Chapter 9 #3
“You can go do that, Rayn, if you feel up to it,” Ward said softly as Maza put the pad back in his bag.
I understood the dismissal and nodded, standing slowly to make sure I wasn’t going to get dizzy, then made my way back out of the conference room as Ward turned to Maza. “I assume you’d still like a victim statement?”
“Yes, please,” was the last thing I heard Maza say before I went back to my desk, then sat down to type up what I’d gotten from the hit-and-run killer.
By the time Maza came back out, I’d finished and printed it, and I offered it to him.
“Can you sign it?” he asked me. “We ask our witnesses to sign their statements.”
I pulled a pen out of my cup—thankfully not experiencing anything from it—and signed the bottom of the page, then handed it to him.
“Thanks,” Maza said with a nod. “Both of you,” he added, looking back at Ward, who had followed him out of the conference room.
Ward nodded back. “You’re welcome,” he replied. “I hope it helps.”
“At least I know it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “Not that it makes me happy, but it’s something, anyway.”
As the door closed behind him, Ward turned to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, pulling his mask off.
I shrugged. “I guess,” I answered. “Tired. A little… wobbly. But I’m not going to throw up again.”
“Not exactly what I meant,” Ward replied, his lips quirking a little. “But that does sound like progress, at least.”
“Progress?” I asked, confused.
He leaned back a little in his chair. “If you intend to hone your skills, to make use of them like you just did for Dan Maza, who will, by the way, almost certainly ask you to do it again now that he knows you can be useful, you’ll need to make sure they aren’t going to fuck you up.”
“Fuck me up?” I repeated.
He made the face he made when he’d used an expression I didn’t understand—one that I think meant that he was frustrated with himself for making confusing word choices, although that only ever seemed to happen around me. “Make you sick or dizzy or unable to really function,” he replied.
“Oh.”
“Which means you’ve been practicing, because you can’t go from barfing in a trash can to pulling a three-minute memory and then copying it down with only some gasping without having worked on it.
” His grey eyes were sharp. “I know what it’s like,” he said, his voice a little softer. “Because that used to be me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, sitting in my office chair, my hands folded in my lap.
“It used to be much harder for me to summon the dead, talk to them, do anything, really,” he replied. “Before I met Mason.”
“Mason fixed you?”
He chuckled. “No. Well, okay, yes, but not in terms of my magical abilities. He did start making me take better care of myself—eating better, eating, period, when I used to skip meals a lot. And then working on the Fitzwilliam case”—He grimaced again, and this time I knew it was because he hated talking about that particular case.
—“I had to start practicing both summoning and self-protection. And I started getting better at both.”
“I thought Archie did something to you,” I said. I’d heard it mentioned often enough.
Ward nodded. “He did,” he replied. “And that sped things up a lot. But we were already trying to work out how I could access that magic.” He smiled.
“I’m pretty sure I would have gotten there eventually, just…
maybe in another decade instead of it taking about a year.
” He made another face. “Not that I’ve stopped working on it,” he admitted.
“But it’s a lot less difficult than it used to be. ”
I thought about this. “Do you think I should see if he can do the same thing for me?” I asked.
“Jesus, fuck, no,” came the immediate and horrified response. “First of all, it was awful. I would not wish that on anyone. Second, Archie has the same kind of magic I do—which is not what you have.”
“I’m like Mason. And Jackson.” Witch magic, not warlock magic.
“Yes, but they don’t at all work the same way,” he said. “Or so Mason says.”
I wasn’t about to doubt anything Mason had to say about magic. “So you’re saying nobody is going to just be able to turn on my abilities.”
He shrugged. “Not as far as I know. Just hard work, I’m afraid.”
I nodded. “Probably better that way,” I observed.
Ward cocked his head to the side. “Not that I’m disagreeing,” he said. “But why do you say that?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Makes it easier to get used to,” I replied. “If it’s gradual and takes work. Less shocking.”
Ward let out a small snort. “It would definitely be that,” he muttered, then smiled. “But yeah, you’re right.” He studied me again for a moment, those grey eyes assessing. “You really are doing very well with it, you know that?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “I—I’m trying,” I mumbled.
Ward smiled. “It sucks,” he said. “Trying to figure out how to use magic—especially when you’ve got more than one thing to manage. But you are handling it. Just don’t stop taking care of your body and your mind just because you’re working on your magic. Okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
I was willing to try.
I just didn’t know how far that was going to get me.