Page 110 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

“I must be careful, all the warmth might set it on fire.”

“I wouldn’t mind the burn, love of mine.”

She rolled her pretty eyes. “Shut up.”

“What? No sassy remark for me?”

Her fists flowed with electricity and she glanced at every other face that had stopped and gone silent while witnessing our conversation.

She had laid sideways on the bed, half of her body hanging over the edge as she read something she’d scribbled down. Her face had turned red from how long she’d stood like that.

I put the delivery documents down and turned to her. “Love, what are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

I stood to fill a quarter of the tumbler. “And can I get you to engage in a less dangerous pastime?”

She pushed up, eyeing me and then the drink I held. “Pour me some.”

Kneeling before her, I lifted the glass to her lips. She narrowed her eyes on me for a moment but drank it at my pace. “Tasty?” I asked, swiping my thumb over her wet lips.

She shivered at the burn of the liquor. “Tell me you only drink it to look all kingly and lethal.”

“Father used to take me to test the new batches. I suppose I grew a taste for it. Now,” I said, drinking the rest of it in a gulp. “What questions do you have for me? The frown tells me there are a couple.”

She smoothed her expression and laid back on the bed. “Why could Esmeray travel through to Cynth?”

“She was one of the first Aura in this realm. Henah was very meticulous when she chose to pass her power and she deemed Esmeray one of the finest humans she’d come across in Numen.” I took a black leather-bound book from one of my shelves and laid beside her. “Esmeray is also one of the five primes that decoded coloured human emotion for us to understand. Also, one of the five that had visited Cynth with the purpose to learn more about emotion—become it too. They say there was a waterfall in Cynth, that if you washed under the water, it would heighten each specific emotion to the fullest. They stayed there for days till they grasped each and every one to the finest of details a human mind could. One of the five of them was my ancestor, the first Obscur to exist—why I am able to see emotion like an Empath is.”

She flipped through the pages of the Anima Book, running a finger over each different coloured section. “This is how you know how to read emotion?”

“Mostly. Some Empaths like Mal and Nia can also feel, taste and smell emotion, so they can interpret it on the basis of how they feel and what they believe it to be.”

“But this could be wrong.”

I nodded. “Could be, sometimes it is wrong. But the general lines are not. We use Empaths as spies mostly, only they need to learn the very fine lines of emotion because it helps decode a person. The rest, however, only learn to read the general lines between happiness, sadness, anger, contempt, pain, fear, distress, and anxiousness.”

“And you? Which did you learn?”

My mouth tilted without much effort. “The very fine lines.”

She scoffed and dropped back on the bed. “But of course.”

Mal burst into my room like he owned the place and Snow jumped a little. My brother gave me an amused look. “Don’t you leave for the Danics tomorrow morning?”

“Are you drunk?” My tone was grating and cold, yet he grinned.

“Not even close. Selia, the usual who is used to my…quirks, was unavailable and the inn was full so they kicked me out. It seems you have confiscated my liquor and apparently all the liquor in the castle and now I can’t sleep.”

Snow crawled to the edge of the bed, giving me a full view of her backside. “Did you say Danics?” She turned to me over her shoulder. “You found a way?”

I pulled the edge of her tiny nightgown down her delicious back before I gave my brother a reason to never look me in the eye again. “You are looking at it.”

She stared around, searching for something in the room.

“My love,” I said with a wide grin. “Me, I’m the way.”

“Oh. How are you the solution?”