Viv flicked a glance at Tandri, who stared back with a level expression.
“Still doesn’t change things,” she said. Her battered strongbox sat to the side, where they must have placed it while she slept. She reached over with one huge hand and dragged it closer. Viv took the key from around her neck and unlocked it, flipping back the lid. Maybe seven sovereigns, a handful of silver, and a scattering of copper bits lay within. The platinum was long gone.
“I saved foryears,” she said grimly. “Bounties. Blood work. Most of it’s gone, now.” She glared balefully. “As gone as the shop and everything else. There’s almost nothing left. Less than what I started with, byleagues.”
She looked at Tandri, who winced at her tone of voice. “What did you call it…Arcane Reciprocity?Well,here it is, this is the backlash.” She felt her teeth bared, her fangs huge in her jaw, her burnt and barely healing skin tight over her skull, her brain throbbing.
A part of her understood that she was hurting them, wounding these people who were friends. That some older, crueler self was emerging, crawling from the wreckage of who she thought she had become. That newly ruined part of her cried out for her to stop, to let it be for now, but the crueler self was ascendant, its opponent too weakened and diminished to intervene.
“It’s fuckinggone,” she snarled. “I spent my chance, and I can’t earn it back.” She held Tandri’s gaze and deliberately said, “This is the part where I do what desperate people do. This is the part whereIflee.”
Tandri jerked as if struck.
Savage satisfaction burned through Viv, followed by a wave of nausea.
“Give it time,” said Cal, in his gritty, patient voice.
“What fucking difference would that make?” she roared.
In the next moment, Viv slumped, staring down at her hands, limp in her lap. “You should go,” she whispered hoarsely.
She heard him quietly rise and leave.
For a while, she thought Tandri had left, too, but then Viv felt her draw near, crouch in front of her, and stroke her burned cheek.
Tandri’s forehead touched hers, an echo of days ago. “Do you remember what you said, in the street? After the fire?” she murmured, her breath light on Viv’s nose and lips.
“No,” she lied.
“You said, ‘At least we didn’t lose everything.’”
Tandri paused.
“And I said you risked too much for the things you saved,” she continued.
Another, longer pause, her breathing slow and sweet.
“But I knew what you really meant.”
Viv didn’t notice her own tears until Tandri’s lips brushed her damp cheek.
She opened her eyes and stared into Tandri’s, so close to her own.
The woman held her gaze steadily, face composed, but eyes wet.
Viv felt a warm weight in her center, and for a moment, they were enclosed again in that bubble of calm rightness they’d once shared.
Then the savage, older Viv clawed her way to the fore, whispering “It’s what she is. You’ve felt this before. She keeps it hooded like a lantern until she needs it, and then she lets it loose, and you fall under her spell.”
But even as that bleak thought spread through her mind like the spectral flame, it evaporated just as swiftly in the light of dawn.
Tandri’s warm, pulsing aura, the one that had touched her a few fleeting times, was absent.
There was no arcana, no force, no trick.
No magic to it, at all.
There never had been. Not even once.
