Chapter 16
He was looking forward to dinner—Mason’s cooking was always far better than anything he managed to put together. And Mason had been up this morning putting something in the fridge, which meant that he had plans for something that night.
Maybe Mason had news about the adoption. Or maybe Jackson had done particularly well on a test. Or something completely different.
No matter what it was, it was going to be tastier than this.
He poked at the noodles in their lackluster tomato sauce that he’d microwaved for lunch. He’d made it two… no, three days ago. It was passable. Better fresh than three days old, anyway.
I sighed, glaring down at the offending spoon.
I usually brought food that I could eat with my hands, but I hadn’t had any breakfast food in my apartment, so I’d grabbed some instant oatmeal cups at the grocery store so that I could have a stash in my desk.
I’d hoped that the spoons in the office would have gotten little enough recent use that they’d be safe, but apparently not.
I contemplated the spoon, currently sitting on the counter.
At the moment, Ward and Mason were both out, presumably because of the lengthy and complicated process of adoption.
I hoped it was going well—I didn’t know that I ever wanted kids myself, but I knew they loved kids.
And as far as I could tell, they’d be good parents.
They seemed to be good uncles to Jackson.
Beck was in her office, doing research on the site of her next job—a newly-renovated restaurant up in the Shenandoah that was having poltergeist problems. She was happy that it would likely only be a day trip or an overnight, unlike some of the places she had to stay for days to a week.
From what she’d said, hotels especially were difficult to do quickly. Sometimes she had to go through every room. But a restaurant generally only had a few spaces and could be dealt with much more quickly.
There were no clients on the docket for the day, so it was likely going to be quiet. Assuming nothing came up that was going to demand either Beck’s attention or mine.
I could finish my last two papers, which would almost wrap up my semester. I only had one class that had an exam, and that was the following week. I wasn’t particularly worried about it.
What I was worried about was the fact that it was the day that Violette was going to bring a picnic lunch, and we were going to walk down to the closest park, hopefully find a bench or picnic bench or maybe she’d bring a blanket. I had no idea.
I wanted to see her—I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to have a sister who was a real sister.
I was also terrified that I would do or say something that would make her hate me, or at least dislike me. I was really good at getting people to dislike me.
I sighed again, picking up my new mug and taking a sip of the coffee I’d made while the microwave heated my oatmeal.
At least Melissa had gone with me to a one-off pottery class the previous week so that I could make myself two new ones, and I’d been able to pick them up the day before.
I was glad to be back to having a mug of my own, although apparently I needed to start bringing in my own spoons, too.
Or I needed to figure out how to keep other people’s thoughts out of my head in a more productive way than blocking out literally everything.
I sighed, concentrating on the spoon just being a spoon, and picked it up again.
He wanted—
“Dammit,” I hissed, putting the spoon down again, frustration welling up.
I just wanted to eat my oatmeal with a utensil like a civilized person, and I didn’t want to have to bring my own spoon or use a plastic one or have a spoon with my stupid name on it.
I just wanted to be able to grab a spoon from the drawer and eat my microwaved food the same way everyone else did.
I picked it up again.
And then stared at it in my hand, breath coming quickly.
I got a faint sense of… I wasn’t sure. Agitation? Anticipation? Something, anyway, from it, but the thoughts themselves were blessedly silent.
I could use the spoon.
Except, infuriatingly, I had no idea how I’d done it.
I wasn’t, however, about to waste it by putting the spoon down, so I kept it in my hand while I took the cardboard out of the microwave, trying to grip it by just the lip to avoid burning my fingers.
I took my breakfast back to my desk, managing to pick up and carry my coffee in the hand still holding the spoon.
Somehow, I neither dropped nor spilled anything, and I happily settled into my chair to eat my oatmeal, slowly editing the paper that was mostly done with one hand so that I didn’t have to put down the spoon.
I was even reluctant to put it in the dishwasher in the kitchen when I was done.
Because this spoon represented something—the fact that it was possible that I could use an everyday object that had a memory attached to it without having to fully experience it.
