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but I'd kept putting it off…
    "I should have realized that," he muttered, his attention fixed on the Powerbook in his lap. Michael liked my laptop even better than television. "Sorcery is illegal here, you said." He shook his head. "Strange. Very strange."
    "I guess magic is pretty easily come by in your realm."
    "Mmm," he said, lost once more to cyberspace.
    Michael had so much to learn about this world. After Erin left to buy clothes for him, he'd done another healing on himself. He'd come out of that popping with questions. More questions than I had time to answer—or the patience, frankly—and many I couldn't answer. So I'd handed him my laptop and shown him how to Google. He'd picked up the basics quickly, though he had to hunt-and-peck on the keyboard. I'd warned him not to believe everything he read, and he'd vanished into cyberspace while I packed up my life.
    He was connected through my cell phone now. Yesterday I would have worried about the charges he was piling up; Molly Brown didn't have much money. But I wasn't Molly Brown anymore.
    My fingers drummed once on the steering wheel. "For heaven's sake, shut that thing off and look at the ocean before it's a blue smear in the rearview mirror. Who knows how long it will be before you see it again?"
    Suddenly those eyes were focused entirely on me. He closed the laptop. "Will it be a long time before you see it again, Molly?"
    "Probably." A very long time. I'd returned to Galveston once, and doubted I would ever go back again. It hurt too much. Places changed. People changed even more… except for me.
    "Your friend was upset by your leaving."
    "I told her." Already we'd left the causeway. Bayou Vista, a subdivision with all the houses on stilts, was on our left. Ahead lay wetlands. "I told Erin a long time ago that one day I'd have to leave. People grow suspicious if you don't age."
    "You'd be in danger if people suspected your nature. I understand that. Yet you told Erin about yourself. And me," he added thoughtfully.
    "You needed to know, and you have to hide your nature, too. You aren't likely to give me away. Erin…" Already the memory hurt. Time would soften that, I knew. Eventually. "I didn't tell her. She figured it out."
    "How? You're careful. You must be, or you wouldn't have survived. I've read some history now," he said, giving the laptop a pat. "This world has been hard on anyone able to use magic, but especially on those of the Blood."
    I snorted. "True, but I'm not of the Blood."
    "Of course you are. You may not have started out that way, but you are now."
    "But those of the Blood
do
start out that way. They're born to it."
    He was amazed. "You don't know, do you? I didn't find anything on the Internet about it, but I thought surely… some things are such common knowledge that no one bothers to write them down."
    "What are you talking about?"
    "Molly, originally you were completely of your world. The curse changed that. Now you're of more than one realm. That's really all it means to be 'of the Blood'—that you're inherently of more than one realm."
    "You are not making any sense."
    He shook his head, as baffled by me as I was by him. "What do you think magic
is
?"
    "I… the Church teaches that it's evil, a contravention of God's laws. Most people don't believe that these days, but… I guess I don't know," I admitted. "It's like sunlight. It just is."
    "Yet people in your world study sunlight and try to discern its nature. They're called physicists."
    "You've absorbed an awful lot from the Internet in one day."
    "I am an excellent researcher."
    "Modest, too."
    "Pardon?"
    "Never mind. I suppose there are people who study the nature of magic?"
    "Yes. They're called sorcerers. Not the most trustworthy beings," he admitted. "Though there are exceptions, sorcerers are known more for obsession than altruism. They can cause great havoc. But so, too, have your physicists caused havoc with their splitting of the atom."
    "True. So what is magic?"
    "One