“None other,” Lucas agreed. “Amelia, this is Percy.”
“An absolute pleasure,” Percy purred as he offered a hand. I shook it but pulled my hand back before he could kiss my knuckles or something.
If Lucas was, in top form, a classy looking aristocratic gentleman, then Percy fashioned himself one of the landed gentry. His pin-striped suit was tailored with a matching vest, a high collared white shirt beneath it, and immaculate, elaborate black leather shoes on his feet. His hair, the same dirty blond as his brother’s, was swept to one side and back, and eyebrows did not grow that precise without a little help from some wax and linen.
“Nice to meet you, Percy,” I said. “Um… I’m happy to meet Lucas’s family, even without any advanced notice whatsoever, in a house robe, before I’ve even had a chance to blow-dry my hair much less be ready for company, but, what exactly are you doing here?” That last part I asked while eyeing a sheepish Lucas.
“Well,” Percy said, doing the same, “I did not know I was unexpected. But it looks like Isaac is working on breakfast so—I’d say I got here just in time. As to why, I’m your ride to the Academy.”
“Portals are Percy’s specialty,” Lucas said by way of explanation. “He’s taking us direct.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well… thank you, Percy, for going out of your way.”
“Not at all,” he said, waving a hand as he took one of the stools by the island. The one on the other side of me from Lucas. Closer than was really appropriate. “Not a problem at all. It’s on the way, in fact. I’ve taken an adjunct professorship for a new class.”
“Oh?” Lucas wondered. “I didn’t know about this. What class?”
Percy looked at me and gave a broad, thin-lipped smile. “The history of Abyssal magic and Outsider Cults. I’m something of an expert.”
I shivered and had to resist the urge to cringe away from him.
And here I thought the year just might be a normal school year. Well, as normal as any year was going to be at Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts.
Apparently, I was dead wrong.
Amelia
“It can’t be a coincidence,” I told Lucas a couple of hours later, after breakfast and while Percy was busy setting up the portal spell to connect us to the Rosewilde portal room—which is a room I didn’t even know existed until he talked about taking us through to it. “All the shit that happened last year, and now, suddenly, they want an expert in the building? And did you know about this?”
Lucas held his hands up. “I knew Percy was in Iran studying with some specialist, but he didn’t tell us anything about it. I swear, Amelia, if I had thought Percy could help us out last year I would have contacted him. My family isn’t exactly communicative.”
“It’s true,” Isaac confirmed, rolling his eyes. “You should spend a Christmas at the Turner estate some time. Lucas’s family are all mired in secrets.”
It wasn’t hard to imagine a family of magicians all hiding things from one another. I sighed and glanced at the door into the hallway. We’d returned to the bedroom, mostly so that I could finish packing. Not that there was much to pack. Rosewilde provided uniforms, and when I first arrived last year I hadn’t seen my suitcase again until after exams. Still, I had gathered some underwear and a few books I hoped I would have time to read, notebooks, pens—things like that. No point in taking much more.
I rechecked my suitcase for the third or fourth time. “It feels pointed, is all I’m saying,” I muttered. “Like they’ve brought someone in to keep an eye on me.”
“Perhaps they have,” Isaac said. He took my hands off the suitcase, which was as packed and organized as it was ever going to be, and turned me to look at them. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have someone around keeping an eye out for you. But it may not be about you at all.”
“How could it not be?” I demanded. “Are there other abyssal harbingers just waltzing around the halls of the Academy? We should meet; maybe we can start a cult.”
Lucas chuckled as he pulled my suitcase across the edge of the bed and zipped it closed before hefting it off the bed and onto the floor. “It could just as easily be more about Sinclaire than about you. Who knows how many more people he was involved with that might still be working there? Or students? He kept a tidy operation.”
“Or,” Isaac added, “it may really be a coincidence. They bring in adjuncts every year with specialties that aren’t part of the usual curriculum. There’s almost nothing in the general or restricted library on the subject. Or last year would have been a lot easier.”
