“A candle is an overstatement, really.” He stared at the couch longingly but didn’t move to sit on it. No doubt he wanted to befriend the hot guy who was making fun of me and didn’t think his inability to sit down was going to help his case. “His test scores were so abysmal it didn’t matter what I trained him in, so we didn’t put much thought into a school.”
In the eighth grade, every school kid in the country gets tested for magical ability. The local Aurora Aureum magisters come to the public schools in the spring and test every kid in every kind of magic. Okay, there isn’t a proper test for temporal mages, or a few other unusual types, but all the basic schools. The elements, internal and external body magic, social magic, even dead magic.
One in ten people has measurable ability, and maybe one in ten of those has enough talent to warrant serious training. The one kid in my grade who scored a five on the Aureum’s scale of ten was offered a scholarship to the state school of magic.
For everyone else, life went back to normal.
Well, everyone except me. The child of two mages, classes six and seven, I’d scored twos across the board. Not nothing, but not a single thing impressive either. Nothing worth training. The magister who’d tested me had looked at my name, looked at me over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses, and shaken his head in disappointment.
Compared to my father’s disappointment, that had been painless.
Dad hadn’t spoken to me for almost a month.
The gunslinger stared at Dad for a long time, then turned back to me. “They’re still doing that? Testing kids?”
“You are a cosplayer, aren’t you? Or, like, some kind of historical reenactor?” That made more sense than an actual cowboy or whatever. Plus it would explain why he knew about testing. I didn’t know exactly when, but I thought it had only started in the last century, not the one before.
The man gave a sigh and leaned his head against the back of the couch. He looked my age, or maybe a little older. Maybe a lot older if he were a mage. Right then, though, with his head back, staring at the shop ceiling, he looked fifty or more. “I was born in seventeen ninety-five.”
I blinked. Seventeen? Whoa.
Everyone was quiet for a moment before foxy leaned in and gave a lick in his direction. He couldn’t make contact, obviously, but the attempt amused the guy, who smiled at him. “Okay, I’m sorry. It was rude of me. Just . . . The last one had a cougar, and she didn’t make it. I’m not sure what keeps happening to them, but I don’t think cleverness is gonna fix it.” He looked back up at me. “I died sometime in the eighteen forties. I don’t remember when, exactly. It gets blurry when I try to remember the last few years.”
I leaned forward, my elbows splayed against the counter and eyes wide. I probably looked like a fish, the way I was gaping, but what else is a guy supposed to do at a story like that? Also— “You must be a powerful mage, to be fifty and look like that. Every ghost I’ve ever met looked the same as when they died, and you look, um.” I waved a hand in his direction and glanced away for a moment, trying to downplay it. “You know.”
That made him smile, and he had a nice one. Literally nice, in that it made him look softer, kinder. Also, nice like it made me wonder what it might be like to kiss his face.
I did not kiss people, let alone strangers.
Not that I didn’t want to, but who could be trusted to get that close?
“I’m a link,” he answered, matter of fact, like that was a thing I should be aware of. “And for the last two hundred years, something or someone keeps bringing me back from the dead to train someone when the current link dies without training a successor.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
He didn’t.
“Without training a successor? That’s so old school. And I don’t . . . What the hell is a link? There’s no school of magic called link.” I itched to do something. Move away from the counter, dust shelves, scrub something, move every book in the whole store over one space.
There are no undiscovered schools of magic, I insisted to my brain. You’re not the