Page 23 of The Diamond in the Rough

At least until Ward came and interrupted me at lunchtime. “Rayn?”

I yelped, then flushed. I hated the fact that I was jumpy most of the time, and thanks to my hyper-aware psychic senses, I’d become even jumpier.

“Are you okay?” he asked, rolling himself a bit closer to my desk.

“I’m fine,” I half-lied. There wasn’t anything really wrong with me, although ‘fine’ wasn’t quite the most accurate term to describe my current state of being. I wasn’t sick or injured or even upset about anything. Just… on edge.

And still feeling guilty about the fact that I hadn’t made any progress with Cass’s worry stone and I really didn’twantto, while at the same time wanting to be helpful to Hart and Raj.

Ward gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me. “Well, if there’s anything you want to talk about, you know you can talk to me, right?”

I nodded. I did know that.

“Or Mason,” the warlock continued.

I nodded again. I nod a lot. Much easier than trying to use words.

You really shouldn’t keep lying to yourself, sunshine.I even jumped a little at Sylvia’s words, then sighed.

Ward was giving me a look that said he really didn’t believe that I was fine. He knew, obviously, that Sylvia had startled me, not that he could hear Sylvia when she spoke just to me. That was one of the nice things about talking to Sylvia—she had the ability to talk to everybody who could hear her or just focus on one of us at a time. Archie Lagarde—our other resident ghost—couldn’t do that.

According to Mason, it was because Sylvia herself had some kind of innate witch magic that was sympathetic to communication—possibly air magic, he thought, althoughhe had also snarkily suggested fire, since every time she and Ward tried to do something and it backfired, it did so literally. There were a couple of scorch marks under some of the rugs at Beyond the Veil, and Mason had mentioned there was at least one at their house, too.

Sylvia always just shrugged and smiled, either not caring or keeping her secrets to herself. Archie was a necromancer, though, so he came with his own set of creepy abilities. Mason had explained once that Archie’s magic was like Ward’s—warlock magic. But as a death witch, I tried not to think too hard about what Archie was capable of, especially because it was likely too close to my own for comfort, if I ever bothered to learn how to do more than suppress my abilities.

It was pretty clear that I was not very good at taking responsibility for myself or my abilities. And, yes, I had a really good excuse for it—spending most of my life locked up in a completely messed up mental institution where they kept stripping my magic from me over and over and didn’t bother with things like education or socialization had left me… Well. A complete mess.

Add to it medical and magical PTSD that wasn’t my fault, but was now my problem, and it wasn’t really surprising to anybody—least of all me—that I was overly reliant on the people who had saved me from said institution. I knew that.

I also knew that I really should do something about it.

Regardless of how I’d spent the fourteen years between the ages of six and twenty, I was now a twenty-four-year-old adult who had finished his online GED and was working on his BA part-time while also working a really straightforward and fairly simple front desk job that didn’t ask all that much from me in terms of overtime orcomplex skills. And let me do my homework, if I needed to.

And that, okay, also came with ghosts and murder on a regular basis, but I felt like my past had actually equipped me to deal with those sorts of things a bit better than most people.

It’s just that sometimes I had to confront the fact that I was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults, to quote Ward, dealt with their shit.

It was really too bad that I was sure what that meant, practically speaking.

I strongly suspected it meant things like being a more active contributor to Beyond the Veil and taking responsibility not only for paying my rent and buying and making my own meals, but for making choices that would enable me to be an asset, not just a door-stop.

I felt like a door-stop.

Sylvia?

Yes, sunshine?

Do you know anything about being psychic?

The smile she turned on me was sad.No, sunshine, I don’t. But I do know a thing or two about flogging a dead horse.

I frowned.What’s that mean?

It means continuing to try the same thing when it hasn’t been working.Her look was sympathetic.You’re trying to help Hart and that Agent Parikh?she asked.

Yes. They have a necklace from the murder victim that they want help tracing—not to the victim, but to whoever gave it to her. They think it might be cursed.Well, I was the one who thought it might be cursed. Raj and Hart hadn’t disagreed with me, but they needed more than I could give them. Names. Details. Something more.

So what are you doing?