“Which would you rather have,” Hiram mused, passing around beers, “our rains and winds or an earthquake, or the heat wave they’re having in the south?”
“That’s a horrible game,” Gilli said, appalled. “I’d rather everything was normal.”
“Okay,” Hiram said, rolling his eyes. “But if youhadto choose?”
“Our rains,” Leah said. “At least we can stay inside.”
“I’d rather have the heat,” Ezra said. “I’m sick of the gray. And this means natural magic is weirdeverywhere.”
Hiram, who was from the Taro Islands, nodded. “My parents wrote that refugees stopped by on their way to Tzorybium from even farther west. From a city now completely uninhabitable.”
The conversation got under my skin, and I was still uneasy when Daziel and I arrived home a few hours later. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” I said. “How things are going wrong not just here but everywhere.”
“Yeah.” Daziel looked distressed by my depression and changed the subject abruptly. “How’s the spell going?”
I groaned. “We’re making progress—yesterday, we inched the magic through three-quarters of the spell. But we’re low on neshem. The professor is trying to get more, but until then, we might not be able to test more iterations.”
“If you need magic, you can have some of mine.”
I jerked my head up. “What? You can…give it to me?”
He looked blasé, as though he hadn’t just offered something unheard of. “In theory.” Light gathered around his fingers. “Hold your hands out.”
I did, and he tried to hand a golden bundle to me. It dissolved into my skin, and I yelped at the shock.
“Sorry.” Daziel looked equally surprised. “Uh…let me try a different way.”
We tried for hours, until we figured out how he could hand hismagic to me, though we couldn’t figure out how to contain it. I practiced directing it into small spells around the apartment.You could make a killing off this on the black market, I almost said, except that was the thing, wasn’t it: Humans had made a killing, of shedim, off this thousands of years ago. “Thank you for trusting me with this,” I said.
He looked up, our gazes connecting. There was an urgency in the way he held himself and in his voice, as though he wanted to make sure he conveyed enough gravity. “I trust you.”
“I trust you too,” I said, surprised by his intensity.
~~~
The next day, ontoo little sleep but not minding, I made my way through my language classes and Household Magic. After weeks of rain, the weather today was bizarrely good, the sky as blue as a summer day, the temperature uncomfortably warm. We passed people in shorts, having unseasonable picnics. Startlingly large butterflies with jewel-bright wings fluttered about, safe without their biggest predator.
At three, I headed to the Keep. Though we had to re-carve charaktêres and rearrange the fragments each time we tried a new spell, though it was exhausting and tedious, I was still excited by each attempt.
I’d never worked so closely with anyone as I now did with Yael and Gidon and Stefan. Even among my new friends at the Lyceum, I’d never had peers who cared about precisely the same thing as I did. It filled a gap I hadn’t known existed, the ability to speak the same language about a passion.
“Here’s my latest,” Gidon said as I joined the other three. Bynow our group had become familiar: Yael’s intensity and leadership; Stefan constantly tossing whatever round thing was at hand in the air; the way Gidon, lanky and still growing, always had small pieces of fruit and nuts for snacking. “We switch the eighth and ninth paragraphs, where the magic got stuck last time, and add a line describing texture.”
“It’s a good idea,” Yael said, “but we don’t have enough neshem.”
I steeled myself. “Daziel offered to let us use some of his magic.”
Yael blinked. “How?”
“He’ll come here, and we’ve figured out how to transfer it to me, and I’ll direct it into the spell.”
Stefan started laughing from his prone position on the floor. “That isridiculous. You figured out how to take a demon’s magic out of him?What?”
Yael reacted more calmly, but I caught a hint of a frown. “Is it legal?”
Binding shedim wasn’t legal. Accepting freely given magic? “I don’t see why not.”
“I’m down,” Stefan said. “I’m so tired.”
