I placed my hands in his reluctantly, watching as his long fingers curled around them. He turned my hands over until my palms rested face up, then stroked my wrists with his thumbs. Another shiver rippled through me, but this one was warm and tingly, and I sucked in a sharp breath through my nostrils. His scent filled my nose, and my cheeks heated as I became incredibly aware of how close we stood together.
If Iannis noticed my sudden discomfort, he said nothing, simply continued to stroke his thumbs across my wrists in small circles. The warm tingles gradually grew stronger as they ran up and down my arms, like an electric current looping between us, and as the scent of burnt sugar thickened around us I realized that current was actually magic.
His eyes opened, and a pang of disappointment went through me as he dropped my hands. “Not a single spark,” he murmured, eyeing me curiously.
“What does that mean?” Fenris, who’d been standing nearby, asked. His brow was furrowed as he studied me.
“It means that someone has put a block on her magic, likely her father.”
“My father?” I echoed. Anger bubbled up in my stomach at the implications. “Why would he do that? So I’d be helpless to defend myself?”
“On the contrary,” the Chief Mage corrected me. “He would have done this to keep you hidden, so you would pass the tests without arousing suspicion.” He sounded intrigued. “Whoever your father is, he must have been a high-level mage to have accomplished such a sophisticated spell.”
“Gee, I’m so proud,” I snapped, folding my arms across my chest.
Annoyance flickered in the Chief Mage’s eyes again, but he ignored my sarcasm as he walked around his desk. I watched, curiously, as he opened a drawer and pulled out a fountain pen. “Hold out your hand.”
Bewildered, I did so, and he placed the pen in the center of my palm. I inspected it to try and see if there was anything special about it, but there were no runes or strange markings of any kind on the surface. “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“Make it levitate.”
I scowled at him. “Exactly how am I supposed to do that?”
The Chief Mage shrugged. “The same way you do it every time. Reach for your magic, and direct it.”
Sighing, I closed my eyes and did as he asked, searching for that glowing light in the center of my being that appeared whenever I had a magical outburst. But as usual, there was nothing but a void, and when I opened my eyes the pen was still in my hand.
“It didn’t work.”
The Chief Mage only arched a brow, and reached for my hand as if to take the pen. But instead, he wrapped his fingers around my hand. Instantly, ice crackled up my forearm, spreading rapidly to my shoulder with no signs of stopping. Panic burst in my chest as a deep, painful cold engulfed my arm. I knew that if it reached my heart I would die.
As soon as I had that thought, the magic inside me flared to life. Heat flooded my body, and blue-green flames raced up my arms. The ice melted instantly, water sluicing down to the floor to be absorbed by the expensive carpeting.
“As I suspected.” The Chief Mage dropped my arm, a satisfied look on his face. “Your magic only works when you believe your life to be in danger.”
“I could have told you that!” I balled my hands at my sides, my heart pumping furiously. “You didn’t need to almost kill me!”
The Chief Mage’s lips thinned. “Don’t be silly, Miss Baine. I would have stopped the ice before it reached your heart. It does me no good if you die before I complete my investigation.”
“Not. Re. Assured.”
As I half-expected, the Chief Mage ignored that too, instead leaning forward to peer into my eyes. “Fenris,” he murmured, “Jaguar shifters, they typically have yellow eyes, do they not?”
“They range in color, actually, but a golden color is the norm.” Fenris shrugged. “They’re also one of the few big cat feline species that have melanin coats as well as lighter coloring, explaining why Sunaya’s coat is black when so many of the Baine jaguars are not.”
“I personally prefer the term panther,” I said coolly. It was a misnomer, but it was simpler than identifying myself as a ‘black jaguar’.
“Hmm.” The Chief Mage glanced back at me. “Your father may very well share your eye coloring, then.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are you seriously going to try and identify my father, a mage who can change his appearance, by his eye coloring?”
“Of course not,” the Chief Mage said mildly. “But it’s something we should consider, nevertheless.”
“You know,” Fenris said, “if her father had claimed her at birth, which would have been the honorable thing to do, Sunaya would be a mage in good standing by now.”
Huh. That was interesting. In theory Fenris was correct – the issue of being born illegally with magic mainly applied to humans, which made sense as all mage families originally descended from normal humans. Full-blooded shifters, on the other hand, were never born with magic other than their innate ability to shift, making me an extremely rare case. I gritted my teeth as the realization swept over me that my father could have claimed me as his daughter and I would have been allowed to train as a mage, sparing me years of heartache and difficulty.
The Chief Mage arched a brow in Fenris’s direction. “Your point?”
“My point is, I don’t think it’s just to punish Sunaya for her father’s neglect, which is the only reason she can’t control her magic properly. In my opinion, he is more deserving of punishment than she is. He knew the consequences of leaving her to fend for herself, and yet did nothing aside from putting a spell on her to seal her magic away. A spell that, in the end, did not save her.”