate moment in the dark forest, I’d have promised her the moon if she asked me for it.
“If you feel like I’m taking too much or going too deep, you need to push me away.”
Her concern is adorable. I don’t remember a time when someone took care of me. There’s a lot I want to say, but now’s not the time, so I simply nod.
Then she takes my hands, and I focus all my thoughts on stamping down the instinctive awareness of her. She’s close enough that I smell the sweet scent of her skin—I now recognize which shower gel she uses. If that doesn’t make me a creep, I don’t know what does.
Still, there’s no other way of doing this. We need to be in close contact, I assume. I’ve never done this, but Skye and Jack wereveryclose to each other when she drained him. I don’t think Skye would want to try to replicate the exact circumstances of that incident.
