Over the previous day, I’d been trying to compile a list of the people he’d trained after his death. It was a distraction from getting started with the training, but if we were being honest, I didn’t mind that.
Gideon said he had to stay until he trained me, so anything we did to put off the end of my training meant he stayed longer. Granted, he’d only been a part of my life for about four days, but like with Fluke, I was already attached.
Sure, he was enormous and had more muscles in his arms than I had in my whole body, but he was also kind and sweet. He smiled at me in a way that made me full-body shiver, and it was only lust about half the time.
The other half, it was just that . . . he saw me.
My father never had. Other than Beez, Gideon was the first person in almost twenty years to really look at me. The first person to give a damn about what he saw.
“The last one, Meredith,” he interrupted my thoughts with an answer to my question. “I think her name was Johnson.”
I sighed, letting my head fall forward and bump against the cupboard in front of me. “Clearly she’ll be a snap to look up.” He didn’t deserve my annoyance, though. He was trying to remember people’s names, and it wasn’t his fault if they were common ones. “I guess at least if you have to do this again, it’ll be easy enough to have your new apprentice look up how I died. Not too many Sage McKinleys out there.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he shot back, scowling at me. “That ain’t funny. I don’t want you to keep dying, that’s why we’re talking about this. We’re gonna figure out what’s going on, and you’re gonna live to be a hundred and fifty. No more need for me.”
My stomach dropped as I realized that was a very real possibility if I were as powerful as he said. Mages above class four or five had extended lifespans, theoretically because of the increased ability to manipulate the energy flowing through themselves. I had never expected to have any part of it.
On the other hand, my parents had been within reason to expect it, and they’d died at thirty-three and fifty-five. The world wasn’t a certain place, and clearly the previous practitioners of this kind of magic hadn’t lived to ripe old ages.
Hell, maybe accessing the ley lines prematurely aged a person, and they were dying because of the magic.
“Okay, Meredith Johnson. I’ll write that one down as soon as we’re done with the groceries. When was she?” I started stacking the items for the cupboard and fridge in different piles, and looked over at him, to assure he knew I was listening.
His eyes were distant, pointed at the ceiling but aimed at something else entirely. “Nineteen seventy-eight,” he said after a while. “Everyone was wearing these damn pants with hems they could trip over, and the ugliest colors.”
Trust Gideon to cut to the heart of the matter—the fashions of the era. “So Meredith Johnson, and she was what, like twenty?”
“A little younger,” he corrected. “Still in high school when we met. Training to be a forest mage, so nobody was too suspicious when she decided to move out into the woods after school.”
I started packing the refrigerator items away where they belonged, nodding. “So we’re looking for a Meredith Johnson born sometime around nineteen sixty. Here in Junction?” He nodded, and I turned back to my work, considering. “There can’t be too many people like that. I’ll check it out. Worst case scenario, we don’t find anything out about this one. It’ll be fine.”
When I turned back, he was staring at the pile of groceries that still sat on the counter like they’d called his mother a hamster. “What if we don’t find anything about any of them? What if there’s no information?”
“Then we move forward and hope for the best,” I said with a half-hearted shrug.
He spun to face me, and I could practically see a thundercloud cross his face. “Hope for the best? People have died, and too damn young. I’m tired of training the new kid and hoping for the best.” He caught my gaze and held it. “I won’t lose another one of you to hoping for the best.”
Maybe he’d have said the same about any of his students, anyone at all, but he was