seat-belted in across from us, my mind was swirling. Iris had tried to be a little subtle, even mixing in a few books on life and deaths magic, but she’d clearly been focused on a few concepts: the ones behind creating golems and realistic illusions.
Normally, I’d have dismissed them as weird and unrelated, and so thought maybe they were her personal interests, but she had only started looking for them after realizing Gideon and I were . . . well, yeah.
The first part of making a golem was assembling a body. The finishing touches of making illusions included adding mass to make them touch-realistic.
My own grandmother was trying to get me laid by making an incorporeal man corporeal.
Best wingman ever.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sunday was always a quiet day for the shop, so we sat on the couch and went through the three books Iris had said were the most important. There was no way to know if her idea could work, but if it could, I was going to make it work. I glanced up at Gideon and couldn’t hold back a smile at his complete focus. Maybe he wanted it as much as I did.
It was all given in general terms, since multiple kinds of mages were capable of the feats detailed within. A water mage and an earth mage could both make golems just like a painter and someone with charcoal could both make a portrait—they simply used different mediums.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that every single spell in each book could be altered to suit the tapping of ley lines. Not because I’d become an expert or anything, but because Gideon had been right. It was arcane magic. Flavorless. Simple energy, mass, light . . . The magic in ley lines truly was clay that could be shaped into anything at all.
No wonder Jonathon McKinley had thought it dangerous.
As though he could read my mind, halfway through reading a passage on removing energy from an object, Gideon looked over at me and sighed. “Winifred didn’t cause that earthquake.”
“How do you know? You were . . . You were already dead then.” That was a sobering thought if ever there had been one.
He nodded and motioned for me to continue the train of thought, but I was lost. What did he expect me to come up with? What else—
“Was there an earlier earthquake that you stopped? Fuck me, can you stop earthquakes?”
That made him laugh, and just watching his shoulders shake ratcheted down my nerves. “Nah. I was never much good with earth, and I don’t think I’m that powerful.” He gave me a wink and added, “Maybe a class two.”
“Ham-fisted, you said. You’re good at hitting things?” I looked down at his hands, one curled casually across the top of his thigh, the other draped over the back of the sofa.
He lifted the one off the sofa and held it up. “Kinesthetics, Meredith called it. I just called it packing an extra punch in a fight. It’s small magic, but effective.”
My high school magic tutor once told me, in a fit of concern for my mental health, that there was no small magic, only small imaginations. At the time, I thought he’d been full of it and just trying to drag me out of a deep depression. It turned out that he was right.
I was taken by the urge to hunt him down and apologize for being a whiny teenager who didn’t appreciate him. Gods knew he’d been the most supportive person of my magical ability.
He’d told me that any skill, however it was classed, deserved to be nurtured. Suggested more than once that maybe social magic wasn’t the best option for someone who didn’t like being around people, and who’d managed to test into every talent tree, even if it was a two everywhere.
Most people tested into one or two disciplines, and he thought my twos across the board were to be taken advantage of, not dismissed in favor of a magic that was ill-suited to my personality.
Me, I’d been terrified of disappointing my father even more, so social it was.
Something moved in my peripheral vision and a second later, my cheek tingled. No, maybe tingled was the wrong word. It was more like the child of a static shock and a shiver.
It was Gideon’s hand.
He was staring at it, pleasantly surprised. “Whaddaya know? Still got it. A little, anyway.”
“Did you just use magic?” I reached out to touch his hand and slipped right through.