Shadowbound (The Dark Arts Book 1) (14 page)

When Thea opened her eyes, mutiny burned there. "I can do it."

"How do you form ice?" Lucien found himself asking, his voice calm and cool.

"Absorb the energy in the water," Thea explained. "Energy and friction compel the water to heat, yet by removing all of the energy and absorbing it yourself, you force it to cool."

"Yet emotion drives us to expend energy, which is why boiling water is easier than cooling it."

"Yes, but I froze the water, even when I was using emotion as my driving force of will!"

He smiled faintly, sharing a glance with Ianthe. "I'm starting to feel some sense of kinship with my own mentor."

Ianthe sipped her tea. "And I believe I'm starting to understand why Drake passed her apprenticeship onto me. I'm learning rather a lot myself, most particularly the fact that His Grace has an odd sense of humor. He's probably been waiting for this moment ever since I first began my apprenticeship."

"I thought it was rude to discuss someone when they are sitting right there at the table with you." Thea stabbed a kipper with ruthless intent. "I don't understand why we cannot simply use the tools we already own. Expression works! Why does it matter if I'm angry, or scared, or—"

"Has your mentor never explained why we tie our sorcery to ritual and power words instead?"

Ianthe glanced his way. "Lucien—"

"The girl should know the truth."

Ianthe's lips thinned. "I didn't wish to frighten her."

Thea's eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

"Most of our first forays into sorcery are caused by emotion," he said. Like his yesterday, which was an uncomfortable truth. He pushed it aside. "A girl is beaten by her father so often, that one day some mental block in her mind snaps and she wants him to stop hitting her so much so that he does. Her desire and her emotional energy force the laws of nature to her will, just for a moment and often uncontrollably. Perhaps she throws her father across the room? Perhaps she breaks every bone in his body or chokes him to death? Sometimes the girl can even force her father to never lift a hand against her again by placing a compulsion in his own head, though such a thing is extremely rare. It's most often telekinesis or pyrokinesis, something destructive, something that is relatively easy for the will to perform. Sometimes these girls or boys are so afraid of what they can do that they form a mental block in their minds, which means they can never do it again. They... suppress their sorcery. It becomes a mysterious miracle, or I'm sure you've heard of mysterious healings, or deaths, or catastrophes?"

Thea's eyes grew distant, her lower lip trembling, just a fraction. "I-I–"

"That's enough, Lucien," Ianthe murmured, taking the girl's hand. "She understands what can happen." Thea turned into her, and Ianthe squeezed her hand and drew her closer.

Of course she did. Most of them did, and now he'd unwittingly blundered into some dark scar of memory that the girl owned. "My apologies. I did not mean to touch a nerve." He cleared his throat. So many times these days he was missing social cues and blundering through human interactions. He'd never been so careless before his incarceration.

Lucien knelt on the rug at Thea's skirts, taking her hands in his. "Expression is incredibly powerful, more so than harnessing your will, but so dangerous, Thea. So uncontrollable. That is why we use ritual and meditation to teach ourselves to harness our will."

Thea looked eminently subdued. "What if I cannot learn to do so?"

Miss Martin kissed Thea's forehead and hugged her. "I remember a time when I was certain I would never learn to harness my will. The more I could not do it, the more frustrated and impatient I became. But it finally happened, and once learned, it became so much easier, Thea. That is why we set you such complicated tasks to study at first—to unknot a rope with your mind, or to use telekinesis to move a wooden puzzle piece from the bottom of a tower of them whilst holding the others in place—because whilst Expression is powerful, it cannot perform complicated tasks. It will come, Thea. Trust me in this."

Thea nodded.

"Finish your breakfast," Miss Martin pressed. "No more talk of Expression and dire disasters. I believe we have enough on our plate as it is." She glanced his way, finishing the last mouthful of her tea. "Have you quite finished, my lord? I believe we have an old acquaintance of Morgana's to question this morning about her potential whereabouts and a Relic Infernal to find?"

Lucien stood. "Actually, I was starting to wonder at your lack of enthusiasm this morning. You seem quite calm, considering someone—possibly a dangerous sorceress with a price on her head and a yearning for revenge—has stolen two infamous relics."

