Page 81 of Heart of Mischief

“Normally we’d be watching our show, but we can’t get that blasted TV to work,” said Bjorn. “Damn interweb needs to be fixed, and I don’t know the first thing about Wi-Fis.”

“Clearly,” Elias muttered under his breath, and Charlie held back a laugh.

Luckily, it only took a few warm-ups before Charlie felt like she was back at the skill level she’d left off at earlier that evening. Unluckily, that skill level was far below where shewantedto be before they got on those school buses the next morning.

But she had six uninterrupted hours to get there.

She worked all night. Elias drilled her like a boot camp instructor, allowing only the occasional two-minute break to pee or chug from the energy drink he’d bought her. When she offered him a sip, he refused. Yet another perk of being a mare, apparently; he could sleep when he wanted to, but he never really got tired.

They started with conjuring. She went through the same list of small items that she knew were scattered about her room, bringing them to her side and snatching them out of the air.

Then, they moved onto aiming. Elias would place a stone in the grass, and Charlie had to summon a specific item, materializing it right on the target he’d created. Aiming the currents was moredifficult than she expected, and it took almost an hour before she could pull it off with any consistency.

Next, he ran her through a series of levitation exercises, challenging her to pick up two items at once, then three, then four. She was fairly certain there would be a permanent divot in her lower lip from how hard she bit down on it in concentration.

But the hardest part—what they spent the majority of the night drilling—was combining the two. Performing both magics at once.

“In truly dangerous situations, like fighting off Rattatosk, you won’t have time to dither about, doing one spell and then another,” Elias said, walking in a circle around the area where Charlie was training. “You have to multitask. To grab multiple currents at once and bend them all to your differing needs.”

“You make it sound so easy,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“It’s not meant to be easy.” He raised one eyebrow. “You have the power of a god, Charlotte.”

The power of a god.

It didn’t matter how many times she heard those words; they always made her skin pebble with goose bumps.

She exhaled. “Let’s just get started.”

It was grueling work. Elias had come up with dozens of exercises that required her to both conjure and levitate at the same time, each one more difficult than the last. At two a.m., she accidentally sent Bjorn flying out of his rocking chair and into a tree. At three, she fell from the sky while trying to hold herself ten feet off the groundandpull a coffee mug out of thin air. Shortly thereafter, trying to conjure her Valkyrie dagger while running at full speed across the lawn, she accidentally grabbed its blade instead of the hilt; if the dagger weren’t spelled to never cut her skin, it would have left a nasty gash.

But by four, the moon was gone, her energy drink was empty, and she was finally starting to get it. To reallygetit. The currentswithin her were violin strings, and she no longer needed to play only one at a time. She could play many, could make chords, could pluck or strum or bow as she pleased.

At six, Elias clapped his hands twice. “Time to go. We need to get you home before your mom wakes up.”

Charlie rolled her shoulders, which were knotted up from six hours of clenching. “It’s a bummer that we didn’t make it to dredging,” she said, sighing. “It feels like all of this was for nothing.”

“For nothing?” Elias laughed. “Are you nuts? In under forty-eight hours, you basically mastered two different types of magic. That’s insane. You should be proud of yourself for what you’ve done, not bummed about what you couldn’t.”

He was right. She was buzzing. Overjoyed. So filled with adrenaline that she almost didn’t process the importance of the compliment Elias had given her. Of the emotion behind it. The genuine pride.

Something was changing.Hewas changing.

Were his emotions returning? Or did it justfeelthat way because they were on the same side now?

And since when had she started to believe that they were on the same side?

Charlie’s mind swirled with questions as she zipped up her backpack and shouldered it. Henry scampered over, climbing up her body to sit on her shoulder, little legs dangling down her clavicle. She looked at Elias. “Drive me home?”

“Of course, madam.” He turned around to face the porch and gave the Vikings a salute. “Gentlemen, I’ll see you when we’re back from the trip.”

“Bring more ale when you do,” said Bjorn, raising his mug. “It’s hard to come by when the people at the grocery store can’t actually see you.”

Elias laughed. “Noted.”

After waving good-bye to the Vikings, Charlie and Elias started toward the convertible. For a while, they walked together in comfortable silence. Charlie didn’t feel the need to fill it with anything. Not even a carefully crafted insult. She was perfectly happy just to walk at Elias’s side.

She realized then that she hadn’t thought about her plan for revenge in almost two days. That she didn’t evenwantto think about it. That should have scared her, but instead it was like a weight lifting from her shoulders. She was floating through the forest.