Page 63 of Marked
Well, crap. We had a little more information but none of the pieces to the puzzle were fitting together.
“If you’ll allow it,” Orion spoke again. “I’d like to take the arrow to my shop and study it some more. Maybe there’s a way for me to trace it.”
I waved at the arrow, and he reached forward to pluck it off the table, careful not to touch the arrowhead. With a curt nod, Orion walked out of my cabin.
I waited until the door to the cabin clicked shut before I turned to Ace.
“You have magic,” I blurted out. “You helped me back there in the forest and I want to know what you did.”
“I cleaned and bandaged your wound, nothing more. Sometimes flushing out the poison can buy you more time or help speed up recovery. Obviously, that helped.”
Bullshit, but from the hard set of his jaw, he wasn’t sharing any more information. At least not tonight. I’d find another way to discover the truth. “What about just now? You accessed power to study the arrow.”
He shrugged. “I have the ability to detect magic. I can’t label it or track it, but I can recognize energy signatures that I’ve come into contact with before.”
“And did this one feel familiar?”
“In a way,” Ace said. “There was something familiar about the magic, but if it was like seeing someone’s face, the image was blurry. I couldn’t focus on enough of it to identify who it belonged to.”
“Has this happened before?”
Ace shrugged.
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“Are you going to tell me why you were really blushing a few minutes ago? I thought there wasn’t anything between you two.”
“There’s not.” Not anymore. Not now that my mind couldn’t stop thinking about how the press of Ace’s power would feel along my skin.
Phaan.
He raised eyebrows. “Poor guy.”
I growled and spun around to walk away. “You’ve been away for awhile. Things have changed. If you want to make any friends here, I recommend you stop antagonizing everyone you come across.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You have two, maybe three friends, and one’s your brother and another just wants to sleep with you.”
I opened and then shut my mouth. I knew I wasn’t the friendliest person in town, but I was trying. Trust didn’t come easily to me, not with my history, and I always had to hold a little of myself back to keep my secrets safe.
“I don’t have to dish all my secrets to be liked, Mouse,” Ace continued. “Nor do I need a heart to heart to get laid.”
I snapped my mouth shut to take a deep breath in and out. “No. But you don’t have to be a dick about everything, either.”
“You seem awfully fixated on dicks.” Ace followed me into the other room. “And anyway, what gave you the impression I was trying to make friends?”
“You’d prefer to be miserable and alone?” I spun to face him. “That’s quite fitting, actually. Sad. But fitting.”
He leaned toward me, somehow dangerously close without any effort. “I prefer not to get distracted.”
“Then we have something in common.”
He rocked back on his heels. “How so?”
“I also don’t want to get distracted, and that’s what a relationship with Rye would become. I don’t feel the same way he does about me and that would also be unfair. So now you know the whole sordid truth about me and him. Probably not what you were expecting but that’s all there is to it.”