I take the extra portion out of my dinner, not his. I figure I can spend at least that much wherever I want it. Better that my stomach occasionally gurgles than having to watch the mutt’s ribs stick out as it wastes away.
I’m just folding the potato and beans into the tortillas with a sprinkling of cheese when Cole comes in. He drops his briefcase by the door and runs his hand through his hair with a sigh.
Because he can’t help analyzing everything I do, he frowns when I set our plates on the old formica table. “Are you sure you’re eating enough?”
I waggle my glass at him. “I stopped growing four years ago. I’m good.”
“You’re skinny.”
I roll my eyes. “It runs in the family, in case you didn’t notice.”
He huffs, but we’ve had this argument before. We both know that we can’t afford a ton more food anyway.
The Luminary administration might have been obligated to take me on as a student when they hired my guardian to teach there, but they only gave a discount on the tuition, not a free ride. Cole hands more than half his paycheck right back to those dicks.
It was worse in my mid-teens. I’d grab snacks in the cafeteria between classes and heap my plate at lunch, and still have my stomach gnawing on itself by midnight. I’d have eaten two lunches if I hadn’t noticed the other students eyeing the size of my plate as it was, probably speculating about the starving scholarship student.
At least these days, any lingering hunger is never more than a dull pang.
When we’re done, I wash the dishes and Cole dries. As he’s putting the plates away, he glances over at me. “You’ve got that demonstration coming up for transmutation class, don’t you? Do you want?—”
I hold up my hands. “If I need help, I know who to ask. It’s coming along fine. I’m going to go practice right now.”
I say that because I know he won’t follow me into my basement bedroom if he thinks I need to concentrate on schoolwork. And I do need to concentrate.
But after I close the door behind me, I don’t reach for the wooden figurine I’m using for the demonstration. I open my closet and dig out the thin silver sword I keep tucked in a bag in the back.
Positioning myself at one end of the room, I focus on the forms I learned long ago and the new ones Jesse’s taught me.
I am going to make a difference to the world someday, every bit as much as Cole made a difference to my life. He just can’t know about it until I’m already on my way.
Thirteen
Elodie
Ipeer across the street at the first building in Other Elodie’s secret photos that I’ve been able to identify, thanks to reverse image search and the fraction of a sign visible at one angle. At first glance, it seems likely to give me more questions than answers.
It’s hard to imagine Other Elodie caught alive or dead at this dingy strip mall. It sits almost perfectly at the border where the increasingly scattered lucent presence—as poorer and poorer families take whatever homes they can get—gives way to purely drab neighborhoods.
Not that the drab residents can tell the difference. They wander blithely in and out of the diner with its MS Paint menu plastered to the window, the discount shoe shop, the off-off-brand clothing store that looks like it’d time-traveled from the eighties, and the laundromat that might make clothes dirtierrather than cleaner. Not one shoots a glance toward the magical drug deals happening around the corner.
To be fair, it takes me about a half hour to pick up on the drug dealing myself. The guy standing by the corner of the laundromat at the end of the strip taps at his phone and periodically gazes around the parking lot as if he’s waiting for a friend. Nothing so strange about that.
What is strange is that when I meandered along the strip to take a closer look at the offerings, I picked up on a tickle of concentrated ephemera around him.
He’s wrapped in some kind of spell.
It doesn’t affect me, because he doesn’t want to repel fellow lucents who might be his customers. But I notice that whenever any of the drab pedestrians amble close to him, they veer away across the parking lot rather than making it all the way to the corner. No one parks their car around that side of the strip.
Subtle, but obvious if you know what magic looks like.
I can’t say I have any direct experience with the drug trade, magical or otherwise, but the dealer isn’t subtle about his actual business since he must assume no lucents other than his customers are likely to be hanging around here. While I watch him in surreptitious peeks over my own phone, a couple of people approach, hand over a ball of cash in exchange for a white plastic box that fits in their palm, and immediately walk away.
The second customer I follow at a discreet distance. Once she’s a few blocks away, she pops something from the box into her mouth. A dreamy smile spreads across her face.
I return to the strip mall with an unsettled squirm of my gut, but nothing about the place seems to fit with the notes I copied over from the secret tablet to Other Elodie’s phone. None of the business names match the possible initials, and none of the phrases in her personal shorthand seem to relate to them either.
I have no idea why my doppelganger took an interest in this place. From things my Salvatore told me, I know there are posher venues for the lucent upper class to satisfy their… habits.
