by Rye Brewer
Oliver shook his head and patted my hand comfortingly. “You’re not that flawed, Moira. He’ll run out of things to point out eventually.”
I snorted at Oliver’s attempt to make me feel better, but appreciated it, nonetheless.
Kendra shrugged and looked up from the notebook in which she’d scribbled what appeared to be thousands of vocabulary words.
“Maybe he has a crush on you,” Kendra offered.
“Aidan? Have a crush on me?” I gasped. “Have you lost your mind, Kendra Shadowmend?”
“I mean, isn’t that a thing that boys do? They pretend to be mean to their crush so that they never find out their true feelings?”
I shook my head, remembering the pointed cruelty with which Aidan’s comments always struck. “I don’t think he’s pretending.”
But Kendra wasn’t backing down from her theory. “I don’t know… I mean, it makes sense. The two of you are practically the same person.”
I gasped in faux horror and clutched my hand to my chest as if I’d just been scandalized. She had to be joking. There was no way I shared any similarities at all with Aidan Grimsbane. He was a jerk.
I gave them a haughty look, imitating Aidan. “Are you insinuating that I’m a rude, heartless man with no tact and an insatiable desire to make Moira Bloodworth miserable?” I asked.
Oliver cackled quietly at my dramatics.
The corner of Kendra’s lips curved upward in a bemused smile. “No, I just mean that the two of you kind of have similar energy. Like, rebellious and too-cool-for-school, but still smart and talented. Both of you are blunt, but you can be charming when it’s necessary. And I mean… you’re both very attractive, so you’d be a pretty couple.”
“Ugh, your words are making me nauseous.” I sighed, holding my hands over my stomach to signal that I might barf if she continued to compare Aidan and me as if we shared special positive qualities. I did not want to hear another word about how much I had in common with that insufferable boy.
Kendra giggled. “Ignore me. I think I’m just feeling romantic.”
Once again, her eyes slipped to the table behind us, softening at the sight of Luca. I fought the urge to follow her line of sight, unwilling to risk locking eyes with Aidan again.
“Hey, Moira,” I jumped at the sound of an unexpected voice beside me.
Kendra and Oliver looked up immediately, shared a secret smirk together, and then looked back down at their notes.
I turned my head for find Calder, his uniform perfectly pressed and clean as always, standing next to our table with his hands in his pockets. It hadn’t been long since the Halloween dance when I made my pathetic attempt to talk to him, only to have it foiled by my weird itchiness and Aidan Grimsbane. Since then, I assumed both Calder and I had been too busy studying for midterms to cross paths.
“Hey,” I replied, admittedly surprised to see him.
“Sorry to interrupt your studying,” Calder told me, glancing down, almost seeming ill-at-ease.
“Oh, no, it’s okay,” I insisted. “I was just thinking of taking a break anyway.”
Kendra snorted quietly, eyes glued to her notebook, and I resisted the urge to kick her under the table.
“Wanna go for a walk?” he asked.
“Oh, um, sure,” I replied, standing up and following him out of the Grand Hall.
We wandered down the cavernous hallway in silence. It was empty in the halls, what with nearly every student huddled in the Grand Hall, the library, or their dormitory common rooms studying. We were alone.
“How’s the studying going?”
From what Talia had shared over dinner the other night, the senior demons were taking midterms very seriously. Demons were notorious for getting bad grades, mostly because they were more interested in being demonic than scholarly, but this year the senior class of demons decided they were going to flip that stereotype upside down apparently.
“It’s fine, I guess,” Calder said, shrugging. “I’d rather be doing anything else, but… you know how it is.”
I offered him a smile.
He answered the smile with one of this own and then stopped walking to lean against a wide windowsill.
“I was sad to see you left the dance so early the other night,” he said.
Wait, really?
“Really?” I cursed my lack of a filter, as well as how eager I sounded.
Calder chuckled. “Honestly, yeah. I was kind of hoping to dance with you.”
I sat down next to him on the sill.
“I wanted to dance with you, too,” I told him, blushing slightly. “I just wasn’t feeling very well.”
His brow knitted with concern. He had to be the nicest demon on the face of the planet. “Are you okay now?”
“Oh, yeah, totally,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders as if my illness—or whatever the heck it was—was no big deal at all. “Absolutely fine now.”
“Good,” Calder replied with a grin.
Then, much to my utter shock and surprise, he leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek.
I froze.
Calder Darkmore just kissed me on the cheek.
Kissed me. On the cheek.
“Maybe we could hang out sometime?”
“Yes, I’d like that,” I told him, trying not to appear as deliriously happy as I felt.
“Cool.”
“Cool,” I responded. “Um, I should get to studying, though.”
“Yeah, for sure,” he said, standing up. His hand brushed against my arm for the briefest of moments and I felt my heart turn to mush. “My people will call your people.”
I laughed at his lame joke and nodded, waving goodbye as I headed back toward the Grand Hall. I practically skipped back to my seat, grinning like a fool as Kendra and Oliver watched me approach.
