Chapter Thirty-Seven

Graves stayed on the phone while Kierse stepped in the house ahead of him. Her head spun. She was something new or old or different, but she wasn't a human and she wasn't a warlock. Her heart sank a little. She didn't realize she had been putting so much stock in that idea until she found out the truth. Being a warlock meant that Graves could train her magic, which would help her escape this job alive.

He'd been shaken when she was hurt at Imani's. Would he still send her in without magic training? She didn't know how she was going to make it out otherwise.

She needed to get herself under control. Whatever she was hadn't mattered before, and it hadn't mattered all those years on the streets. She'd survive this like she had everything else. And if she didn't, at least Gen and Ethan would be set up for life.

She pushed her shoulders back and tipped her chin up. They still had a spear to steal. Her plans didn't stop rolling forward just because they had taken two steps backward.

"Let's go into the library," Graves said, sneaking up behind her.

She jumped. "How do you do that?"

"Do what?" he asked. His eyes twinkled and were full of humor. One day, she would figure him out.

She slunk into the Holly Library, settling into her favorite seat.

"Drink?"

"No thanks."

Graves poured himself a glass of bourbon and then came to sit across from her. "Ask me your questions."

She skipped the ones that would make her sound weak. She needed facts, not reassurances. "What is absorption exactly? I mean, I know what it means to absorb something, but I don't understand how it works."

"Well, what we have been assuming thus far is that when you were bypassing my wards, you were immune to their touch. So the magic couldn't touch you or was even repelled by you. A passive ability that you couldn't control," he explained. "With absorption, instead of repelling the magic, you would take it into your body. Every time you stepped over my ward threshold, the magic to keep you out would be brought in through the skin. It's unclear at this point if you store the magic and can use it later. You've never mentioned any other abilities that would suggest that."

"I don't have any other abilities." She pursed her lips and then sat up straighter. "Wait..."

He raised his eyebrows. "Yes?"

"I never thought of this as an ability. I just thought that this was who I was, but I'm fast. Not as fast as you, of course, but when I would spar with Ethan, he always said that I had an advantage because I could go so fast. It wasn't actual speed, though. I could kind of... slow things down. That way I could see him coming at me and react. I called it my slow motion."

"Interesting," Graves said. "How long can you do this for?"

She shook her head. "Not long. I usually burn through it so fast. And once it's gone, I become sluggish and feel sick."

"You were using your abilities this entire time, and you didn't even know it."

"It didn't feel like magic. It felt natural."

He nodded, understanding lighting his features. "I understand. Mine does as well." He poured the rest of his drink down his throat. "We will figure out the rest of your abilities, Wren."

She shivered at that word. "How can we if I'm not a warlock?"

"I know you're concerned, but I am not. I've lived a long time. We can figure this out."

She wanted to have his faith, but she hadn't lived a long time, and magic looked daunting.

Graves took the seat beside her. She could feel his bright fire against her leg—searing and delicious. A part of her froze at his nearness—old habits—before she relaxed again.

Graves held his hands out in front of him. Then he removed his gloves. Her heart galloped. His hands. Those long, beautiful fingers and commanding, powerful hands. The ones she had so rarely seen. Beyond that to the vines that laced his wrists and disappeared up his sleeves in black ink. She hadn't gotten to see them when they'd had sex. He hadn't even taken his gloves off then. Her face flushed as the very vivid image of him stripping out of his suit coat and shirt to reveal just how much of his body that ink washed over assaulted her senses.

He cleared his throat, and her eyes snapped back up to his. She carefully schooled her features so that he couldn't see what she had just been thinking.

"I am a master of my craft. I have mastery over more than one key ability and several smaller ones." He placed the gloves to the side. "First, I have noise distortion. I can make a room soundproof or close off conversations from prying ears." His eyes met hers. "Or moans."

Her mouth opened slightly. She'd thought he was just going to ignore what had happened, but here it was on his lips. She tried not to squirm. "Well, at least Kingston didn't hear," she said. "Though he seemed to guess anyway."

