Free Lessons After Dark by Isabel Cooper Page A

do,” he said. “Or wait until I’ve dried off.”
    Olivia took herself out, wondering who’d won that round. It was a waste of time to consider it, she told herself. Scoring points was childish. She didn’t want to fight with the man, and she certainly didn’t wish Fitzpatrick hadn’t interrupted.
    Not at all.

Chapter 9
    Olivia finished the final line of a pentagram and then lifted her pen from her journal and tried to shake the cramps out of her aching wrist. Teaching was no joke, not even with as few pupils as she had, and teaching magic was proving to be harder work than she’d thought. Her practice in London and her time under Gillespie had given her a head start, but not a particularly large one, and there were some areas that greatly needed filling in.
    Protection, for example. Olivia had learned how to guard a room or a person against accidents and even the occasional predator that lurked in the realms beyond, but she’d skimmed lightly over protections against anything someone had purposefully sent. Nobody who could command demons, she’d thought, would have bothered setting them on a medium of no great fame or fortune.
    The young men and women who would come from Englefield would be a different story altogether. Mr. Grenville did know protective spells—she was doing research in his library, after all—and would certainly cover anything more advanced, but there would be times when he was away or otherwise unavailable.
    Those last two words covered a great deal. Olivia tried not to think about certain possibilities.
    Instead, she leaned back in her chair and looked out at the rainy landscape. Rainy without Michael Fairley’s influence this time: either her lecture or an hour washing dishes in the scullery had driven home certain points. Olivia hoped so.
    Where powers were concerned, Michael’s control was better than Elizabeth’s, who still tended to react to any alarm by rising half a foot off the floor. However, Michael tended to cut corners in practice, and the incident with Dr. St. John hadn’t been the first time he’d used his talent unfairly. According to his parents, by way of Mr. Grenville, it had been common for the clouds to open whenever Michael’s governess tried to take him on an unwanted walk. So far, there hadn’t been much self-indulgence of that kind at Englefield, but there also hadn’t been much opportunity for it.
    Olivia closed her eyes, pentagrams and circles still dancing in front of her lids, and let herself slip into further assessment. Elizabeth’s problem was mostly being afraid of her own shadow. She was getting better, but as soon as she felt herself losing control, she’d grab and clutch and try to shut off all her talent, which usually only made the situation worse. She had nightmares too, with all the loss of control that implied, and Olivia was usually in her room to ground the energy no less than once a week. Elizabeth had never gotten as far off the ground as she’d done that first day, though, and Olivia counted that as a victory.
    The older students were coming along well, she thought. William tended to rush things. Michael and Charlotte were also hasty about ceremonial magic, the spells anyone could do, which didn’t surprise Olivia. Growing up able to do one form of magic simply by thinking about it might naturally render one impatient with the sort that took time and intricate planning. Elizabeth was the exception to that rule. She was as careful in spell casting as she couldn’t be at levitation. She had the makings of an excellent magician, as did Arthur, who had an eye for patterns.
    Much she knew, Olivia told herself with a small smile. She had all she could do keeping up.
    That was no complaint. There’d been a vigor and a challenge about the last month Olivia hadn’t known she’d craved. Teaching and research had been like taking a brisk walk uphill after