Chapter Nine.

"I brought a friend," Greyson said as he entered Elaine's living room, plopping himself onto her couch and kicking his feet up onto her coffee table, crossing his ankles, his hands remaining firmly in his hoodie's pocket. "You're teaching her today. I'm paying."

"It would count as a double lesson-" Elaine began as she eyed the girl her favorite student and brought with him.

"No," Greyson interrupted. "I don't have any talent with force magic and am sticking to the two schools I know currently. It will likely be a few years before I bother trying force magic. Her innate ability is force push. She's here to learn how to control it. I'll just practice some water manipulation while you train her."

"I interview all potential students-"

"You are not slipping her compulsion serum," Greyson stated. "She is my friend, and she just awakened her magic."

He paused for a moment, then frowned.

"And if you attempt to use her to find out who I am or where I'm from," he added. "You will regret it."

"We've long since given up trying to locate you, Greyson," Elaine told him. "We learned months ago it was a futile task."

"Doesn't mean you wouldn't take an opportunity," he stated. "Now teach her. Jess, this is Elaine, the mage teacher I told you about. She'll teach you how to control the power of your pushes."

Elaine sighed, then grabbed a pitcher and filled it with water, then a plate from the drying rack.

"Come with me," she said. "We do the force training on the roof."

The two teens followed Elaine out back and up the stairs leading to her roof. She promised that there was a protective shield around the roof that prevented magic from being perceived from outside the area. There were a couple of tables and two planter boxes with herbs, in addition to four training dummies.

Greyson took the plate and pitcher from Elaine and sat down to practice as Elaine walked over to Jenna and began instructing her.

"Have you used your magic since you awakened?" Elaine asked.

"No," Jenna answered.

"How long ago did you awaken it?" Elaine asked.

"A few days ago," Jenna answered.

"Alright," Elaine said. "Do you remember what it felt like, when you pushed with your force magic?"

"Yes," Jenna nodded.

"Focus on that feeling," Elaine instructed her. "Remember what it felt like to manipulate force, draw it up through you, and push it outwards. Show me what you can do. Aim at one of the dummies."

Jenna nodded, then faced one of the dummies and took a few breaths, thinking back to what it felt like when she used her force magic when the traffickers had tried grabbing her. Feeling for that power, she lifted her hands up and pushed forward, willing that power outwards.

The air rippled as the invisible power of force magic flowed forth in a wave four inches high and sixteen wide, nearly half an inch thick. The force traveled two feet before dissipating.

"Decent job," Elaine nodded. "Yours takes on a more rectangular shape and has some decent thickness to it. Your specialty among force magic will likely be for brute force over fine touches. Summon this over and over until you can't anymore. I want to see both how much magic you have and how quickly you recover."

Greyson watched as Jenna began firing off force pushes. It took her nearly thirty seconds to cast each one, excluding a small break between to collect herself. She stopped after fourteen pushes and dropped to the ground, soaked in sweat and breathing heavily.

He remembered when he first had to exert all of his magic. It wasn't fun for him, and the feeling of exhaustion was horrible. He sympathized with Jenna on that.

Jenna looked over at Greyson, and he gave her a small wave, frowning as she gave him a befuddled look.

"What are you doing?" She asked.

"Manipulating water," he answered as several more streams of it lifted up from the pitcher in front of him, joining with the others. "I can maintain up to four streams of it at once. Because of my talent with blood magic and intense training with manipulating blood, I have an easier time for doing it to water. Some things carry over. Both mediums are liquid, so once I got the hang of it, it became easier."

"Another similarity," Elaine added. "Would be air and force. Much of what you can do with force magic, you can do with air magic as well. Greyson's a prodigy among mages, so his rapid growth with the two similar spells isn't normal. I'd say that if you practice your spell for the next five years, an hour every day, then branched into air magics, you could likely generate a similar blast of air as your current force spell in another year."

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"Which is why," Greyson told Jenna. "Most mages stick to their natural school of magic, branching out within it. It's always easier to learn and hone spells within your root school. For you, that's force, and for me, it's blood."

"Indeed," Elaine nodded. "Spells more similar to your root magic, the first spell you ever cast, will always be easier as well. Cast the push again once you've recovered enough to. You should be able to feel your magic now."

Jenna nodded, as she could. It wasn't a strong feeling, but it was there.

Greyson returned to manipulating the strands of water, twisting them around each other until he lost control, attempting to do too much at once. The water splashed down onto the plate and the nephilim sighed. Some of it had splashed onto the roof, enough that he'd need to pull from the pitcher once more.

His goal was to be able to manipulate all four strands of water individually before moving on to attempting a fifth strand of water. Training like this would help him with the blood version of the skill immensely, as it was a spell in a school not his root. He could already do five strands with blood, and was nearing six.

After an hour had passed, Greyson noticed Elaine switching Jenna to meditation. It was something most mages did.