“Whatever the case,” Lucas said, joining the two of us to put a hand on my cheek, “all that matters is that you aren’t a danger to anyone, and that no one becomes a danger to you. I know the former is true; it’s the latter that I want to stay true. What Percy lacks in boundaries or couth, he makes up for in wits. I haven’t spoken to him about you. At least, not the stuff you’re worried about. But I could, and he might be able to ensure that whatever happens next doesn’t drag you into a place you don’t want to go.”
I supposed he wasn’t wrong. Neither of them were. It didn’t really make the feeling go away—that someone at the Academy was worried about what I might do, what I might become, and had gone to some effort to contain or defend against me.
Nathan’s warning about me had affected me. Deeply. I had carried it around all summer, watching my every move, my every thought. My nightmares had continued but they had evolved. I hadn’t had the ocean dream in months now, but I had plenty of others to take its place. This morning’s crazy “thing at the end of the bed” dream was quickly becoming a new classic. There was one where I was lost in the halls of Rosewilde while being pursued by shadows, and one where the boys and Serena were all in an empty room, their eyes inky black. My personal favorite was the one where I was falling off a cliff and could see Nathan above me on the edge. I never dreamed the part where he pushed me, but I always knew that he had. That one ended with the crushing darkness of the Abyss swallowing me whole. Always a favorite.
It was amazing that I slept at all. The only reason I ever did was thanks to some of the techniques I’d gotten from a lucid dreaming manual last year, courtesy of Mara Eze, the Academy librarian. I never did manage to master the actual technique, but I’d learned to put myself to sleep at least.
“I guess,” I sighed, and let them both put and arm around me.
“Nearly done,” Percy called up from the kitchen.
I winced. “He’s not carving anything into the doorframe, is he?”
Lucas gave a noncommittal, “No…” but after a moment shrugged. “At least, I don’t think so.”
That was all I needed. Repairs to do when I got back. “If he ruins the frame,” I warned, “you’re going to be responsible for fixing it. The old-fashioned way, too.”
That earned me a grimace from Lucas, who had grown up with magic. If the way they did things at Rosewilde was any indication, there was every chance Lucas hadn’t so much as picked up a hammer in his life, much less ever done home repairs by hand.
“We should head down,” Isaac said. “The sooner we get there and get settled in, the better. I hate the anticipation before school starts.”
Lucas grinned wide. “Well, there’s always the start-of-term party to look forward to.”
I blushed thinking about it. There were probably already seniors at the Academy working the spells that split the Cabin into seven different spaces, all slightly out of sync with one another. Last year, Serena had taken me, and I’d wandered right into a room full of magicians having a kind of no-holds-barred sex party. I’d seen Lucas and Isaac there, too, and wondered if that’s the party they would go to this year.
“Don’t worry,” Lucas murmured in my ear, “this year, we’ll see to it that you enjoy it far more than last time.”
A queasy tremble in my stomach turned into heat between my legs. I cleared my throat and extricated myself from them before anyone got any ideas and grabbed the
handle of my suitcase. “Are we going or not?”
The two of them followed me back downstairs as Percy raised his hands to begin the portal spell. I tried to follow from the side, watching the gestures carefully, but they were more complex than anything I’d witnessed before. Some of them looked almost as though he were stitching something, others were a tangled mess. The magic happening, though, was impossible to miss; the air hummed with it. The doorway took on a dense blue glow that grew brighter as tendrils of light crept out like a spiderweb made of slow-moving lightning, all reaching out to a point at the center of the double doors.
Percy muttered the spell quietly to himself. I thought it was something Semitic, possibly Hebrew, but if so, it was a dialect I didn’t know yet. I barely caught any of it and was so focused on trying to observe that when he finally finished and gave a final, booming clap of his hands it startled me so badly I almost slipped off the edge of the counter I had rested my elbows on.
