Free The Golden Apple by Michelle Diener Page A

mistake was underestimating the lengths he would go to keep you from me without showing his hand.”
    Her throat closed, and Kayla had to force out her response. “What do you know?”
    Eric laughed. “How innocent you look. I must commend you, but witches are duplicitous, aren’t they? You take after your kind so well.”
    “Witches.” She repeated the word, flat and expressionless.
    “Your dear, departed mother, of course, although like you she was untrained, and your paternal grandmother. With power from both sides, I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time. Your heritage shines out of you. But I cannot believe the restraint you’ve shown.” He twisted her arm painfully, looking at her inner wrist, and shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s a sign of outstanding control, or total ineptitude. But we shall see, won’t we?”
    She stamped down on every emotion swirling within, every question, and forced her eyebrows up. Forced her words to be cool and biting. “What did you have in mind?”
    Eric fingered a strand of her hair, pushed it off her face, and it took everything in her not to jerk away. “I think you can guess.” He lowered his mouth to her ear. “You’ve been so obliging, turning away suitor after suitor, giving me time to build up my power. Then came De’Villier. He managed to impress you because he let you do the work, am I right? Let you think you were in control. But with me, you can have all the control you have ever wished for. More power than your father, more power than any other in Middleland.”
    How little he understood. “Power through you?” She let a little of the scorn she was feeling slip into her question.
    “You are hardly going to harness it on your own. I know you are…uninitiated.” He gave the word a sexual innuendo. He dipped his head even lower, nuzzled her throat, leaving her gasping for breath at her vulnerability. She could feel the edge of his teeth, just beneath the softness of his mouth.
    “The world will be at your feet.” His whisper teased the shell of her ear, and she shivered.
    His hand still held her wrist as viciously as before. The warm, gentle touch of his lips and the steel of his grip deepened her sense of violation.
    She lifted her own hand, touched his face to bring his eyes back to hers.
    “Kiss me,” she whispered.
    He laughed, a throaty sound of triumph, and released her wrist at last, lifting his hands to her shoulders to draw her closer.
    In that sliver of a moment she was unrestrained, she dropped straight down in a crouch, spun, and dived headlong through the wild magic doorway.
    * * *
    Rane approached the wild magic cautiously. He’d seen it glimmering ahead, and with a sense of inevitability, of foreboding, he made his way towards it.
    It had formed a thin oval, like a mirror, and as he came closer, it spun, so he was presented with the thin, almost invisible, side view.
    The movement was furtive, as if it were hiding something from him. He moved right, and again it spun away.
    Anger spiked in his chest, and he feinted right a second time, then leapt left. He found himself staring straight at a strangely lit Eric the Bold. Eric’s head was thrown back, as if in triumph, but already, as Rane watched, he saw the beginnings of a frown.
    He realized why a moment later, when Kayla of Gaynor leapt from the pale-green tinted image within the wild magic, into his arms.
    The instant Kayla was through, the wild magic crumpled in on itself, forming its usual ball. It spun, lifted off the ground, and flew away.
    Kayla struggled against him, and he realized he was holding her tight, as if Eric could lean through some magic window and grab her back. He set her down.
    “What was that?”
    She was breathing hard, her hands shaking. She lifted fingers to her forehead, and pushed back the hair that had fallen over her eyes.
    He could see the dark red marks of a man’s grip on her wrist.
    “The wild magic. It formed that mirror thing and came