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“Am Iokay?” Dakota’s voice was high and choked.

Clearly, I’d asked the wrong thing.

“I mean... I’m sorry. I don’t really know how this usually goes. Can you call your guardian?” Maybe this had been too early to talk about dinner. I didn’t know if it took a couple hours or a couple weeks for a mage to come into their power after their Awakening, but it clearly wasn’t going as smoothly as one might hope.

“My what?”

“Isn’t that what you all call the, I don’t know”—I circled my hand in the air—“the person who helps you learn to manage your magic?”

“Mymagic?”

“I mean”—I glanced significantly at the pen in the wall—“yes?”

With a hard thump, his elbows hit his desk as he bent in half over it.

“What the fuck is happening?” Dakota pushed his fingers through his thick, dark hair. The heels of his palms pressed against his eyes, and he groaned like he was in physical pain. That wasn’t a thing, right? Surely his own magic couldn’t hurt him.

Plus or minus getting impaled by the sharp nib of an ink pin.

Okay, I didn’t actually know if his magic could hurt him, burn through him as easily as it burned through his enemies. But surely not so soon after his Awakening.

“I assume you mean that in some kind of... of non-literal way?” I wasn’t really sure how to ask what I thought I was asking because—because that was ridiculous, right? He was overwhelmed because he didn’t have as much control as he expected, not because he didn’t know what was going on.

He blinked his enormous dark eyes at me, looking almost desperate. The stapler started to lift off the desk again, and he snatched it and shoved it back down. “No, I do not. I definitely do not mean it in a non-literal way. What the fuck is going on? Is this some kind of new technology? Levitating office supplies? Is that what Crescent makes? I can’t find our website, you know. Like it doesn’t even exist. But it can’t be levitating office supplies, because that’s my pen.” He motioned toward the pen in the wall with his stapler. He turned back to me, panting, panicked, and almost ready to bolt.

Fuck.

He had no idea.

“Well, going out tonight seems like not the best plan,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, trying to sound like I knew exactly what I was doing, but really trying to figure out what the fuck came next.

He didn’tknow.

How the fuck could he not know?

Mages were notoriously power hungry. They didn’t just abandon one of their own when they could instead use them to grow their own influence.

It didn’t happen. No way had Dakota wandered into Howl, with all its protections,accidentally.

Except—if he had latent magic of his own, the wards wouldn’t keep him out.

I had Awakened a mage who didn’t even know what he was giving up when we?—

Oh fuck.

“What if we order in?” I suggested, fighting hard to keep the gut-churning panic out of my voice.

Dakota looked up at me like I’d gone crazy, his brows forming little “u”s of concern.

“For dinner,” I clarified.

He still looked pale, but he’d feel better after eating. Everybody felt better after eating.

“Okay,” he said, still looking rather ill.

I opened a delivery app on my phone and handed it to him. “Pick whatever you want.”

For a whole minute, he just stared at the screen. His thumb flicked across the glass, but he didn’t pick anything.