by Sarina Dorie
Perhaps the drain of electronics was why my adoptive mom had budgeted to buy me a new iPhone for Christmas every year. She hadn’t exactly wanted me to embrace my powers. Abigail Lawrence wanted to hide magic from me, fearful I was going to get hurt or draw the attention of Fae who would snatch me up. I’d come to realize neither fear was that farfetched.
Jeb drummed his fingers on a messy stack of papers. “For this reason, we’re fixin’ to teach you to control your powers and help you find your path in our world.”
Thatch snorted. “Even if you risk injuring one of the students or staff, apparently. If I hadn’t been there to put out that fire—”
“Lord have mercy! Shut your trap. I heard you the first time.” Jeb cast Thatch an annoyed glance. “Who’s the sheriff around these parts?”
A sardonic smile tugged at the corners of Thatch’s mouth. “Principal. I think you mean, ‘Who is the principal?’”
“That’s what I said, dagnabbit!” Jeb turned back to me. “Where was I, darlin’?”
“Um… .” This was not how I had envisioned my first heart-to-heart conversation with an all-knowing, all-seeing wizard. This must have been what Dorothy had experienced after Toto outed the Wizard of Oz. I prompted, “You want to help me find my path and learn to use my powers?”
“Right. Left unmanaged in the Morty Realm, it would only be a matter of time before your powers harm yourself or others,” Jeb said. “The energy within you is a big ol’ beacon to any Fae fixin’ to snatch up an unregistered Witchkin. We could have drained your powers to keep you safe. We could have sucked you dry of all magic, so that no Fae would ever recognize you or abduct you to become a slave in their court.”
The memory of the Raven Queen and how she’d tried to claim me as her tithe—as her sacrifice—made ice race up my spine. She’d been beautiful with her liquid black eyes and a gown made of feathers. The lullaby of her voice had seduced me. The very air around her tasted of candy-coated black magic. By Fae laws, I could have been hers. Not only had I used magic in the Morty Realm, but I’d unwittingly used magic on one of her servants. I still didn’t know why she’d allowed me to strike a bargain with her.
I could see why a high school like Womby’s existed for the half-breed offspring of Fae and Morties. Witchkin needed a place to learn magic that wasn’t in the Morty Realm where it was forbidden. A place to learn to hide from the Fae and protect themselves.
Jeb had given me that chance as well. I lifted my chin. “Thank you, sir.” More than anything, I needed magic. I needed to understand who I was. I suspected he understood that. “Thank you for not draining me.”
Thatch’s voice slithered across the expanse between us, so quiet I almost didn’t hear him. “It isn’t too late for that.”
Jeb grimaced at Thatch. “You, shut it. This ain’t my first rodeo.” He tugged at one end of his mustache, the curl springing back into place as he turned to me. “You don’t want no drainin’, so that leaves the other option. You gotta stay in our stronghold, safe from Fae and creatures who would do you harm. We’ll teach you to harness your powers, but you gotta hold your horses on the magic part. Learn outside of school hours so your charges ain’t put at risk. You’ll obey the rules of the Unseen Realm like the rest of us and follow our school rules so you ain’t puttin’ no one in danger. And from what I understand of your past, courtship is out of the question. We don’t want this school to get blown to smithereens from some kind of fertility magic. Can you get behind this?”
“I understand. No boys. I’ll follow the rules. Thank you.” It was hard to hide the eagerness from my voice. “When can I start learning magic?”
Thatch made an insolent tsk. My face flushed with heat. I did sound like a child.
Jeb arched an eyebrow at him. “Felix, you got a bee in your bonnet?”
He dipped his head in mock apology. “No, Jeb. I never get bees in my bonnet.”
“Miss Lawrence has got herself an earnest enthusiasm for learnin’. Bless her heart,” the principal said kindly. “That privilege for learnin’ has been denied her entire life. Are you objectin’ to her right to an education when the time is right?”
