Page 49 of The Fantastic Fluke

“He’s probably hungry too,” I argued. “He’s my familiar. Maybe all this magic practice is tiring for him too.”

He rolled his eyes and waved a dismissive hand. “Fine. You do what you want, just don’t either of you come crying to me when he gets out of breath walking to the shop.”

I tore about half away from my remaining food and leaned across the table to set it on Fluke’s plate. Then I stuck my tongue out at Gideon. Then Fluke stuck his tongue out at Gideon.

“So you think the, ah, convergence is trying to drag me in?” I asked, pulling the conversation back on track.

He pulled his fond gaze off Fluke, shook his head, and turned back to me. “Not exactly. It’s just, it wants a link. I guess I think, maybe, it’s... lonely? So when there’s been no link, and one comes, it gets a little overenthusiastic. And especially if you’ve got a strong connection—that’s, you call that class, right? If you’rehigh class, it can be a lot to deal with.” He rolled his eyes as he said, “high class,” which, well, fair enough.

But wait.

“Are you saying I’m not class two?”

The look he gave me, lips drawn down, eyebrows up and knit together, could be well described on anyone else as “bitch, please.”

I should have realized it. Why would Fluke have come, or Gideon, or any of the rest, if I were still just plain old class-two Sage, even if it were class two in super special arcane magic?

“Don’t you start worrying you need to fix the whole world,” Gideon said warningly, waggling a finger in my face. “Fact is, there’s nothing impressive about having a strong connection to magic. It’s an accident of nature. You’re not the savior of everything just because you were born with a high capacity for magic.”

I smirked in return. “So, another fluke, huh?”

If he’d been alive, the neighbors would have heard his groan.

Chapter Eighteen

Ididn’t dream of my mother’s garden again, and I was a little disappointed by it. At least Fluke didn’t actually dig up my damned athame.

A lot of nonmagical folk found ritual especially sinister, with the tendency toward robes, chanting, incense, candles, and, well, ceremonial daggers. The fact was that it was a way to simplify. The athame was always a metaphor, but usually, it was a metaphor in the mage’s head, a tool of focus. In ritual, using physical tools took some of the work out of a mage’s mind, helping them use all that internal ability on their magic instead of on the details of spellwork.

Plus, there was usually a lot of mental preparation and chanting to help the mind focus. A mage wasn’t all-powerful when doing a ritual, they were just at their personal best.

Also, no one got stabbed, despite the dagger.

That hadn’t changed the basic fact that my athame, given to me by my mother when I was a child, represented something I now struggled to accept. I had accepted myself as both a weak mage and a victim long ago, and with that, I had buried the thing in a box under the old rhubarb patch.

But was I still those things?

“You’re quiet today,” Gideon said, his voice almost a whisper but still echoing off the mostly empty early morning streets. “Everything okay?”

“I’m just—” How could I put it? He’d turned my whole life upside down, and he knew that. On the whole, my life was better upside down. Two weeks earlier I’d had Beez, and unless I counted my father as an ally—I did not—that was it. But the good had come with a lot of baggage. “There’s a lot happening,” I finished uselessly.

He nodded, and he must have understood at least a little, because he went quiet again, letting me think.

That was a problem I’d had trying to make friends over the years, let alone my few pitiful attempts to date. My tendency toward introspection made people uncomfortable, and they were constantly trying to fill the conversational void.

Of course Gideon wouldn’t have that issue.

The guy I’d dated for three months, who had left his towels on the hallway floor, hadn’t been able to get past it. Or the one who had called everyone “bro.” No, the one guy not immediately annoyed by my personality traits was the one whose main flaw was unignorable; he was dead.

The fact that Gideon was enormous and intimidating was becoming less of an issue every day I knew him, entirely eclipsed by the fact that he was fucking incorporeal, and I wanted him not to be. In fact, I hadn’t dreamed about Fluke in the garden with my athame again, but I had dreamed of Gideon. Not in the garden. In my bedroom. And definitely not with my athame.

Like a game of sexy Clue: Gideon, in the bedroom, with the exceptionally impressive, er, tool.

He and Fluke took a seat on the couch as I ran through the morning routine, both of them content to be silent and soak up the morning sun.

David approached the door just as I was heading to the front of the shop to flip the open sign on, and he flashed me his bright grin and waved. “Morning,” he said cheerfully when I let him in. “How are you feeling?”

He headed straight for the front counter and the new release rack, as always. It was a tiny bit of mundane normalcy in the middle of a week that had been like a tornado through my life, and I couldn’t help a smile at his predictability.

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