I recovered, thankfully, before anyone saw me. The space between the lines of the glowing web over the door to the backyard filled in as if someone were blowing away mist to reveal a black void that drank in light before itself dissolving into the image of a room with the familiar old wood of Rosewilde Academy’s flooring.
“That’ll do it then,” Percy said, grinning around at us as he stepped aside and gestured through. “Nothing magical through the doorway, please. Except magicians, of course.”
I didn’t have anything that fit the bill, at least. Other than myself. Lucas and Isaac went through first. When I reached the portal I paused. Did I count as a magical… object? Or creature? I looked at Percy. “What happens if something magical goes through?”
“Some magic disrupts the fabric of the portal,” he said, raising an eyebrow as he peered at my suitcase. “If you’ve got anything, it’s really best if you leave it here.”
How much did he know about me? I shifted on my feet, and when Lucas held a hand out I passed him my suitcase. Percy spread his hands. “Clearly nothing worth worrying about.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, and balled my fists up as I attempted to dip a toe into the portal. Not that there was anything obviously fluid about it, but I put just the tip of my shoe over the perfect line that divided my house in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the academy in the mountains of Vermont, just north of Moretown.
The portal did not collapse and cut off my toe or… something. I exhaled the breath I was holding quietly and took a slow step across two hundred miles out of the house I’d inherited from my godmother and into Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts.
Lucas and Isaac both bit a lip, their eyes wincing slightly as if I still might explode. “What?” I asked, and glanced back through the portal as Percy stepped through. I reached up to touch my hair, confused about what was wrong. “Did it do something to—”
The wave of nausea hit me like a slap to the face and a punch to the gut. With it came dizziness that would have dropped me if Lucas and Isaac didn’t rush to my sides and slip their arms under mine. They hoisted me forward to where a large bucket waited. I didn’t have to ask what for.
When I finished emptying the contents of my breakfast, thoroughly mortified at having done so with such violence in front of the boys, Percy offered me a handkerchief as Lucas helped me to my feet. None of them seemed remotely worried or embarrassed at my display. Very helpfully, the bucket remained empty, my lost breakfast hopefully not appearing over someone’s head elsewhere in the world. I tried not to look anyone in the eye as I wiped my mouth. “You could have told me.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Isaac said. “But on the upside, it really only happens the first time. It’s the spatial displacement. Your body has never moved so quickly from one place to another, and there are all sorts of small differences we don’t notice—air pressure, temperature, even gravity, though it’s a very small change.”
“Also, master portal magicians do it all a bit cleaner,” Lucas said softly. Not so soft that Percy couldn’t hear him as he closed the portal down.
Percy snorted as he unwove the portal. “Hey, next time you can do it yourself, ingrate,” he complained. “Or hire one of the three or four master Doors in the world.”
“Cheaper to buy a first-class plane ticket,” Isaac said.
The portal turned off like someone had thrown a switch, just like before, and we were officially on campus.
“May I take your bag, Miss Cresswin?”
I snapped around, barking in surprise. I had flashbacks of the first day I’d arrived at Rosewilde as I nearly tangled my feet. This time, though, I managed not to fall down a flight of stairs. For one thing, there were no stairs.
Lurch, the Academy’s… well I wasn’t sure what his actual role was, held a hand out, his flat blue eyes just as mysterious as they had been a year ago when he picked me up in Moretown and drove me up the mountain. “How did you…?” I stared at him, and ducked to pick up my suitcase and hand it to him. “There’s stuff in there that I need.”
“Any contents that are not contraband will be transported to your dorm room, Miss Cresswin,” he droned as he took the suitcase and turned to leave us.
I peered up at Lucas. “Okay, what is the deal with that guy?”
“Not a guy,” Lucas said.
“Girl, non-binary, whatever,” I pressed.
Isaac chuckled. “No, he’s not a person at all. He’s a golem.”
