by A. L. Knorr
Dr. Price’s expression was closed, unreadable. She snatched a paper towel from a holder mounted under the cupboard and held it out. “Pat yourself dry. Gently. I’ll fix you up and you’re going to tell me everything. No omissions, no lies, and be explicit.”
“Of course.” April’s voice quavered. She dried her burnt fingers, wincing.
Christy rolled a table with a long-necked lamp on the top of it closer to April and had her lay her hand under the light, palm up. The doctor inspected the burn, shaking her head and sending us disapproving glances. She muttered more unintelligible things under her breath as she rooted through a drawer and retrieved what looked like a soft makeup brush. Using that, she applied the salve with a delicate touch. Using medical shears, she cut off a piece of gauze and fixed it around the wound with the medical tape.
Shoving her glasses on the top of her head, she stepped back. “Will you be able to sleep or do you need something for the pain?”
“Thank you.” April cradled her wounded hand against her belly. “I think I’ll be ok, but maybe you could give me something just in case? I wouldn’t want to wake you up again.”
Christy nodded and rooted through another cupboard for some medication. Half of me wanted to ask if I could have a sedative too. If any of us slept after this I’d be surprised. A fire mage losing her fire was like a non-supernatural waking up with a lily growing from an ear.
When April had the medication tucked into the pocket of her sleep shorts, Christy led us from the treatment room and had us sit on the bench just inside her office door. She rolled the chair over from her desk, took a seat and looked at April expectantly.
“You’re hoping for some big long story,” April said, “but there’s not much to say. I had gotten up to go to the bathroom. As I crawled back in bed, I felt my fire just...” she paused and tried to think of the right word. At a loss, she blew on the end of her fingers and made a little exploding motion to illustrate a flame going out.
Christy’s eyes narrowed. “What time was this?”
“Around two, I think.”
The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall. “An hour ago?”
April nodded.
“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
“I thought I’d imagined it. I still had heat here.” She lay her non-wounded hand over her ribcage. “And some pain. But over the course of the next thirty minutes or so, the heat and the pain just drained away to nothing. I was lying there with my eyes closed, focused on how I was feeling and noticing how cool I’d become. Then I actually got cold, which is the weirdest feeling, by the way. I began to shiver. When I got up to get myself an extra blanket, it hit me how bizarre that was. Then I started panicking, and tried to ignite the end of my finger. I couldn’t do it. That’s when I woke Saxony.”
The doctor’s face was pinched, her complexion pale. “Then?”
“I told Saxony what happened and she didn’t believe me at first. I insisted my fire was gone. We thought she’d try giving me some of hers, to see if we could reignite it.”
“That’s when I burnt her,” I said.
Christy’s brows lifted. “I’m surprised you didn’t burn her worse, in that case. Endowment is dynamic.”
“I went slow,” I explained, “thinking it would be better than hitting her with a full blast. I wanted to let her feel it come into her body, see if it would take root. When I burnt her instead, we both were shocked and upset. That’s when we came and woke you up.”
The doctor raked a hand through her short messy bob, looking troubled. “Do you mind if I take some blood, April? I need something to work with here.”
“I hate needles.” April cringed.
“I’m very good with them,” Dr. Price said, her voice soft and soothing. I had an idea she was proud of her bedside manner, and my heart slowed a little. She was starting to believe us.
“Alright.” April nodded, biting her lip.
The doctor got up to gather what she needed, then came to sit on April’s other side. I took April’s non-injured hand as she exposed the crease of her elbow to Christy. Her fingers almost crushed mine as she turned her face away and squeezed her eyes shut.
Dr. Price swabbed the crease, inserted the needle, and drew a vial of blood. “All done,” she said, putting a little plaster over the puncture wound.
“Really?” April opened her eyes to gape at her arm. “I didn’t even feel it.”
“What did I tell you?” Christy gave a smug smile, but it faded fast. “Now, go back to sleep, girls. We can talk again tomorrow. I need time to process the blood.”
“Should we wake the headmaster?” I asked.
“He’s not here. He left for the weekend earlier than usual,” Christy replied, “and I wouldn’t want to wake him without something concrete to tell him. I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”
The doctor escorted us from the library and we said goodnight. Walking back to our rooms with my arm around April’s shoulder, I murmured, “I should have asked for half a sedative.”
“She gave me two.” April rooted out the little baggie, opened it and dumped one into my hand.
“Are you sure?”
April nodded, squeezing my hand with her good one. “I’ll take mine after all. Either that or I’ll be up all night worried that my fire might come back.”
And with that she disappeared into her room, leaving me in a thicket of mixed emotion.
Thirteen
When a Rumor is not a Rumor
My feet pounded along a narrow I-beam suspended hundreds of feet above busy city streets. The sound of car horns and traffic drifted up as I ran. Glancing over my shoulder I caught the shape of a shadow-man leaping from beam to beam on my heels, hands reaching out like claws. His mouth was a hole in his head, yawning wide, lined with a nest of shadow-fangs.
