“Well?” Morgan asked, leaning forward. Acantha had been impressed by her sister’s show of restraint over the last week or so. She must have been able to see that something was going on—Acantha had caught her staring intently at her aura more than once since that fateful afternoon when she’d knocked Cato out with her sword—but she had refrained from asking anything beyond a simple check that she was alright. It made Acantha feel guilty to know that her sister was probably dying of curiosity as she waited for her to volunteer the information willingly. But she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“These are…” Cato’s brow was furrowed. “I can’t be sure, but I think…” Gingerly, as though they were red hot, he slipped his hands through the rusted metal cuffs, the worn chain between them jangling a little. At Cato’s nod, Arric leaned over to click them closed—first one, then the other. Cato waited for a moment—then his eyes widened and he hissed a strangled curse. Arric quickly yanked the shackles free, and Cato sat back in his chair, massaging his right wrist with a pained look on his face.
“What? What happened?”
“Like I thought,” he said, releasing his wrist with a final wince. “Hard to find these kinds of things these days—mages generally consider them poor sportsmanship, which is saying something.” Acantha refused to find his rueful little grin charming. She simply refused.
“What do they do?” Arric’s eyes were wide. He’d filled nearly an entire notebook with observations that afternoon alone.
“Power dampeners,” Cato said, wrinkling his nose as he pushed the manacles gingerly away. “Cut a person off from their power.”
“Fascinating,” Arric muttered, and Hartwell lunged forward in his chair with a shout, then a strangled apology.
“Sorry, but—yes! Fascinating! There’s a story—a record I found—I thought it a folk tale, stored erroneously, but perhaps it corresponds with—”
“Straight lines, please, Hartwell,” Morgan said kindly.
“Yes, indeed. A story I read told of a set of manacles that imprisons a shifter in their two-legged form—the suggestion being that the experience was rather dreadfully uncomfortable, too.”
Cato shrugged. “You use magic to shift, these cut you off from your magic—it all adds up.”
“Useful,” Acantha heard herself observing, nodding at the manacles. “Maybe I ought to keep them with me. I’d feel much safer leaving you alone if you were wearing these.”
It was intended as a joke, and the archivists at least chuckled a little. But the look of dread on Cato’s face was too quick and too shocking to have been manufactured. He leaned back in his chair, hauling a smile into place to cover the expression she’d seen there, but it was too late to fool her.
“I’d prefer you didn’t,” he said, his voice not quite as light as it usually was. She didn’t like the suspicion that rose up in her. Didn’t like the way it felt, after so many days of Cato giving her nothing to worry about.
“Why?” she asked levelly, suddenly aware of the sword she was holding. “Aren’t you disconnected from your magic right now anyway? You came to us unarmed, right?” And she’d have noticed by now if he was wearing anything else, she thought, her mind providing her with a profoundly unhelpful memory of his naked body stretched out on the bed beneath her possessive, roaming hands…
“It’s still an uncomfortable feeling,” he said with a shrug. Acantha felt her heart sinking as the archivists moved the conversation along, clearly eager to get through as many of the artifacts they’d brought up for Cato’s perusal as they could before the day’s end. She wanted, very badly, to believe what he’d said. That the discomfort of the manacles was the only reason he’d reacted so badly to the prospect of wearing them again. But the force of her wanting, that was what worried her. Wanting to think the best of him—that was a sure sign that he’d gotten under her skin. That meant she needed to redouble her suspicion, redouble her surveillance, redouble her commitment to finding the crack in his story and dragging out the truth.
But Acantha was beginning to worry that when it came right down to it, she wasn’t going to be strong enough to do what was needed.
Chapter 16 - Cato
The days were getting harder and harder to get through without breaking down. It was taking all his strength to maintain his sunny disposition during these long days with Acantha and the trio of scholars who had enthusiastically adopted him like some kind of academic mascot. It was easy enough with Arric and Hartwell, who were so deeply absorbed in their work that they’d probably not have noticed if he’d levitated a foot off the floor. They weren’t going to pick up on his stress. But that Morgan… she was another matter entirely. Something about the way she looked at him, seeming to look right through him, or past him. Acantha had made an offhand comment about her sister’s ability to read people that was still haunting him.
