The Zero Curse

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  I shrugged. I didn't think my father would disown me. And if he did ... my talents were unique. I could think of a dozen people - starting with Magister Tallyman - who would be happy to employ me. Dad would know it too.

  “We’ll think about it,” I promised. On one hand, he was right; on the other, there was no way to know what would happen if we swore the oath. “And Rose needs to know what she’s getting into too.”

  We sat in companionable silence for a long moment. I thought back to Tyros and his companions, a man and a woman who’d brought down an empire. What could I do, if I put my mind to it? What were the limits of the possible? And what would happen if I built something like his magic-draining device? Part of me wanted to see if I could build one, the rest of me knew it would be dangerous. A world without magic would be a world without civilisation. It would be a nightmare without end.

  Do some experiments, I told myself. And then figure out what you can safely tell others.

  I looked at him. “If I gave you a protective bracelet,” I said, “would you wear it?”

  Akin frowned. “Why?”

  “It might be interesting to see how it felt, for you,” I said. It wasn't entirely true. I knew Rose couldn't use magic while wearing protective earrings. There was no reason to assume it would be different for Akin. But ... what if he tried to forge while wearing one? “I’ve been doing a lot of research into how Objects of Power interact with magic.”

  “But you can't feel anything yourself,” Akin finished.

  “Unless it grows hot,” I agreed. It was a shame I needed to keep the amulet - or earring - touching my bare skin. I’d have to make myself a suit of armour, when I had a spare moment. “But I wanted to know how it felt for you.”

  I smiled as a thought struck me. If I could craft a magic-free bubble, could I cut Akin off from his powers? And if I did, could he forge Objects of Power while he was in the bubble? Or would that block the Object of Power from touching the magic field too?

  More research, I told myself, firmly. And perhaps I should carry it out somewhere a little more private.

  Rose tapped on the door. She looked pale.

  “Dinner time,” she said. “And then the library?”

  I rose. “Definitely. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Rose looked past me. “Is that the famous sword?”

  “Apparently,” I agreed. “Try and pick it up.”

  “I heard Henrietta claiming she would be able to take it,” Rose said. She wrapped her fingers around the hilt, but the sword refused to move. “She said her family’s insignia was clearly visible on the blade.”

  Akin stood and inspected the sword. “I can’t see it,” he said. He looked at me. “Can you?”

  “There was nothing beyond the runes,” I said. The dinner bell rang. “Do you want to try to pick up the blade before we go?”

  “Yeah,” Akin said. “Why not?”

  His hand curved around the hilt and lifted ...

  ... And the blade glowed brightly as he held it in the air.

  End of Book Two

  The Story Will Conclude In:

  The Zero Equation

  Coming Soon

  If You Enjoyed The Zero Curse, You Might Like ...

  Instrument of War, by Rebecca Hall

  The Angels are coming.

  Mitch would like to forget the last year ever happened but that doesn’t seem likely with Little Red Riding Hood teaching Teratology. The vampire isn’t quite as terrifying as he first thought but she’s not the only monster at the Academy. The Fallen are spying on them, the new principal is an angel and there’s an enchanting new exchange student with Faerie blood.

  Angry and afraid, Mitch tries to put the pieces together. He knows that Hayley is the Archangel Gabriel, he knows that she can determine the course of the Eternity War and he knows that the Fallen will do anything to hide her from the Host.

  Even allow an innocent girl to be kidnapped.

  Free Sample

  Term One

  The New Principal

  Mitch upended his bag over the bed, tipping everything out and shoving his clothes into drawers at random until they began to overflow. The rest got stuffed in the closet or scattered across the faded carpet. Mum would have tsked if she’d seen him unpacking but she never stuck around that long.

  This time she hadn’t even bothered to stick around for the entire summer, returning him and Cullum to the Academy three days early so she could get back to her fake pot plants. She wouldn’t have done it if Dad had been there, but Dad had never come. At first Mitch had thought that they were finally going to come clean about the divorce but apparently Dad just couldn’t be bothered.

  He tossed the bag aside, sufficiently unpacked for now, and glared at the open window. It didn’t appear to have made an appreciable difference to the temperature of the room and the curtains failed to stir in the non-existent breeze. He hesitated, he hadn’t had any formal lessons on cryomancy yet but he’d done plenty of informal experiments over the holidays, well away from Mum’s watchful eye of course; enough to cool his tiny room.

  He focused, willing the air around him to cool and wondering if he had anything that could serve as a heat-sink. He couldn’t keep this up forever. Nothing came to mind. He scowled and released the magic; at least it would take a while for his room to heat up again.

  He flopped across the bed, almost banging his head on the wall. It was nice to be home again, he just wished home came with a larger bed and air conditioning. He sighed; it was too quiet. All he could hear was the ticking of his indestructible alarm clock and the buzz of insects outside. It was going to drive him crazy.

