Academy of Magic Collection

by Angelique S Anderson et al.

  “Very soon you’ll feel quite a bit better. In the meantime I know it's a lot to take in,” Uri said. “But that's what the honing period is for—a week or so where you'll learn about not only your particular ancestry, but also about the bloodlines of your cousins.”

  “My cousins?”

  “Well, not really your cousins, given how many times removed they are, of course, after all these centuries.” He chuckled. “But in principle, the newly born Sylphs, Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes are all descended from the four sisters—the Elemental Queens who preceded humanity here on Earth.”

  My head was spinning as I looked for the door. I turned to Leo. "Did you drug me? The wings, the way my hands turned into feathers, that was all a hallucination, wasn't it? The antidote was in the seawater? What did you—?"

  Leo moved toward me, stepping in front of the others and blocking my view of them.

  "I know it all sounds insane, Halsey,” he said in a quiet voice. "Just take a walk with me. Let me just give you a tour of this place, and it will all have a chance to sink in, I promise. I went through the same thing—thought the same things two years ago.”

  “What was the drug in the food?” I said through my teeth.

  “That's just what Hurricane berries do. They strengthen our physical states,” Leo said. “It's all part of the honing—you’ll learn to control it.”

  I glared at him. “You knew this would happen to me if I ate those berries? You gave them to me!”

  He lowered his voice again. “They thought it would be better if you had your first transition here with support than in front of mixed company. This is the procedure for all new students,” he said, then turned back to Uri and Sylvie. “I’ll take her to get settled. She’s starting to fade,” he added with a shrug.

  I just stared at him when he turned back to me, his dark brows drawn up, his jaw clenched again, his entire expression almost pleading, and I suddenly felt like I was losing all hope by the time we got into the corridor.

  “It wasn’t the medicine Jen gave me? It didn’t cause the screech, or the running speed, or my hands?” I said to myself, staring at my fingers, which looked perfectly normal again.

  “Jicambi can’t do that, no,” he said, which startled me.

  “You know Jen?” I asked.

  Leo took a deep breath and sighed. “They work through several people when they’re scouting for potential students.”

  “She tried to drag me into a van!”

  “She is not one of their associates,” he said, shaking his head. “They just keep tabs on her work like they do for all the medics and researchers looking for a Red Fever cure.” Leo checked over his shoulder. “The virus has a catalytic effect on some people, Halsey. People like you, me, and the others on the island. It’s why they created this school.”

  “Catalytic of what?” I asked, barely able to accept any of this.

  “Like Uri said earlier, in people with Elemental ancestry, it reactivates the dormant genes.”

  “And in people who don’t have the genes?” I asked.

  Leo sighed. “The person who bit you had Red Fever, but did not have Elemental blood,” he said, watching me like he was just waiting for me to figure it out.

  “She was infected…” I finally whispered to myself as the pieces started fitting together. “She caught on fire because of it?” I said, then quickly looked up at Leo. “And she gave me Red Fever?”

  I pressed my back into the wall, trying to let it all sink in.

  “The bite wound, yes,” he said. “Your body began transitioning at the cellular level the same day.”

  It all started to make sense, at least, as much as such a thing could. If what Leo was saying was true, it would explain the rest of the physiological changes I’d been attributing to the jicambi bark enzyme.

  “Come on, before they hear us. Any minute now, I’m sure you’ll feel a lot better.” Leo said. “I’ll take you to your dorm, OK? It will help her to meet Alita, your roommate. She just arrived last week, so it’s all fresh for her too.”

  I wasn’t sure what else to say since I didn’t quite believe anything he’d just told me. I didn’t even believe what I’d seen with my own eyes, but there didn’t seem to be another explanation. I needed to talk with Max, to tell him what happened and get his opinion. If nothing else, I needed to let him know my plane hadn’t been ripped out of they sky and plunged into the ocean, which we’d both joked about only a little bit when we learned I’d be flying over the Bermuda triangle to get here.

