"Precisely," Victor agreed. He knew all about Spiritus Sancti now. "It took me nearly two days to uncover that she was alive and it was a drug. She'd never said anything about it before. And by then she was quite adamantly against any type of reconciliation," he continued. Christabel's words from when he had tracked her down at the Dempsey estate still rattled in his head from time to time. He generally considered himself logical and level-headed, but thrice in three days she had driven him to raise his voice at her. You were not the one who lost everything, Victor, she had said, as though her wilful withdrawal from society was comparable to the fact that he would never cast a spell again, never eat a meal again, never touch someone's hand again. Her egocentrism still boggled his mind to this day.

"But the point of the story," he said, arching both eyebrows at Leonid. "Was that she touched me."

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