"Indeed," he said. "As I told you before, I am knowledge, but I didn't explain further. My main ability is reading."

She frowned. "Everyone keeps saying that. What does it mean?"

"My body is a weapon." He held his hands up between them. "When I touch someone, I can read them. I can skim the surface of their mind. I read their memories and whatever is loudest. Usually, their deepest desires and all the pleasure they want. It can happen in an instant or, for those trained against it, it can take hours."

"Oh," Kierse said, flustered. She remembered his hand around her throat that first night. The shock in his eyes as he held her in place. Obviously checking to see if he could read her. So deliberate. He hadn't known what to make of her. "But... you couldn't read me?"

"No," he admitted. "I couldn't read you. There were so many times I have wanted to know what was going on in your head."

"That must have been frustrating."

"You have no idea. I have spent much of my life learning exactly what and who people are based on a bare touch on the street."

She bit her lip. "Is that why you always seemed so confused by me?"

He nodded. His eyes, usually so blank, were open to her now. "You make little sense. I have no context. I admit that I had gotten a bit complacent with the ability. I had to learn your body language, the shape of your face, all the things you said and didn't say."

He told her about that like he hated it, but something about it seemed backward. Like he'd enjoyed getting to know her. Like not being able to glean information had made him appreciate every new thing he had to learn from her the old-fashioned way.

"Well, I'm glad that you can't read me. It feels invasive."

"Hence the gloves," he said, reaching for them.

Kierse didn't know what compelled her, but she put her hand on his. "Don't." His swirling gray eyes met hers. "You don't need them with me."

"Habit," he admitted, looking uncertain.

"You can go without." She withdrew her hand.

"All right." He put the gloves on the table. "I should let you know, since I am telling you my powers... that I actually have read you."

"What? You read my mind?"

"I don't read minds," he said with a shake of his head. "That isn't how it works. I mostly read memories. Sometimes very close thoughts. Things that people are yelling at me. In my business dealings, I use it by drawing the answers to the surface through questioning and then scanning what their memory brings to the surface. It's not an exact science, but it is how I have become this successful."

"Using your powers in business dealings is how you've gotten the information on Third Floor and the vault."

"Yes."

"And I thought you were torturing people."

His stare was flat when he asked, "Who said I wasn't?"

She nearly choked. She would put nothing past him.

"And what memory did you read from me?" she whispered, suddenly terrified of what he might have seen.

"When you were in my arms after the wish powder, I had no idea how to help you. I had the medicine, but you couldn't drink it. You'd drown. So, I tried to read you, and I can only assume what I saw were hallucinations from the wish powder. It was all a jumble from the drugs. You had bruises on your throat and face. You were bleeding from your mouth." His face darkened. "You were in a gutter."

"Oh," she said with a gulp.

She knew exactly what memory he had seen from her. The night that Jason had tried to kill her when she'd tried to leave him. But she didn't want Graves to know that. If she told Graves about her past, it would have to be on her terms.

"Like I said, it must have been a hallucination," he continued when she said nothing else. "And I haven't tried since. More to the point, the absorption powers make sense, considering what happened that day with the wish powder. You must have absorbed more magic than you could process. So the magic took hold and did its job to try to kill you. That was why I could read you as well. You had so much magic in your system that you couldn't absorb mine fast enough."

Kierse ran her thumb across her bottom lip as she processed that information. It made sense. All of it made way more sense than immunity.

"We really had to test my limits, then. We would have been blind to that."

"Precisely. What we need to figure out now is how to restore your magic. That way, we can train them safely."

"How did you figure out that reading restored your magic?"

He considered for a moment, his eyes going distant. "After Kingston took me on as an apprentice, I threw myself into my education. I'd always wanted to read everything at my disposal long before I had access to Kingston's library, but there was only so much a poor boy could read at the time. The green book that I lent to you was actually a translation of a book I read in my youth."

No wonder it was dear to him.