  “I need to let my family know I made it here,” I said, hoping dropping the family card would hold more weight than just saying I needed to call my best friend.

  Leo looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d just started speaking in tongues or something. “Oh, well, Tia actually already sent a landing confirmation to your aunt and uncle, so you don’t have to worry,” he said, and my stomach sank. All right, there was another way to do this.

  “Thanks,” I said in the most pleasant tone I could muster. “I guess I should just get some sleep then. I’m suddenly really tired,” I lied, wanting nothing more than to get behind a closed door, away from him. I started walking faster.

  “Hey, what’s the rush?” Leo called up to me, almost laughing. “Slow down, you don’t even know where you’re going.”

  “I need to find a restroom,” I said bluntly, not even caring what he might have thought about the urgency in my tone.

  “OK, well that’s right here,” he said, and I immediately turned around. He cocked his head to the door on his right, toward which I made a B-line, and his face lit up again. “Halsey, your queue won’t work here,” he said softly. “It’s the fog around the island. Nothing gets through.”

  “All right, thanks?” I said, trying to make it seem like I didn’t know what he was talking about. The second I was behind the door, though, I touched my temple and scrolled for Max’s queue number. I pressed it, and a wave of relief washed over me when I saw the spinning arrow and the word connecting appear in my field of vision.

  But any hope I had of hearing Max’s voice, of getting his opinion on this whole insane thing, was dashed when the arrow stopped spinning, and the words connection failed appeared in its place.

  My stomach sank again, but I took a deep breath and decided I’d try again outside, later tonight after my shadow was gone.

  I crossed to the sink and washed my hands, the water feeling like a soft fabric running over my skin. It was such an odd sensation I had to look down to make sure it was, in fact, water. I looked around for a dryer, but there wasn’t anything like that on the wall, nor were there any towels to be found. How did they expect anyone to dry their hands here? I thought, but as soon as I turned the water off, my hands were immediately dry. I took several steps back from the sink, stopping only when I ran into the divider post of the stalls behind me. I caught my reflection in the mirror… My short blonde hair was now purple.

  I pushed open the door and bolted into the corridor. Leo’s face was calm, but I’d definitely caught him by surprise.

  “Halsey, I told you your queue wouldn’t—”

  “Why is my hair purple now?” I asked, trying to bite back some of the fury that was surely the result of more than just my stupid hair color changing, but I was too exhausted to rein any of it in.

  “I guess it is purple,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Though I’ve never seen anyone be able to get a gradient like that.”

  “Why is it purple?”

  Leo restrained a laugh. “It just happens sometimes after your first shift—eye colors change, hair colors…” His dark brows relaxed as he gave me a slow smile. “It looks good on you,” he said, brushing a strand from my eyes. Heat rushed up my throat and into my cheeks, and small tingles started in my fingertips. I pulled back, immediately worried my fingers were shifting back into feathers, and that any second, searing pain would rip down either side of my back again. I looked at my hands, then over my shoulder, but there was
nothing there. Yet.

  “The wings?” I said breathlessly, clawing at the shoulder of my shirt and bringing it forward.

  “Whoa, it’s OK.” Leo let himself laugh this time. “The seawater will suppress any shifts until it’s out of your system tomorrow. But we do need to get you a new shirt,” he added, nodding to my hand. I reached back and felt my skin through the two holes in my shirt and sighed. Leo looked over my shoulder in the direction we’d just come, then waved for me to follow him.

  We went out a different door than the one we came in through at the front of the house, this one leading to a path lined with flowering bushes—the intoxicated, spicy-sweet smell almost too much to handle. The sun was low on the water in the distance, casting a strange glow over everything. It was all so beautiful I almost forgot about the gaping holes in the back of my shirt until I felt the cool breeze darting through them, sending a chill through me.

  “This is the way to my dorm?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself. Leo looked over his shoulder one more time, then nodded to me. He started to pull off his black T-shirt, and I immediately started shaking my head. “No, that’s OK,” I said. I mean, points for the gesture, but eww.

