Read Hereditary for Free Online Page B

his eyes flashed with amusement and he lowered my hand, though he did not release it.
    “You won’t be dying today, Beatrice.”
    “Bea,” I corrected automatically.
    He was suddenly very close, and his smell was delicious, his skin impossibly smooth, as the back of his hand slid across my cheekbone and beneath my chin, lifting my face for what felt like an inspection.
    “A glamor,” he muttered, “interesting.”
    For the first time that day, I didn’t bother disputing the glamor comment, only gazed at him with wide eyes, wondering why he wasn’t trying to eat me yet. And then something else occurred to me.
    “If you’re… if you’re…”
    “A synfee?”
    “Er, right. If you’re one of those, what are you doing so close to the kingdom?”
    “Waiting for you,” He said it as if it were obvious.
    “Why?” I asked dumbly.
    “You’ll be eighteen in a week, and then your inheritance power will come into full fruition. I’ve been instructed to make sure that you can control it properly. These people,” he gestured a hand back toward the castle walls, which were now hidden behind the looming cover of trees, “they don’t know the first thing about synfee inheritance. If it’s not properly monitored, it will kill you.”
    He seemed to finish his appraisal of me then, and abruptly turned to continue down the game trail that I had been travelling. Embarrassingly, if he hadn’t still been holding onto my hand, I would have stayed where he left me, my mouth still hanging open.
    “Aside from the fact that none of that makes sense,” I stuttered, as soon as my feet remembered how to work again, “what do you and your people care about it anyway?”
    “That’s none of your concern.”
    “I think it is.”
    He paused, bright eyes turning back to me in astonishment.
    “Did you just argue with me?”
    As he said the words, another wave of feeling suddenly swept through me, and my eyes narrowed until all I could see was the glittering, light-golden tint of his irises, until I was suffocated simply from the force of his gaze, boring into mine.
    “No,” I whimpered.
    He pulled back, and the feeling retreated, making me stumble and almost fall. He caught me, and it struck me as strange that I wasn’t protesting at the arm that wound about my waist.
    “I’ve been watching you for a few weeks now,” he started again, once we were moving forward, “and you have a pretty good handle on parts of it, but others are building up and you’re ignoring them. Keep doing that, and you’ll start experiencing some pretty dark mood swings. Of course it’s worse for you, because your power is quite strong… In fact the last person who had your kind of power ended up killing himself only a few days after he came into it.”
    “And I come into it in a week?”
    “Correct.”
    “And it is what exactly?”
    “Our people call it Force. You can control the forces of nature around you, the wind, the clouds, the sky, the flowers, the vines, the heat, the rain… all of it.”
    “That’s absurd. I didn’t even specialise in earth.”
    “Earth isn’t a force.”
    We had reached the outskirts of my village now, where the game trail branched off suddenly to go deeper into the forest. The arm about my waist retreated, and as the touch disappeared, so did the entranced feeling that had held me in check so far. I jumped back hastily, throwing my hands up when he made an annoyed gesture in my direction.
    “ Stay where you are! ” I shouted, stumbling backwards until I felt the roughness of tree bark catching on my dress.
    Instead of darting forward as I expected, he simply considered me thoughtfully.
    “Compulsion works very differently on you. I suppose that’s because you’re only half human, but it’s going to make this whole job a little harder.”
    “Don’t ever do that again!”
    His brows arched high, and I realised that he really wasn’t used to people refusing him, questioning him, or ordering him around.