I’m clinging to him. He knocks my wand from my hand. (More disgrace.) (I’m the Chosen One. How do I bounce back from this? What is destiny doing?)

He drops me onto the flat roof of a nearby building. I hate to think about how good he looks doing it. Against the green hills, the castle walls. Those fucking red wings.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

I refuse to answer.

He touches my shoulder, and I roll away. I’m not hurt. I’m just at a loss. I hide my head in my arms. “That was a debacle.”

“I don’t know what you expected to happen,” Simon Snow says. “People were going to figure out that your spell doesn’t work.”

I sit up to face him. He’s standing over me with the sun at his back. One of his wings is pulled in; the injured one is hanging. It’s asymmetrical. It works for him, damn it. “The spell does work,” I snarl. “You’ve seen it with your own eyes, Simon!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me—or anyone else—that it wears off.”

“That doesn’t matter!” (It doesn’t! It’s practically irrelevant!)

“It matters to the people who lost their magic!”

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake,” I shout at him, “they hardly had any magic to lose!”

He puts his hands on his hips. He’s wearing jeans. And an artfully torn T-shirt. “Did you steal it?” he demands. “Is that what this is?”

“Did I steal it?” I laugh, I sound hysterical—I suppose I am. Simon Snow is interrogating me. He looks like he just rolled out of bed. I’m the Chosen One. I am. “No,” I say. “I gave it to them.”

I gave them all of their magic, all at once. That’s what my spell does. Draws their magic up, so they can reach it. And then … they run out. Sometimes in a month, sometimes in a week. It depends on how much they started with.

(I’d never cast the spell on a Normal before. I never will again, not if it makes them immune to me.)

“No one else can do what I do,” I say. “No one. My magic begets magic. It’s unheard of—it’s a miracle.”

“Yeah, but it’s a lie!”

“It’s not a lie!”

“Everyone was going to figure it out, Smith!”

“Not immediately!”

Not until it was too late to turn back!

I was going to give the people in the White Chapel the best day of their lives.

And then, tomorrow, their friends would line up at my door. All the weakest wands, all the weakest wills.

And the next day, more.

I’d clear them all out in the kindest way possible. I’d make some very strategic edits.

“They were going to see the truth in the end,” the boy says. “And then what?”