Magical Midlife Love (Leveling Up #4) - K.F. Breene Page 0,39

connection from Austin.

“I made it different. I know how to control the link, and you don’t,” Ivy House said. I’d apparently broadcast my internal debate to her. I occasionally did that without realizing it. It was like talking to myself, but with an audience. “You’ve been a prude for far too long.”

I formed the spell without thought. Niamh was right—I could always perfectly execute the spells in the book. The act of Edgar reading them planted them in my brain as if they’d always been there, waiting to be released.

“You know how to alter the link?” I asked as I released the spell.

“You don’t?”

I frowned at her as the spell reached Austin. It swirled around his body. The knife fell out of a suddenly limp hand. His expression didn’t change, but pain bled through the link. He sank to his knees, his muscles popping, straining his tight white T-shirt and pushing at his sweats. Trembling, he struggled to stand.

“What’s happening?” I asked, my focus narrowing in on him as I jogged over. “What’s it doing? I thought it was supposed to just disarm him.”

“He’s a shifter,” Sebastian said. “His animal is a weapon.”

“But…” I looked at Edgar. “What’s it doing to him?” I shouted.

“Let me just…” Edgar’s finger moved faster over the book.

“I’m…good…” Austin wheezed, on his hands and knees, head bowed. Pain drowned me through the connection.

I could fix his pain. I could numb him. But I worried that if I did, he’d stop fighting against whatever the spell was doing. If I numbed the sensations, I worried the spell might kill him.

Fear ate at me as Edgar said, “Here’s the counter-spell.”

“No—”

A flash of blistering heat and a blinding light cut off Austin’s voice. Fur erupted from him as his body shot up and out, his animal form taking over. Suddenly, a massive polar bear stood in the clearing, much bigger than its counterparts in the natural world. His shoulder was at about the level of my head.

His roar thundered through the woods. The pain fizzled before dying, shed from him like a snake shed its skin. He shook himself before standing on his hind legs, a second roar shaking my bones and jittering my nerves.

Yesterday, I’d thought I could tango with this massive beast. Clearly it had been too long since I’d seen him in his animal form. Raw power pulsed into the clearing, squeezing something inside me left over from my ancestors. The fight-or-flight response to danger in the wild. Right now, it was screaming at me to run.

He lowered back down to all fours before huffing, the clearing dead quiet. A moment later, the heat and light made me flinch, and there was Austin again, his ripped and ruined clothes at his feet, his robust, muscular body on full display.

I was too frazzled to take notice.

“Wow.” Sebastian ran his fingers through his messy hair. “That was…” A cockeyed grin spread across his face. “Very cool. I am literally shaking right now.” He held up this hand. “I am so scared that I am literally shaking. I honestly do not know if I could magically fight that monster.” He paused for a beat. “No offense intended, sir. Just… Wow.”

“Take a number.” I blew out a breath. “Someone run and get him some new sweats. Try to find something other than purple, if you can. He hates the purple ones.”

“I have gray for him, in the laundry room with the others,” Mr. Tom said as Ulric straightened out of a crouch and took off jogging. “Mind the size. I ordered the wrong size the first time around. Get the larger ones. He’s bigger than you—”

“He’s already gone; he can’t hear ye anymore,” Niamh said, waving her hand to quiet Mr. Tom. “Austin, what happened there, then?”

“The spell was trying to cut out my ability to shift,” Austin replied. “Fighting it…hurt.”

“Saying it hurt is a severe understatement,” I said, bracing my hands on my hips. “I didn’t want to numb you and possibly cut out your resistance. Was that a good idea or bad idea?”

“Numbing the pain would’ve made me submit to the spell. It was working through my limbs to my middle. If I hadn’t been able to feel it, I wouldn’t have known how to fight it.”

“Why fight it at all?” Sebastian asked. “It would have kept you from shifting, sure, but the effects would have been nullified by the counter-spell.”

Austin studied him for a moment. “I don’t like being controlled. I would succumb if Jess explicitly