Crescentia takes another sip of her beer. My eyes get caught on her lips around the bottle’s rim, and my reaction conflicts with Orok’s plea not to hook up with his teammates. Was that a serious plea? Is it worth having to prove to Crescentia that I’m nothigh maintenance?
Though if I do try to get with her, even for a one-night thing, would Orok be all accusatory again about me slipping back into reckless behavior? I have had hookups without his judgment, so maybe it was the bit where he thought I’d connected it to a favor.
This is a lot of mental hoops for an orgasm I’m not sure I—
I’m flung into Crescentia, who flattens against the wall with a shout of surprise.
I whirl on Orok and steady him. “Dude, what the—”
“We gottago,” he says, putting his face right up in mine. “Seb. We need toleave.”
“You were gone two seconds. There’s no way you fucked something up that—”
“Elethior is here.”
My grip on Orok’s shirt tightens. I pop my eyes past his shoulder, scanning the party.
People press around us, everyone well past inebriated, limbs strewn in the air and heads lolling to the music or thrown back in laughter.
A figure leans against the wall that divides the dining room from the kitchen. Elethior Tourael is all length and height—long black hair buzzed on one side; long, slender, half-elven ears; long limbs under a black T-shirt and black pants; thick boots like he rode here on a motorcycle, though I think the fuck not. It’s okay for a Tourael to play pretend at being some kind of badass, with the black tattoos up the side of his neck and along his arms contrasting against his pale skin, but for him to actually be a badass would require a level of slumming it that he’s not capable of.
He’s listening to whatever someone in his group is saying, but he reaches for his drink on a table behind him and his eyes lock with mine.
Recognition transforms Elethior’s expression. Seizes him in a cringe of revulsion.
My already rapid-fire pulse goes ultrasonic. I can’t even hear the hum of it in my ears anymore.
“Seb,” Orok pleads. “We gotta go. What if he knows we were in his lab?Oh my gods.”
“Hey.” I break my gaze from Elethior like I’m emerging from underwater—sound throbs again, movement speeds back up—and I cup Orok’s face so his bloodshot eyes focus on me. “You always get super paranoid when you drink. We’re good.”
Ivo pats Orok’s shoulder. “Maybe lay off the hard stuff. And stop doing whatever this moron tells you to do.”
Crescentia tips her beer at Ivo. “I’ll drink to that. What is this rivalry about, anyway? Evocation and conjuration are basically the same thing.”
My hands are still cupped around Orok’s face, so when we both turn to look at her, it’s more than a little ridiculous.
There are a good number of spells all wizards are capable of. Once you get into higher-level stuff, things break into rigid class structures—and evocation uses magical energy to create nonliving things, like magically generated fire. But conjuration uses magical energy to pull inanimate shit to the caster, regardless of where it came from; no creation, nothing new, just something fully formed that belonged to someone else, thenpoof.
“Evocation creates from magical energy.Creates. Like a—like a— We’reartists.” I release Orok to point at Crescentia, who looks like she’s regretting ever having said anything, or maybe being this side of sober when she did. “Conjuration wizards arethieves—”
“Funny. I was going to say the same about you.”
The words are only spoken loud enough to be heard over the music, but the voice itself is a thunderhead, and it crashes into my nerve endings like each one was caught unaware in a storm.
Our group turns.
To Elethior.
Orok curses, Crescentia chugs the rest of her beer, and Ivo rolls his eyes and ducks around Elethior to slip off into the house.
I’m only vaguely aware of these things, tuned in to Elethior in a tunnel of narrowed awareness, the primitive part of my monkey brain screamingthreat, threat, threat.
Elethior gives me a flat, cold stare.
I return it with a confident grin. “Can I help you?”
He tips his head, his dark hair catching the yellow light with a sheen. A cloud of cologne, smelling of floral vetiver, billows over me, so thick it takes a beat for it to emanate from him.
