Chapter Nineteen
She tried to practice, before she went to her next lesson. Mainly because of the air of threat to his words, over breakfast.
But there were other things in there, too. Frustration that it still wasn’t coming easy. The feeling that other threats were
closing in on her. A sense of time racing on, and every challenge that would bring with it.
Practical lessons began after Christmas.
And practical lessons would not wait for her to catch up.
She would either fly when pushed, or fall. Defend herself while dueling, or get cut down. Contain a fireball, or be incinerated.
There was no in between when it came to things like that. So instead of reading How to Navigate the Underneath for the seventh time, she stood up. She closed her eyes. And she tried to summon the right sort of feeling, without falling
back on any recent situations.
Like him lifting her. The look of him on that bed. His mouth—
Think of something from before all this, she ordered herself.
Something that is not him and all the ways he is obviously poisoning you.
Because he is poisoning you. Making you think he means any sweet thing he says and does, making you sleepwalk into sympathy, and then telling you your sympathy is dangerous just to fool you even further.
He is smart, and you have to be smarter.
But when she tried, nothing came up.
It never came up. There wasn’t anything there.
The best she could do was things she’d read in books, about swooning maidens being haunted by fiends. Most of which had never
really inspired a whole lot of anything. And the stuff that had was pretty much useless to her now. Every time she tried to
fall back on some story that had produced the slightest spark in her, the story simply reminded her of him.
Like she’d been primed to fall for this.
There was just no way out.
Desire for him was deadly.
But only desire for him would do.
And that was a very bad thing, indeed, when she had to walk into that theater knowing he was most likely waiting with a fistful
of snakes. She had to let herself think of a nightgown being slid over milky thighs, just to make some sort of shield before
she went inside.
Though she knew it wasn’t a very good one.
She brought it up the moment she set foot through the door, and it actually seemed to wink out for a second. She watched that
silvery blue dissolve, just as she felt magic rushing toward her. A knife of some description, she thought it was and tried
to duck. To lurch to the left.
But just as she did, the shield wavered back.
She heard it thunk into that imperfect square, hard enough that the impact juddered up her arms. It made her stumble back and let out a sound
of shock. But she got it back together fast. She had to. She could see him across the theater, arms crossed over his chest,
looking at her like he had just known she wasn’t up to scratch.
And it deepened her frustration like nothing else.
“I stopped it, all right? I did what I needed to do,” she spat, as she yanked that very heavy-feeling blade out of her shield,
and threw it back. Though of course it dissolved before it got anywhere near him. And so did the flimsy thing she had managed
to conjure. It flickered and then winked out, while he eyed the place it had been pointedly. Before flicking his gaze back
up to her.
“Yes, you did,” he said. “With a shield so weak it’s already lost cohesion.”
“It can’t have been that weak. It stopped that thing cold.”
“Because I barely gave it any power.”
“So now you’re pulling your punches.”
He held her gaze for that. Assessing her, it seemed.
Like he suspected she was starting to test the limits of his supposed hatred.
In the end, though, he just shrugged. “All I do is pull them. If I don’t, you die.”
“Well, that’s a very thoughtful gift to give me. Not making me a corpse.”
“No need to thank me. Just think of it as an early Christmas present.”
She let out a scoffing laugh. “Do you actually even celebrate Christmas?”
“If you call unwrapping the single gift I get celebrating, then sure,” he said, a little bored sounding about it. A little
bored looking while the words came out. It was only after they had that she saw him stiffen a little.
Like this time, he had said too much. “So you don’t get dozens, from all your admirers. It’s just one special person,” she said, and now his full
and very focused attention was back on her.
“I’m not going to tell you who they are. You might as well stop trying.”
“Where would the fun be in that?”
“There isn’t supposed to be any fun. This isn’t a guessing game.”
“Yeah, but if it was one, I think I would definitely go with Cobble.”
“I have no idea how you figure that one,” he said, with an actual laugh in his voice. A pretty convincing one, too. It was
just a shame that his face was typically such a stoic mask, really. Because it definitely showed when he experienced an emotion
he didn’t mean to.
And that seemed to be the case right now. She could see the hint of tension around his smile. The slight drop that happened,
just below his eyes. It even seemed like a flicker of light crossed the surface of his gaze.
