by Elena Lawson
“That’s enough,” Elias called to us over the sound of rustling papers and chairs scraping against the floor as the other students rose to leave, taking their time as they went—probably waiting to see what Kendra would do.
But Elias came to rest a hand on her shaking shoulder, and she spun, doing that hair flip thing that only popular girls managed to pull off before she stormed from the classroom.
I collected my notebook and shoved the history textbook back into the desk. I’d almost made it to the door and freedom when two words froze me in place.
“A word,” Elias said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his navy slacks.
The two girls who I assumed were like tumors on the hips of Kendra paused on their way out to give me a look that told me without the need for words I now and forever would be labeled as a loser. It was kind of a Catch-22 wasn’t it? That only the winners got to decide who the losers were.
With a flick of his fingers, Elias closed the door behind the other students, and with a speedily drawn sigil he pulled a ward up from the earth, making it so no one outside of the door could hear what we said inside.
“Look,” I said, turning to face him. “I’m sorry, but that girl deserved—”
“I don’t care what you said to Kendra,” he replied, raising a brow at me with a slight shake of his head. “Though I wouldn’t put it past her to tell Headmaster Sterling, or at the very least to make your life at the academy a little less agreeable while you’re here.”
Right, because it’s been so agreeable so far.
“Then what?”
He sat down at the desk nearest him, lounging in the stiff-backed wooden chair as though it were the most comfortable thing in the world.
Looking so out of place.
I don’t know how I ever thought he was a student.
He regarded me with contemplative, guarded eyes. “I saw them again last night—the Enduran shifters.”
He brought his steepled hands to his face, resting his two index fingers against his lips as he considered what to say next. “They were sniffing around my cabin. I think they caught your scent there.”
So, they’d come looking for me already. The whole thing was so confusing. I didn’t know what to do. Should I go looking for them? Introduce myself…?
Bonding with an animal was supposed to be easy. Familiars protected their witch counterparts as they came into their powers and acted as a sort of magical battery—lending strength and power when the witch was in need of it. Every witch bonded to a familiar. There were no exceptions.
Some took longer than others to find their animal counterpart, but most found theirs within the first year of coming into their powers.
I came into my powers nearly three years ago.
Familiars stayed with their witch until death. And, of course, witches took care of their familiar animals as best they could. Prolonging their short lives so they could remain with their bonded witch for as long as they should live.
Familiars were made to be irrevocably loyal and trustworthy. Their love unconditional. The bond unbreakable.
But the wolves I’d bonded to in the woods were not simple animals. They also had humanoid forms. And the human mind was a treacherous thing. People lied, stole, backstabbed, and manipulated. People did things animals would never do.
People were dangerous.
I sank into a chair opposite Elias, most of the frustration and anger I’d felt at Kendra only moments before disintegrating. “What should we do?”
Elias’s eyebrows raised at my question, and a finger of heat traced a straight line up the back of my neck when I realized I’d said we in reference to a problem that was really only mine.
He sat very still, moving only his lips when he said. “We—”
“I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“We,” he said again, more strongly. “Don’t do anything yet. I can’t be certain what their intentions are, but Harper… I don’t think they were looking to say hello, if you know what I mean.”
I cocked my head at him, not quite sure I understood.
“Fallon, my familiar—well, from the way he was acting when they were near… if they know what happened—that they’d been bonded to you, they may be looking for their own way to sever the bond.”
I shivered, the truth of what he was trying to tell me in as gentle of a way as he could becoming clear.
My familiars were out for my blood.
I didn’t know why I was so surprised. Of course, they’d kill me if they knew it meant severing the magic tying us together.
“Hey,” he said, brushing a strand of hair back from my forehead. “We can’t be sure of anything yet. I don’t want you to worry. We’ll figure this out.”
His fingertips lingered near my jaw, and I could still feel the ghost of them along my temple. I blinked rapidly, trying to quell the delicious sensation dancing along the surface of my skin.
We, I liked the sound of the word when it came from his lips.
He went back to the front of the classroom, and I went back to breathing normally, not realizing I had stopped.
Clearing my throat, I gathered up my things from the desk, realizing I was more than a little late for my next class and hoping there wouldn’t be some form of punishment waiting for me there.
“I’ll look into the possibility of severing the bond,” Elias said, beginning to erase the day’s lessons from the blackboard. “I’ve never heard of it being done before,” he continued, pausing in his work to give me a sympathetic glance as I hovered near the door. “But that could be because no one’s ever needed such a spell. Granger might know something, or there may be texts on it in the library.”
I nodded numbly, knowing he was only trying to make me feel better. Little did he know that I’d been waiting years to bond with my familiar.
Moving from place to place, with no familial ties and no true friends. I’d always thought when I finally found my familiar, I’d have at least one constant companion in my life.
And now my only option was to sever that bond. Even though we both knew you only bonded to a familiar once. If Elias somehow found a way to do it, I’d never have a familiar.
I walked from the classroom without another word, wishing more than anything that I could go crawl back into my bed and stay there.
