The smell in the room was faint but unmistakable. Clean, like ozone and chlorine, but slightly burned. Magic. Powerful magic at that, if the smell of it lingered for a week.
Not much remained in the room, except a desk piled with papers and a framed newspaper article. Nikolai picked up an essay at the top, and read Jun Bear, Professor Cartwright, Business Analytics Midterm Final. He skimmed through the writing.
As far as segmentation strategies, the business targets middle income groups through promoting products that the customer perceives as more upscale and “trendy.”
He would hazard a guess that he wasn’t about to find anything magic here, but he took the entire stack regardless.
Professor Cartwright. Currently in intensive care, according to the campus newsletter. The sole victim of the earthquake.
The damage was localized to this room. The caved in ceiling matched the destruction Nikolai would expect from a 6.5 magnitude earthquake. Strong, but less than what he’d expect from the scent left behind. Let alone the earthquake lights that alerted a team of hunters.
No. This seemed personal.
Nikolai looked into the pit that ripped apart the professor’s room.
Whoever had done this seemed capable of worse.
His phone rang.
“You lost or something?” Roman’s dulcet tones echoed over the cellphone.
“Or something.” Nikolai paid Roman half a mind, scanning over the room for any clues he might have missed.
“We’re picking classes to check tomorrow. You have any preference? There’s Economics, Finance and Marketing, Business Analytics, a computer science class…”
“Yeah, Professor Cartwright’s classes,” Nikolai stated, while looking down into the mangled remnants of the lecture hall below.
“I can give you one of his. David and Pistachio were thinking the same.”
Nikolai checked the stack of paper in his hands. “Business Analytics, then.”
Thursday at 8:15 p.m., sitting in the back row of the Business Analytics class, Nikolai observed Cartwright’s students. None looked like a magician. Some of them wore collared shirts and ties, typing notes on laptops.
Who goes to class in a tie?
He thought his gray sweats and shirt with the school’s bear mascot would have allowed him to blend in, but that wasn’t the case.
Most of the conversations were about the professor. He was still in critical condition. There wasn’t a single nice thing said about Mr. Cartwright—in fact, the words ‘deserved it’ popped up at least three times. Nikolai took special notice of those who held a grudge against the man.
As an older man stepped inside hesitantly, wearing a stiff suit with sharp creases, the chatter spiked.
“Settle down, settle down. Class is in session.” His voice was about as engaging as a sack of potatoes. “I’ll be covering for Professor Cartwright.” He then wrote his name on the whiteboard. Dr. Goldstein.
“When will Professor Cartwright return?”
“At this moment his recovery time hasn’t been specified—”
“Do we still have to wear these ties?” someone in the front interrupted.
Goldstein looked down at the papers in his hand. “Ah, concerning Dr. Cartwright’s syllabus, if you wish to continue to receive extra credit then yes, wear the tie. Now, roll call.” He adjusted his glasses as he peered down at the papers. “Rick Abbot.” One hand went up from a scrawny kid in the front of the room.
“Bailey Allen.” Another hand.
“Tom Bates.”
“Here.”
“Jon Bear.”
“It’s Jun,” called out the girl who was the only other person sitting in the back row. Nikolai must have overlooked her the first time around. That, or she came in late. She wore a purple hat and hid yarn and needles under her desk and was currently knitting without looking down.
“Ah, yes.” The professor scribbled something in the margins. “Evan Campbell?” A new hand was raised. “Louis Cooper.”
Nikolai wrote down all their names and circled the ones who looked promising. Jotting down hair color, approximate weight, watching them out of the corner of his eyes.
Goldstein fiddled with his projector. “As I understand, you left off on chapter eight in your books: ideas that shaped the business world.”
Nikolai tuned out the talk of stakeholders and allocations, instead looking for twitching fingers, tapping, quick angular movements. Many magicians didn’t have the control to hide the natural response of their body to the electric call of magic. He’d heard it described like a high, similar to a hit of heroin once they were properly addicted.
If there was anything to see, the magician hid it well. But if there was a magician in this school, chances were he was hiding in this very room.
4
The phone's persistent buzz startled Jun awake, and she reached out from her heavy Merino wool covers just a moment too late. She greeted the missed call with a raspy “hello,” and squinted against the bright screen light instead. Four missed calls. Three missed texts—all from her father.
Jun jolted up in her bed. Her dad must be panicked by now; she had to call him back.
Jun hadn’t called him on the night of the earthquake. Why worry him? He must have seen the email the school sent out with the new earthquake evacuation plans, with the headline “Business Professor Hospitalized.” It was just too much to hope that he wouldn't check his email this time. The phone didn’t get to ring twice.
“Jun! Are you okay? What's this about an earthquake?”
“It was just a small one.” Jun smiled as she held the phone to her ear to make her voice sound cheerful. “Most of us barely even noticed it.”
“ABC-Seven made it sound more serious than that.”
Jun couldn’t help wincing at the panic in his voice, how he was practically gasping for breath. Natural disasters raging across his only child's college campus were just about the last thing he needed to hear about. “It was probably just a slow news day. It was either this or the latest rescue dog adopted into the police force.”