It made her laugh back.
“He’s kind, he’s not awful about anything that lives in the Underneath, he has the clout here to get away with keeping a secret
like that. And he’s pretty ancient, so he could have looked after you for a long, long time,” she said, as she ticked every
bit of reasoning off on her fingers.
While the tension in his face tried to deepen.
A muscle in his cheek twitched, almost like a tic.
Before he managed to get himself back together.
“I’m not a thousand years old, for fuck’s sake.”
“So just hundreds. then.”
“No. I was born in 1972.”
Not old enough to be a student in the years Lilibet was here, she thought, in a great rush of both relief and disappointment. Relief that he probably wasn’t. Disappointment that the mystery had just deepened.
Though, of course, there was every chance he was lying.
Even if it did ring so true she momentarily didn’t know what to say about it.
He actually looked like someone who had been born in the seventies, in the strangest way. Maybe because of the hair, she thought—that thick shaggy mess, the slightly too long sideburns. Or the clothes—so close to something that wasn’t quite
this generation. Or the last even.
He favored striped jerseys.
Those too-long-for-his-legs jeans.
He could have starred in a movie about teens getting killed in a summer camp, set in America. In fact, for a second she almost
asked him if he had been born there, instead of here. If the accent was an affectation, too.
But she was on a roll now of getting him to reveal things.
And she couldn’t let that go right away. “You realize that’s still incredibly old,” she said as lightly as she could. Almost
a scornful tease, because scornful teasing seemed to work the best.
Though it still surprised her when it got him.
He looked briefly offended. “Yes, but to be fair I slept for a good amount of that time. When things got—” he started to say,
before he realized, and looked furious at himself, and cut his words short.
As if that was going to stop her. “When things got what? Bad? Traumatizing? You made a mistake you couldn’t take back, and
then had to be a living corpse in that windowless room until the heat died down? Come back with some new name, some new approach.
Just be cool.”
“We should go back to lessons.”
“But I just did a bingo. Don’t I get a prize?”
“You’ll get a prize when you successfully deflect something.”
He moved before he finished speaking. To shut the conversation down, she knew, and yet it didn’t make the slash of his wand
any less scary. The second she saw it, she automatically ducked and put her hands over her head. She didn’t even wait to see
what he was throwing.
But that was her mistake.
Because this thing?
It was big. It made a whistling sound as it cut through the air, loud enough that she looked out from underneath her own arm. She tried
to catch a glimpse of what she was facing and got just a flash of teeth, of something circular. Like a saw, it seemed, and
so large she knew she’d never be able to get low enough.
All she could do was close her eyes and brace.
Only to have it hit and then just slide right through.
It didn’t even sting her. In fact, the sensation was almost pleasant. Just a strange tingle, and then a sense of something
she couldn’t quite understand. Like being held, somehow.
Though it quickly passed.
And now she was left with him, all being an ass about it.
“You realize that would have sliced you in two, if it had been a real attempt.”
“Well, then. Good job it was just you trying to scare the shit out of me.”
“You will be scared, if you don’t stop getting in your own way.”
God, she wanted to kill him. She wanted to kick something in his face.
But she settled for punching the air in front of her.
“I’m not getting in my own way, you ass.
The emotion I use to connect to magic is just really difficult, okay?
I mean, Anaya’s is relief. I heard someone in the halls talking about theirs the other day, and it was the satisfying feeling you get from peeling Velcro.
And I just know that you have something easy for you, too.
Like contempt or some fucking thing. So don’t get on my case about it,” she snapped, everything forgotten, now, aside from how annoying and unfair all of this was.
Not to mention hard on her knees. She’d bruised one of them while trying to duck. It didn’t want to quite straighten. And
there was dust all over her best woolen tights. She swiped at it angrily, in the silence that followed. In fact, she was still
seeing to it, when he answered.
“Mine is love,” he said.
So simply she didn’t even look up, at first.
But then it hit, and she just couldn’t help it
She had to see his face. His expression. How sincere it was.
Only to find it hadn’t changed at all.
“No,” she said. “No I don’t believe you.”
“I have no reason to lie. In fact, lying here would benefit my image more.”