“I’m just saying, I think this place has most of that locked up somewhere,” Jace countered. “Even sneaky can’t get through a locked door.” Or maybe they could actually, with all the world-of-weird that had been cropping up lately. It was like living in an X-Men comic book, which in and of itself was kind of cool. “Actually, I’m just gonna go ahead and take that idiot statement back, because of reasons,” he said, shifting his eyes one way and then the other for effect.
He really couldn’t see how to differentiate the two, because things that were new could all be categorized by things that could get a person injured, since if you did anything wrong, no matter how safe, you could still get hurt. But he wasn’t going to get into some long drawn out conversation with Nick; especially not one he could potentially lose. He didn’t like to lose. “What made you give it up?” he asked out of curiosity since she’d used the past tense to talk about it, so he figured that must mean she didn’t do it anymore. “Blow something up that you shouldn’t have?” And if that was something she used to do then maybe she needed to reconsider giving other people warnings, but who was he to make that judgment?
It wasn’t like he didn’t believe her, but most people didn’t get defensive like that, so he was more than ready to call BS on her defense. “Why the hell did you have to jump out a window in the first place?” he blurted, because as far as he knew she wasn’t a regular looter and usually they were the only ones that got themselves into unlucky situations like that. “And totally family heritage stuff still counts, doll, sorry.” Because not every family made homemade liquor; he’d never had a real family of his own, what with being a foster kid, but even the foster families had had pretty tame traditions.
“I’m good enough that there’s practically no chance of me lighting myself on fire,” he told her. “Is that good enough to want to see?” He wasn’t used to someone putting conditions on whether or not they wanted to see a trick of his. Personally, if someone told him they could breathe fire he’d want to see it, no matter how amateur they were, but then maybe that was him and Nick was just that much more difficult to impress. He felt old even thinking that teenagers these days had such standards.