Page 124 of The Rut in the Road

At the time, it had essentially confirmed—for Mason, anyway—that I was in fact a life caster. It had felt disturbingly easy to just… elevate his energy levels.

I’d been afraid to offer to do it for anyone else, though. Ward, maybe, but while it might have been appropriate to give him energy over the hell that had been Halloween weekend, I hadn’t had enough myself to actually give any of my power to anyone else. That, and I didn’t want to accidentally hurt him.

But a sigil was just a sigil. It was a drawing. How much damage could I do with a drawing by giving it energy?

I reached out a tentative finger, touching it to the lower corner of the symbol I’d so carefully inked onto the floor under where the rug usually went.

I closed my eyes and thought about pushing energy into it.

“Oh, shit!” Beck’s shout interrupted my concentration, and my eyes flew open.

I almost repeated what she’d said.

“Well,” Mason remarked mildly. “I suppose it’s now permanent.”

I gaped at the sigil now scorched into the wood of the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasped out.

Ward was studying it, his head cocked to one side. “Oh, I wouldn’t be,” he replied mildly, his eyes slowly tracing the room. “Because that just saved us a lot of work.”

Mason started laughing.

“Somebody gonna explain?” Beck asked.

Mason just kept laughing.

“Well,” Ward said, and I wasn’t sure what exactly the tone was in his voice. “Normally, you’d have to do several of these around the space. Except,” he said, gesturing around the room with one hand. “I can see that this is covering pretty much this whole lobby space with a lattice of fine red magic.”

Mason finally stopped laughing. “Oh, shit,” he said, then chuckled again briefly. “We’ve clearly been under-using Rayn’s abilities here.”

Ward and Beck just stared at him.

“But why is thatfunny?” Beck wanted to know.

Mason smiled. “It’s not, not really. But it is pretty funny that I’ve been trying to train him as a death witch for years, when if I’d had him use life casting, he’d have flattened my ass in a heartbeat.”

I frowned. “But you can’t attack people with life magic,” I protested.

Mason grinned at me, baring all four fangs, top and bottom. “Sure you can,” he replied. “You just have to think about it differently.”

I stared at him blankly.

“You can short out a circuit or a battery by pushing too much into it,” he said. “The same way that the sigil started smoking, because you were about to overload it, you can do that topeople, if you have to.”

“I—don’t know that I want to short out people,” I said, hesitantly. “And that also seems… dangerous. Because if you give energy to… well,” I swallowed. “To someone like Garraway, that could go very, very wrong.”

Mason’s expression turned serious, and he sighed. “You’re right, of course. And if you had kept putting power into that sigil, I imagine we’d have discovered how dangerous life magic actually can be.” Then he smiled. “So perhaps we do the windows and the door, and we take it easier?”

I looked at him, knowing my eyes were wide. “It felt like I barely pushed any power into it,” I whispered.

“Well,” he replied, standing and moving to the door. “Perhaps then instead of pushing, you try to slow it down?”

It wasa good thing Ward had ordered pizza for everyone, because I stripped down and flopped on my mattress as soon as I’d cut a small strip off one of the leftover pizza slices that had been sent with me for Victor, telling him not to gorge himself and make himself sick.

I had the feeling from his level of excitement that all I’d managed to do was addict my undead rat to pizza.

I let most of my clothes fall to the floor as I took them off, flopping down on my mattress and half-heartedly pulling blankets over myself so that I wouldn’t get too cold as I slept. Mason—as usual—had been correct about my magic: if I tried slowing it down, I had a lot more control over the life casting.This essentially definitively confirmed that I was, in fact, a life caster, not a death witch.