wizard-of-the-pigeons

actually made yourself believe it, too. You’re a very young wizard, as wizards
go, and tonight you nearly lost your chance to get any older. But you had better
believe this, now. This gray thing of yours, this Mir. It’s real. Real enough to tear
you into shreds. Real. And smart enough to start with your mind first, if you
leave it an opening. Or it can stand back and watch you chase your own tail until
you’re exhausted, and then it can step in and take you without a fight. And use
you for its own ugly ends.”
“I think it’s already begun,” he admitted cautiously.
“Bullshit.” Cassie smoothed out her needlework and picked up a skein of
yellow thread. “You’re scaring yourself. Searching your soul for bogey-men. So
you have a temper. So your body has been trained as an effective weapon and
steps in to save you when your mind is out to lunch. Maybe you even have a few
kinks that the right person can trigger with the right sort of behavior. Well, don’t
we all? Don’t blame the gray thing or the magic. Don’t even blame Lynda,
though she sounds like she could piss off a saint. Blame yourself. You set it all in
motion.”
“Meaning what?” He demanded. He didn’t like the way this was going. Not
matter what he said, Cassie seemed to circle back to where it was all his fault.
But she couldn’t know what it was really like. She hadn’t been there.
“You deliberately unbalanced your magic. When Lynda came to you on the
bench that day, she had a problem. You listened to her, but you didn’t tell her
what you Knew. Nor did you turn her away. You kept what you Knew to
yourself, like it was some ponderous secret. Hell, even I could have told her the
answer. I would have said, ‘Lynda, it’s fine to like men, any number of men, as
long as you still like yourself.’ But you didn’t. So you owed her, and she became
a danger to you. Mir has used her as a channel to get to you. Hell, didn’t you
wonder at a waitress that could jump up to a bar and chin herself up to a fire
escape? Mir used her to move you away from the rest of us, to get you out on
your own. But even though the magic was unbalanced when you didn’t give
more than you got, it didn’t go away. Didn’t you Know that Booth would follow
and attack?”
“It wasn’t the same. I couldn’t feed the pigeons.”
“Did you try?”
“She took the fucking bag!” he roared in sudden exasperation. “What was I
supposed to do? Make popcorn appear out of nowhere?”