Meditating on one's magic and looking inwards and familiarizing themselves with their inner tree granted them greater access to their magic, more control over it, and more familiarity with it. It could even raise one's innate skill level with it, though prodigies like Greyson, Cam, and Eden would barely receive an increase in their skill or power.

Greyson debated on meditating, but in the end, decided not to. He was already pretty intimate with his inner tree, having meditated on it at least an hour every day for almost a year. As a nephilim and a magical prodigy, his familiarity with it had grown rapidly.

He was jealous of Cam, though, even though he knew he shouldn't have been. The children of High Gods rarely needed more than two or three months of hour-a-day meditation and examination of their tree to form a nearly perfect connection to it, and Cam had spent a lot of time while he was kidnapped familiarizing himself with it. Nearly every waking moment.

Because of that, Cam had pretty much solidified his connection in just a week or two.

Sighing, Greyson went back to work on practicing the water stream manipulation. It was one of the most basic water spells there was, a branch off the most common root, the ability to draw water up from a source.

When the two hours ended, Greyson paid Elaine the three hundred dollars for Jenna's lesson, then the pair left. Greyson led Jenna to the restaurant he liked to visit after lessons. They sat down and were given menus by a waitress, who took their drink orders and left.

"So," Jenna hesitated. "That was exhausting."

"Very," Greyson nodded. "The more you do it, the more you'll get used to it, the less magic it'll take to cast each one, and the more magic you'll build up. It'll also take you less time to cast."

"Oh," Jenna said, then noticed Greyson frowning. "What?"

"She asked if you were coming back with me on Thursday."

"I am, aren't I?" She asked.

"If you want," he nodded. "I was just surprised by that. Normally, she'd tell someone to practice that spell until they can perform it so many times in a row or something or other, then they'd be ready for the next lesson. That's… kind of suspicious."

The waitress returned, and Greyson ordered burgers for both of them. After they ate, Jenna's mother picked her up and Greyson climbed into his driver's car and let the man drive him home. When he arrived, he made his way up to his father's office and entered without knocking.

"Greyson," Lucas sighed as he rubbed his temples. "Please knock before entering. I could have been on a phone call like the one that just happened."

"What's wrong?" Greyson asked. "Did fairies find their way back here? Are they remaking their forest?"

"No," Lucas responded. "But Ulrima showed up earlier and kicked everyone back to their native realms, from what we can tell. More than a thousand people from a dozen different worlds and realms, all evicted. The spatial mages we contracted to create the gates into it reported they can't create them anymore – something's blocking them."

"Ulrima kicked everyone out?" Greyson gave him a confused look. "But why? Isn't, like, the entire realm frozen from that spell?"

"Yes," Lucas responded. "The elder Leosvar's magic that you helped put into place completely froze the realm that housed the Fae Forest. Our agents – and beings from other worlds – were analyzing the realm and investigating caves and tunnel networks found in its mountains. Once we were able to unfreeze it, we were planning on harvesting fae stone, an agreement was being drafted up. Since it was our world that took out the fairies and the forest, we had conqueror's rights. Why Ulrima decided to do that-"

"Conqueror's rights," Greyson snorted. "His son was the reason the realm was invaded and destroyed. His son was the reason Titania died. Dad, stop being a moron. You're an adult who's dealt with stuff before. Ulrima probably considers it his son's realm. Lemme text Cam to see if he knows anything."

Lucas nodded, contemplating Greyson's words. The High God of love was protective of his children, if they passed his test. He also had a tendency to not like people taking that which belonged to his children. If he saw the realm as Cam's, then his actions made sense, including the ward he seemed to put up to prevent others from entering.

"Cam said he asked his father for the realm," Greyson told Lucas. "Since the only reason it was taken over and Titania killed was him getting kidnapped. There's a dozen cookie emojis in here. Why did he-oh, he responded to that. He said they're making cookies, and he wants to know if I wanted to try some? I'm going to my room and playing video games."

Lucas rolled his eyes as his son left the office, then he turned his gaze back to the report he was reading. Derrick was spotted in Tejina that morning, which didn't bode well. He was nearly a hundred years old, but easily one of the strongest mages on Earth and in the US. If he was expanding his territory into Tejina, then hunting the mage slave traffickers there was about to become a lot more difficult.

Praying to any god that would listen, Lucas asked for a fairy to show up just so he could have something to do that fell within his comfort zone. Then, he got to work on typing up a report regarding what he found out about the Fae Forest Realm's sudden and unexpected evacuation by a High God.

His lips curled down as he thought about it. He had just entered the realm to check on something, only to be greeted by the god. There was no mistaking the divine presence, and the being had identified himself as Ulrima, the High God of love, promptly before flicking him. Lucas found himself in his bedroom immediately after that.

That wasn't what bothered him. Well, it did a little. What bothered – or more accurately, confused – the agent was that Cam had specifically requested the realm for himself. The boy's nightmares stemmed from things that happened in that realm.

Why did he want the place that traumatized him?