I stared into his dark eyes for a beat. Every inch of me wanted to stay, to beg him to stop this and come back with us, but I couldn’t. I was done risking my friends for Rowan Underwood.
As he ran, our eyes stayed locked. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but I knew I couldn’t stay to hear.
I dematerialized again.
I jumped in the same fashion nine or ten more times, carrying my friends and randomly changing direction until I was sure we’d lost Rowan.
At last, we materialized inside an alley where I collapsed, exhausted. Bridget was unconscious on my lap while Disha got to work on several cloaking spells that must have made us triple invisible.
My head fell back against the wall. The roiling smell of garbage drifted from a dumpster straight into my nose, but I didn’t care.
I fought with all my might to stay awake, but the spells had drained me dry. My eyes closed and I knew no more.
Chapter Fourteen
FALL SEMESTER
MID-DECEMBER
“You humans are very bad at glamours,” Sinasre said, shaking his head, his long, reddish hair swaying from side to side. “It looks like a slug.” He laughed, displaying sharp canines as he did so.
“A slug?” I protested. At the moment, I was trying to glamour a pencil to resemble a snake, and I was failing miserably. “It looks… better than a slug.”
Disha, Bridget, Sinasre, and I were in the library, tucked in a corner table behind a tall bookshelf as we practiced for our Spells final.
It was the middle of December, one week from our Christmas break. I had two finals left and my Spells class promised to be the hardest… what with a sucky teaching assistant, Ramona, who could barely glamour anything herself. Still, our exams would test us on every subject as if a proper professor had taught us. So unfair.
I had to admit my pencil did kind of look like a slug. God, this was pointless.
“Are you actually trying to help us?” Disha asked Sinasre. “Or are you just going to keep laughing at us?”
She had tried the same glamour just a moment ago, and Sinasre had said hers resembled runny snot. So, him calling mine a slug was actually an improvement.
Bridget was sitting at the end of the table, quietly waving her fingers over her pencil. She’d been a little different since the Shadow Puppet had invaded her body a month ago. It really had affected her. She’d told us she’d felt so thoroughly occupied, controlled, and violated that the next time she ran into that entity—as she kept calling the Shadow Puppet—she would kill it.
And I didn’t think she meant in the figurative sense. Poor Bridget. She’d been through a lot. We never should have taken her to Canada.
Sinasre scowled, his cat eyes narrowing. With a toss of his braids, he gestured at my botched spell. Today, he was wearing tight pants that left nothing to the imagination and a hand-stitched shirt that appeared to be made of forest floor leaves.
“You have to be very specific as you imagine your target subject,” he said, a twinkle of amusement still in his yellow-tinted eyes.
“I’m doing my best,” I whined.
“Have you even seen a live snake?” he asked, frowning.
I searched my mind. “Once. At the Atlanta Zoo. I think I was four at the time.”
Disha shivered. “I’ve never seen one I.R.L. We don’t have a lot of wildlife in New York. They look creepy enough on TV.”
“And, next, you’ll tell me you prefer a city to an open prairie,” Sinasre said, shaking his head with incredulity.
“Duh, of course.” Disha rolled her eyes. “Clearly, you’ve never been to New York City.”
“Nor want to,” he shot back.
Bridget got up, her chair scraping the floor. A small snake sat where her pencil had been. It was brown with a black pattern running along its sides. It wiggled for a moment then went back to being a pencil.
“I’m going to bed.” She picked up her backpack and walked away.
It was one AM, so I didn’t blame her for leaving us behind now that she’d succeeded. During finals week, the library was open 24/7, and the last two days we’d been here studying well past three AM. We were simply exhausted. I wanted to go to bed too, but I couldn’t until I mastered this stupid skill.
Like usual, I was having trouble with a small hex. Finesse was not my forte. If you needed someone to blast a pencil into next week, I was your girl. This was more Disha’s style, and it made no sense that she was having such trouble. Maybe the lack of sleep was really getting to us.