“No.” Thatch lifted his chin. His voice was even and calm. “I object to her presence at this school. If she follows in the footsteps of her mother, all of us are put in danger. None of the teachers on staff are powerful enough to sense forbidden magic. If I hadn’t immediately gone to Miss Lawrence’s classroom earlier, she would be dead by now. The school would be burned to ashes. Only a Merlin-class Celestor such as myself has the skill to put out a seraph-fueled fire. Imagine what would have happened had I not been around.”
“Thank you kindly for makin’ your indispensability so clear.” Jeb folded his weathered hands in front of him on the desk. “Sure ’nuff, you are the most powerful and skilled of all teachers at our school. I’m mighty pleased how keen you are on the welfare of our students, and I’m indebted to your unexpectedly selfless concern, Felix.”
Thatch slouched against the mantle, arms crossed. His eyes narrowed.
“I agree that somethin’ has got to be done to ensure Miss Lawrence don’t stumble down some dark rabbit hole of evil. As a department head, you surely have more than enough to do. But seein’ you’re one of the most powerful Witchkin at this school, and you’re fixin’ to keep her out of trouble, I’ll task you with her education until the school year begins.” Jeb hooked his thumbs into his belt, reminding me of a cowboy.
Thatch’s face remained a mask of unreadable calm. “If she lasts that long.”
“Um,” I said, standing up. “Maybe I should focus on my job before I start studying magic. I have a classroom to set up and—”
“Yep,” Jeb said. “And then Merlin here will see to your learnin’.”
The principal could not be serious. Felix Thatch was the one person at the school who shouldn’t have been teaching me magic. Maybe Jeb wanted me to fail. Or maybe it was a test. Yes, heroic characters in fantasy novels were always tested.
That settled it. The person who hated me most was about to become my teacher. I would do anything to learn magic. Even this.
CHAPTER THREE
Encounters of the Witchkin Kind
I had hoped that once I came to Womby’s, everything would be clear to me: I would understand where I came from and how my powers worked. Now that I knew Derrick, my former best friend and high school sweetheart, was in this realm, I would get to see him. We could be together again, if not romantically then at least as friends, and I would know who my biological mother was and what she had done to make everyone hate her—and me.
No such luck. The rest of the meeting had gone downhill from the moment the principal appointed Thatch as my new mentor. When I asked if they’d had a student named Derrick Winslow five years before, Jeb said student records were confidential. He evaded answering questions about my mother.
I wasn’t going to learn to control my powers—or anything else—from a kind and benevolent mentor.
I trudged back to my classroom. One thing I hadn’t gotten used to during the two days I’d been at Womby’s was all the stairs. To get to my classroom from the principal’s office I had to descend three flights of stairs, go into the main passage, pass the seventies-era cafeteria/great hall and hang a left, go down another hall with crumbling plaster that probably contained lead, and up four flights of stairs to the most remote tower in the school. It was the farthest wing from the West Tower where the main office, Jeb’s office, and administration facilities were located, and several flights higher than the main levels of classrooms. I tried to look on the bright side. My classroom wasn’t that far from my dorm room, only two flights up and a hallway away.
I had learned during student teaching that the fine arts and industrial arts wings were usually the farthest from other classes. On the plus side, that meant micromanaging principals, like the one where I did my internship, were more likely to observe classrooms other than
mine. I’d probably have a lot of freedom at this school. On the downside, I got turned around in the twisting passages. I could sort of tell the difference between wings by the eras of architecture and their levels of disrepair.
The great hall and the corridors outside it were ancient and made of stone, resembling a medieval monastery. A more recent addition of converted classrooms were built in a Gothic style with arches and stained glass. Another section resembled Frank Lloyd Wright architecture with the same mold problems associated with his designs. The student and teacher dormitories were reminiscent of a Victorian mansion. Each wing snaked out from the main hall in a different direction, like the legs of a spider. The mishmash of styles built on top of each other reminded me of Howl’s Moving Castle, only on crack.
