Page 52 of The Diamond in the Rough

Maza’s dark eyebrows went up.

“He’s already deeply anti-Arcanid,” I explained. “Believes that Arcana is God’s punishment for sin. He took it as a sign from God that he was supposed to kill the faun. That it was God’s will.”

Maza ran a hand over his hair. “Fuck,” he grumbled. “Fucking bigoted nutjobs.”

It sounded like something Hart might say. I couldn’t disagree.

He sighed. “Can you write down everything you saw?”

“I—yes. Although it’s more like hearing than seeing.”

Maza shrugged. “That works, too,” he replied, then pulled out a yellow pad and slid it across the table.

Ward put a hand on it. “He’ll use one of ours,” he replied.

Maza’s cheeks flushed a little. “Right. No touching strange things.” He grimaced. “Sorry.”

“You can go do that, Rayn, if you feel up to it,” Ward said softly as Maza put the pad back in his bag.

I understood the dismissal and nodded, standing slowly to make sure I wasn’t going to get dizzy, then made my way back out of the conference room as Ward turned to Maza. “I assume you’d still like a victim statement?”

“Yes, please,” was the last thing I heard Maza say before I went back to my desk, then sat down to type up what I’d gotten from the hit-and-run killer.

By the time Maza came back out, I’d finished and printed it, and I offered it to him.

“Can you sign it?” he asked me. “We ask our witnesses to sign their statements.”

I pulled a pen out of my cup—thankfully not experiencing anything from it—and signed the bottom of the page, then handed it to him.

“Thanks,” Maza said with a nod. “Both of you,” he added, looking back at Ward, who had followed him out of the conference room.

Ward nodded back. “You’re welcome,” he replied. “I hope it helps.”

“At least I know it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “Not that it makes me happy, but it’s something, anyway.”

As the door closed behind him, Ward turned to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, pulling his mask off.

I shrugged. “I guess,” I answered. “Tired. A little… wobbly. But I’m not going to throw up again.”

“Not exactly what I meant,” Ward replied, his lips quirking a little. “But that does sound like progress, at least.”

“Progress?” I asked, confused.

He leaned back a little in his chair. “If you intend to hone your skills, to make use of them like you just did for Dan Maza, who will, by the way, almost certainly ask you to do it again now that he knows you can be useful, you’ll need to make sure they aren’t going to fuck you up.”

“Fuck me up?” I repeated.

He made the face he made when he’d used an expression I didn’t understand—one that I think meant that he was frustrated with himself for making confusing word choices, although that only ever seemed to happen around me. “Make you sick or dizzy or unable to really function,” he replied.

“Oh.”

“Which means you’ve been practicing, because you can’t go from barfing in a trash can to pulling a three-minute memory and then copying it down with only some gasping without having worked on it.” His grey eyes were sharp. “I know what it’s like,” he said, his voice a little softer. “Because that used to be me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, sitting in my office chair, my hands folded in my lap.

“It used to be much harder for me to summon the dead, talk to them, do anything, really,” he replied. “Before I met Mason.”

“Mason fixed you?”