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I folded them under my arms. “No.”

“Trust me for one stupid minute.”

“You used that line last time.”

“It worked last time.”

“That’s not an argument for using it again.”

“It’s the perfect argument for using it again. It’s the only kind of argument that means anything. Results.”

He held out his hands with no flame above them now, just Kit. He was warm and kind and watching me with a carefulness I was sure he’d deny under torture. So I gave him my hands. When his fingers closed over my hands the prickle woke.

It didn’t creep this time.

It struck.

Up both arms straight into my chest, a line catching fire so fast I gasped before I could stop myself. Kit’s hands tightened around mine, his eyes snapping up to my face, and whatever joke had been forming there died before it reached his mouth.

“There,” he said, low and not triumphant at all, almost afraid. “There you are.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I panted with frustration leaking into my tone.

Kit shook his head. “Don’t argue with the impossible thing while it’s happening.”

He brought my hands up and around his, not quite holding, not quite letting go, and a flame sparked into the small space our hands made. It burned small and gold, ordinary for one breath. Then it bowed toward me the way a flower leaned to the sun without being told to, dumb and certain and turning.

And the gold flooded green.

It doubled in size and then doubled again until the whole nook filled with green light and a heat that should have stripped skin off bone.

It didn’t burn. It poured through me.

That was the only way I could describe it, and yet it was still wrong. It was the closest I could get though. Kit’s fire ran out of him, into my hands, through some place inside me I had never been given a name for or even been aware of until recently. I knew without him saying aloud that it returned to him changed, I could feel that it was different as the circuit completed. It was stronger and calmer at once, impossibly both. His and mine but not ours at all.

Kit made a sound that was not a word. When I looked up, he was already looking at me.

The green light caught in his eyes and stripped the showman clean out of him. There was no grin, no practiced lean against anything, no easy glittering deflection to hide behind. He was just there with fire in his blood and my hands caught up in his. He stared at me like I had turned, all at once, into the one thing he had never, could never, be ready for.

My body noticed everything all at once. I felt his thumbs against the backs of my hands and the heat of his chest close enough to radiate through the robe and my uniform. It noticed the small pale scar at the corner of his mouth, and the plain fact that both of us were breathing far too hard for two people standing completely still.

While the fire rose higher between us, Kit’s gaze dropped to my mouth and mine dropped to his. Nobody moved. Or maybe we both did. The space between us disappeared by degrees too small to name or blame on anyone, a half-inch and then a breath and then his forehead almost against mine. The green fire caged in the basket of our hands, which were now pinned between our chests, was bright enough to throw our shadows huge on the walls. The heat of it made the whole world feel like it had taken a breath and was waiting for us to choose wrong.

“Billie,” he said. My name sounded different in his mouth, not a tease and not the opening move of an argument. A warning maybe, or a question, or a plea he was doing everything in his power not to make out loud, and the fire surged.

Kit pulled back.

He didn’t do it fast or like he was disgusted or scalded. He did it carefully and almost painfully, the way a person stepped back from the edge of a high place because the view was too beautiful to be trusted for another second.

The flame snapped out and the cold hit hard all at once. For a second I just stood there with my empty hands between us and felt the loss of it like not just the rug but the whole damn floor had been pulled out from under my feet.

“Right,” Kit said. His voice had gone rough.

“Right?” I repeated, because apparently I’d survived green fire only to lose access to useful vocabulary.

He dragged both hands back through his dark hair. “We are not doing that.”

“Doing what?”