“It really isn’t.”
I glanced up at Liam, prepared to give him a dour look. But he was grinning, and it was a pretty good smile.
“No,” Nix said, drawing my gaze to her again. “That is for you to practice. I am here to keep you alive.” She gestured to the box. “Imagine, as you gather up magic, that you’re taking the extra magic inside of yourself and putting it in the box.”
“How will I know if I did it?”
Liam lifted a hand. “You won’t become a wraith.”
I was clearly encouraging him by snarking back. So this time, I ignored him.
“Liam is right, in his fashion,” Nix said. “As you become more sensitive, pardon the expression, you will learn to gauge the level of your magic and adjust it as necessary. Now,” she added, nodding toward the box, “you try.”
I leaned over a little, focused my attention on the box, blew out a breath. I was about to perform a magical act in front of an audience.
I was nearly to the point of feeling out the magic in the air when my brain started working.
I bolted upright. “Wait. Wait. I can’t just pour magic into a box in here. We’re, like, forty feet away from a Containment monitor.”
“You think I did not consider that?” Nix sounded entirely unimpressed with me. “I would not have dropped my human shadow if the building was not insulated.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that dropping her guise actually expended magic. It clearly had occurred to Nix, given the indignation in her voice. “The—wait. What? What do you mean, it’s insulated?”
Frowning, Liam rose, moved through the labyrinth of furniture to the window. He pushed it open, climbed onto the balcony outside. I waited, nerves firing and body prepared to run again, if he found the light outside had changed.
After a moment, he climbed in again, closed and locked the window. I waited impatiently for the verdict.
“The monitor hasn’t been triggered.”
I blew out a breath through pursed lips, tried to slow my racing heart. And I thought of the falling star, of the lifted gear, of the fact that neither of those little bouts of magic had signaled the monitors outside. It wasn’t because there hadn’t been much magic, or I’d gotten really lucky. It was because they couldn’t have. Because someone had fixed it so magic couldn’t be detected here.
“I said that already,” Nix said. “Someone has insulated the house for magic—made it impermeable.”
“That’s not possible.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “I would not have dropped the shadow if it wasn’t.”
“Someone would have had to perform magic on the building,” Liam said, joining us again.
“Like I said, that’s not possible. This store has been in my family for more than a century.”
“Are any members of your family Sensitives?” Nix asked.
“No.”
“Then they must have had a friend who was.”
She said that as if it was the simplest thing—that my father had had friends who were Sensitives. But that wasn’t likely. My dad didn’t involve himself in magic, although there had been times when it was unavoidable.
“The building took a hit from a flaming sword during the Second Battle,” I said. There was still a dark streak of soot across the brick wall that faced the alley. Soapy water and elbow grease hadn’t made a dent. “Maybe that’s why.”
“Maybe,” Nix said.
“So, what does this mean?” I asked. “I can do magic in here and Containment won’t know it?”
“Theoretically,” Liam said. “But that doesn’t make it a good idea. You don’t want to make the problem worse.”
“No,” Nix said. “She does not. The house is insulated. Your body is not.” She pointed to the box. “Try.”
I wiggled on the floor, adjusting my seat, and leaned forward again.
To put the bystanders out of my mind, I closed my eyes, imagined everything in the world was dark—except for the glimmering magic that had situated itself in my body, an irritating cancer that would eventually destroy who I was.
I reached in, grabbed a handful of those stars, and yanked.
Dizziness racked me, and cold sweat trickled down my back, while everything inside my body felt cold, heavy, and completely disorganized—as if every organ were in the wrong place.
“Oh, crap,” I said, bearing down hard against a wave of nausea that almost had me tossing my lunch in front of Liam Quinn. Which I didn’t think I’d ever live down.
I tried to ignore it. I opened my eyes, squeezed my palms tight against the magic I’d metaphysically grabbed, and imagined pushing the magic into the box.
It worked as well as stuffing my previous tightrope-walking elephant into a water bottle. Neither one of them would be superpsyched about the idea.
The magic flashed back, sparks arcing through the air—and this time, they were real. Liam stamped a few out, looked back at me with obvious concern in his eyes. But I couldn’t worry about him. Not right now.