“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But I’d rather drain more quickly as myself than live a half existence as an ashen ghost.”
I supposed that was fair. I had promised to keep him supplied with fire until his own came back, and while I didn’t appreciate him disparaging Nik, my dad had gone to his room last night when I’d told him to without a fight. That counted as a petition for sainthood given who we were talking about, but as I was reaching for the floating magic to give him the boost that would hopefully keep him together until I got home from my lessons, I realized I was going about this all wrong.
“I’ve got a better idea,” I said, reaching out to grab my dad’s hand instead. “Come on, we’re taking you to the doctor.”
“Which doctor?” he asked in a voice that almost sounded nervous as I dragged him toward the door.
“She is kind of a witch doctor,” I agreed, laughing. “But she’s the best there is.”
That joke only made him look more wary, but I’d already seized the doorknob, twisting the magic to open a portal to the one destination I never had to think about.
***
I don’t think I could have made Dr. Kowalski happier if I’d brought her back to life. The moment I dragged my dad into her kitchen, she was on him like a bloodhound. While I helped myself to my usual bowl of stewed wheat berries from the stove—no salt, no sugar, no dairy, just grains and sadness—she circled and prodded and poked my father until he looked ready to turn back into smoke just to get away. If she’d been anyone else, I was certain she’d have been a pile of cinders, lack of fire notwithstanding. But unlike my first meeting with Dr. K, my father clearly saw right off the bat that she was the face of a god. Even if he’d been his old full-burn self, he wouldn’t have been a match for her, and from the looks on their faces, they both knew it.
“This is just marvelous,” Dr. Kowalski said excitedly, dragging her kitchen stool over so she could climb up onto it and peer into my father’s eyes. “You used his own curse as an entry point. It’s absolutely brilliant! Did you think of that yourself?”
“The Spirit of Dragons helped,” I said, piling as many blueberries as would fit into my bowl in an effort to make my breakfast taste less like boiled paste. “But the general idea was mine.”
Dr. Kowalski sucked in a proud breath. “So good,” she said delightedly, working her fingers into my dad’s mouth to check his teeth. “But how did you mimic dragon fire? It’s a completely different form of magical expression.”
I was dying to tell her all the details if only for a rare chance to brag, but the Spirit of Dragons had been very specific that what had happened with my dad’s fire was privileged information. “I just sort of fudged things around until it felt right,” I said instead.
“You fudged the essence of a dragon?” My teacher’s face split into a smile so wide, her eyes vanished into her wrinkles. “I knew you were a natural!”
That wasn’t exactly what had happened. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything if the spirit hadn’t given me a spark to copy. Even with her help, though, I was the one who’d figured out how to turn city magic into dragon fire, so I felt justified accepting the praise. But while I was preening under Dr. Kowalski’s impressed noises, my father looked confused.
“Opal,” he said when Dr. Kowalski finally took her hand out of his mouth. “What is she talking about?”
“Didn’t you know?” I replied with twenty-six years of pent-up righteousness. “I’m a natural-born Shaman.”
Yong looked unimpressed. “A what?”
“A natural-born Shaman,” Dr. Kowalski repeated, grabbing a handful of his long black hair to check its strength. “Someone who understands instinctively how to work magic in its free form. She has the potential to be the talent of the age if she keeps improving at the rate she has been. Of course, she’d already be there if her early training hadn’t been so grossly mismanaged.”
“It wasn’t mismanaged,” Yong said angrily, jerking his hair out of her grasp. “She had the best tutors in the world!”
Dr. Kowalski scoffed. “Best according to whom? A bunch of academic Thaumaturges too blinded by their own prejudices to notice when their methods are failing them? Bah! Whatever they were, they were fools to try and teach a child. There’s a reason mages don’t start training until age ten. Magic of any stripe requires the individual to have reached a certain stage of mental development and self-awareness. Starting too early risks harm to the child’s still-developing soul. It’s ridiculous.”
“Opal wasn’t at risk,” my father argued. “She was bred to be a prodigy. Other children—”
“Just because she was born with a naturally super-high draw doesn’t mean she had the capacity to control it. She told me you started her training when she was five. Five! Frankly, it’s a miracle she didn’t burn herself out ages ago, though she was certainly close enough when I found her.”
My dad looked at me in confusion, but I just shrugged. What could I say? She was right.
“And that’s not even the worst of it,” Dr. Kowalski said, shaking her finger in my dad’s face. “As if your ‘best tutors in the world’ allowing a five-year-old to handle magic wasn’t bad enough, they forced her to learn Thaumaturgy, even when she was clearly not thriving in the discipline. A good teacher would have adapted the lesson to fit the pupil, especially one as vulnerable as a young child, but your idiots just kept slamming her into the wall and blaming her when she got hurt! What kind of halfwits did you hire?”
Yong took a step back. “I…Everyone said they were the best.”
“Well, you should have
