I’d forgotten about the demons.

  For that little bit of time, I’d been so caught up in why I had gotten lost, that I’d forgotten why we had come here in the first place.

  Whisper called the fire back into his hand. “As I was saying, it doesn’t seem like our stats get applied to our skills in here.” He let the flames begin to snake around his fingers. “It’s also worth noting for this exercise that I don’t have fire skill.” He extinguished the flames.

  “Wait, what?” I looked over at Kara, but she seemed completely entranced by the show.

  “There are a lot of theories, but the one I like the best is that the BCs exist in pure magic, which allows those inside it to directly control that magic instead of channeling it through our own Mantles.” He pointed at a place on the wall where the shadows had eaten a fist sized portion. “It helps to use the skill names because that helps you visualize it more, but…” Three metal spikes the size of his finger shot out of the palm of his hand and struck the hole, vanishing in the shadows. “Basically any spell that you can visualize can be used.”

  I swallowed as his eyes fell on me. “You don’t have any metal skills, so try doing what I just did.”

  “Okay…” I looked at the target and stretched out my hand and tried to visualize three nails shooting at it. I strained until my eyes started hurting, but nothing happened.

  “You’re trying too hard…” Whisper shook his head. “Let’s just try it with ones you already know, then we can work up to the stuff you don’t.” He pointed at the shadowy hole. “Cycle through your spells..!” He held up his hand. “But don’t verbalize it to cast them.”

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  I nodded and settled on Pebble Shot. It was my first spell and the one that I’d cast the most outside of my enhancing spells. At first nothing happened and I thought about trying to mumble the words under my breath, but Whisper must have seen what I was going to try.

  “Try to think about how you feel when you cast the spell.” Whisper grabbed my hand and came behind me so that he could whisper in my ear. “Remember how it feels to cast it. You may have never noticed it before, but the power builds inside your body, takes form, then releases. You need the skill outside to start the process, but in here, you don’t have to rely on the spell. Feel the magic in you, then tell it what you want it to do.”

  My hand would have been shaking if he hadn’t been holding it so firmly. I knew he wanted me to focus on the spell, but right now all I could think about was how the man that I’d lived in fear of while I’d been kidnapped was right behind me. My mind was going to how easily he could kill me and I couldn’t shake the feeling of danger despite all he’d done to protect me in the last few weeks.

  “Maybe if I did it normally, I could see how it feels?” I swallowed as I waited for the rebuke.

  The blonde bandit let go of me and shook his head as he walked over to the two sisters. “Training wheels it is. Go ahead and try that while I get them started.”

  I didn’t like how he referred to using the spell as ‘training wheels’. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was right. The spell itself was keeping me focused on the end result and without it, I couldn’t cast the spell.

  I focused back on the target. I wasn’t going to use the training wheels for long.

  “Pebble Shot.”

  I tried to pay attention to the magic building inside me, the three stones the size of marbles forming in my palm, then shooting towards the target. It all happened in an instant. I knew that was the process and had some idea of how it had happened, but I still couldn’t follow it in my mind. I shook my head. Maybe I was going to need the training wheels longer than I thought.

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