Consume. Melissa Darnell

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      You have to, Emily’s reply read. The Clann needs to be sure he’s in control and not a danger to anyone.

      I scowled at the screen. As far as I was concerned, we were never going back to Jacksonville. How could we, when Tristan was still more animal than man? I wasn’t sure he could even control himself in a crowd full of humans, much less descendants.

      Sighing, I propped up on one elbow, looked around and froze.

      I was alone in the cabin.

      Had Tristan run outside after another hunter? Maybe Dad had been in too much of a hurry chasing after him to wake me? If so, why hadn’t I heard anything?

      My pulse racing, I jumped to my feet and rushed toward the door. But movement outside the window stopped me. Tristan and Dad were practicing tai chi a few yards from the cabin.

      Blowing out a long sigh of relief, I moved closer to the window to watch them, and a sigh of a different kind slipped from my lungs.

      In the cold morning air, still predawn gray, Tristan’s fiercely determined focus turned each motion into a thing of both beauty and danger, like a fighter in a martial arts movie preparing for a battle. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched him unseen and unheard for once, and in that moment remembered again why I loved him. It wasn’t just the way he moved, or the beautiful lines formed by his sculpted body, honed by endless football practices over the years and perfected by vampire blood. It was the look in his eyes, the firm set to his mouth and jaw, that single-minded determination to succeed at whatever he attempted. Just like he always had.

      It was a rare glimpse of the old Tristan I knew and loved and had missed every waking day of the past five months.

      When he smoothly slid down into a low right lunge in Form 16, I actually shivered. A minute later, as he progressed to Form 18 and his left palm slowly pushed forward as if pressing open an invisible door, my shiver turned into full-on goose bumps down the back of my neck and arms. But this time it wasn’t because of the beauty of the moment.

      Tristan was about to use magic.

      I had time to think Oh, no and rush for the door. By the time I opened it a half second later, a nearby tree had already gone up in a thunderous boom of flames. The morning’s tai chi lesson was definitely over.

      Tristan stared at the tree. He glanced down at his hands then up at me, his eyes wide as I ran over to him.

      “I... Did I just...” he sputtered.

      “It’s okay,” I said, taking his hands into mine. “You did it with your willpower and that bundle of energy inside you. Can you feel that energy?”

      He frowned then slowly nodded.

      “Good. Now focus on that energy. Think about keeping it as a tight ball inside you if you can.”

      “I didn’t mean to set the tree on fire. I just...I was ticked off. I got distracted. I was thinking...”

      I read his mind. He was thinking that he was tired of not knowing who and what he was. And then his anger had triggered his willpower to kick in and spit out a bit of magic in the form of a fireball.

      A fireball that could have easily killed my dad or me if he’d aimed it in a different direction.

      I pushed that thought away. “I know. It was an accident. That’s why we do the tai chi. It gives you a way to physically get the emotions out without, well, blowing stuff up.” I turned toward the tree, took a deep breath, held out my hands, and willed the tree to cool off. The flames died down then extinguished in a thick cloud of smoke.

      “Savannah, the smoke...” Dad muttered. “Others will see it for miles. Can you do anything to disperse it?”

      I thought for a moment, nibbling at the inner corner of my mouth. Then I raised my hands and imagined a strong breeze blowing out from my palms toward the smoke.

      Tristan hissed and rubbed his arms as wind whispered to life, gathered the smoke, and shredded it into long gray ribbons that trailed off into nothing.

      “There.” I turned to Tristan with a forced smile. “See? All better. Just try to keep your willpower under control and you’ll be okay.”

      But Tristan was frozen in place, staring with wide, unseeing eyes at the now blackened trees.

      “Tristan?”

      He didn’t blink, didn’t move, his mind a million miles away in another place and time when he had last worked with someone to learn how to control his Clann powers.

      TRISTAN

      Images I didn’t understand at first flashed through my mind, of myself and a big bear of a man with a thick silver beard standing in a yard at night.

      Then I recognized him. The answers flowed to me without my having to struggle for them.

      Dad. We were standing in the backyard behind our house.

      Okay, Dad said. So here’s the basics of casting a spell. Every witch starts off at the beginner level of spell casting by saying a word and using a small hand gesture. This helps you focus and control when the spell is actually cast, until you learn how to discipline your mind. Someday, when you’re ready, I’ll teach you how to cast a spell even if you’re tied up with your mouth taped shut, just by thinking the word and using your willpower. Eventually you’ll learn to cast a spell without a word at all, just by thinking about the results you want to create. Like you do when you create fire or ground your energy.

      The brief memory was like the strong wind Savannah had just whispered into life, blowing away the mental fog that had filled my head for months now. I remembered. Everything that had been lost to me came back in wave after wave of memory. I remembered Dad training me how to use magic...the vamp council abducting me and handcuffing me to a chair in their underground Paris headquarters to test Savannah’s self-control...Mom expecting me to follow in Dad’s footsteps to become the next Clann leader and how desperately I had wanted to play pro football someday instead and our endless family arguments about it...Dad’s death...Mom’s heartache turning into happiness as I finally took the stone throne as Clann leader...the pain that exploded in my chest as Gowin tried to rip out my heart through my back...and then waking up in Savannah’s arms with only the memory of her smile to anchor me as everything else faded beneath the fog that had filled my head.

      I remembered it all. But it was too much too fast, a thousand different memories and emotions swirling СКАЧАТЬ