When I came to, I was lying on one of the library couches near the big windows with a blanket on me, and Cal was holding my hand.
“Déjà vu,” I said as I watched silver sparks of magic race over my skin. He gave a tiny smile, but his eyes were trained on the rapidly closing cut on my palm. I looked past him and saw Dad standing at the end of the couch, his face etched with worry. Suddenly, everything came rushing back to me. The case, the book.
The missing page.
Dad gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, but I knew better than to say anything in front of Cal. Still, now that I didn’t feel like I was dying from blood loss, I felt every bit as disturbed about that missing page as Dad had looked.
Like he could read my mind—and for all I knew, he could—Dad said, “I want you to rest here for a little while, Sophie. Once you’re feeling better, we can discuss the ramifications of that spell in my office.”
“Must have been some hard-core spell,” Cal remarked as he gently laid my hand down on the couch.
“Yeah,” I said, my mouth feeling like it was full of sawdust. “Dad’s been working with me on controlling my powers. Guess I overdid it.”
Dad walked around the couch and, to my surprise, leaned down to kiss my forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “But I am also very proud of you.”
It was hard to talk around the sudden lump in my throat, so I just nodded.
“I’ll be in my office. Come see me when you’re feeling up to it.”
Once Dad was gone, I flexed my hand, studying the place where the gash had been. There was no sign of it, and I could swear that even my demonglass scar looked a little better. “Okay, so the ability to heal people has to be the coolest magical power ever,” I told Cal.
His lips quirked. “Yeah, well, I didn’t always think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s what got me sent to Hecate.”
I perked up. I’d always wondered how someone as straight-and-narrow as Cal had gotten sentenced to Hex Hall. “They sent you there for healing someone?”
“Making someone’s leg magically unbreak itself kind of draws attention to you,” he said.
“Yikes. I bet. So when you did it, was there a lot of screaming and pointing? That’s what happened to me.”
He laughed. “Yeah, she was nowhere near as happy to be healed as I’d thought she’d be.”
We were sitting so close that our hips touched. He smelled nice, like freshly cut grass and sunshine. I wondered if he’d been outside already this morning, or if that’s just the way Cal always smelled.
I was about to ask him more about this mysterious “she” with the broken leg, but he changed the subject. “So you’re learning to control your powers,” he said, studying me with those clear hazel eyes. “How’s it working out?”
“Great,” I answered, before I remembered that Cal thought I’d just been grievously injured during one of those lessons. “I mean, it’s really hard,” I amended, “but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Sure beats the idea of going through the Removal.”
“Does that mean the Removal is out?”
I ran my finger around the paisley pattern on the couch. “I think so, yeah,” I replied, leaning back against the cushions. The cut on my palm may have healed up, but I still felt pretty wiped out.
“I’m glad,” he said quietly. The space between us suddenly seemed smaller, and when he covered my hand with his, it was all I could do not to jump. It took me a minute to realize that he was just using more magic on me. I could feel the weariness running out of me as silver sparks ran along my arm.
“Better?” The sparks faded, but Cal didn’t take his hand off mine.
“Much.” Of course, all that tiredness had now been replaced by a weird jitteriness that had me shoving the blanket off my legs and standing up. “What does it feel like, doing healing magic?” I asked, moving away to stand near one of the big windows. The early morning sunlight sparkled on the dew-covered grass.
“What do you mean?”
Rubbing my hands up and down my arms like I was cold, I shrugged. “It seems like it would be super draining, closing wounds and bringing people back from near death.”
“It’s actually kind of the opposite,” he said, getting up off the couch. “It’s like…touching electricity, I guess. You’re handling someone’s life energy, so it’s intense, yeah, but there’s like this charge from it.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about you ‘handling my life energy,’ Cal.”
He grinned, and I was taken aback by how different it made him look. Cal spent so much time being stoic and solemn that it was easy to forget he even had teeth. “I’ll buy you dinner first next time, I promise.”
Okay, the grin was one thing, but that had definitely been flirting. Then, like I wasn’t thrown enough, Cal leaned down and picked up a potted African violet on the low table next to the sofa and brought it over to me. For a second, I wondered if this was his socially awkward way of trying to give me flowers, but he said, “Any Prodigium can do it, really. Not on the same level I can, but still. You just have to be patient.” He pushed the plant toward me, and I noticed a few brown spots on its velvety petals. “Wanna try?”
