“It isn’t against the rules. I looked it up,” Firian said.
“It isn’t against the rules because no one’s ever tried it,” Professor Adams said. He also had a deep, distinguished voice. “Any boy of mine would be far too ashamed to bring his familiar to class. We might just have to make ourselves a rule. But—back of the room, at least.”
As the boys filed in, Professor Adams turned to the class with his most wild-eyed look still in place. “Today,” he said. “We are going to summon a demon.”
“Are you sure—“ one boy tried before getting cut off.
“Don’t worry, boys, I have all of this under control; this demon happens to be a friend of mine—a practice demon, if you will. We’ve had our differences, of course, ethereal to sinistral, in the tradition of fine debate. But this will not be a dangerous, fire and brimstone affair—“
“Damn,” muttered Royce Locke. Under his breath, he said, “I thought maybe we were going to see Roller Slut versus Werewolf with our own eyes.”
Everyone had gotten some idea of how the fight had gone because weird scuff and burn marks were left behind on the roller rink. Master Blair had hired someone to clean and polish or whatever you did with a roller rink. Plus it was now under renovation by his designer, because he was insulted that we’d made fun of his playlist. Everyone was mad that they couldn’t skate with the girls during the upcoming winter ball. And I was now referred to as Roller Slut. Because of course, I had been alone in the roller rink with a vampire and an incubus, and rumor was…ehh, you can guess.
“No. Summoning high demons is not something you should ever practice,” Professor Adams said. “Even summoning low demons is not advised. But, this is Merlin College, and you are the best of the best. There may be times in your life when you need a demon—for the greater good. To gain information. To prevent a tragedy. If you summon a demon for your own selfish purposes, you have taken a huge step toward the path of Sinistral. Remember—we are Ethereal warlocks. Honor, duty, community, benevolence, for we are the servants of the highest order. Now, I need a volunteer.”
Put up your hand, my gut said.
Everyone will make fun of me.
(I had officially reached the “my own private voiceover” stage of loneliness.)
Who cares? No professor has let you actually practice magic yet. Show them all. Especially—
I glanced at Harris. He had his hand up, just a little, because he knew every professor would look at him so he barely had to lift a finger. I quickly threw mine up too.
I heard soft laughter around me as soon as I put my arm up.
“Pick the girl!” a boy crowed from the back. “Pick—the—girl! Pick—the—girl!”
Luckily his effort to get a chant going was dead on arrival. Unfortunately, it was because Professor Adams snapped his fingers at Harris. “Nicolescu,” he said. Of course he did. Because Harris got whatever he asked for.
Harris slid out of his seat. “Can’t wait.”
“When am I going to get to practice any magic?” I asked. “Respectfully, Professor Adams, I have been taking classes for a month now and no teacher has called on me for one single thing.”
“You can learn by watching like the rest of this class. You are untrained. You are not ready to be summoning demons, even friendly ones.”
“Yes, watch and learn,” Harris said, smacking my desk.
“Clear your mind of wicked thoughts,” Professor Adams said. “Your mental state can leave you open to a demon’s influence.”
“I thought this demon was your friend.”
“She is. But you still have to take the lesson seriously. Now, this is ash you will use to form a pentagram. There are other ways to summon demons, as most of you probably know already. For instance, if you have an object that belonged to the demon, that can serve. You can draw the pentagram in the dirt, particularly in places where the energy is already strong. You can also use magical objects such as crystal balls, mirrors, or fire. Eastern traditions of magic will often use symbols instead of pentagrams. Using a pentagram or symbols to form a circle or gate will control the demon. It also usually makes the demon rather pissed off. Elise has consented to this method today just for learning purposes.”
“‘Elise’?” Ronan said. “Is she hot?”
“Well, she’s a demoness, so she’s gotta be hotter than Charlotte.” I wasn’t even sure who said that.
Bullying, I thought, was really dumb. Like, now that I was a target, they never let up. It was just a game, so why did I still get so upset? Firian was right. I could fight back…although I had no control over my magic, so I didn’t really want to fight back.
“I need silence in the room,” Professor Adams said.
Harris formed the pentagram on the old wooden floors. “Let me do that again,” he said, frowning. “It turned out smaller than I wanted.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know what they say about pentagram size…,” I hissed under my breath.
“That’s fine,” Professor Adams said. “It doesn’t actually have to be to scale. You don’t want to waste too many materials in this case. Now, part two of this is that you must have something to offer the demon for your request.” He reached under his desk and handed Harris a plate of cinnamon buns covered in plastic.
“Cinnamon buns?”
“She won’t say no to that,” Professor Adams said, with a little chuckle to himself.
I think at this point we all knew that Professor Adams was just summoning an old girlfriend. Well, whatever worked, I guess. They were probably lonely too. None of them had wives; maybe that was a rule. Sinistral wives had to be especially off-limits.
I was also getting very hungry. My grandmother made an awesome cinnamon-nut roll thing, and this smelled the same.
“I know you don’t know Elise. Normally you will either have a demon in mind, or you will simply have a favor you need, and you’ll try to summon the best demon you can for the task. In this case, invoke her name.”
