I nodded, unable to speak. He was so close I could feel his breath. All I wanted was to lean toward him, vanishing the last of the space between my mouth and his. His head tilted downward by an inch, his fingers squeezing my shoulders.
And then he turned away from me and sat down on the sofa. I drew a deep, ragged breath, my head swimming and my whole body on fire.
Eli shifted his position on the sofa a couple of times before turning his attention to the note once more. He cleared his throat. “Maybe we can use this to help us figure out what really happened. I haven’t talked to Lance at all today, but I will first thing in the morning.”
“Yeah, good idea,” I said, my voice breathless. At least the prospect of a new case would lighten Eli’s mood. “Oh, and I’m supposed to focus your dream on Britney’s attack. Lady Elaine thinks it might be connected to some of Marrow’s supporters.”
“Makes sense.” Eli slid the note into his pocket.
I considered telling him the rest of it, but decided not to. For one thing, Lady Elaine and the sheriff had sworn me to secrecy. For another, telling him about that would inevitably lead to telling him about Paul. Didn’t take a genius to guess that such a revelation wouldn’t go down too well at the moment. I figured Eli hadn’t heard about his release yet—he would’ve said something straightaway.
I pulled out the chair beneath the desk and sat down. “So tell me about your trip to Lyonshold.”
Eli arched a single eyebrow at me. “How did you know I was there?”
“Oh.” Crap. I searched for an explanation and decided a partial truth was better than a lie. “I bumped into Sheriff Brackenberry on campus today. He told me.”
“What was he doing on campus?”
I leaned forward, only now remembering. “He was interrogating Oliver Cork. I guess he was the last person to see Britney before she was attacked. They were attending some meeting about a group called the Terra Tribe. I think it’s like a student organization, but I’m not sure. Ever heard of it?”
Eli shook his head. He stood and walked to the desk, bending down next to me as he opened the drawer to retrieve a pen. I couldn’t help myself. I took another deep inhale of his clean scent. His hard shoulder brushed my arm, and I caught myself leaning in toward him. But he moved away, using the desk’s surface to write the name Terra Tribe down in the little notebook he’d started carrying around in his back pocket after we formed the Dream Team.
“I’ll research it later,” he said, returning to the sofa. He yawned. “Anyway, my trip to the capital was pretty interesting. A couple of people interviewed me about what happened, and then I spent several hours playing lab rat to a group of magickind scientists.” He screwed up his face. “More like mad scientists.”
I had a vision of a bunch of wizards poking and prodding at him with needle-tipped wands and resisted a shudder. “What’d they figure out?”
Eli brushed a hand through his hair, his calm, nonchalant expression belying the sudden excitement I sensed in him. “They think I’m a Conductor.”
“Like a train conductor?” An image of Eli dressed in a blue and white striped pair of overalls popped up in my mind, and I started to grin.
“It’s not funny.” Eli crossed his arms. “It’s kind of cool, actually.” A smile broke across his face, his excitement refusing to be contained a moment longer. “It’s really rare and not something anyone has seen since before The Will, but a Conductor is an ordinary who has the ability to channel magic from inside a contained source.”
I tilted my head, thinking it over. “What does that mean? A contained source.”
He shrugged. “All magical objects I guess. From what they’ve told me so far, stuff like wands and staffs have a magical core, kind of like a battery. You know how witchkind require an object to focus their magic?”
I nodded, envisioning my favorite analogy for this phenomenon—a witchkind’s magic was the computer and the magical object the mouse and keyboard.
“Well, it’s the core that does the focusing,” Eli went on. “Their magic flows through the core, but it doesn’t really use it. Conductors, on the other hand, channel the magic inside the core. It’s a more limited source of power, but still magic. Enough for minor spells at least.”
The scene from English class replayed in my mind. The fligere spell wasn’t very complicated, but given how hard it had struck Miss Norton, I wasn’t sure I would call it minor. And that had been only his first attempt.
“In other words,” Eli said, “I can do magic now.” I looked at him, surprised by his bubbly, kid-on-Christmas-morning tone. He was grinning in earnest, our earlier argument forgotten. “I’m supposed to pick out a wand sometime tomorrow.”
The reality of what he was saying finally dawned on me. Eli Booker, the only ordinary at Arkwell, could now do magic. All my worry about him being in Britney’s dream faded away in genuine happiness at this news. He would no longer be the outsider. No longer have to watch from the sidelines, only studying the theory of magic but never practicing it himself. He would finally be a part.
I beamed at him. “Congratulations. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks.” He leaned back, putting his hands behind his head. “I think this makes breaking The Will totally worth it.”
I frowned. “So The Will was set up to prevent Conductors from doing magic the same as halfkinds?” It was this reason, more than any other, why Paul had become Marrow’s follower. He was a halfkind, cut off from his magic at birth by the spell all because the Magi Senate wanted to keep the kinds from intermixing. But not anymore.
Eli dropped his hands into his lap. “Looks like it.”
“Did they say why?”
“I asked, but nobody had an answer.”
“Huh.” I thought back to the reason Marrow had given for why halfkinds had been blocked—the Magi feared them because they tended to be so powerful. I wondered if the same was true of Conductors.
Eli glanced at his watch, excitement still buzzing around him. “Then again, I don’t know how I’m ever going to fall asleep for our session without The Will to help me.”
I laughed. “I don’t blame you.”
“For real.” Another huge grin seemed to split his face in half. “Do you know any sleeping spells?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Even if I did, they wouldn’t work on you.”
“Right. Good thing, too, or we would never have beaten Marrow.”
I smiled, remembering with grim satisfaction how the spell I’d cast at Eli had ricocheted off of him and struck Marrow. It was a rare moment of brilliance for me and had only worked because, as my dream-seer partner, Eli was impervious to my magic.
He shifted sideways and laid his head on the arm of the sofa, stretching out his long, lean body, his feet dangling over the edge. “I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything, an uneasy feeling tightening in the pit of my stomach. My happiness for him was truly genuine, but now a trickle of worry began to seep in. Magic had a way of changing people. Look at what it had done to Paul. Just the hope of possessing its power had been enough to turn him from a decent person into someone willing to lie, cheat, and kill to get what he wanted.
It would change Eli, too. Inevitable, really.
And as I watched him fall asleep, his breath slowing as his chest rose and fell, I could only hope it wouldn’t change him too much. Or for the worse.
9
Dream Share
Nearly twenty minutes later, Eli finally fell asleep. I didn’t need the slow rhythm of his breath to tell me. I could smell the fictus coming off him as he started dreaming, my desire for it a bone-deep ache.