“Ah…I mean, sure. I can give it a go, I guess,” I said. “Manifesting a door or whatever.”
Rafe didn’t hesitate. He lifted the key and turned toward the wall. “We need to enter the archive at a place where we can learn what we most need to know to win the Mage Trials,” he murmured.
“To win the Mage Trials and help it, too,” I added, staring at him intently as a chill ran down my arms. Rafe arched his brows, but nodded. We’d recently learned that anything we did for the greater glory of the Mage Trials helped us inside the game. Maybe we could leverage that magical goodwill outside the Trials too.
“To win Trials and to help it,” he agreed.
He placed the key on the wall. I lifted my hand and rested it on his. Fire flared deep within me for half a second—then Rafe’s hand nearly fried my skin off.
“Ow!” I yelped. I yanked my hand back, only to have Rafe trap it with his other hand on top of mine, holding it down as I gasped in pain.
“Feel it,” he said to me, or I thought that was what he said. It was difficult to tell since my head was filled with a scream of panicked outrage. He kept babbling words that were barely understandable as I jerked against his hand. “Go deep within it, accept it. Don’t fight it…dammit, I said focus!”
His last word had the strength of a literal slap against my psyche, and mentally I flipped my pain, surprise, and anger around and slammed it into the bricks in front of me.
“Open,” I snarled. A click sounded beneath our hands, and a second later, a chunk of the wall disappeared. There was no swinging door or sliding panel—the bricks simply evaporated.
Rafe shoved us both through the opening, into the yawning shadows beyond.
2
The wall immediately re-formed behind us. We stood at the edge of a large, dusty storeroom, empty except for built-in shelving and several long, heavy wooden tables that were lined up like church pews in the space. Nothing sat on either the shelves or the tables, and Rafe gestured with the key, which conveniently provided enough illumination to cut through the gloom. A single door stood at the far end of the room, and he headed for it, reaching for my hand.
“I’m not touching you again,” I informed him, stepping out of range. “It’s like holding on to an electric eel.”
He glanced back at me, surprised, though he withdrew his hand. “Stronger than when you touched the other guys? Either before or after you bonded?”
I considered the question as we moved forward. With Rafe, there didn’t seem any point in not being honest. I didn’t like him much, for all that my body had become unusually attracted to him, and I suspected more than a little that he still carried the torch for his former girlfriend, Cynthia, currently one of our competitors in the Mage Trials. I didn’t really know how I felt about any of that. He certainly was allowed to care for anyone he wanted, but it didn’t help me feel warm and fuzzy toward him. Not his fault, of course, but—
“Maddigan,” Rafe prompted. “What’s the difference in your connection with me versus the other guys?”
The exaggerated patience of his tone irritated me. Because everything irritated me with this guy.
“It’s stronger,” I snapped. “It hurts. With Connor, it was more like a thrill of excitement. With Luke, it was more like a tremor of fear, I guess, a vulnerability that was quickly soothed. Like that. With Marcus…”
I broke off, my lips curving despite themselves as I thought about the deep primal heat that Marcus evoked inside me. Heat I still felt down to my toes.
“I get the picture,” Rafe said drily. “But you only feel pain when you touch me?” He sounded more curious than dismayed. “That seems…odd.”
I paused. I didn’t think I was supposed to feel pain with any of the guys, but that totally had been my initial reaction to Rafe’s touch. I’d wanted—needed—to pull away from him, to protect myself.
“It’s too much,” I finally offered, while Rafe tilted his head, studying me. His hair had fallen over his forehead, and in the faint silvery light of the key, he looked like a forsaken angel, lost to the shadows. I shook off the thought.
“Like catching hold of a live wire,” I clarified. “There’s too much electricity coming through when I touch you, if that makes sense. It makes me panic.”
“Panic…” Rafe echoed, as if he was turning the word over in his mind. “And you didn’t feel this with any of the other guys?”
I made a face. “Sorry,” I offered. “You asked.”
His chuckle rolled back to me as he reached the door, then pulled it open. Without another word, we both poked our heads through, taking in the nondescript hallway. More doors stretched off to the right and left. A few feet down to the right, the corridor teed off to a more traveled-looking section of the building.
“That leads to the main archive,” Rafe said. “I’ve been to that part. There won’t be anything for us there.”
We turned to the left and tried other doors. The farther forward we went into the building, the more it seemed abandoned. There were archival supplies and boxes of materials in one room, another room set up as some sort of workshop for preserving documents, and three others that had floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with moldering books. We stepped into the first of these, but Rafe never quit scowling.
“These books are all from the 1950s, up to the eighties or so. Presumably when the archive switched over to computerized storage.”
I pursed my lips. “Really? You guys trust computers instead of actual books?”
He looked at me, startled, and I made the same connection as soon as the words left my mouth. “Why would you trust even books?” I said aloud as he nodded. “Why would you trust anything that could be stolen?”
“You wouldn’t,” he agreed. “At least not the books that were out in the open, easy for anyone to access.” He gestured around the room. “This portion of the archive is outside the boundary of the academy, but it doesn’t feel like anything special. It feels like overflow.”
I glanced at him. “You can sense the meaning of a room? That’s a thing?”
“I can sense the energy of everything,” he admitted almost offhandedly, as if this wasn’t anything unusual. “People, objects, events. They all possess an electrical energy depending on where and what they are—a charge or an emotion or a presence. Like that.”
“Okay, so what’s that get you? I mean, great, you can recognize that the energy of point A is different from the energy of point B. Can you track that energy back to its source and identify it? Or is it more, like, you can recognize it if you run across it again?”
“Much more the latter than the former,” Rafe said, answering me with a distracted air. “It’s how I connected you to the library.”
I blinked in surprise, but Rafe was already moving on. By now he’d left the first archive room and poked his head into the next one, this one also bristling with old computer components. He ducked back out just as quickly.
“None of this feels right,” he muttered.
At the moment, though, I cared less about the storeroom and more about the enigma of the guy in front of me. “While we’re up, what other magical abilities do you have? You said you weren’t a mind mage, and I’m willing to go with you on that, but I’m not totally buying that you just get a funny feeling about everything and that’s as far as it goes.”