“Good thing I made some.” Noah brought the tea over. “Hang on, I think we have...” He trailed off as he left the way he had come, and a moment later, the back door opened and closed.
“Here.” Noah came back with a milk crate in one hand and another cup of tea and a plastic bag in the other. He dropped and nudged the crate into place for use as an end table, and sat on the floor.
“Thank you. Not just for the—” Lindsay raised his cup in salute. “For all of this. If we’re going to be here a while...” And it certainly looked like they could be. None of them had anywhere else to go, not now.
“Might as well make the best of it, right?” Noah turned the contents of the bag out carefully and started poking through them. It looked like a haul from thrift stores and pawnshops. Various bits of broken
gold jewelry went into the bag again, but he kept out several little bags of old coins. “It’s not like we haven’t done this before, the rest of us. Well, aside from Zoey. Not a skill you can put on a job application, but it’s useful.”
“Dane dug me out of a dumpster and brought me back to Cyrus,” Lindsay said, sipping his tea again, remembering what it had felt like to wake up in that big, warm bed with Dane watching over him.
Terrifying, at first, and then more wonderful than anything he could have imagined. “I never really had to make do on my own. What are you doing?”
“Arts and crafts time.” Noah started sorting coins by size. “Making a set of runes, to start. Divination games are common when you’re a kid, where I grew up. I wasn’t bad at it. Well, pretty good, really. I think that’s one of the reasons I went so long before they finally broke down and admitted I wasn’t going to be any use. All the early signs were there. But they never turned into anything else.”
Lindsay wondered if that would be worse or better than what he’d lived with, the knowledge that he’d never been what his parents had wanted in a son. “When do people usually...come into their magic?”
“Some people are born with it, like second sight. That’s disappointing, too, for a lot of families. It means the child won’t ever have much else. The material has to be strong enough for the magic, and if the magic arises while the material is weak, either the magic is weak or the child will die. So, it starts cropping up as early as seven and as late as your teens.” Noah scooped up what seemed to be the rejected coins and shook them back into a bag. “They like to start seeing it around puberty. The brain has major shifts then, and it’s important for the magic to run in the body and develop with it. The later the manifestation, the more likely there are to be complications.”
Complications. Lindsay had been seventeen; he supposed that was on the late side according to Noah’s math. Not as late as Noah’s had been.
These were all questions he hadn’t thought to ask Dane or Cyrus. Or Taniel and Izia and Ezqel, when they’d been working to fix his broken magic. Each time he thought his questions had been answered, new ones arose in their place. His curiosity was such a contrast to how he’d once clung to ignorance and wished his magic would fade away from neglect.
“What are the runes supposed to do?”
“They give you basic guidance. Depending on how they fall, they let you know the nature of things surrounding a choice or direction.” Noah felt in his pockets and came up with a small pencil that he used to make a mark on a coin. “They’re the same runes we still use to create artifacts. The magic in us knows them, because our minds know them. Some people say that gives them extra power, that magic remembers them. That the stones do, or the metal. You could use anything that was familiar enough to you, with practice.”
Lindsay wondered if he’d be able to learn to do something like that. Make runes, and use them. He set the tea on the crate, and folded up the newspaper and tucked it into the seat beside him, so he could lean forward to watch Noah instead. “Can I see?”
“Sure.” Noah scooped up the coins and shifted to lean against Lindsay’s chair. “There’s twenty-four. I try to make sure they’re about the same. When I was a kid, I’d have to use a tool to mark them. Not anymore...”
Noah held up a coin that had pencil marks on it, a simple X. A tiny line of flame crept over the pencil marks and flared white. Where the marks had been, there were blackened grooves. He tossed it in the air and bounced it off his palm.
“Hot, hot, hot...” Noah laughed and caught it, then passed it back to Lindsay. Tentatively, Lindsay touched the inset marks, but they were barely warm now.
“You’ll do that to all of them? What would someone with another kind of magic do?” Lindsay leaned over Noah’s shoulder to return the coin. Heat radiated off Noah’s body, and Lindsay couldn’t resist, he nuzzled at Noah’s neck and cheek, feeling some of that warmth up close.
“You don’t have to bring your magic on them to make it work.” Noah sounded distracted. He cupped Lindsay’s face in his hand and leaned back to return the favor, gently rubbing his stubbled cheek against Lindsay’s. “It helps. But you’d learn to put your mind to it. Magic is around you and in you. The coins spin through it, magic and nature meet, and magic makes nature speak. I must have made a dozen sets as a kid.”
As Lindsay was about to coax Noah into a kiss, he heard footsteps—a light pat-pat-pat that wasn’t quite what Lindsay had come to associate with Kristan—that stopped out in the hall. He looked up to see Zoey standing in the doorway, dark eyes wide and one hand over her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, um. To interrupt.”
“That’s okay. You’re interrupting Lindsay interrupting.” Noah laughed at that and nosed Lindsay’s cheek before letting him go. He put the finished rune down and went back to writing on the remaining coins.
Lindsay snorted and rubbed his hand over Noah’s bristly scalp. He knew Noah hadn’t minded the distraction. “It’s fine,” he assured Zoey. “Come on in. I’d offer you a place to sit, but...” There hadn’t been time to bring anything else in yet. His chair must have been here when they arrived. “Pull up a piece of floor, I suppose?”
Zoey hesitated another moment before nodding firmly, like she was convincing herself it was all right.
She padded across the room and dropped to the floor to sit across from Noah. She was silent, picking at her nails and glancing up at Lindsay. Lindsay waited, but whatever it was she needed to say never came.
“You’ve had a rough few days,” he offered as a starting point.
She seemed relieved by that, taking it as the invitation it had been. “Yes. Oh man. Ylli said... Well, he kind of explained stuff, but I still don’t know what’s going on. I get that I, um, I kind of made a big mess
back there in Wildwood, and those people, they wanted to do some kind of experiments on me or something. That woman, the doctor, she...” Zoey shook her head, trailing off.
“She’s been at this a while,” Noah said dryly. “The mess wasn’t your fault. Can you say what happened? Before she came. Was there anything strange?” He looked like he was busy with what he was doing, but Lindsay could feel him listening for something.
Zoey’s face scrunched up, and she picked her nails as she thought about what Noah was asking. “The punch clock broke again. It’s supposed to interface with the computers, but it’s glitchy, and it wiped out all my hours for the second time this month. I got screwed out of money I needed last time it happened.” She looked uncomfortable. “It was funny at first, with the computers acting weird, but I got scared. I could see what was in my head spilling out everywhere, on the screens, over the speakers. And then everything kind of...went crazy.”
“That sounds about right.” Noah shrugged and looked over his shoulder at Lindsay. “The focus is rare, but the rest seems normal for someone raised mundane.”