Read Online mythean arcana 06 - master of fate by Linsey Hall - Free Book Online Page B

found by another soulceress. The city’s protective magic ensures it. So I created a portal to my own island in the Med and made her find it.”
    “Why did you want to see her?” Had the madness prevented her from remembering him? 
    She whipped around to pin him with a shocked gaze. “She’s my sister. I might have been mad, and a little bit evil, but I still wanted to see my sister. I didn’t even know I had a sister until shortly before I escaped the aether. As soon as I escaped, I wanted to meet her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to hang out on that glacier for any length of time. Too cold and dark. That’s not what I was looking for after the aether.” There was a shivery quality to her voice that made an old part of his mind ache to reach out and touch her. Funny how being around her revived parts of himself that he’d thought long dead.
    He couldn’t touch her, so he asked more questions. He wanted to know more about her. Everything. “You’ve only been free for a year? How do you have such a modern accent? There’s no trace of the old days in your voice. Your accent is now vaguely American.”
    “A spell. That accent revealed a weakness and also my identity as the Scottish soulceress who went mad.” She looked straight ahead, her gaze far away, her voice hard. “I don’t do weakness. A soulceress can’t, if she wants to survive. So I adopted my sister’s way of speaking to blend in. She was raised in America.”
    His chest ached for her. The woman he’d known had been wary, but nothing like this. That woman was long dead. The phoenix who’d risen in her place had been forged in fire. He wished he could have saved her from that fire. He opened his mouth to speak. Faltered. Coughed to cover it up. Eventually, he got out, “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I tried to find you, after I returned.”
    “Don’t worry about it.” Her tone was flippant. She didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe brushing it off was the way she dealt with it, but it couldn’t be healthy. 
    But who was he to give advice about the healthy way to deal with trauma? “I dinna want it to go that way,” he said. He’d wanted far more for her. For them. 
    “Seriously. It’s done. And your life hasn’t been a rose garden.”
    His gaze jerked toward hers. Did she know what had happened to him? He barely resisted running his hand over the scar on his arm.
    “Years change you,” he conceded, unwilling to say more.
    “Those tattoos are a change.” She nodded at his arms and chest.
    He glanced down at them and nodded. Suddenly, she was kneeling on the bench directly beneath his, her head close to his left arm. He wanted to jerk away, but forced himself to hold still. His muscles vibrated. She was so close that he swore he could feel her breath on his forearm. Even in the dim light, her hair gleamed. His hands itched to touch it. He clenched them hard.

    Aurora stared down at the wolf tattooed on Felix’s chest, trying to distract herself from the devastating knowledge that he’d searched for her after her disappearance. He’d cared enough to look for her. She’d known he cared, but the idea that he’d searched for her was more than she could think about at this moment.
    So she studied his tattoos and horror turned her stomach. They were beautiful. Besides the wolf, there were whorls of vines, leaves, and prominent thorns decorating his skin, curling up from his wrists to his shoulders and down to where they met the wolf on his chest. It looked as if the wolf had been born from the thorns.
    It was the scars beneath the lines that made horror well up within her. It was difficult to scar a Mythean. Their quick healing made it nearly impossible. It would have taken torture and dark magic to make scars like this stick. Had he covered them up with the tattoos afterward?
    She swallowed hard, wanting to ask. But he wouldn’t want to answer. He’d brushed off her comments about how he’d changed, and she