Page 72 of Until the End of Ever
Ronan snorted. “I’ve known you for twenty-four of your twenty-seven years, Lucian Regis, and you’ve never worn jeans in my presence.”
Lucian didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve never seen you in a lacy thong, and I still know you own half a dozen in your size.”
Ronan opened his mouth, presumably to riposte, then simply shrugged. “I mean, point. Anyway, Kleos, you look perfect. People who own jeans—and don’t consider them the equivalent of intimate lingerie—do wear them to meetings in the town hall.”
I grinned at the two friends, amused by their banter. “You guys are like siblings.”
Not unlike Gideon and me.
“Perish the thought. My sibling is a self-important dick,” Lucian said.
“You can say that again,” Ronan agreed. “I wouldn’t have minded someone growing up, though. A little brother or sister would have been nice.”
His wistful smile was almost as uncharacteristic as the professor persona.
“How about Lucky?” I wondered. “You said your parents fostered her.”
“She was twelve when her family passed away—I was already out of the house. I mean, she’s always been around, as we were neighbors, but presumably, a sibling would have been a constant presence, you know?” He looked out the window as he spoke. “Maybe the old house wouldn’t have been as lonely.”
I nodded. “I’m glad I had Gideon. My house was pretty cold, too.”
“You guys can have Damian for a week. Just say the word, he’s yours. You’ll see you missed nothing.”
I laughed. “What’s so wrong with your brother?”
“Everything,” Lucian and Ronan replied together.
“By the way, mentioning Lucky reminded me: she told me yesterday that she was looking for a few ingredients. She started brewing last night; her spell should be ready in a day or two.”
“I have a full stock of potion ingredients,” Lucian pointed out. “She could have asked me.”
“Yeah, she said the potion’s pretty low grade—the kind of things kids can get ahold of. You wouldn’t stock spider eggs or kelpie hair.”
Lucian wrinkled his nose. “They’re not useful for any potion worth my time.”
“Precisely.”
“I’ve worked with kelpie hair as a child,” I said, remembering brewing with my grandmother. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s…” After thinking a second, Lucian settled on, “Cheap. Kelpie are magical horses, yes, but frankly, some people even consider them shifters. Their nature is too changeable to offer the strength needed for a powerful potion. For the permanence ointment I apply to fabric, I use unicorn hair. Kelpie would be weaker.”
“Therefore, if she’d raided Lucian’s stock, Lucky would just have found fancy-ass components. But she’s not trying to create a permanent, or even particularly strong potion. She doesn’t want to send you to your ancestral plane forever.”
I nodded, remembering enough of my old classes to understand that the same effect could be gained when swapping every ingredient in a potion, or every component in a spell, but it changed the intensity of the result. Just like writing runes on paper, stone or skin could have different effects.
“We’re here,” Lucian announced just as the carriage halted.
“Here” was the same street at Night Academy, but this time our destination was opposite the hospital, in the great golden domed hall he’d indicated last Wednesday.
Outside, a steady stream of colorful people walked in, greeting each other. Ronan’s carriage wasn’t the only one, so we had a little walk to join the queue. I stopped at the back of the line, while both men kept walking.
As one, they turned to look at me.
“Is shequeuing?” Ronan asked, making it sound like a rare, potentially contagious disease.
“We’re all going to the same place, aren’t we? No sense in cheating.”
Lucian released a long-suffering sigh. “She’ll learn, eventually. I think.”
