The Fairer Hex

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “I don’t care about my reputation, Firian!”

  “You will.”

  He melted away before I could convince him otherwise. Now I was more dejected than ever. I’d been run out of the restaurant and now I wondered if I would ever spend the night questing with Firian again. Plus, I couldn’t even call my dad without finding the “house phone”, and I couldn’t drive home to see him on weekends. It felt like everything I really cared about, everything that defined me, had been taken away.

  Alec walked over to the small dresser, yanked open a drawer, and pulled out a shirt. I tried very hard to stare at the pages of my book instead of him. A slow fierce blush burned its way up from the lacy jabot…

  This was not a good part to be reading.

  “What were you so excited about?” Alec asked.

  “I’m not excited! Oh…you mean…in the game. We got two uncommon drops at once, which is…good.”

  “You and Firian are close, huh?”

  “We’re—we actually didn’t know each other until recently, except he’s been watching over me, I guess. Through the game, and as the backyard fox.”

  “So he’s been stalking you.”

  “No.” I brushed breadcrumbs off the bed onto the floor. “Do you have a familiar?”

  “Yes. Everyone here has a familiar. If I had been born without one, I would be considered an incubus, not a warlock. But since I do have a familiar, I take after my dad.”

  “So I guess I take after my mom… Did you know your mom?”

  “No. She dropped me off and she was out. Really screwed my dad over. He wasn’t prepared to have an incubus son. That’s why…you don’t have to worry around me.” He came over to my bed and sat down next to me, sort of putting one arm behind me. “Yes…my body does want you. That’s a fact, the same way a hungry person wants a meal. But…like I said…I’m glad to be tested like this. I’m not going to be ruled by my nature.” His eyes roamed from my lips down to my legs. My eyes moved similarly, except they roamed even more places.

  I think a slow fierce blush might have burned its way up from the breadcrumbs on my shirt.

  ‘My body wants you’? Like I was supposed to have no reaction to that?

  “Well…I’m glad I was here to test you,” I said, a little sarcastically.

  “Yes,” he said. “Me too. We’ll both be stronger for it, I’m sure. If my presence bothers you, remember, it’s only my inherent magic trying to lure you in. It’s not real.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  “Good. We should probably get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He went back to his own bed and threw back the covers.

  It’s very hard to sleep when you can hear someone else breathing and you know it’s a very sexy man whose body wants you. Just so you know.

  Chapter Eleven

  Charlotte

  In the morning, I had an orientation class. I knew this because Firian told me he had read over the packet of information I was given when I signed up, and he appeared in the morning and told me I’d better get ready for orientation class. Alec was already gone. First, I was starving for anything that wasn’t bread. I went downstairs and found a spread of fruit, cheese and pastries in the common room. A few boys were in the room, and they stared at my every move.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, as I grabbed almost all the fruit.

  They all glared back like they didn’t know what to make of me.

  “You don’t belong here,” one of them said in a low voice. He was a tall guy with spiky dark hair and a glower, and I thought again about how everyone in this dorm was at risk of turning to dark magic.

  “Yes. I know. I have cooties and get periods. It’s been made abundantly clear to me that I am in the wrong place.”

  “Your familiar definitely doesn’t belong here.”

  Firian looked a little twitchy, like he would love to punch the guy, but instead he just crossed his arms and looked impatient for me to fill my plate.

  Montague came down the stairs. “Good morning,” he said, whisking the last clump of grapes out from under my hand. He glanced at the rest of them and then raised an eyebrow at me. “How was your night with Alec?” he asked. “Poor Alec. An incubus who hates sex is a sad life.”

  “Good morning to you too,” I said. “This is an interesting choice of morning conversation.”

  “Do you know where to go?” Montague asked. “I imagine you have some kind of orientation.”

  “I have the map,” Firian said. “No problem.”

  “Well, I am trying to make some amends for last night, if that’s not obvious,” Montague said.

