dice on his forearm caught my eye.
I pushed a strand of hair away from my face. “I’m Zadie.”
“I figured that. Heard a lot about you from Chase.”
My cheeks flared. “Oh. Yeah, he’s been training me.”
“I bet he has.”
“Hunter!” Lilura called from the dining room. “Tea.”
His eyes never left me. “It’s not boiling yet, Nana.”
I averted my eyes as I walked past him to join Lilura at the table. She glanced up at me momentarily, her messy gray and dark brown hair framing her face. I was used to Lilura’s usual hunched posture, but her back seemed more bowed than normal. Dark bags weighed down her eyes, and her crackled lips were practically white. She closed her eyes and covered her mouth with a trembling hand as she let out a round of liquid-sounding coughs. I sat down across from her and waited until the hacking stopped.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She waved at me in dismissal. “I just need my tea. What’s taking so long?”
“I wish more people were as patient as you are, Nana,” Hunter said as he leaned on the doorframe between the kitchen and dining room.
Lilura leered at him. “If you don’t want me to come over there and kick your tuckus, you better go get me some damn tea.”
Hunter chuckled and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Now,” she said to me. “Where did we leave off on Friday?”
Like a good student, I placed my hands on the table and sat up straight. “Object manipulation.”
She coughed into her hand while she nodded. I waited, pretending to be patient. Clearing her throat, she stood to retrieve the three objects I’d been training with: a feather, a pen, and a paperback book.
She placed them on the table and dropped into the chair opposite me. For a moment, I could only stare at the objects.
Lilura leaned forward. “What are you waiting for?”
“Are you sure it’s safe to do this? I’m seventeen now.” I thought she’d say something about it being my birthday, something about me being in danger, about the increased possibility of a Reaper coming to get me, but she didn’t.
“Have you had a stroke or something?” she asked.
“What?”
“Well, it’s the only thing I can think of that would explain you forgetting how things work. The intent behind the magic counts. This is training; this is not using your power for selfish reasons.”
“Isn’t gaining skills selfish?”
“No, anything to do with saving lives is not selfish. Now shut up and get on with it already.”
I took a deep breath and told myself to concentrate. I knew there wouldn’t be a problem manipulating the feather. I could make a whole tabletop’s worth of feathers float into the air—basic magic Lilura taught me to control when she first took me under her wing. So far, I had only been able to get the pen to roll back and forth across the table. I hadn’t even begun on the book.
“Remember,” she said, noting how hard I was staring at the pen. “It’s not the pen itself you are manipulating. It is the air around it.”
Right. The air. The elements. The witch blood that made up half my Vila existence was bound to the elements. It shouldn’t have mattered if it were a feather or pen or book I was working with; it was the air around the object that I needed to concentrate on. My stupid practical side was getting in the way of me succeeding at the task.
Reminding myself how magical I was, I focused on the air around the pen.
The tingle started in my veins. My skin prickled as the Vila energy surged through me. The pen rolled left, then right. I grunted. I had to push the air from two different directions, I realized. My hands balled into fists on the table as I willed the air to succumb to my command. One end of the pen lifted a centimeter off the table and then dropped. I focused harder, telling myself I could do this. My bones buzzed, and finally the pen inched upward.
“Keep it up,” Lilura said, wiping her nose. “Raise it higher.”
Elated that I