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Drew Hayes [Super Powereds 02 Super Powereds Year 2 (epub) i
Beth Harbison [Shoe Addict 02 Secrets of a Shoe Addict (epub)
Cate Masters [Blue Moon 02] A Wedding at the Blue Moon Cafe
C C Wood [Bitten 02] Once Bitten, Twice Shy (epub) i
C J Barry [Body 02] Body Thief (epub)
Anthony Burgess Enderby 02 Outside Enderby
Amanda Mackey [Instinctual 02 Instinctual 2 (epub)
Cygnet 02 The Cygnet And Th McKillip, Patricia
B L Mooney [Striving 02] Striving for Perfection (epub)
C J Corbin [Destiny 02] Revealing Destiny (epub)

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.The lovely woman draped in beautifully mixed oils was watching me.Again.The hair on my neck stood on end.Olivia deliberately picked up our pace, hurrying me past.We hadn't spoken of the portrait, but there was no doubt in my mind that the artist who had created the extraordinary piece in Ganymede Circus had created this one as well—Sergei Kinsky, the last mage capable of wielding Origin Magic, both a god and bogeyman.Olivia didn't have to tell me that I didn't have the time to study the magnificent work of art.She also didn't have to explicitly state that I couldn't afford to be seen doing so.As it had for the last three days, my heart only stopped racing when we broke from the main corridor and entered the gallery tunnel webbed by thousands of complex and interconnected wards.My fingers brushed the access panel and quickly pulled up visuals of the wards that were on my day's to-do list.Colored lines and shapes zipped and zoomed across the indexed screen and I pressed the button for “educational activation,” which pulled my twelve selected wards from the web and into the area where I could study and internalize them individually.I took a deep breath, centering my magic.Replicating each magic and setting it to paper would require the entirety of my allotted library time.My parents had “acquired” twenty-seven new pieces of frameless art in the past two days.After today, a dozen more would be attached to their walls.Using one of the library spells, Olivia conjured a table and two chairs next to the staging area.We dropped our bags on the tabletop.“How much time do you have today?” she asked.“Fifty-five minutes after the cloak.” The cloak protected me from the library's 'taste sampling' inclinations so that I didn't have to expend the energy to protect myself.I had seen more than one screaming person run down the halls after being sampled.But everything had a cost, and time was one of the most precious bargaining chips here.By increasing the magic around me like it did, the cloak cost ten minutes of my allocated time.I touched the first ward I was interested in replicating and wrapped it around me, absorbing it into my senses—taste, sight, sound, texture, purpose.The sensations coalesced into a dimensional picture in the eye of my mind and I stamped the image into memory, then sealed the associated sensations into the skin and bone of my fingers.I released the ward and stepped back, shuddering at the discharge of the sensory overload.The real world snapped back around me.Not for the first time, I ached to discover what the other sections of the library could offer.Someday I would.“I could live here and not be bored for a thousand years, Liv.”Unsurprisingly, Olivia rolled her eyes.She hated coming here and never left the table once she placed all the appropriate protections.There were too many elements outside of her control in the library, and she hated things out of her control.“The library would suck you dry in the one minute succeeding your fifty-five allotted ones, then feast on your bones for that thousand years,” she said.“Might be worth it.” I flipped open my folio and extracted the specially designed sheets of paper I had created during the last week of fall term.I had created them just for this purpose—to put wards to paper.To protect my family.The sensation of the ward swirled beneath the skin of my fingers, ready to push through my pencil and come alive on the page.“You ready?” Olivia asked.She was researching the protections that had been previously placed on my parents' house.We needed to make sure that what I was installing wouldn't conflict and destroy the house while the new wards were seeking to replace the old ones.“Yes.Yesterday's batch settled in well.I'm feeling positive,” I said.“Using paper was smart, and you have a talent for this.”“The first time I died I was attached to a billion wards.That helps, I think.” It also helped that the defensive wards were responding to my overwhelming need to protect.“Having a photographic memory for images and the ability to put an exact likeness to paper likely helps just as much,” Olivia remarked dryly.“That too,” I said, twirling my pencil.Using magic was exhilarating and art made my magic sing.If only I could use it everywhere.If only I could draw directly on the walls of my parents' house.But using magic in the non-magical First Layer was impossible for normal mages without a container like Olivia's, and would, without a doubt, bring the magical spooks of the Department right to my door—the opposite of what I was trying to do.So for the past three days while my parents had been under the assumption that I was showing Olivia around our town, we had been returning to the Second Layer, and bit by bit I was constructing new protection wards and embedding them in the fibers of the paper [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]