Cassie looked pained. “A job or welfare. Shit, Wizard. Look at yourself. You can’t change your residence and put on new clothes and be what you aren’t. You’d still be a wizard, and you’d still have responsibilities to your magic.”
“My magic’s gone, anyway.” Wizard crushed his eyes shut as he made this final admission. He dangled once again in the abyss of that loss.
“Hold it!” Cassie’s voice snapped him back from it. She looked incredibly tired. “What a tangle,” she murmured, mostly to herself. She managed a tired smile for him. “Let’s take this one thing at a time. Go clean up. Maybe it will sober you up a little, too. Go on. You’ll feel better.
She picked up her book again. He blundered about the place, discovering a closet and an office with dusty files and a typewriter and then a short corridor with a door ajar at the end of it. The bathroom was small, little more than a sink, toilet, and shower stall. He untied the silver tassels of the cloak slowly.
He draped it and the soiled robe over the sink and turned on the shower to the hottest water he thought he could stand. He shut the glass door behind him and stood in the stinging rain, letting it batter his face. His brain slowly cleared. He began to soap himself, finding numerous small abrasions he had been unaware of. They stung. The hot water loosened the newly clotted blood on his elbow and it bled again, slightly. With cautious fingers he explored the tender lump on one temple.
He stayed under the shower until the water turned suddenly cold. Then he shut it off and stood dripping in the stall. It seemed so safe in here. Getting out of the shower and drying off meant facing up to whatever came next. But after a few moments he began to shiver. Best face it. He blotted himself dry and then glanced about for something to put on. There was only the robe and cloak. He slipped the robe over his head, expecting the smell of smoke and pigeons. But there was only the soft blue robe spangled with stars and moons. But for the small rips from the glass, the events of the past few hours might have been dreams. That was not reassuring. He pulled on his socks, slung the cloak over his arm, and emerged in search of Cassie.
He stood silently until she looked up from her book and nodded approvingly at him. “That looks better. Feel any better?”
“Some,” he admitted, and suddenly he didn’t want to feel better. As long as the events were overwhelming, no one could expect him to assume responsibility for them. Cassie seemed to sense his reluctance.
“So what is still so awful?” she demanded.
“Everything. My den is gone, with everything in it.
And—“
“Wait. One at a time. What did you lose in that fire that you can’t replace? You’re wearing the only unique thing you possessed. The rest of it could be replaced by a few strolls down dumpster row. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t, but it seemed cruel of her to state it so baldly.
He racked his brains for a defense. “Black Thomas. I got the pigeons out, but I didn’t find him.”
Cassie gave him a disparaging look. “Black Thomas’ Come here, tomcat!” Wizard followed her gaze up to one of the bookshelves. Thomas sat up slowly. He yawned disdainfully, showing a red mouth, pink curling tongue, and white teeth.
He surveyed them both with disgust, then rearranged himself with his front paws tucked neatly against his breast. His stump was tidily wrapped in a clean white bandage. He closed his eyes to slits and made Wizard and Cassie disappear.
“He’s still angry,” Cassie observed. “At you, for bringing a stranger into his home. And at me, for holding him down while I dressed that stump. But he didn’t even stick around for the fire to start.”
Wizard felt relieved. And guilty. “He wouldn’t let me clean and wrap it for him.”
“You didn’t even try,” Cassie stated factually.
“Well, I was afraid I’d hurt him,” he said defensively. Had she no sympathy for him at all? His magic was gone.
“Sometimes you have to hurt someone to help him- When cleaned that stump with peroxide, he screamed like a baby.
But it’s clean now, and he won’t get gangrene.“
“I’m glad he’s all right.”
“I know. Now. What upsets you most? That your magic is gone, or that you got caught before you could run out on us?”
Wizard’s breath caught. The question was as cold and unexpected as a knife in the spine. Cassie’s blue eyes continued to bore into his.
“Well, what would you call it?” she asked him at last, sounding a bit defensive. “Only days ago, you and I discussed this gray thing of yours, this Mir. That it had come to Seattle, and that you are the only one that will have its balancing point.
That it will come to you, and you must stop it. And if you fail, it will take us all down. What happens next? Next we have Wizard forsaking the duties of his magic, claiming that he has no magic, and contemplating moving in with a waitress, to watch TV and drink beer and line up for payments from a window. So what should we think? What were you thinking?
That you could roll over on your back and Mir would pass you by? Even if it did, which you well know it won’t, where did you think it would satisfy its hungers?“
The enormity of it settled on him- He could only look at her. The grave sadness in her eyes was more than he could bear.
“You know,” he said slowly, “that those things never crossed my mind. I never saw it that way, that I was abandoning a position. I only saw that my magic was gone, that I was Wizard no more. Somehow, I… forgot about it.”
“I know,” she conceded. She walked away from him to drop back into her chair, but then waved him into its thate on the other side of the lamp stand. His legs and back were stiff, and his ribs ached from the collision with the lamppost. The wound her words had dealt him was worst of all. He was glad to ease into the chair instead of standing. He smoothed his robes over his knees.
“You look like you’re already comfortable wearing that,”
Cassie observed softly.
He looked down at the soft blue cloth. “It seems natural,” he admitted. “Right.”
“Are you sure your magic’s gone?”
He nodded, tired of repeating it.
“Then the worst part is that you are sure. How did you lose it?”
He heard a test in her question. Did she think he would lie about it? “I broke the rules.” he said simply. “And it went away.”
Cassie was shaking her head slowly. From somewhere, a bit of needlework had come into her hands. Embroidery. He watched her bite off a thread and select a new color. “You’re wrong, you know,” she said conversationally- He leaned forward to catch her words. “The rule? broke you.”
He bowed his head to that rebuke. “I suppose I never really had the strength, the discipline, to be a wizard.”
Cassie snorted. “Idiot. No. You knew what would break you. You knew what rules you couldn’t keep, so you made those rules and then you broke them. To get away from the magic. It’s scared you shitless since the first day I told you it was yours.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No. No, you don’t understand. Cassie, I broke the rules that had brought the magic to me, and so it went away. I kept more than a dollar in change, I’ve lain with a woman, I’ve turned my strength loose upon others.” He was babbling, close to falling apart again. Cassie poked her needle through the heavy linen. He heard the rip-drag of the embroidery floss as it followed. She kept her eyes on her work, making no reply as he catalogued his sins, but only shaking her head. He told her all, all since the night she had done the Seeing for him, croaking out the tale when his mouth grew too dry to speak.