I hadn’t considered the impractical nature of an old building: a lack of running water in many of the rooms, cracks in the walls that were big enough I could see daylight outside, and how large and difficult it was to navigate. The stone of the hallway was covered with black-and silver-banners— the school’s colors. Crests, portraits and trophies decorated the walls. The paintings didn’t move like in Harry Potter.
Already I felt disappointed with the school’s underwhelming magic.
It only took me about twenty minutes to find my classroom this time. I knew I was in the right tower when I smelled the unmistakable odor of bleach and Lysol. After I’d arrived at the school the afternoon before, I’d spent over three hours scrubbing the walls and floor to bring it up to my standards of cleanliness. Though, even standing on one of the sturdier tables to reach higher, I couldn’t remove all the splatters and cobwebs from the grimy stone walls. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high.
I grabbed my roll of duct tape and turned to gather up a poster. A looming figure blocked my supplies. Startled, I dropped my duct tape. Thatch smirked.
“Sorry, didn’t hear you come in.” I laughed in my nervousness. I casually inched back.
“Witchkin do not use nonorganic cleaners and human-crafted disinfectants.” He waved a hand at my bucket of cleaning agents. “I can smell those chemicals all the way down in the dungeon.”
“This wing has a serious black mold problem.” I scurried after the roll of duct tape and slipped my arm through the hole like a bracelet. “And there were dark splatters on the wall that looked a lot like blood. It was unsanitary.”
“You should have seen the mess the last teacher left it in before Ludomil set the crew of brownies to cleaning.” He eyed the sooty rectangle that remained on the wall where Guernica had been.
“Ludomil?” I asked.
“Mr. Ludomil Sokoloff, our head custodian.” He said it in his don’t-you-know-anything tone. “After the last teacher exploded, it was a gore-fest in here. You’re fortunate you didn’t arrive a week earlier.”
“Exploded?”
He waved at me dismissively. “The former art teacher had a little accident.”
My expression must have given away my horror. “What do you mean ‘accident?’ What happened?”
He smirked. “Let’s just say the students were tired of learning about postmodernism and decided to demonstrate their version of a Jackson Pollock painting—with his blood. As you can imagine, it didn’t go over well.” He shuffled around boxes of my art books and files, glancing through the contents. “They never caught the students who did it.”
“That’s supposed to be a joke, right?” I fiddled with the roll of duct tape on my arm. Thatch was just trying to scare me, I reasoned. He wanted me to leave the school.
He looked up from the box of posters. His gaze followed the movement of my hand spinning the duct tape around my wrist. I removed the roll and set it on the table. I didn’t want him to think it was a grubby, Morty accessory to match my even grubbier jeans and T-shirt, now spotted with bleach stains and cinders.
He unrolled a poster with an Albert Einstein quote, reading it out loud. “‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’” His nose crinkled up in disgust. “I suppose you think this resembles you. That every child is a special snowflake, and you are the most original, extraordinary flake of them all.”
I wasn’t going to reward his sarcasm with an answer. “Did the students really attack the last art teacher?”
He eyed the duct tape with a disapproving grimace. “I do hope that is for silencing the students.” He lifted it with two fingers as if it were something gross, like his underwear. “You can do as you please, but if Ludomil catches you using any kind of tape on his walls, he’ll do more with your blood than splatter it across the walls.”
Cheery much?
“How do teachers hang stuff up?”
“Spells, of course.” He looked me up and down. “Unless they’re you and can’t use magic.”
What an ass-hat! I would have kicked his behind out the door right then and there if he hadn’t been so big and tall and able to hex me with black magic. I crossed my arms.
“Is there something I can help you with?” Or had he left his dungeon of doom just to awe me with his wit?
He pursed his lips. “Headmaster Bumblebub requests all staff currently on the school grounds attend dinner. For some reason he thinks you’ll look forward to meeting the other teachers. Six o’clock sharp in the great hall.” He said it with his usual unenthusiastic monotone. “There, I’ve relayed the message.”
I gestured to the clock on the wall that was stuck on twelve thirty. “Speaking of time—”
“Something I have so little of, especially now that I have one more incorrigible student to teach.” He turned to go.