  “Then why did you take my grapes?”

  He looked at my plate, which was already heaped with grapes, and put them down. “I heard you’re a Caruthers,” he said. “I heard you were recommended to this school by Samuel Caruthers himself.”

  There was a murmuring around the room.

  “Samuel Caruthers?” said the glowering guy. “Are you freaking serious? But why did he want her to go to a warlock school?”

  “I don’t know, but I bet he had a reason.”

  “Why does Samuel Caruthers matter?” I asked. “I’m not even sure how we’re related.”

  “Wait right there,” said the nervous guy I’d seen on a laptop yesterday. He dashed up the stairs and came back with a magazine called CAST. On the cover was a guy who looked like a celebrity, around forty or so, ruggedly handsome, wearing black on black. Samuel Caruthers: Reinventing Necromancy, it said, right over How to Cast Date Night Glamours and Drinking + Magic: Hottest Speakeasies.

  “I heard that he’s your mom’s cousin,” Montague said.

  “Huh,” Glowering Guy said.

  “Respect,” Nervous Guy said.

  “Can I borrow this magazine?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you ever met Samuel Caruthers?”

  “I haven’t even met my own mom,” I said. “Not really. But…hopefully he’ll turn up and explain all of this to me someday.” I opened the magazine to see photos of Samuel Caruthers holding a skull like he was in Hamlet while wearing some sort of pirate-y looking outfit. A quote popped out: “I’m here to shake up the status quo.”

  No kidding. He sent me to this school.

  There was some relief in putting a face and—style, I guess—to the person responsible for all this. I just had to wait for Samuel Caruthers to show up and explain why I was here.

  Harris came down the stairs. “Hey, why are there no grapes left?” he said.

  “Let’s go,” Montague said, steering me to the door.

  “You still have forty minutes until the orientation,” Firian said.

  “That’s okay. We can take a little tour,” Montague said. “The school extends along the whole mountain ridge here. It was all built by wealthy warlocks in the 1890s. Blah blah.”

  “Where do y’all hang out?” I asked, then paused. “So I know what area to avoid since everyone hates me.”

  “Don’t say that. You have to give them a chance,” Montague said. “As word gets around that you’re related to a celebrity warlock who sort of sponsored you, and it occurs to everyone that you are a genuine woman…” He gave me a cocky grin. “Well, I hope you’ll remember that I was good to you from day one. I would never shun a woman’s company.”

  “Blech,” Firian said behind us.

  “You know, there is a reason familiars disappear as you hit puberty,” Montague said, giving him a glare.

  I wasn’t ready for Firian to ‘disappear’. To me, it was disturbing to think that all of them had familiars who had already vanished into Etherium or whatever. But I didn’t want either of them getting in each other’s business. “So what stick is up Harris’ ass?” I asked.

  “A stick full of family history,” Montague said.

  “That sounds painful.”

  “Very. He’s practically a prince in the warlock world, and his parents have high expectations of him. He’s the only boy after six gir
ls.”

  “And I guess they wanted a boy.”

  “It’s not that boys are more valued, it’s just…well, with different types of magic being practiced by both sexes, every parent hopes for one of each, at least.”

  “Is that why Harris is at risk of turning to the darkness?”

  “Who said he was?”

  “Alec said everyone in the dorm was.”

  “Not true,” Montague said, a little defensively. “I will never practice dark magic. And I’m sure Harris won’t either. I was placed there because I became a vampire, just as a rule. But I’m not any risk to you or anyone else. We have so many ways of suppressing the vampire instinct.”

  “That doesn’t explain why Harris is in the dark magic dorm.”

  “Well, like I said, it’s not a big deal. It’s just that Harris is powerful.”

  “My dad said my mom became a dark witch…”

  Montague looked at me. “You won’t,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Whether you are an ethereal witch or a sinistral one, that is for you to decide, and not anyone else. Understand?” I must have hit a nerve. I could feel Firian tensing behind me, but he stayed out of it.