“What favor am I requesting?” Harris asked.
“You’re asking her to show up in a room full of bored-ass teenage boys just for the purposes of this lesson. That’s more than enough.”
“I’m not bored,” Harris said. “All right. Here we go.” He took the plate of cinnamon buns. “Elise! I summon thee from Sinistral to appear before me. Elise…!” He said some stuff in Latin and then in French, lifting the buns above his head. Harris was doing an admirable job of making this look significant, I had to say. He had a lot of presence, and he said the words so forcefully. He wasn’t just treating this like a joke.
He might be an ass, but I think he is actually a good student, I thought begrudgingly. If I want to do a better job summoning a demon, I’ll have to really get control of myself…
A wisp of smoke rose from the center of the pentagram.
“Elise? Are you there?” Professor Adams asked, when the wisp just hung there for a long moment, putting off little tendrils of shadow. “Elise?” He sounded a little concerned.
“Elise, I command thee to appear before me!” Harris demanded.
Still just a wisp. The class started to snicker. Harris shot them a look and they shut up.
“I think something’s wrong with the demon,” Harris said. “It’s obviously not my fault. I can summon a common demon.”
“Elise is no common demon,” Professor Adams said.
Harris’ eyes crossed mine for a moment and I smirked.
He gave me his most insolent, superior, rich blonde snot look in exchange. “You want to get up here and try?”
I mean, it probably wasn’t the best idea, but no one ever called on me. At some point, it seemed I would have to insist.
“Sure!” I said, coming up to the pentagram.
“You can’t actually do this,” Harris hissed at me.
“How do I know if I don’t try?” I knew he wouldn’t give me the cinnamon buns. So I just clapped my hands together. “Elise, I summon thee! Come forth and show yo
urself!” Nothing was happening, so I tried to remember some high school Spanish. “Um…usted…por favor…”
Hopefully what happened next had nothing to do with my poor memory for foreign languages.
A dark face formed from the wisps and spoke in a voice that made me cold just to hear it. “Oh…little goblin…Charlotte…I know what you want…”
I screamed and backed up—into Harris’ arms. He grabbed me and kicked his foot through the ash over and over. In that brief second, where I was obviously too shaken to be sensible, I was actually glad to have his strong arm around me. It felt like everything was going to be okay.
“I expel thee, demon!” he shouted.
“You’re no Elise,” Professor Adams said, before chanting something in French. The dark face vanished back into the ether, the floor now scattered with a mess of ash.
“It’s over…it’s over,” Professor Adams said in a low, comforting voice. I jerked back from Harris and clung to his suit jacket in a moment of shock before I realized the Locke brothers and some sub-bullies were snickering again. I stepped away from him too and brushed off my jacket like evil demon smoke was clinging to me.
“All right, all right, boys—shut up,” Professor Adams shouted at them. “Charlotte, I want you to go see Master Blair and tell him what happened. I want some answers. You aren’t practicing any magic in my class until we know it’s safe. Seems like you’ve been marked by something pretty wicked.”
“Is—is Elise okay?” I asked.
“Oh, I bet Elise is fine. She can take care of herself. That thing probably just blocked her from getting through the channel because it had something to say to you.”
I nodded. I was all shaky now. “Is—is she going to eat the cinnamon buns?”
He grabbed the plate from Harris. “There you go.”
Well, the day wasn’t a total wash.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Charlotte
“Yeah…everything’s going pretty well. I mean, not perfect. Some of the guys kinda bust my balls, but they’re still not as mean as middle school girls, so…”
Dad laughed as I lied through my teeth to the person I loved more than anything. “Well, that’s good to hear. I can’t wait to see you for Christmas. I got those ribs you like for lunch today and they didn’t even taste that great without you.”
“Aww…well, the food here is super gourmet, and let me tell you, I miss your dad cooking.”
“I’m sure. Sounds terrible. Gourmet food.”
“I mean it.”
“Well, I was just blasting my Genesis records un-harassed, so it’s not all bad, being a bachelor.”
“Dad. Genesis insists upon itself.”
“You’re a bonehead.”
“What album?”
“A Trick of the Tail. You don’t actually care.”
“So it’s just a fancy way of saying you were listening to Phil Collins.”
I almost started crying really hard. You know when you love someone so much, and you’ve been around them so much, that you can speak entirely in a language of in-jokes, quotes from TV shows, and insults? It hurt. I’m glad he started talking about how he was doing some work on the house so I could get ahold of myself.
“Hey…just wondering…have you heard anything about your mom?” He said it so casually, but I could hear desperation and pain in his voice. He couldn’t hide from me. I probably wasn’t fooling him either. But I guess we both had to dance around this stuff.
“Not…really,” I said. “All I’ve heard about the family is that she had a cousin named Samuel who was a famous necromancer. Do you know anything about him?”
“Samuel—yeah. They were super close when they were younger. In your mother’s wilder days. When we got together and your mom settled permanently in with me, they didn’t talk as much. Sam and your mom used to travel together. They were like siblings. But she always seemed glad to settle down. I think it tired her out after awhile, you know… We all grow up. At least, I thought so, until…”
Until she was gone. I knew Dad had a hard time talking about Mom, so I tried to change the subject fast. “Anyway, I’ll tell you if I hear anything but mostly I’m focused on meeting…people.” I swallowed down my loneliness.
