Every instance of progress with Luka felt like taking two steps back. He had agreed to work with her, but Alice had no doubt he would be keeping her at arm's length and withholding information. She could accept his dismissal for today, but she wasn't about to let him do little more than humor her.
With the way things were going, she was never going to earn his trust, but she wished there was a way for her to prove worthy of just a fraction of it. While heading back to the Academy, she wondered if there was some offering she could make. She was mad at him, yes, but she could get over that. Luka, meanwhile, had held on to his grudge against Hadley for ten years, so she was going to have to make some sort of gesture, if she was going to preserve their partnership.
He clearly thought, they would have made some strides in the investigation, during his coma, but how? He had the only clue they were likely to get, and without that, she simply didn’t know how to move on. She had the rest of the day to figure it out, and intended to try, when her mom disrupted her.
She answered the phone with some measure of trepidation. Her mom had finally accepted her decision to stay, but the condition — giving up Ravi — had yet to be met. She had talked to Ravi, but when he had rather boldly asked if she was calling things off, she had said no. She told him that they should talk about it, when they saw each other.
Whenever that was going to be.
Since then, she’d been too busy to really worry about it, but she had a feeling she was about to.
“I talked to Ravi,” her mom said, very quickly confirming her suspicions.
“Mom—”
“No, just listen.” Alice quieted her protests, even if she would rather make her arguments in advance. She was already mapping out the entire argument in her head, trying to find a way to win it.
“I understand. You think you should be able to have it all, but I’m asking you not to pull him into this.”
“What about him?” Alice asked, because she didn’t know how to end it without explaining why. “Shouldn’t he have a say in this?” Maybe it wasn’t fair to him, to force him to make the choice, and maybe she had already told too many lies, but the alternative was more lies. Harder lies.
“No, Alice.” Her mom said. “It could break him. It’s fine to learn magic exists, when you can feel it under your skin and it seems like the most natural thing in the world, but normal people aren’t meant to understand magic. Their minds will want to reject the very reality of it.”
“Dad is fine,” Alice argued. He didn’t really understand magic, and tried not to engage in conversations about it. He was probably doing some pretty serious compartmentalizing, where all the magic parts were left abandoned in a dark corner of his mind, but he was coping.
“Your father had to very suddenly accept a reality, in which his daughter’s magic spontaneously tried to kill her. He’s not fine. But yes, the adrenaline probably helped his mind adjust.”
“Plenty of Mages tell their spouses. It’s a whole thing.“ It was sort of a thing. The Council didn’t like it, but had to, for practical reasons, trust in the confidence between spouses. Especially if their children manifested.
“Maybe most people can handle it, but this isn’t something you can take back.”
“Who?” Alice asked. “Who couldn’t handle it?”
Her mom paused, for just a second too long. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter, if it’s what I’m basing this choice on.” She hadn’t even wanted to tell him, at least not yet. She shouldn’t, not before they were married, but of course they probably shouldn’t get married, if she was never going to tell him. It was impossible to decide what to do, without knowing how he might react.
It was very possible, that her mom had a point, but how could she know?
This was between her and Ravi.
“He’s twenty-four. If he has to start over, he needs to do it soon.”
There was a lot she could say to that, like he was only three years older than her, and she would have to start over too, but apparently that didn’t matter. She was still stuck on the former point, though. That leaning about magic could break a person. She didn’t want the change of subject to work, but still decided to keep it tugged away for later. It wasn’t worth it to have any of this conversation now. It wasn’t like Ravi was—
“Is he on his way here?”
“He said you sounded weird, the last time he talked to you, so he wanted to come see you in person.”
It was a long drive, so she had time to think, but she didn’t have time to see him. She wouldn’t be able to focus.
“I don’t…” She bit down on her lip, before she could make some useless excuse. “Couldn’t you have reassured him?”
“You have to deal with this, beta.”
“And if I can’t?”
“If you love him, you shouldn’t burden him with that world.”
