At the sixth teaspoonful of sugar, Rui lost her restraint. “You know that’s going to kill you someday, right? I bet all that sugar is making your migraines worse.”
“I didn’t think you cared, Rui. I’m touched,” Zizi said, half-sarcastic. He smiled and dropped another spoonful of sugar into his coffee to make a silly point.
“I merely tolerate you,” she said. “Now show me the spell you need tested.”
Zizi’s lips twitched with amusement. “So tiny, and yet so bossy.”
Rolling her eyes, Rui followed him to the coat closet in the hallway. Inside, there was a leather trench with fancy silver epaulets, a leopard-print faux-fur midi coat, a garish orange poncho, and a plain black jacket that looked completely out of place. There wasn’t much room, and they were standing close enough to touch.
Something fluttered in Rui’s stomach, catching her off guard. Maybe she needed food. Maybe she needed a nap. Groaning inwardly, she grabbed the thing in her stomach by its neck and wrung it dead.
Zizi nudged a pair of spiked boots aside and raised his right leg a few inches from the ground. His slipper fell off.
Rui sighed. “Why isn’t the button up here so we can press it with our fingers like normal people?”
“Because it is asecretbutton,” Zizi replied with a sideways glance and a lifted brow. “And because I am not, by any measure, a normal person.”
Deliberately, he brought his big toe to the bottom corner of the closet and pushed a button so camouflaged that Rui wouldn’t have known it was there if she hadn’t witnessed this ridiculous act of his so many times before.
Something whirred like gears locking into place. The back wall slid open.
A large room with softly lit panels on the walls revealed itself. Scores of rectangular yellow paper hung down from the ceiling like leaves on a weeping willow. Talismans. Some had red calligraphy already written on them—completed spells—while others were still blank. The dimness of the room concealed several large pillows and a fluffy blanket, which Rui knew were in the corner.
This was Zizi’s spell lab. It was so different from the spell labs at the Academy.Thoselooked more like the science laboratories in a mundane school.
Humming a pop song from the previous decade, Zizi retrieved his slipper and flip-flopped in. He meandered around, plucking a few talismans like they were ripe fruits.
He spread them out like a deck of cards on the single glass table in the corner of the room. “May I interest you in some spells? Standard stuff—barrier spells, binding spells—the usual incantations will do. I made a few extra the other day. Thought it might come in handy for you.”
“Are they free?”
He gave her a little bow. “For you? Absolutely.”
Rui swiped the stack off the table just as her phone began to buzz. She ignored it and focused on her haul, carefully folding the papers in half before sliding them into her pocket. Talismans were nifty little things to have around, and having fresh ones meant she didn’t have to go through the trouble of making them herself or signing them out from the Academy’s spell labs. Besides, she wasn’t very good at calligraphy, and skillful penmanship was the difference between an effective spell and a total dud.
“Take a look at this,” Zizi said, showing her another talisman. “It’s a spell that separates a Revenant’s spiritual energy from its form for a short period of time, rendering it completely vulnerable. I finally finished it last night. If it works, it might be my best work yet.”
Rui ran a finger down the talisman. She didn’t recognize the complicated characters written on it. Most of the spells she tested were devised by Zizi. The unorthodox way he used magic befuddled her. He’d beenexperimenting with it since he was a young child, and the trauma of his magic manifesting too early in life had resulted in his unusual eyes. Sometimes he went too far in his experiments, and they triggered migraines that consumed him for days, leaving him curled up on the floor in the dark.
Once, Rui found him lying motionless in the rear courtyard. Eyelids fluttering, blue irises so dark they were almost black, as if he were trapped between worlds, unable to crawl his way out. She had never felt fear the way she had in that moment, and she was close to tears when he finally roused.
“So? What do you think?” Zizi was watching her carefully with a smug, expectant look. He wanted to be praised.
Rui wasn’t good at giving praise. “Is that why you were snoozing earlier?” she asked instead. “Because you stayed up all night again?”
“That was a beauty nap.”
“I guess you do need one.”
“You wound me,” Zizi said, a hand on his chest.
Rui shot him a scathing side-eye. He didn’t look wounded at all. He was so melodramatic it was hard to take him seriously sometimes.
“Is it even possible to separate a Revenant’s yinqi from its body?” she asked. As far as she knew, yinqi existed throughout a typical Revenant’s body, keeping it alive. There wasn’t a concentration of it in one spot, and she’d never heard of a method that could pull all of it out.
“That’s what you’re going to find out,” Zizi said. “This is the spell I need tested. Be careful when you cast it. Theoretically, if there’s contact between two bodies, the spiritual energy may transfer.”
Rui’s phone buzzed again. Who could be calling her?