  Montague’s hand was very strong. I could just tell, even though he wasn’t gripping me hard. I just sensed this potent force inside him. His skin was cold, too, and I flinched ever so slightly before something in his eyes caught me and held me.

  He was a vampire.

  Like, I just felt that fact sink down inside me. And even though I knew that he was a college freshman and the other guys’ friend, in the moment, I hardly believed it, because something in his eyes seemed ancient and predatory. His youthful face was both handsome and beautiful, from the black hair that brushed the back of his neck and framed his high cheekbones to his mesmerizing lips. But he seemed like something else, wearing a young man’s skin.

  “I’m not a sinistral and I’ll never ever be one.” He backed off, mastering himself with a quick breath. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Good.” He seemed light-hearted again, but I wouldn’t forget the way he looked just then. It was only a second, but it was a second of this pure vicious and dark hunger that set every one of my nerves on edge. And I knew Firian wouldn’t forget that either. I had no hope of ever being left alone with Montague. Well, maybe I didn’t want to be left alone with him, anyway. This was all getting a little too intense.

  “Did you hear something?” Montague asked, looking toward the woods.

  “No…”

  “I was asking the fox.”

  “Maybe,” Firian said. “But I have to get a little more familiar with the landscape before I judge.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Anyway.” Montague waved a hand as I glanced at both of them curiously. “This building is the ‘hang out’,” Montague said, pointing across a green space to a building with two towers on the ends. It had a grand entrance with statues of two Victorian-esque nymph girls clad only in their swirls of long hair. Inside was a wide promenade-type central hall and on either side of this was a roller skating rink, a bowling alley, a dance floor, and a movie theater. The rooms were silent and empty now.

  “Whoa. This is where you guys hang out? Down at the roller rink?” I giggled.

  He opened the door of the roller rink and looked back at me with a raised eyebrow. “So you don’t want to skate with me?”

  “Now?”

  “Ever. Because you are too cool for such things, clearly.” His eyes were a warm brown and he smelled really good. I don’t know if it was cologne or like, vampire musk, but it was this sexy, vaguely exotic but distinctly male aroma that was somehow very subtle and very hard to ignore at the same time. It made me think about how his skin would feel under his shirt. How it would feel if he grabbed my hand while I tried to learn to roller skate. “It might be quaint, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun.”

  “I’ve never been, actually. I didn’t say it was uncool… I mean, roller derby is cool. It just seems funny for an all-guys school.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s…strange, isn’t it? I remember…” His eyes seemed far away for a moment, and then he stopped and looked troubled. “I remember.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just—yes. We’ll go skating sometime. You know how, right?”

  I did not. I kept that to myself. I could tell something was wrong, but I couldn’t imagine what could have struck him. If he had been a normal person back home, I would have pressed him, but I realized there was this tiny part of me that was terrified of Montague. It was a pure instinct. Don’t push a vampire.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting to your orientation class?” Firian drolled behind me. I’d almost forgotten he was there, which was strange, because I was pretty aware of him since he’d appeared. “I mean, as delightful as it would be to spend our afternoon in an abandoned roller rink with a vampire…”

  “You’re right,” I said, the spell broken.

  Chapter Twelve

  Montague

  There are things they always warn you about becoming a vampire. The need for blood, obviously, being the main reason you want to avoid becoming a vampire. The non-aging thing is complicated too. And the sun. We had spells to get around it, but I had to get them reinforced every year for the rest of my life, and I’d still been getting sunburned. I wasn’t supposed to sunburn like this. My Spanish ancestors had settled magical Florida; they must be laughing from beyond the grave.

  The most pressing thing on my mind when I woke up covered in blood in a hotel room in Cancun was that I was going to be socially shamed, and Harris would have to pretend he didn’t know me. We were still navigating that one. He did avoid me when I came back, but he looked miserable. The guy wasn’t exactly the type for making a bunch of new friends. Plus, Alec would still hang out with me, so Harris was the odd man out. Over the summer it was easy enough to skirt the issue, though, because he went back to his parents’ summer mansion, and I went to…rehab.

