Total pages in book: 194
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 187021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “Tea should be fine for now. Unless Graves wants something.”
“I do not,” Graves said, striding into the room behind her.
“Excellent, sir.” Edgar bowed and departed.
Kierse set her tea on the coffee table, carefully avoiding looking at the table they’d had indecent relations on. “This is for me?”
“I thought it’d be more comfortable than the couch.”
“We could have used a bed.”
His eyes flashed when he looked at her. “I’m more powerful in the library.”
Mmm. As if that was all it was.
She took a seat. He dragged a chair over before her, and her body trembled. She was nervous. She had every reason to be nervous. Graves, no matter how much she was attempting to put her trust in him, could destroy her mind. She was certain of that. It was what he was good at. If she let him in, he could hurt her…like he had before. But she couldn’t afford Nying Market every time she needed information. Graves was right here.
“Your absorption is a problem,” he said flatly. All business.
Good. Business made sense.
“It serves me well.”
“Generally, people have to learn to keep others out of their heads. There’s an entire discipline devoted to strengthening the mind to deflect anyone seeking to get their claws in.”
“To stop you, you mean.”
Graves shrugged. “They’re not usually good enough for that, but sure.”
“Modest.”
“It doesn’t suit me.” He passed her a book. “If you want to work on mental fortification, then this would be of use to you. In the event that your absorption fails you, you want to make sure you still have teeth.”
She cradled the book in her hands uncertainly. He was giving her information to deflect against him? That was…strange.
He must have read that in her eyes. “We’re building trust,” he reminded her. “I’d be remiss not to teach you self-defense.”
“Right,” she agreed.
“So training today will focus on lowering your absorption. And if I can get you to do that, then we can look for your memories.” He tapped the book. “If not, I’ll start you reading the theoretical side of that mental work, and we can work on mental fortitude. There are some easy exercises that you should start doing on your own either way.”
Kierse leafed through the book. “More homework.”
“You thought you’d escape it?”
She laughed. “With knowledge incarnate before me? Not really.”
“Seems you did plenty of research back in Dublin. You should be used to it.” He reached for another book and tipped it open. “As far as tackling your absorption, I needed a different plan.”
“Have wisps ever done this kind of work before?”
Graves glanced up at her thoughtfully. “Most wisps wouldn’t let me close enough to find out.”
Kierse laughed. “Yeah, I bet not. That has something to do with me being able to kill you?”
“Something like that.”
“And how do I do that exactly?”
Graves grinned, all teeth. “Another lesson, perhaps.”
“Oh, how I look forward to it.” She set the book aside. “You did call me the source of your destruction.”
“And I meant it literally, in every sense of the word,” he said, his voice pitched low. Suddenly, they were talking about something else entirely. She flushed, and his smile only grew. “Lay back.”
Kierse did as instructed. The chaise was a soft, midnight-blue velvet with enough cushion to cocoon Kierse’s body. She swallowed and waited for more instruction.
“Absorption, as you’re currently using it, is passive. Just in the way we believed that immunity was. But absorption can be active. I’ve seen wisps siphon magic, store it, and redirect it. You aren’t a warlock, but you still follow the rules of magic. You can recharge as I can, but you can also be charged through your absorption. Just as you burn it off when going into your slow motion.”
So far all of that made sense. “I need to make it active. Like when I pulled the wish powder magic out of Ethan?”
“In theory, what we’re trying to do is the opposite of that. Drawing magic out is one half of the equation and not absorbing at all is the other side.”
“Is it the opposite?” she asked, scrunching her nose. “Is absorbing the opposite of turning the powers off?”
“Think of active absorption like turning your powers on. Right now, they’re on standby. When you drew the magic from Ethan, they were on. We need to recreate that. Once you can pull energy, then we’ll think of shutting it off instead of letting it slide back into standby.”
“Okay,” she said uncertainly. She’d been in deep, desperate shit when she’d done that for Ethan. She hoped that she could do it again here.
“One step at a time,” he encouraged. “I am going to use my magic to try to read your thoughts and just feel the absorption that stops me from doing it.”
Graves touched a bare hand to her wrist. She concentrated on his hand against her skin. When they had first attempted anything like this, she hadn’t even been able to see or sense the magic, but now it came to her easily.