Page 54 of Hearts of Stone

Adam lifted his hand, palm up, and moved it towards her, slowly, so she could pull away at any point. The only reaction from any of us was simply to stare. Because in his palm, there was a red glow.

I took a sudden breath that sounded like a hiss of pain. I didn’t mean to betray myself, but I couldn’t help it. Most witches had an elemental affinity, which showed itself in the colour of the light that glowed in their hands when they came into their power. But, fire? There weren’t many of them gifted with this power, probably because witch families always shied away from bonding with fire users. Fire wielders were tremendously powerful, but also had the capacity to be so destructive. Water might drown or flood, but it also fed the roots of plants, and was the giver of life. Earth might smother in an earthquake, but it also was the means to grow crops. Air filled our lungs. But fire…? It destroyed. I knew that all too well. And as soon as I saw that red glow, I remembered the consequences of that power in the hands of one not fit to wield it.

I was thrown back into the terrible memories of what it was like to be trapped inside the walls of Z Ward: the screams and wails of the inmates echoing in your ears, reddish smoke thick in the air, so that every breath caught in your lungs. Flesh burning and bubbling. Fire raging in old, metal drums, heating up iron implements of torture. And, reddest of all, his eyes. I blinked, coming back to the room to find that I was staring at the portrait wall. I foundhisportrait without thinking. But the brushstrokes revealed a mild-mannered man, nothing like the Luther Whiteley I’d known. My attention was drawn back to Jade as she put her hand in Adam’s and he turned her palm upwards, before sliding his fingers across it.

At that, I wanted to be him more than anything else in the world. I wanted to be the one that touched her, that introduced her to her power. Instead, it was his touch that caused the light in her palms to glow brighter. That meant that there was a compatibility there. That was what Vernon Britton had been referring to when he’d dismissed her plea to be introduced to the witching world. For, if Jade had been born at The Eyrie, if she’d known she was a witch her entire life, then the minute she was eighteen she’d have been pushed to touch hands with all of the eligible bachelors from the other First Families and see whose power flared in response to hers.

“What does this mean?” Jade asked in barely more than a whisper, all of her bravado gone as she stared from their joined hands into the man’s eyes.

Don’t tell her, I silently begged, sure that when she found out, it would be the beginning of the end for the hopes of me and my stone brothers, just as it had been for all other gargoyles.

In the time that I’d been born into, my family was one of several living in a tiny village, far away from the castle belonging to the lord that ruled our land. People grubbed in the dirt, making their living from subsistence farming. Tools were mostlymade from timber, with the few forged metals so prized that they were treated like they were made of gold. I had now lived for almost a thousand years, and I was considered to be young for my kind. And in all that time, apart from the story in the mural, I had never heard of any witch choosing to accept the suit of her gargoyle mates. And so, although we had waited all this time to find Jade, if history repeated itself, she’d spend her life wrapped up in the arms of the likes of Adam, not with us.

Chapter 31

Jade

“What does this mean?” I asked, referring to more than the glow in my hand.

I’d liked guys before; thought I’d known attraction in how I felt about Trevor, how I’d felt butterflies in my stomach when he looked at me. I’d even known the wave of white-hot fear if a popular boy caught me looking at him at school. But none of it had been like this. In my dreams, a man’s hands, maybe something like Adam’s, had scalded everywhere they touched, but that didn’t explain why I was feeling the same as he touched me. In dreams, anything could happen, but reality was usually so very different. I looked down at the matching lights in our hands and then reached out and touched his.

Fuck…

I could barely contain myself. Heat, tremendous heat, rushed through me. It was the feeling of sinking down in front of a heater on a cold winter’s day or the first sip of piping hot coffee as you were still waking up. It warmed me all the way down to my core. And as it did, I felt something strange. I was still a little… sore, after the other night’s hijinks with Carrick andGraven, but it felt like something secret deep inside me flared to life. My fingers pressed down harder on the pulsing red light on his palm, seeking more.

“Bloody hell…” he groaned. His blue eyes sought mine, something soft and unguarded there for a moment, and he smiled hastily, before moving to grip my arms softly around the wrists. As he pulled away, I thought I caught regret in his expression. He shook his head. “These…” He held up his hands, displaying the glowing patches of red light clearly. “These are manifestations of our power. Mine’s red because my elemental affinity is fire.”

“So what’s mine?” I asked, glad for the change of topic. The glow in my palm seemed to brighten as I stared down at it. “Like, air or light or something?”

“That’s just it, yours has no colour,” he said.

“Oh.”

My fingers closed up into fists, but Graven stepped forward.

“That in no way means you are without power, Mistress,” he told me. “It means you are capable of performing all magic.”

“What?”

I’d had plenty of teachers tell me I had great potential, if I would just… But no-one had ever said anything like this.

“You’re not limited to one elemental affinity,” Adam agreed. “It’s very rare. So rare that I don’t doubt the heads of the First Families have all gone straight home to call together the single men in their family and let them know they’ll be required to present themselves at your gate in the morning.”

“Oh my god, no…” I said, recoiling at the thought.

I wasn’t imagining these prospective suitors as being young, and I didn’t think that any of them would be hot, either. Somehow my mental picture was that they would all be versions of their stuffed shirt fathers, with less wrinkles but more pompous attitudes. I would have to draw Daniel into the fray, tostand on the parapet of The Eyrie, trying to work out which ones were gay and which ones were straight, all while pitching stale bagels at their heads.

“No?”

I was standing in a massive boardroom with several freaking gargoyles at my back who said I was their mate, a powerful warlock in front of me who’d caused a reaction that I hadn’t expected, and a lawyer who seemed to be the epitome of a supportive family retainer. Yet it was the space between me and Adam that felt curiously intimate. As I watched, one arching eyebrow was raised, and then the twinkle started to shine in his eyes, heralding the return of that devilish smile. I’d seen that smile before, knew what it would be like when it fractured, when he became open-mouthed, panting as he… I forced my thoughts and my body away from him.

“Definitely not.” I turned to Mellors, who’d been patiently observing from the sidelines. “There’s no clause in the will about the heir having to be married by a certain age.”

“None at all,” he replied smoothly. “If you do not have children, then the estate may pass to another distant relative upon your death, but that’s the only clause relevant to that matter.”

“Perhaps it would fall to you, then, cousin?” I said, forcing myself to affect a neutral tone so as not to make clear the effect Adam had had on me.

“Cousin, is it?” His teeth gleamed as he grinned. “Yeah, I like that. So, in the spirit of bonding with new-found family, would you be interested in getting to know some of the…” he paused to look around the room, running his eye over those portraits again, “…shall we say, less stuffy elements of the witching world? There’s a lot more than these four walls, not that the First Families would ever acknowledge it. There’s a night market run by some of the fae that came over with the First Fleet, a biker barout in the northern suburbs run by werewolves, or a high-end strip club that some lesser demons have set up.”

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