Strength (Curse of the Gods #4)(44)

“You are a sol of Trickery, aren’t you?” Siret bated her, stopping at Cyrus’s circular table and dropping an assortment of wooden food containers onto the surface.

Emmy must have followed Cyrus out of the room earlier, because I didn’t hear an outraged scream when her scrolls were crushed.

The Trickery student looked appropriately chastised, her purple eyes downcast, her hands shoved moodily into the pockets of her pants.

“Not to be a dick or anything—” Siret began, before Rome cut him off.

“He definitely means to be a dick.”

“But,” Siret continued, “you should really be able to tell when you’re being conned by an illusion. It’s part of the power, being able to see through other people’s tricks. I guess it was slim pickings for Trickery sols this life-cycle.” He shrugged, taking the lids off the food containers.

He definitely meant to be a dick.

The Abcurses all grinned then, amused by my thought.

The Trickery student snarled, stalking past me for the door. “I’m just going to go, since you five clearly aren’t going to teach us anything.”

“We’ll stay,” the Seduction student piped up in her honeyed voice.

“Oh joy.” I rolled my eyes. “Did you hear that, guys? The sexy one is staying. That’ll calm things down.”

“The sexy one isn’t allowed to go anywhere,” Coen muttered, pulling me against his chest. His hands slipped down over the curve of my back, finding their way into the folds of my cloak and down over the curve of my ass. He pulled me harder against him, making a deep, rumbly sound in the back of his throat. “You belong with us. Always.”

I was having trouble finding a response that didn’t involve me winding my legs around him and pushing my lips against his, so I only nodded and threw my arms around his neck. My face ended up pressed against his collarbone, so I dropped a soft kiss there. He shifted me up higher against the growing hardness that pushed into my belly. He was having that reaction over me. Me. Not some perfect, pink-haired, honey-voiced seduction sol. Just me. I pressed another kiss to his skin, and then another, and his hands tightened before reluctantly releasing me. His eyes found mine as my feet hit the floor, and I could see the promise in them. The heat of what might happen later.





Ten





I didn’t have the energy to do anything other than slump down at the circular table and start pulling food toward my face. Rome came along behind me soon after and looped an arm around my middle, lifting me up from the stool. In response, I just leaned further over the table so that I could continue shovelling noodles into my mouth.

Shifting his position slightly, he took my place on the stool and sat me down so that I was now on his right leg. Then, without a word, he began pointing to the various foods arrayed before us. With one hand, I fed myself, while my other followed his indication, picking up the foods he was interested in and handing them back to him. The others watched our process with slightly astonished looks on their faces.

“That’s actually impressive.” Siret saluted me with his bread roll.

I tried to swallow most of the food in my mouth before I thanked him, because multitasking was only good up until the point where you were talking and eating, and then multitasking suddenly wasn’t something to be that proud of.

We didn’t say anything more as we ate, mostly because the two remaining sols were still in the room, but also because we were all starving. I wasn’t sure how many meals we had skipped, but it was too many. After eating, Rome gently set me down again, and we started to file out of the room. I was sure that the guys had forgotten all about the two sols by that point, but they all seemed to be in a good mood so I didn’t want to ruin it by pointing out that the two girls had slipped out after them and were now following us.

“So, how did we do on our first sun-cycle of being godly instructors?” Siret asked me, throwing his arm around me and pulling me into his side.

I was grateful for the embrace, because I still didn’t want to slip on the frost-covered stone stairs leading down the mountain. I clutched at his shirt as we stepped down, wondering why the five of them didn’t seem to need any further protection against the cold, whereas I did.

“You did great,” I told him. “Your student really seemed to be ... learning ... so much. What was your illusion teaching her?”

“He was running through a list of all the punishments given to gods who make eye-contact on Topia.”

I arched a brow at him. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Hi.” He held out his free hand to me. “My name is Siret, I’m the god of Trickery. Of course it doesn’t happen, but she learnt something at least.”

“She learnt something that isn’t even true.”

“Better than nothing.”

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to argue with that logic or not, so I dropped it. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to find Cyrus, obviously. We have our assignment, remember?”

“I have my assignment,” I corrected him. “And I don’t really think that the last rotation and a half counts as the required amount of teaching.”

“We’re coming with you.” Rome was the one to answer. “No arguments.”