I stared after Lurch as he left. “That’s a golem? But he… I mean it does explain a few things but he’s so fast, and he can drive, and speak.”
Percy watched the golem leave the room through one door before waving us toward another on the opposite wall. “The Academy Golem was made by an exceptional enchanter, Finneus Goldman. He loved sculpture, so all of his golems look almost lifelike. Never could make the eyes just right… anyway, there are about a dozen of those around. Believe it or not, all that intelligence is just six thousand fifty-seven lines of algorithmic enchantment and a direct connection to the Academy database. Brilliant work.”
“Just?” I wondered, shaking my head. The things that some magicians considered ‘simple’ was beyond me.
“That’s down from fifty-eight thousand individual enchantments,” Isaac said.
Alright, well… it was all relative, I supposed. As we left the portal room, just as another portal began to take shape behind us, I flicked my hands through a Whisper spell and reached out to Hunter. “Hey! We just got back. Where are you?”
The magic worked; I felt it move out of me, felt the air around my lips stir as the message was carried off. But even after the ten minutes it took us to leave the North Wing of the academy and emerge into the courtyard, Hunter hadn’t responded.
Lucas and Isaac both seemed to notice when the look of disappointment settled on my face despite my best effort to hide it. If he was here at the Academy… maybe he didn’t particularly want to talk to me.
Maybe the summer had just been too long to go without talking.
Hunter
“Hey! We just got back. Where are you?” Amelia’s whisper reached me unexpectedly, and I almost turned to look around and spot her before the contents of her message really set in. I looked at the door I’d been about to walk through, and my insides tried to pull in two different directions. I started to Whisper back but…
It would have to wait. Just until I knew a bit more what the year was going to look like. Better that way, so that I didn’t give Amelia the wrong set of expectations before I knew what they were myself. I had missed her over the summer and felt like a shit for not going up to Cambridge at least once. That had been the plan, originally. I had wanted to see her, desperately, but everything with Nathan stole the summer away.
I pushed through the door into the recovery clinic. It was mostly empty now. There were always at least a few students and sometimes a faculty member in residence here, working with master psychics as they had their psyches repaired after one mishap or another. Or, sometimes, j
ust learning too much magic too quickly. Or getting stuck on the astral plane, or in a dream world, or undergoing a nasty possession in a necromantic rite or… well, the list was long. Almost all of them recovered in a few weeks or a couple of months.
That was because the psychics that handled recovery sessions had seen almost everything.
Almost.
“Hi, Gina,” I thought pointedly as I let the door close behind me. The perpetually cheerful telepath behind the front counter didn’t look up from whatever task she was working on but responded as though she had.
“Oh, Hunter,” she sent back, her voice in my head like I imagined it myself. “Good to see you as always. Nathan just finished a session, he’ll be coming out of room,” the image of the icon marking the session room he was in flashed in my mind. The same one as before, and before that. One of three high security rooms.
“How was he last night?” I asked.
There was a tinge of concern in her mental voice when she answered, and a delay that was uncommon for telepaths. As if she were prepping herself before she replied. “He’s made a lot of progress.”
That was a non-answer, and I left it like it was. I had authorization to see him for a few hours each day between sessions, so I walked past the small, comfortable waiting area, down the hall to the room he was treated in and waited outside the door until it opened. My mind drifted toward Amelia, to the kiss that almost happened, the feeling of her pressed up against me... and I wrestled my thoughts away. No need for Gina to “overhear” anything like that.
“Hunter,” Nathan’s regular healer said as he came out of the room. Master Larson was a monkish type, complete with orange robes and a long mala made of inch-wide beads like something out of an eighties kung fu movie. He bowed when he greeted me.
I gave him a nod in return as I searched over his head through the open door. “Can I see him?”
“Of course,” Master Larson said, and stepped aside. “It was a particularly intense session today. He may be somewhat out of sorts for the moment, but he will right himself in time, as all things do when allowed to settle into their natural state.”
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 2