“Your grandma’s coming for Christmas, by the way, so I’ve gotta get the lights down from the attic soon… you okay, kiddo?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good—uh—“ Firian was motioning to me frantically, let me talk to him. “Firian wants to say hello.”
“Sure.”
I thrust the phone at him. “Hey. Yeah, yeah—she’s doing great…”
He took care of it for me. “Charlotte has a ton of studying, so she’s…she’d better get to it. But she’ll call again in a few days, she says. Yeah. Looking forward to Christmas too, hey…thanks.”
Tears were starting to flow. I really tried not to let that start, but I missed Dad so much. The house phone was inside a tiny, booth-size room that two people barely fit in, so I stepped outside.
Harris was in the hall.
When he saw my tears, he immediately backed up. “I’ll come back. Didn’t realize it was occupied.”
In a panic, I shot back in the booth. Firian gave me a wry look and produced a handkerchief for me. In another minute, he hung up the heavy receiver of the house phone. “I’m invited to Christmas with your grandmother this year. How’s he going to explain that one?”
“Well, she will definitely think you’re my boyfriend, no matter what we say.”
“Ah…yes. So we’ll just have to…dance around that.” He tilted his head slightly as he looked at me.
I dried my eyes. “This is so hard. I feel like I should tell him, but…he would be scared, and he doesn’t know anything about it.”
Firian nodded. “I know. But maybe we’ll have a few more answers by Christmas.”
“Hopefully we’ll get some answers now.” I put on a smidge of makeup to try and hide my sadness from Master Blair. He wanted to meet with me about the ‘incident’.
Unfortunately, I got nothing, except a ruling that I couldn’t practice any magic that touched upon other worlds until he knew more. He mentioned again how he didn’t want to stir trouble with the council. Sometimes I felt like he was more concerned with the council than my safety.
“Am I in serious danger?” I asked. “That thing seemed to expect that I would call it.”
“You are in the safest place you could be,” he said.
So I left feeling, if anything, worse than before. “None of the adults know anything!” I cried.
“You’re eighteen, Char. Welcome to it. Your guess is as good as anyone’s.”
“Oh great, so what’s even the point of going to college?”
I didn’t feel like going back to the dorm just yet, because Alec was there, and before I even got that far, I’d have to pass through the common room, where I might see Harris and Montague. So I was just wandering with my hands in my pockets when Firian suddenly said, “We should go back.”
“What? Why?”
“The Locke boys are shadowing you.”
My stomach clenched. “Oh.”
“It’s okay. I’m here. But no need to tempt fate.”
“Aren’t ‘ethereal’ witches supposed to be the good guys?” I hissed. “How are they not ‘sinistral’?”
“It’s not that simple.”
I was currently on the tree-lined path that looped around the entire campus, passing by the side of the gymnasium, which was a boring tan building with a colonnade front, and the small conservatory, which was shaped like a birdhouse made of glass. I veered back toward Lancelot dorm.
I felt like the Locke brothers could smell my fear. I heard them coming up behind me with long strides. I glanced around for potential help, and saw a few other boys wandering around campus in the distance. None of them looked familiar.
“Hey, Roller Slut,” Ronan said. “Are you gonna turn around?”
I kept ignoring them, walking
faster.
“Do you want to see our familiars? Since you showed us yours…,” he leered.
“No.”
Suddenly a snake appeared out of thin air around my neck. I screamed, flinging it off me. The snake slithered back to my feet, but it looked at Firian. “Are you a familiar…or a babysitter?”
Firian stomped on the snake—well, almost. It vanished in the nick of time. But as soon as his foot hit the ground, Ronan lunged at him, knocking him to the ground.
“Thanks for giving me an excuse,” Ronan said, punching Firian.
“Nobody messes with our familiars,” Royce said. “Especially not another familiar.”
Firian vanished out of sight and Ronan’s arms hit the pavement as it knocked him off balance. He got to his feet and turned to me. “Well, while he’s busy…”
Royce grabbed my arm. “Are you gonna burn me?” he asked. “I heard it’s the only move you know.”
“We’ve considered reporting you to the council, but you’ve been a lot of fun to have around.”
“We never know what you’ll do.”
“…except that it’ll be so fucking inept that it’ll make us laugh.”
“So much for having the powers of Samuel Caruthers! I guess you take after your grandmother. Such a bad witch that they wrote her right out of the Caruthers family…”
“Let me go,” I said. “I don’t want to burn you.”
I wondered what happened to Firian.
“If you’re looking for your fox, our familiars were just waiting for him to go to Etherium so they could…hold him up.”
Ronan grabbed a fistful of my uniform shirt. “Do you get the picture? You’re going to leave this school in shame. You’re going to beg for it. But they won’t send you home to your family. You’re too dangerous now. They’ll put you away with the vampires and the other fuckups where the council can keep a close eye on you.”
A Witch Among Warlocks: The Complete Series Box Set Page 13