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He looked up and surprise showed on his face before he schooled it into blankness. Good.

I left before either of us could do anything foolish with the inch we hadn’t crossed.

TWENTY-TWO

Billie

My mind was still reeling from my conversation with Linden when I headed to my session with Cormac.

He sat behind at the table with his gloves on and the black notebook open to a fresh page. I dropped into the chair across from him and looked at the candle like it had insulted my mother.

“No lamp today?” I nodded at the candle that sat between us replacing the lamp we’d been using.

“No.”

“Downgrading me. I’m hurt.”

His pen did not move and he did not look up. “Hands around the flame.”

“No hello?”

“No.”

“Good.” I set my bag on the floor, slower than I needed to, because slow, as always, was my thing to control. It was something I could give him instead of nerves. “I was starting to worry we’d become warm.”

Nothing crossed his face, and I’d learned that that was Cormac’s whole method. With most people there was a tightening at the eye or a breath let out through the nose, the small human motions that told me I had landed a verbal hit. He was locked up tight and I knew he’d never give me so much as a quickly indrawn breath.

“Hands,” he repeated.

I put them around the candle, palms facing each other, close enough for the heat to pool in the bowl of space between them, the way he’d shown me the first week before I’d started hating his patience. The flame threw a small unsteady light up the inside of my wrists, while under the smell of beeswax there was the older smell of the room itself, cold stone and iron and the dry mineral ghost of old ink, the smell I now associated with being measured.

“Reach for the channel,” he said.

I hated that he had a word for it. I hated more that the word had started to feel right, that when he said ‘channel’ some part of me knew exactly what he meant, the way a person knew which stair creaked in their own house in the dark.

Part of me wanted to make him wait, to teach him that I wasn’t a robot to be commanded, but I knew that would just end badly for me, so I reached and the prickle woke almost at once. It came up through my palms and gathered in the space between them, and the candle answered before I’d decided anything. The flame bowed toward me, small and eager, like a dog that had been waiting all day at a window. Then it deepened and gold slid down into pale green the way it always did when I was with Kit, green at the ragged, flickering edge, a color no candle had any business making.

It might have been similar to my reaction with Kit, but it wasn’t Kit’s fire. Kit’s fire roared and wanted an audience, and this one was just a sad candle in a cold room. But the color still came through me dark and living, and I watched it the way I watched most things about myself lately, which was to say from a slight distance.

Cormac’s pen moved. “Source flame unchanged at base,” he said, and his voice had gone flat and precise. “Output altered above contact range. Heat concentration around the subject’s palms. No visible distress.”

“Subject is having a wonderful time,” I said.

The pen kept going. “Subject remains sarcastic under strain.”

“Put that in the official report. Word for word. I want future generations to have the full picture of what a delight I was.”

“Sustain it.”

I sustained it, or at least I tried to, and that was the part he could not write down properly, because there was no clean noun for it. Holding the channel without Kit was like carrying water uphill in cupped hands. Kit had a current of his own, a restless warmth that fed back into me while I pulled, so that channeling with him felt less like lifting and more like leaning into a river already running my direction. The candle had nothing, no personality, no want, no company, just thin obedient heat that had to be dragged out of me instead of coaxed through me.

After a minute the drag settled behind my ribs and started to drain me. My breath went short and I made it go quiet instead, because quiet was free and short was information.

Cormac noticed anyway.

Of course he noticed, because noticing was what he was good at. There was probably a version of Cormac Vere somewhere who had noticed the exact second his own heart broke and had written it down in the margin of a journal with the date and time.

“The reading is incomplete,” he said. He set the pen flat against the page, which I had learned meant he was about to change something. “The candle is insufficient.”