The Reluctant Witch: Year One (Santa Cruz Witch Academy Book 1)
Page 9
“Put that away!” I scolded him, but it was too late.
Professor Yamasato cleared his throat. “May I ask what is so amusing in the back row?”
Before Damian could hide his notebook, it floated out of his hand and flew straight to the professor.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Witchcraft wasn’t something you could do with just the wave of a wand. It took careful preparation and usually a lot of components, like magical herbs or crystals.
But then I realized the professor’s hand was in his pocket, fiddling with something. He must have made a charm ahead of time, planning to mess with students. Damian was just the one he’d chosen for his target. Pre-made charms took extra work to store the magic and trigger it later, but they were usually good for more than one use. It was the kind of advanced thing that would take years of study before we could do it on our own.
Professor Yamasato glanced at the drawing and closed the notebook. “A juvenile piece,” he said. “But your stereotypical picture of a mermaid brings me to the last point of my presentation: some magikin are better avoided.”
He touched his remote again, and the presentation flicked to a new screen, labeled, “Hostile and Xenophobic Magikin.” Under a list of races, there was a map of the area with several spots marked.
“Some of these will not harm you, but they prefer to be left alone,” the professor explained. “For example, some dwarves like to live in separate towns, sometimes underground. You can visit if you’re polite and stick to the public areas.” He pointed to an old quarry in the mountains. “Our local dwarves are a historical community, from the days when they mined limestone. It’s only open to visitors on weekends.
“Other magikin can be dangerous if you get too close.” Yamasato raised his eyebrows. “We don’t have any mermaids here, but there are dryads in the forest and they are very defensive of their groves.” He indicated red marks in the state parks: Big Basin and Henry Cowell. “If you go out hiking, stick to the trails and obey all the signs. Restricted areas are always labeled. There is also an ogre commune south of us, on Mount Madonna. Eating humans is illegal in most places, but if you trespass on their land, you are fair game.”
I shivered. The thought of just seeing a huge, disgusting ogre was enough to keep me away from their territory.
Damian patted my arm. “Sorry, no mermaids,” he whispered, misunderstanding my reaction.
“I’ll get over it,” I muttered back.
The lecture was finished. I watched the professor closely as we all filed out. Did the school’s expert on magikin really have no idea about the mermaids in the bay, or was he just saying that? But he was too hard to read.
I wasn’t sure what the next step was after I found out what the mermaids were doing here. Did I warn the locals, maybe the school administration? Did I report directly to the Queen? I wouldn’t be able to do anything about them myself, but I wasn’t sure who should be in charge of handling the situation. If mermaids weren’t supposed to be here, they wouldn’t be allowed to stay.
“Imagine you are a tree,” Ms. Murphy’s voice intoned calmly. “Your roots extend down, down, down into the earth below you. Your branches reach up above your head, stretching toward the sky.”
I took a peek to see if everyone else was taking this seriously. We had blankets underneath us for comfort, but I could still feel the hard-packed dirt under my butt. This would be uncomfortable in any circumstances. I felt extra ridiculous because of the teacher’s New Age meditation style.
All the Earth students were sitting in a circle around the teacher while she guided us through the grounding exercise. After the first few lectures where she explained the theory of Earth magic, Ms. Murphy dragged us outside. “There’s nothing like being outside in Nature to connect you with our element!” she’d said. Now we were in a redwood grove, and everyone was following along.
My mind kept wandering. Loki promised me that I had some Earth powers to help with my classes, but I just couldn’t connect with the element. Solid, boring Earth was so different from Water.
Sunlight filtered through the tiny redwood needles. If I’d known I was going to be outside, I would have put on sunscreen. I didn’t apply any before swim practice since we met so early in the morning. Even though it was the first day of October, the afternoon sunshine was strong enough that I worried about my skin. As a redhead, I could sunburn just from sitting close to a window, and I got freckles like crazy.
Ms. Murphy was pale enough that she should understand my problem. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. Her skin was flawless, with not a freckle or wrinkle in sight. Her daughter was in the class, too, a girl named Erin who looked just like her, so Ms. Murphy had to be at least as old my moms. For a middle-aged human, she was remarkably youthful.
Erin sat next to me in our first class and kept trying to talk to me. “I heard your mom is an herbalism teacher,” she had said. “We should be friends!”
I grunted something, trying to be polite. From then on, she’d stuck to me in every class we shared. She was next to me in the meditation circle now.
When I glanced her way, she sensed my gaze. She cracked one eye open and smiled at me, then closed her eyes and resumed the deep breathing rhythm.
“Follow your roots down deeper,” Ms. Murphy continued. “Picture them reaching the center of the world. Feel the heat of the core. Now draw that heat up into your trunk…”
I closed my eyes again to hide my irritation. Her guided meditation made no sense. Tree roots couldn’t reach that far underground, and if they did reach the molten core of the planet, they’d just burn. She also taught herbalism, so shouldn’t she be an expert on plants? My biology teacher would poke holes in everything she said.