Fire exploded in my limbs, driving my legs and arms. Fire-power detonated smoothly and sequentially through my body, fueling incredible velocity. An enormous gap between beams loomed ahead. As I readied myself to jump, something inside me popped like a balloon. I made the leap but there was no fire to power it, no detonations to send me hurtling through the air to the next beam. A shadow-claw reached for me and missed as I screamed and began to plummet to the concrete below.
My eyes flew open as I gulped down air. My heart thundered and my pillow case was soaked with sweat. Looking around like a frightened bird, it took me some time to register that I was safe in my own room. My fire was banked but hadn’t vanished. It was just a dream.
Letting my head collapse back on my pillow, I put a hand over my heart and sucked in deep breaths. When my pulse slowed I checked my bedside clock: 8:15 AM. It was Sunday morning, I had nowhere to be and nothing urgent to do except check on April.
Rolling out of bed, I made a face. My sheets were also damp with sweat. Tearing the cover off my duvet, I stripped the bed and pillow-cases and dumped the lot by the door. After taking greedy gulps of water, I went into my bathroom and turned the shower on full blast, as cold as it would go.
By the time I emerged I was wide awake and could barely remember the details of my nightmare, except the part about my fire making that horrible popping sound as it went out. I wouldn’t forget that so soon, and shuddered at the memory. I wondered if April was still happy that her fire had expired or if she’d recovered her senses in the night.
Picking my hair up into a topknot, I dressed and slipped on a pair of sneakers. Tumbling my damp bed-linens into a laundry basket, I went down the hall to the girls’ laundry facilities where I put it on to wash.
“Morning,” I said to Lora as I passed. Stopping outside of April’s room, I listened at the crack. Hearing nothing, I rapped with my knuckles very lightly.
A moment later, April opened the door, looking like a ray of sunshine. Her hair was pinned up in spiral buns like bear-ears, little pearl earrings in her earlobes. She’d lined her eyes with green liner and glossed her lips with something pink and shimmery. “Morning!”
I followed her in, bemused. “Eye-liner and gloss at the same time? What have you done with April?”
She looked at me, momentarily alarmed. “Is it too much?”
I laughed. “Not at all, you look great. How did you sleep?”
“Like a baby.” She grinned, all traces of alarm gone. She buried her head in her wardrobe and rooted around in the bottom. Retrieving a pair of shoes, she took them over to her chair to put them on.
“How’s your hand?” I inspected her expression and body language for signs of trauma, depression or shock.
She wiggled her bandaged digits. “It throbs a little but otherwise it’s fine. I always wondered what a burn felt like for a natural. Now I know.”
“Right,” I murmured, half-relieved half-dismayed at how smoothly she’d assumed she was now a natural. “I was thinking we could go see if Dr. Price is awake. Maybe she’s processed your blood sample by now.”
April straightened and put her arms overhead, stretching from side to side. She rolled her neck then shrugged. “Sure.”
It was like I’d asked her to go for a jog instead of to get potentially life-changing test results.
April locked her room and we headed down the corridor, repeating the journey we’d made in the wee hours of the morning. A few students were out and about, looking sleepy and half-awake. Lexi’s door was still closed.
The library was open but there was no one there, not even the part-time librarian. Sunday mornings were slow at the academy. There were sounds coming from Dr. Price’s office, though. I knocked on the door and when it swung inward, we poked our heads in.
Dr. Price stood at her desk, shoulders stooped, hair wild and with glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked up with blood-shot eyes. Her voice came out rough and grainy. “Morning, ladies.”
We moved to stand in front of her desk. Textbooks, articles, folders and documents lay askew on the surface.
“Have you been up all night?” I asked as April sank into a chair and looked around as though seeing the office for the first time. I didn’t think she’d noticed the state of exhaustion the doctor appeared to be in.
She took off her glasses to rub her eyes. “I caught a couple of hours shut-eye.”
“We were wondering if you had results from the blood sample you took last night,” I ventured with hesitation. It wasn’t my blood, but April was now playing with a paper weight with three flying swans perched on the top of it. When she realized we were watching her, she put the weight down.
“Yes.” April nodded. “What she said.”
Dr. Price slid her glasses into place, looking uncomfortable. “Not yet. It needs more time.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Really?” I didn’t know how long a blood sample took to process, or even what Dr. Price was doing with it, but something about the way she said it made me wonder if she was fibbing. Protecting April from bad news, maybe?
April turned to leave. “That’s okay. Come on Saxony. I’m dying for a coffee.”
“Wait.” I didn’t take my eyes off Dr. Price. “Are you sure?”
Christy paused, wilting under scrutiny. “I’d like to discuss April’s results with Basil. I’ve been texting with him this morning. He’ll be back at the academy around lunchtime.”
“That’s fine.” April tugged on my hand with cool fingers.
“But they’re April’s results,” I said, resisting April’s pulls. “Shouldn’t she be the first to learn what they are?”
Dr. Price bristled. “This is Headmaster Chaplin’s school. I think he has the right to know what’s going on under his roof.”
For a moment, the doctor’s gaze and mine clashed. I refused to look away.
April looked back and forth between us, picking up on the rising tension. “Why don’t you tell us at the same time as Headmaster Chaplin?”
I almost protested again, but Christy gave an audible sigh of relief.
