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He just looked at me, and the answer was written all over his face, which somehow made the question both stupid and completely necessary. “That,” he said.

“We were testing,” I replied indignantly as though I hadn’t just thought about how many layers of clothing were between us.

“We were about one bad breath away from a very bad idea.”

Heat went up my neck, and this time it had nothing at all to do with flame. Kit saw it, because Kit saw everything. His expression shifted, soft and hungry, and then locked itself down so fast it was almost cruel to watch.

“Fire doesn’t do that,” he said. “Power doesn’t do that. I don’t do that.”

“Congratulations,” I said, still trying to gather myself.

“Billie.”

“What?”

“That’s you.”

The words landed a good deal harder than they had any right to. I looked down at my hands and found them shaking, not much but enough that I shoved them in the pockets of my robe.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t make fire.”

“No. You took mine. Or…accessed it. Or, stars, I don’t know what the word is.” He exhaled. “But the green isn’t me. It never was. The yard. My shoulder that day. All of it, every time. That color comes through you. What we saw last time wasn’t a fluke, and we’ve been lying to ourselves telling each other it might have been.”

“It’s real? Really me?” I breathed.

He nodded.

I hated the relief that moved through me at that, hated how warm it was and how fast it came and how much room it took up. For six days I’d been calling myself an accident report and half meaning it. Before that I’d sat in the back row of Sallow’s hall with nothing in my hands while the whole school lifted water and grew glass and shoved chairs across the floor with a lazy flick. There had been nothing to demonstrate and nothing to declare, provisional in every sense the word could carry.

And here it was, late and green and wrong and mine. Something. Not absence or no aptitude or blankness, not the girl in the back row with nothing to demonstrate.

Something.

My stomach knew it before the rest of me caught up, the way my stomach always got there first. It dropped and rose and then settled into a hard low knot, and I recognized the knot. It was the same one I’d carried out of the Walkers’ house on the wet grass, staring at an arm that should have been meat and wasn’t. That knot came when the world stopped matching the story I’d agreed to tell about it. Then the fear came so close behind it that the two nearly arrived as one thing, tangled together, indistinguishable.

“If that’s true…” I began, and my voice petered out unsure of what to say next.

Kit’s face hardened, all the softness gone in an instant. “You can’t tell Cormac,” he said. “You’re ice prince doesn’t get to know, not yet, not until we can replicate it on command.”

“He’s not my anything.”

Kit’s mouth twitched, just once, entirely without humor. “Good.”

That word had teeth in it, and I noticed. I shouldn’t have liked it as much as I did, but I did anyway, because I was getting tired of denying myself things I wanted. And if I had learned one thing that afternoon it was that I wanted Kit.

EIGHTEEN

Billie

I didn’t even last a full day with the secret before I decided I wanted to tell someone. Not just anyone though. This surprised Kit so much that he dropped an entire roll into his tea when I brought it up to him at breakfast.

“You want to tell Fenwick,” he said, fishing the roll back out with two fingers and looking at it like it had betrayed a confidence.

“I didn’t say I wanted to. I said we have to.”