  Leo laughed and shoved as much of the shirt into his pocket as he could, the muscles in his chest and arms catching every ray of the setting sun as they jumped.

  “Don’t panic, all right?” he said, holding out a hand to me. “Come with me.”

  Do not stare at his abs, I thought. Do not stare at—

  “It’s OK,” he insisted, interrupting my mantra. “I promise I won’t hurt you.” In the same second, two enormous, featherless black wings unfurled behind him. They looked like the wings of a bat or something—an unfathomably huge bat with armored plating. “Hold onto me, and we’ll be at your building before you can ask me why I have wings like this.” I shuddered again as my shirt billowed behind me, but I was pretty sure the prickle over my skin wasn’t from the sudden breeze. I took his hand, and he pulled me closer. “Sorry, safety first,” he said in a low voice, then pressed me against him, his arms folding around me as we rose into the air, the beating of his wings low and so palatable I felt it in my chest. The ground fell away as we rose higher, far above the trees and buildings. I clung to him, suddenly not sure this was the best idea now that the initial shock had worn off.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered, closing my eyes and turning into his shoulder.

  Leo chuckled. “Hold on.”

  The next thing I felt was a whoosh of air, and then we were still. We were on the ground, at least it seemed we were. He released me, and I slowly opened my eyes to find him pulling his shirt from his pocket, and his wings were gone.

  “What just happened?” I said, afraid to move. His perfect, white smile peeled through the dim light as he put his shirt back on. “How did you do that?”

  “Well, I’ve had a little more practice than you, Halsey,” he said, arching a dark eyebrow.

  “But your wings weren’t like mine…” I trailed off, not even totally sure I hadn’t somehow hallucinated mine, and I definitely wasn’t sure how to describe his. I shook my head, opting for the obvious. “There were, um, no feathers.”

  He shook his head in agreement, letting his gaze sweep the ground for a second. “I’m a Salamander Elemental…fire,” he said, meeting my eyes again. “My physical shift is a dragon.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “A dragon? They don’t exist,” I said flatly, though I didn’t know why I wouldn’t believe him. I’d just seen his wings with my own eyes.

  “A lot of things aren’t supposed to exist,” he replied with the ghost of a grin. “That doesn’t mean they don’t.”

  We walked a few more steps before stopping at a huge, white-brick estate house, this one, two stories high with rows of long, narrow windows on each level.

  “This can’t be my dorm building,” I said in disbelief.

  Leo winked at me. “Don’t worry. You’ll move to a bigger one next year.”

  I smiled, but the insanity of everything that just happened the last hour prevented me from sharing his levity.

  I glanced at the enormous house again, then back to him and shook my head. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, but I’m still not totally convinced all this isn’t the result of major hallucinogenics in my system.”

  “I felt the same way,” Leo said as we started walking toward the iron-framed door. “After my welcome dinner, I tried to queue home just like you did in the bathroom, even though Sylvie told me it wouldn’t work—she was my mentor since there weren’t really any upperclassmen then.”

  “What finally convinced you?”

  “Meeting my roommate and hearing that he felt the same way—then hearing about his shift,” Leo said, glancing at me. “It was a relief to know someone else had been going through the same weird stuff the week before arriving too, not to mention everything with the Hurricane berries.” He stopped in front of the door and leaned against the frame, meeting my eyes with another slow smile and a shrug. “It helped not to feel alone.” I didn’t know what it was about the way he looked at me—like he was looking for something—but I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply while I tried to figure it out. He sucked in a sudden breath after another few seconds and pushed a hand into his jeans pocket. “Which is why it’s time to meet your roommate,” he added, handing me a key. “Go ahead, that’s your copy.”

  I turned the key in the door and pushed it open. Inside, the foyer was dimly lit and more modestly furnished than the main house where I imagined Uri must have lived. Two staircases wound down from the open second floor, which was lined with doors that seemed to wrap around to the back of the house.

