On a Razor's Edge (Darkness #3)(28)

They all needed to get laid. That was one of the problems right there.

“Okay,” Sasha said as the white sphere melted back into the air. Her brow creased.

“Show me, please,” Toa instructed in his sing-song voice.

Sasha put up her hand, palm toward the ceiling. A colored wisp drifted above her skin, deep red. Now orange. Quickly to gold.

“Slower, please,” Toa said.

Sasha’s lips parted, her breath falling out of her open mouth heavily. Her other hand clenched at her side as the wisp eased past burnished gold and into white. She was trying to slow the draw, but based on her rigid body, having a hard time of it. Finally, the wisp was a deep, bottomless pit of black, sucking in the light around it. Full power.

“Good. Now…” Toa gave her a sweeping hand gesture.

Jonas stepped out through the doorway, an orange shield blocking Sasha's magic. Toa flicked up a white shield as red wrapped around Darla. Charles was last, nearly having forgotten to raise his shield. If the Boss trusted Jonas, there was no reason Charles shouldn’t. Especially in the face of whatever was coming.

“Okay,” Sasha said again, her brows dipping down her nose in concentration. “I’m trying to create a moving sphere to sideswipe people who aren’t paying attention. I’m aiming for pain, not death. Okay…”

She put her hands up, palms facing each other. Blackness materialized in front of her like pixilated smoke. Her brow started to glisten as she concentrated, her fingers trembling. The black took shape, ball-like, though too dense. Then denser.

“Not so much,” Toa warned in a gentle voice.

Charles started to cringe.

Perfectly round now, outsides glistening like it was coated in oil. Charles’s skin started to tingle furiously, magic crackling the air. The ball started to wobble, losing shape but not density.

“I’m losing it,” Sasha said through clenched teeth.

Toa stepped forward. White frost enveloped the black, freezing the oil slick. Another moment had the outside cracking like ice, both Toa and Sasha now battling with flexed bodies and grim faces. In a whoosh, magic flooded the room, pounding against Charles’s shield, threatening to erode it away. Darla shrieked as her red was sandblasted, her hands in front of her face in a defense posture, pain lacing her expression.

In another second it was all over, Sasha and Toa left panting in the middle of the room, Darla with a crazy mask of rage.

“This is what you’ve learned?” Darla spat, standing up with a red face. “You’ve been here for two weeks! You’ve been in classes for weeks before that, and this is all you can do? You can’t even control your magic, let alone contain it. You’re dangerous, human. No wonder the Boss sent me. There’s no way you can lead our people. You can’t even look after yourself!”

“She is working with more than twice the flow you are,” Toa said calmly, completely unruffled by her tirade. “You could not possibly understand the effects of drawing that much power, since you reside in meager red. I will only say that it is slippery and dangerous, and you will never experience it no matter how much, or whose blood you take. You, simply, don’t have the ability to hold it. Now, Sasha, letʼs chat about what went wrong as we ready for bed.”

Sasha’s gaze had fallen, now focused on the floor in front of her feet. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, following behind Toa like a kicked puppy. She didn’t raise her eyes in defiance as she passed Darla and out the door. Toa might not have been worried about Sasha’s lack of material progress, but Sasha clearly was.

Charles wished he knew what to say to her. She would learn control of her magic, Charles was certain—that girl rose to the occasion when she had to. But she wouldn’t believe him if he told her that.

That bitch Darla didn’t help matters by throwing it in her face, either.

As Sasha disappeared, Jonas stepped to the door to follow, having entered the room again after the magic was diminished.

“You got it, bro?” Charles asked as he dropped his knitting into the basket beside his chair. “I might get a quick workout before I tuck into bed. I didn’t get to kill any of Sasha’s creations today.”

Jonas spared him a glance before nodding. When he turned back, he ran smack into Darla.

“Running away so soon? I thought maybe we could—ˮ

Jonas’s hand came up…and wiped Darla away as if she was a curtain covering the doorway. Limbs flailing, she went staggering out of the way, Jonas already strolling out. Charles couldn’t help laughing.

“What is his problem these days?” Darla muttered as she straightened herself out. Her heat-soaked eyes hit Charles, now the only one in the room, almost as an afterthought. She paused for a moment, and then her body seemed to lose all its bones and kinda slink down into a shrine of sex.

Oh, no.

Charles tried to stand in a hurry, but his hard-on got painful when her dress gave in to gravity and shimmered down her nude body. Perfectly round br**sts stared him in the face. This was the absolute worst time to be sex starved.

“You’ll do,” she purred with a sultry smile, crossing the room.

“No, no—I have stuff to do. And I don’t like giving blood. I’ll just…”

Her tinkling laugh filled up the room as she stopped right in front of him. Her knee bent forward and nudged his legs wider apart. She stepped closer, his legs pushed out to accommodate her body. She bent low, her br**sts passing by his vision as her beautiful face leveled with his. Her tongue slipped across his bottom lip.