"One relic, Rathbourne. We're not quite certain she has the other in hand yet. As for lack of impatience, Drake sent out Sensitive's to comb the streets of London last night for hints of sorcery. If they'd found anything, we'd already know it." She flashed a warm smile at Thea. "I want you to continue trying to freeze and boil the tea. However, if you find yourself growing irritable, you are to set aside such a task and return to your meditation. Use your rituals to simply gather your power to the point where your skin is brimming with it, then disperse it and do it again. The more you use ritual, the more your mind will form that path, until
it
becomes instinct, not emotional channels. I shall see you tonight, hopefully."

They left her staring forlornly at the dining table.

***

L
UCIEN LEANED BACK
in the carriage and tried not to stare at the woman bound to him. He could sense her emotions pricking at his skin like needles, and the color wash of it over her face was immense, despite her expressionless face.

She was staring, arrested, at a pair of young children playing in the park across the street. The girls couldn't have been more than nine or ten and were laughing as they deliberately splashed each other, stomping their boots into puddles. Ianthe fingered the locket at her throat and looked as though the world might not have existed around her.

Through the bond, it felt as though her heart was breaking.

Lucien looked again at the girls. Happy young lasses, wrapped up in bonnets with a plaid shawl thrown over their shoulders. One of them had shiny black hair knotted into a plaited chignon, and the other wore pigtails.

He couldn't for the life of him figure out why the sight of them ached within her so much. Pressing a hand to his chest, he squeezed, but it was merely a phantom emotion. The bond between them was strengthening. If he wasn't careful, he'd begin to hear her more outspoken thoughts—and she his.

"You are fond of Thea," he said, both out of curiosity and also to see if he could discover what had set her emotions roiling.

"You sound as if you're surprised."

"Perhaps I am. I would never have suspected you to own a maternal side."

Ianthe reacted as if he'd slapped her. "You do not know me at all. I know you hold me partly to blame for your incarceration, but that does not mean I am a cold, wicked woman, devoid of feelings."

"I know." Lucien cleared his throat. "My apologies. I didn't mean to offend you. I just... I was trying to understand you."

"What you must think of me." She gave a tight, pressed-lip smile. "All these words you throw my way: mistress, whore, unmotherly—"

"I never called you a whore," he said sharply.

A flash of violet eyes. He
had
hurt her. "And yet, what have you demanded of me?" At his own flinch, she smiled bitterly. "It's all right, Rathbourne. I'm used to it."

Then she turned to look out of the window again.

And he suddenly felt quite ill and ashamed of himself.

"I'm sorry that you feel that way. I did not think of our agreement as such, no more than I thought myself a lesser man for bending to your will during the day. I wanted you, and I feared the imbalance of submitting to your will with no recourse, which is why I demanded such a thing of you." His gaze lowered. "Perhaps it was wrong of me."

There was an echoing moment of silence. When he looked up, Ianthe's eyes were wide, and she looked surprisingly young. "Well. Look at the pair of us, treating each other kindly. That was something I did not expect."

"Perhaps we have both made assumptions about each other?"

More silence. It was awkward, and she looked flushed and somewhat sweet.

"What is your relationship with the Prime?" He was beginning to suspect that he'd been very, very wrong in regards to everything he knew about her.

"Why?"

"So I can stop making assumptions about you, and perhaps because last night was rather... intimate. I'm curious about you. You have the body of a courtesan, but in bed, you're somewhat... Not shy. That's not the word I'm looking for. Perhaps not quite certain of what I was doing to you at times or what my intentions were. You kept hesitating."

"Perhaps the word you're looking for is 'inexperienced'," Miss Martin said, puffing up like a peacock. "I do hope it wasn't boring to a man of your caliber."

"Certainly not boring. It was more than I'd ever hoped for," he replied, though he couldn't stop chewing over her words. "Inexperienced?"

She looked away. "Forget I said it."

"No. I want to know what you meant by it." A sudden thought struck him, a thought that made his stomach twist a little. "The Prime's not your lover, is he?"

