I shook my head, but I must have looked bad enough in the moment that my guilt wasn’t obvious because Lucas just kissed me before he let Isaac through to do the same.
“Ghosts are assholes,” Serena said, “but they can’t actually hurt you. They just make a big show and talk you to death basically. If it comes back, just turn over and don’t listen to it. Jealous bitches; they’re just pissed they can’t eat, piss, or fuck anymore.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll… try to remember that next time.”
“There won’t be one,” Isaac assured me. “Yakovich will take care of it. Come on, tell us about what happened with Nathan. Say what you will, but we need to have a talk with him.”
“Fine,” I said as they led me down the tiers of the courtyard to our favored spot under a peach tree that always had fruit in its branches.
I did tell them, though I hated the thought of them going after Nathan too hard and said as much. Yes, he was an asshole, and yes, he said awful things. I still hurt for him, and for Hunter who was stuck dealing with him. I could feel all those things at the same time.
And in the back of my mind, as I laid it out, I tried to remember—had Sadie’s ghost ever actually touched me? And if not—if it was just some other ghost who’d seen what happened and wanted to fuck with me for whatever reason—then could I afford to call her bluff when or if it happened again? She’d wanted to rip my heart out, after all.
That was a hell of a gamble.
Amelia
It took three days to hear back from Yakovich that, in fact, the six ghosts bound in great big warding boxes in the sub-levels of the academy were secure and not going anywhere. “However,” he said, tugging at his pointy goatee, “this does not mean there are no other restless spirits on the campus. I will perform appropriate rituals and investigate. Ghosts cannot harm you, do not fear.”
He had tapped his chin at that, and spread his hands as he shrugged. “Wraiths, revenants, shades, poltergeists, and eidolons, however—these can be quite dangerous.”
“Uh… and how do I know the difference?” I had asked, bewildered.
Yakovich quirked an eyebrow. “They will be able to do you harm.”
“Wards,” I demanded of Lucas and Isaac when the creepy old dean was finally gone. “I want wards against all of that, and astral projection, and psychic intrusion, and anything else.”
“All right,” Lucas said, urging calm with his hands. “We can do all of that. Between the four of us we should be able to shut down anything trying to get in.”
By ‘four’, of course, he meant them, myself, and Serena. Hunter was almost entirely absorbed in Nathan’s ‘recovery’, which I was beginning to think didn’t actually mean anything. As far as I could tell, nothing about Nathan had changed. I had done my best to avoid him, even going so far as to show up to Wardwell’s class at the last possible minute to take whatever seat was furthest from him. I waited until everyone else had left to leave, and made a habit of taking the door out to the greenhouses and going the long way around. The boys had talked to him, apparently, and even warned him off. But they came back sympathetic to both of us.
“Good,” I said.
“But”—Isaac held up a finger—“before we do that… maybe we should talk to Mara. If we could get a better look at whatever it was, that could help set the right wards, and even help Yakovich trap or banish whatever it is.”
A thrill of panic straightened my back. “I wouldn’t want to bother her with it,” I said. “And the room does need cover, so, we could just hit all the bases?”
“Sure,” Isaac agreed, “but honestly… there are always going to be gaps. Something we didn’t think of.”
With any luck, Mara would just refuse. She did like Isaac, but she didn’t particularly like actually using her magic except in service to the library books. I crossed mental fingers that she would decline his offer to leave the library and peer through time in my room.
“Oh,” I said, just thinking of it, “my roommate—he doesn’t spend much time in the room; I’m actually not sure where he spends most of his time, we don’t have any classes together. But maybe we could set the wards while he’s out? I don’t want to freak him out; he seems a little… um, well actually he doesn’t seem like the type who gets freaked out about anything, but still.”
“Pete?” Lucas mused.
I sighed. “Yes, Pete.”
“You do know the academy can tell if you’ve got a roommate or not,” Serena said. “Making someone up doesn’t change how they manage the dorms.”
Owing in part to the fact that I had no idea what Pete’s schedule was, and he’d taken to having his meals away from the dining room for some reason, I had never managed to quite create an opportunity for them to meet him. When I’d told Isaac and Lucas about him they admitted they hadn’t noticed him sitting across from me on the first day of class. Serena outright denied his existence.
“With any luck,” I grumbled, “he’ll be there and we can finally lay this whole thing to rest.”
“Could be he’s your ghost,” Isaac offered.
I thumped him in the arm, barely hard enough to sway him. “Har har. You’re making it worse, you know.”
“Roommate or not,” Lucas said, “let’s ask Mara. We’ll need to get some books anyway if we’re going to turn your room into a small fortress.”
We left the courtyard where we’d congregated after lunch, entered the west wing of the Academy, where the entrance to the library was, and predictably found Mara where she always seemed to be—behind the front desk, reading a book in one hand and sorting recently returned ones with her other. She barely looked up as the door opened. “Mister Roth,” she said. “Mister Turner. Miss… Cresswin. Serena. What can I help you with? Not up to anything dangerous, I hope?”