However, just before I sat down and opened my mouth to tell my friends what just happened, my eyes involuntarily trailed to a table across the room.
I met Aidan’s gaze again. He was watching me steadily with a look that seemed almost like a glare. Clearly, someone wasn’t happy that Calder was actually interested in me. I wondered if he’d been observing me from the moment Calder entered the Grand Hall.
I glared back at him for a few seconds before I turned my attention back to my fellow witches. I had no idea what his problem was, but I had better things to think about.
7
Auntie Inez,
Midterms are over… finally. Don’t worry, I definitely passed. I also finished my application to Brayton, but I’m just waiting for my letter of recommendation from Professor McGill. I still can’t believe she agreed to do that after I practically blew up the Potions classroom. I guess the Bloodworth charm really is irresistible.
I actually wanted to talk to you about that. The cauldron explosion, not my charming personality.
When it happened, I felt really strange. I was nauseous out of nowhere, my head was spinning, and I had a sudden fever. Normally I would think that I was having a bad reaction to the potion ingredients, but I’d only touched the dragon scales. It was like I couldn’t control myself anymore, which would totally explain the fact that I accidentally set fire to something. I mean, how weird is that? I normally have really good control of my fire affinity.
The weirdest part is that, by the time I made it to Nurse Dahlia, all of my symptoms were gone. It was like it never happened.
Then, a few weeks later, I was studying in the library with Kendra—she says hi, by the way—and I felt a weird itching on my back. It happened right between my shoulder blades and started to burn the more I itched it. I thought it was a rash, so I went to the bathroom to see if I could check it out in the mirror. The thing is, I got distracted by something else before I could look.
This is going to sound so weird, but my eyes were black. Like, completely black. Baby witch black. I freaked out and thought that I had age regressed or something and was losing my fire abilities, but my affinity is actually stronger than ever.
That’s been great, by the way. It’s like fire is listening to me in ways that it never did before. Kind of like we’re one and the same.
Anyway, the blackness faded from my eyes after a few minutes and they went back to normal. It was so strange that I haven’t told anyone about it, not even my friends or Nurse Dahlia or any of the witch professors. You’re the first person I’m telling, because I feel like you might be able to help me.
At the Halloween dance a couple of weeks ago, the itch in my back returned, only that time it was a really painful burning sensation. It almost felt like something was on fire and was trying to burst out of my spine.
Creepy, right?
I know you’re not a doctor, but I feel like you’re the only person I trust to tell these things to. I guess I could tell Kendra, but I don’t think she’d be able to help.
Am I sick? Is there some kind of rare witch disease that I’ve somehow fallen ill from? How do I make these weird symptoms go away?
Eagerly awaiting your advice.
Love you,
Moira
P.S. Can you please tell Whiskers that I love him and miss him, and I wish I could come home for just five minutes so I could kiss his cute little kitten face? Thanks.
I finished the letter to my aunt and sighed quietly to myself. It was one of the longest letters I’d ever written, but I knew I had to do something. I spent far too much time worrying about what was happening to my body and fearing the moment when it would happen again.
I just wanted to be normal and enjoy my senior year without the stress of a freakish witchy virus taking over my body.
Sitting up in my bed, I folded up the letter neatly and clasped it in both of my hands. I closed my eyes and concentrated on thoughts of my Aunt Inez, who had pale skin like me, but blue eyes like my mother. She also had long blond hair. In contrast, my mother and I both had thick, dark waves. Breathing in deeply, I summoned the memory of her warm smile and her gentle touch.
Keeping my eyes closed, I could smell smoke as the edges of the letter began to smolder. In a matter of seconds, the letter had burned to a crisp and disappeared into thin air, leaving not a single ash behind. I smiled, satisfied at my work.
Witch delivery was just as fast as email, which was great when you attended a school that didn’t have Wi-Fi—not that I hadn’t tried to convince Headmistress Somers to reconsider the latter.
I collapsed back on my bed with a huff and stared at the ceiling while I waited. My aunt usually didn’t take very long to reply, so I my plan was to doze off while I waited for the tell-tale mist of her letter arrival.
It was funny the way that witches put a trademark on their letter delivery depending on their elemental affinity. My letters usually arrived in a dramatic burst of—harmless—flame and pretty tendrils of smoke. Kendra’s arrived with a gentle breeze. Aunt Inez usually sent hers with a light misty fog that would dissipate in seconds. I’d known earth-inclined witches to send theirs with a flower blooming out of thin air.
Aunt Inez once told me that my mother, who also had a water affinity, liked to send her letters with several inexplicable drops of water that would land on the receiver’s head. Apparently, she thought it was funny that whoever received her correspondence would automatically look up at the sky and wonder if it had started raining, even if the sun was shining or they were indoors.
I thought about my mom. She died when I was only eight years old, so I didn’t remember much about her. All I could recall was that she had a soft voice, but a bold personality. She liked to joke around, according to my aunt. The thought made me smile. Both my mom and I preferred to not take things too seriously.
