He grunted.
“Something like that,” he muttered.
Both of our eyes had returned to our files when he spoke again.
“You asked me before what I’d do without you?”
My ears pricked. I glanced over. “With your overloads, you mean?”
He nodded, then gestured around, his eyes still mostly on the text in his lap. “This is basically it, sweetheart,” he said.
Something in him using that word brought a disturbing shiver down my spine.
He went on after a pause.
“My father made arrangements with the headmaster prior to the start of term. And, as you pointed out,” he addeddryly. “The administration can’t exactly refuse when my father makes a personal request. My family still funds a massive endowment here. We also technically own the land, and most of the buildings, including Malcroix Mansion. So yes, mongrel, I have the only key to this particular compartment. I can use it whenever I want… for whatever I want. No one else is allowed in here.”
“So why not use it?” I asked, puzzled. “Why make this deal with me?”
His eyes flickered in my direction. So did the eyes of his dragon.
A faint tightness came to his mouth as he studied my face.
“I told you why,” he said, his voice patient, if the slightest bit terse. “It doesn’t work as well. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all.”
I frowned. “Whywouldn’tit work, though? Offloading magic is offloading magic, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly, no.”
I thought he would say more about that, but he didn’t.
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” I prodded.
He looked up with a put-upon, impatient exhale.
“I meant precisely what I said. It doesn’t exactly work that way.” His eyes returned to the pages in his lap. “I hadn’t fully realized it myself, to be honest. Not until I used you to do it. My magic seems to want to…” He hesitated.“…hit upagainst something. It wants an opposing force. Just expelling it doesn’t really satisfy it. Andonlydoing that here, with nothing to push back, was satisfying it less and less as time went on.”
I glanced at him, quirking an eyebrow.
He wouldn’t return my gaze.
“Huh,” I said only.
Before I could add to that in any way, he changed the subject.
“Oh. I nearly forgot. I have something for you.” His voice switched back to brusque. “I meant to give it to you this morning, but I’d left it in my room.”
He handed over a worn, leather-bound book with a soft cover.
Something about the lavender and green patterns, the vines and flowers etched into the leather on both sides and the spine, struck at something deep inside me. My hands trembled where I held the book in my lap. I remembered this.
Howdid I remember it?
Sunlight flashed behind my eyes.
My mother’s back blocked part of it, where she sat at a painted, sky-blue table, in a fenced backyard in Southern California. The sound of waves crashing filled my ears, and sea gulls’ arguing drifted through the bamboo wall that separated us from a brick path down to the ocean. My mother bent over the notebook with a funny pen that had a green feather at the end, her fingers tracing glass beads embedded in the table’s sides.
A green crystal hung from a bronze chain around her neck. It caught glints of sunlight, moving with the motion of her writing hand.