When we had properly grounded or whatever, Ms. Murphy had us experiment with our Earth powers. There wasn’t much we could do without a proper spell, but she had us try to bend spoons. Since metal fell under the auspices of Earth, she claimed we could connect with the particles inside the spoons and reshape them with our minds.
Yeah, it sounded even more ridiculous than her roots-into-the-core meditation. My spoon never budged. In fact, only one student succeeded in the cheap parlor trick—Erin.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get there,” she reassured me. “It just takes practice. You have to let yourself feel it.”
“And then I can have a lucrative career as a television psychic,” I muttered.
Erin laughed. “We’ve barely been witches for a week. This is just the start.”
But when I got away from the stupid class, I sat on a log over a creek on the edge of campus. Checking around to make sure that no one was nearby, I reached my hand into the water and closed my eyes.
Connect with the water. Follow it down into its source, deep in the earth. Feel it surrounding me and filling me up.
The cool water chilled my skin at first, but then I began to feel a faint tingling. I struggled to hold on to it.
Now what was I supposed to do? If Earth magic could bend spoons, then what was Water’s equivalent? Make things damp?
I yanked my hand out and wiped it on my plaid skirt. This was just as stupid. Loki said I would figure out how to use Water powers on my own, but I didn’t even know where to start.
Professor Goldheart said Water witches had to control their emotions. I took a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, calming myself down. Getting all worked up wasn’t going to help anything.
The scent of the water filled my nostrils, crisp and clean. The little creek babbled as it spilled over the rocks. My hand wasn’t in the water, but I could feel droplets splash onto me. Light played across the surface in random patterns. I let my whole awareness fill with the sensations.
Calm. Like ice water ran through my veins.
The tingles came back, traveling up my damp fingers to my arm. I pictured my emotions flowing through me and into the water. My frustration at the school, my embarrassment about my family, my attraction to Samantha
and Gabriella, my affection for Damian, and all the other emotions that bubbled up inside me. I tried to let them go.
I was empty. There was nothing left to make my heart race or my mind whirl with thoughts. At peace.
Then something crashed through the brush nearby. I looked up and saw a deer. She met my eyes and froze for a second, then turned and bounded away.
My concentration was broken. I stood up and brushed myself off with a sigh. Maybe that was enough for now. I’d have to keep practicing and see if I could find out more about beginning Water magic.
10
The bookseller was right when she said that the textbooks were in high demand at the library. I didn’t want someone to question why I was asking to see the Water elemental books, so I decided against researching there.
But that left me stumped. Damian was studying Fire, and my mom used Earth almost exclusively. I could try to ask that sneaky Loki for help, but I wouldn’t be able to cross the Veil again until All Hallows’ Eve. In the meantime, it was hard to make progress on investigating mermaids without any Water magic.
But my roommate, Samantha, was studying Water. There was no way I could talk to her, since she pretended like I didn’t exist. Maybe I could get a peek at her books or notes.
I waited for a chance to be alone in our room by lurking around, pretending to study or sketch. Wednesday evening, the perfect opportunity showed up.
Right after dinner, her friends came to pick her up for some stupid girls’ night. Samantha didn’t even glance in my direction as she grabbed her purse and sashayed out the door.
It was better if she ignored me, or that’s what I kept telling myself. I’d seen her and the other popular bitches mocking students around the school. One time, they made our magical history teacher so nervous, he dropped his phone and cracked the screen. If I kept my head down, I’d never be their target. Yet I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt. So many people told me about how their roommate was one of their closest friends long after they graduated school. There could be a good side under all that rich bitch posing, but I’d never get the chance to find out.
I wasn’t hurt tonight. I dropped my sketchbook on my bed, climbed halfway down the ladder, and then hopped the rest of the way to the floor. Time to start digging.
Switching on all the lights to see better, I turned to Samantha’s desk. Hanging from the chair, she had a cute mini backpack that barely looked big enough to hold a phone and makeup, but it was the first place to start. When I peeked inside, I found a notebook with a reversible sequin cover and a rhinestone-crusted pen, like a seven-year-old’s school supplies. Yuck.
The notebook held notes from her academic classes in tiny, cramped lines. It looked like a code full of abbreviations. In the history class, for example, she had written “Wcraft law in 1692—bad” under the lecture about the Salem Witch Trials. It could be enough to help remind her about what the teacher had said, but it was way less detailed than I was used to writing. I flipped through a few pages, searching for her Water magic classes, but I found nothing.
Then I turned to the stack of books on the desk itself. These giant textbooks would never fit in her little bag, so she must not take them to class. I noticed that all of them looked brand new. No used or bargain books for daddy’s little princess.
Like me, her magic classes had a workbook for theory, Introduction to Emotions, and a thin manual for practical work, which was Basic Cleansing. I was torn about which to look at first. Who knows how much time I had?
