I hummed. “Yeah, I could see that. But you have magic.” I pointed my water at her before twisting the lid off and taking a sip. “Can’t you just turn them into a toad if any of them tried to, you know, eat you?”
“Uh… I guess.” Tabby wrapped her hands around her bottle of water, not opening it, her fingers rubbing up and down the condensation coming off the sides of it. “I mean, if we knew how.”
My brows shot up. “What do you mean know how? Don’t you?”
“I mean, sure, I know how… theoretically.” Tabby grimaced, tapping the lid of her water bottle.
“I don’t understand.”
Tabby sighed. “Most witches know basic spells. Charms. Transmogrification. Glamours. Potion making. The usual.” She paused, her eyes lifting to mine a kind of despair in her mismatched eyes. “Then there are others… like me. Who focus more on the academic side of things.”
“What does that mean?” I cocked my head to the side.
Her voice was small. So small that I barely could make out her words even with my super hearing. “I can’t do magic.”
“Oh. Oh! Tabby!” I blinked, realizing what that meant. “Why would you risk coming to the academy if you can’t do magic? You can’t even defend yourself.”
Tabby’s face changed, a fierce look of determination taking over. “Hey, I’m as much a witch as any of the others. My family’s line goes back for hundreds of years. My ancestors were sorcerers to kings and queens. So what if I don’t have any of that flashy magic?”
She set her water aside as she opened her bag and started pulling out notebooks and a large tome. “I have something better. Intellect.”
“Oh, really?” Trying to sound enthusiastic but mentally concocting a plan to keep an eye on the witch while she was at the academy. Could I get a hunter to shadow her?
I worried about telling my parents. They might do something drastic like refusing to let witches attend the academy that didn’t have actual physical magic. And I couldn’t do that to Tabby. Not when she was helping me figure out my own powers.
“So…” Tabby placed the thick tome on the coffee table in front of her.
Its cover was made of an aged leather, the spine laced up with some kind of rubbery looking string. There were words written on the front at some point but they had worn off long ago.
Tabby flicked through the pages until she landed on the one she wanted and then pulling open her notebook. “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you.”
“Me? Oh, yeah. Okay. What do you want to know?” I crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in my chair.
Staring at me like she was some kind of therapist and I was her patient. I supposed in a way I was. If I couldn’t get my powers under control that could be my future. Locked away in a padded room where I couldn’t accidentally hurt anyone.
Taking a deep breath to remind myself that it wasn’t going to happen. That was why Tabby was here, I prepared myself for her questions.
Tabby peered down at her notebook, twirling a pen between her fingers. “Let’s start at the beginning. When were you born?”
“You want to know my birthday?” My lips twisted to the side. Did that really matter?
“It doesn’t need to be the exact date,” Tabby clarified, quickly. “How old are you will suffice?”
Then why didn’t she say that in the first place?
“I’m twenty-five.”
Tabby scribbled in her notebook. “And was it a normal pregnancy?”
My lips pursed. What the fuck? “Uh… I’ve never been pregnant.”
Tabby’s eyes flicked up to mine. “I meant, your mom.”
“Oh,” I said then shrugged. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“You never talked about it?”
I shrugged a shoulder again. “It never came up.”