“That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.” The doctor went back to rifling through the things on her desk.
I allowed April to coax me toward the door. Once we were out of the library, I fell in step beside her. “You could have pushed the issue. It’s your blood, your test results.”
She dazzled me with a grin and I half wondered if the event last night had cracked her. “It’s waffles this morning in the cafeteria. I can wait. I don’t mind.”
“Waffles are good,” I replied, for lack of any other appropriate response.
The cafeteria smelled of melted butter and toasting batter. My mouth watered and stomach growled as we joined the back of the short queue. The seats were less than half full and the room was quieter than usual as students tucked into breakfast. We shuffled forward as Lexi and Lora exited the line with their trays, walking close together and chatting quietly. Lexi looked over her shoulder, peeking through her hair at the line up. The L’s found a seat under the window and began to eat.
April and I slid our trays along the metal railings and piled our plates high with waffles, fresh berries, chopped peaches, whipped cream and maple syrup. Making our way to a table where broken sunlight spilled from the windows and brightened the furniture, we slid into chairs. As April sliced her waffle up with a fork and knife, I glanced around the room, taking a sip from my cappuccino.
Zack, Dar and Alex were seated together at one of the longer communal tables. I caught Dar’s eye and gave him a smile. His lips kind of flattened out in what might have been an attempt at a smile back, then he looked away. Leaning forward, he exchanged muted words with Zack and Alex, who glanced at us before casting their eyes down.
“It’s like a funeral in here,” I murmured.
April looked around briefly, cheek bulging with food. “People are always half-dead on Sunday mornings.” She returned to her plate and tackled her waffle with enthusiasm.
“If you say so.” I took my first bite of breakfast.
As we ate, more students trickled into the cafeteria. There were no smiles or laughter, none of the usual banter. April did have a point, students were tired on Sundays. I still thought the place had an air of melancholy.
Gage came bouncing into the room on the balls of his feet. He spotted us as I lifted a hand in greeting, and came over. Sliding into the seat next to us, he planted a kiss on my cheekbone. A little firework went off in the right side of my face.
“Morning,” he said.
“Hiya,” April replied around a bite, then took a big gulp of grapefruit juice.
Gage looked from April to me and back again, curiously. I knew from his expression that someone had told him something. He leaned into the table, gaze intent on April.
“There’s a rumor going around about you that can’t be true.”
April dimpled, knife scraping across her plate, cheek bulging out. “Really?”
“Must be thanks to Lexi,” I murmured, peeking over April’s head to where the L’s were just getting up to return their trays. She was the only one who knew anything. I turned to Gage. “What did you hear?”
“Lexi is telling people that the two of you were up in the middle of the night last night, messing around with alchemy or something equally nefarious. She says April’s fire went out. Now you have to confess your sins to the headmaster and ask for help.”
April guffawed and wiped her juice mustache away with her wrist, taking what was remaining of her lip gloss with it.
Numerous heads came up as her laugh broke through the heavy atmosphere like a sunbeam through a bank of thunderheads. Faces relaxed, a few even smiled.
The tension in Gage’s expression melted away too and he leaned back in his seat, slouching and crossing his arms. “So, it is just a rumor. It should be against the rules to spread lies like that about other students.”
I shot him a wide-eyed look and spoke slowly and with emphasis. “Yes. It should.”
He and April looked at me, puzzled.
I added: “Oth
erwise someone might get blamed for starting an altercation when they are actually the innocent party.”
Gage looked at his lap and two pink circles appeared in his cheeks. “Touché.”
“She’s not wrong.” April didn’t bother to temper her volume. “Lexi, I mean.”
I pressed my lips together and mimed slicing a finger across my throat. I thought it would be better to wait until Dr. Price reported the results of April’s test. Clearly, students were already on edge.
“What?” April shrugged. “My fire did go out. I see no reason to keep it a secret.”
Gage gaped from her to me and back again. His jaw snapped shut. “But your fire has gone out before, so it’s no big deal. Right? Saxony helped you with that problem last semester.”
April took another slurp of her juice, wide-eyed gaze on Gage over the rim. When she set her cup down I thought she’d answer him, but she just sighed, gave a little burp, pardoned herself, then speared another piece of waffle.
I leaned toward Gage. “This time is different. Notice the bandage? I tried to help but ended up burning her.”
Gage looked scandalized as his eyes went round. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying.” April swallowed, the bite visibly sliding down her skinny neck. She took another bite, not bothering to add her own details.
“Dr. Price took her blood last night.” I kept my tone hushed. “Headmaster Chaplin will be here by noon. The doctor will give them the results at the same time.”
Gage pressed his fingers to his mouth as he gazed at April. He’d lost all of his previous flush. In fact, he’d taken on the pale shade of paraffin.
“I think she’s still in shock.” I took a bite of breakfast, which was starting to get cold.
April looked at me with reproach. “I’m not. I’m just hoping it can’t be fixed.”
Stunned silence fell over Gage as April ate her last bite of waffle. She sat back with a sigh of pleasure, then glanced at the slim watch on her wrist. “I have a few hours. I’m going to take a long hot shower, then call my parents.”