Page 10 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Another flicker, but this time with a frown. “Of course not. You can’t tell?”
“I thought I could, but apparently not.” I swallowed and looked out the window. Yes I‘d originally guessed something else, but if he wasn’t a seer, how could he block his thoughts the way he had?
“I’m a sorcerer,” he said, confirming my initial suspicion. “And you’re a seer. Though not a very good one.”
I turned back. “What isthatsupposed to mean?”
One ginger brow arched wryly. “Why don’t you tell me? Isn’t that what your lot do?”
My jaw clenched against a wave of indignation. I barely tolerated it when Professor James nitpicked my gloves or minor word choices. I wasn’t about to put up with a strange fae disparaging my entire subspecies, rescue or not.
“Thanks for c-clearing that up,” I snapped. “And no, you don’t have to worry about me stealing your thoughts. We’re not touching, so I’m not exactly a threat, all right?”
He jerked as if he were examining some rare new species with eight eyes that couldn’t possibly exist. “You have to be touching to See?”
“It’s beensuggestedit’s because I’m a half-breed,” I fairly spat. “My father is plain if you must know.”
I honestly wasn’t sure why I had volunteered the information. I hated this conversation, avoided it at all costs with other fae, though most of them figured out something was off within a few minutes. Their looks of inevitable pity, disgust, loathing, or some mixture of all three were intolerable. Not because of my parentage, but because of my dysfunctional abilities. To people like this, I was a freak. Treated like an invalid or avoided completely.
This was why I kept so thoroughly to myself, despite my grandmother’s encouragement to reach out to local covens, ofwhich there were many in Boston. Massachusetts had a long, venerated history of the craft for all fae creatures. But vertigo spells aside, I was better as a hermit. Better on my own in just about every way.
There was no response for several blocks. But when I dared to look up, the man’s expression only revealed faint skepticism over obvious fascination.
“So, have I got this right?” he continued as he turned onto Beacon Street. “You think you can’t hear my thoughts remotely because you’re half plain?”
I nodded. “That’s what I said.”
“I assure you, whatever your abilities, they have nothing to do with something as absurd as blood quantum.”
“Why do you think that?” I’d never heard such a statement.
“Because I’m a scientist, not a backwater charlatan.”
“A geneticist?”
He snorted. “Particle physicist, actually. But no matter. The point is that I believe in science, not fairy stories. And the genetics of magic don’t work that way. It’s like brown eyes or hair color. It either manifests or not. There’s no in-between.”
My jaw nearly dropped. It was one thing not to believe in something like fae eugenics. It was quite another to deride the myths that ungirded our kind’s entire history. Ourraison d’être.
“And what fool convinced you otherwise?”
I bristled. “That isnoneof your business who’s told me what. I don’t know you.”
“Well, whoever they are, stop listening to them. Blood quantum is just more imperialist claptrap imported from plain folk.”
I opened my mouth to argue but found I couldn’t. There had always been something insidious about the assumption. It was as backward as any other theory of racism to emerge from the Imperialist era.
“It’s like taking medical advice from an eighteenth-century doctor,” he continued. “But maybe you would. Ponds are excellent places to find leeches. Perhaps that’s what you were doing in there.”
“I wasn’t looking for fugging leeches!” My lips still felt thick with numbness, but I found I couldn’tnotspeak. In barely ten minutes, this stranger was finding nearly every way under my chilled skin possible.
“Must it be skin to skin?” he asked, changing the subject as abruptly as his insults.
I frowned. When others discovered my disability, they never wanted totalkabout it. More often, they would move on to more benign topics before making a quick excuse to leave.
The man seemed to take my pause for suspicion and held his hands up innocently before replacing them on the wheel. “I’m just curious. Truly.”
I rubbed my hands again in front of the heater, though I was quickly thawing out. “Okay…well, no, it doesn’t have to be skin-to-skin. But clothing can…muffle things. Most of the time, anyway.”
