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The room has stone walls, a high ceiling, and large, paned windows. Today, the space is dominated by a boxing ring in the centre, with about fifty round tables, each seating ten people, arranged around it in concentric circles.
Liam leads us to one close to the ring. “Sit down. I need to go and prepare. I’ll come over and say hi before the fight.”
“I’ll go and order some drinks,” I say, gesturing to the bar along the back wall.
I try to swagger to the bar in my best imitation of my siblings’ style, but I’m conscious of their worried eyes on my back.
There’s a wait at the bar, but people can’t get out of my way quickly enough. It’s unclear whether they know who I am or just who my associates are. Within seconds, I’m at the front, waiting only for a female couple ahead to be served.
The woman on the right is distinctive even from the back—taller than most men, near-black hair cropped close to her face, powerfully built shoulders showing through her cocktail dress—but it’s not until she turns round that I recognise her.
“Are you okay to take the drinks back to the table, babe?” Nikki says, speaking to her companion but staring at me.
The other woman nods. I can’t tell whether I’ve met her before or not. She’s one of those generic blondes that always swarm around Gabriel, with a little bit of power and a lot of hair. Nikki gives her a peck on the lips, then the woman scoops up an ice bucket full of champagne and several glasses and disappears from sight.
I glance around as subtly as I can and ready my internal defences.
“He’s not here,” Nikki says. “Though I’ll tell him you were looking for him. It’ll make his night.”
What are the odds of her attacking me on Gabriel’s behalf? Should I fire first? I glance up at her face to check her uncovered eyes aren’t going any particularly deadly colours. They emphatically are not. Her irises are brown and a regular size. And her pupils are round.
“Hang on. Your eyes. So you’re not…”
Nikki narrows those unremarkable eyes. “And here I heard you were a nice person underneath it all. I’d have thought a little London lawyer would understand about respecting people’s identities? Besides, the last person who claimed I wasn’t a practitioner because I don’t have mood-ring eyes got a fireball to the chest for their pains.”
I can’t help but smile at ‘mood-ring eyes’. I’m more relieved than ever that mine are hidden away behind sunglasses.
To underline her point, she methodically draws fire into her palms. Her lips whisper the words, and her hands make the shapes. It’s very slow compared to the way I’d do it, but impressive, nonetheless.
“You’re a Learnt Practitioner.”
It isn’t a term that gets used very often. Most people tend to prefer the more offensive alternatives. But Nikki’s right. I’ve always done my best to avoid all of the more human prejudices and to be a good ally on a variety of fronts. The least I can do is check my magical privilege and put my family’s outdated views on witchcraft to one side.
I strongly believe in the principle that magic isn’t some rarefied thing that lives in chosen people’s blood, but a science like any other, capable of being learnt. But accepting the theory is different to talking to the sort of person my father constantly sneers about, and attempting to be polite.
“If we have to draw a distinction at all, I prefer the termTaughtPractitioner,” she adds. “It’s more accurate in any case.”
I frown. It’s not quite clear why we’re having this conversation or exactly where it’s going, but Nikki doesn’t seem like she’s planning to attack me, and deep down, I’m just bigoted enough to believe I can stop her if she tries. Besides, this is oddly fascinating.
“Really? Who taught you?”
Learnt Practitioners are a relatively common phenomenon. They find the right books or dig deeply enough on the internet, and come to understand that magic’s real. And then they dedicate their lives to learning individual spells, one at a time, step by step. It’s rare they find one of us though. And when they do, they tend to be overawed, and we tend to be underwhelmed.
The idea of a Taught Practitioner is altogether older. Basically medieval. Masters and apprentices and all that. Seven years of study. But even then, it tended to be those who were at least vaguely of the blood. A practitioner grandmother who’d fled from her family, that sort of thing.
It was presumably what Chris, my ill-fated date back in London, had convinced himself the London Coven would do for him, but he was deluded. Nikki, on the other hand, has got the firepower to back up her proclaimed identity.
“Who taught you?” I ask again, when she stays silent.
“Who do you think?”
“Are you joking?” There’s only one person she can mean, and it hardly seems likely.
“After my parents moved here, I grew up in one of the cottages adjacent to Thornber Manor. I befriended Gabe when we were about five and both lonely, only children. It didn’t take long for me to realise there was something different about him, and it didn’t take long for him to start to show me how to be different, too.”
“Forgive me if I find this a little hard to get my head around. Gabriel Thornber does not strike me as the sort to take a human girl under his wing and teach her magic.”
“Believe it. Though to be fair, he didn’t do much of the actual instructing himself. He’s an awful teacher. It was more a case of strong-arming all his wide-eyed acolytes into helping out.”