  He rolled off the bed and went outside, creeping past the level that his brother was living on. He’d just spent two months with Cullum, he didn’t want to spend any more time with him. He already missed the days when his brother was on the primary campus.

  The heat was just as unrelenting outside, the air still and lifeless. The usually lush Academy grounds were yellowing in the sun and heat haze shimmered over the footpath. Mitch was seriously reconsidering his decision to never set foot in the lake again. It was only a matter of time before some hare-brained lesson took him out on it, he might as well go swimming. Everyone had gone to great pains to assure him that the Taniwha was a herbivore. Of course, no one else had had to listen to its telepathic voice.

  He wasn’t the only one to think of the lake. He spied another figure by the shore as he approached. He slowed and sharpened his vision, relaxing when he realised that his unanticipated companion was too pale to be his brother. Someone from the northern hemisphere? Sometimes they came back early to recover from the jet lag.

  “Hayley?” Mitch said, finally recognising her. Auckland wasn’t quite as far north as he’d been imagining.

  “Hi Mitch,” she waved at him lazily and he sat on the grass beside her.

  “Did you spend Christmas under a rock or something?” he asked. They were at the tail end of summer and she looked like a ghost.

  “Or something,” Hayley replied, sitting up and brushing bits of grass from her wavy black hair.

  “You’ll burn,” he warned. He could feel himself burning already and Lake Moawhango was looking more inviting by the second.

  “I’ve got sunscreen,” she replied.

  “So where did you go for the holidays?” Mitch asked. She should have been as darkly tanned as he was.

  “Away. My parents don’t know about magic. Going home was awkward.”

  Mitch blinked, “so you just ditched them for the other side of the world?” Her adopted family could probably afford the flights but he’d assumed that they weren’t as detached as his.

  “No,” she said, blue eyes paling slightly. Mitch abandoned that line of conversation, it gave him the creeps when her eyes did that. Last time it had left him badly burned and in need of Fae help. He shivered and used a little magic to render himself sun resistant. He hadn’t thought to put on sunscreen.

&n
bsp; “Do you think the Taniwha still has enough water?” he asked. The lake level was lower than usual, low enough to allow him to sneak out of the Academy without getting his feet wet. Not that he would, last time he’d gone out that way he’d been chased down by a zombie horse.

  Hayley shrugged, “It can just return to Faerie if it doesn’t.”

  “So it won’t be popping up to demand more water then?” It would probably call him Cursed One again and demand to know why he hadn’t delivered its message to the archangels. Maybe he should have asked Azrael to pass it on, but Azrael had been consuming Dr Dalman’s soul at the time. He shivered again; there were parts of last year that he would dearly love to forget. It said a lot about the year that a telepathic lake lizard didn’t even make the list despite the splitting headache and nose bleed it had given him.

  “Probably not. I imagine it can get water from Faerie as well if it really needs to.”

  “As long as that’s all it’s getting,” Mitch mumbled. He’d met the Fae before: the first had tried to kill him, the second had healed him before threatening to do the same, he didn’t want to know what the third would do.

  “Why didn’t you just tell your parents about the Academy?” Mitch asked. Hayley was a good magician, there was no danger of her being locked up for insanity.

  “I got a lengthy lecture on the subject by Mr McCalis,” she replied. “And it just seemed easier not to explain that I’m attending a cursed school of magic.”

  “It’s not cursed anymore,” Mitch replied. Unless someone had cursed it while he wasn’t looking. It wouldn’t surprise him. He sneaked a glance at the mountains but even Ruapehu was quiet with no sign of the clouds of ash and smoke that had plagued them the year before. The Eternity War had moved away for the time being.

  “I’m sure they’d find that vastly reassuring,” Hayley said. Mitch shrugged, he’d never really gotten the hang of talking to Hayley. He usually ended up yelling at her or putting his foot in his mouth and she’d stare at him with those blue eyes that sometimes seemed to pale and… She wasn’t even on the list of people he’d prefer to avoid talking to after last year.

  “I still have your feather,” Mitch said to fill in the growing silence. Wavelets and insects did not count as noise in his opinion and even the birds had given up under the unrelenting heat. “And I don’t need it to protect me from the curse anymore…”

  “Keep it,” Hayley replied, “it’s just a feather.”

  “But…” The archangel feather was the only link she had to her birth parents and archangels didn’t just leave them lying around.

  “Hayley,” Belle yelled, rushing over to them, the sun bringing out red highlights in her dark curls.

  “Hi Belle,” Hayley said, half rising to hug the younger girl.

  “Hey,” Mitch said, smiling at her. He liked Belle, but if she was back then her sister probably was too and Mindy was right at the top of the list of people he didn’t want to talk to.

  “Hey Mitch,” Belle said, sitting down between them.

  “You’re back early,” he said. Belle was another person he’d never worked out how to talk to.

