Tarot Academy 1: Spells of Iron and Bone

by Sarah Piper

  Finally, The Star, my mysterious lady at the lake, endlessly pouring out her urns of water.

  “Maybe she’s pouring out her tears for her lost lovers,” Isla says.

  Nat glares at her. “Not helpful, Isla.”

  “Stevie doesn’t need help right now,” Isla says, fingering her teardrop pendant. “She needs tough love.”

  “I think she just needs to get laid,” Jessa pipes in, and we all crack up.

  “Yeah, I don’t need the cards to confirm that.” I take another swig of whiskey. “Okay, next question. Why do I have a stupid crush on Baz?”

  I shuffle all the cards again, then lay down my next three:

  Cernunnos, my old horned-god friend. The Lovers, which is ironically the card Professor Nakata joked about using to enhance your sex life. And The Star. Again.

  “I can’t believe you keep getting the same cards every time for each question,” Jessa says. “Is that even statistically possible?”

  The mention of statistics reminds me of Kirin, and I get up and head to the kitchen in search of something more palatable than whiskey to drink.

  “See, this is why I have rules in the first place,” I say, putting my company kettle on to boil. “Even though I keep forgetting to follow them. Who else wants tea?”

  “I’ll have a warmup,” Isla says. “Nat, you good?”

  But Nat’s buried in her phone, her eyes wide, her hand covering her mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, heading back in to check on her.

  “Text from my mom,” she says. “Apparently there were two more arrests last night—a mage in San Francisco accused of poisoning the food in his own restaurant. No one died, but a bunch of people got really sick. And another—a witch in Portland, Oregon. My mom used to work with her—she lives about half an hour from our house.” Her face goes slack, her eyes filling with tears. “Goddess, they’re saying she tortured her husband and her mother-in-law to death with a clothes iron.”

  “What the fuck?” Isla whispers. “No way.”

  “The city of Portland is declaring a state of emergency,” Nat says, still scrolling through the message. “Since the story broke, people are starting to protest on both sides. They’re asking for federal assistance to help deter any riots. They’re… Holy shit. They’re sending in military.”

  “To Portland?”

  Nat nods, and in the silence that follows, a sliver of fear cracks through my heart.

  Things are getting worse.

  Forty-Two

  CASS

  “Two more attacks. Two more wrongful imprisonments. Towns falling under martial law, military presence on the rise in every major U.S. city and a good deal of Europe as well.” I pace in front of the classroom, looking at each of my students—my responsibilities—in turn. “The news is becoming more grim by the day. I don’t tell you this to frighten you, but to inspire you.”

  Twenty-one faces stare back at me, including my bonded brother and another who’s come to mean more than just a responsibility to me.

  Stevie raises her hand, and I fake a cough to hide my smile.

  Never a dull moment with this one.

  “Yes, Miss Milan?”

  “I was just thinking… I mean, you’re the professor, so don’t take this as gospel or anything. But as far as inspirational pep talks go, maybe we could focus on something a little more… I don’t know. Inspiring? Peppy?”

  “I was getting to that.”

  “Oh! Good. Carry on.”

  “May I?”

  She gives me two thumbs up, flashing her heart-stopping smile.

  It’s good to see her smiling again, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. After that snake bite incident, I never want to see her so close to the brink again. Her body healed quickly, but I won’t soon forget the wild, crazy look in her eyes, as if she’d gotten a glimpse of her own death.

  In so many ways, she had.

  I look at her again now, taking in the sight of her, reminding myself that she’s whole and alive and beautiful, just like always.

  That she’s safe.

  “Mental shielding magick may seem complicated,” I continue, practicing some shielding of my own, lest I be sucked into another one of those visions of her by the lake. “But it’s actually quite simple, and fairly easy to practice. I want each of you to become adept at these techniques, and to feel confident in your abilities. The more confident you are in the face of danger, the less likely you’ll be to suffer an attack of this nature.”