She nodded her frustration. There was nothing she could say to that, even if she didn’t agree.
“Okay,” she said, without really meaning it. “I’ll think about it.”
She didn’t go back to the Academy. There was no point. Even if the alternative was spending at least three hours in the city, but it was an opportunity to go back to both Mutiny and the restaurant, just in case they had missed something.
In Mutiny, she looked for some sort of signature around the hand print, and other images painted in the same color, but came up with nothing. It was to be expected, since the bad guy wasn’t stupid, and he had wanted Luka to infect himself, but she had still allowed herself to hope that this was a game with more than one solution.
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She headed for Chinatown next, back into the alley, and through the softly creaking backdoor. She walked slowly through the kitchen and into the floor of the restaurant, dreading the sight of old blood. She didn’t want the reminder, of just how much of it he had lost, of just how close he had come to death.
There was none.
It was like they had never been here. Even the carpet, which should have been soaked through and nearly impossible to clean, didn’t have a drop of blood on it. She knelt down on the spot, just to feel the fibers under her fingertips, but they were soft. It wasn’t an illusion, or if it was, it was a very good one.
The Agents had been here, and they had cleaned the place up. She went back to the door, to the gate they had drawn on the wall, but it wasn’t there anymore. She had no doubt it had been done with the best of intentions, but it had effectively erased any and all evidence that might have been there.
She didn’t feel like talking to Hadley, but she texted him. She had softened towards him, seeing how upset Luka made him, and learning more about why they could cut each other so deeply, but it didn’t change the fact that she had been put in the middle of the mess of them.
“You didn’t mention cleaners had been sent to the restaurant,” she wrote.
He responded quickly. “It’s procedure.”
“Did they find anything?”
“No.”
Alice frowned at her phone. They should have found something of note, she knew that much from what she had seen.
“What about the gate? Or the remains of the dogs outside?”
The rain could conceivably have washed the evidence of what they had been away, but certainly not the piles of dirt and bark and stone that had no business being in an alley in the middle of the city.
He sent her an attachment, and when she opened it, she realized it was the report from the cleaners. She skimmed through it, but it didn’t tell her anything she hadn’t already known. There was mention of the remains of some natural creature, likely a bird based on all the feathers, found inside the building, which was odd. The ones outside could be explained by the rain, but inside?
A nature mage shouldn’t have been able to work magic inside the building, but maybe they hadn’t. She looked around, and it was at least plausible that the nature mage had been outside, or near enough to a window to get power from the rain.
There was no mention at all of the gate.
“What happened with Lavrin?” Hadley asked.
Alice debated her answer, but then simply wrote, “We’re getting back to work tomorrow.”
It was evasive, especially since she was clearly at the restaurant, but it was as close to the truth as she wanted to get.
She took one last lap around the building, even moving up to the second and third floor, just in case, but either there had never been anything there, or the cleaners had been far too thorough.
It hadn’t quite taken two hours to search both locations, but she was out of options and out of ideas, and anyway, she needed to prepare herself for her conversation with Ravi. At least her mind was more at ease now, that she had made the effort to find another clue. Even if she had failed, she could tell Luka that she had tried.
She found a coffee shop, texted Ravi her location, and settled down to wait.
When Ravi arrived, she had already had two cups of coffee, and the second one hadn’t even seemed like a good idea, when she ordered it. She stopped Ravi with a light tough to his arm, before he settled down in front of her.
“Can we walk?” She didn’t know what she was going to say to him, and she didn’t like the intimacy of the coffee shop.
“Sure,” Ravi said. They stopped at the counter, while he ordered a coffee to go.
“You talked to your mom?”
Alice nodded. “She’s very concerned for your future.”
He made an affirming sound. “Should she be?”
Sometimes, it was nice that he was so direct. It was refreshing in a world, where most people tried to avoid conflict. Sometimes, it was very annoying. The barista called his name, giving Alice a second to settle her thoughts. Once she had completed her obligatory years at the Academy, she had to make up a story that allowed her to stay and postpone college. She told him that she had taken a job as a TA, and that she was trying to figure out if she really wanted to study law. That was two years ago.