8
It’d been three days since I’d seen the shifters in the woods.
I hadn’t seen them since, and neither had Elias. And we hadn’t really gotten an opportunity to talk much since the other day after class. What little communicating we did was mostly done in a series of different looks, nods, mouthed words, and shaken heads.
It gave me a sort of thrill—if I was being honest. The two of us working together in secret.
But he still hadn’t found anything on severing the bond, and the not knowing, and the not having a plan, had me on edge and twitchy.
Elias warned me to stay indoors until he figured out a solution, but tomorrow marked the start of outdoor phys-ed. In the near week it’d been since I arrived, the winter chill left the mountain, and spring could be felt in warm ribbons on the wind.
It would be fine. Two shifters wouldn’t dare approach an entire class of witches, not to mention the more experienced teacher who taught the class as well. Elias was a bit more skeptical, but eventually agreed.
“Late again, Harper,” Ms. Granger said. “Once more and I’ll have no choice but to give you detention.”
“Yes, Ms. Granger. Sorry about that.”
I rushed inside to the sound of her familiar, Frankie—the moody ferret—hissing at me from his makeshift bed of paper atop Ms. Granger’s desk.
There was only one open spot left, and it was right beside Bianca at the two person high-top desk. Sigil’s 101 was a standing class. Granger believed that since our magic was derived from the earth, feet planted firmly on the ground and an erect spine would make for easier practice.
All I knew was every time I left her clas
s it was with sore feet and a tired mind.
Sigils were a form of advanced magic. And could be used to create portals, heal wounds, grow stuff, to strengthen or weaken. I once saw Lara use a sigil to kill every mosquito in a few miles’ radius… I hadn’t even known there was a sigil for that. There really was a way to do almost anything with magic.
Incantations were used to strengthen the power of sigils or perform simple spells—like, say, changing the color of your hair, or turning lake-water to lemonade. And potions were more science-based. I likened them to baking. You had to follow the recipe exactly or the potion, elixir, or compound simply wouldn’t do what it was supposed to. Potions were a very volatile form of magic—and consequently the most difficult for me to master.
I was what Leo would call a ‘natural witch’. Where most witches had only a small amount of natural power and used things like sigils, incantations, or potions to strengthen their ability, I had the opposite problem. When trying to strengthen the raw energy drawn up through the earth into my veins, something almost always went haywire.
Some of the most renowned witches in history could create massive storms, turn a person to ash where they stood, and even create objects from nothing. But I was willing to bet they didn’t do any of that by accident…
“Hey,” I whispered to Bianca as I slid into my spot beside her at the tall desk.
Her bubblegum pink lips pursed, and she didn’t raise her eyes to meet mine. So, we still weren’t speaking to each other. Awesome. I had done my best to avoid her the last few days, scouring book after book in the library to try to find a solution to my little wolf problem—only going back to the dorm room in time for lights out.
She spent an inordinate amount of time in the library too, but at least it was large enough that we could be on opposite sides and not be within sight or earshot of each other.
It was starting to get awkward though. And tense, and a little annoying.
As Ms. Granger went on about proper sigil formation and its crucial importance because of all the different variants and types of sigils, I leaned in a little closer to Bianca’s side.
“Are you really going to stay mad at me forever? I said I was sorry.”
“Yeah, but not sorry enough to tell me where you actually were.”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, Bianca, I’m sorry that your uncle is Headmaster Sterling. That must really suck,” I said, and I meant it. I saw him wandering through the library, his gaze falling on me way more than what would’ve been normal. And in the cafeteria. And in the hallways. He seemed like he was always watching me. She had to understand that I couldn’t trust her to keep secrets from her own flesh and blood.
“Can we just,” I started. “I mean, I’d like to just start over.”
Bianca dutifully scribbled copies of the sigils Ms. Granger was drawing on the board, but I could tell she was considering my offer. It would be nice to have one friend in this foreign place. And Bianca was not the bimbo I had originally thought she was. Like me, she’d been forced into wearing a mask she never asked for.
“I promise,” I said, waiting for her to look at me. “If I could tell you where I was, then I would. But trust me when I say you don’t want to know.”
“Something you’d like to share with the class, Harper?” Ms. Granger trilled, turning from the board with one hand on her hip and the other poised over the blackboard with a nub of chalk.
I shook my head. “No, sorry.”
Biting the inside of my cheek to stifle the discomfort and the blush trying to crawl into my cheeks, I set to doing my work. Ferociously, I scratched the sigils into my notebook to catch up to everyone else in the class.
“Fine,” Bianca said after a time, and I noticed some of the tension in her neck and shoulders had relaxed. “We can start over… and I’m sorry.”
I scrunched my eyebrows at her.
“It really wasn’t any of my business where you were. I just—I just hate being lied to.”
I nodded, both to her and to myself. Of course, she did. Who didn’t? I could understand that at the very least. “Okay, no more lies then.”
She nodded back. “All right. Then we start over.”