  “Are those the dorm rooms?” I asked, immediately feeling stupid because what else could they be?

  “Most of them,” Leo answered, leading us toward the polished wooden staircase on the left. “There are more on the main level in the East wing. The kitchen and library are in the West wing.”

  “How many people live here?” I asked just as two girls came out of a room and nearly ran into us.

  One of them looked me up and down, raising an eyebrow at my hair. “You a unicorn shifter or something?” she asked, but she and her friend didn’t slow down long enough for me to volley a comeback, even if I had one.

  I did, however, risk a glance at Leo to see if there were such things as unicorn shifters, but he’d already closed his eyes in a long blink. I was admittedly a little disappointed.

  “Magical mean girls—awesome,” I said with a nod.

  “That would be Anya. She arrived a few weeks ago.” Leo shook his head. “And she wasn’t nearly as mouthy when her skin hardened and her tail was flapping all over the dining room floor.”

  I gaped at him. “What?”

  “They’re both water Elementals—Undines,” he said with a nod to the pair as they left the house. The confusion I felt must have registered on my face, because the corners of his mouth pulled up when he leaned a little closer and whispered. “Mermaids.”

  I stared at him blankly for a few seconds, not quite sure if he was joking or not. He didn’t say anything else about it, though, and I was honestly starting to feel too exhausted to ask.

  “Of course. Mermaids. Why not?” I managed, nodding a few times before following Leo to a door with a bronze number seven fixed to the wall. There was no answer when he knocked, so he fished another key from his pocket and handed it to me. I didn’t have a chance to put it in the lock before a girl with red hair came bounding up the stairs, dropping flowers from the enormous bundle in her arms. She backtracked a few steps to try to pick them up, but only wound up dropping more.

  “I’ll get those,” Leo said, chuckling as he darted halfway down the steps to pick up the flowers that had fallen.

  “Thanks. Hi. Sorry. Sorry I’m late,” the girl said, her long red hair falling into her eyes. She tried to blow it clear, but somehow just managed to make more fall forward in the
process. “Hold these, Leo. Um, please and thank you.” She shoved the bundle of flowers into his arms and in the span of about five seconds, she twisted the length of her hair until it looked like rope, then wrapped it into a bun and pulled it into a kind of slipknot. She picked up the flowers that had fallen, and grabbed the rest from Leo as she made her way up the stairs to me. I was out of breath just watching all that.

  “Halsey, this is Alita,” Leo called up to us. “Your roommate.”

  Alita pushed the flowers into my arms this time, but tucked in the ones that were falling out. “These are for you,” she said. “They sing. Not right now because they need water, but after that they’ll sing, and I thought you’d like that because I would have liked that when I got here, but I didn’t have a roommate yet who already knew about them,” she rambled. “So, I got them. Oh, we can go in. Thanks, Leo. Bye!”Alita added as she pulled a key out of her pocket and quickly opened the door. I glanced down at Leo, whose dark brows were arched in surprise, his wide, brilliant smile beaming up at the door Alita had just disappeared through.

  “Looks like you’ll be in good hands now,” he said, meeting my eyes one more time before he turned to go back down the steps.

  “Wait!” I called down to him. He looked back at me over his shoulder expectantly, and my mouth suddenly went dry. “Thanks,” I said, more quietly than I had intended.

  He nodded and bowed just a little before taking another few steps, swiping up the last one of Alita’s fallen flowers and smelling it as he made his way out the door.

  I followed Alita into the room and closed the door behind me with my foot. The space was bigger than I expected it to be with a small, round table, four chairs, and two full beds, one on each side of the room. A side table and an old fashioned lamp sat along the wall next to each bed, the light filtering through the lampshades making the room glow orange. The embroidered quilts on the beds looked thin, but I imagined it didn’t get too cold here, and the stacked, white pillows nearly did me in. One look at them and I was overcome with exhaustion, despite the nonstop adrenaline rush since the helicopter landed. Or, maybe because of it.