Not old enough to be a student in the years Lilibetwas here, she thought, in a great rush of both relief and disappointment. Reliefthat he probably wasn’t. Disappointment that the mystery had just deepened.
Though, of course, there was every chance he was lying.
Even if it did ring so true she momentarily didn’t know what to say about it.
He actually looked like someone who had been born in the seventies, in the strangest way.Maybe because of the hair, she thought—that thick shaggy mess, the slightly too long sideburns. Or the clothes—so close to something that wasn’t quite this generation. Or the last even.
He favored striped jerseys.
Those too-long-for-his-legs jeans.
He could have starred in a movie about teens getting killed in a summer camp, set in America. In fact, for a second she almost asked him if he had been born there, instead of here. If the accent was an affectation, too.
But she was on a roll now of getting him to reveal things.
And she couldn’t let that go right away. “You realize that’s still incredibly old,” she said as lightly as she could. Almost a scornful tease, because scornful teasing seemed to work the best.
Though it still surprised her when it got him.
He looked briefly offended. “Yes, but to be fair I slept for a good amount of that time. When things got—” he started to say, before he realized, and looked furious at himself, and cut his words short.
As if that was going to stop her. “When things got what? Bad? Traumatizing? You made a mistake you couldn’t take back, and then had to be a living corpse in that windowless room until the heat died down? Come back with some new name, some new approach. Just be cool.”
“We should go back to lessons.”
“But I just did a bingo. Don’t I get a prize?”
“You’ll get a prize when you successfully deflect something.”
He moved before he finished speaking. To shut the conversation down, she knew, and yet it didn’t make the slash of his wand any less scary. The second she saw it, she automatically ducked and put her hands over her head. She didn’t even wait to see what he was throwing.
But that was her mistake.
Because this thing?
It wasbig. It made a whistling sound as it cut through the air, loud enough that she looked out from underneath her own arm. She tried to catch a glimpse of what she was facing and got just a flash of teeth, of something circular. Like a saw, it seemed, and so large she knew she’d never be able to get low enough.
All she could do was close her eyes and brace.
Only to have it hit and then justslide right through.
It didn’t even sting her. In fact, the sensation was almost pleasant. Just a strange tingle, and then a sense of something she couldn’t quite understand. Like being held, somehow.
Though it quickly passed.
And now she was left with him, all being an ass about it.
“You realize that would have sliced you in two, if it had been a real attempt.”
“Well, then. Good job it was just you trying to scare the shit out of me.”
“You will be scared, if you don’t stop getting in your own way.”
God, she wanted to kill him. She wanted to kick something in his face.
But she settled for punching the air in front of her.
“I’m not getting in my own way, you ass. The emotion I use to connect to magic is just really difficult, okay? I mean, Anaya’s is relief. I heard someone in the halls talking about theirs the other day, and it was the satisfying feeling you get from peeling Velcro. And I just know that you have something easy for you, too. Like contempt or some fucking thing. So don’t get on my case about it,” she snapped, everything forgotten, now, aside from how annoying and unfair all of this was.
