I Am the Wild (The Night Firm #1)- Karpov Kinrade Page 0,18
what I’m drawing. I just let my muse’s voice speak through the charcoal and pencil.
Everything around me is silent as I work, and I don’t realize until the drawing is complete that Sebastian is staring at me.
Or rather, at my drawing.
I study it myself, now that my focus is returning to normal and my head is clearing. Four men—clearly the Night brothers—stand back to back, forming a circle around a woman, surrounded by a dark and menacing wood, with trees that look alive and hungry in the worst possible way. The brothers hold drawn swords, steel glinting in the moonlight.
I am the woman they are guarding.
We're all standing in the center of a pentagram burned into the grass beneath our feet.
Sebastian is still staring, and I quickly close my sketchbook and slip it into my bag, embarrassed that my boss saw what I drew. Embarrassed that my subconscious pulled that image out of my mind for this exercise.
And more than a little unnerved at what that image might mean.
“How did you learn to do that?” Sebastian asks.
“Do what? Draw?”
“Well, yes, that, too. But how did you learn to induce a trance state so easily?”
“Um. I taught myself. Both things. As a kid I loved drawing, and the obsession never went away. I drew on anything I could with anything I could. By the time I was ten I was selling my drawings to the neighbors. My brother was my business partner and marketer," I say with a smile. "He could sell shoes to a shoemaker. He’d go door to door, and by the time he came back all my art had sold. I didn’t learn until much later that he was the one buying most of it, because he didn’t want me to give up on my dreams.” I suck in a breath to keep myself from rambling even more. He doesn’t need to hear about my childhood. And I don’t need to dive into stories about my brother right now.
Instead, I turn to his original question. “As for the trance, it’s just a silly self-hypnosis trick. It helps put me in a more creative mindset. It’s nothing, really. Anyone can do it. Just google a YouTube video.”
He scoffs at that. “Trust me, it is not “nothing” as you say. And I do not watch the YouTube.”
I snort-laugh at that in a very unladylike way. “What are you ninety years old? The YouTube? Oh dear. You have so much to learn.”
“No offense, but I highly doubt there’s anything you could possibly teach me,” he says, and then he snaps up his newspaper and proceeds to ignore me again.
“How could I possibly find that offensive?” I ask, with a sharp dose of sarcasm before I turn away from him, folding my arms firmly across my chest to reinforce my point.
I press my lips together, biting my tongue to avoid saying something hot-headed and stupid to my new boss who already doesn’t like me. The boss I now have to live with.
What have I gotten myself into? I wonder, not for the first time and very likely not for the last.
The minutes tick by slowly, and the exhaustion of the last couple of days seeps into my bones. Just as I'm about to doze off, my flash buzzes in my head. My eyes blink open just as my body slams forward. My seat belt tightens around my waist and chest, digging into my skin even through my clothes, pushing out all the breath in me.
And then my world is spinning. Spinning wildly, toppling end over end, crunching and slamming and crashing into itself.
Pain bites into me, but I can't tell where on my body it specifically hurts. My nerves dance, lit up like current pouring through live wires. I feel everything and it becomes a kind of nothing.
When I can think clearly again, I find I'm hanging from my seatbelt, upside down in what’s left of the car, my head spinning and my breathing coming in short gasps.
There's a voice, but I can't find the face it belongs to.
He's saying my name.
"Eve. Eve, focus on me. Eve. Stay with me."
I blink. Something thick drips into my eyes, stinging. The face in question comes into focus, and though my mind is sluggish, and words and names come reluctantly, as if being dragged through tar, the visceral response of my body is instant. Warmth floods me, and I feel myself sinking into him, like into quicksand.