“Sorry,” she muttered. “Word travels. Did something happen? I mean… other than, you know, everything.”
I started to tell her nothing was wrong, but… something was. And I had to say it. Someone needed to share it with me and I couldn’t bear to put it on the boys. Or even Serena. Not when they had so much faith in me. “I keep seeing Sadie Chapman,” I whispered. “First in my room, and then just now. She looks like she did when I… uh, when I found her. I guess I’ve never been in that position before, you know? So maybe it happens to everyone. I was her mentor. Or, I was supposed to be. Maybe it’s just guilt but she’s so… real.”
Nina was very quiet after that.
Shit.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed as I pushed myself up to my feet. “You didn’t need all that, and it’s insane, I know. I’m a mess. It was nice to meet you—”
“It’s okay,” she said as she stood. “Really, it is. Um… this is probably going to sound like I’m making it up but… I’ve seen her, too.”
I stared at her.
“I swear, I’m not—”
“No,” I said quickly, recovering, “no, I believe you. I just am a little shocked. No one else… when did you see her?”
“Just around,” she admitted, shrugging. “I was in class, Wardwell’s 100-level Thaumaturgy, and I was taking notes and then I looked up and she was just… there. By his desk. I looked around to see if anyone else noticed and when I looked back she was gone. And then in the dining hall? It was breakfast, five or six days ago, Tuesday I think, and she was sitting across from me just… watching me. I freaked out and got up and then she just wasn’t there. I saw her in a bathroom mirror, in my dresser, just… everywhere. I thought I was crazy.”
It meant something. It meant it wasn’t just me, that I wasn’t losing my mind, that there really was something happening. Maybe it really was Sadie’s ghost, or revenant, or whatever, I didn’t care if it was fucking Fury sent by a pissed off god as long as it wasn’t just in my head. “Have you told anyone else?”
Nina shook her head. “I guess I thought it was just stress?”
“Did she say anything?” I pressed. “Anything at all, has she spoken?”
“No,” she squeaked. “Nothing…”
I realized I was slowly invading her space. I backed off. “Sorry,” I told her. “I’m just… honestly I thought I was losing it, too. Um… do you mind coming with me to the junior dorms? There’s just… there’s someone else I need to tell about this and I think if you’re there it will be easier and then they’ll know that it isn’t just me. Which probably sounds even crazier but—”
“It doesn’t,” Nina assured me. “I get it. I wanted to go to the necromancy dean, Yav… Yas…”
“Yakovich,” I offered. “Yeah, I did go to him. He said there were no ghosts or anything. But my boyfriends are a little more open to the idea there’s something going on.”
Nina raised an eyebrow.
I shrugged. “It’s… a long story.”
I led her up the stairs and down to the junior dorms, where I listened a moment at Lucas’s door before I knocked. I didn’t mind walking in on them, but Nina… well there was no telling what she was used to or not.
No one answered. “Lucas?” I Whispered.
I waited a full two minutes with no answer, so long that I actually imagined the brief tingle of air in my ear a couple of times. That was… not right.
Lucas wouldn’t have put anything dangerous on his door, but I tested the doorknob carefully at first, before I eased it down and then pushed it open carefully. “Lucas? Isaac?”
There was no answer, but the silence in the room made my stomach twist. I reached a shaking hand inside and felt around for the light switch and pressed it.
No!
I fell to my knees inside the door, my hand over my mouth, too horrified to even make a sound. Isaac was slumped over the desk, his eyes wide and staring, tarred with black ooze, his lips thick with it as it dripped off the side of the desk. Lucas was half on the bed, half on the floor, as if he’d been crawling onto it to get away from something. His mouth was open wide, as if he’d been screaming, and as my heart pounded in my ears I could almost hear it, like an echo left behind.
Nina’s hand rested on my shoulder and I flinched away before I remembered she was there. I cracked like glass, into a million jagged pieces, as my heart threatened to choke me.
“This is your fault,” Nina said softly. “You must have killed them to. The way you killed Sadie. What a shame.”
I bolted to my feet, a knot of grief and fury and fear, my fingers crooked into two halves of some spell I didn’t even know, words crackling over my lips.
For half a second, I froze, staring into Sadie’s dead, smiling eyes.
And then I was on my back, struggling against her, screaming as I tried to form spells with my hands, biting at whatever I could manage as magic churned in my veins.
“Amelia!”
If I could just summon enough, maybe I could force her back. I tried to push with raw magic.
