by Lan Chan
When we got back in our dorm, Sophie and I elected to eat inside rather than brave the crowds in the dining hall once more. “The others have been asking after you non-stop,” Sophie said. She was helping me to put away all of my new things. A free standing cherry-wood closet had appeared by magic in my room. I’d also been given a new pillow and a stack of text books were sitting on my side table. I’d never seen this much new clothing in one place except an actual store.
“What others?”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “The ones we fought with in the trials? You know, the dwarves and the tiger shifter?”
Understanding dawned on me. “Oh! They were real? I just assumed they were also an illusion.”
She made a face and then seemed to contemplate it. “Yeah, that’s probably a fair call given everything else. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“And so they should be!” Basil piped up from the bed. In the very short amount of time he’d been with me, he’d somehow made himself a little fortress with mirrors. He’d taken the one on the wall down and also confiscated Sophie’s compact which she was not impressed about. “It was the most exciting trial since the one Malachi Pendragon first fought.”
“How would you even know?” I asked.
He huffed. “I saw the whole thing.”
“You did what now?”
He pointed to the mirror. “They were broadcasting it to the magical community. My favourite part was when the weedy little boy got raked by the manticore and curled over and cried.”
“That’s real mature, Basil,” I said. “And what do you mean the whole magical community saw it?”
He pointed harder at the mirror. “This is how we communicate.”
“Through mirrors? Snow White style? Mirror mirror kind of thing?”
Basil snorted. “Snow White was such a base witch. She couldn’t even tell a poisoned apple from a normal one.”
I didn’t even want to unpack what that meant. My mind was simply racing with the knowledge that every person in the supernatural community might have seen my breakdown at the end. “Poor Fred,” I said. “No wonder he didn’t want to leave the infirmary.”
“On another note,” Basil said, “Can somebody lend me some money? I need to make a bet with the dwarves.”
“Does it look like I have any money?” I asked.
“How did you pay for those new things?”
“Academy credit.”
Sensing I was useless to his purposes, Basil turned to Sophie. She pretended not to notice and was putting my clothes on hangers. He cleared his throat a number of times. “I can’t hear you,” she said.
“All I need is two hundred manna,” he said.
“Two hundred!” Sophie exclaimed. “That’s three months of my salary.”
“I’d get it back to you. All that needs to happen is for Obsidian House to win the Unity Trials.”
Sophie threw him a dark look. “You want me to lend you a butt load of magical currency so you can bet against my House winning the end-of-semester trials?”
I had no idea what either of them was talking about. They kept arguing. It started up again after Sophie came back from collecting our food and then well into the night. Finally, I’d had enough.
“Will you two please be quiet? It’s my first day of school tomorrow and I do not want to be left behind by a class of twelve-year-olds.”
They both grumbled but stopped talking. Now that I was sleeping in a room, it was much harder to physically draw the circles around my bed. Instead, I did it in my mind before I drifted off to sleep.
My eyes peeled open in the middle of the night. It was dark. All I could hear was snoring. I couldn’t tell whether it was Basil or Sophie, but that wasn’t what had woken me. I listened to the wind whispering outside the window and the rustle of leaves in the nearby treetops. I had this incredibly sucky habit of being fully alert almost as soon as I was awakened. It was something I’d honed on the streets. A habit I so wanted to break. Tonight, I tried to squeeze my eyes shut again. But closed eyes does not a sleep make.
And then I heard it again.
That voice inside my mind. It punctuated every syllable with a low cadence like it was struggling to push speech past a barrier. You know, that voice they always used for ghosts in scary movies. One winter, when it was especially cold outside, I’d started sneaking into movie theatres to seek shelter. Unfortunately, my timing was crap and they were showing a slew of horror movies. This voice definitely spoke of things haunted.
Not wanting to wake Sophie because she had classes the next day too, I grabbed Basil by the arm and carried him outside our door. For a soul inside an inanimate object, he sure slept like the dead. I wasn’t even sure why he had to sleep because he had no physical body. But he’d cited keeping in a routine for the day when he would be free. It was wishful thinking. He’d already told me that given his age, his physical body would have expired long ago. There was only one real way for him to gain his freedom. He had to be unbound. With no body to go back to, that freedom would ultimately end in his death.
“Psst, Basil.”
There wasn’t a curfew in the Academy per se, but it also wasn’t a good idea to be caught in the hallways at three in the morning. My so-called guard was out cold. I shook him. He grumbled and tried to swipe at me.
The disembodied voice moaned. A shiver ran down my spine. Rattling Basil harder now, I craned my head to try and get a lock on where the voice was coming from.
Basil snorted and rubbed at his woollen eyes. It’s funny the habits that we keep. “What’s happening?” he asked. “Why are we out in the hall?” He was suddenly all alert. “Are we being attacked? Where are they?”
“Shhhh. Not so loud. No, we’re not being attacked.” I’d stalked all the way to the top of the staircase. Peering down into the darkened halls, I tried to get a gauge on what it was I’d heard. The boys’ wing was on the other side of the dorm building. There were definitely rules about going over there. Especially at night.
