Chapter Eight #2
“Then what is the problem?” Maggie wasn’t used to yelling at colleagues, let alone someone as important as Taliesin, but she was so angry, and he was being so foolishly prideful.
“You practically shoved me down the stairs when you were warding the building against the pall that day. You don’t think I’m good enough to keep up with you?
Don’t think there are a dozen professors here who can do the same work as you? ”
He couldn’t even look at her as he said, “Quite the contrary, actually.”
“Then what?”
He sat up, leaning forward on his knees until the two of them were mere inches apart.
She smelled the sulfur clinging to his clothes first, but then that familiar smell of his cologne beneath it and the spice of the ginger chew.
When he didn’t answer, Maggie kept talking.
“You seem fine with inconveniencing an entire academic building,” she went on.
And then, thinking of what the dean had told her earlier that week, “And there’s no way Dean Clearwater is okay with this scheme of yours with graduation coming up and all the donors that are going to be on campus. ”
Taliesin scoffed. “It’s always about the budget! If I had known how much of my time at Hawthorn was going to be spent pinching pennies, I would have stayed at Dartwood.”
“You would have been doing us all a favor, then!” Maggie’s face burned as she shouted it, and her voice carried an embarrassing screech, but she couldn’t believe he dared to bring up the budget. Not to her. Not now.
To his credit, Taliesin looked ashamed. Or wounded.
She couldn’t quite read his expression as he scrunched up his face and made a sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh.
He leaned back against the couch, and they both found something, anything else to stare at in the office, unwilling to look at each other after their outbursts.
Maggie stared at a particularly worn part of the emerald couch, threadbare and showing some of the stuffing.
Maggie was the first to break the painful, awkward silence. “Why won’t you let anyone help you?”
His voice had the steady beat of a recitation.
“Pall sickness develops after prolonged exposure to the vaporized ectoplasm that feeds a pall. After light to moderate exposure, small particles, constructed primarily of elements found only in realms unseen, can cause fatigue, nausea, vomiting, headache, melancholia, and confusion. Prolonged exposure can cause more serious effects, such as a temporary loss of consciousness and, in extreme cases, death. Frequent short-term exposure is associated with shortened lifespans due to all causes.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. He was so godsdamn annoying. “Thank you for reciting the textbook definition of pall sickness, but I already knew all that.”
“Then what aren’t you getting? I’m not risking anyone else,” he snapped, looking up at her.
His tone wasn’t angry, not the way Maggie’s had been, but it had a sharpness to it.
“Not their safety or their sanity. My students were terrified that day because of a stupid mistake that I made. I’m not going to let anyone else suffer the consequences of my mistake. Least of all you.”
“I’m already suffering!” Maggie slid her sleeve up to her elbow, revealing the ghoul’s blistering and raw handprint.
Taliesin stood with a sharp intake of breath, but there was so little space between her desk and the couch that he towered over her.
He stared at the wound, and then his fingers were on her, so gentle, turning her arm so he could look at the burn.
She was confused by the graze of his touch, by his concern, by the goose bumps she watched rise on her skin.
He finally looked up from her arm, a question in his expression. She swallowed. “There was a ghoul. At Rodrigo’s downtown. It’s my friend’s dive—”
“I know Rodrigo’s,” he interrupted, and she bit her cheek to keep from snapping at him.
“He’d already called a wardsmith, and they did a shoddy job getting rid of it, so Dahlia…Dr. Hawberry and I went to the basement to eradicate it. It was fine, honestly. It barely got to us before we finished the banishment spell. It was just bad luck that it grabbed my arm.”
“A banishment spell takes at least eight minutes,” he said, his voice tight.
“I’m aware.”
“And even longer to properly draw a rune.”
“Dahlia is the best. She did it in four,” Maggie said, and she meant it to lighten the mood, but Taliesin’s expression was still pained. He cradled her arm, looking at the wound as if he could find a new way to heal it that the nurse hadn’t thought of yet. “It…it’s fine. It doesn’t hurt much.”
She gently tugged her arm from his grip, and he seemed reluctant to let her go. When he finally did and she drew her sleeve back down over the burn, she could still feel the places his fingers had touched, as sharp as the ghoul’s.
“Dean Clearwater thinks I have help. And I do—colleagues from Dartwood are working on the problem remotely, with samples I’ve sent them.” He paused. “But Dean Clearwater doesn’t know I’ve been going into the pall alone, or that I haven’t technically put together a team to dissipate it.”
Maggie raised an eyebrow at that news. “And how long do you think you can coast on being Arthur fucking Taliesin before he starts wondering why his third floor is still attracting every ghost, ghoul, and banshee for a hundred miles?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted with a sigh.
An idea began to take root, and before she could doubt herself too much, she blurted, “You need help.” He looked up at her with something like indignation.
“No, you need my help.” She marveled at the words even as they came out of her mouth.
The last thing she wanted to do this summer was help Taliesin do the spellwork necessary to get rid of the pall.
Tedious calculations, rare ingredients they’d have to hunt down, extra translations, but if he was going to be this stubborn…
at least she already knew about his problem.
“What exactly are you proposing?” he asked her, eyebrows arched until they disappeared behind his hair.
He was still so close to her, and it was overwhelming, so she returned to her desk chair, her shoulder brushing his chest as she walked past. She felt better, though, with even that small amount of distance between them.
He stared at the spot where she had been standing until she rummaged through her drawer for another ginger candy, placing it on the desk.
He grabbed it and she marveled at the way she felt strangely attuned to every one of his movements.
She took a deep breath. “I’ll put aside my summer schedule and help you. Between the two of us, we should be able to figure out why you can’t get rid of this pall. Together, we can have it clear by the end of June.”
It looked like gears were moving in his head, as if he was trying to determine her intentions. “If I refuse your help?”
“I’m not going to tell Dean Clearwater, if that’s what you’re afraid of.
That’s your own mess. But you can’t stop me from researching it on my own.
” She paused for a moment, thinking about the way his fingers felt on her skin, about how he seemed so afraid of anyone else being exposed to the pall.
She shrugged dramatically. “I can access the third floor as easily as you can. I don’t mind working by myself. ”
He stared at Maggie and asked, “What do you want?”
“I want my office back, Taliesin.”
For the first time since he had collapsed on the couch, his expression lightened, his lips curving into a grin.
“I thought it was ours.” Her stomach gave a traitorous flip, and she wondered if he could see it on her face.
He unwrapped the ginger candy that was still in his palm and placed it on his tongue.
“What else?” he asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “Eight thousand dollars from next year’s alchemy budget, returned to the linguistics department for special projects,” she said with a nervous swallow.
She waited for him to push back and say she couldn’t risk her life.
She wanted him to say it was too much money.
Waited for him to question why she had asked for eight thousand dollars exactly so she could stay mad at him and start yelling.
Any of that would be better than whatever this strange, agonizing tension was between them.
Instead, he kept looking at her with that grin that seemed to say he was getting exactly what he wanted somehow.
Finally, it was as if his mind had caught up with what she was saying. “Returned?” he asked, a small frown on his face, as if he didn’t know exactly what he’d done during that budget meeting in November.
“Yes, returned,” she repeated. “That’s the least you could do.”
After another agonizing moment when she waited for him to ask for an explanation, he instead said, “Fine. I can agree to your terms.”
So, before she could think too hard about it, she held out her hand for him to shake. He stared at it for a second and then reached for her.
Why did it feel, suddenly, like she was the one who had bargained something away?
She didn’t have time to think about it before his hand was enveloping hers, and she had that strange sensation of smallness again as his fingers closed around her palm, their calloused pads reaching down to the soft skin at her wrist.