Stifling a small smirk, I went back to trying to catch up. My smile faded into a grimace as I beheld the chicken scratch on my pages as compared to the beautiful swooping lines and swirls on Bianca’s.
I had a lot of work to do.
By the time the end of class rolled around my stomach was growling and my fingers and wrist were cramped. We hadn’t done any actual practicing of sigils. Only studied how to draw them and watched Ms. Granger perform a few of the simpler ones.
“Harper,” Mrs. Granger called out from the front as we packed our things. “A quick word if you don’t mind.”
Bianca gave me a tight-lipped smile and a small shake of her head before she whispered. “See you in the dining hall,” and sauntered out of the room with the rest of the class.
I readjusted my headband, tucking the hairs that had liberated themselves back in before I made my way to the front of the class. “If this is about me being late, I promise it won’t happen again.”
Ms. Granger finished up writing something down on a piece of parchment. Her long wavy brown hair lit with streaks of bronze and gold fell forward to cover her face. When she looked up, I found she had warm brown eyes, set in a gently long face with full pale lips, and a strong chin.
A younger version of her could’ve had a career in modeling, but age had crinkled the skin around her eyes and mouth. Lucky for her, the wrinkles only gave her more character, and added a sort of homey mother-like feel to her features.
“I should hope not,” she said with a knowing smile, straightening and spinning in her chair to get a better look at me. “But I only asked you to stay behind to see how you’re doing.”
My eyes narrowed with something like confusion, or maybe it was suspicion. But there was no condescension in her tone, and her gaze held nothing but curiosity, and maybe a little bit of empathy, too.
Swallowing past a sudden lump in my throat, I clutched my notebook and pen tighter to my chest. “Well, I—I’ve never been to a real school before. It’s… quite a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be.”
Ms. Granger nodded her understanding, though I really didn’t know if she did understand. If anyone at this place could. All the teachers and students at Arcane Arts Academy came from wealthy families and dignified backgrounds.
But the fact that she was even trying gave me a little bit of hope.
“I thought so,” she said knowingly. “Which is why I wanted to extend my help. If there’s anything you aren’t understanding, or anything that needs clarification, please do feel free to come to me once classes are finished for the day.”
I was taken aback by her offer. Elias aside, every other teacher in the academy had been standoffish and harsh toward me. I wasn’t sure if everyone knew the circumstances that led me to be a student here, but either way, the teachers weren’t willing to cut me any slack.
And as though my past and lack of position in alchemical society were written in permanent ink on my skin, they regarded me with disdain. Making me a leper before I even had a chance to prove otherwise.
I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that Ms. Granger was the only female professor within the academy. Where the rest of the world seemed to be moving into the direction of true equality between genders, the witching society had a long way to go before they caught up.
“Thank you,” I said, and truly meant it.
“It’s no bother,” she said, and my grip on my notebook lessened. The shiny gold of my father’s ring caught the light, reflecting it into Ms. Granger’s eyes.
I watched as her mouth slackened, and her eyes widened before her hand snaked out and she snatched my hand, pulling me toward her roughly.
Her shoulders shook. Her hands were near vibrating where they still clutched mine. I tried to pull my hand away, making a so
rt of weak squealing sound between my lips.
Snapping out of her strange state, Ms. Granger finally let go of my hand and I stumbled two steps back. “Where did you get that ring?” she asked, rising from her seat, her hands clenching into white knuckled fists.
“Did you steal it?” she almost yelled, taking a step closer. Her warm brown eyes lost all of their gentleness. Her full lips puckered into the epitome of bitch-face.
“No,” I gasped, stumbling further backwards until my back met the closed-door. Did she recognize the ring? How?
“Harper,” she warned, her jaw clenching and eyes gleaming in the bright fluorescent lights of the classroom.
I held my one hand and my notebook up in a placating gesture, my heart racing. “I didn’t steal it, I swear. It—it belonged to my father.”
You would think I’d stuck her with a cattle prod—the way her entire body went rigid, her lips parted, and her brows raised so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline.
Then just as quickly, her shoulders sagged, and her hands unclenched.
“That’s impossible,” she said quietly to herself.
I resisted the urge to run out of the classroom and tear down the hallways—to get as far away from the woman who was staring at me like I was either a monster or a ghost as I could. But I was too stunned, and I’ll admit more than a little curious to do much more than stand there.
“Oh!” she breathed, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. Her gaze devoured me from my toes to the top of my head. “Oh,” she gasped again. “You are their child.”
My lungs felt near giving out, along with my knees. She knew them. She knew my parents. My palms grew clammy, and a fevered sweat broke out over my chest and the back of my neck. I’d never met anyone who knew who they were.
I never knew anyone who could tell me a single thing about them.
My hope that I wasn’t wrong was so strong I was near shaking with it. Buzzing with impatience. Waiting to be disappointed.
I didn’t dare speak, afraid to ruin everything. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, she would suddenly turn around and say she was mistaken, and she never knew them at all.