“It’ll be fine,” Dr. Kowalski said, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re a fantastic mage! Even if you don’t come up with a solution for rapid dragon refill, you’re bound to get better at the transfer process. In fact, let’s work on that right now.”
“What?” I looked around at the sun-drenched garden. “You mean here?”
“This is your practice time,” she said, sitting down on a stump that had been left artistically in the middle of a bed of crawling violets. “So let’s practice! You haven’t done any difficult casting all morning, and the DFZ tells me you’re off this afternoon for some kind of sporting event.”
I nodded as much for myself as to her. In the craziness, I’d almost forgotten that tonight was Nik’s fight. Remembering made me even less eager to give my dad a transfer that would leave me exhausted. I didn’t know much about it, but the Gameskeeper’s arena definitely didn’t sound like a place I wanted to walk into empty. That said, I did need to feed him, and Dr. Kowalski was right here…
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“Excellent!” my teacher said, rubbing her hands together. “Do it slowly, please. I want to see exactly how you transform the magic.”
I nodded and lifted my hands, focusing on my father’s real body since his smoke one made me twitchy. Our connection was in my mind, anyway, so it didn’t really matter where I pointed my hands, but it was the principle of the thing. I wanted to feel like I was healing my father for real, not putting a bandage over a wound that I was starting to worry would never actually close.
But those sorts of thoughts only made an already hard job harder, so I forced them away, reaching for the warm magic of the garden instead as I closed my eyes and embraced the memory of fire.
Chapter 7
I ended up transferring magic to my dad three times over the next two hours. I didn’t think I had it in me to be honest, but as Dr. Kowalski had predicted, the process got easier the more I did it. It was still exhausting, but knowing that Dr. Kowalski was watching encouraged me to keep my form perfect, which helped to mitigate the strain. She also praised me extensively, which—not gonna lie—was a huge factor.
What can I say? Praise from authority figures was a new experience for me. One I was apparently willing to exhaust myself for, because even after the second transfer left me ready to fall over, I dug down deep and somehow managed to pull off a third.
It worked too. By the time I flopped over in a heap, my dad was doing much better. His physical body no longer looked like a cancer patient’s, and his smoke form was fully opaque and much less susceptible to wind. His mood had improved as well. I hadn’t realized just how maudlin and droopy he’d gotten until he started pulling himself up straight and looking down his nose again like the proud dragon I remembered. That was a mixed bag for me since, in hindsight, I was pretty sure his weakness and vulnerability was what had enabled us to actually work on our problems, but it was still comforting to see my dad not looking like he was on death’s door.
His new vigor also made him much more helpful. Not only did he get back into his body to finish weeding the garden while I panted on the ground between sessions, he even walked himself up the stairs to Dr. Kowalski’s spare bedroom-slash-storage-room in the attic. Good thing, too, since I’d had no idea how Dr. K and I were going to carry him over all the boxes she’d stacked in front of the bed. Thankfully, my dad was back to his old nimbleness. He hopped right over the obstacles and stretched out on top of the dusty twin mattress with only the barest minimum of snooty looks.
“There,” he said, rising in a smoke cloud from his chest the moment his body was settled. “I should be fine for the evening.”
“Your body will be perfectly safe up there,” Dr. Kowalski assured us from down the ladder, which was too narrow and rickety to hold more than one person at a time. “No one comes here without the DFZ’s explicit permission except the Great Seer of the Heartstrikers, and he only shows up on Tuesdays for his vegetable order.”
My father scowled at that unwelcome information.
“You don’t have to leave your body here if you don’t want to,” I whispered.
“No,” Yong said, shaking his smoky head. “I’m better than I was, but everything I said before remains true. Until I’m strong enough to hold my own against another dragon, this is by far the safest form. It’s also a good opportunity to practice.”
I blinked. “Practice?”
My father grinned, the smoke doing nothing to soften the predatory display of teeth. “I’ve never heard of a dragon who was able to leave their body before. If I can survive this trial and maintain my ability to dislocate myself, I’ll have gained a new strategic weapon that none of my enemies will know to expect.”
I snorted. “Leave it to a dragon to weaponize being turned into smoke.”
“Let no defeat go to waste,” Yong replied in a sage voice, flitting through the stacked boxes. “Anything you survive makes you stronger. That’s why old dragons are the most dangerous.”
I rolled my eyes. Yep, my dad was definitely back in business. But if he was comfortable, then we were done here. It was already two thirty, two and a half hours past the end of my typical morning training
