Page 62 of Deadly Reckoning
“Did you get any sleep last night?” I ask once he’s slowed down.
He winces and looks at me guiltily, “No. It’s the wards.”
“You can’t make them?” I ask.
He shakes his head, “No, I can make them. The standard ones that everyone uses I could make in my sleep, but standard isn’t good enough. I need wards that are as strong as the ones that are on the house here, on us, flexible, mobile, and undetectable. It’s proving difficult, and I struggle to shut my brain off if there’s a problem that I can’t fix.” He frowns, “Weird, huh?”
I shake my head, “Not really. Have you met me? I’m a big tangle of weird, but what you just described isn’t weird, not to me.”
He smiles, his hand coming up to grasp my chin gently as he leans forward and kisses me, “Thank you.”
I grin, “You’re welcome.” Standing up, I say, “Come on, maybe talking about what you’re struggling with will help? I mean, I probably won’t understand a word of what you’re saying, but just explaining to someone else might be enough to jog something in your brain and help you figure out what the problem is and how to fix it?”
Ransom smiles, “You’d do you that for me?”
I frown, it’s really not a big deal at all. “Of course I would, why wouldn’t I?”
“When most people realize how far down the rabbit hole I go when I do my work, they tend to quickly lose interest, and they definitely don’t offer to help me out,” he explains, his voice flat.
The tone of his voice is enough to tell me that he has been hurt a lot in the past by the things that people have said to him in this scenario.
“That’s their loss. I’d like to help you any way that I can, and considering that I know fuck all about making spells and potions and all of that, the only way that I can help is by listening. So that’s what I’m going to do.”
His eyes heat, and his fingers spark with magic, as he slowly stands and stalks toward me. He pulls me into his arms and kisses me deeply, leaving me breathless and wanting more.
“You sure? It gets pretty boring?” he asks when he pulls back, watching me closely.
It takes me a moment to catch up on what he’s talking about, but eventually it clicks.
I clear my throat and nod, “Yep. Come on, explain it to me and why it’s not working.”
He still looks unsure, so I kiss him again and then move over to the science things.
“What does this do?” I ask, pointing to a vial that’s being held in a complicated-looking clamp.
Chapter Seventeen
Neith
“That’s just distilled water,” he replies with a smile.
I end up going around the room asking him what a lot of things are, and there’s a good mix of fairly normal things like the distilled water and then things like essence of fire, which is all glowy and pretty, and I have to force myself not to touch it. I have to assume that it wouldn’t be a good idea to touch it.
Eventually, he relaxes enough that he starts to talk about the wards and explain what he’s putting into the potion that he wants to use to back up the magic ward so that it moves with us, is undetectable by everything, and we can just top it up every now and then rather than having to go through the process of putting it on every time that we leave the house or go somewhere.
We don’t want to be in the middle of a job, undercover or something, and have to stop to redo the ward.
I have no idea what he was talking about earlier because listening to him talk about this sort of thing is far from boring. It’s really interesting, and although I know I shouldn’t be, I am truly surprised at just how clever he is. The way that his mind works, and how he puts things together in a way that no one else would, is quite honestly sexy as fuck.
“So you’re going to put all of our magic into the potion part of the spell?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” he replies.
“It doesn’t need to be tailored to us as individuals?”
He shakes his head, “No. In this instance, because I want the ward to be as strong as it possibly can be, it's better if all of our magic is in it because we’re fucking strong, and it will make the wards so much stronger having all of our magic in the ward rather than just one of our magics. If that makes sense?”
I nod, “Yes, that makes sense. So the problem is that two of the ingredients seem to be clashing, but you don’t know why, and they both play a really important part that no other ingredient can do, so you can’t get rid of either of them?”
