“You’re terrible.” I hauled her away, the two of us giggling like the schoolgirls we once had been, and we collapsed on the front porch swing. “I’m not going to spy on my teacher.”
Except, a few hours later, we sort of did. Blame it on the night being filled with the echo of childhood horseplay. Blame it on the color in Linus’s cheeks before he unbuttoned his shirt. Or blame neither of those. Both of them? Whatever the reason, I followed Amelie out into the dawn with the avowal in hand as an excuse in case we got caught.
We checked each window in the carriage house as we passed them, clamping hands over our mouths to stop laughter from spilling out. There was no sign of him, not that I had expected him to be lounging in plain sight at this hour.
Amelie palmed the doorknob and gave it an experimental twist.
“What are you doing?” I whisper-screamed. “We can’t go inside.”
“Of course not.” Her mouth formed a smile a beat too late. “I was just pulling your leg.”
“You got me.” I laughed, the sound as forced as her expression. “This was a dumb idea. Let’s go.”
“Yeah,” she murmured, lingering in the doorway, her hand still tight on the knob. “You’re right.” Her eyes flashed at me. “We’ll go as soon as we scout his bedroom like the pervs we are.”
“Fine.” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just be quick pervs.”
A snort escaped her. “Aren’t they all?”
But when we circled around back to the bedroom windows, there was a crack in the blackout curtains I had been counting on to protect him from our shenanigans.
His bed was empty.
Six
I woke in the usual manner, which is to say sweaty, trembling, and miserable, to find a clipped message on my phone from Mr. Voorhees.
“Marit is stable, but they’re keeping her for observation.” A growl sounding a lot like blame rumbled through his words. “The police want to interview all the employees present last night.”
Seeing as how I had already been put through the wringer by Russo, I had no choice but to believe if she hadn’t reported my accounting, it was because she was cowboying. A quick call to her supervisor might scrape her off my bumper, but following my case for so many years smacked of obsession.
“There’s no work tonight,” he continued. “Go to the station and do your duty to Marit.” Silence reigned, a call waiting to end, until a girlish voice murmured a protest, and he sighed. “Work starts tomorrow night at eight.”
All my noodlelike upper-body muscles protested as I pulled on ratty jeans and a battered tee. I was more out of shape than I’d realized if one night of rolling carpet had me ready to cry uncle. Not bothering with shoes, I padded out onto the back porch and tested the wards. Their music was subdued but melodious.
Woolly’s happiness to find herself at the center of a project was infecting her magical signature.
The notion made me smile as I strolled for the carriage house. The front door was open wide in welcome, which always caused me to hesitate. Certainly, it had never seemed welcoming before Linus moved in. I found the man himself at the kitchen table with his head bent over a stack of drawings he tweaked with sharp scratches of his pen.
Since he didn’t jump up and yell aha at me, I assumed Amelie and my snooping had gone unnoticed.
“Bagels and cream cheese are on the counter,” he murmured. “There’s fresh fruit and cream in the fridge. Help yourself.”
“Self-serve.” I set about daubing strawberry cream cheese over a blueberry bagel. “I see how it is. Lure me in with home-cooked meals and then switch to processed once you’ve got me hooked.”
“Are you?”
I paused with a clean butter knife dipped in the herb spread I was planning on slathering over an onion bagel guaranteed to taste like regret. “Am I what?”
“Hooked.”
The knife wobbled in my fingers as I angled my head toward him. Dressed in a French blue button-down, he didn’t give the shirt a chance to make the color of his eyes pop. He kept doing what he was doing, giving no indication he had asked what he’d asked in the tone he’d used. Maybe I was imagining things. “Free food is hard to resist.”
He spared a glance for me, his mind so obviously elsewhere that I relaxed. “You’re buying the groceries, remember?”
“Hmm.” I hadn’t bought anything yet. There hadn’t been time. Grocery delivery should be a thing. Was it a thing? I would have to ask Amelie. “You’ll have to give me a list of things you like to eat.”
When he didn’t answer, I wondered if that was because he had no favorites or because he didn’t eat.
But he had to, right? No one could live on air and crumbs. Tonight he wasn’t even pretending hunger.
“I’m enjoying our lessons,” I said, changing subjects. “Though mostly it’s been more like shop class.”
