“Yes, you could, if only you weren’t six weeks behind on your schoolwork,” I said through clenched teeth.

“I’m not!” Orion said. “I’m only four weeks—” He stopped himself too late and glared at me while everyone at the table, including even Chloe, made the appropriate squawks of horror at him. I smirked back over folded arms. That evening he got told off by Magnus and Jermaine, by which I mean they cornered him in the boys’ bathroom and earnestly talked to him about the need to catch up properly and how silly he was being to let his work get away from him for no reason when it could be so easily managed. I wasn’t there to hear it, but I didn’t need to be; they were enclavers.

I did see them going in after him, so I hurried to brush my own teeth and then waited in the corridor until Orion sloped out again, properly chastened; I fell in with him and said, “So, Lake, going to let your enclave pals shove your schoolwork off onto some poor sod desperate to get in with them?”

He threw me a look of outrage: having got him into trouble in the first place, couldn’t I at least have the decency to let him just look away while Magnus made his work conveniently disappear? But as I clearly couldn’t, he sighed and muttered, “No,” reluctantly.

I nodded and asked very sweetly, “Going to keep shoving the consequences off onto me?”

The right answer to that question wasn’t very hard to find, either, although he did scowl at me before handing it over. “No.”

“Good,” I said, with satisfaction, and stopped by his bedroom door and pointedly waited for him to go and shut himself in with his overdue homework.

He looked at the door and then back at me. “El—if the cleansing runs down in the graduation hall again—”

“At New Year’s, you mean?” I said. The end-of-semester cleansing isn’t nearly as thorough as the graduation day cleansing. School maintenance had to be cut back a great deal in quantity and ambition once they had students doing it instead of teams of grown professional wizards coming in through the graduation hall. One of the places where they decided to cut back was the mid-year cleansing. Only about a quarter of the walls of mortal flame go, in order to save on wear and tear. That leaves plenty of survivable escape routes available, so the cleansing really only winnows back the more mindless mals.

Of course, where a lot of the smarter ones retreat to is the graduation hall. If the machinery did run down there, then we’d very likely end up with all the mals cut down back to the nonexistent levels from the start of the year.

“Yeah,” Orion said, glumly. Poor him: the greatest hero in generations and no evil monsters for him to fight. Precious made a dismissive squeak from her cup, but lucky for him, he wasn’t in range for biting. At least he wasn’t trying to complain of it to anyone but me, the one other person who had a decent reason to dislike the idea. If the mals did get cut back that far, the school would probably be able to funnel all of the attacks right back at me again.

But I wasn’t going to commiserate with him out loud. I was in range, and I’d been bitten twice that week already. “Much difference it’ll make if you get yourself turned into goo beforehand because you couldn’t be arsed to do a few worksheets,” I said. “It’s thirteen seconds more to New Year’s, and then you won’t need to do any more classwork ever, unless you completely flunk everything. Do you need another helping?”

“No, I’m okay,” he said, although he had to drag his eyes away from the power-sharer when I waved my wrist at him. “I’ve got enough, I just—got used to it, I guess.” He shrugged away the misery of his lot with one shoulder, but he was still staring at the floor, and after a moment he brought out the real problem: “It’s not like there’re loads of mals in New York. In the enclave, I mean,” he added. “Not much gets through.”

I couldn’t help myself. I blurted out, “No one’s chaining you down in New York.”

That was a nice and sympathetic thing to say to a boy who wanted his mum and dad and his own bed as much as I did. But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.

You could say I was just offering him a different future, and I had as much right to put that future on the table for him as he did asking me to come to New York, only I didn’t feel as though I did. I’d like to have felt that way; I’d have argued myself breathless and blue if anyone else had tried to tell me I didn’t. But there wasn’t any convenient opponent around to be argued with, and on the inside of my own head, I didn’t really believe I had any right to ask Orion Lake to walk away from a future of safety and ease in the most powerful enclave in the world, just to spend his life as an itinerant bodyguard at my heels.

And even if I could squash that particular squidgy feeling, my vision would still mean asking him to walk away from his family and everyone he knew. He wasn’t saying he didn’t want to go home, he was saying he didn’t like the idea of spending the rest of his life having to go begging to Magnus Tebow every time he wanted a cup of mana. I wouldn’t have liked asking Magnus Tebow for pocket lint. I felt like a selfish beast as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“If you just set up shop, you’ll get booked to come out and kill the worst mals the world over,” I added, as if that was all I’d meant. “Orion Lake: Maleficaria Hunter for Hire, no mal too large, some too small.”

He huffed a noise that aimed for laughter and stopped at a sigh. “Am I a jerk?” he asked abruptly. “Everyone always acts like—” He made a frustrated wave of his hand in the direction of the legions of his fan club. “But I know that’s just…”

He was being about as articulate as, well, the average seventeen-year-old boy, but I understood him perfectly. He’d been trained to think he was only good if he ran around being a hero all the time. Naturally as soon as he dared think about what he might want, surely that made him a monster. But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence. “What do I look like, your confessor?” I said bracingly. “Go and do your homework so I don’t have to cobble you back together out of spare parts, and have your existential crisis another time.”

“Thanks, El, you’re such a pal,” he said, in tones of deep syrupy affection.

“I am, aren’t I,” I said, and left him to it. And then I went to my room and didn’t do any of my own homework. Instead I spent the entire time reading the Golden Stone sutras and translating more bits of it and doodling stick pictures of tidy little enclaves in my notes. Precious scampered around the desk messing my pens about and cracking sunflower seeds out of her food bowl and occasionally coming to inspect my work. She didn’t approve of the bit where I scribbled in a little stick figure with a sword killing mals; when I looked away, she slipped under my arm and deposited a dropping in exactly the right spot so I put my hand right down on it when I started writing again and squished it over my own artwork.