I shift, angling toward him. “Becks, it’s not your fault I was attacked. You know that. Right?”
That muscle tics again. “If I’d approached you earlier in the day, when I first spotted you, or followed you more closely last night, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”
Cocking my head, I regard him. Is he really taking blame for what happened?
“You know, you’re right,” I say, and he flinches. “Or we could blame the fact that I decided to cut through the woods instead of taking the lighted path. If we want to go deeper, if my parents hadn’t decided to bring me into the world, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.”
The quick look he gives me says that he doesn’t think those are the same.
“We can play the ‘what if’ game all day, but it’s never going to change the past. At the end of the day, if you hadn’t been there last night, I’d probably be dead right now. My parents most likely too.”
“I don’t know if I should get credit for saving you when it might have been my fault the demon found you in the first place,” he says, referring to the leak in the Order.
I shrug. “You say this demon’s been hunting me for a while, and killing innocent girls along the way, right?”
He nods.
“Then it would have found me eventually. It was only a matter of time. And who knows how many more innocent girls it would have killed if it didn’t find me last night. So when you look at it that way, you didn’t just save my life, you stopped it from hurting anyone else.”
When he glances at me out of the corner of his eye, one brow is cocked, and there’s a whisper of a smile on his face. “That’s a positive way of looking at it.”
“That’s me. I’m a glass half full type of girl.”
“Hmm,” is his only response, before he changes the subject. “I’ve been wondering about something.”
“Yes?”
He doesn’t look at me when he asks, “Why didn’t you use your magic against your attacker? You clearly have some defense training, but if you’d used your magic, you might have had a chance on your own.”
I blow out a frustrated breath of air. “I tried, but I don’t really know how to control and use my magic. It’s unreliable, and so I couldn’t reach it.”
“Have you ever trained with your magic?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Why?”
“A few reasons. Most of them had to do with keeping me hidden. My parents don’t trust anyone, especially not other creatures, and for all intents and purposes, they’re basically human, so there was no one to teach me. The other big reason is that they believed my magic might potentially draw whoever, or whatever, was after me. Like accidently send out a beacon.”
He turns his head, his eyebrows hiked up his forehead. “Is that true?”
I shrug. “Who knows. But they had a theory that because of the prophecy, my magic is different than other creatures’ and using it might inadvertently attract the evil we were hiding from.”
“If your magic is as powerful as the prophecy says, learning to use it might be what protects you from the demon someday.”
“I suppose that could be true as well, but is it worth the risk?”
Becks seems to mull it over for a few minutes.
It’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once. But without someone to guide me, it never really mattered. On my own, I was more likely to accidentally blow something up, or set our house on fire, than anything else, so I resigned myself to live a magicless life a long time ago. Now it only ever came out on accident, like it had at the Halloween party, and when I sent a fireball at Becks. It was always destructive, which made me scared of it.
“When was the last time you used your magic, accidently or otherwise? Before the fire at the frat house, that is?”
“Hmm.” I have to think back because it has been so long. “It’s been a couple of years, actually. The beginning of my senior year of high school. I got startled and accidentally blew up my parents’ grill in the back yard. Shot it at least twenty feet in the air,” I say with a chuckle, remembering the look on my dad’s face when the whole grill shot straight up like a rocket, sparks igniting underneath it and all. But then I sober. “We moved right after, packing our things that very night. By the morning, we were gone.”
I liked that school. I had started to feel, not exactly like I was fitting in, but that I was settling in. The school after that was in a small town. Everyone there had known each other since birth and so I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was bullied the rest of the year.
A warm hand lands on my knee and gives it a slight squeeze. “I’m sorry you’ve had to live like that your whole life.”
