“I don’t know—I’m a quick study. And the library is right there.”
“Books won’t be enough. You need someone to show you. Someone to teach you everything you need to know. A tutor who can guide you through all the practical elements, all the ways in which to draw magic to you,” he said, like a patient schoolteacher, just trying to help a particularly foolish child.
Even though she knew what he was really doing.
“Give me a break. This is just you, trying to convince me my plan is impossible—I mean, nobody is going to want to do that, and you know it. There isn’t a powerful person here who has any incentive to help someone like me, with not a thing in the world to recommend them. No connections, no power they can use, personality plain as paper, and face as forgettable as a pane of glass.”
“That’s true enough. They have no reason to do it.”
“They really don’t.”
“Right. ButIdo.”
He said the words so lightly she thought she had misinterpreted, at first. She even went to say something else, some comeback that had nothing to do with his actual meaning. Then she took in the strange, steady way he was staring at her, and the tilt of his head, and the way the air between them suddenly felt—like it was full and fat with a sort of tense expectation.
And she knew.
It burst through her, hard enough that she got to her feet. She took a step toward him, so she could hit him with her answer harder. “You cannot be seriously suggesting thatyouteach me,” she said, half laughter and half scorn.
But he didn’t even have the decency to act like he had been joking.
He lifted one shoulder in a kind of shrug—as if two was too much effort. “I mean going on everything you’ve just told me, I’m the only logical choice,” he said, as breezy about it as she was incensed. Or at least, breezy on the surface.
She could see something else there, just below.
A kind of waiting. A tension—like he knew he had to do this carefully, if he wanted to reel her in. Even though he had to also know she could never be fooled like that. “There is nothing logical about my potential murderer somehow volunteering to help me stop him murdering. Unless, of course, he wants to lure me in, and then find a way to make me hurlmyselfinto oblivion.”
“That would be awfully risky to try, when she’s smart enough to know that.”
“You don’t really think it’s risky or that I’m smart. You think I’m a fool.”
“A fool who loves to look all the important facts up,” he said, and just as she was about to respond, he carried on, in the same faux conversational manner. “Like, for example, thewaythey go about beheading any creature who breaks the accords. Did you know they do it with a blunt instrument? I don’t even think it has any particular benefit, process-wise. It doesn’t curse your soul to never return or anything like that. They just like to.”
Then he leaned back against the hallway wall, hands in hispockets. The perfect image of casualness. An obvious ploy to sell his gambit harder—and yet she had to admit, it hit her hard anyway. She took the wordsbluntandlike tolike a blow to the stomach. And her mind immediately went to every undercurrent of that human viciousness toward the uncanny that she had ever picked up on.
Yates calling them lower beings, Derrickson talking about tumors.We are the tumors, she had thought, when she read that one.We are the ones feasting on their magic, like parasites. Take, take, take while giving absolutely nothing in return, not even admiration or love. Just like always, whenever those on top think they can exploit anyone else.
But of course he knew she felt like that.
Somehow, he knew.
Maybe he’d seen her wincing over Professor Hargreaves’s similar-seeming sentiments in class. Perhaps he’d overheard her and Anaya talking about the old white men who had shaped half the world, in the image of their ideas about how things should be. Everything powerful should be suppressed. Everything beautiful should be seized. Everything they don’t understand must be ruled over.
It was possible. They weren’t subtle.
And she knew now that he was always around.
So it was important to not let him use that against her. “That’s a good try, but I’m not going to believe you’re actually scared of me, or scared of killing me, and then drop my guard enough to say yes to this deranged scheme,” she said finally. Voice firm, with a healthy dose of withering disdain running through it.
He didn’t seem fazed, however. “Good. Because guard dropping would definitely be a mistake around something like me.And especially when you’re going to be spending a lot more time in my company,” he said, with so much conviction she had to laugh. A little hysterically, truth be told. A little rattled sounding.
But she got it out.
“Youactuallythink I will agree to this.”
“I don’t think, little bookworm. I know.”
“Oh, really? And where did you get this great knowledge?”