  I cross to the other side of the room, deftly avoiding Stevie’s gaze.

  “Fear is a powerful weapon. All it takes is a single doubt, a single crack in your armor, and the enemy will find it and exploit it to the fullest extent. But here’s something the enemy doesn’t want you to know—fear itself isn’t real. Danger may be real, but fear is just an emotional response to that perceived danger. First, there’s a stimulus—say, a lion prowling around your cave. Then your brain forms a thought about that stimulus—lion wants to eat me! Danger, Danger!”

  Some of the students chuckle.

  “From that thought, your emotions respond accordingly—danger! I feel fear!—and then you have another thought about what to do—run? Fight? Next, your brain tells whichever parts of your body are involved to get moving—feet, make haste! Or hands, pick up that shotgun! It’s a long chain of events that happens in mere seconds, but the part we want to focus on is that initial thought formation after the stimulus. We’re going to learn how to essentially hack our brains—hijack those thoughts before they have a chance to produce the fear response, or to linger there too long. The key to all this starts with presence and awareness, and that’s what we’re going to practice today.”

  I pair them off, giving them a series of exercises to test each other’s awareness, telling myself it’s a good start.

  But in the face of everything Kirin and Stevie have postulated so far, it feels futile. Though they’ve made progress on her mother’s prophecies and the Dark Magician legends, we still have no way of knowing who the Magician is, what form his or her rise will take, when it will happen, and what—if anything—we can do to prepare. And none of us has any ideas how this is all connected to the arrests in the wider community—only that it is connected. It must be.

  I rub my eyes and take a deep breath, trying not to let my own fear consume me. Tucked away in my bottom desk drawer, the whiskey bottle calls.

  I ignore it, looking out at my students once again. This is a good start, I remind myself. And start we must.

  By the end of the class, I’m fairly confident at least half of them would survive a lion attack, and possibly even a dark mage possession, which at this point is the more pressing danger.

  The chime announces the end of class, and I assign them two pieces of homework—one, practice their presence and awareness exercises with their roommates. And two, stay safe and alert, especially at night.

  Then I send them on their way.

  Not sure I’ll ever get used to that—the emptiness that creeps in next. The fear—one that no amount of presence and awareness—or whiskey, for that matter—has ever allayed.

  When they’re here in my classroom, safely ensconced inside these four walls, I can protect them. Stevie. The other first-years. Even Baz, who still insists he doesn’t need protection.

  Shaking off the old ghosts, I glance down at my desk, trying to get things in order for my next class.

  But it seems not all the students have left.

  A shadow falls over my desk, and I look up to see her standing before me, her eyes lidded, brow furrowed with some new worry.

  “I need to speak with you, Doc,” Stevie says, and my heart melts a little bit.

  I love when she calls me that, but still, professional boundaries and all. I turn my attention back to my paperwork, shuffling and reshuffling. “Stevie, you know the rules.”

  Ignoring me, she blurts out, “What’s going on with Kirin?”

  I look up, try to thi
nk of a quick answer. But there isn’t one.

  “Kirin is… He’s going through some personal challenges right now.”

  “What challenges?”

  “That’s not something I’m going to share, Stevie. But I will tell you that it’s not your fault, and Kirin is okay. He’ll be back at work with you soon.”

  “No,” she says, adamant.

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t buy it.” She sets down her bag, crosses her arms over her chest.

  Shit. We’re in it for the long haul, then. Prepare for battle.

  I rise from the desk, cross to the other side to meet her.

  “Stevie, I’m not going to delve into Kirin’s personal business with you. I’m sure you can appreciate the need for privacy and personal boundaries, though I know you struggle with the latter.”

  “I struggle with the latter?” She steps closer, her eyes blazing, heat and anger emanating off her body in waves so strong, they nearly knock me down.