  Belle grinned, “I told my parents that a snowstorm was going to close the airport so they sent us back early.”

  “Was it?” Mitch asked. Belle was clairvoyant and what she saw always happened but he didn’t think she could control the weather and she could certainly lie. After the zombie horse incident she liked Mindy even less than he did.

  “An airport anyway.”

  Mitch snorted; she probably hadn’t specified when either. Maybe she’d seen it closing ten years from now.

  “Mindy is in her room.”

  “I’ll avoid the girls’ dormitory then,” Mitch said. At least he could avoid their resident psychopath until dinner. “See ya later,” he said, deciding to leave before he could become any more of a third wheel. He wasn’t that desperate for company.

  He meandered back to his room, circling around the old buildings and wondering what new tortures their teachers had planned for them this year. Probably dissections, man eating trees and vats of acid.

  He paused outside his room, it looked as if one of the other doors was closed. He crossed the corridor, trying to get a clear view and took a couple of steps in its direction. It was closed and it was Nikola’s room. He grinned to himself and knocked softly.

  The door opened.

  “Mitch,” Nikola croaked and started to cough.

  “Sick already?” Mitch asked as Nikola stepped back and motioned for him to take the desk chair. Nikola returned to the bed, wrapping himself in a large green blanket and reaching for a tissue.

  “You know I can’t travel,” Nikola said after he’d blown his nose. It only made him sound more congested and the bin was already half full.

  “I didn’t think you’d want to come back early.” Cursed or not the Academy was Mitch’s home but Nikola hated it.

  “My guardian’s idea,” Nikola explained. “She thought that if I came back early then I’d have plenty of time to recover before classes start.”

  “Sorry,” Mitch said, shaking his head. Sensible people would have left Nikola to be home schooled. Nikola had a lot of contact with the Seelie Court and the Fae’s magical knowledge was second to none, but Mitch wasn’t sure his guardian counted as a sensible person.

  Nikola shrugged, “it’s only one more year. Besides, I get to see you a few days early as well.”

  “Nikola…”

  Nikola coughed, groping for his drink bottle until Mitch pressed it into his hand.

  “Thanks.” He coughed some more, draining his bottle and tossing it aside. Mitch refilled it for him and by the time he got back Nikola had stopped coughing and was leaning against the wall, his grey eyes almost closed and his cheeks flushed. He was still wrapped in his blanket though his room was just as hot as Mitch’s had been.

  “I should let you rest,” Mitch said.

  Nikola groaned, “You mean escape before you catch my bugs.”

  “I mean let you rest,” Mitch said. He could heal himself if he got sick, Nikola had to recover the old fashioned way and he was lousy at it.

  “That’s all I ever seem to do,” Nikola said, his expression downcast. “Rest, rest, rest. Rest for what? So I can go to class and get sick again?”

  “You must have done something fun over the holidays,” Mitch said, “I’m sure that was worth resting for.”

  “Getting my b–” he sneezed, “brain rewired? When Gawain let me have a day off I was too exhausted to do anything.” He sneezed again, looking so utterly miserable that Mitch sat on the bed next to him and put an arm around his shoulders.

  “We’ll find something fun to do over Easter then,” Mitch promised. “No rewiring then right?”

  “Just a cold or the flu, or allergies or–”

  “We’ll find something fun to do,” Mitch said, cutting him off and squeezing his shoulder.

  “That would be nice,” Nikola replied.

  “Now get some rest,” Mitch smiled at his friend and pretended not to see the answering glare.

  #

  If he hadn’t been so on edge Mitch would have been bored. He wished that they could have held the assembly somewhere else, or, even better, not held it at all. He was missing maths to be tortured by constant replays of Dr Dalman’s death and Miss Band’s suicide. He liked maths.

  Unfortunately they had a new principal to welcome to the Academy. And new teachers. And naturally that had to take place during his favourite class in the auditorium where the old principal had died. He slouched a little lower in his seat. No one else seemed bothered by their location. His best friend, Bates, was having a whispered conversation with Mindy. He’d been cursed when Dr Dalman died and if he could get past his girlfriend’s attempted sororicide with undead weapon, then their principal inexplicably turning into goo was unlikely to bother him.

  On his other side Nikola seemed just as unfazed but he’d missed that particular ass
embly and he was still sniffling.

  “You should have stayed in bed,” Mitch whispered when he sneezed.

  “That would have defeated the purpose of coming back early,” Nikola replied. A tissue appeared in his hand just in time to smother another sneeze. As far as Mitch knew Nikola’s ability to teleport objects was unique, but he’d probably have traded it for Mitch’s ability to heal himself.

  Mr McCalis’s speech came to an end, he’d kept it short at least, and Mitch sat up a little straighter. Now they just had to introduce the new teachers and principal and then he could get out of here and stop listening to the sound of Miss Band’s neck snapping as she hanged herself to break the Twisted Curse’s influence on the Academy.