Iris half the information and see if she filled in the rest. At the very least, it would give me a way to gauge if I could trust her.
Unless she was a really good liar.
I definitely wouldn’t tell her that I was a . . . convergence link. Fuck, I couldn’t even think it with a straight face. Might as well call myself a pretentious porn star.
“I won’t tell her I know about, um, arcane magic.”
He smirked as though he could read my mind but didn’t question me. Instead, he dipped his head in the direction of the kitchen. “You should eat. Then you can call Mrs. McKinley, and then we can work on training.”
I swallowed hard but nodded and followed him toward the kitchen. We hadn’t gotten too far into me actually learning to use the ley lines. Beyond the fact that people were supposed to learn their chosen magical discipline starting as a teenager, so it was going to be far more complicated for me, there was the deadline waiting at the end of my training.
Deadline in the literal sense, because Gideon was dead, and as soon as I was trained up, he would be gone.
He was sitting in his chair in the kitchen when I got there, dragging my feet the whole way.
I had bought that chair. The whole dining set, in fact. I’d painted the kitchen, had the cabinets redone, and changed literally everything in the room. The stove and refrigerator weren’t even in the same place. The man who’d installed the new ones had started to argue their placement with me, then recognized that he was in “the McKinley Murder House,” and my name was Sage McKinley, and he’d shut up.
My mother had kept everything bright and cheerful in her kitchen. The walls had been yellow gold, with vegetable accents like a painting of a garden on one wall, and a border near the ceiling with cartoony tomatoes and corn and peas. She’d painted the cabinets white herself. It had all looked horrific splattered with blood.
I couldn’t even stand the color yellow anymore.
So I’d gone with a cool green in the remodel. Sage green, if you will. Dark wood everything, including the floor, and black appliances. No blood spatter would show up on those.
I wouldn’t say it was logical, making sure it wouldn’t be such a garish house of horrors if I were murdered in the same room as my mother. It was just what I’d needed in order to live in the house.
The remodel had been finished by the time I was nineteen, but I’d only finished paying off the loan for it at twenty-eight. My father had been disgusted by me taking out a home improvement loan when I, in his words, fell into a free house. I never told him that as long as the only thing I could see in the kitchen was blood-spattered-gold, it would never be anything like a home.
I wasn’t sure the concept of home meant much to my father, whose home had only grown more spare and sterile as the years had passed.
I dished up Fluke’s dinner and set it on the table, then settled on something fast and simple for me: peanut butter and jelly again.
“We weren’t big on balanced diets in my day, but Meredith gave me to understand that in her day, people liked these things called vegetables,” Gideon said, observationally and judgmentally at the same time. “Something about not wanting to die of malnutrition or heart attacks.”
I rolled my eyes at him as I set my sandwich on a plate, along with a side of cheesy corn snacks. “I tell you what, if owning the shop means I have more than a few hundred dollars a month for groceries, I’ll buy all the vegetables you want.”
He squinted at that, opened his mouth, and then shut it again. Something hardened in his eyes, and I hoped he wasn’t angry with my flippant attitude, but whatever it was, he covered it quickly and changed the subject. “Have you tried touching the convergence again on your own?”
We stared at each other for a long, fraught moment while I tried not to laugh. I swallowed it down effectively and finally shook my head. “Nope. Not so much as a tickle.”
He rolled his eyes, and his face went long-suffering for a moment before he, too, schooled his expression. “It’s gonna be hard at first, but you know that.”
Boy did I. Starting a new skill is always hard, but