You only have one choice, the voice groaned.
I spun around. Ice stole the heat from my body. “Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“That voice!”
“All I hear is you screaming.”
I clamped my mouth shut.
They will never accept you. All you’ll ever be is subservient. You only have one choice: kill them all.
I pointed futility where I thought the voice was coming from. Which to be honest was everywhere and nowhere. It occurred to me that I might only be hearing it in my head. But Basil caught on.
“You’re hearing voices?” he asked. I nodded vigorously. “Did you set up a sleep circle last night?”
“I always set one up.”
“What is the voice saying?”
I hesitated. If it was just a voice in my head, the last thing I wanted was to let people know that it was urging me to kill everyone. That seemed like the kind of thing that could get a person in a tonne of trouble. “Umm...it says a bunch of stuff about not fitting in. About having no choice.”
Basil propped his nonexistent chin up with a fluffy hand. It wasn’t as dignified as he thought the gesture would be. It was more cute than anything else. But I would never tell him. Sophie had suggested something similar and he sulked for an hour.
“What does the voice sound like?”
“Like all the voices I hear in my head!” Uh oh.
He turned to me then, his expression somehow quizzical for an inanimate object. “What do you mean all the voices you hear in your head?”
I could feel my eyes darting around. In hindsight, telling him anything was probably a bad idea. If this was how Basil reacted, I probably should keep my mouth shut from now on. “Lex.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Now that I think about it, it might have just been a dream.”
He repeated my name in that stern adult voice that people often used on me. Like I was some wayward child.
�
�Don’t worry about it!”
“I do worry about it,” he shot back. “The women in your family....they tend to fall prey to...suggestions.”
“Are you insinuating that I’ve been possessed?”
“With that kind of lip on you? No. But voices in your head are never good. Not when coupled with the fact that you should be undetectable by supernatural means. At least while you sleep.”
“Doesn’t that mean that it’s not me but somebody else?”
He contemplated this. “It could mean a lot of things. Telepathy, while common, is a dangerous ability. It’s what the Dark One uses to bend others to his will.”
“The Dark One?”
“What the humans call the Devil.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, of course not. The archangels managed to bind him and banish him to hell, but he is and always will be, one of them. The greatest one of them bar perhaps Michael. He will never be truly defeated. And always, he is calling to those who are weak, those who are broken.”
Goosebumps ran up and down my arms. I thought of the other voice I often heard in my thoughts at times when I felt like all hope was lost. That voice had kept me company for the first lonely months I spent on the streets. It had never seemed insidious. Then again, I had thought it was just a figment of my imagination. Now I wasn’t so sure.
I tried to warm up my body by massaging my hands over it, but the cold seemed to have seeped into my very soul. It wasn’t every day that you learned the devil, evil incarnate, was a real thing.
“And you think I could be susceptible?”
“All humans are susceptible. It’s what he loves so much about you. It’s why he chose to make this dimension his.”
All of this talk of morbid things had distracted me from the voice. After a couple more minutes on the landing, I didn’t hear it anymore. “Come,” Basil said. “You need to get some rest.”
As I slid back under the covers, I couldn’t help but turn to Basil. “Were you there when that thing infected Nanna?” I asked,
He made a mournful sound. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “I never spoke to your nanna, you know. She wasn’t like you. Strong-willed, yes, but she’d grown up as a human. Her grandmother felt it was too dangerous for your family to continue to be part of this world.”
“Why?”
“You’ve seen what you can do, Lex. Low witches are not meant to possess that kind of power. Here at the Academy you’ll be somewhat protected. But out there, in the real world, there will be some who will see you as either a threat or a tool. And those will be the ones who are supposedly on our side. Don’t even get me started on the demons who have managed to escape the Hell dimension.”
“Right,” I said, turning onto my back. “This is all very reassuring.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t intend for it to frighten you. But I keep thinking I should have been there for Betty. That I should have spoken up and warned her. I was worried revealing myself to her might frighten her to the point of breaking. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Irony wasn’t what concerned me. “You don’t think I’ll break?”
He snorted. “If you could have seen the look on your face when you thought Betty had burned alive in that trial, you wouldn’t be asking me that question. Now sleep.”
“Basil,” I said, as a yawn overtook speech. “Can you tell me everything you know about my great-grandmother?”
He hesitated. “I will tell you everything I can one day. Now sleep.”
When I closed my eyes, sleep did come to get me. But not before I heard a sigh inside my mind. Not like the voice that had moaned before. But a softer sound. Something that was so light it could have been blown away by the breeze. It carried with it a single sentiment: Rest, little one.
18
Despite my interrupted sleep the night before, I woke up earlier than the screeching mirror alarm and felt strangely calm. Sophie on the other hand groaned when the mirror sounded and tossed many a clothing missile before violently pulling off her covers. The moment her feet touched the carpet, the alarm cut out.
“You have to admit,” I said, “that’s pretty impressive for glass.”
