Tangled in Moonlight: Unshifted (Ava and Lucas)

Chapter 229 Ava: Fire

Bureaucracy in the Fae Ward moves with the pace of a paralyzed sloth, leaving me with an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades, as if staying here is the worst decision I've ever made.

Selene spends most of her time slinking around the Fae Ward, finding pockets of space with less wards to sneeze over. Vanessa and Marcus stick with me, with Vanessa sharing my bedroom.

Our first lesson doesn't happen for three days. Why?

Application for Unlicensed Magus to Practice Dangerous Magic Within Residential Areas.

It's an actual title of a piece of paperwork Magister Orion had to file. Apparently, new wizards (though the official Fae-paperwork term is magus, unknown origin) are deemed a deadly force. Whoever runs this place has a serious stick up their butt about me learning magic.

"I don't like it," Vanessa says, staring out the window. "They'll have your name on official paperwork. We have no idea how deep Renard's influence lies."

"It's only within the Fae Ward," I point out, like I have the other thirty times she's mentioned it. "If they're going to find me here, the paperwork won't be the only reason."

Marcus, of course, is quiet. We already know how he feels. He hates it and doesn't trust the paperwork, either.

Not that I disagree with either of them—it's just that, like them, I feel stuck.

Lucas for three days. Knowing that they're fighting over there,

all of us on

on the bed beside me, where I'm surrounded by five papers with different runes written on them. Unlike the magic book I'm still kicking myself over for leaving in my room at the lodge, these runes don't disappear, and

papers, looking them over again and again. There's nothing that happens when I touch them; no tingle or buzz

the elements within me that correspond to them. With such

commune with a single element within

fighting. Learning to center, to focus only on what matters. Maybe you're too in tune

him a dubious look—it's not like I haven't tried that before—I grab the one

fade away, leaving only the sensation of my own body, its thudding heartbeat vibrating through my chest, and the pulsing core of magic within me. It's there, bright and

warms me from within, I imagine myself reaching out to touch it. Nothing happens. I try to visualize tugging at it, like pulling on

this power if nothing works? Taking another deep

fire sitting on the paper in front of me. Fire. Destructive, passionate, life-giving. I think about its properties—how it consumes, how it transforms,

Burning.

of this life, but of another. A dream? A vision?

of my being. I couldn't move, couldn't scream, couldn't see. There was nothing but the all-consuming agony

to pull away from the memory, to escape the torment, but

life, that other death, I was nothing. Only pain. No name, no self, just pure sensation. And in that moment

that feeling, on the memory of being unmade by fire. The bright core of magic within me pulses in response, as if recognizing