Pyromancist (Seven Forbidden Arts 1)

“If you ever lift your hand to a girl again, I’ll hang you from a tree under a pack of wild boars and let them eat you from your feet to your useless dick,” Joss said. “Understand?”

He’d spoken very softly, but the woods had gone quiet. No birds chirped. Not even the leaves rustled. Thiphaine stood aside, hugging herself.

Iwig tried to scurry away on his elbows, but Joss stepped on his jacket.

“I asked you a question,” Joss said.

Iwig started crying. “Yes.”

When Joss lifted his boot, Iwig scrambled to his feet. He didn’t look at Clelia before running down the path toward the school.

Only then did Joss turn to her. After a moment of studying her, he gripped her chin and tilted her head. Trailing his thumb over her lower lip, he said, “You’re bleeding.”

Then he did something that shocked her wildly. With his gray eyes locked onto hers, he brought his thumb to his lips, slipped his finger into his mouth, and licked it clean.

She couldn’t move. She didn’t dare as much as blink.

He saw her. It felt like he saw through her. She couldn’t speak with the power of the knowledge weighing her down. He was a god, a rebel, a cruelty, a stolen sight, and he saw her.

He’d tasted her.

He’d swallowed her DNA.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from her lip before pressing the ball of fabric into her hand. “He won’t bother you again, but you better go home.”

He was so tall she had to crane her neck to look up at him. He shifted, and then the shadows obscured his face and the sun at his back blinded her, breaking the spell.

Her flight instinct kicked in. She remembered wondering if he’d forgotten about Thiphaine who still stood to one side with wide eyes as she hurried down the path.

“Wait,” he called after her. “It’s Clelia, right?” he asked when she’d stopped to look at him.

“Yes.” Everyone knew who everyone was in town, but he hadn’t acknowledged her until that day.

“You’re fourteen.”

Of course he knew. There was only one school. He had to know in which class she was.

His voice became soft and dark again like when he’d spoken to Iwig. “You’re too young to wander alone in the woods.”

His intense stare was unnerving. That was when the insight hit her. Catching Joss’s attention was dangerous. A girl couldn’t survive it, not with her heart. Her body wouldn’t stand a chance. She realized it instinctively, even if she was much too young to know.

The way he scrutinized her with a smirk tugging on his full lips and knowledge burning in his eyes told her he knew. He knew what she was doing here. Shame crept through her veins. Scarlet heat rose to her cheeks. She wished the path would open up and swallow her.

His gaze continued to consume her for another moment, and then, as if nothing had happened, he turned. Just like that, she’d been unseen, going back to how it had always been.

She went back to nothing.

Without sparing either of the lovers another glance, she sprinted home with his bloody handkerchief in her hand, shaken and disgusted with herself while something that refused to be quieted tingled under her skin, a kind of exhilaration, the kind you feel when you fall in love.

They’d never spoken another word. Joss had left the village that same year in August, the summer he’d finished school, just after the fateful incident in his life.

Nine years was enough time for fixation to bloom into unrequited love. The pain of knowing her feelings would never be returned only made them stronger. In a twisted way, it gave her one-sided love a poetic edge. Besides having heard via the grapevine he’d gone to New York, she hadn’t had news and she’d refused to look at the house in which he’d grown up. Being reminded of her hopeless crush was too hurtful.

Now she stood facing it, taking it all in with a mixture of mounting fear and premonition. It was the biggest house—three stories high with two turrets framing the pointed roof—for miles around. The once pretty garden had been transformed into weeds strangling rose bushes and climbing the fence. Nine years ago, there was a swing bench on the porch overlooking the grassland that flattened out to the sea. The white shutters had stood out against the gray of the stone walls and the silver slate of the roof, but now the wood was the color of ash, faded, cracked, and splintered in places, hanging askew in front of the narrow turret windows.

His bedroom was on the top floor in the west tower. Sometimes he smoked a cigarette on the balcony with his gaze trained on the ocean or maybe what lay beyond, what the eye couldn’t see. It was the room in which the light burned the latest. Often, when Erwan was out fishing at night, depending on how the tides turned, she’d sneak out here on her bike and stood in the road until his light went out.