I had never heard Mara use anyone’s first name. I glanced at Serena, curious, but there was nothing there to see.
“We actually have quite a favor to ask,” Isaac said as he sidled up to the desk and started to lean on it until Mara shot him a warning look. He smoothed his jacket instead. “Ah… so Amelia’s recently had a bit of an incursion, and we’re having a time trying to figure out what it was so that we can properly guard against future visits.”
“This is the ghost that Yakovich was looking for?” Mara asked.
Word did travel. “Yes,” Isaac confirmed, “but it turns out the ghosts downstairs are all still secure. It was only a few days ago now. Do you think you could… drop by with us and help us get a look?”
She closed the book she was reading, and took her glasses off to rub the bridge of her nose. “I have told you before, Mister Roth, that peering through time is a delicate process that I do not exercise incautiously. You’ve got a ghost. Ward the room in all nine directions and it won’t matter what kind of spirit or spell plagues you, none of them will get in.”
I relaxed tension I didn’t realize I was holding in my shoulders.
Isaac wasn’t ready to take no for an answer, though. “Mara, please,” he insisted, pouting out his lower lip a little—just enough to make his lips seem slightly sexier than they already were. That was never going to work on someone like Mara, though. “As a personal favor? I’ll whip up anything you like in the lab, I promise. You know what last year was like for Amelia. I just want to keep her safe.”
I started to interrupt him. “Isaac, last year was—”
Lucas put a hand on my arm and shook his head, suppressing a smile.
Mara gave a long-suffering smile as she stared at Isaac’s most adorable puppy-face, and then looked at me before her placid frown turned to real sympathy. A bit of a crease between her eyebrows, the sudden appearance of faint lines at the corners of her eyes. She spread her hands. “My price will be steep and you will pay it without question,” she said, pointing at Isaac. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“Excellent,” Isaac chimed. “You’re the best, Mara, you know that?”
Mara snorted as she s
tood from her seat.
I put a hand out. “Oh, you don’t have to… I mean we can do it later, we need to get some books and plan some—”
“Nonsense,” Mara muttered. “May as well do it while it can be done. The longer we wait, the murkier the past becomes. More than a week, and too many streams have intersected, and I could be looking at a past that never was. We’ll go now, while it is relatively fresh. How long ago, did you say?”
Isaac looked to me. “Dinner three days ago, just before—about ten to twenty minutes, would you say?”
I knew my eyes must have shown my panic. I stammered the response out. “Uh… yeah, that’s… something like that.”
“Good enough,” Mara breathed with no small amount of irritation as she led us through the door and down the hallway.
If I tried to tell them I didn’t want it, they’d wonder why, and I’d have to make something up for that, which would probably lead to some other lie or omission, and I knew from both experience and common sense that you could only manage so many lies before they came tumbling down around you. Laura had proved that to me more than once when I was a child.
And while I tried to figure out how to keep Mara from looking into the past and seeing Sadie accusing me of being her murderer, we managed to make it all the way to my door. Mara looked it over. “No wards at all?”
I shrugged uncomfortably.
“Could have been anything, then,” she said.
“Isn’t the whole school protected?” I asked. “I mean, are we supposed to prepare for this kind of thing?”
She knocked lightly on the door before she opened it, and I half-hoped Pete would be in there but he apparently wasn’t. “This is a school for magic, Miss Cresswin,” Mara said as she looked around the room slowly. “You have to prepare for everything, because anything is possible. Give me a moment, then.”
Mara Eze dipped her hands into the pockets of her jacket and pulled out a magnifying glass and a twenty-sided crystal icosahedron. She muttered a few words before she placed it in the air around the center of the room, where it hung suspended, perfectly in place as if she’d fixed it to time and space itself.
She took a slow step back, continuing to mutter spells in a language that didn’t seem at all familiar until I realized she was speaking backwards. It was Sanskrit, maybe, or some variation, and as she spoke the spells, she cast with both hands—different gestures with on each. We all stood back from the door, and as nervous as I was about what she would learn, and reveal to the others, I couldn’t help but marvel at a master magician at work. I was always impressed with how easily the boys, and even Serena, seemed to pull off the most complex spells, as if their hands were made of putty. Mara was over ninety years old—even if she didn’t look a day over thirty, or sometimes forty depending on her mood—and had been at this longer than we’d collectively been alive.
It showed. Magic built up in the air, first just whispers of power being stirred up, but then visibly as threads of gold began to pierce the air and pass into each of the crystals faces. It wasn’t until all twenty sides were threaded that she brought both hands together gradually and then made a slow turning motion with her hands.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe for my life for the past three days to go streaming by in reverse? From the outside, though, nothing seemed to change, though there was an odd kind of pressure in my ears, like the air pressure rising. Mara adjusted the crystal’s orientation several times, each time lifting the magnifying glass up to look through it, until, finally, she let out a soft gasp. “Oh, dear… that is most likely not good at all.”
“What?” I asked, desperate for her to just say that it was the ghost of Sadie and accuse me of killing her.
