“Sooo…” she said, still staring across the aisle. “What brings you to San Francisco?”

“Oh, hell,” I said, leaning back in the chair. I felt the baby in the seat behind me reach at my Mohawk, grabbing a thread of purple before her mother pulled her back. “I’ve got quite the agenda, but mostly … negotiating with people to establish some new rules for magic.”

“Rules for magic?” Granola Girl asked, brow furrowing. “Really?”

“Well, that, some other, uh, business, plus taking my daughter to colleges—”

“Go back to the rules for magic bit,” Granola Girl said—and no, really, I’m not making fun of her; she ordered yogurt-and-granola on the flight out. “Magic isn’t just ‘more than the sum of its parts;’ it transcends the parts that invoke it. You can’t reduce magic to something less than what it is. If you start putting rules on magic—a tabu on mana—you’ll cripple it.”

I let out my breath. I’d heard all this before. Heck, I had to break all the rules I knew just to start practicing magic. But to keep practicing magic, you had to be really careful, or it would kill you. And recently, I’d found that it could kill other people too.

Labels: Dakota Frost, Dragon Writers