“Pretty sure it’s because of, you know, these little things called ‘laws.’ You can’t just go around enchanting public property.”
“I’d start with the Citadel,” he crusaded on. “Leave my name scrawled in a bathroom stall.D.B.—Even better than advertised.Forever immortalized.”
Caldwell’s laugh escaped with a snort. She covered it with a hasty cough.
“Sorry,” Domenic said, though he wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Does that implicate you? Are you my coconspirator now? Damn. All that potential. All those accomplishments. That’s a real shame.”
She chewed on her lower lip—a gesture Domenic tried not to stare at, especially as he worried he’d committed a fatal error in reminding her of just how little they had in common. But then she declared, “Well, if my fate’s already sealed… There’s a very boring theory book Professor Clark read from every day last semester. What if whenever he opened it, it swore?”
He feigned clutching at pearls. “Caldwell, I amscandalized.”
“Then I’d do something about those run-down buildings in the back of campus. The ones people only visit to drink or hook up in. You’re familiar.”
“Hey now.” He laughed.
“I’d clear away all the weeds and ivy. Strip the beer-stained floors. Replace the creepy tapestries, the grimy windows—”
“You’d destroy them?” Domenic didn’t even need to feign his horror.
“Well, they’re not exactly in their prime anymore, are they? Those tapestries are beyond warped. And there’s always someenchantment on them so that all the magicians and knights and kings are either flipping people off or mooning—”
“The Hook Up Halls arehistoric.”
“They’re probably full of mold.”
“They havecharacter.”
“They smell like must and despair.”
“Hey now.”
Again, Caldwell smirked. And though it might’ve been his imagination, he swore she inched closer to him.
Their conversation wandered on. Toward every other neglected spot on campus needing a little imagination. Through places in Gallamere that deserved the same. To enchantments of every variety, letter boxes that belched as you fed them envelopes, mirrors that reflected you trying on any possible outfit, cobblestones that squirmed if you stepped on them, streetlamps like lighthouse beacons leading the lost home. As minutes bled into hours, as even Mercester Square’s tumult grew drowsy, Domenic learned a lot about Ellery Caldwell he’d never realized. The traces of her Northern accent when she swore. Her encyclopedic knowledge of fashion trends. (The mirror was her idea.) Her uncanny sense of direction. (The lamps were very much his.)
After so long casting Ellery Caldwell as the perfect hero, Domenic was struck by the revelation that Caldwell was, in fact, simply human.
It did nothing to dull his fantasies of her. If anything, they sharpened, like a far-off sight coming into focus.
“So I know I interrupted you earlier, but I can’t stop wondering,” Caldwell said, now beside him on the grated bench. Though several others had come and gone from the bus stop, Domenic had stopped noticing them. He and Caldwell could be sitting amidst a crowd and he’d still feel they were alone. “How can you, a magician, love a movie with such an unrealistic depiction of magic?”
Domenic warred with himself. Not just because he’d never been good at explaining how he felt. But because if he washonest, she might look at him like all his other classmates—with pity. Or even like his parents—with bewilderment. He’d be devastated to a mortifying degree, if so.
But he never dared fantasize himself in this position, so close to Ellery Caldwell that he could smell her: like crisp air and evergreen. The stakes felt astronomical. Worth risking it all for.
“All right. Honestly?” His leg jittered. “I don’t think the movie was that unrealistic. Sure, it made a mess of the details, but it made magicfeellike magic always has to me. Like something more than any textbook could describe or exam could measure. And I’m not just saying that because I’m no honor student. I know my magic, and it’s not rules or theories. It feels deeper than that. It’s…”
Domenic stopped himself. He was rambling toward nowhere, as always.
“It’s instinct,” Caldwell finished softly.
“Y-yes.” His voice cracked. He was pretty sure he heard his reputation crack along with it.
Her throat bobbed. “My magic feels that way, too.”
Then her gaze slipped away, wistful, and Domenic followed it toward the bus stop’s corner, where the enchantment had since faded.
Domenic stalked toward the transit map against the far wall and made a show of examining it.
