Zion lifted his head back to look up at Elias, his curly silver hair falling back and revealing eyes of molten gold. Elias lost his breath, his grip tightening and head lowering as Zion raised himself to the balls of his feet to close the distance between them. The door opposite them slid open with a loud hiss, and Elias let go with a push. With a heavy breath, he jerked back behind the barrier of his doorway, blocking Zion's shocked frame and eyes blazing with hurt.
Elias turned his face away as his heart raced and his breathing laboured, his desire spiking and screaming for more of his touch. He almost cursed his sister Opal as her tall, curvy body danced around the group and raised an eyebrow at Zion's hard stare at her brother. Her long, wispy white hair moved around the air with her. Zion blinked and turned his body and attention back to his sibling, his head staring down at his tablet with keen precision.
"We will give you a tour while they're out cold; they won't wake up until we're downstairs." Cassie cried out hysterically, drawing Carmell's eyes from the scene between the rival kingdoms.
It seemed to her that the rivalry wasn't as deep as to span over their entire personalities, and it mainly was the twins and possibly toxic ideals passed through generations that let the good ones down.
'What an interesting development. They were Merrida's love interests, but that looked intimate. Should I ask if he is alright?' Carmell pondered the right course of action while walking down the hallway and stepping over the knocked-out twins with a sigh.
Darrius stayed on her left, close enough to set sparks down the back of her arm. Slowly, she lost her train of thought as the feeling of being whole bloomed through her cells. Zyn took the front and dramatically swept his arms to point to the right, where Kitchen Two, with its connected Common Room, sat.
"Do not use! Temperance and Envy tools reside inside." He bellowed, snickering as Annika's piercing grass-green eyes lifted from her book of Illusionary Magic to narrow on him.
Her eyes flicked to Carmell and widened, her deep blue satin-covered book dropping on the high kitchen island with a deafening crack. Hopping off her seat, her bobbed black hair lifted from her face and fell in place with a strange flow. Carmell smirked as Annika stopped at the doorway and leaned against it with her arms crossed under her chest and head cocked to the side.
"How are you able to use multiple spells?" She asked with suspicion, lacing her tone.
Carmell laughed, startling Cassie. Covering her mouth with her hand, she bent towards Annika with her left shoulder.
"What do you mean? You say them together, " she replied, dismissively waving her hand.
She then unhooked her arm from Cassie and bumped Zyn, who stood in the other doorway, raising an eyebrow at Annika before Carmell's answer registered with the group.
"Wait! Ha! You can't mean one after the other, right?" Zion clapped his hand against his tablet excitedly and moved around Cassie to get closer to Carmell with his head craned back.
"You need to weave the two spells together, not one after the other," She replied, shaking her head slightly and turning away from them and into Common Room One.
Darrius followed closely behind her, a ghost of a smile playing across his lips as Annika and Zion stood in the doorway, calculations zooming through their eyes.
Carmell's eyes widened at the enormous red velvet corner sofa, which could double as a super king-sized bed. The soft, fluffy pillows covered the couch in different shades of green that called to be leaned on. Carmell swept her eyes over the closed balcony doors and landed on a lean man with long white hair and sharp, pointed ears hunched over an oval-shaped table in the far corner before the archway to the kitchen.
Dylan lifted his gaze from his book of Concealment and Camouflage to fix on Carmell with wide blue eyes. She stared at him with furrowed eyebrows, acknowledging that he looked too close to Elias not to be from Temperance.
'Why was he huddled in the corner like a shadow and not chilling with his family?' His gaze dropped back to his book, fidgeting with increasing intensity as Carmell stepped forward, feeling that if he weren't allowed in here, the castle or the Pride and Humility royals would have kicked him out.
Darrius stepped up behind Carmell, his pointed look at Dylan working in his favour as he dropped his gaze. He put his hand on her shoulder, the tingles calming his underlying rage, but she jumped in shock with a small gasp leaving her lips. Dylan's entire body shook from her sharp gasp filtering into his sensitive ears. His eyes lifted from his book to see her body turn away from him at the speed of light to hit Darrius in the face with her fist, but her hand froze a few inches away, and she skipped away from him with wide purple eyes and specks of dust lifting from the skin on the back of her hand.
The purple in her eyes faded as quickly as it appeared, but her look of regret never left her face as she gripped her hand to her chest. Darrius had to admit that she had hurt his pride; she moved so fast, and he was so focused on the feeling of their bond that he didn't see her hand until it stopped mere inches from his face. After the hurt came a sudden sense of understanding; he remembered her reaction to the twins and how lost she looked when Zyn dragged her through the hall. Something terrible had happened to her before she came here, and it reminded him of how his mother was when they first met – skittish was what she called it months later.
"It's going to be all right," he whispered, moving forward to wrap his arms around her mortified body. "I should have called your name first." He mumbled into her hair with a sigh.