"Have I mentioned that I admire your thoroughness?"

(He has. Several times.)

"I think I'll go with both on that one."

"I might have heard it mentioned," she murmurs, with a sly smile.

"I'll type it up, then get to work on the spell to stick your soul on, mm?" Oh, wow, she is getting nuzzly. He did do a number on her, didn't he. Oh well. This is very pleasant, anyway, she doesn't mind.

She retrieves her laptop and settles back down to prepare a re-ensouling in Africa itinerary, notes the lack of a copy machine in her cottage, and just decides to lean on her superspeed and typing skills to type it very quickly rather than get up to copy it elsewhere. Because, look, he did a number on her, okay, she is justified in staying in bed rather than doing things.

"I appreciate your help very much."

"Mmm, careful, darling, I'm trying to work here to get your soul back. Keep looking at me like that and I might take longer at it, because I want to extort another night from you."

He laughs. "All right, I'll save the looks."

"For later, I hope, I wouldn't want to miss out," she purrs, but - yes, work. Back to work. She can cuddle while doing it because he's pleasant to cuddle.

The documentation for the curse is - well, annoying, why doesn't everyone document their spells like she documents hers, but it's passable. Enough to start figuring out the spell's construction and how exactly they screwed it up.

"Hm," she observes, after a while. "So this is complicated, of course, but surprisingly the spell itself doesn't have the usual weird backlashy effects that I'd expect from something of this strength."

"That sounds heartening," says Miles. "Although my inner paranoid wants to know how sure you are of that."

"Yeah, mine too. Older spells tend to not need to reach around and do strange, squirrely things as much, which would account for the readings they documented if it were old enough. Which, it - seems like it is, it's a very old spell. But yeah. And there's not really any way to properly check for the subtle things they might not have documented without casting the exact spell they made, and if I'm going to be doing that blind anyway, I'm going to cast my version, which will be better."

"Well, I'll trust your judgment, then."

"I appreciate it." She reaches out to pet his hair, because it's soft, within easy reach, and it's soothing.

"I like magic, but I despise all of my predecessors for their lack of. Of. Organization and sense. It's infuriating."

"And something tells me you're going to set that straight."

"I will outlive them all," she sniffs, "and every bit of magic I get my hands on will be well documented and every spell I make built properly. And if eventually all of magic is tidy then I will consider it a job well done."

Miles grins at her.

"Behave, darling, I still haven't finished your spell."

He laughs, but obligingly turns his smile toward the ceiling instead of toward Yvette.

She leans over and kisses the corner of his mouth because she finds tempting him fun, but then returns to work. She'll have this spell sorted in record time.

Yes she will. And then maybe everything will be okay again.

Until then, he has a lovely vampire witch that finds his company very pleasant, and will work very hard to make everything be okay again.

... She does need breaks, though. It's hard to do one thing for days without going slowly mad. She might need to instead do Miles, which helps with the mental fatigue quite a lot.

(And also finish that website, because she has a deadline and she keeps those, but that hardly takes much time at all, in comparison to Miles and his spell.)

Miles is very happy to help her with her mental fatigue.

Excellent, she appreciates his attention so much.

Two nights later, she wakes up (.... in his arms, because he's comfortable to snuggle) with a subtle edge to her. Something like impatience; she fidgets and readjusts where she sits and occasionally taps the back of her laptop, before noticing she's doing it and stopping.

There might, perhaps, be something up.

He notices.

(He knows what he would've said.)

"You all right?"

"Mmm. Magic's addictive, it's kind of hard to be a serious practitioner of magic without getting a bit hooked." (Tap tap tap tap - she notices, and stops.) "I am not going into what are properly withdrawals but it's slightly uncomfortable and makes me twitchy."

"All right."

"I'm almost done with this, so it's a bad idea for me to just cast something small, when I'm going to cast something much larger soon enough," she says, partially to herself.

Seems like a reasonable occasion for him to take her word for it.