I ignored that comment. “Do you know what time it is?” I’d left my phone in my purse in my dorm. “My wristwatch went missing from my nightstand and the one on the wall—”
He sighed in exasperation. “A digital watch, I suppose.”
“Yes?”
“See rule three in the student handbook regarding electronics.” He started toward the door again.
I had skimmed the handbook. Like every school I’d interned at, students weren’t permitted to use electronics. That didn’t answer my question.
“Wait! Do you know what time it is?” I asked.
He lifted up the long sleeve of his tweed jacket, glancing at his bare wrist. There was no wristwatch as far as I could see. “Five thirty,” he said. “By the way, your first magic lesson is tomorrow morning. Seven o’clock sharp. I will not tolerate tardiness.”
Ugh. I soooo didn’t want to learn magic from him. Especially not at the butt crack of dawn. But he was my teacher. I would try to make the best of it.
“Seven. Great. Thanks.”
“If you have the courage to show up.”
That irritating way his eyebrow lifted, his bored indifference, the way he came in and tried to intimidate me about my job—I couldn’t take it anymore. “Why are you acting like this? What is your problem?”
“You.” He sighed in an overdramatic way one usually expected from teenagers. “It’s bad enough I have to teach at the same school as you, but now I have to … teach you.”
“Look, I know you didn’t like my mother, but I’m a different person than she was.” Being nice to him was more painful than having teeth pulled, each word a struggle to form, but I gave it my best. “I know you don’t want me at your school, but I’m here, so you might as well get used to it. We’re going to have to work together.”
He ignored my attempt to make peace. “Don’t think that because Jeb wishes me to teach you, I’m going to make this easy for you. You are a danger to those around you. The moment Jeb catches you using one of the forbidden arts of pain magic, necromancy, or blood magic… .” He glanced at the burnt remains of poster on the wall.
My blood turned to ice. Never had I realized getting a papercut could be so dangerous.
A sinister smile tugged at his lips. “He will insist I drain yo
u of your powers, leaving you as a mortal. It will only be a matter of time before you show your true nature and kill someone. I’ll be watching you.” His eyes narrowed. “Closely.”
I swallowed. On the plus side, he hadn’t threatened to turn me into a toad.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sweet Dreams
It wasn’t uncommon for me to have bad dreams when I was stressed. Nor was it uncommon to dream of Derrick. When magical things popped up in my life, sometimes my guilty conscience punished me with nightmares of the tornado that had whisked Derrick away. Being at a school for Witchkin, surrounded by people who cast spells, couldn’t get more magical. It shouldn’t have surprised me I would dream of Derrick.
What surprised me was how real it felt.
I lay in my old bed, in my childhood room, surrounded by My Little Ponies, Strawberry Shortcake, and fairy decorations. Part of me knew this scene wasn’t right. That room had been destroyed in the tornado.
Warm sunlight filtered in through the window. An arm slipped around my waist under the Tinker Bell bedspread.
Without even looking, I knew it was Derrick. I snuggled closer to him. He smoothed my hair away from my face and kissed the back of my neck. I wanted to savor this moment, but the incongruity of being an adult in this bed tickled my mind.
“This is how I always imagined it would be.” His voice was slightly deeper than I remembered.
I turned to look at him, wanting to confirm it was truly Derrick. His blue hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen him in real life, his face leaner and older. He grinned, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes as he leaned closer and kissed me.
That kiss was like falling into the embrace of warm water. I allowed the current to sink me deeper. The tension in my muscles melted away. He squeezed me to him, his fingers sweeping against my naked arm.
Holy cow! I was naked. It was going to be one of those dreams… .
I wanted this to be real, but I knew it wasn’t. Derrick had never stayed the night in my bed. The one time he had been there briefly in high school was after my sister had spiked my drink with alcohol and he’d put me to bed. He’d told me he would talk to me in the morning, and he would kiss me again if I still wanted to another time. He’d been too much of a gentleman to stay the night. Plus, my parents would have freaked if they’d found him in my bed.