Chapter 10 #3
“So what does this mean?” I asked, feeling unsettled both by the idea that we’d been wrong about my magic for years and about the fact that I was apparently stronger than I’d thought—and definitely stronger than I was comfortable with.
Mason shrugged. “I still think you’re a life caster,” he said. “One who had to learn death magic for survival—meaning that your natural magic isn’t that, even if you have an affinity for the dichotomy.”
“But why would I instinctively use death magic to protect myself?” I asked.
To my surprise, it was Vi who answered. “I mean, you can’t very well use life magic to do it,” she said. “What would you do, make our ass—sorry,” she said to Mason, her cheeks coloring. “Our mean uncle feel better to stop him?” She shook her head. “Of course you’d pull the opposite.”
“What if it’s not pulling, but pushing?” Jackson asked. He’d set his laptop aside and was leaning forward on his knees.
“What do you mean, Jax?” Mason asked. I liked the fact that Mason never dismissed suggestions or questions from either Jackson or me—even if he sometimes seemed to think we should already know the answers.
“Well, like, I lashed out with death magic when I got upset or whatever,” he said, cheeks turning an even darker shade of brown.
“And it feels kinda like magic tentacles or something. Going outward. What if using the other side is like going the other direction? Instead of coming from the inside, it’s like going to the outside? ”
All three of us stared at him, jumping a little when Grace banged something against the metal hinge of her pack-and-play.
Mason walked over and reached down, letting her tug on his fingers, at least until she put one in her mouth.
“No, Grace,” he told her, gently extracting his hand. “No biting people.”
I thought about what Jackson had said. There was definitely power inside me—a reservoir that I could draw on when I needed to.
But did the actual type of power come from there, too?
It had always felt like lashing out with power to me.
“I—don’t know if that’s right,” I admitted.
“It’s hard to tell, though.” I thought about it.
“I—I was working on draining flowers,” I began.
“And that felt like pulling the magic from the flowers out of them. But when I—” I paused momentarily, trying to find the right way to say it without actually saying that I’d killed people in front of Jackson.
“When I had to defend myself,” I said, settling on something more neutral.
“It felt like lashing out with everything I had.”
“Everything?” Jackson asked, frowning.
I nodded.
“That’s not right,” he said to Mason. “If he’s a death witch, it shouldn’t drain everything, right, Uncle Mace?”
There was a slight furrow to Mason’s brow. “I wouldn’t think so,” he answered, studying me. “Usually your own affinity feels fairly easy.”
It was my turn to frown, because magic had always felt a bit difficult to me. I’d assumed that I just wasn’t as strong a witch—something that people kept telling me, over and over, was simply wrong.
“What would something life-magic-y be?” Vi asked. “If Rayn’s only ever done death magic, what could he try to see if it works better?”
Mason thought about this, his eyes moving slightly as though he were reading through a book or codex in his mind. He might well have been, given the encyclopedic nature of his knowledge about magic.
“What about a simple energy boost?” he asked me.
I looked at him blankly. “I don’t know how to do that,” I told him.
Mason bared his upper and lower fangs at me in a grin. “I do.”
I stared at Victor, who continued grooming himself. I tried willing him to stop.
He kept rubbing at his ear.
I sighed, and he looked up at me for a few seconds, then went back to his ears.
“What’s wrong?” Raj asked from over near the stove.
He’d gotten off work early, and had offered to make me dinner.
Raj was a much, much better cook than I was, so I was more than happy to let him feed us.
I’d taken advantage of the opportunity to try to exercise my new-found life casting magic on Victor to see if it worked any better than necromancy.
So far, it wasn’t. Necromancy didn’t really seem to be doing anything, either, which was making me wonder if my original supposed communication with the undead rat had been real or simply a coincidence of his behavior and my failed attempts.
“I’m trying to communicate with him,” I told Raj. “And it doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Are you trying death magic or life magic?” he asked. I’d already explained to him that Mason seemed to have confirmed that I was, in fact, a life caster rather than a death witch, despite the fact that most of the magic I’d done—dreamwalking aside—was death magic.
“Both,” I replied glumly.
“Ah,” came his reply. A sizzle came from the pan as he pushed a bunch of onions into hot oil, and the smell immediately filled the kitchen.
Victor lifted his pointy little half-whiskered nose into the air, sniffing.
“He can smell that,” I said softly.
Raj glanced over. “I mean, onions are pretty pungent,” he remarked.
“Yeah, but you’re alive,” I pointed out. “And his nose is like half-decayed.”
Raj’s face flickered through an expression that I’d come to recognize as him trying to think something through that he found either confusing or, as was more likely the case in this instance, disturbing. “Huh,” was what he said. “Do you—” He stopped, not finishing the question.
“Do I what?” I asked.
His gaze was focused down on the onions as he stirred them in the pot, then added several spoons-full of garlic from a jar.
He’d told me once that fresh was better, but while he was happy to chop onions, mincing garlic was annoyingly tedious and he was too lazy most of the time.
“Well,” he said, and he was drawing out the words, thinking as he spoke.
“Life-casting is supposed to give life, or restore it, right?”
“That’s what Mason said,” I replied. I certainly didn’t know very much about it, although Mason had promised to bring me some books.
“Do you think you’re… fixing him?” he asked.
I looked down at Victor, a little alarmed at the idea that his resurrection might be a long-term process that would restore him to actual life. What would it mean if I were? Resurrecting something and actually restoring it to full life wasn’t something you wanted to do by accident.
But I’d raised Victor by accident—and I was absolutely terrified that I might do it again. And if Victor was… was healing the right word? If his physical body was somehow being restored…
I shuddered.
“Why would that be a bad thing?” Raj asked, reading my response correctly despite the fact that I hadn’t said a word.
“Because it would mean that I have even less control over my magic than I thought,” I answered, not taking my eyes off Victor, who was now grooming his dilapidated tail.
“Accidentally resurrecting a rat is bad enough,” I continued.
“But if I’m somehow doing something else to him… ” I shuddered again.
“Wouldn’t that just mean you’re stronger than you thought?” Raj asked, adding peppers to the onions and garlic.
I made a small noise in the back of my throat, and Victor looked up at me. “It would mean that I’m not controlling my magic,” I whispered. “And that’s dangerous.”
Raj was quiet for a few moments, stirring. Then he added a package of ground beef, the fat sizzling as it hit the pan.
Victor sniffed at the air again, then looked up at me with what seemed to be an imploring expression on his tiny little rat face.
“Is life casting particularly dangerous?” Raj asked me when I got up and took a spoon, scooping out a tiny piece of the meat. “That’s not cooked.”
“Victor wants it,” I told him.
He glanced over at the rat, who was still watching me with beady black eyes that I couldn’t remember whether they’d been more cloudy two days ago or not. “Victor… wants it?” Raj repeated.
I looked helplessly at him with absolutely no idea how to explain to him how I knew that.
“I mean, go ahead,” Raj told me, nodding at the undead rat.
I took the spoon over, blowing on it a couple times so that it wouldn’t burn him—why, I don’t know, since as far as I knew he didn’t have nerve endings left in his paws, but I guess he could still smell, so maybe he did.
I held it out, and Victor came right up to it, then bent and took the small piece of ground beef in his mouth.
He backed up a few paces, then sat back and gripped it with both paws, chewing on it.
“So he eats now?” Raj asked.
“I guess so,” was all I could think to say, but worry was a ball of dread in my stomach. If I’d done this to Victor, what else might I do without knowing it? What worse would I do?