Page 52

“I know.”

“No. You know the version people tell. Brave girl runs into fire. Saves child. The local paper would’ve used the word miracle if it gave a single damn about Calder Street.” I pulled my sleeve down over my left wrist, an old habit. “The true thing is I didn’t decide. Everyone else on that lawn stopped to do the math or survival, and I didn’t. There’s something missing in me, right in the spot where that math is supposed to be.”

Kit looked at me, and I still didn’t look at him, staring out at the courtyard instead.

“I don’t think that’s missing,” he said.

“That’s because you’re also bad at math.”

“Famously.”

“My arm didn’t burn.”

The words burst out of me before I could stop them, and then there was no pulling them back. Some tight thing behind my ribs loosened by half an inch the second they were out, which felt like the worst kind of betrayal. Kit went still, and all the ease drained out of him at once.

“My sleeve burned off in the fire as I was rescuing Davey,” I said, because I’d started now, and starting had always been my problem. “Shoulder to wrist, clean gone. The skin underneath didn’t. Wasn’t even pink. The fireman saw it. My mom saw it. No one asked about it overtly, didn’t even want to look at it, like they already knew there was no logical explanation for it. It’s not just that the fabric burned away though. The fire didn’t touch me. It refused to.”

Kit’s voice changed, going low and careful. “Billie.”

“No face.”

He closed his mouth. Good.

“Even my hair didn’t burn, not really,” I whispered.

We sat in the quiet of the impossible thing I’d just admitted to, though how impossible Kit would believe it to be since he was from this world of magic, I didn’t know, but he seemed just as shocked as if he was from the normal world. Then, slowly, he lifted his hand and touched a strand of my pink hair where the wind had blown it against my cheek.

This was not a grab and it was not a flirt. His fingers tucked the strand back behind my ear, warm and unhurried and strangely careful. He seemed to realize what he was doing only after he’d already done it, the way a person noticed his own hand halfway through a habit.

His hand stayed there a heartbeat too long, and my breath caught in my chest, the whole moment feeling frozen around me. Kit noticed, of course he noticed.

But he didn’t grin, and that was the dangerous part. If he’d grinned, I could have labeled him as a beautiful nuisance and shoved him into the correct mental drawer and turned the key so I could go on with my day. Instead his thumb brushed once near my temple, barely a touch at all, and his face held a question that he had the decency or the cowardice not to ask out loud.

I didn’t answer it. The next bell rang, and somehow the sound was lower and sweeter than usual. It traveled up through the stone into my boots, and suddenly we separated like we’d both remembered gravity at the same instant.

Kit stood first and held out a hand to pull me up. The hand hovered in the cold air between us, uncertain in a way that I’d never once seen him be.

I took it only because the step was steep, because refusing would have made it a capital T Thing, and I wasn’t ready for it to mean something. His palm was warm, with no prickle and no green at the edges of anything, just warmth that was ordinary and human and his.

That was almost worse because I wanted to sink into it and wrap it around myself the way I’d never wanted to with anyone else before. I pushed the thoughts deep down in my mind and refused to examine them. Kit was my friend and friends didn’t feel that way about each other, did they?

SIXTEEN

Billie

When everything that had happened with Kit wouldn’t stop rolling around in my mind I went to the library. There had to be a word for my ability, I refused to call it power, since I couldn’t control it, and if there was then the library was where I’d find it.

Plus, it was the time of day that Linden was normally at the library so if I couldn’t find it I knew he’d be able to help me, as long as I was vague about it and didn’t tell him what was actually going on. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Linden, in fact, as I thought about it I realized that I did trust him, but I’d promised Kit I wouldn’t tell anyone and I never broke a promise if I could help it.

But I needed a way to talk about my ability, even if it was just in my own head, and that meant going to the library and possibly getting help from Linden.

Who was I kidding? I would definitely get help from Linden.

He was in the low gallery when I found him, because of course he was. Linden was always exactly where a person needed him to be and had apparently decided a long time ago never to be obvious about it. He sat in the white shirt of his uniform with the sleeves pushed to the forearm and his tie loose, a book open under the lamp, with a short stack of old volumes waiting their turn next to him. The air held the usual library smells, old paper and old glue and warm dust, and threaded under all of it, faint, something green, like flowers through a cracked window type of green, and I ignored that. It wasn’t important at that moment.

“I’m looking for something,” I said, and sat down across from him without being asked.

He looked up and just waited for me to continue. It should have been unnerving, but somehow it was the opposite.