“Wasn’t it your teacher who got hurt? Didn’t he end up in the hospital?”
Jun swallowed hard. The last time she saw him, Professor Cartwright's body was broken across the floor, his mouth agape, his eyes unfocused. Latest gossip was that he was still in intensive care, and it wasn’t clear whether or not he was going to make it.
Jun kept her voice light. “Cartwright was practically ancient. The wind could have just as easily knocked him over. The news is blowing this out of proportion. It’s nothing to worry about.”
The line at the other end of the call went quiet as her father digested this new information. Then he sighed. “I do worry, though. You’re working too hard.” He spoke slowly, as if there was a tired pause lingering after each word.
“Just keeping busy. I’m fine, Dad.”
The TV across the room turned on. The volume increased until the Bachelor rerun was cringingly loud. Suzie glared at the screen, remote in hand, refusing to make eye contact when Jun mouthed, “One more minute.”
Jun tugged off the glorious warmth of her blankets and tucked her feet into fuzzy pink slippers, then stepped outside to finish her call. The moment she was out, Suzie slammed the door shut behind her.
If housing wasn’t such a major impact on Jun’s financial aid eligibility, she'd just move back in with her dad.
“What was that?” her father asked when she could finally hear him again.
“Just some party going on downstairs.”
“You still on for The Sushi Blanket?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Jun said, not having to force a smile for once.
“Love you, Jun Berry.”
“Yeah, see you soon.”
If only pretending that everything was okay could make it so. The illusion of normality was shattered as Jun returned to her Business Analytics class. They moved across campus into an old auditorium, a disused scien
ce building with curved tiered tables in rows. Fifteen minutes before class started, Jun arrived and sat in the back. She sighed in relief and took out her yarn, letting one finger twist into a coil of soft Cheviot. Okay, no earthquake. So far so good.
Soon others began to stream in, and for a second Jun worried that she might have the wrong place. Gone were the ties and collared shirts. They arrived, flip-flops slapping against tiles and legs bare from the knees. Clean shaven faces were replaced with five o’clock shadows.
Then he came in.
He might have been wearing a simple grizzly hoodie and jeans, but even that loose material wasn’t enough to hide lines of muscle. Everything about the man was hard, from his close-cropped hair, to the angle of his jaw, to his stare as his eyes swept across her classmates.
He was not in their cohort. After three years sharing classes, she thought that someone else would notice that this guy appeared out of nowhere. In their last class, she assumed that one of the football players simply wandered into the wrong room, what with classes shifted about for the earthquake repairs last week.
He had been vigilantly focused, but at all the wrong times. While everyone else was jotting down definitions, he was watching the other students. Not once did he look at the professor. She was willing to bet his notes had nothing to do with stakeholder requirements.
Why was he here again?
He walked down the aisles with the confidence of someone who belonged, and Jun forced herself to look away as he came nearer, straight into her row and toward her. He stopped just four seats away.
Jun’s mouth went dry.
She fought to silence the feeling that there was something not right about the man; something feral.
Her hands started to shake. She grasped her yarn tight and started a new row. She let the familiar motion of wool rocking back and forth, the needles nothing more than an extension of her fingers, calm her. Just enough to take away the worst sting of anxiety. Holding it at bay, until it was nothing more than a prickle at the back of her neck. She could handle this.
She surrendered herself to the rhythm of the weaving, letting the sense of danger fade to a whisper.
From four seats away, it was obvious he wasn’t paying attention to the lecture. But it wasn’t until the class was over, and everyone was packing up their stuff, and their substitute made a quick retreat that things got weirder.
“Hey, did anyone hear if Cartwright died yet?” Evan said a little too loudly to his friends.
Jun winced. Well, she got it. Cartwright used Evan’s last essay as an example of what not to do, but was that reason enough to wish him dead?
He got a couple groans and a few nasty snickers for that. In front of her, Bailey muttered, “That’s such a dick thing to say.” But the unwelcome guest looked right at Evan and then flicked back to his notebook. It was angled so that she could just read Evan: asked about Cartwright’s death out of the corner of her eye before he snapped the notebook shut.
Jun slipped quietly out the back after that. She didn’t want any part of whatever that notebook meant. It was already dark, the air unusually foggy, when she crossed campus for Feelin’ Saucy.
A stack of boxes was waiting for her. Alexa was at the register, texting on her phone, and Jun walked around her to pick up the boxes.
“Hey,” Jun called out as she reached under the counter for the key.
Alexa nodded in reply, not taking her eyes off the screen. Her coworker cut her uniform low enough to catch a glimpse of the black lace of her bra and tied the bottom of her shirt into a knot, revealing the pink glint of a belly ring. She’d just started last week.
Jun maneuvered herself out to the Crust Mobile, juggling the cardboard boxes just enough to unlock it. She skimmed through the address list, noting her regulars. Jun rolled her eyes when she saw Shattuck Ave. As promised, Jun reorganized the stack to deliver that pizza last.
