in this case, it was a minor miracle I’d been able to feel the ley line at all. I spent fifteen years training as a social mage, and sources are singular.
That is to say, if a water mage is in the desert, they can’t just use earth until they find an oasis. They’re a water mage. The longer you train in one discipline, the more impossible it is to even sense the others, let alone use them. Two-sourced mages didn’t exist, unless they were teenagers who hadn’t chosen between their strongest affinities yet, and they never had reliable ability with either of their sources.
So me training as a social mage since I was fourteen and then being able to sense another kind of magic was unheard of. It was undoubtably because I was the weakest social mage in all California, and hardly ever used my abilities.
I’d never thought I would feel lucky that I had scored all twos on the tests, but there we were. Trying to unlearn what I had was going to be hard enough. Trying to unlearn something I was good at . . . well, Gideon would have been hard-pressed to convince me to try it at all.
I would have thought my mother had been in that situation, as a certified class seven . . . something. I’d always thought Mom was a forest witch—a discipline that specialized in growing things—given her enormous garden and affinity for plants.
Gideon was right. I had to find a way to discuss it with Iris.
As soon as Fluke’s and my dishes were washed, I pulled out my phone. I stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at Gideon and Fluke, both of them watching me expectantly. Clearly, I wasn’t going to be allowed to put this off.
I dialed the number she had given me on the night I visited and waited while it rang. Twice.
“Sage? How lovely to hear from you,” she answered, and if the warmth in her voice was faked, she was damn good at it. Of course, if she’d been married to a controlling douche for most of her life, she probably was good at lying.
I cleared my throat and turned my back on my staring housemates before speaking up. “Hey. You said to call you, and it seemed like a good idea. I mean, it’s pretty much you and me now, right? I doubt Roger or his kids want to get to know me.”
She gave a bitter little chuckle, and something brushed against the speaker, like she was moving around. “No, I would imagine Roger does not. His son, Freddy, is a little more personable, but he’s still a spoiled brat, just like his father.”
Behind me, Gideon gave an aborted laugh that he tried to pretend was a cough. I couldn’t blame him. Everything about my grandmother seemed to be a surprise. A breath of fresh air, even.
“Should we have lunch, maybe?” she asked, back to the hesitant way she’d acted at dinner. “I know you must be working all the time, trying to take over your father’s shop. Could an employee take over for lunch?”
It took everything I had not to laugh out loud. Employee. Dad couldn’t afford an employee for more than minimum wage, so he’d had me, the only person he’d known who wasn’t going to complain about never getting a raise. The single time I’d broached the subject, he’d given me an abrupt, “the store can’t afford it,” walked away, and that had been that.
“I’ll figure it out,” I told her instead. Even if Beez couldn’t cover for me, I would figure it out. Even if that meant closing the shop for two hours in the afternoon.
I’d been doing my best to run the shop the way my father had always done.
The way he demanded.
But it seemed more and more as though my father had a lot to answer for. Hell, part of me wanted to march down to the shop and demand answers right now. But I knew my father. He wouldn’t give me answers, and the more demanding I was, the less likely he was to give me what I wanted.
Closing the store for a two-hour lunch with my grandmother would probably clinch it, and he’d never have a civil word for me again, but he’d made it very hard to care. I expected lunch with my grandmother to be both more fruitful and more pleasant anyway.
“Is there some modern faux pas in suggesting tomorrow?” she asked,