Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,113

to work with.”

He was a mage too. The two of them could turn any joy they stirred up in each other or me—or anyone else we ran into—into power. Dad’s specialty was healing. Around his ordinary accounting job, he volunteered at a nearby hospital, nudging people’s recovery along. Always be open to happiness, he’d told me when I was little, half playful and half serious. Every time I make you smile, it could save someone’s life.

Letting them turn my happiness into magic was as close to any kind of supernatural power as I got. From what I’d gathered from the little bits and pieces they’d revealed over the years, being a mage was hereditary. As an adoptee, I hadn’t gotten the genetic benefit, and there was no way for them to teach me when I didn’t have the power already inside me.

Maybe that was another reason I wanted to take at least a few more steps away from the house I’d grown up in. No matter what I did, I was never going to be as special as they were. Most of the time, I was okay with the fact that I was just a Nary, which was what Mom and Dad called regular people—short for ordinary, or as Mom had said when we’d had The Talk about their talents, Nary a bit of magic. Sometimes, though, the yearning prickled so deep it made me queasy.

I was ordinary, and eventually I was going to have to build a life with no magic in it at all. Might as well get it over with.

“We’ll come back to this conversation when I can convert some of those cons into pros,” I told my parents, getting up. Maybe they hadn’t been able to teach me magic, but they’d definitely taught me stubbornness.

I brought my coffee downstairs and through the laundry room. On the threshold of the basement apartment, I paused for a moment, taking a sip and contemplating the space.

I really did appreciate having it, and I wished it’d done the trick. Even though the apartment was cramped and dim with storage boxes stacked against one wall, it wasn’t awful. I just couldn’t shake the growing sense that the longer I stayed this tied to my parents, the harder it was going to be to stand on my own when I really needed to. Until I’d started the college classes this fall, Mom and Dad had been the only people I’d regularly spent time with. I had a lot of catching up to do.

My pet mouse, Squeak—not the most original name, but it was her first owner who picked it, not me—was scurrying around her cage, nuzzling at the bars. The sunlight coming in through the little window over her perch made her fur shine: pure white other than a splotch of black on her left flank. I popped open the door and let her scramble up my arm to my shoulder while I considered how I wanted to spend the rest of my morning.

I could finish the last bit of the History of Modern Design essay that was due on Thursday… or I could get to work on that phoenix figurine idea that had come to me last night.

I wavered for approximately two seconds before grabbing my bin of polymer clay and my sketchpad off my desk. Squeak’s whiskers tickled the back of my neck as she wriggled under the dark waves of my hair. Sometimes she liked to hang out back there like it was a nest or something, which, given how much trouble I often had getting those waves to behave, was kind of fitting. I started up one of my favorite playlists on my phone and sat down at the little kitchen table.

The first stage for any figurine was working out the design with pen and paper. I had to see what I was going to sculpt before I could start working on the actual pieces. My fingers flew over the sketchpad, bringing to life a fiery bird soaring up from a burst of flame. A giddy shiver ran through me as I filled in the details. Perfect.

It was going to be hard to part with this one, but now that I’d spent a few years building a name for myself online, I could make twice as much money selling just one of my little creature sculptures than I did with my three shifts a week at the art supply store downtown. I needed to pay for that Florence