"Well, I thought it might take you a little longer to discern the truth. There goes your revenge, my lord. No, I'm not his mistress. I never have been, and I never will be. That place is already taken. Why do you think I was so certain Mrs. Ross had not stolen the relic? Let us just say that her whereabouts that night were quite well-known and her alibi is foolproof."

"But you love him?"

"Of course I love him. He is terribly dear to me." She seemed to enjoy his discomfiture.

Lucien's eyes narrowed. Miss Martin actually laughed, a soft, husky sound that he liked very much.

"Come here," he said.

"But it's not nighttime, my lord." Miss Martin blinked her eyelashes at him flirtatiously. "I don't have to do anything that you say. Quite the opposite."

Reaching forward, he hauled her into his arms. Miss Martin gave a startled squeal that died as he settled her in his lap. Her skirts fell around his thighs, and the snug curve of her bottom settled against his groin. Miss Martin sucked in a sharp breath.

"Why do you hold him so dearly?" he asked, toying with the buttons on her dress. It was buttoned all the way to her throat, where a fringe of lace brushed against her neck. Red suited her. It was a color made for dangerous women, though her admission of inexperience threw him a little.

"Why does the precise nature of my relationship with Drake concern you so much?" As he drove forward to press his lips against the soft skin beneath her jaw, her fingers pressed against his mouth, stilling him.

Lucien looked up, then sucked one of them into his mouth, circling it with his tongue. Miss Martin's pupils were so very large, her lips parting breathily. She might be unused to such displays, but she didn't dislike them. White teeth sank into her lower lip. He wanted, very badly, to replace it with his own mouth.

And couldn't.

"It doesn't," he lied. Again those fingers denied him.

"Answer my question, and I'll answer yours."

That irritated him, for as much as he didn't particularly want to explore his own motivations in pursuing the answer, he did indeed want to know the truth.

Lucien nipped at her fingers. "Because
I
want you. Because I wanted to steal you away from him. Because I wanted to fuck him out of your mind. That's why I wanted to know what he is to you, especially now that you speak of him having another mistress."

"He was never in my mind."

"In your heart then." He started to undo the buttons at her throat.

"My lord," she protested in a whisper.

"It's not night. You have no obligation to let me please you, unless you wish to. And you owe me an answer."

Thick lashes dragged over her violet eyes. Miss Martin looked both helpless and fascinated. Her hand splayed flat over his heart, holding him at bay. "Drake was the father I never had," she blurted. "You don't have to do this. He's not your competition."

That satisfied something inside of him that Lucien hadn't even known was bothered. It also raised numerous questions about her. "Your own father chairs the Vigilance Against Sorcery Committee." Grant Martin was a thorn in all of their sides, and a bastard to boot. "Does that have anything to do with you?"

"Of course it does. My father thinks that I am filth. He threw me out onto the streets when I was seventeen. I had no one. Nothing. Only the clothes I wore and a future where I could earn my living on my back or as some rich man's mistress." Her laugh sounded brutal. "You will never understand what Drake did for me. He'd felt my sorcery—the way I expressed it—and he came looking for me. He offered me a life as my own woman and took me under his wing as his apprentice when nobody had ever given a damn about me, and when such a position was highly coveted. Of course everyone in the Order thought I was his lover. What other use could a man have for a young woman? Why else would he help her? I love him for that. I love him for showing me that men can be trusted. That someone wanted to be my father, without trying to ever take anything from me. You don't know what it is like to grow up knowing nothing but shame—"

A queer feeling twisted in his stomach, an echoing ache.
Yes, actually, I do
...

"—and then realizing that you
do
have worth. That everything that you had despised about your own nature was something to be celebrated and accepted. It was
encouraged
. Does that explain it all?" Tears pricked at her eyes, but they were fiercely determined and very, very protective. "I would do anything for Drake. Anything at all."

The cut of it went deep, that the Prime could be a father figure to her, when he had never given a damn about a son of his own blood. It was an ugly feeling, for Lucien hadn't known he'd even craved such a thing.