“I understand you’ve been working with the shifters on your magic?”
“I’ve been working on control,” she said, meeting my gaze without blinking, which showed more confidence than I’d expected. Maybe she was ready to fan out her cards after all.
“They have a relationship to magic that’s unique, and Gabe thought if I had a better connection to that magic, more sympathy for it, I might be able to balance myself a little better.”
“Is it working?”
“It’s not not working,” she said with a smile. “But I use so little of it, it’s hard to say.”
Ethan leaned forward, elbows on his knees. By his expression, he was clearly fascinated by the concept. “They’re letting you watch their rituals?”
“Some,” she said carefully. “For some of the Keene wolves. I understand each type of animal has its own way to commune with the world.”
“And that’s what it is?” I asked. “Communing with the world?”
She tilted her head to the side and scrunched up her face, trying to gather the right words. “Magic isn’t binary. It’s not on or off.” She glanced at Catcher. “Some folks say it’s divided into keys, into segments.” That was the way I’d learned about magic, the theory Catcher had espoused.
“But for me,” she said, “it’s more like a radio tuner. You can adjust the dial up or down until you get the station you want.”
“And they’re helping you get the station you want?” Ethan asked.
“They’re helping me identify the stations,” she said. “Feel them out. Figure out which stations are good for me, and which aren’t.”
“That sounds promising,” Ethan said. I had to agree. It sounded better, at any rate, than her tuning into the magical “station” that was apparently intent on destroying Chicago.
“It is, I think,” she said. “There’s a way to go, but it’s promising.”
“What does the Order plan to do with you?” Ethan asked her.
“Pretend I don’t exist?”
“They aren’t good with punishment,” Catcher said. “Yeah, they can kick someone out and theoretically ban someone from practicing in a particular area, but we’ve seen how well that worked.”
Catcher wasn’t supposed to be in Chicago; he’d been kicked out of the Order for coming here against Order mandate.
“They have methods,” he said. “You might remember we can be stripped of our magic, but it’s an . . . unpleasant process. Like the magical version of a lobotomy.”
“Nullification, right?” Ethan asked.
Catcher nodded.
“And when Mallory’s time with the shifters is up?” Ethan asked.
Mallory and Catcher looked at each other, and Catcher nodded a little.
“We’ve actually been talking about that,” Mallory said. She linked her fingers in her lap and looked at Ethan.
She looked nervous and eager—like a job applicant at an interview—and it wasn’t hard to guess what she was about to say.
“Catcher and I have been talking,” she said. “And I’ve talked to Gabriel and Berna. With Berna until I’m blue in the face,” she added. “And sooner rather than later I’m going to need to branch out on my own. They don’t think it’s wise that I don’t use my magic at all—it builds up, and we saw how unpleasant that can become.”
She paused, waiting for some commentary from Ethan, but he offered none. He stared back at her from his chair, his emotions completely unreadable. She might have been a stranger, not a woman with whom he’d felt a psychic connection.
“I have to prepare for my life,” she said. “A life with my magic. A life in which I use it for something that makes me feel better about myself, instead of worse.” Tears welled in her eyes, and she wiped them away.
But whether they were tears of embarrassment or guilt, she made herself look directly at Ethan, and the tightness in my chest eased a little bit.
For a long, quiet moment, they looked at each other. Magic rose and circled in the room, spilled by him and intentionally cast off, or so I thought, by her. I couldn’t see the magic itself, but I could feel it. It swirled around us like the current of water in a stream. Their magic interacted, spun and danced and battled for superiority. Not because they were fighting each other now, but because they’d been so intimately connected. Because Mallory had been in Ethan’s head, and he’d been a conduit for her emotions, her fears, her anger.
All the while, they watched each other. They looked oblivious to the magic, but it would have been impossible to ignore. Even Catcher eyed them as he sipped slowly at his cherry red drink, goose bumps plainly visible on his arms. Being a sorcerer, he was even more sensitive to the magic than I was. It must have been odd to stand in the midst of a vampire-sorceress battle of wills.