“Very well.” His lips curved into a small smile. Electricity skipped through my veins. “I will play your game. This spell is a bit beyond your current skill level, but if you master it, I will do as you ask.”
We spent the next two hours struggling through an illusion spell - or rather, I struggled while Iannis stood in front of me and showed off. He made it look easy, the way he flickered from the form of a young girl to a hulking dog to a hunched old man, while I had trouble maintaining the singular form I was trying to recreate. By the time I’d mastered it, I was sweaty, hungry, and had a hell of a headache.
“Well done,” the Chief Mage said as I stood there in my new form. I wasn’t sure if the admiration in his eyes was due to my magical prowess or because I looked like a curvy redhead. Either way, though, it was gratifying. If I could distract someone as rigid and logical as Iannis with an illusion, then I could do it to lesser-willed people too, which would come in handy as an Enforcer.
“Am I ever going to get my Enforcer’s bracelet back?” I asked grumpily, now that I’d been reminded of it.
The Chief Mage arched a brow. “In due time.” He flickered from his own form to that of a muscular human with shaggy blond hair, tight red pants and an electric blue shirt that stretched across his broad chest. “For now, I suggest we go and embark upon this adventure of yours... and perhaps get some sustenance for you as well.”
I snorted, trying not to stare. For a stuffy old mage he seemed to have a good grip on human fashion sense. “You’re going to have to lose the ‘holier than thou’ dialect if you want to blend in,” I told him. “No human looking like you is going to talk like that.”
“Alright,” he said easily. “Let’s go have some fun on the town, huh?”
I blinked. That was a lot easier for him than I’d thought it would be. “Let’s,” I agreed uncertainly, no longer sure this ‘adventure’ was going to go quite the way I thought it would.
My steambike would only make us stand out, so we took a cab to the Sycamore, a popular gastro pub in Maintown that served as the local watering hole for humans. The cab let us off on Argent Street, across from the restaurant, and I took a moment to eye the place nervously as Iannis paid the fare. The black-and-red corner building had a line snaking out the door, and every single one of those trendy men and women were one hundred percent human, not a single shifter in sight.
“Alright,” Iannis said as the cab drove off. “Let’s go.”
“Wait.”
He paused, his foot already halfway off the curb.
“What names are we going by? We can’t exactly go in there using our own.” My name was unusual enough as it was, and now it was being printed all over the papers. And I doubted there was a human named after the Chief Mage.
Iannis shrugged. “You can call me Ian for the occasion,” he decided. “And you’ll be Nadia.”
“Nadia?” I grumbled, but then he hooked his arm through mine and I forgot all about complaining about the name, which wouldn’t have been my first choice. A warm current flowed through me as he tucked my body against his and escorted me across the street.
“Umm, what are you doing?” I muttered as we headed for the back of the line.
Iannis didn’t even look down at me. “We’re getting in line. It would be suspicious if I used my rank or my magic to try and bypass all these people to gain entrance.”
I would have rolled my eyes if I hadn’t been so damned uncomfortable. “No, I meant what are you doing here?” I hissed, tugging a little on my arm through his to draw attention to it.
He arched his brow as he looked down at me with pale blue eyes like Comenius’s, and suddenly I wished they were their normal violet hue. I tugged at the collar of my jacket nervously, uncomfortably warm beneath his gaze.
“We’re undercover, aren’t we?” he murmured, knowing that my sensitive ears would catch his words despite the buzz of conversation from the line. “If we’re coming here as a couple we should look the part.”
I gritted my teeth as heat continued to spread throughout my body, and glanced up at the moon as we settled in at the back of the line. It hung bright and round in the inky, star-splattered sky, perilously close to being full, and my hormones surged in response to its magical pull. Shifters were always strongest at the height of the lunar cycle – for some reason it gave us a boost, allowing us to shift more frequently and faster than usual.
“Are you alright?”
I glanced up to see Iannis watching me, once again disconcerted by the fact that I was looking up at a tanned blond rather than a pale redhead. His illusion was so good that even I couldn’t see through it – which boded well for us, as it meant none of the humans in the bar would be able to either.
Unfortunately that thought didn’t do anything to calm my nerves.