Page 12 of Fortress of Ambrose
“I don’t want to be its vessel. I just want it safe. But I can feel it attaching to me. It might be too late.”
“We still have to try.”
He opens my palm and kisses the soft flesh of my hand. “You being here, holding you like this, feels like…” His eyes water. He looks away. But I pull his face back to mine, and he says, “It feels like the sun shining after a long rain. Like a meadow of wildflowers just in bloom.”
I rise on my toes and meet his lips. My eyes close, rimmed with tears. For all it has cost to get us here. For all it’s going to cost to keep us here. He parts his mouth, his tongue exploring, and our bodies melt into one another. He holds on to me tightly and it feels like it did the last time we were this close. Like hope isn’t a dream. And our future hasn’t already been decided for us. He kisses me deeper and I let myself taste his love, believing all it promises. That it won’t ever leave me like everyone else I’ve loved has. That a life in hiding with toushana isn’t all my mother’s death will amount to. That the girl who should be dead by now will fly, one day.
Jordan’s hold tightens around me, closing the sliver of distance between our bodies. He breaks the kiss, pressing his forehead to mine as his thumb strokes my lips.
“I dream that this could be us forever.”
“I am yours, Jordan.”
He tries but fails to bite the smile away from his lips. “Say that again.”
“I’m yours.” I pull us apart and set my hand back on his chest where the bruise is the worst. “Andyouaremine.Wefix this. Which includes dealing with those people after you. Who—”
His jaw ticks. “Darkbearers. The way toushana moved back there, I just knew.”
My mind races, remembering that Beaulah tried her hardest to makeme into a Darkbearer, a toushana-bound magic wielder who weaponized Dysiis’s teaching to terrorize and pillage to feed their own power. Even though they are not all monsters, Beaulah was trying to control me, and I almost fell for it.
“They want the Sphere’s magic,” he says, his gaze moving beyond me.
“You hold all of magic’s future inside you. Of course they do.” Suddenly, magic shudders in my chest. The sharp cold twists painfully. Toushana rushes through me like a live wire, bubbling beneath my skin. It stings.
He shoves me away. “Did you feel that?”
Everything burns. I stumble backward, when I notice toushana bleeding from him again. But when he closes his fist to call the magic back, it doesn’t stop, shadows billowing from him like smoke. The burning tugs beneath my skin, growing sharper, as if my magic is being pulled from my body. Tohis. I try to go to him, but he puts more distance between us.
“Away, please!”
The pain is so strong my head rings. Then slowly, as his shadows settle, seeping back into him, the searing feeling of magic settling in my body curls around my bones. “Whatwas that?”
“The trace. It’s confusing the magic.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, inspecting the parts of my skin where the hot sensation was the worst.
“Like calls to like.” His skin is clammy. “Because of the trace between us, the magic in me is a part of the magic in you. It is pulling your magic to mine like a magnet.”
That’s how it felt.Like my magic was going to rip itself out of my skin.
“Because we’re bonded, there’s a bridge between us that magic doesn’t have to work very hard to cross. And I can’t seem to stop it.I tried.” He widens the distance between us and shakes his head. “You have to stay away, Quell.”
His words hit me like a hammer to glass, like the wings I just dared tospread have been clipped. But if his magic pulls at mine and he can’t stop it, he is right. Until we can get the Sphere’s magic out of him or better control it, touching is a risk.
He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I need this out of me.”
“Then we keep a distance. But we still do this together. I know a place where you can be healed. Please, Jordan, come with me.”
Six
Jordan
Quell’s eyes glitter with a hope I cannot give her. The Sphere’s magic is hurting me, and now it can hurt Quell.
“I can’t come with you. I’m sorry.” If I can find more whispers of Lady Ruby, I can use my connections, if I must, to get into places. My stomach begins to twist at the reprehensible abuse of duty, until I remember the coppery smell of my own blood and the Dragunhead’s face as he stabbed me. The leader of the brotherhood—one of the highest-ranking officials in the Order, the man I trusted to shape me into the next Dragunhead—tried to kill me. His second-in-command.
Screw them all.They can burn.
