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“Slippery slope and addiction.”
“Yep. Old magic is heavy. Powerful. Pricey. The trick is understanding the boundaries. And that requires a very careful hand.”
“How’d you know all this?”
“Not at all because I snuck into the Cadogan House library during sleepovers.”
“I know you did that,” I said with a grin. “The Librarian told my mother. I just figured you were looking at the anatomy books.”
“You weren’t entirely wrong. I was curious! And Seth Tate told your mother about the old magic during my mother’s Unfortunate Time. Your mother told mine eventually.”
Seth Tate was Chicago’s former playboy mayor and a Messenger, a kind of angel with a very complicated backstory. He and my mom had been friends of a type before he’d left politics for a life of religious service.
“We need a new name for ‘dark’ magic,” I said. “I mean, aside from the gross Colonial racism nonsense, it’s not accurate from a good-versus-evil standpoint, and it’s meaningless since most Sups are nocturnal. When you think about it that way, it’salldark magic.”
“You have a point. Blood magic?”
“Uh, no. That’s my exclusive territory. And Hot Boy magic is Connor’s.”
“If we don’t want to just say old magic, how about alt magic? Ur-magic. Wild magic. Ooh, eldritch magic. That’s not bad. Kind of a mouthful, though.”
“That’s what she said.”
I said it just for the laugh I knew it would get and was still thrilled when she responded. She hadn’t laughed nearly enough lately. Which was when something hit me.
“It was the fairies, wasn’t it?”
She blinked, looked at me. “What?”
“You’ve seemed unhappy lately. And it started around the time when the fairies started messing with the green land. We think that’s what made the wards weak enough to let the demon through. Did it affect you, too?”
“If you’re asking if the magic made me sad, no. It was uncomfortable, though. It made my awareness of magic... constant.”
“Like when you suddenly realize you’re breathing? Like, as an activity, and you wonder if you’ll remember to breath if you don’t think about it.”
A corner of her mouth lifted. “I actually thought I was the only one who did that.”
“Nope. So, what did make you sad?”
“Well, that whole thing with Riley.” Riley was a shifter andex-boyfriend who’d been framed by the fairies for murder. Clearing him of those charges had brought up some difficult feelings for her, including about the role of magic in her life.
“Also being past twenty,” she continued, “and still not feeling authentic. Not feeling comfortable in my skin. Not feeling... like me.”
“You’re not alone there, either.” But I didn’t make my confession to her.
“Then let’s figure out who we are,” she said, and put her head on my shoulder. “So we can be us.”
“In the meantime,” I said, “I’ll take anything you can give me about Rosantine.”
“Working on it,” she said with a yawn. “And what we have to do when we nail her. Let’s make a pact not to be so weird in the future. To, maybe, admit who and what we are and deal with it. We’ve both been pretending for so long. Do you wonder what it’ll be like to just be ourselves? To peel back the layers?”
The fact that I was still hiding something from her made my heart clench. “Is this a naked thing?”
She smiled, bumped my shoulder with hers. And for the first time in a long time, that smile looked real and unburdened. “I think we’ve spent enough time worrying about other people and hiding who we really are. Maybe we deserve to be ourselves.”
She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and my arms still wrapped around her as if I might protect her from herself, from her fears, from the magic that permeated our world and was looking for an opportunity to sink its claws into her.
And from those who’d try to use her—and her magic—against the rest of us.