She claimed to have deferred college since, even though she hadn’t applied until last fall. Students from Collingwood Academy had an unusually high acceptance rate, and with her 3.8 GPA, it hadn’t been a problem getting in, but now she was glad that she had still been mourning, rather than celebrating, when she got the acceptance letter. She had told no one, so the news had never reached Ravi.
She waited until they were out on the street, feeling safer in the anonymous crowds.
“It’s not… about you,” she said. “Not the way you think. It turns out I’ve been deferring college for too long, and I had to reapply. Only, this time I didn’t get in. I’m on the wait list, so there’s still a chance, but I’ve been trying to come up with some other solution. I never wanted you to support me, not even for a little while, and I need… I need to find a way to be independent, before I can commit to us.”
She paused, awaiting his reaction. She was getting better at lying, and it frightened her. It shouldn't be so easy for her to explain away her secrets. She was stalling again, and she knew it, but at least, if he couldn’t accept her terms, that would make it easier.
“I get it,” he said. “I do.”
It sent guilt, rather than relief, tingling down her spine. She didn't deserve his easy forgiveness, because he was forgiving the wrong things.
“But,” he continued, “would it make any difference, if I moved here? If we split all the expenses equally?”
“Ravi, no. You just got that job, I can’t let you keep making these sacrifices.” Or let him move here. The lies were already overwhelming, and if they lived together, they would surely topple over and bury her alive.
“Someone has to.”
Alice startled. He hadn’t sounded angry, but it felt judgmental all the same. She was used to his patience, but maybe she had finally reached the end of it.
“What?”
“I don’t want to pressure you, and I’m never going to, but something has got to give, Alice.”
Alice took a long, slow breath. She wanted nothing more than to agree, to make a sacrifice for their shared future, but how could she?
“I don’t know how to do that right now.” It wasn’t the right answer, but that much had been obvious, even before she spoke the words. “I…” She should offer him an out, even if he wouldn’t take it. If he’d wanted out, he would have just broken it off. She should force him out, really, but she still couldn't do the one thing she was supposed to do. She couldn't set him free.
Ravi took mercy on her, when her pause turned to silence. “We can revisit this in August, when we know for sure if you got in.”
“Yeah,” Alice said, accepting the offering. “Yeah, okay.”
He gave her time, the thing she kept wanting, but could no longer be allowed to claim. Unless it was freely given, she amended. Even if he was only giving her a few more weeks. She would have a solution by then. She promised herself that.
They walked back to his car, the tension lifting. Even if they were both still frustrated, setting time limits was something familiar. Maybe long ago, they should have stopped believing there would ever come a time, when they didn’t push a deadline.
Ravi drove off, leaving Alice with a longing to be back behind Academy walls. It was easier to feel in control of some aspects of her life there, even if she wasn't. The day had felt endless, but now she could finally head home.
Nick and Teagan were posting on Vision, which was how she knew they were at the library. She tracked them down to one on the study rooms, let herself in and collapsed dramatically on the couch, her head landing in Teagan's lap.
"Rough day?" Teagan asked, combing her hair away from her face.
"Rough day," Alice confirmed, then asked, "what do you think happens to people, who can't handle the truth about magic?"
"Can't handle how?" Nick asked.
Alice shrugged. "In any way. My mom suggested it might break some people, but also, I guess, people who just see something they shouldn’t."
“The Oracles,” Teagan offered. When Alice and Nick only looked at her with question marks written on their faces, she continued. “There are rumors.”
“Maybe they drop them in a Coven,” Nick suggested. “But if they break… no one is going to believe them anyway.”
Alice hummed some sort of answer. She was tired. She didn’t actually want to think about this, or anything. If only it were easier to shut off her brain, and be unconcerned for just an hour or two. Tomorrow, there would be plenty to worry about.