Rule was not happy, "Lily could have ended up on the floor instead of you."
"Oh, no. Evidence—anecdotal, but sufficient—indicated hers was the greater Gift, though I didn't realize how much greater. You are quite amazing, my dear."
Lily didn't look flattered. "So what happened?"
"Why, our Gifts duked it out, and yours won."
"Is that supposed to be an explanation?" Sherry asked dryly.
"Come, Sherry, you aren't thinking. You know what makes the sensitive Gift unique, don't you? It cannot be controlled in any way."
"Telepaths can't control their Gift, either," Ito said. "Or they wouldn't go insane so often."
"Fernando Baccardi, Ito?" Fagin's eyebrows bounced up and down. "Yes, I see you know what I mean. Baccardi was a telepath in the last century," he explained to the others, "who remained stable well into his forties because he could dial his Gift down. His ability supports my thesis that, before the Codex Arcanum was lost, it was possible to erect psychic blocks or shields."
"Actually," Lily said, "that's still possible."
"Is it? Is it, indeed?" His expression was all astonishment, but the eyes beneath those bushy eyebrows turned sharp. "I hope you'll tell me more about that later. For now, I attempt to cling to the subject at hand. As I was saying, my Gift and Lily's cannot be controlled—not consciously or unconsciously, not by ourselves or any outside agency. Intriguing, isn't it? In addition, sensitives are said to be completely impervious to magic. That's obviously not true, sen—"
Lily broke in. "Wait a minute. What do you mean?"
"We know when we touch magic, don't we? We may even know what kind of magic we're touching—you do, I suspect… yes?" He was pleased by her nod. "I can't always tell, myself. Still, this makes it clear there is some slight interaction between what we touch and our own magic, yet we remain untouched ourselves, so to speak. I've devised two models to explain this. First, we may possess a sort of permeable film of magic overlying an impenetrable core. The interaction would take place in that film. Second, we might be absorbing a tiny bit of power from whatever we touch and transmuting it, making it purely ours."
Lily frowned. "Transmuting it, not blocking it?"
"You see the difference, don't you? I'll confess I'd favored the first model, but my reaction today tends to support the second one."
The archbishop shook his head. "Fagin, try to remember that not all of us are familiar with your field."
"Of course. Sorry. If the transmutation model is accurate, when I touch someone who possesses a fire Gift I suck up a tiny bit of fire magic and turn it into my own type of magic. I affect it—it doesn't affect me. You can see why I preferred the other model."
"This one raises as many questions as it answers."
"Just so. Yet when I touched Lily, it seemed that my Gift tried to take in a bit of hers and couldn't, because hers is so much stronger. My power snapped back at me like a rubber band." He beamed at her. "What was it like for you?"
Rule bent his head closer to hers to murmur, "It was good for me. Was it—" The quick pinch on his ass stopped him, as she'd meant it to. It also made him grin.
She pretended not to notice. "Static. As if music was playing, but I couldn't get the station tuned in."
"Ah! So my—but no. I'm so easily moved to digressions! Let us sit down, and perhaps you will tolerate a few questions."
There were more than a few questions, and they ranged all over the place. Had either of them experienced any unusual sensations or thoughts during the demon's attack? What did the demon's poison feel like now? How much holy water had Cynna used? How strong would Lily rate the power wind? Did she associate it with a color? A sound? Had Rule smelled anything when it hit? Why did the lupi not name this so-called goddess? What kind of powers were attributed to Her? How did they know Her avatar had been eaten by a demon prince?
Some answers were simple. They didn't name the goddess because names held power, and She might be drawn to the namer. Cynna had used about six ounces of holy water. The demon's poison felt, to Lily's touch, like a rotted orange.
Other answers took longer, and some they simply couldn't give.
When the others weren't asking questions, they were arguing about what the answers meant. At least, three out of four of them argued; Fagin looked on, a dreamy Buddha contemplating the is-ness of being, or maybe a nap.
Rule grew twitchy as the discussion dragged on. The wolf was bored, and his hip hurt. Not with the sharp pain of a fresh wound, but a tired sort of ache, as if the muscle were weary of the battle going on inside it. He was getting hungry, too; healing burned calories like crazy. The wolf didn't see the humans as food—only the feral or the very newly Changed lost their humanity to that extent—but he wanted to explore, even if he couldn't hunt.
Rule glanced at the door for the second or third time.
"Uh-uh," Lily whispered, leaning close. "If I can't escape, neither can you. Kind of like being around triplet Cullens, isn't it?"
"At least none of them are burning anything," he murmured.
The human in him recognized the method beneath the apparent disorder, however. Fagin might claim to be prone to digression, but he let the others have only enough time to see if a debate was going anywhere productive, then sighed and, professing regret at the necessity, pulled them back on topic.
Which apparently was the fate of the world.
When Lily asked, it turned out that all four of them did agree on one thing: the world teetered on the cusp of great change. Ito saw that change in terms of various prophecies; Sherry spoke of a trembling in her bones and a vision experienced by a member of her coven. The archbishop simply agreed that if the power winds continued, the level of magic in the world would rise.
And that could change everything.
Fagin grounded his explanation in his own specialty. "There are two schools of thought concerning pre-Purge history. The first school, accepted by the majority of the Western world, holds that early accounts of great magical events and abilities were the product of propaganda, exaggeration, hysteria, and superstition. Yet many of those accounts come from men who were hardly charlatans or credulous fools."
"It's the winners who write history," Sherry said.
He awarded her a delighted smile. "Precisely. Those who conducted the Purge were the winners, and their view is enshrined in our culture. We teach it to middle school students and expound upon it in countless doctoral theses."
Ito snorted. "It's not the first time a lot of crap has been taught at Harvard."
Sherry's eyes twinkled. "Hikaru, don't you teach at Harvard?"
"That's how I know."
Fagin nodded at Lily. "You've undoubtedly guessed that some of us do not share the accepted view. We believe there was once much more magic in the world, and that the failure of magic to deliver as it once had caused the Purge."
"You're right," Rule said quietly.
"Ah!" The bushy brows drew down in the first frown Rule had seen on the man's face. "I've heard that your people have a particularly vital oral history. One you don't share with outsiders."
"True on both counts."
Fagin regarded him a moment. "I may attempt to change your mind about that, but later. Interesting, isn't it, that your Mr. Brooks assembled his task force from academics and practitioners who don't subscribe to the conventional wisdom about the Purge?"
Lily leaned forward. "So what do you unconventional thinkers think?"
"Basically that during the sixteenth century the quantity of available magic began to decline. Perhaps people depleted it, just as any natural resource may be depleted. Perhaps the decline was part of a purely natural cycle, an ebb and flow of magic that produces occasional barren periods, just as the cyclical nature of global temperatures results in periodic ice ages. That is my own theory."