Bastian lifted an eyebrow. “Is there a reason you’re carrying Lee like he’s a snot-filled handkerchief?”
“This is not a cat,” Roger replied. “Can you keep him from going back to Vincent?”
“He’s curious about the boy. Nothing foul involved,” Bastian said.
“Vincent is under my protection. I will decide what motives are foul, and since I don’t know what this beast has in mind, I would prefer he remain away from the boy. And I notice that you didn’t deny he’s not actually a cat.”
“He’s not, but he won’t be changing into anything else for a while.” Bastian gently took Lee from Roger and cradled the cat in his arms, scratching his belly. He strode across the room to theturned-over chairs, righted two of them, and sat in one. “Think you can keep a level head about you?”
“Despite what you saw, I’m not known to give in to impulses of violence,” Roger replied. Slowly, he took the chair that Bastian had set up for him. “What happened earlier … Vincent and I have some shared pains. I?—”
“Hey, I don’t need you to divulge your traumas.” Bastian deposited his cat onto his shoulder, and the creature remained there, casting his silver-eyed gaze on Roger. “I take it your magic is something new to you.”
“I would say I don’t have magic,” Roger said. “At least, before tonight, I didn’t think I had anything in common with arcane practitioners. Vampires my age are known to gain new abilities, but this doesn’t have the touch of them, except for the shadows.”
“There are some arcanists that can manipulate shadows, but I have seen it more with vamps.”
“I am over three hundred years old,” Roger said, allowing his shock into his voice. The night had been full of long plunges up and down high waves. “I should have shown some sort of power like this before, correct?”
Bastian took a very long moment before he said, “I wager Thomas hasn’t told you much about me, so let me tell you a little more about what I do. The Greater Circle of the Unyielding concerns itself with bigger matters than the day-to-day politics of mages, which is a fancy way of saying I spend my time going from one magical disaster to another. I’m familiar with power manifestation.
“Vincent gave us a clear picture of some of the trauma he’s been dealing with. And you told me just now that you can relate.” Bastian looked up from the floor to meet Roger’s gaze. “In my experience, abuse is more likely to suppress the onset of arcane manifestation. Abusers and manipulators excel at making their targets feel not only physically powerless but spiritually weak.Forgive me for having overheard, but you told Thomas you had been surviving for centuries.”
“He’s saying that because you molded yourself into a vapid fuckboy, you couldn’t be anything more than a vapid fuckboy,” Dmitri said. He thumped his head back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. “I am such an ass.”
“You?” Roger asked.
“I haven’t helped,” Dmitri replied, his voice growing more distant.
“You two seem like you’ve got a lot of history, but I need you to dissect that later,” Bastian said. His cat slipped off his shoulder, landed on the floor quietly, and sat a small distance away, like he was another member of the conversation. “Right now, yeah, it seems like you’ve had some sort of arcane breakthrough. You were casting wildly, but you moved with intent. You weren’t trying to blow up Noah. That spell was a raw undoing, the same sort of spell I used to disperse it. When you turned on us, it was out of protection. I think you’ll do fine in a standard lesson structure, starting tonight if you want.”
Bastian pointed toward the back room where Vincent slept. “He’s a different story. His manifestation nearly brought the building down. Your power is raw, but you have a better handle on your emotions. He doesn’t have that. He could be a danger to himself and to others.”
Roger narrowed his eyes. “What do you propose to do about that?”
“For the time being, nothing without consent,” Bastian replied.
“For the time being?”
“I’ll repeat, he’s showing signs that he is dangerous. His magic is incredibly volatile. I’m not blaming him. It’s clearly unintentional at the moment.” Bastian produced two metal bracelets. “My first suggestion is that he wears these until helearns how to separate his emotional state from his power. They’ll dampen his magic so that if he manifests like he just did, it’ll come out like a breeze instead of a tornado.”
“May I see one of those?” Roger asked.
Bastian tossed him one bracelet.
The metal was lighter than Roger expected, and it wasn’t silver like he’d initially suspected. Instead, it was aluminum. A series of runes covered the outside and the inside. As far as Roger could tell, Bastian wasn’t lying, but Roger didn’t know the man. He pulled his phone from his pocket, snapped a few pictures of the bracelet, and sent Ezra a message with the images. Ezra had said that he’d researched arcane manifestations. Both Ezra and Bastian could lie to him, but Ezra wouldn’t have the motive.
And Roger had to trust someone, or he might lose his mind.
Within a minute, Ezra sent back a message confirming what Bastian had said. The bracelets were a common tool among “troubled” cases of manifestations.
Roger ran his thumb along the runes and then tossed the bracelet back to Bastian. “You won’t force them on him?”
“These things are designed to work with the willing,” Bastian said. “If I were to shove them on him, he could wreck the enchantment the first time he has a fit. For the record, I want these to work for him. I want to find him a mentor that’ll give him the time he needs.”
The cat let out a loud, meaningful “Mrrreow.”
Bastian startled and then frowned at his cat. “Seriously?”