She grumbled something about hating early birds and shuffled out the door to the bathroom. Having already showered and changed into a new pair of dark blue jeans and a light grey T-shirt of my own, I took the time to pore over my schedule while I waited for her to return and we could go down to breakfast.
Basil inspected my new backpack. It was made of navy canvas with varying sizes of white stars scattered all over it. A bit childish if you asked me, but Sophie said it was whimsical. Was that the look I was going for? Now that I was going to kiddy school it seemed like a terrible choice.
“Where shall I position myself?” Basil asked.
“Where is what now?”
He jumped up onto my knee where I’d spread my timetable. “You don’t expect me to sit around here all day?”
“That’s exactly what I expect.”
“Now hold on a minute. I’ve been cooped up in a storage box for years. I’m not going back in there.”
“Well you’re definitely not coming with me. Especially not to the junior campus.”
“And why not?”
“For one, how old are you exactly? How am I going to explain that I’m carrying around the spirit of a thousand-year-old mage into a school with children?”
“A thousand years? I’ll have you know I’m not even a hundred and ten yet.”
Sophie arrived back. “I can hear you guys arguing from down the hall.”
“Basil thinks he’s going to come with me to school.”
“That’s so not happening,” Sophie said. “The security around Bloodline Junior Academy is astronomical. No way are you going to be able to bring a spirit past the barrier.”
“There you go,” I said. “No more arguments.”
If mages could throw tantrums, Basil looked like he would have thrown himself on the floor. Sophie and I made a break for it before it could escalate any further. Halfway down the staircase, I asked her whether it was really true that the barrier wouldn’t allow me to take him. She pumped her brows at me and we fell into a laughing heap.
“No seriously,” she said, “they do have beefed-up security. But you really don’t want to be that girl carrying around a doll. We’ve got enough social issues as it is without that one on top of everything else.”
I bit my lip. “I do feel bad for him cooped up like that.”
She turned to me, her arms coming down on either side of my shoulders. We were halfway to the dining hall. More students than I had seen on the previous day were scurrying around us. “I know he seems harmless enough,” she said, “But we have to put some boundaries on him. Binding a consciousness isn’t a spell that’s done lightly. Whatever he did, it has to have been pretty bad.”
I’d never thought about it that way. “Hmm. I just thought maybe he and my great-grandmother had a falling out.”
“Who knows?” Sophie started walking again. “Mages aren’t something to sneeze at. Maybe we can look him up in the library records. All supernaturals of note are in the Book of Beasts.”
We stopped talking as we got closer to the dining hall. The hubbub from inside was almost deafening. “First day,” Sophie said. She straightened her spine and joined the back of the line. Today, the huge double doors that enclosed the dining hall had been opened wide and extra tables and chairs set up outside on the lawn. It turned the hall into a bit of an alfresco dining situation. I could feel more than a couple of eyes on the back of my neck, but Sophie linked arms with me and made us stare straight ahead.
Once again there was so much food on offer that I had a hard time choosing. I had gone from famine to feast. The hungry girl inside of me kept waiting for someone to pull the rug out from underneath me.
“Don’t you dare put that muffin in your backpack,” Sophie said through a grimace. My arm stopped mid-air.
“But –”<
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“You know this place is always open because everyone is on different schedules. You don’t have to hoard food anymore.”
“I don’t like coming here alone.”
She shook her head at me. Then she nudged me in the back with her tray, and I had to leave the muffin behind. In the end, I settled for hot buttered waffles with maple syrup, fresh cream and blueberries.
We were casting around for somewhere to sit when I caught some people waving at us. I did a double-take and squinted. They were sitting on a patch of grass beside the tables set up in the open air.
“Oh good,” Sophie said. “Come say hello.”
I was going to ask who these people were but then a horde of bodies appeared in our path. I tried to sidestep Brigid and her posse but she danced around me. Not wanting another repeat of last time, I drew a quick protection circle in my mind around Sophie and me.
“Well, look what we have here,” Brigid said. As if she had read my mind, Sophie rolled her eyes.
“Excuse me.” Once again, I tried to move aside. Golden Wings blocked my way.
“So I hear you got yourself into Obsidian House,” Brigid said. “Are you deaf or something? Did you not hear me tell you to stay away from Malachi?”
She was clearly drinking crazy juice. Nobody at the trials could have accused me of being chosen last on purpose. It appeared that Golden Wings had not filled her in on that part. Or maybe she was too scared to speak up.
I glanced around for a teacher or someone to break this up, but the students sitting around us had closed ranks. They blocked off my line of sight to the others who had waved at us. I so badly wanted to lay low and coast through the middle, but she wasn’t giving me much of a choice. I also didn’t want to just be a doormat either.
“Yes, I’m a new member of Obsidian House,” I said. “Since I’m being upfront, I’m also seeing Kai every weeknight for private tutoring lessons too.” A hush fell over the crowd. Since I was too much of a nobody to have ever been involved with schoolyard politics, I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. I certainly didn’t expect for Brigid to raise her hand and send a gust of wind whipping our way.