I did put it in the dishwasher, but I felt weirdly fond of that spoon.
I’d just finished up the first of my two papers—it had mostly been done anyway—and sent it off to my professor through the online platform the college used for that sort of thing, when the bell at the door let me know that someone had come in.
I looked up, about to launch into my usual greeting, and stopped when I saw that the person who’d come in was Violette.
Her dark hair had been pulled back into a pony tail and her skin was picking up a slight tan—her eyes were hidden at first behind sunglasses, but when she took them off I could see that she’d drawn attention to their grey-green color with swoops of dark eyeliner.
The moment she saw me, she smiled widely, her eyes crinkling over the bright purple mask she was wearing.
The mask matched a pair of bright purple jeans, which she’d paired with a glittery black shirt.
It was about as far from my extremely boring khaki slacks and grey button-down as you could get in terms of style.
I stood, feeling awkward, wondering if she might want a hug or handshake or something.
Apparently, she took my standing up as an invitation to half-drop the rope basket she was carrying, run over, and throw her arms around me, squeezing tightly. I froze for a second, then hugged her back, hoping that touching her shirt wouldn’t trigger anything.
She was excited, but nervous, not sure what kind of impression would make her brother actually like her. She didn’t know why that was so important to her. She hadn’t given two shits what their parents had thought of her.
But she cared what Rayn thought.
I pulled back, swallowing. It was nice that she wanted me to like her. I wanted her to like me, too. I hadn’t wanted to find out by touching her, but… despite the positive sign of the spoon, I clearly didn’t have that much control yet.
I smiled at her—I hadn’t had a chance to put my mask on, so I wasn’t wearing it. “Hi,” I said.
She hugged me again, but so quickly that I didn’t really have a chance to hug her back, but at least that meant that I didn’t have to worry about triggering more of her thoughts.
Violette stepped back a little. “Hi back,” she said, color rising above the top of her mask. “Sorry. I just kinda rushed over.”
I shook my head. “No need to apologize,” I told her.
“I—I’m happy to be hugged.” My own cheeks flushed.
“By you, anyway,” I amended. I didn’t want random people on the street hugging me, although she probably didn’t actually need to be told that.
But I’d already said it and couldn’t take it back.
I felt foolish, although it didn’t seem like Violette noticed or cared.
She smiled back at me. “I brought lunch,” she said. “I made some salads and put together some little sandwiches and stuff.” She turned and went to grab the rope basket. “Do you like sweet tea?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Do you—are you ready to go?” she asked.
I nodded. “Just let me tell Beck.”
It was just after two in the afternoon by the time I got back from lunch with Violette. My sister.
I didn’t know her, but I knew her. It was like finding someone else who understood the way my brain worked, who laughed at the same things I did, who liked the same foods, who took things just as literally as I did.
It wasn’t the perfect afternoon, but it was pretty close.
She told me about what she wanted to do with her life—her dreams of becoming a biologist. Maybe a vet or an animal rehabilitator.
She was finishing up her first year at William & Mary, having taken incompletes in her classes following our parents’ deaths.
She’d finish over the month of May, then was planning to take some of her inheritance and travel—Europe, then Japan and Thailand before coming back to the US.
She was going to send me pictures, although we already had lunch plans for two weeks later. I was looking forward to it.
I was looking forward to having family.
Or, at least, family who didn’t hate me. It was… nice.
Focus, sunshine.
I sighed, pulling myself back out of my thoughts to pay attention to the dead woman. Sorry, Sylvia.
I didn’t watch a murderous death witch for a century-plus and not learn a thing or two, she informed me primly.
Sylvia had been trapped in a house by the spirit of a centuries-old death witch—long before she’d died—who had possessed the bodies of his descendants to continue his murder spree after his own demise.
I’d felt his magic, and that’s what had first led me to Ward—because Ward had been trying to undo it.
I’m sorry. I’m paying attention, I told the ghost contritely.
Her expression told me she didn’t believe me, although she didn’t actually say so. Your magic, she said instead. Works by siphoning away life energy. It converts someone or something else’s life into yours.