We were lucky to have enlisted Sinasre to help us. Fae were the best at glamours. This type of spell was their specialty. I was still sort of angry at my woodland friend for using Rowan’s name to get a rise out of me, and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him and his friends one hundred percent, but I was desperate. They’d started acting a smidge more friendly than in the beginning, though. Plus I needed to pass this exam.
I hadn’t been doing my best at paying attention in class or even bothering to attend much since our supposed teacher was so incompetent.
Moreover, against our better judgment, we hadn’t returned the grimoire to the library.
So much for Follow-the-Rules Charlie.
We’d hidden the book under my bed as we tried to figure out what spell Tempest had gotten out of it. So far, we’d tried everything we could think of and still nothing. It had been a huge waste of time, so we should probably have been practicing how to glamour the heck out of our school supplies instead.
“Never thought Bridget would be the first one to get it,” Sinasre said, watching her go.
He glanced from me to Disha and back again. I scratched my head. Disha let out a huge yawn, folded her arms over the table, and put her head down.
Determined to get the hang of this, I tried to clear my mind of all other thoughts and focused on picturing a snake. Holding the brunt of my magic back, I released a measured amount and pointed it at the pencil. It rolled away, giving a couple of turns, then sprouted scales, a tail, and a head. A tiny forked tongue tasted the air as it coiled tightly in a defensive position.
“I got it!” I exclaimed.
Someone on the other side of the bookshelf shushed me.
“Sorry,” I said, though I was still smiling. I’d managed the glamour, which meant I could finally go to bed. I almost cried.
Disha lifted her head for a moment and examined my creation. She frowned, gave me an annoyed look and a head shake, then lay back down. It seemed she was mad I’d figured it out before she had.
Sinasre rubbed the back of his head. “You suck at this, Char-lie.”
“What? But I got it.” I pointed at my cute, little snake.
“Not from where I’m sitting,” he said. “Your glamour will have to be perfect from all angles if you want a passing grade.”
I stared at him, confused. He sighed and pulled on my arm, forcing me to see my snake from his perspective.
My excitement deflated.
From Sinasre’s side, the snake had a pink eraser for a head and its slitted eyes floated in the air like two independent orbs while the forked tongue hung limply to one side. The thing looked like some sort of freakish cartoon.
“Shizznit on a stick,” I said, sliding down in my chair. I wanted the floor to open up and eat me. “I give up.”
“You can’t give up.” Sinasre glanced over his shoulder, a pensive expression on his face. Then he stood and walked away. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just disappeared through the bookshelf corridors. I lay my head down like Disha, exhaustion weighing my entire body down.
Sinasre startled us awake by dropping a heavy book on the table. Disha and I jerked to a sitting position, glancing around as if expecting subversives to rain down from the ceiling tiles.
“You scared the crap out of me,” Disha complained.
He ignored the comment and leafed through the book. Its elaborately decorated sp
ine read Advanced Revealing Spells for Animals and Objects.
“Where did you get that book?” I narrowed my eyes at the tome, which looked too fancy for general consumption.
“The advanced section,” he answered as he roughly flipped through page after page with his clawed fingers. “Where is it? I just saw it,” he mumbled to himself.
“Sinasre, you’re not supposed to take books from that area.” I squirmed in my chair, growing nervous. We could get in trouble for having this book on our table.
“No one saw me,” he said dismissively, like worrying about a silly rule like that was ridiculous. “Ah, here it is.” He turned the book in my direction, pointing at a very realistic illustration of a snake. “You two should stare at this little fellow for about an hour before trying your glamour again. The next page shows other angles. That should help.”
“For an hour?” Disha huffed. “Are you serious? I doubt we’d do more than slobber all over the pages.”
“Char-lie doesn’t slobber,” Sinasre said with conviction.
