“Allure is like this,” I whisper.
Her eyelids fall as my fingers edge closer to her wrist.
“Understand?” I ask.
She mumbles, “Mm.”
“Kitten?”
“Mmmmmm.”
“We can’t do this if you fall asleep.”
“Oh,” she says, opening her eyes and sitting up straighter. “Okay. Soft – gentle, got it.”
The smile on my face can’t be helped. I never thought I would be instructing someone in Allure. While I was sure that one day I would have children, my Seed doesn’t require a perfect match to sire offspring – but it does require a perfect match to have anything other than Seedless offspring. Silvari – yes. A Saber – no. And nowhere near strong enough to be immune to me. I would outlive them. With a high chance that too much exposure to my magic would be harmful, even deadly, my outliving would be from a distance.
I want to be a father. I always have. It’s an annoying little early thought that has crossed the non-Allure part of my brain at the beginning of every serious relationship. How would we make that work? What would I sacrifice?
My heart aches as I remind it that Kitten isn’t absorbing my power. Somehow, she’s using it, but it is still tapping at her energy, drip by drip, and each of us only has so much to spare at any one time. Mortals begin with much less than a Saber.
I can’t let myself go down the relationship planning path with her. She’s not mine, for one thing. I’m never going to be inside of her, for another.
And it would kill me to have to put distance between us, between me and my child – so much so that the pain niggles at me even now. And now has nothing to do with us and everything to do with her arm, her survival.
I draw the heat back in, and the swirls of desire that have stirred inside me stab like daggers through my chest. I barely manage to keep from grunting. Pax was right. It’s been too long since I’ve had someone between the sheets. Desire doesn’t just dissolve…
But I don’t want to have anyone else.
I want Kitten, or nothing.
She screws up her nose. “Why can I smell jasmine and roses? I’ve looked, and there is no jasmine around here – but bralls, I keep smelling it, and I swear I’m going to cut those roses up.”
Killian stabs a finger towards me. “It’s Allure, and –” he says, then seems to realize what he’s saying, cuts himself off, and moves closer instead. He closes his eyes for a moment, concentrating, then opens them and asks, “What do you smell now?”
She sniffs, then glances towards the kitchen. “Cinnamon.”
Killian huffs.
“She’s using you too?” I ask.
Cinnamon is the scent of regret – I’ve lived with the guy long enough to pick up a small catalogue of his power. I’m pretty sure he can draw and manipulate threads enough to spike certain scents. Aeons, it could be my regret that he’s teased to the surface for his little experiment.
He gives me a sharp nod.
“What do you mean, I’m using you?” Kitten demands.
“If you feel it, he knows it. In this case, smells it. And you’re smelling it too. Smelling something is the same with or without power.” I stop myself there, about to tell her that feeling love is not something everyone can naturally do.
This small creature has spent more time in the darkness than I want to explore; she steps so easily into Killian’s shadow. It’s something she’s not afraid of. But desires, wants, love… those concepts she grips at with the barest tips of her fingers and tries to force into place. Being Allured is easy, but Alluring is hard – like learning to sing softly when all she’s heard in her life is shouting. I need to teach her to sing.
“That sucks. I feel lots of shit. I thought you just read my mind when I started remembering and stuff,” she says, interrupting my train of thought.
Killian grunt-chuckles, and I translate.
“He doesn’t read minds. His sense of emotions is either visual – threads – or chemical – scents.”
“Sometimes colors, sometimes sensations,” Killian adds.
“I’m just smelling crap. Mostly jasmine and roses.”
I push my free hand through my hair. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on.”
“Burnt roses?” Killian asks.
Her brow creases in a look of concentration. “Sometimes.”
Killian glares at me.
“I’m controlling it,” I say.
I know I’m lying, and the next few minutes are going to be very hard. HealingSeeds are highly prized for the way their power turns hours of healing into seconds and days of it into just a few minutes. Seconds would be better, but I’m not a HealingSeed. She has weeks of healing ahead of her. I can’t turn weeks into seconds.
“Okay, concentrate,” I say, drawing Kitten’s eye from Killian back to me. “Try to use my power.”
“What power?”
I reach up and cup her cheek, my thumb trailing across her lips, then resting lightly at the corner of her mouth. Her breath stutters, and a seductive smile pulls at my lips before I manage to slip myself into control.
How did she manage to get Pax to agree to this?
Kitten’s already fallen into my Allure, but now she needs to use it. Draw it like a thin inked line across fine grade paper. Perfect.
“Concentrate,” I whisper. “Harmony.”
Harmony. I need to let myself be in perfect tune with the thing I’m doing. Exist like the brush does to a painting, like ink does to a book, like the sun does to a flower.
“Harmony,” I repeat the word I used when I first began to control my desires.
The more I relax, the more she relaxes, and the more my power draws in on her energy. One part of me is trying to prod along the edges of her being, looking for the gap that might be her Saber lineage, that might be a way for her to absorb some of me – and not finding it. It’s like her