Because if Morgan looked too closely into Cato, she wasn’t going to like what she read there.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring his coven down on these dragons, couldn’t let the attack go ahead. He was counting down the days with his heart in his mouth, every hour that dragged past filling him with a deeper and deeper dread. The absolute best-case scenario was that everyone’s memory was cleared and nobody died… and that scenario still ended with half of the community’s priceless treasures going missing. He’d gotten to know them well enough to know what a blow that would be to their collective morale.
And he didn’t even want to think of how it would feel to know that Acantha didn’t remember him. All the moments they’d spent together in bed, either shuddering with pleasure or curled up with absolute contentment in one another’s arms… he wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle knowing that those had been wiped from her memory without a trace. It was frightening, how quickly he was falling for her. He’d never felt like this about anyone… not that he’d ever had the chance to spend this much time with anyone. But there was something else going on here, too, something working on him on a deeper level than simple emotion.
Ironically enough, he felt himself desperate to talk to Inota. She’d know what was going on with him. Along with her personal illusion magic, she’d always had a fondness for spells and abilities that interfered with feelings and perception… one of her favorite piercings cast a temporary love spell he’d been on the receiving end of once or twice, usually as vengeance for some petty prank of his. It had been an intoxicating feeling… but even that false and temporary high paled in comparison to the strength of what he had begun to feel about Acantha. And in such a short space of time, too.
But what could he do? She was still right on top of him every minute of every day—in some cases literally, now. Even if he could sneak away and make contact with his coven, what could he say? Hi Haspar, can you just leave the room for a second, I want to speak privately with Inota about how I could have fallen in love with the guard captain I mentioned, oh and by the way, let everyone know the attack that took us weeks of planning is canceled?
It was impossible. But as the days crept by and the scheduled attack drew closer and closer, Cato knew that he was going to have to take a chance.
He and Acantha fell into bed together as they always did—it was becoming the one bright spot in his otherwise deeply harrowing day. Worried as he might be about the deception that was about to come crashing down around his head, with Acantha in his arms, all of that vanished. It was an impossibility to even try to think about anything else. And so he lost himself in her for as long as he could, drawing out their pleasure, keeping her right on the brink of her orgasm without ever quite nudging her over, until her playful frustration began to give way to real anger and he knew he was risking his neck. He made it up to her with a second round… and when she was finally sated, curled in a contented heap of sweaty limbs in his bed, he fought off his own sleepiness and kept watch.
Ten minutes passed, twenty, thirty… she always slept very deeply after they’d made love, but he didn’t want to take any risks. Forty minutes, fifty… he stopped himself from nodding off, focusing on keeping count. And when she’d been fast asleep for a whole hour, he slipped carefully out of the bed and stole away to the other side of the room, as far from her as he could safely get. Her breathing remained unchanged. Hoping like hell that he’d judged this right, he sat cross-legged in the corner of the room with his left hand pressed to the inside of his right wrist, hoping it would be enough to hide the glow as the gemstone buried deep in his forearm lit up.
Mages weren’t much for assigning monetary value to artifacts, preferring to speak only of power… but even then, Cato knew that the gemstone buried in his arm was worth more than an entire insula. Haspar hadn’t let him forget that. Not since the day he’d used the stone to save his life. He’d been so young at the time, barely past his adolescent years… and just old enough to get cocky enough about his skills as a thief to bite off more than he could chew. The men who’d caught him had broken both of his hands and left him for dead in a gutter. That was where Haspar had found him. Was it coincidence or fate that of all the city’s lonely, desperate people, it was Cato who’d fallen into Haspar’s path that day? He’d never know. All Cato could remember, through the haze of the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life and the certain knowledge that his death was minutes away, was the sudden sharp sting of a blade against his forearm. Fresh blood dripping across the dried blood on his wrists, Haspar had asked him if he chose life or death.
For the first few years in Haspar’s service, Cato had wondered if he’d made the right choice. Then he’d stopped wondering. What good did it do?
Healing, that was the gemstone’s major gift. That much had become clear when Cato’s desperate, pain-addled will had reached into the object and grasped the cool light at its core. It had poured through his body like sunlight, dancing across each bruise and cut, replacing the splintered agony in his hands with effortless warmth. And when he’d looked down, it was to see his hands whole and unbroken, and every bruise gone, too. The last thing he saw was the terrifyingly deep gash in his forearm closing over and vanishing without a trace… but not before he saw the gemstone, like a fat blue slug, pulsing with light where it nestled in the viscera of his arm.