Page 42 of The Lunatics

Michael spared them a glance. His face was stern, but the amusement I felt coming off him made it obvious that he cared for these people. “I do trust them, despite the fact that they have a propensity to act like a pack of feral malefactors when they’re together.”

James laid his head down on his forearms and gave Michael a dreamy look. “I love it when you use SAT words.” His expression was probably meant to look cute, but with a face like his, it was closer to panty-melting.

I looked away before I could be caught in its spell.

Ronald was less amused. “Knock it off,” he said, his voice dropping into a warning growl.

The room settled down.

I figured now was as good a time as any and started easing the restraints I’d placed upon my power. When my parents, with the aid of Audrey, had taught me to control it, they used metaphors. Audrey said that when learning spells, routines and visualizations could be helpful for young practitioners just beginning to harness their magic. She saw no reason it would be different for me, so I’d spent years perfecting my very own ritual.

In my mind, there was a cage. It formed a perfect circle around my metaphysical abilities. The number of bars never changed. That was important. If they were always there, it would be much easier for me to remember their presence when I was upset or afraid. Audrey taught me to give them flexibility. When I drew my power in, I visualized the cage shrinking in my mind. When I let it out, the cage expanded. Expansion was easy. Shrinking all those bars down until I could barely detect them? That was the hard part, even now, after years of practice. And that was what I’d been doing since I arrived in the city. It would be nice to let them out some.

With a thought, they began to loosen. The tightness in my shoulders eased as I returned the cage to the size I normally kept it at around my own pack.

“You feel like an alpha,” James said. The green of his eyes had an iridescent sheen to them now, his wolf form closer to the surface.

Michael shifted in his seat. “This is just above the level she had it at when I met her.”

“At the bonding ceremony?” Ronald asked.

“Yes,” Michael answered.

Kevin leaned his elbows on the table. “And no one tried to fight you there?”

“The peace of the ritual is sacred,” I said.

He frowned. “Oh, right. I forgot about the sanctity some packs place on that night.”

“Keep going,” Ronald told me.

I closed my eyes and took another deep breath, and as I let it out, the bars of the cage expanded even further.

“Keep going,” Ronald repeated.

I did what he asked, letting the bars loosen so much that power flowed out through the wide gaps between them. My very existence expanded with the cage. Smells became stronger, sharper. I picked up the hint of fur just beneath James’s skin, the lingering scent of the shaving cream Ronald had used this morning. Monica must have had something sweet around lunch, because there was a small drop of honey on her pant leg, hidden by the dark fabric.

Sounds likewise became amplified. Not only could I hear every heartbeat in the room, I also heard the valves that pumped the blood in and out of them. Emma’s stomach rumbled. The fabric of Michael’s suit sliding across itself as he shifted beside me was almost deafening.

Even without the threat of fighting, I would keep my powers caged in, because everything was so overwhelming at this level that I could barely concentrate. No wonder my birth pack had eventually lost control and destroyed itself.

“Stop,” Ronald bit out.

I opened my eyes to see everyone sitting very still in their seats. Even Emma, a human, appeared supremely uncomfortable, as though the air itself pressed down on her. To my enhanced eyes, they looked like new people. All the tiny, minute flaws that marked their skin were apparent. I could have stared at the various shades of dark blond and light blond in Emma’s hair for days, learning all the new variations of color I found there.

I turned from her to Michael. He looked incredible. Like Michael, onlymore. He’d missed a few hairs in his beard with the clippers this morning. The dark eyes that met mine were slowly bleeding into the lighter color of a wolf’s, and I watched as brownwas supplanted with the jeweled tones of topaz, citrine, and amber, ringed by a darker band of onyx.

He somehow felt even better than he looked. If pressed, I couldn’t have found the words to describe it. It was like I was meeting him all over again for the first time through my power. I shifted the focus of it, concentrating it around him. He looked at me with his wolf eyes, and I could feel some dark, primordial part of himself rising up to meet my own. His chest heaved beneath his suit jacket. His pulse picked up, and my own heart raced to match it.

I grinned at him, feeling the sharp prick of canines against my lips. Home. He felt like home to me. And now I knew that I felt like home to him, too. That I wasn’t the only one struggling to figure out what that meant or how I felt about it. There was something incredibly comforting about that. It reminded me that I wasn’t as alone here in the city as I thought.

Before either of us revealed anything we weren’t ready to, I closed my eyes and shrank the cage back down to its usual level, the one I’d kept it at for so long that I didn’t have to focus to maintain it.

When next I opened my eyes, it was to see Michael leaned as far back in his seat as he could get, gripping the arms of his chair. He stared at the wall, slowly but steadily pulling himself back from whatever brink I’d driven him to.

“That was intense,” Monica said from across the room.

“That was only half power,” I told her.