Disha rolled her eyes. “Sure, and she doesn’t sweat, either.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I glisten.” I pulled the book closer and stared at the snake for a bit, then turned the page to look at the other illustrations. I read the title on the page out loud. “Prying Secrets From a Witness Snake. What the hell does that even mean?” I asked.
“People used to utilize certain animals as spies,” Disha explained. “It’s an old practice.”
“Old practice?” Sinasre said. “We still do it. A witness snake can be quite useful out in nature. You can even get secrets out of regular snakes that happened to be just where you needed them.”
“Interesting,” I said, flipping through the pages with curiosity. There was something we wanted to pry secrets out of… La Sorcière Noire grimoire. Maybe this book could come in handy.
“Charlie!” Disha exclaimed, her eyes growing wide as she stared pointedly at the book, suddenly realizing that same thing I had.
I gave her a slight nod, trying not to appear suspicious, but Sinasre didn’t seem to miss our exchange.
“You know,” he said. “Maybe it would be best if I put this book back.” He reached for it.
I pulled it back. “Um, I’m not done memorizing the snake. We can keep it for a bit.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. I shrugged and went back to memorizing the snake.
After a long and quiet half an hour, Sinasre yawned and stretched. “I’ll be right back. I need to use the restroom.”
Disha waved two fingers at him and made as if to cast another glamour over her pencil. As soon as he disappeared, she leaned forward.
“Hurry,” she urged. “Find the index.”
I noted the page with the snake, then jumped to the front of the book. I flipped a few empty pages until I found the index. The first heading was Animals.
“Keep going,” Disha said.
I flipped through several pages listing all kinds of different animals until we got to the next heading: Objects.
I ran my finger down the page. “Here… books! Page twelve hundred and thirty-three.”
Quickly, I opened the book to its middle and leafed ahead until I found the right page. Disha was fast with her phone and, under a minute, took pictures of all the pages that described revealing spells that could be used on books.
After Sinasre returned from the restroom, Disha and I tried our glamour spells a few more times and ended up mastering them fairly quickly. It seemed we had gotten just the right amount of adrenaline in our systems to override our tired stupor and make us focus. Talk about finding the right motivation.
Sometime later, as we speed-walked across the dark campus back to the Junior Dorm, Disha and I debated whether to wake Bridget and tell her what we’d discovered, but in the end, we decided against it. We didn’t even know if what we’d found would help in any way, so there was no point in making her miss more sleep than she already had.
Once in the privacy of my room, we went over all the pictures Disha had taken, reading every spell carefully.
There were a few spells to help you find out an unknown author, the place where the book had been printed, the type of tree used for the cover and pages, the number of words in the entire text, the relevance and truthfulness of a particular sentence or page and more.
All of it just completely, utterly, obnoxiously useless crap.
“Well, that was a royal waste of time,” I said, stomping around the room to release the anxious energy that coursed through my body.
Disha threw herself on the bed and stared at the ceiling, looking as frustrated as I felt. “At least we learned to glamour the pencil. That’s something.”
“I guess.”
I couldn't even find solace in that. We’d gotten back the grimoire, had tried every revealing spell possible, and we still had no idea what Rowan and Tempest were planning.
“I’m starting to regret not acting when we had a chance," I said. “We could have stopped them back in Quebec. Now, they’re out there, planning who knows what. Maybe I should rename myself from New Charlie to Useless Charlie.” I dropped heavily onto my desk chair.
“Charmander,” Disha started hesitantly, “do you think Tempest and Rowan have… a thing together?
God, I didn’t know Disha had gotten the same vibe I had. I pushed my jealousy and her comment away.
“That’s ridiculous and irrelevant,” I said, acting as if I didn’t care.
Hmm, irrelevant. An idea tickled the back of my mind.
“Can I see your phone again?” I said.
Disha handed it over. “I know that look. What do you have in mind?”
I held up a finger while I thumbed through the pictures and found the spell that allowed you to figure out how relevant or truthful a page was.
