Chapter Eight
As they wandered the streets of London, Kierse understood Graves’s methods for training. They clearly came from his many years with Kingston, who was currently offering scant advice on how to actually portal and seemed to be more tour guide than master warlock.
“And that’s the Tower of London,” he proclaimed. “You know they say that if the ravens ever leave the tower, the crown will fall and England with it.”
Graves sighed heavily. “This again.”
Kierse glanced between them. “What does this have to do with portaling?”
“History lessons are good for you. Memorize this spot,” Kingston insisted as he had with half of the city. “Ravens are important.”
“So important they clip their wings to keep them inside the Tower,” Graves said.
“Well, I would have clipped your wings to keep you here, too,” Kingston added.
“You tried,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets and looking up at the black birds just visible atop one of the gray stone walls.
“Not hard enough, apparently.”
“Warlocks don’t share territory.”
“We managed it for hundreds of years,” Kingston reminded him.
“I was traveling all over the world those years.”
“Why do I feel like we’re talking about something else?” Kierse said. “What does this have to do with the ravens?”
Kingston raised his eyebrows as he leaned forward on his cane to look pointedly at his old apprentice. “You are marrying this woman and she doesn’t know?”
Graves shot him a look of pure death. “Why must you always stick your nose in things?”
Kingston smiled broadly. “Because it’s fun to rile you.”
“Okay. Care to fill me in?” Kierse asked.
Graves sighed and then nodded. “As you well know, my mother bestowed upon me the name of her Irish clan, Brannon.”
“Yes, you made it very clear that only people who you dislike still call you that.”
“Brannon hasn’t felt like me for many hundreds of years,” Graves continued. “It belonged to her and her heritage, and when I was cast from Ireland, I left it behind where I could.”
Kierse never felt like Brannon suited him anyway. No, he was just Graves.
“Well, Brannon means raven.”
“Oh,” she said as the pieces clicked together.
“And Kingston likes to joke that I was one of the ravens that left the Tower, because when I left England, it was around the time that they lost the Revolutionary War and began the eventual downfall of the empire.”
“Raven,” she said, reaching forward to brush his midnight-blue hair out of his eyes. “It suits you.”
“Mmm,” he said disbelievingly as he grasped her hand and brought it to his lips. His mouth brushed her knuckles, and she shivered under the intensity.
“We’re both birds,” she said a touch breathlessly.
“Yes but you’re a cute fluffy songbird, and I’m a massive, opportunistic carrion feeder.”
“They kill wrens every year the day after Christmas,” she reminded him.
“Fair, but ravens are usually bad omens.”
Kingston held his cane up to interject. “They’re also highly intelligent and mate for life.” He tapped his cane twice. “Well, I think that’s enough for today. Let’s head back and see what we remember.”
“Remember?” Kierse asked.
Without looking back, Kingston sketched a circle in the middle of broad daylight, tourists everywhere. Kierse’s eyes widened in alarm as she glanced around. No one looked at them.
Kingston grinned as he ushered them through the door, and from one step to the next, she vaulted back across his museum floor, trying to keep from pitching into a bench again. “Ugh!”
Graves offered her a hand, and she let him steady her. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I hope so. Would be embarrassing to make my own portals and collapse every time I do it.”
“It’s a possibility,” Kingston added.
“How did no one seem to notice that you opened a portal right in front of the Tower of London?”
Kingston shrugged. “Surely Graves has explained magical intent.”
“We’ve gone over it,” Graves said as Kingston began to meander the room. Graves patted his pocket as if looking for a book that he didn’t have with him. He always carried books everywhere to recharge. It must have been disorienting to not just pull a book out and read everywhere.
“Well, intent works with my persuasion. I can use my magic to convince people not to look at us.”
“That’s handy,” she said, considering exactly how she could use that to steal shit. Maybe she had picked the wrong thing to learn from him.
“Graves does it, and he doesn’t even have persuasion. So maybe he could teach it to you.”
Kierse glanced to him. “Oh?”
“It’s just my shining personality,” he said with an arched eyebrow.
She barely managed not to snort. “I bet.”
Kingston tapped his cane twice again as he came back to the front of the room, looking rejuvenated. “Well, we’re at the middle of the lesson now. How do you feel about portaling?”
Kierse glanced to Graves, who just shook his head.
“You haven’t started,” she told Kingston.
Kingston grinned. “Are you certain?”
Graves sighed. “Classic, Kingston.”
“Go find the library,” Kingston told Graves with a wave of his hand. “Give me time with my pupil.”
Graves’s face immediately soured.
“You can trust her with me. I’m an excellent teacher.”
“That isn’t how I remember it,” Graves said.
“You brought her to me. I will not harm her.”
Excellent teacher or not, Kierse knew Graves didn’t want to leave her alone with Kingston.
He didn’t trust Kingston with her secrets.
And he wouldn’t put it past Kingston to do something irrational if he found out she was a wisp.
And without Lorcan’s power sharing, she couldn’t do anything about it, either.
“Kierse?” he asked, his eyes imploring.
But if she wanted to learn, she had to put her nerves aside.
“It’s fine,” she said, pressing a kiss to his lips. “I can do this. And you’re itching to read something.”
It was a testament to how much he must have wanted to recharge that he finally nodded, giving her space. His jaw was still clenched as he said, “I’ll get a book and come back. If you harm a single hair on her head—”
“Yes, yes, threaten me all you like, but I get results.”