She’d quit if she had any luck finding a better job—or any luck with jobs in general. Her last job was cult affiliated, and the one before that the manager “forgot” to pay her for three weeks.
She kept to the speed limit through the fog, sticking to quiet backroads as she cut her path across the gloom. Her first address was new, but she recognized the location, smack dab in the middle of El Cerrito Plaza. It was a common off-campus housing location, and Jun mentally crossed her fingers that she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.
She parallel parked in front of a sleek luxury apartment complex, one of the newly built ones that cost four times as much as Jun’s dorm room. As she was buzzed through the gate, she passed cultivated palm trees and the rectangle of a backlit swimming pool.
Her elevator alerted her in a cheerful feminine tone when she arrived at the fourth floor. Her steps faltered—this place was fancy. The corridor was chrome trimmed with room numbers engraved in crystal plaques. Jun pulled her work cap low, shielding as much of her face as possible, just before pressing the doorbell.
As soon as the door opened, she bit her lip when she recognized that profile, the shape of his head, having spent the better part of two years sitting behind him—it was Bailey. She looked at the pizza box, hoping that breaking eye contact would stop him from recognizing her in turn.
“Hey, Jun! What are you doing here?”
Shit.
“Uh…” There really wasn’t any way to save this. “I got your order.”
He then looked down at the large square box between them. “Oh, of course. I had no idea that you worked for the Sauce.” Bailey opened the door a little wider as he leaned against the frame. “They are the best pizza in town,” he said with an amiable grin. It was obvious he had recently returned from either a swim or a shower, refreshed, while Jun was positive that the aroma of pizza had imbued into her clothes. She always felt grimy while in her uniform.
“Yeah, the pizza is great. Fresh ingredients and all that.” Jun kept her voice normal as she died a little on the inside. Though it wasn’t bad, Jun knew for a fact that the majority of guys that ordered from Feelin’ Saucy didn’t just have pizza in mind. Not that there was anything wrong with some harmless flirting, but her classmates were different. And Bailey always treated her like a professional, just like another one of the guys. He was actually one of her go-to guys for group assignments. How could she talk economics with him now?
Which was why, as he looked her over, it made Jun uncomfortably aware that her uniform was unnecessarily tight. She normally wore a small, but this ridiculous shirt was practically a child’s size.
“Hey, what are you doing after this?”
“Probably working on that variance analysis essay.” She pushed the box forward, hoping he’d take the hint.
“That’s a shame.” He stepped back inside for his wallet, affording Jun with a view of a sleek, modern apartment. A huge gray cat watched her lazily from a couch before abruptly licking its hind leg. From another room, a TV was playing a commercial about life insurance. Bailey returned with a few bills. “I’ll catch you some other time, then.” He gave her a wink.
Jun was halfway down the hall when she realized that her twenty-dollar tip had his number written on it. She shook her head.
He was kind of cute, and she sort of liked him, but if she wanted it to stay that way, a date was off the table. Her luck with dating was especially bad. Her last boyfriend hadn’t even lasted a full day before his clothes somehow caught fire when he was making toast.
Graduation was right around the corner. She could deal with heartbreak and emotional fall-out then. When was the last time she even went on a date? Had it really been over a year since Andrew? She didn’t want to think about it.
She dropped off pizza for three regulars before she got to another new address. Durant Avenue was another popular off-campus housing spot, but what were the chances that she bumped into two people she knew from school on the job? She parked in front of a cute little shopping complex. There was a family run bagel shop that Jun knew from experience served the good st
uff, as well as a laundromat. Perched on the second floor were apartment buildings.
With four boxes of pizza, she went through the doorway, realized that the laundromat had no stairwell leading upstairs, and crushed a corner of the cardboard when she hastily backtracked. Only two little old ladies even bothered to look up briefly from folding laundry. Okay, she spotted the entrance on the other side of the laundromat. A green door with chipped paint was marked with 1306.
Jun was lifting the corner of the first box, making sure that none of the cheese was stuck to the edges or the crust ripped, so when the door opened, the first thing she saw was his bare arms. Jagged lines of scar tissue, some white and faded, others just scabbing over, ran down his arms in angry patterns.
She recognized those arms. Had sat just a few seats away from them.
“There you are,” he said.
She caught his eye, pale and fierce—the stranger intruding on her class.
When he grabbed the boxes, Jun saw that his knuckles were bruised. “Took you long enough,” he muttered under his breath. “So you got the meat lovers, pepperoni, mushroom, and the one with artichokes and olives and shit.”
“Yeah, all here,” Jun said.
He had two twenty-dollar bills and a ten ready.
She swallowed past the growing anxiety. “That’ll be fifty-eight dollars and seventy cents please.”
“Assholes didn’t give me enough.” He balanced the boxes in one arm, reaching for his wallet in his back pocket. With more dexterity than she’d expected, he took out another twenty-dollar bill. “Here.” The money dropped into her hand.
“Nikolai!” yelled a voice from up the stairs. The stranger looked up at the sound of his name. “Stop flirting with the pizza guy, we’re starving up here!”
Magician Rising (Divination in Darkness Book 1) Page 3