  Jabbing a finger into my chest, she says, “You know what drives me crazy? I’ll tell you. You warned me not to trust anyone, yet you seem to want me to trust you in everything. You guys are always asking me to give this a chance, to respect the rules, to respect privacy. And I think I’ve done a pretty damn good job of all that, considering I signed onto this project with zero upfront information and have rolled with the punches—punches that keep on coming, mind you—and you and Kirin, who insist that you’re here to help me, basically stonewall me every chance you get. Now Kirin has gone AWOL, and you’re stonewalling me again.”

  “Stevie, there are things—delicate things—that require—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, Doc, unless you want your delicate things to end up in a jar.”

  Instinctively, I cover my crotch—an excellent example of the stimulus-thought-response mechanism at work.

  “Kirin needs his privacy right now,” I say firmly. “I will respect that, and so will you. End of discussion.”

  Stevie’s anger spikes so high, her hair practically curls.

  “So then it’s okay to keep me in the dark?” she asks. “To stay in total control, leaving me hanging out here in the breeze by myself? What about my privacy?”

  “If the situations were reversed, I would afford you the same courtesy,” I say.

  And then I realize my mistake.

  Stevie smirks, hands on her hips, her eyes laser-focused on mine. “Really? So… What’s my true form? You all seem to know it, yet none of you thought to clue me in.”

  I’m falling off a cliff, scrambling to hold onto something, but she’s got me right where she wants me. I knew this would come up again after that day in her bedroom, after the delirious snake-bite conversations, but now is not the time.

  There’s absolutely nothing I can say in response. All I can do is close the classroom door, hope like hell no one else is listening in.

  “One more chance,” she says, lowering her voice and leaning in close—so close her honeysuckle sweetness tickles my nose. My heart lodges in my throat—I have no idea what she’s going to say next, only that it’s going to hit hard.

  I steel my nerves, slap on my poker face.

  “Who are the Keepers of the Grave?” she whispers.

  I choke out a sputtering cough. So much for the poker face.

  “Nothing to say?” she presses. “Cat got your tongue? What about the Book of Shadow and Mists? Hmm, drawing another blank?”

  “Stevie, how do you… This isn’t…” I grab her shoulders, desperate. “I don’t know how you see the things you see, and yes, there are a great many of them I’ve kept from you. Not out of secrecy or betrayal or a desire to keep you beholden. But because it’s dangerous for you to know. There is so much you have yet to learn, so much we haven’t even delved into yet with your mother’s prophecies, and now we have a possible dark uprising, the consequences of which you’ve seen with your own eyes, and…”

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath.

  Get a hold of yourself, Devane—before this situation spirals so far out of control, you lose everything you’ve ever cared about.

  Mustering all the authority I’ve got left, I open my eyes and shoot her a firm glare. “Stevie, now is not the time or the place. I’ve got a class to prepare for. And you need to get to your potions class before Professor Broome writes you up for tardiness.”

  “Professor Broome won’t write me up. She isn’t an egomaniacal control freak.”

  “Are you saying I am?”

  She glares at me, her smart mouth twisted in a smirk, her anger still simmering. “What else would you call a professor who drones on and on about fear magick, too scared to face his own fears and trust someone once in a while?”

  “Drone on?” I shout, knowing that’s not what we’re arguing about but seizing on it anyway—anything to avoid the raw nerve she just scraped. “Do you have any idea how important it is to learn proper defense against mental manipulation? Clearly not, or you wouldn’t be so damned stubborn and insolent.”

  “Clearly not,” she says, imitating my voice. “Or I’d be able to defend myself against your boring-ass lectures!”

  Mere inches separate us, and despite the ridiculously immature turn this argument has taken, all I want to do is kiss her. It’s completely inappropriate, totally unethical, absolutely forbidden by Academy policy, but it’s taking a good deal of mental magicks of my own—thoughts of icy rivers, of puppies, of wrinkly old grandmothers and hot garbage and other things that make my cock shrivel on command—to stop me from claiming her right here.

