“I want to go home.”
“Then take him home. Please. Something’s happened, and I need to know that someone who can communicate with him is watching that man.”
I stare at her in disbelief while they rush off, leaving me alone with Torin the God of Something or Other from Something or Other.
“Did you say something to offend them?” Torin asks. “Or was it merely the look on your face that did it?”
“No, they had an emergency. And…” I grit my teeth,despisingthe fact that I really do owe Imani. Like… couldn’t she have been a pal and forgotten that? I really think that would have been best, and now here I stand, coated in blood, with some dude who thinks he’s a god, and I find myself wishing that I hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning.
“Are you aware there is vermin on your shoulder?”
I reach for Kit and set my hand on her back. “She is not vermin.”
“Or is it dinner?”
I stare at this man in disbelief and decide that I will simply leave him here. Anyone who calls Kit a bad name is a monster.
Storming back inside, I head to Vinny’s empty office and hunt around for some clothes I can borrow while Torin the Great and Annoying God of Something or Other trails after me, head on a swivel.
“The things in this building are very strange.”
“Not as strange as you are,” I inform him as I open a cupboard and find Vinny’s spare clothes. “Wait here. I’m going to go change my clothes because you had to kill the creature on top of me.”
“You should be praising me for saving your life.”
“Uh… huh.”
I head over to the restroom where there’s a shower. I make it quick, not wanting to spend more time here than I have to or someone will force me to do something else horrible. I bag up the bloody clothes, put on the loose but clean ones, and hurry to Imani’s office where I leave the bag on her desk as a present for her. Then I step into the hallway and see a man I don’t know well, but I am aware that he’s a low-level mage. I purposely bump into him and feel magic tingling up my arms.
Honestly, I simply want to test whether or not I can still understand Torin if I switch to a new magic. Some knowledge-based magic doesn’t leave since I technically “gained” the knowledge while using it, even once the magic is gone. So did the woman’s magic make it so I’ll continue to possess that knowledge? Or is it a type of magic I can only use after borrowing it?
A crash makes me hurry up, so I rush over to Vinny’s office where I narrowly dodge the desk phone being flung through the open doorway. Since I tilted my head to the side, it whips past me and slams into the wall out in the hallway.
“I have slain that annoyance. You are welcome.”
“You’ve slain thedeskphone?” Sadly, I can still understand the man, telling me that the magic I’d momentarily borrowed is a permanent fixture… guess I can’t complain too much about that. Being able to understand other languages could come in handy… besides right now.
Because not dealing with this man would be most desirable.
“I regret everything,” I declare.
“That’s the spirit,” Torin says as he charges off without me. When he realizes I’m not coming, he claps his hands like I’m a dog, and I grudgingly follow him.
When we step outside the building, he looks to the left and then to the right. Then his head cranks back while he looks up at a skyscraper a bit of a distance from us.
“Who erected such a large structure?”
“I didn’t ask.”
His eyes narrow as he takes it all in. “Why is everything so tall?”
“So we can cram more buildings next to each other.”
“This is very suspicious. I feel like you are compensating for something if you need your building to be that tall.”
“That’s definitely it.”
He nods approvingly while he looks around some more as though everything he’s seeing is magical, and we’re not even close to the main part of the city.