I pulled out my phone, opened the theory book, and started snapping pictures of the first lesson. What was the secret to emotional control? My eyes widened when I read the opening paragraph:
Water is the element of emotional manipulation. Water witches master their own emotions first, then progress to reading the emotions of others (called empathy) and moving on to control. This may sound bad and some types are illegal. But with careful use, emotional manipulation can have many practical applications. For example, calming a crowd in a crisis will prevent panic that could create dangerous situations. However, you must never use this power for your personal gain.
I wasn’t sure if I was more disgusted or intrigued. It was true that emotions were powerful and they could be used for good or bad purposes. But I could imagine way more bad uses. In the hands of a bitch like Samantha, wouldn’t she be tempted to just make everyone else miserable so she could feel superior, or something? And what about the teachers? Maybe Professor Goldheart had goaded me into freaking out during the Elemental Assignments so he could say I was too emotionally unstable and justify his choice.
That reeked of conspiracy theory, though. I wasn’t going to spin off into paranoia. The simplest explanation was still that when my mom talked to her friends in the academy’s faculty, she suggested that I study Earth, like her, and they agreed.
Right now, I couldn’t get distracted by the details. I had to get as much of this information as I could before Samantha came back.
When I flipped to the second page, I saw the first worksheet was already filled out. Her handwriting was much neater, thankfully, because the workbooks had to be turned in to the teacher periodically. I took pictures of each sheet she’d done, then I put it aside and reached for the book on Cleansing. This looked totally different from what I was doing in my Earth Grounding.
Just as I raised my phone to take a picture of the first page, the door to the bedroom opened. My head snapped up, and I froze like the deer in the forest.
Samantha took in the whole scene: me, standing over her desk with her books open, taking pictures on my phone. “What. Are. You. Doing?” she asked in an icy, menacing tone.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I blurted out.
That was a dumb thing to say. I didn’t know what excuse I could give her that didn’t sound awful.
She strode across the room and slammed the Cleansing book closed. “You’re snooping through my stuff.”
I took a step back and held up my hands defensively. “Okay, um, but not in the way you’re thinking.” I really had to come up with something besides these lame excuses, but my brain was a total blank. “I mean, I wasn’t digging for personal information. I was just curious about your classes.”
Samantha glared daggers at me. “All of my stuff is off-limits,” she snapped. She opened a drawer in her desk and started sweeping books into it. “I didn’t say anything when you went through my things on the day you moved in. I don’t react even though you, like, keep staring at me all the time. But this is going too far.”
She’d caught me staring at her? Great. I backed up farther, but I bumped into the far wall. Suddenly the dorm room felt way too small. “S-sorry,” I stammered out. My stupid brain had given up on excuses, so it was all I had left to say.
“Sorry isn’t good enough,” Samantha snapped. She dropped her mini backpack on top of the books, shut the drawer, and locked it. “I’m asking for a transfer to another room. Until then, I don’t want to see you at all.”
I grabbed my messenger bag and ran out the door.
“She’s a total monster,” I sobbed into my carton of dairy-free ice cream. It was my favorite flavor, salted caramel, but it had mostly melted. I’d eaten more than half without realizing it, which was probably enough to make me sick. I shoved the whole sticky mess onto the nearby table and pulled my knees up to my chest.
Damian wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “It’s no surprise that the mean girl was mean to you,” he said. “We knew what she was like from day one. Don’t let it get to you.”
I wiped my face on my sleeve and tried to even out my breathing. “But she said she doesn’t want to see me at all. What am I supposed to do? Stay out of the room completely?”
“She can’t lock you out of the whole room. Your stuff is in there, too.” He rubbed my back. “Just give her some time to cool down.”
I glanced at my watch. “Curfew’s in less than an hour. Am I supposed to stay out the whole night?”
Damian groaned. “Dude, you’re not part of this conversation.”
“I’m just saying,” Tyler said. His face was turning red from hanging upside down. “We would get in so much trouble if we had a girl stay over.”
“Brie’s not a girl-girl.”
I sniffled. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not a real girl?”
Damian’s grip on me tightened. “I just meant you’re not doing anything wrong. Like, you’re not here to have sex with me.”
I clutched my stomach and mimed gagging. “Ugh! Just the thought of seeing you naked makes me want to throw up.”
“Hey!” He nudged me playfully.
Tyler nodded. “I’ve seen him. It’s like a war crime.”
“I keep it tight,” Damian said, flexing his arms. “Just because you’re a dyke and a cishet who can’t appreciate what I have to offer, that doesn’t mean I’m not a total snack.”
I giggled. “Yeah, like a free sample snack at the grocery store.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” He threw my own question back at me.
“It means you give it away too easily,” Tyler picked up the taunt.
Damian pushed off the bed and spun around, folding his arms and glaring at both of us. “I just came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.”
Tyler snickered. “Way to defend yourself with an ancient meme.” He sat upright, making the bunk bed shake. “Whoa. I am so dizzy right now, I’m seeing stars.”
I laughed so hard at the both of them, I collapsed on the bed and lost control of my breathing again. At least it was a different kind of hysterics than what I’d had earlier when I couldn’t stop crying as I described the confrontation to Damian.
Finally, I sat up and smiled. “Thanks for cheering me up, guys.”