I frowned. Mason says that witchcraft is about balance, I mused.
Sylvia was nodding. Yes. And you’re using death magic to tip that balance in your favor.
That seemed… wrong. Not incorrect, but immoral. I didn’t like the idea that my magic could only operate at others’ expense.
It does you credit, sunshine, that you don’t like that idea, Sylvia told me. But you also have to be able to understand and control that magic so that if you need it, you have it at your command.
I don’t want to have to kill anything, I told her.
I’d done that before—targeting the mice and spiders and roaches that had invaded my cell at Tranquil Brook.
I still felt a bit guilty about it, but I’d been desperate to control the magic—and more than a little disgusted at how unhygienic it was to live in a pest-infested room.
Not that hygiene had been my first priority.
Well, then let’s start with something that’s already doomed, shall we?
I looked at her, horrified. What does that mean?!
She gestured at the vase of flowers sitting on the coffee table. Those, she replied mildly. They are, for the moment, still living, but they’ll be dead in a day or two.
Oh. I could manage that, although I did still feel a little bit bad about draining the cut flowers, if only because they did make the space feel a little more cheerful. And someone would have to pay to replace them.
Start with one, Sylvia advised. And see if you can make it wilt.
At the end of the day, I had only actually wilted about half the bouquet of flowers, which I’d removed and thrown out.
Draining them had made me tired, which Sylvia assured me was because a cut flower didn’t actually possess that much life magic, and so I’d been expending more than I’d been gaining to do it.
But if you drained it from something more powerful and more, well, alive, you could get back more than you lost in the process. Which was something I didn’t want to think too much about, because it felt an awful lot like what had been done to me at Tranquil Brook.
I knew that the type of magic hadn’t been the same—the godawful people who’d run the asylum had been practicing warlock magic, not witchcraft—but it certainly seemed a lot like it when you thought about life magic as zero-sum.
If there was only so much of it, some of us were basically just taking it from other people and creatures. And flowers, apparently.
I didn’t really like that idea much, either.
What was the point of magic if it wasn’t, well, magical?
In that sense, I supposed that magic wasn’t actually real—what we called magic was just another layer of physics and metaphysics that had its own rules and followed its own laws, just like gravity or Newton’s Laws of Motion.
I didn’t know enough about the Laws of Thaumaturgy to know whether Sylvia’s argument about life magic actually matched what people knew to be true about magic or not, but it did also track with everything Mason had ever told me about the balance of witchcraft.
But I also knew that Ward’s magic was different.
There wasn’t balance in the way that Mason talked about it.
Ward talked about threads of magic, about weaving and knotting.
And that made me wonder what rules my magic followed—because I knew that my family had both types of magic.
According to Mason, dreamwalking was witchcraft, like death magic—but not, apparently, like necromancy.
And me being a psychic was—like Ward’s medium abilities—Arcana-based.
But Violette was a warlock. She’d admitted that she didn’t practice much, mostly because our parents had desperately wanted her to and she’d made it a personal policy not to do anything they’d wanted her to.
But she’d also admitted that she started to get restless if she didn’t do something with her magic.
I’d suggested she could talk to Ward about what kinds of things she could do, but she’d shaken her head.
“Nah, but thanks. I’ve got books and stuff—shit that was in Dad’s library.”
“How is that not doing what they wanted you to?”
“Oh, Dad had books on all sorts of stuff that they thought was corrupted or inferior. Just so that I would know what not to do. What was unworthy of me.” She grinned. “So I’m doing that shit.”
I’d asked her what kind of shit, and she’d described mostly nature-based magics. Growing plants, using herbs for healing, things that had honestly all sounded not only benign, but even beneficial for other people.
But that wasn’t my kind of magic. At least, I didn’t think so.
I wondered if there was balance to all types of magic the way that Mason said there was for witchcraft.
And I wondered how it exacted the price for what it was that people took.
Mason talked about how he gave up his energy and strength to heal others—that he took on some shadow of their suffering in order to make the pain go away.
So what would magic or the universe or whatever take from me for what I’d done?