  If you get turned into a vampire, you gain memories from the entire vampire line. This is, apparently, how vampires have survived and formed networks and royal families of their own. As soon as I got turned, the guy who had just ruined my life tried to tell me that I was supposed to serve his ‘lord’.

  Immediately, the guy’s face flashed into my mind and this sinking feeling flooded through me, which is when I whipped out more magic than I thought I was capable of and escaped.

  The only thing that protected me was my status as a warlock. I rushed to the nearest magical council office in Mexico and they helped me get home to the States, where I spent six weeks at the Haven.

  The Haven. Now there’s a place to drum fear into a warlock’s heart. It was supposedly a place where witches and warlocks could go for safety and rehabilitation from the darker forces of the world. A place where an unlucky guy like myself who’s been turned into a vampire can get the spells he needs to stay with his family and friends and go to a normal college.

  I got all that. I also got an epic amount of lecturing and attempts to program me to be a good little warlock, and in the end I got slapped with a bargain: if I wanted to leave the Haven, I had to hand over my car.

  I wasn’t even allowed to sell it to someone who would love it. I had to give it to them.

  My car was my pride and joy. My parents hated it. Every old witch and warlock who saw it hated it, and the more they hated it, the more satisfaction I took in trying to make it the most obnoxiously tricked out street racer I could. It was a 1996 Mitsubishi Eclipse with a performance chip for the engine and a free-flowing exhaust that made it sound like a hive of angry bees and amped up the performance, a spoiler and an electric blue paint job that faded to a darker color in the back.

  I didn’t really care about becoming a vampire half as much as I cared about losing the car. I’d been telling everyone that I just had to sell it to help pay for school. I couldn’t stand talking about it.

>   But I’d also been having some weird thoughts. They warned me this might happen. I was supposed to cast a ‘memory banish’ spell every time one hit me.

  When I looked at Charlotte I suddenly saw Lisbeth.

  I knew the girl’s name, because she was his girl. My vampire ‘lord’. The oldest vampire in my line. I saw her skating on iron skates on a frozen body of water, smothering a laugh in her glove, her fair face surrounded by a starched ruff.

  Shit. This was really scaring me sometimes, and I didn’t want to admit that to anyone.

  I was used to fitting in, not being different. Before this, I was as normal as a warlock can get. Just a promising, middle-class warlock, making my parents proud, except for the cell phone and the car and the fact that I snuck off to party in Cancun for spring break. I had some idea I would hook up with some human girls and get drunk, that now seemed very quaint and immature.

  Young Monty, such dreams you had.

  Well, a guy’s gotta let go sometimes when he studies hard the rest of the year.

  I cut the tour short so I could go off by myself and banish ‘Lisbeth’ from my mind before my own class started. I didn’t even show Charlotte the gardens or the swimming pool, all of them still with gilded age beauty that I thought a girl would appreciate. Sometimes it seemed pretty wasted on this lot. Warlocks were pretty attached to views that sometimes seemed not just Victorian, but more like Medieval.

  I saw Charlotte to her class, but as soon as I stepped out of the building smelled something kind of musky in the air.

  I didn’t think it was the fox. He was a little too human to stink like that. This was a raw, beastly scent.

  I knew I saw something earlier…

  Movement flickered in the woods through the old iron fencing. It looked like a large dark animal in the brush. I might not have caught it if it wasn’t for my enhanced senses.

  “Hey!” I ran toward the fence, grabbed the bar and vaulted over it.

  Yeah, this was definitely the source of the musk. But by the time I got there, I didn’t see any sign of anything. I kept sniffing, even though I felt stupid, like the drug sniffing dog I saw at the airport during my fateful trip.