"During training with Kingston, I would routinely return to my books weakened and in pain, and I would leave them stronger and sustained. It is like with Kingston's art—the process of doing something that always brought me energy in the past now brings me energy in my magic as well."

She considered his explanation. Something that energized her in her past. That made her feel stronger and more whole. That sustained her when she felt her weakest.

"Stealing," she realized. "Stealing is what recharges my magic. It's the only thing that makes sense. It's the only thing I've done my entire life that made me feel better. And that time I thought I had the flu, I couldn't go out and steal for weeks. It was the first time in my life that I wasn't out casually picking pockets. Except the day after Imani and Montrell."

He actually laughed. "Of course it is. The thief would think that picking pockets would energize her magic."

"A thief is who I am. Just like you specialize in knowledge and Kingston swears that art is its own form of persuasion."

"Stealing it is, then," he said, coming to his feet.

He returned a moment later with a plain box much the same as the one she had opened her first day here.

"What's that for? Another magic trick?"

"I'll get to it in a minute. I think that we need to change our strategy to get the spear."

"This late in the game?"

"Before, I was under the impression that you were a warlock and that you were immune to magic. Absorption is something else entirely. It's notpassive, which means it opens a whole new level of powers that I can train you to use. And more to the point, you can be trained to absorb wards so that I can come with you to the solstice party."

Her eyes widened. "You think I can do that?"

"I think you can if we train. You're already passable with the spear. We can work on this instead."

Kierse could hardly believe it. Not just about her magic, because she had been certain that finding out she wasn't a warlock meant certain death on this job. But if Graves was going to train her anyway and he was coming with her, then she might actually have a much better shot of getting out. Something she hadn't let herself consider.

"When do we start?"

"As to that..." He passed her the box on his lap. "We'll begin with you making wards and then move on to removing them."

She tingled with excitement. "I'm going to practice magic."

"You probably won't get it on the first try," he warned. "But I'll start with the basics."

"Okay," she whispered in reverence, staring down at the little wooden box.

"Warding is like all other magic, but it requires barely any energy. You can have multiple active wardings at all times and hardly ever run out of power." That explained his house, if he was always maintaining the wards. "Most magic starts off with a sense, but I'm going to leave that for another day, another lesson. All you need to know right now is that magic is intent."

"Intent?" she asked.

"You have to tell the magic what you want it to do, and then it does it."

"That easy, huh?"

"Not at all. But warding is the easiest, at least. If I wanted to ward this box, all I would have to do is think about wanting it and then use my magic to make it so."

"Would that put the ward language all over the box?"

He grinned. "Not unless my intent was for it to be there. It can be masked so only I could see it, but it would be weaker. A ward is stronger the more it's seared into something. The library has the strongest wards, as they're carved into the frame. This is a temporary ward. It doesn't need to last two or three hundred years."

"I see," she said, eyes wide.

"So, I want you to focus your intent on the box. And I want you to reach out to it and seal it shut."

She looked at him dubiously. "That's it?"

"If you don't think you can do it, then you're right."

Well, she wouldn't have that. She could do this.

Kierse focused all her intent on the box. The little wooden square. The metal clasp. The slick edges. This was her box, and no one else could get inside it. She would stop anyone who sought access. She pushed her will toward it, but nothing happened.

She sighed. "I don't think it worked."

"No. You would have felt it, but I hardly expected for it to work on the first try."

She nodded and returned her concentration to the box. She would exert her will on the thing. And so she tried again and again and again. Nothing happened. No matter how much she focused, she couldn't seem to get to the point of exerting her will on the box. It was just a box. She wasn't even warding anything within it.

She slumped backward. "Ugh. I don't have it."

"Keep the box," he said with a nod. "And keep practicing."

"Okay," she said, disappointed in herself.

"This isn't the only thing we have to work on. You're going to like this part."

Her eyes perked up. "Oh?"

"Reconnaissance," he said with a feral grin. "Tonight, we go to the underworld."