He glanced over his shoulder once with a creased brow as he headed out of the room, leaving her alone with his mentor.
“We probably only have a few minutes,” Kingston said with an eyeroll. “I’ve never seen anyone else read like him. It’s as if he skims the page, commits it to memory, and is turning the page by the time most people would have been on the first paragraph.”
Kierse had seen him do that too many times to disagree. She shook out her jittery hands, keeping them away from checking her ears on reflex. “And what’s the real reason that you wanted him gone?”
“Because he’s going to be judgy.”
Kierse let her hands drop. “He is trying to be a little less judgy.”
“Is he? That doesn’t sound like him,” Kingston said with a wave of his hand.
“Now, let’s get into this. The reason we walked all over town first was to familiarize you with different areas of the city.
You needed to be able to visualize different locations to the best of your knowledge.
If we were in New York, I think you’d have no trouble at that part. ”
No. She knew New York like the back of her hand. The city was a road map of boroughs and niche areas and gangs and monster havens. It was all crisscrossed across her mind via the subway and a map of safe areas to walk through.
“The reason you need that visual cue is because you cannot portal somewhere you have not been before. It’s a good way to get split in two.”
Kierse grimaced. “Got it. No portaling places I’ve never been.”
“If you could even manage it,” he said with a shrug. “Half of portaling is being able to see where you’re going. I like to think of it like painting. Have you ever painted before?”
“By choice?”
He laughed jovially. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Not a lot of time for that on the streets.”
“I suspect not. Well, I was raised in the aristocracy. My father was a politician and a soldier, but he enjoyed artwork. He hired and kept on many artists as their patron when I was young, and many of them taught me how to paint. It became a passion of my own, which is why when my magic came in…” He gestured to the walls.
“This happened. I still dabble, but I must admit my talent should be something extraordinary after hundreds of years of lessons. I am never satisfied.”
“As with most things,” she said softly.
The grief of trying to be good at something for hundreds of years and still feeling inadequate was palpable in the room.
“Anyway, I’m good enough to explain to you how this applies to portals.” Kingston stepped away from her to an open section of hardwood floors. “You’ll want to have a nice, empty space, and you’ll want to open the other side of the portal to another nice, open space.”
“This much Graves explained.”
“Good. Then he remembers something. But it’s in the finesse of what happens next that he wouldn’t understand without the power. You want to imagine exactly where you’re going. And when I was first learning portals, I would literally take my hand out and paint a door.”
“A door?”
“Just a door.”
Kingston demonstrated easily by holding his hand out like he had a paintbrush and sketching a door in the middle of the room. It glowed gold around the edges and was firm and hard and empty. Just a blank space in the middle of the room. A door to nowhere.
“Try it. Try it.”
Kierse shot him a disbelieving look as she got into her own space and held her hand out. She’d never held a paintbrush before, but she understood the concept. And then she bent down and tried to concentrate on making a perfectly fake door appear out of nowhere.
It did not. Of course.
“Uh…” she said.
“That’s all right. It’s your first try.”
Kierse tried again, thinking of it as a pencil, but it was Gen who was the artist. She could sketch incredible things in her notebook. Kierse could barely draw stick figures on a good day.
“I didn’t expect you to get it right away,” Kingston told her easily. “Think on that and let’s come back to it. We need to think on filling the space we created.”
Kierse frowned. “And if I created no space?”
“Take it as a visualization theory.”
“Theory. Okay.”
Because she sucked.
“This might be difficult for you because you’ve never had to truly stretch your powers.
With immunity, it is entirely passive. There are ways to use immunity to give it to other people and the like, but it will feel like it’s always on.
This is a new muscle you have to warm up and stretch.
We don’t want to overexert ourselves in the beginning or we’ll pull a hamstring, understand? ”
“There were some mixed metaphors in there,” Graves said as he appeared back in the room.
“Alas, I am not knowledge,” Kingston said with a wave of his fake paintbrush.
“Now, think of somewhere you have been, somewhere close. The next room perhaps, the loo, the park across the street. Anywhere near enough that you wouldn’t have to stretch yourself to draw it.
Then I want you to focus your magical intent and paint that image into your doorway. ”
Graves took a seat on a chair, crossed his leg at the ankle across his knee, and pulled out a brown leather book. His eyes scanned the pages as Kierse settled in to do as Kingston ordered.
She could imagine the park across the street. She’d marveled over how much it reminded her of Central Park in its own way. She could probably paint a picture of it in her mind but in reality?
She tried. She tried all of the ways that Kingston suggested to do it. She tried until she had no more will or intent. Until her muscles ached and her powers drained and she felt like an unformed ball of clay that had been thrown onto a pottery wheel.
Something was happening inside of her because her magic reacted, but it certainly wasn’t a portal door.
“Let’s call it,” Graves said after Kierse collapsed onto the floor for the third time. “She’s drained.”
“Yes, well, we can keep working on it tomorrow,” Kingston said with a flourish. “Shall we go to the opera?”
“I have nothing to wear,” Kierse said from the floor.
“That won’t be a problem.”
Kierse glanced at Graves, who shrugged. “You can pickpocket unsuspecting opera patrons?”
She groaned. “Fine. You convinced me.”