head. As he did it, I could see cuts close, discoloring fade, and swelling reduce as if I were watching time spin backward. By the end, his body looked loose and comfortable again, while his voice had regained its usual strength and tenor.
Taking my own wand in hand, I started to repeat the spell Gideon had used. I had never used it before. The healing spell I had always relied on was far cruder and couldn’t do much to reduce pain. It was simply something to keep me from dying so that my body could finish naturally healing on its own.
“No!” Gideon said sharply, halting the words in my throat.
I stared at the warlock in surprise. Was he really going to stop me from using magic to heal myself? Sure, it was technically against the rules, but I was pretty damn useless as I was and we still had to finish our investigation in Charlotte.
To my utter shock, Gideon rolled to his feet and squatted down on my right. Carefully, he adjusted my hold on my wand, corrected my pronunciation of the spell, and even changed my breathing pattern for optimal use of the spell. He taught me magic.
In all my years at the Ivory Towers, not once had anyone taken an active role in making sure that I knew how to properly replicate a spell. It was monkey see, monkey do at the Towers. You learned to mimic what you saw if you wanted to stay alive. It was only after you survived your apprenticeship that you went back to try to understand why the things you did and said worked.
Under his guidance, I managed to easily replicate the healing spell he used, wiping away cuts, fractures, bruises, and pain. When I was done, I felt better than I had in a long time and a little sad. How many kids would be alive today if they had been taught magic with patience and care? The faces of so many dead zipped across my mind for a second that I thought I was going to drown but I pushed them back into the shadows for another time.
When I looked up at Gideon, there was a sadness in his own expression that made me believe a similar thought was crossing his mind. Which style of teaching had guided him through his apprenticeship? Or worse, which style waited for his daughter should she prove to be magical in nature? Of course, that was assuming he found a way to hide the fact that he was her father.
“I wasn’t going to kill them,” he said as I stood again. His voice was dull and flat. He refused to look at me. Gideon was hurt by the unspoken accusation, though he’d choke before he admitted it aloud.
I opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t thought that, but I quickly shut it again with a click of my teeth. The truth was that I didn’t know what the warlock was going to do to the crowd. I hadn’t really thought about it. The only thing I had been sure of was that he was using magic on people and it wasn’t going to be the nice fluffy bunnies-and-rainbows kind of magic.
“They’ve suffered enough,” I simply said.
“I agree.”
“Then why?”
Gideon finally looked down at me, frowning. “What would have happened if Simon Thorn had been hit with a rock?”
I cringed at the thought of that crowd striking back at my old mentor. “Fuck,” I whispered as horrible images of death and smoldering carnage flickered through my brain. I could think of any number of gruesome and painful spells that he would have used to slowly kill each of them, and then it was likely he would have leveled most of Charlotte to teach the rest of the area that he was not to be disrespected.
“Exactly,” Gideon said as if I’d spoken. “If they strike at one of us and we do nothing, then it could give them the courage to strike at another. The only problem is that the next one could be like Simon. You scare them. Give them what they will consider a close call and it should stop them. Otherwise, you’re guaranteeing they will die the next time.”
I nodded, hating it but recognizing the truth behind his words. I had fought Reave and sacrificed my own future to crush the same kind of hope that Gideon was talking about. The dark elf had gotten information on the locations of the Towers, hoping