“Stay back,” Jay warned. Simeon Fox will bloody murder us if the shop goes up in flames for this, he thought but didn’t say. Eli didn’t speak, but he pointed towards the wall, and Jay furrowed his brow trying to understand what the boy had done, when there wasn’t a match in sight.

But the fire was spreading, the blanket half-eaten already, so there wasn’t a great deal of time to discuss it - Jay, presuming the fire would be ordinary fire, shot a jet of water from his wand to douse it with a muttered “aqua eructo.” He didn’t catch sight of what it was, but the force of the water’s stream sent some object slipping from the blanket off Eli’s cot bed and clinking to the floor.

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