I leaned back on one foot and glanced at Zayvion. He watched me, fists clenched at his sides belying that oh-so-Zen mask. He’d been helping me keep my dad blocked in my mind. Taught me a few spells that seemed to be working to keep Dad quiet. Until now.
I raised one eyebrow, to let him know I could handle it.
Shame, however, was pacing across the room away from us, like a man walks on rice paper. His head was tilted down at an odd angle, as if he were listening to his footsteps. His hands were lifted slightly above his waist, fingers spread. He was trying to hear something, sense something. Something beneath the floor.
He was listening for magic.
I realized I couldn’t feel it like I had before. The deep strumming heat of it beneath the room, beneath the tiles. Outside the inn, the well was usually no more than a faint presence, but down here, the well radiated power.
Or at least it had the day I’d taken my test. And now the well felt—not empty, but certainly less strong, less radiating, less full.
“It’s different,” I said.
Shame paused over tiles that were gray going on black. He knelt, stuck his fingertips against the marble. Took a deep breath, let it out, then rocked back on his heels. “Damn.”
He patted the pocket of his jacket, looking for cigarettes, found them, tapped one out.
“Don’t smoke in here,” Maeve said. Then to me, “How is it different?”
I glanced at Zay. He had moved silently to stand next to Greyson’s cage. Maybe he didn’t want to influence me. Maybe he wanted to pound Greyson.
He wasn’t the only one.
“You want me to Hound the room?”
“First I want you to tell me what you feel. What you sense.”
I’d learned that when Maeve asked me to do something in her teacher voice, she wasn’t really asking. Normally, it bothered me and I gave her lip for it.
But there was something very wrong about the well and the magic here. Something that made me want to go home to my apartment, home to my stone gargoyle, and stay as far away from the Authority and magic as I could.
Like ducking for cover before a storm hit.
Who was I kidding? Even if I went home, I couldn’t get away from magic. It flowed under the entire city, through the conduits and Gothic glyphed cage work that wrapped every building. And it flowed through me.
I tucked my hair behind my ear, my hand trembling. I walked across the room until I stood in the center of it, and stopped just short of where Shame knelt.
The same down-the-throat horror that I usually got from enclosed spaces skittered through my brain and set fire to my nerves. My heart was pounding too hard. I wanted to turn back. I wanted very much not to do this.
Shame watched me from his position on the floor. He placed one hand on the tiles, palm flat. I hoped he wasn’t planning to Proxy or Ground me. I was shaky. I wasn’t sure how magic was going to respond to my cast, or if it would respond at all.
I stopped, spread my feet so I had a chance of staying on them if things got bad. I resisted looking behind me to see what Maeve, Zayvion, and Greyson were doing. Instead, I calmed my mind: Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack . . .
I licked my lips. Instead of tracing a glyph in the air, I tipped my head up to the angel-wing ceiling, dropped my hands at my sides, fingers wide and open, and drew the glyph for Seek at my side. I reached out with my senses, using a little magic from inside me to seek. I sent my mental fingers deep, deep into the earth beneath me.
The well was not there. I frowned, reached deeper, sent my magic farther. Finally felt the well, a glow of magic, a heat, yet so far away. The magic was there, still pooling, still flowing, but it was like an ocean at low tide. Or like someone had punched a hole in the well, and magic was draining away. I didn’t feel it filling any other space, didn’t feel it creating new channels, new rivers. Didn’t feel it pouring out through the iron and glass conduits that channeled the magic that flowed freely beyond the well.
Something, or someone, was draining an enormous amount of magic out of the well.