“Get Master Larson,” someone snapped. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her!”
It wasn’t Sadie, or Nina—if there even was a ‘Nina’. It was Isaac, trying to hold my hand open with his while Lucas held the other.
The fear and fight poured out of me in a high-pitched whine of mixed relief and horror at something else entirely. I’d been… had I been dreaming? I didn’t remember going to sleep. “Lucas?” I asked. “Isaac? You’re alive… Oh god… Something’s wrong with me…”
“Amelia,” Isaac breathed, and then his arms and Lucas’s were under me as they helped me sit up. The two of them crushed me between them, shushing and rubbing, their hands tangling in my hair, stroking down my back.
“It’s all right,” Lucas insisted as I sobbed between them, “we’re here, you’re awake. Whatever it was, it was a dream, it wasn’t real. Let it out… it’s alright.”
Isaac pressed his lips to my temple. “We’ve got you.”
I had to get it all out, once it started. They held me close as I cried, until the last sob left me, and my eyes stung from giving up too much. For the last minute or so, I didn’t even have tears left. My throat hurt, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. If either of them noticed how utterly ragged I must have looked, they didn’t show it.
When the crying spell was past, and I was left shaky and weak, my stomach sore from it, they finally asked. “What happened?”
I didn’t want to tell them. Still, after all that, I just hated the thought of how they’d look at me if they knew. I was slipping. Something had gotten to me, and if it wasn’t a ghost, or a poltergeist, or a fucking wendigo or something then the only options left were inside and… if they looked at me, just once, like I was losing my mind or like I was going dark, I didn’t think I could take it.
Maybe they read some of that in my hesitation. Isaac knelt at the edge of the bed, took my hand, and looked up at me, pleading. “Amelia, whatever it is, we can work through it together. Anything at all.”
Lucas rubbed my back, from the nape of my neck down to the base of my spine, and pressed his lips to my hair. “Please don’t shut us out,” he breathed. “We’d never turn on you. Please believe that.”
I wanted to. So… I did.
It still took a moment for me to compose myself, but when I finally had they watched me with sympathetic, compassionate expectation instead of the nervousness that I expected.
I licked my lips and steadied my breath before I spoke. “I saw Sadie again,” I said slowly. “And then something else. This… girl. Nina. Except I don’t think she was real, and I brought her here and saw… I saw the two of you. Like Sadie. It was as real as this is. And…”
The lump in my throat returned. I swallowed around it and croaked out the rest. “I think there’s something really, really wrong with me. I think… I think I could have killed Sadie.”
Hunter
I closed the door harder than I meant t
o when I marched to his room. Nathan didn’t even look up from his work, where he stared at the diagram he was working on before, motionless. “Were you going to tell me you were going to teach Amelia summoning?”
Nathan didn’t respond. I rolled my eyes and went to shake his shoulder. The distance between the courtyard and his solitary dorm hadn’t been enough to settle me. And I was sick of his fucking games. “Are you just going to ignore me?”
He startled slightly, looked up at me, then back down at his diagram. “Ah… again. What are you on about? Amelia?”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me about this?” I asked.
Nathan looked up at me for a long moment, frowning, but seemed to recover himself before he turned back to his work and picked up the compass. “You’ve got enough on your mind,” he muttered as he traced a line on his diagram with the tool. “I didn’t think you needed to know. My deepest apologies if it does concern you.”
I stared at the back of his head. “Would you just… stop working for a moment and look at me?”
He sighed and laid the compass down. With exaggerated deliberateness he turned his chair to face me and folded his hands in his lap. “I’m perfectly capable of multitasking,” he said curtly. “But you now have my full attention. I take it you’d like to discuss my plans for Amelia?”
What I wanted was to discuss why he was lying to me, and how much he was lying about. Now that he brought it up, though, I did have that concern as well. His flat expression, tinged with a hint of aloofness, was irritating enough that I was almost ready to haul him to his feet and shake this madness out of him. I restrained myself, but had to speak through gritted teeth. “Do you have plans for Amelia?”
He glanced sideways at his diagram. “In fact I do. I intend to continue her education in Summoning magic, as the headmistress asked me to. I may not be entirely prepared for our first lessons, of course, since I’m currently falling behind on the planned materials, but if you prefer her education be full of holes, I suppose that’s your prerogative.”
“Stop. Lying. To. Me,” I ground out. “Nathan, I know damn well what you think about her, what you think she is, and you expect me to believe all you want is to teach her? I’m at the limit of what I can take. No more lies, no more… whatever it is your trying to do. Just be honest with me, for fuck’s sake!”