“This spell about relevancy,” I said. “It doesn’t say relevant to what. You can pretty much define that yourself.”
Disha sat straight, her eyes lighting up. “So we can just ask how a particular page is relevant to the Academy.”
“That might be too broad,” I said. “We’d probably need to be more specific than that.”
Disha groaned in frustration. “I don’t know, Charlie. That might turn out to be a huge waste of time just like everything else we’ve tried. We would have to go through every page of the grimoire—all three thousand of them. And if we’re not specific enough, we could get the wrong answer or no answer at all.”
I peered at the phone and read the spell again. “Cut that in half. I think the spell would work for both opened pages.”
“Still, who has that kind of time?” She collapsed back on the bed. “This spy business is exhausting. I just want to go home and see Drew.” She sighed and closed her eyes as if imagining him shirtless or something.
She was right. This might turn out to be useless, too, but what other choice did we have? We had to do something. The Academy and its portal were in danger, Dean McIntosh was missing, and Dean Bonnie Underwood was pretty much in bed with the bad guys.
Someone had to act. Even if it was New, Useless Charlie.
Determined to uncover anything that could help me stop the subversives, I grabbed a notepad and pen from my desk and wrote the word “Academy” as a starting point.
“Besides the Academy, what else could the spell be relevant to?” I asked.
“The non-wizards,” Disha said.
I wrote that down.
“The portal?” Disha said, sounding less sure.
I nodded at the three items on my list, then scratched out Academy. “The last two are good, but you’re right, if we don’t choose right it would be a huge waste of time—not to mention that Tempest and Rowan will get what they’re after.” I paused. “Anything else?”
“Vampires? Elementals? Dean McIntosh?”
A guilty pang hit my chest at the mention of the dean. Where was she? Was she safe? Regent Nyquist was trying to set things right after the mess Irm
agard had made, but it wasn’t the same without Dean McIntosh. Even he agreed.
I jotted down Lynssa McIntosh in my list.
Thinking about Regent Nyquist got the back of my mind tickling with another idea.
“Do you remember what Tempest and Rowan were talking about when we overheard them in Quebec?” I asked.
Disha sat up straighter and tapped a finger against her lips. “Rowan wanted to ‘move again’.” She made air quotes. “And Tempest couldn’t believe he’d told Bonnie they were in Quebec.”
I nodded as Disha’s words helped bring the memories forward. “And then Rowan said something like… ‘my mom knows we have to deal with our phoenix problem’.”
“Phoenix problem,” Disha repeated with a frown. “Regent Nyquist wears this giant bird pin on his lapel, like, all the time. Does that mean anything?”
“I’ve seen him, too,” I said, trying to picture the pin in my mind, then it hit me. “I think it’s not just a bird. It’s a phoenix, a city symbol for Atlanta if I remember correctly.”
I grabbed my friend’s arm in realization. “Holy shit, Dish! The subversives already got rid of Dean McIntosh and now I bet they want to finish off Regent Nyquist!”
Chapter Fifteen
WINTER BREAK
MID-DECEMBER
We warned Nyquist about our discovery, but he didn’t listen.
“Now girls,” he’d said, blinking at us from under bushy eyebrows after we tracked him down on his way to the Administration Building the next morning, “I appreciate your concern, but I assure you, there’s nothing to worry about. I’m perfectly safe, as is the Academy. Additional wards have been applied all over campus. No one is getting in.”
“But what if the subversives try something over Christmas break?” I’d asked, staring at the pin on his lapel for the third time to make sure it was a phoenix and not an overgrown chicken or something.
“I will be safe then, too. I promise.” He smiled fondly, clearly appreciative of our concern for him. “This old dog knows some very good tricks.” His smile deepened, revealing a set of well-worn teeth. How old was this man? One hundred? Was he the best choice to oversee the Academy’s wellbeing? I had to question the Board of Regents’ decision. He looked like a hard-boiled egg could take him down. And why wasn’t he taking us seriously?
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