The worst part about losing my mother was that she died in one of the most human ways possible—a car accident. Most of us magical creatures liked to think that we were invincible, or at least too strong and fantastical to be taken down by something as mundane as a vehicle wreck.
The hard truth of the matter, however, was that there was still a human side to us. Even though I could summon flames with a breath of air and Luca Romanov could talk to ghosts and Talia could possess living beings, and Nurse Dahlia could inhabit both the world of the living and the dead at the same time… even though all of those things were true, we could still die the same way that any regular person could.
From what I knew, my mom wasn’t just a regular person. I think it bothered me that someone like her died like that. She was one of the most talented witches of her age. She was a healer, too. She worked with soul reapers in magical hospitals to heal the sick and injured.
She didn’t deserve to die. There were a lot of bad people in this world who could’ve taken her place. Maybe it was cruel of me to think that way, but I couldn’t help it. After all, it would’ve been nice to at least have one living parent.
The thing was, my father was dead, too. At least, that’s what I was always told.
I never met my dad. As the story goes, my parents fell deeply in love one summer when she was backpacking in Europe. They had a brief and passionate affair, during which time I was conceived.
Then, tragically—though no one had told me specifically how—he died a few months before I was born. My mom returned home and gave birth to me. Thankfully, the Bloodworth coven all helped to raise me. I never felt like I was missing anything because I grew up without a dad, but I did always wonder what he was like.
If my mom fell in love with him, I’m sure he was amazing. I wondered what kind of things I inherited from him. Was he also a little bit rebellious? Did he also have a fire affinity? Was he tall and thin like me? If he was European, what witch school did he go to over there?
I wiggled my nose as I felt a subtle layer of precipitation hovering over my nose. Blinking open my eyes, I swatted the mist away and a letter landed in my lap. I opened it up eagerly, hoping to have all my questions answered.
Dearest Moira,
I am so happy to hear that you’ve done well in your examination. Congratulations. I have no doubt that Brayton University will accept you into their Potions program.
It pains me to hear that you are unwell. If you are experiencing a fever and a rash, give me a few hours and I will send you some recipes for some remedies you can brew in your dorm. I am sure that it is merely the stress of school and impending adulthood that has you feeling a little out of the ordinary. I remember what it was like to be a senior at Under Realm Academy—great fun, but a little overwhelming.
Send Kendra my best and tell Talia that I saw her mother at the Witch-Demon Historical Committee meeting last Tuesday and she’d like her to call.
All my love,
Inez
P.S. Whiskers says, “Meow.” I believe that means he misses you, too.
I frowned at the page before me.
What the heck?
She hadn’t answered a single one of my questions. In fact, she completely glossed over my mention of black eyes and fire in my spine.
That wasn’t like Aunt Inez at all. She was caring and attentive, and always went out of her way to answer my questions and teach me everything that she possibly could. She was an incredible guardian in that regard. I was never left wanting for support or guidance or help.
Hence my confusion. My letter to her had felt urgent. At least, that’s how I had intended for it to come across. I’d pointed out symptoms that no normal witch would be experiencing. Not even a stressed-out witch would have black eyes and a persistent itch between her shoulder blades. I’d looked it up in the library.
The only explanation I could think of was that Aunt Inez was too busy to read through my letter thoroughly. But that didn’t seem right either. Ever since I first started going away to boarding school at the age of eleven, she had replied to every single detail I wrote in my letters, no matter how much work she had. Even when she helped Dior design a couture collection, she made time to answer my letters.
So, that didn’t make sense.
The only other possibility that did make sense made my stomach
flip unpleasantly.
Aunt Inez was hiding something from me.
I frowned deeply at the ceiling and tossed her letter onto the floor.
Why would she do that? Surely if she knew why I was experiencing such bizarre symptoms, she would tell me. Telling me meant that I could stop worrying. If I knew the cause of my inexplicable illness, I could just go get treatment. Even just knowing what was going on would help me calm down a little bit.
Maybe Aunt Inez had no idea what was wrong with me.
However, why wouldn’t she just tell me that?
Nothing was making sense. I thought about going to bother Kendra, who was reading in the common area, but I decided against it. I didn’t know why, but I felt timid about opening up to her. Even though she’d witnessed some of my odd afflictions at the library that one time, I didn’t know if admitting to my best friend that I might be horrifically ill with a rare disease that even Aunt Inez couldn’t identify was the best news to deliver in the middle of our senior year.
After all, Kendra was so taken with Luca Romanov. She hardly ever got interested in boys, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of that.
Talia might be a good person to confide in, but she was a demon. She didn’t know anything about being a witch, so she certainly wouldn’t be able to understand a witch illness.
I chewed on my lip and rolled onto my side.
I wished my mom were alive.
I bet if my mom were here, she wouldn’t have ignored the majority of my letter. In fact, if my mom were here, she probably would’ve boarded the first train to Under Realm Academy and used her healing powers to make me better herself.
I’d give anything to talk to her.
Suddenly, I sat up ramrod straight.
Moira Bloodworth, you are so stupid.
Was I even a witch? Did I know anything about magic at all?
Even if my mother was dead, that didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to her.