  Instead, I turn my back on her, return to the safe harbor of my desk.

  “Go to class, Stevie. And I meant what I said about staying safe,” I tell her, shuffling through my paperwork. “I don’t want you wandering around campus at night without an escort.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of assessing situations and handling them accordingly, Dr. Devane.”

  She grabs her bag and huffs toward the door.

  Not before I see her eyes glaze with tears.

  Shit.

  I set down my papers. “Stevie, wait. Can you just—”

  “Just what?” She calls over her shoulder, refusing to turn around. “Just trust you?”

  I lower my head. Point made.

  And then she’s gone, every last one of those damnable old ghosts rushing back in to fill the space.

  I slide open the bottom desk drawer, reach for the bottle.

  And hope that one of these times, the booze will chase away those ghosts or erase the lingering pain or infuse me with all the courage I lack.

  Hope that one of these times, it will do something other than burn all the way down.

  Forty-Three

  STEVIE

  The archive drawers containing Mom’s research seem to go on forever, packed not just with her notebooks, but with books and scrolls from all over the library.

  Professor Phaines told me she was working on many different things, all of them connected to her prophecies, many of them considered blasphemous by some of the elder administrators. He didn’t mention Trello by name or offer much detail beyond that—and I still don’t feel comfortable asking him about it—but something tells me Trello played a big role in my parents’ downfall.

  For all her rah-rah-rah, we’re-here-to-help talk on that first day, I haven’t seen her once.

  Professor Phaines also told me that when Mom left the Academy, some of the other researchers wanted to destroy her work, but he fought to keep it all in place. Despite her tarnished reputation, he had a hunch the Academy might eventually glean something from the prophecies.

  “After all,” he told me with a wink, “Melissa Milan was a talented seer, and many of us never stopped believing that.”

  I’m glad at least Professor Phaines falls into that camp. At this point, he’s the only one involved in this project that I still trust.

  I haven’t spoken to Dr. Devane since my outburst on Monday. In today’s
class, we were content to ignore each other. And Kirin? Still a no-show. I haven’t seen him in almost two weeks now, and he isn’t responding to my texts—not about our work or anything else.

  Ani told me that he, Kirin, and Baz have plans tonight, which means Kirin’s not dead in a ditch—the only acceptable excuse, as far as I’m concerned. And as much as I’d love to fly on over to their super-secret Keepers of the Grave cave again, I haven’t heard a peep from my avian familiar.

  So that’s it. Kirin’s officially ignoring me.

  And I’m officially heartbroken.

  “Everything okay, Stevie?” Professor Phaines asks, and I look up from my spot at the archive table, startled.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, then takes the seat across from me. “You look a bit melancholy. Are you alright?”

  I force a smile, even as my throat tightens at his kindness. “I’m good. Low blood sugar. I should probably eat a candy bar or something.”

  He glances around, making a show of inspecting the room, even though we’re clearly alone. Then he presses a finger to his lips and retrieves a Snickers bar from his pocket, passing it over.

  “Professor Phaines! I thought there was no food allowed in the archives?”

  “It’s my one weakness.”

  “Guess that explains the chocolate fingerprints I found in Plant and Animal Symbolism in the Major Arcana.”

  “Page nineteen?” He chuckles. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  “My lips are sealed.” Laughing, I tear into the candy bar with gusto, grateful for the sugar rush. “Now we’re officially co-conspirators. Mmm, perfect. This is all I needed.”

  He nods, but I can tell he’s not convinced. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Sometimes when he looks at me like that, he reminds me not of a grandfather, but of my dad, who was always the best listener, patient and soft-spoken, never rushing a conversation or talking over anyone. Basically, the opposite of me.

  But Professor Phaines is not my dad, and he doesn’t need to be burdened with the lovesick melodrama of a twenty-three-year old student who’s supposed to be putting forth an image of abject professionalism and dedication.