Page 88 of The Diamond in the Rough

I nodded. “Just let me tell Beck.”

It was justafter two in the afternoon by the time I got back from lunch with Violette. My sister.

I didn’t know her, but Iknewher. It was like finding someone else who understood the way my brain worked, who laughed at the same things I did, who liked the same foods, who took things just as literally as I did.

It wasn’t the perfect afternoon, but it was pretty close.

She told me about what she wanted to do with her life—her dreams of becoming a biologist. Maybe a vet or an animal rehabilitator. She was finishing up her first year at William & Mary, having taken incompletes in her classes following our parents’ deaths. She’d finish over the month of May, then was planning to take some of her inheritance and travel—Europe, then Japan and Thailand before coming back to the US.

She was going to send me pictures, although we alreadyhad lunch plans for two weeks later. I was looking forward to it.

I was looking forward to having family.

Or, at least, family who didn’t hate me. It was… nice.

Focus, sunshine.

I sighed, pulling myself back out of my thoughts to pay attention to the dead woman.Sorry, Sylvia.

I didn’t watch a murderous death witch for a century-plus and not learn a thing or two,she informed me primly. Sylvia had been trapped in a house by the spirit of a centuries-old death witch—long before she’d died—who had possessed the bodies of his descendants to continue his murder spree after his own demise. I’d felt his magic, and that’s what had first led me to Ward—because Ward had been trying to undo it.

I’m sorry. I’m paying attention, I told the ghost contritely.

Her expression told me she didn’t believe me, although she didn’t actually say so.Your magic, she said instead.Works by siphoning away life energy. It converts someone or something else’s life into yours.

I frowned.Mason says that witchcraft is about balance, I mused.

Sylvia was nodding.Yes. And you’re using death magic to tip that balance in your favor.

That seemed… wrong. Not incorrect, butimmoral. I didn’t like the idea that my magic could only operate at others’ expense.

It does you credit, sunshine, that you don’t like that idea, Sylvia told me.But you also have to be able to understand and control that magic so that if you need it, you have it at your command.

I don’t want to have to kill anything, I told her. I’d done that before—targeting the mice and spiders and roachesthat had invaded my cell at Tranquil Brook. I still felt a bit guilty about it, but I’d been desperate to control the magic—and more than a little disgusted at how unhygienic it was to live in a pest-infested room. Not that hygiene had been my first priority.

Well, then let’s start with something that’s already doomed, shall we?

I looked at her, horrified.What does that mean?!

She gestured at the vase of flowers sitting on the coffee table.Those, she replied mildly.They are, for the moment, still living, but they’ll be dead in a day or two.

Oh. I could manage that, although I did still feel a little bit bad about draining the cut flowers, if only because they did make the space feel a little more cheerful. And someone would have to pay to replace them.

Start with one, Sylvia advised.And see if you can make it wilt.

At the endof the day, I had only actually wilted about half the bouquet of flowers, which I’d removed and thrown out. Draining them had made me tired, which Sylvia assured me was because a cut flower didn’t actually possess that much life magic, and so I’d been expending more than I’d been gaining to do it.

But if you drained it from something more powerful and more, well,alive, you could get back more than you lost in the process. Which was something I didn’t want to think too much about, because it felt an awful lot like what had been done tomeat Tranquil Brook.

I knew that the type of magic hadn’t been the same—the godawful people who’d run the asylum had been practicingwarlock magic, not witchcraft—but it certainly seemed a lot like it when you thought about life magic as zero-sum. If there was only so much of it, some of us were basically just taking it from other people and creatures. And flowers, apparently.

I didn’t really like that idea much, either.

What was the point of magic if it wasn’t, well,magical?

In that sense, I supposed that magic wasn’t actually real—what we called magic was just another layer of physics and metaphysics that had its own rules and followed its own laws, just like gravity or Newton’s Laws of Motion.

I didn’t know enough about the Laws of Thaumaturgy to know whether Sylvia’s argument about life magic actually matched what people knew to be true about magic or not, but it did also track with everything Mason had ever told me about the balance of witchcraft.