Page 83 of Crossroads Magic
“It felt like the cold was trying to burn me right through the potholder,” I said. “Why didn’t I feel that coldness any time before today?”
Trevalyan didn’t look up from his examination. He moved to another side of the chopping block, to look from a different angle. “You’re only just coming into your powers. You were a half-blind human before today. You didn’t know about the missing token, and weren’t attuned to find it.”
“But the cold…?”
He glanced at me. “You and I feel the cold. If I were to try to pick it up, it would leave burns on my fingers. For you, too. But anyone else would feel nothing. They could pick up the puck, even play hockey with it, and come to no harm, because they are not sensitive in the way we are.”
“Muggles?” I asked.
Trevalyan grinned. Then he shook his head a bit. “Not muggles.” He moved a bit further around the block. “They just have different sensitivities to us.”
“Different powers?”
“That, too.” He straightened and moved back to the old stove and leaned back against it and crossed his arms. He scowled at the puck. “Leave it with me.”
“What are you going to do with it? Invert it, like my mother wanted to?”
“After Benedict and Thamina nearly came to blows over it?” Trevalyan shook his head.
I sucked in a breath, shocked. “Thisis what they argued about, the night she died.”
“Probably,” Trevalyan said. He grimaced. “They’d argued about it before, in front of me. Only then, it was still theory as the token hadn’t been found. Even so, Benedict and she shouted at each other for a good few minutes over the wisdom of even trying the inversion.”
He paused, while I imagined my mother and Benedict arguing.
Trevalyan added, “At least, Ithoughtit hadn’t been found. But if she found it in the last couple of days before the solstice, she probably asked Benedict for ingredients she didn’t have. She wouldn’t come to me because she would have guessed rightly I would be flat against her trying it. I hadn’t supported her the first time she argued with Benedict about it.”
“But if Benedict was so set against it, why would she ask him and not you?”
Trevalyan thought about that. “She maybe thought she could talk him around. She and Benedict were alike in their absolute determination to protect the people here. If she appealed to his sense of responsibility for us wee folk, he might have helped her.”
“But he didn’t, clearly.”
“Clearly your mother forgot that she’s one of the wee folk Benedict feels he has to protect. He’d been worried about her for a year or so—she kept pushing to cast larger and more powerful spells. Dangerous ones. It was eating away at her and he wanted her to stop.”
I shivered. What they had been arguing about gave Benedict no reason to kill her. The exact opposite, in fact.
Trevalyan stirred, shrugging off the memories. He scowled at the puck. “That piece of black foulness has to go. I will find a way to draw its teeth, then dispose of it. No one here in Haigton wants demons among us, and inversion is too uncertain. We must be rid of it.”
He gave me a small smile. “Go back and take care of Ghaliya. Leave it to me.”
?
Later that night I woke suddenly and was instantly alert, all sleep evaporating. It was late, I thought, but there was a pale light in the window that said it was close to dawn.
I couldn’t have slept that long! Only, Ghaliya had eaten an enormous dinner, followed by hot chocolate and a stewed apple with whole cloves and custard for dessert, then burped and gone to bed to sleep.
When I had checked on her an hour later, her skin was normal, dry and smooth. She even snored a little.
My relief was so vast my knees weakened. And I laid down upon the sofa, a great weariness coming over me, now that the immediate danger to Ghaliya and her baby had passed.
Now I was awake. Something had woken me, but the room was silent. I could hear Ghaliya snoring through the closed door of her room. It wasn’t she who had woken me, then.
I rose to my feet, barely noticing the chill on my bare soles, and moved over to the window showing the pale light. It couldn’t be dawn, my now awake mind told me, for the window faced north.
I peered out the window, my vision adjusting to the light out there. My glance fell upon the large Dumpster at the back of the yard behind the inn. It was silhouetted by the light. It was the flicker of flames, but a steady, surreal blue glow that made me think of every bad Hollywood movie about ghosts.
The Dumpster was shielding the source of the light. I walked up to the other end of the long sitting room, and looked through the far window.
