Chapter
One
Pain is a fire.
That’s true for all of the people, some of the time. If you’ve never had to stand in that fire, be patient: Your turn is coming.
Whether the pain is physical or purely mental doesn’t really matter—it turns out that your brain reacts to it the same way, lighting up many of the same centers of perception. Some brainy types in lab coats proved that one fairly recently. The suffering from a broken heart is similar to that from a gunshot wound, in terms of how our minds react over the long term.
It all hurts.
When you have to live with that hurt, with that pain, when there’s no way to turn it off or get away from it, you start to make adjustments. Your choices in how you deal with your pain determine the course of your recovery. That’s why people who go through a difficult ordeal sometimes come out stronger, and sometimes they come out broken—but they always come out…
Changed.
Pain is a fire.
I opened my eyes so I could stop seeing Murphy’s cold, dead face.
Her lips, turning blue.
“Murph?” I mumbled, looking around.
But I was alone.
I checked my windup Mickey Mouse alarm clock. Three thirty a.m.That meant I had slept fifteen minutes longer than I had the night before. Almost one hour and thirty minutes of rest.
Progress.
It had been somewhere around three weeks since Karrin Murphy died and a big bite of the city got stomped flat. Three weeks since Chicago had lost tens of thousands of innocent lives, seen a million people displaced from their homes, and had its infrastructure wrecked by an EMP—an energetic magical pulse. Three weeks since I had seen young wizards I had helped train, friends, die before their enemies. Three weeks since I had been cast out from the White Council of Wizardry entirely.
Three weeks since the battle with Ethniu had announced to an entire metroplex of poor innocent normies that the things under the bed and hiding in the closet weren’t just in their imaginations anymore.
The alarm was set for five a.m. Which gave me about ninety minutes of my own time when no one with a kind, concerned expression was watching me.
Alone time.
I let the pain have me. Replayed old memories of those who were gone. Relived the most hideous moments of the battle, and of battles past.
I don’t win them all.
I cried. I cried and I screamed into my pillow until my stomach muscles were sore and my throat ached. In the snug, lonely little chamber in the basement of the castle, with stone walls a foot thick, no one was going to hear me.
That used up maybe thirty minutes. Then I sort of sank into a stupor, staring while tears came steadily.
When the alarm rang, I started putting myself back together as best I could. I got up and washed my face and brushed my teeth. I went through a stretching routine that the ignorant would call yoga. I made the bed.
I still had a broken arm. The gunshot wound in my calf had closed and healed up nicely. My ankle wasn’t swollen anymore. Those didn’t really trouble me. None of the physical injuries did.
The real pain was all in my head.
That’s why the routine was important. Fires are all chaos. Putting them out requires the imposition of order, and getting your head backinto order means routine. I didn’t feel like doing any of the standard morning things—mostly I wanted to lie there and hurt. But that wasn’t the same thing as healing.
There would be time to let myself bleed again tomorrow.
And there were people who needed me.
So I followed the routine, trusting that the pain would slowly grow less. It hadn’t, that I could tell, but it would.
