It’d all been gone.
“Hmm,” Theo said. “That sounds like some variant of the Aiwass Rituals, not that I’m speaking from practical knowledge. And why on earth should you have known that someone would be practicing centuries-old forbidden magic-absorption rituals on what sounds like a simple intelligence-retrieval mission? It’s hardly your fault no one prepared you for that highly unlikely possibility. I wish I’d been there to stop it before it got all the way into you. I might’ve—”
“I don’t wish you’d been there,” Henry interrupted, horrified. “You might’ve been the one hurt and I—no. Just no, Theo.” Theo’s cleverness and kindness and love of crumpets forever scarred and scoured by whistling shots and nightmares and bodies? No. Never. Not if he could prevent that.
And then his brain caugh
