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But it scared me a little less with Tami around.
She glanced at Rhea. “You okay with that? I wouldn’t be stepping on any toes?”
Rhea shook her head. “No toes. Or . . . or anything else. That actually sounds . . .” She took a deep breath, and I could almost see some of the weight falling off her shoulders. “That sounds wonderful,” she said honestly.
“Well, I guess I could give it a shot,” Tami told me, but distractedly. Like she was already making a mental to-do list.
“And the safe?” I asked, because it looked the same to me, with the pale, almost invisible barrier still glowing faintly in front of the door.
“No.” Tami turned her attention to it. “Doesn’t feel like I’ve drained it at all.”
“Drained it?” Rhea said. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
I nodded. “Tami’s a magical null. If she’s not actively repressing her abilities, wards come down when she walks in a room.”
“It was how I used to raid the Circle’s damned internment camps,” she told Rhea. “Hard to keep out somebody who can just walk in through the front door.”
“Yet this one is keeping you out,” I said, starting to get worried. I’d seen Tami drain bigger wards faster plenty of times.
She sighed. “Yeah, we may have a problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“You know how a null works, right?” she asked.
I nodded, but Rhea shook her head.
“Our magic is inverted,” Tami told her. “Instead of projecting out, it pulls in. Specifically, it pulls in other magic in an area and destroys it. It’s like we have a big, black hole somewhere inside, just sucking all the magic in. But unlike a black hole, we do have a limit—we do get full.”
Rhea nodded.
I wondered where Tami was going with this.
“So, most of the time, it’s not a problem,” she said, looking balefully at the safe. “For a strong null, the limit is really, really high. A talisman, like the ones they use to power most wards, can usually be drained in a couple of minutes.”
“But you’ve already been at it that long,” I pointed out.
She nodded. “Yeah. And if I’m right, I could stay here all day, till I was full and running over, and it wouldn’t matter. That thing’s not coming down.”
“Why not? I
t’s just a ward—”
“A ward hooked into the ley line system.”
“What?”
Tami nodded. “And the ley lines aren’t some supernatural battery, like a talisman. They’re more like . . . a direct link to the world’s electrical system. To big rivers of metaphysical energy that just keep coming and coming and coming. I can’t absorb that. No one can.”
I stared at the little safe. “But . . . but if people can hook a ward directly into a ley line, why use talismans at all?”
She shrugged. “’Cause the lines don’t run everywhere. Plus it’s expensive. Cutting into a line is dangerous work, and it don’t come cheap. Someone must’ve paid a fortune for all the wards around this place. But if you really, really want to make sure that nothing and nobody gets in, that’s how you do it.”
“Then I can’t age through the wards, either?” I asked, because that had been option number two.
“Sorry.”
And that probably meant Marlowe’s were done the same way. Not to mention whatever snares and traps he’d laid out for unsuspecting burglars, all of which were probably lethal. No wonder the damned acolytes hadn’t found any Tears yet!
