Mercy Strange by Alisa Woods

Author:Alisa Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alisa Woods

Chapter Eleven

She could still feel the ghost of Swift’s kiss.

Her lips tingled. Her chest was exploding with emotion, including the weird itchy-awkward feeling that came from knowing he knew—Swift could sense every tiny, fleeting thing. She felt naked in front of him, even though she was fully clothed. He saw her in a way no one else could. He knew things about her no one else did. It was terrifying… and freeing.

She pulled in a breath and let it out slow, willing her body to relax. To embrace that freedom. “You’re the only one who knows about my whisper magick.”

His eyes lit up. “Whisper magick—is that what you call it?”

“Well, there’s another kind called shout magick.” It felt incredible to be talking about this out loud. “I have that too, but it’s different. It’s a class of field magick where you’re able to generate sound waves, simply by shouting, that are incapacitating in a physical sense. Although it’s really shutting down the brain by overloading the sound receptors in your ears, so it’s not that different. I think the two Talents are connected somehow, but whisper magick operates directly on the brain. Through the auditory nerve, still, but I think that’s just a conduit. For all practical purposes, it’s mental magick—and the worst kind. It exerts complete control over a person’s mental processes.” The scientific version sounded so much less heinous than the reality: she could control people with her words.

“But you have to actually speak to activate it?” He had that look in his eyes again—some cross between admiration and attraction. It was heating her up inside.

Shit, he could probably sense that, too. This whole thing was so awkward. She retreated into focusing on the magitek, and not the soft appeal of his lips, because that was a lot safer. “Yes, but it’s not like the magick is in the words themselves. Like today when I told those people to stop—I meant stop attacking me, stay where they were, shut everything down. The word was just a conduit for my intent, and they got the intent loud and clear. They stopped breathing. I should have been more careful, but I was kind of in a panic and…” She dropped her gaze to her hands, pulling them out of Swift’s grasp because it was just too much to be talking about it and touching him at the same time. “I never use it. I mean, I try to never use it. It’s so fucking dangerous. I try to pretend it doesn’t exist—it’s too much power, and I don’t trust myself to… to not…”

“Hey.” His hand was on her cheek again. “You’re a good person. You wouldn’t hurt people.”

She suddenly had to blink back tears. “I don’t mean to.”

He frowned. “Have you hurt people?”

“No.” She shook her head, too much, and pulled away from his touch again. “I mean, there was this one time, when I was just a kid, and I didn’t know what I could do…” She stopped and pressed her lips together.

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