I looked at the droopy violet and snorted. “Thanks, but that poor little flower looks like it’s suffered enough.” Wiggling my fingers, I added, “I’m way better at the blowing-stuff-up part of magic. Healing is probably beyond me.” Sure, I’d managed to make water pink and change Nick’s clothes yesterday, but healing seemed a lot harder than that. Not to mention that my mind was still on that jagged piece of paper, and how Dad had covered up our stealing the grimoire.
Cal nudged my arm with the pot. “You said you were working on controlling your powers. No magic requires more control than healing. Try.”
I thought about protesting that I was too worn out from the spell with Dad earlier, but the truth was, thanks to Cal’s magic, I felt better than I had in days.
And I’m pretty sure he knew it.
I took the terra-cotta pot. “What exactly do I do?”
Cal curled his fingers around mine and raised my left hand to the brownish flower. There was a callus on his thumb that should have been irritating against my skin.
“In a lot of ways, healing is like any other magic. You concentrate on what you want to change, and you make it happen.”
“Or, in my case, explode.”
Cal just shook his head and said, “But when you’re healing something living, you have to take it into account, too.”
“And I do that how?”
Cal’s fingers tightened on mine, and my heart thumped in response. The library felt very quiet and very still around us. “You’ll feel it.”
I swallowed, which was hard to do what with my mouth suddenly drying out. “Okay.”
I closed my eyes and felt my magic traveling up from the bottoms of my feet. So far, so good. I thought about those brown spots on the petals, all the while keeping Mom’s face firmly lodged in my brain. Heal, I thought, feeling too self-conscious to actually say the word out loud. The flower stirred under my hand, but when I cracked my eyelids, it looked as brown as ever.
I closed my eyes and took more of those deep breaths Dad was so fond of, thinking that it was no wonder Prodigium were always getting their asses handed to them by humans. I mean, every time I had to do an intense spell, there was all this focusing, and relaxing, and picturing, and breathing…. It wasn’t exactly the most effective battle strategy against something like The Eye.
I should’ve known better than to think about The Eye, though. As soon as the name popped into my head, my control shattered.
And so did the terra-cotta pot.
Black soil rained down on my feet, and the purple flower drooped even further. I could have sworn it actually bobbed accusingly at me.
“Ugh,” I groaned, as Cal quickly scooped the jagged pot out of my hands. “Sorry, but I warned you I was destructo-girl.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, even as his hand curled protectively around the plant. “You almost had it.” He glanced down, probably to survey the damage. “Oh, wow,” he said, surprised.
I wiped my dirty hands on my jeans. “That bad?”
“No, it’s not that,” he said. “Look.”
He held the pot out to me. The flower was still awfully droopy, but just behind it were two other smaller, non-droopy flowers. And these were vibrant purple, without a brown spot to be seen. “Whoa. Did I make those?” I asked.
Cal nodded. “You must have. So much for destructogirl.”
I gave him a rueful smile. “Yeah, well, shiny new flowers or not, there’s still a broken pot, and a very sad old violet.”
“Maybe,” he said with a nod. Then he paused, and I could tell that whatever he was going to say was really important. There was even a chance he might use more than five words to say it. “Or maybe your magic isn’t that destructive after all. The rain of Doritos, the bed thing, this…Maybe it’s just that you create too big, you know?”
When I could find my voice, I said, “Cal, that might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me since we got here.”
He twirled one of the naked roots between his fingers, and didn’t meet my eyes. “It’s true.” Then he glanced up and gave one of those half smiles I was really starting to like. “And it’s also true that I need to find another pot for this guy. I, uh, guess I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Great. We can pick out our colors.”
“What?”
“For the wedding. I’m thinking melon and mint. Supposed to be really hot next spring.”
Cal laughed out loud, the first time I’d ever heard him do that. “It’s a plan. See ya, Sophie.”
“Later,” I called after him, suddenly struck by a pang of sadness. Archer had called out, “See ya, Mercer,” at the end of nearly every cellar duty. I’d never hear him say that again.
It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you’ve accepted that someone is out of your life, that you’ve grieved and it’s over, and then bam. One little thing and you feel like you’ve lost that person all over again.
I thought about him sitting in the corn mill, waiting for me. What had he wanted to tell me so badly that he’d risk his life to say it?
I tightened my fingers around one of the jagged shards of pottery so hard that I nearly drew blood. “It doesn’t matter,” I murmured. The whole Archer thing was beyond done. And, I reminded myself with a glance upstairs, I apparently had way bigger problems than a messed-up love life.