Cassie snorted. “Lynda. She’s another matter entirely. Don’t blame it on her. So you’re sure it’s gone. Then you’re a fool and no one can help you.” She finished a leaf and knotted off her thread. She suddenly crumpled her work into her lap and sat up straighter. “I have an idea about you. I may be completely wrong. Want to hear it?”
“Why not?” What could she say that would be worse than what had been said?
“This gray thing, this Mir. It scared the hell out of you. So, rather than face it, you tried to pretend it was only imaginary.
Something inside your head, some neurotic disorder from your past. It isn’t. It’s as real as I am.“
“How real is that?” he asked lightly, but she brought a pointing finger to bear on him.
“Never doubt me, not even in jest. I’m real, real enough to kick your ass if I bear another comment like that out of you tonight. That would have been me next step, wouldn’t it? And you damn near took it. You would have convinced yourself nut Rasputin and Euripides and I ”were all—I don’t know what—imaginary, or fragments of your own disordered mind.
I mink: you could have actually made yourself believe it, too.
You’re a very young wizard, as wizards go, and tonight you nearly lost your chance to get any older. But you had better believe this, now. This gray thing of yours, this Mir. It’s real.
Real enough to tear you into shreds. Real. And smart enough to start with your mind first, if you leave it an opening. Or it can stand back and watch you chase your own tail until you’re exhausted, and men it can step in and take you without a fight.
And use you for its own ugly ends.“
“I think it’s already begun,” he admitted cautiously.
“Bullshit.” Cassie smoothed out her needlework and picked up a skein of yellow thread. “You’re scaring yourself. Searching your soul for bogey-men. So you have a temper. So your body has been trained as an effective weapon and steps in to save you’when your mind is out to lunch. Maybe you even have a few kinks that the right person can trigger with the right sort of behavior. Well, don’t we all? Don’t blame the gray thing or the magic. Don’t even blame Lynda. though she sounds like she could piss off a saint. Blame yourself. You set it all in motion.”
“Meaning what?” He demanded. He didn’t like the way this was going. Not matter what he said, Cassie seemed to circle back to where it was all his fault. But she couldn’t know what it was really like. She hadn’t been there.
“You deliberately unbalanced your magic. When Lynda came to you on the bench that day, she had a problem. You listened to her, but you didn’t tell her what you Knew. Nor did you turn her away. You kept what you Knew to yourself, like it was some ponderous secret. Hell, even I could have told her the answer. I would have said, ‘Lynda, it’s fine to like men, any number of men, as long as you still like yourself.’ But you didn’t. So you owed her, and she became a danger to you. Mir has used her as a channel to get to you- Hell, didn’t you wonder at a waitress that could jump up to a bar and chin herself up to a fire escape? Mir used her to move you away from the rest of us, to get you out on your own. But even though the magic was unbalanced when you didn’t give more than you got, it didn’t go away. Didn’t you Know that Booth would follow and attack?”
“It wasn’t me same. I couldn’t feed the pigeons.”
“Did you try?”
“She took the fucking bag!” he roared in sudden exasperation. “What was I supposed to do? Make popcorn appear out of nowhere?”
“Exactly. Did you try?”
“No!” he snapped. “I just knew I couldn’t. And you can’t shrug it off like it’s nothing when I say that I’ve been hurting people. I had stopped doing that.”
“I know. Because you didn’t need to. Who did you hurt?
A mugger? A murderer? A man who attacked you from behind?“
“And Lynda. And I hurt them all more than I needed to.”
Cassie shook her head. “You hurt them as much as you had to, to make them stop what they were doing. In the case of the knife-man, not quite enough. And Lynda? Lynda is like a rat pushing a bar to cam a feed pellet. She sized you up right away without even being conscious of it. She can push your buttons and you give her a little scare that puts an edge on things If you wens really a danger to her. do you think she’d stick around? She was already smart enough to dump one man that got too rough. You’re the key to the candy store for her. She sets the scenes and you say your lines. While the gray thing uses her to undermine you.”
“You don’t understand anything!” He rose so suddenly that he nearly upset the lamp. Fists clenched, he paced the room twice and stopped in front of her chair. “It’s different for me.
Maybe you can never understand. I don’t just lose my temper and slug someone. I Know what I am capable of, in a way most people never realize. I’ve killed, Cassie, with a rifle and with my hands. And I’m good at it. Very good. So good that when I am crossed, it’s the first solution I think of, not the last. And Lynda. I don’t like what she triggers in me, what she makes me want to do to her.“
Cassie shrugged easily. “Then get away from her. Find someone else. But don’t blame it on the magic.”
He shook his head. It was so simple for her. And so hard for him. “I’m a violent man.”
“You are also a man sickened by violence. A man triggered by violence to violence. Do you suppose I am so different? If I saw a mugging in progress, do you mink I would turn away?
If I were attacked, wouldn’t I defend myself? Wizard, there is only one rule about violence. Do whatever you must do to make it stop.“
He was so far beyond what she could imagine. It made her seem vulnerable and young as be told her, “I can’t agree with that.”
“I can’t make you. I can’t force you to believe that the magic hasn’t deserted you, either. And because of that, you just may the.”
His eyes snapped to her face. She suddenly looked very old. He crossed the room to her and sat at her feet, looking up at her. There was something in her eyes he knew. “Were you in Viet Nam?” he asked suddenly.
“My friend, I have been in them all since the wooden horse was dragged into Troy. They haven’t unproved them any.”
“Viet Nam was the worst.”
“It was different,” she agreed. She leaned her cheek on her fist and looked at him sadly. “Do you know, since I met you, I haven’t eaten a pigeon.”
He was touched. “Don’t look so sad. I feel like you’re saying last words to me. I’ve listened to you, I really have- I’m going to go back and get it all straightened out. It’s going to be alt right.”
“Fool,” she said fondly. “The time I can shelter you here is ticking away. Then I must put you out, back into the streets.
And Mir will have you. Tonight. This is the night it takes you away.“
“I’m not ready.” His mouth was dry. “You threw away your weapons to pretend there was no war.”
“Cassie, what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to get yourself killed. And maybe take down the rest of us as well.” She slid forward off her chair to sit on the floor beside him. “Why didn’t I ever see what a child you are?”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t think so, perhaps.” Her fingers traced the pattern on the nig. “But when did you really have the chance to grow up? You were just a kid when they took you. And when you came back, you were older than God, but without the wisdom.
Only the knowing. Not adults, but wizards. You and Rasputin and Euripides. The difference is they found themselves sooner, and have put in enough time to do some growing. You’re not going to have the chance.“
Her words were chilling. He wrapped himself in bravado, leaning back against her chair as he spoke. “And just what makes you so different, then?” ‘