“That changes tonight. I’ve outlined a rough ward that takes into consideration Woolly’s special needs. Your task is to break the design apart and analyze each component.” When he glanced up, a smudge of ink streaked his cheek. “Once you’ve finished, assuming you pass, we’ll do it again. And again. Until you grasp the intricacies of the ward enough you can duplicate the framing to create your own.”
“Come on.” I dropped into the chair across from him with a put-upon sigh. “Can’t we go outside and play in the cement some more?”
“No.” His lips twitched as I kicked my feet for emphasis. Maybe that’s what sustained him. His students’ tears. “I have a field trip planned for the end of the week if you’re a good girl and finish all your homework on time.”
Delighted he was playing with me when I’d doubted he knew how, I slumped forward in a sprawl across the table. “Homework is dumb.”
Linus swept a handful of hair off my face to better see me. “Would you rather leave Woolly dependent on the ink on her siding?”
I popped out my bottom lip. “No.”
“Then you better get started. The concrete requires forty-eight hours to set. We need to be ready to move in half that time so it will be soft enough to take the sigils more easily.”
That sobered me. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to figure this out?”
“More like twenty-three if you count breakfast and all the wallowing you just did.”
“That was hardly wallowing. I didn’t roll across the floor or anything.” I held out my hand and accepted the stack of papers from him. The sigils were complex, some overlapping in ways that made my brain throb. “What if…?”
What if Maud had been right all along? What if my magic was wonky and not miraculous? What if he was better off bleeding me and inking the sigils himself? What if I really was only ever meant to be an assistant?
I definitely needed a new game to play. What if was getting a mite repetitive.
“You can do this.” He rested his hand on my forearm, the weight of his cold fingers snapping me out of my spiral. “If you get stuck, ask for help. That’s why I’m here.”
“Helping a student with a test is cheating.” I tried to recapture our earlier playfulness. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I hereby forfeit all future apples as penance for my crimes.” He bowed his head, and it was all I could do to keep from tugging the dark-auburn tips as they swung forward. We might be working toward an understanding, but I wasn’t certain it could ever be friendship without trust. “Will that suffice?”
“That suffices.”
“You have one hour.” He set a timer on his phone. “I’ll be in the office if you need me.”
After that, he left me to my bumbling attempts at deciphering the intricacies of his masterpiece. His mother’s brags hadn’t been empty on that front. I recognized the configurations, the way his mind attacked problems. Maud’s had worked the same. Her guiding hand was present in each line of every sigil on the page. Having that link to her anchored me in a way that told me I hadn’t realized just how far I’d drifted from the kid she’d adopted.
The hour lapsed in a blink, and I jumped when a hand landed on my shoulder.
“Time’s up.” Linus leaned over me, his lips parted, and his exhale raised chills up my throat. “Let’s see how you’ve done.”
“Linus?” Glancing up put us almost cheek to cheek. “Why is your skin so cold?” I covered the hand he’d left braced on my shoulder with mine, and he allowed me to trace the length of his graceful fingers. “Lots of people have cold hands, but touching you is always like plunging into an ice bath.”
“It’s a side effect of bonding with a wraith.”
There seemed to be a lot of those.
He straightened, taking my pages with him, and the frown I’d caused smoothed as he studied my work. The edge of his mouth kept hitching higher, until he was smiling at the paper. Marveling at it, really.
I ducked my head to hide how much his silent praise meant. I would never be the practitioner Maud had been, that Linus was, but I would be more than I’d ever dreamed thanks to the anomaly of my blood that made me worth educating. Linus wasn’t Maud, but his approval was the next best thing.
“You’ve gotten a few of these additions wrong.” He pulled a mundane red marker from his pocket and corrected the lines until they flowed one into another. “All in all, I would say this is a solid C plus.”
“I’ll take it.” I beamed up at him. “How does a girl get extra credit around here? I want Woolly to have A-plus wards.”
“There are no shortcuts, Grier. Practice is how we strengthen your magic, how we hone your craft. Study is how you learn to protect yourself, how you secure Woolly and Maud’s legacy. You’ll pay for your education with blood and with pain, and you’ll hate me when we’re done. All my best students do.” He gave me the marked-up paper to study. “But when I finish with you, you’ll be able to decorate her foundation with gold stars.”