Page 71 of Darkest Magic

He went still, and it was not his usual still but the still of a man deciding whether or not to move ahead with something. It made me look up from the flame to his face for the first time since I put my hands around the candle. His right hand had drifted to the edge of his left glove, two fingers resting on the seam.

The room changed before he touched me. I watched as he braced himself for whatever he was about to do.

“Adept Vere,” I said.

“For accuracy.” His voice was too flat, even for him, the voice people used when they had already argued with themselves and lost. He drew the glove off one finger at a time.

I had never seen his bare hand, not once in all those weeks of him moving his chair and setting his flames and writing me down like a specimen. I told myself a hand was a hand, pale skin, long fingers, clean short nails, a thin old scar riding one knuckle like a seam that hadn’t quite closed. There was nothing to it, and there was no reason for my stomach to drop the way it did.

But he had kept those gloves between himself and the whole world for as long as I’d known him and seeing him without one made the whole thing feel indecent, like he’d taken off something that wasn’t a glove at all. He reached across the table and set two bare fingers against the inside of my wrist.

The channel caught him.

Not like Kit, and that was the first thing I understood in the half-second before I understood anything else. Kit came through the channel as heat and want, as a hunger for the world to look at him and never once touch the sore place he kept hidden behind all that gold. Cormac came through all cold and clinical control at first, and somehow a visual of a narrow careful bridge laid one plank at a time over dark water. Then suddenly the bridge was gone.

Rain on hot stone.

Three notes of a song I had never heard and somehow knew the end of.

A laugh that was not mine.

Grief opened under my sternum so fast and so total that I nearly doubled over from it. The worst part was that it wasn’t my grief. It arrived complete, furnished, someone else’s whole ruined house dropped into my chest, and I had no idea whose it was or why it lived in the fingers of the coldest man in this building.

Cormac went white. Not pale, because people said pale when they meant a little less color. This was white white, like the white of paper.

His fingers jerked off my wrist like my skin had burned them. His bare hand flew to his own collar and pressed there, two fingers at the side of his throat, checking a pulse he had absolutely no business letting me watch him check. For one second the man across from me was not a Vere and not an evaluator and not a flat voice attached to a black notebook.

He was frightened.

Then the mask came down, and it came down badly, crooked, the way a curtain fell when someone yanked the wrong cord. “We’re finished,” he said.

I stared at him across the very normal looking candle. “What was that?”

“An inconclusive reading.”

“That was not inconclusive.” My own voice surprised me, coming out lower and more commanding than I meant it. “You went the color of paper.”

His hand shook once as he pulled the glove back on, and I saw it. I watched the tremor travel through those long fingers and disappear into the leather.

He saw me see it. Something crossed his face then, faster than the fear had, gone almost before it registered, a wince, a flinch at himself. Shame? Disgust?

He had touched the power living in me, bare-handed, and gone white and reached for his own pulse like he needed to confirm he was still on the safe side of the table. Revulsion was the word my body reached for. The first-gen contamination, the green channel, the ugly shape I apparently made in a memory-worker’s skin, something so wrong that even a man trained to feel nothing had flinched from it.

I watched him for a second longer and he refused to meet my stare, which only convinced me further. “Right,” I said, and reached down for my bag. My voice went flat, scraped clean of everything, the flat thing Kit could name and I could not stop doing. “Wouldn’t want to document something you can’t put in a file.”

“Miss Lane.”

“No, it’s fine.” I stood, the chair legs shrieked on the stone, and I did not care. “Subject contaminated the instrument. That’s the finding. See, I can write your report for you. Saves us both the hour.”

“Miss Lane⁠—”

I left before he could think better of it. Part of me wanted to stay and force him to explain himself, to do what my mother did and force him to look away first, but I found, at that moment, I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t want to be a subject that was studied, because I was under no illusions anymore that that was what he was doing. If I was honest, I just wanted to go home, go back to Calder Street, where at least no one looked at me the way he just had.

But the kicker was that I didn’t want to go back to Calder Street at all. I didn’t want to give any of this up. And yet they might make me, they might take it all from me without so much as batting an eye at the life they were destroying in the process.

Cormac

After she left, I sat in the cold practice room with my hand gloved again and tried to write. The page stayed annoyingly blank.