Instead, she turned to us with a grim look in her eyes and held the magnifying glass up for us to look through, far enough away that we could all cluster around and try to see.
“This was the moment after you entered your room, before dinner, three days ago,” she said. “I believe you can see the problem.”
I could. We all could.
Just like the story Nathan told me about Mara’s investigation into Sadie’s death, my room and everything in it was shrouded in absolute darkness.
Whatever had killed Sadie—really killed her—had been in my room that night, with me.
Or, even worse…
It was me.
Amelia
We left no potential metaphysical stone unturned. Over the next few weeks, all while Pete was frustratingly away at just the right time to miss them, we painted sigils, set crystal anchors, even hung a variety of animal bones around the edges of the room. If Pete noticed or cared, he didn’t say so. The only comment he made at all was late one night while I was studying.
He came in as quietly as he normally did, looked up at the animal bones, and made a rare sound of curiosity. “Worried about wendigos? Something I need to know?”
“Just covering our bases,” I muttered.
“Smart,” he said, without inflection at all to tell me if he was being sarcastic or not. “The day you’re not expecting a wendigo is probably the day one of them gets you. You never expect the thing that gets you, though, I suppose.”
I was protected from wendigos, in fact. And a long list of about fifty-something other nasties, several of which the boys were convinced did not exist. After picking apart the structural elements of some of the wards that purported to keep out things like ‘bogeys’—which Isaac got a good laugh from before offering to just buy me a palette of tissues instead of going to all the work—it was clear that at least a few of the warding practices were nothing more than superstition.
That didn’t stop me from putting them up, however, or the next ones, or the ones after that, until the state of my dorm made my and Hunter’s old room seem tidy by comparison.
“Well,” Serena said, the day we exhausted the last of them just after dinner, “I’d be surprised if you could get back in here with all this going on. I have to say, the boys do pretty good work. You, too.” She had her hands up, formed into a triangle as she looked around at what I knew was a dense network of mystical energies all crammed together in the walls, ceiling, the floor, the space under the bed, even the closets.
She had no idea how close to home the comment struck. Two of the wards were suggestions of Percy’s, and I’d taken them. They were meant to keep out Abyssal magic and entities. Lucas was skeptical that they worked at all. “Percy’s specialty as a magician isn’t Abyssal anything,” he complained. “It’s talking himself up, and he’s a master.”
“Just help me?” I’d insisted. And he had, and Isaac had, and even Serena had pitched in, until all of us has sore fingers and raw throats and the smell in my room was… exceptional.
“I’m not too worried about me,” I said. “Yakovich says there are no ghosts, Mara can’t identify that… darkness that covered my room, and I’m not taking chances. Now, I don’t have to. Honestly, when I’m awake at least there are normally people around. It’s going to sleep that worries me.”
“Still having nightmares?” Serena asked.
I shrugged. “A few. Not as bad as over the summer. Or while we were picking apart that fucking book last year. Mostly just your standard ‘running down an endless hallway from a faceless horror until you run off a cliff into a black sea full of crawling things’ kind of dream. You know the type.”
Serena gave me a horrified look. “I mostly have sex dreams.”
“These are sometimes sex dreams, too,” I said. “They don’t usually end very well, though.”
She heaved a sigh and flopped onto the edge of my bed. “You are stressed.”
“I think it’s a combination,” I told her as I sank onto the bed next to her. “Stress, a looming sense of doom, a certain asshole I won’t name who I can feel looking at me every time we’re in a room together, waiting for me to prove that I’m fundamentally evil and… well, the fact that somewhere deep down I might actually be fundamentally evil.”<
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“Please.” She leaned into me. “You’re fundamentally pure as the driven snow deep down. I can smell it on you, all the time. It’s a smell that says ‘this girl probably doesn’t even masturbate she’s so repressed’.”
I nudged her back. “Shut up! I do… you know.”
She threw her head back, laughing. “You can’t even say it! You’re adorable, Amelia; I’m so glad we met. I’ve got to take you traveling sometime. Nothing makes me happier than corrupting the innocent.”
“Which one of us has a soul from the Abyss, again?” I wondered.
Serena gave a pretty snort, and rubbed my knee. “Have you thought about talking to someone? About your dreams, I mean.”
“I have,” I said. “All summer before I came here for the first time. I had this therapist… she was good, I guess, but she thought my dreams were all about things like… you know, parental issues, or anxiety about being a woman and grief from losing Laura. I sort of don’t think eldritch horrors from outside reality were quite in her scope of practice.”
“I do think everyone needs therapy,” she said, “but I meant more along the lines of someone here. Like one of the dreamers.”
At that, I laughed. “Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that. I don’t want anyone running around my dreams. Honestly I don’t even know if that’s safe, Serena. They’re dreams to me but sometimes they feel intense. Real. I can’t always wake up from them when I want and this summer I woke up casting a few times. Ask Lucas; I could have done damage.”
“Still,” she urged gently as she stood, “it’s something to think about. The other thing to think about in the meantime, however… is the Inter-Academy Gala.”
I blinked at her. “The who-now?”
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 10