Page 28 of Impawssible Magic

But I feel his attention on my window long after I’ve climbed the stairs and turned off the lights.

SIX

ASLAN

She’s halfway up the stairs before I let myself move.

I stay by the fountain until her window goes gold, then dark. Counting the seconds the way I count everything about her now—automatically, uselessly, a ledger no one asked me to keep.

Goodnight. One word. I nearly said the other thing instead. The true thing.

The beast doesn’t nearly do anything. He’s already decided. Has been deciding since the first night I stood outside her shop and felt her wards hum a greeting instead of a warning.

Caius wants reports. Threat assessments. Patterns.

Here’s a pattern: I no longer remember what my apartment looks like in daylight.

I should go home. I don’t. I cross the square instead, mist curling silver around my boots, and let my feet carry me toward Duskfire—not for the ale, though I won’t say no to a glass. For the noise. For something to drown out the specific quiet of watching a woman I can’t have go to sleep twelve feet and an entire world away from me.

Torin’s already at the bar when I get there, nursing something dark and unbothered by my mood. He takes one look at my face and pours a second glass without asking.

“Rough patrol?”

“Something like that.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t push. Bears rarely do. He just sets the glass in front of me and goes back to whatever he’s carving out of a coaster with his thumbnail.

I drink. I don’t stop thinking about the way she said Tiger like it was a name she’d chosen for me herself.

Grandmother Peach appears somewhere around my third glass, uninvited and unsurprised to find me there, and orders something with too much sugar in it before fixing me with that look that sees straight through several centuries of practiced restraint.

“Lavender bath salts,” she says, apropos of nothing. “Very wise choice.”

I don’t ask how she knows. I’ve stopped asking.

I stay until the noise gets loud enough to be useful, and later—much later—I walk home the long way, past a dark shop window with a citrine still glowing faintly on the sill, and let myself hope for exactly as long as it takes to pass it.

SEVEN

LEIRE

Hangovers, I’ve learned, come in varieties.

There’s the standard variety—pounding head, queasy stomach, deep regret for that last drink. There’s the magical variety—sparkles in your peripheral vision, occasional bursts of color when you sneeze, the lingering sensation that reality is slightly tilted.

And then there’s the Duskfire Brewery variety, which combines both with the added bonus of your magic refusing to cooperate because apparently even your power has limits on how much sentient beer it can process.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” I mutter to the citrine on my nightstand, which is pulsing with aggressive cheerfulness. “Stop being so bright. Some of us are dying over here.”

I’m lying face-down on my bed, seriously considering never moving again, when the knock comes.

Not on my shop door. On my apartment door.

The private one. At the top of the narrow stairs that no one should be climbing without my permission.

I’m upright before conscious thought catches up, hand outstretched toward the nearest crystal—a chunk of black tourmaline I keep on my nightstand for exactly this reason. My wards aren’t screaming, which means whoever’s out there either has permission to be here or is very, very good at bypassing magical security.

Neither option is comforting.