Wraith (The Scarred Mage of Roseward #3) - Sylvia Mercedes Page 0,2

back, nearly tripping over the bottom step.

“Miss Beck!”

“Mage Silveri.” Nelle pulled herself upright. His gaze swiftly traveled over her, taking in his own garments hanging loose from her scrawny limbs. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “There’s an awful lot of magic out there. It don’t look good.”

His mouth opened, closed, opened again. Then he shook his head and passed a hand over his face as it darkened into a terrible glare. “I told you to leave! I told you to go, to get away from here!”

“Yeah, well.” Nelle folded her arms across her chest. “I didn’t. It’s my choice, and I didn’t. Don’t you remember?”

She watched realization spread across his face, shock mounding on horror as he recalled their encounter the day before, when she, wearing nothing but the scanty garment given her by Kyriakos’s wives, had put her arms around him. Had told him she wouldn’t leave him. Had raised her face to his and kissed him . . .

He’d pushed her away, convinced she was no more than a Noswraith illusion. After all, the Thorn Maiden’s favorite game was to torment with false seductions and dangerous promises. And Soran Silveri, after fifteen years of imprisonment on Roseward, had learned to be wary of her wiles.

But their encounter hadn’t been a dream.

Heat rushed to Nelle’s cheeks as she stood facing him. What would he think now of that delicate, tentative kiss she had offered him? Now that he knew it was real?

But the mage swiftly recovered from his surprise and shook his head, scowling furiously. “You should have listened to me,” he snarled and marched across the room, brushing past her on his way to the door. He reached for the latch.

Nelle leaped to his side and grabbed his cold wrist. “It’s bad out there, sir!”

“I know.” He tossed her hand off and threw the door open.

Nelle yelped and flung up both hands to shield her eyes again from the glare of brilliant magic. Squinting painfully, she peered through her fingers at Soran in the doorway, his hair tossed wildly back from his shoulders, his eyes wide as he stared directly into that tortured sky.

“Ruvyn-satra,” he said, his unnaturally calm voice carrying clearly to Nelle’s ears despite the thunderous gusts. “A magic storm.”

“Is this kind of thing normal?” Nelle cried.

Soran shook his head slowly, dashing her hope. The line of his jaw tightened, and one nilarium-crusted hand flashed in the strange light as it caught the doorpost, gripping hard. “I have seen only one other since my imprisonment began, and that from a great distance and nowhere near so massive as this.”

“Well, boggarts then.” Fighting against the gale, Nelle moved to stand at the mage’s side. The storm bore down faster now, eating up the small patch of blue sky that still hung above Roseward. “What . . . what do we do?”

“Do?” He looked down at her, his eyes flashing with weird light. “It’s a ruvyn-satra. We shut the doors and windows and hope the protections on this lighthouse are enough to weather the storm. Other than that . . .” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he stepped suddenly through the doorway.

“Where are you going?” Nelle darted out a hand to catch his arm. “Didn’t you just say we had to wait it out?”

He pried her hand away, but she only caught him more firmly with her other hand. “My wyverns,” he said, meeting her gaze hard. “They are beings of pure magic. If they are left exposed to that front, their essences will be reabsorbed into the quinsatra. I must get them.”

Nelle’s eyes swiveled, taking in that oncoming rush of frantically churning light and power and energy and utter chaos. “Are you insane?”

One of his eyebrows quirked. “Probably.”

With that, he wrenched free of her hold and strode swiftly to the top of the path leading down to the beach far below the cliff on which the lighthouse stood. Moments later the top of his head disappeared below the edge, and Nelle stood alone on the threshold, her hands empty, her mouth ajar, her eyes straining to see against the glare of the magic storm.

“Bullspit!” she growled and, turning to look back over her shoulder, glared up at the wyvern cringing in the rafters overhead. “You stay here. At least one of us should try to survive this thing.”

Without waiting to hear the wyvern’s answering squawk, she hauled the door shut. When the raging gale sought to tear it from her hands, she merely wrenched harder, refusing