Nathan’s jaw worked as though he were chewing something. “If you’re so concerned,” he said, “you can sit in on the lessons. I assure you, I’d much rather Amelia have some basic grasp of her particular talent than to let it run rampant. But, if you’re concerned about ulterior motives then… you may as well know that I do have them.”
“Do you care to share them with me?” I asked.
“In this mood?” He waved at me. “I’m not sure I do. However”—he tilted his head sharply as I opened my mouth to demand he talk—”there is no reason they should be secrets. I want to examine her in greater detail, in a controlled environment.”
“Why?” I pressed. “What are you hoping to gain from this?”
He sighed and looked around the room. “If I were to tell you to pick an object in this room and hold it, what would you choose? You needn’t do it. Just… pick one and think of it.”
“Nathan, now is not—”
“Please, humor me,” he murmured.
I narrowed my eyes and picked at random just to see where this was going. The pillow, I decided.
“You chose the pillow,” Nathan said.
“All right,” I replied, unimpressed, “so, you’re running some minor telepathy spell?”
He shook his head slowly. “The reason I’m not explaining myself, Hunter, is because you wouldn’t comprehend it. You could understand, but it wouldn’t give you the necessary experience. Part of the work I did with Larson was to sort out the information I brought back with me from the Abyss. I had to choose from among hundreds of thousands of timelines, perhaps more, that I witnessed from within that place. In seventeen of them that I currently retain, you chose the pillow. Now, let me ask you this: could you have chosen differently, just then?”
I opened my mouth to insist that I could but… I was well aware of the many philosophical arguments for and against free will and fixed choices.
Nathan went on without waiting for my answer. “Allow me to enlighten you—if I had told you not to choose your pillow as the object, you could have. But only through my intervention. In fact, in three of the timelines I have in my head, I did just that, to make the point.”
“What does this have to do with Amelia?” I asked.
He spread his hands. “I need data. The timelines are all similar enough that I can’t always tell which one is unfolding. Which one I’m in. I need more. In each of these timelines, I continue Amelia’s summoning education. I’m playing a delicate game of chess here, Hunter. The kind where only I can see the board, and if I let anyone else see it then none of the timelines I remember will be of use.”
That hardly tracked. “But, you’re telling me. Doesn’t that… invalidate the data or whatever?”
He smiled. “Does it?”
Trying to match Nathan’s intellect was going to be like chasing a nonexistent tail. I’d never catch it and it was an act of insanity to even try. This time, at least, I managed to figure it out on my own, I thought. “In these timelines,” I said slowly, “you… tell me this. You’ve seen this entire conversation. But then… did you see...?”
“You and Amelia?” he asked. It was the first hint of emotion I saw in him. In the corners of his eyes, where he gave the slightest wince. “Of course I did. It happens in virtually every timeline. I knew when you came here and told me. Before that, in fact. I identified events this morning that helped me orient myself to which set of timelines I was experiencing. They’re entangled, crossing at specific moments, which is why I kept this group and not another. Think of it like my ‘neighborhood’. Is your head hurting yet? Because mine is killing me. Always.”
It wasn’t hurting yet but it was certainly spinning. At least the sting of Amelia’s rejection couldn’t hold up against the philosophy of parallel universes and timelines. “So, is there a timeline where the thing you’re trying to prevent… doesn’t come to pass?”
Nathan pressed his lips tight and said nothing.
I sighed and ran my fingers though my hair until I was rubbing my neck. “So if you tell me, it changes things… and you end up in a timeline you can’t predict, so you have to be careful what you tell me, so that things play out the way you… need them to, right?”
Still, he said nothing. His eyes flicked to the door and back.
It made me wonder why, so I looked over my shoulder just as the door burst open. Lucas and Isaac charged in, Amelia right behind them. She was pulling at Isaac’s shirt. “Please, Isaac—Lucas—don’t. I don’t want this!”
Before I could figure out what she didn’t want, Lucas stormed past me and hauled Nathan to his feet by his jacket. “Whatever you’re playing at, it stops right fucking now, Nathan; do you understand me?”
“Lucas!” I put my hands on his shoulders to pull him away, but Isaac got between us and pushed me back.
“You don’t know what he’s done,” Isaac snapped at me. He looked back at Nathan. “Tell him.”
Before I shoved Isaac out of the way, I checked Nathan. His face was placid, still, as he held Lucas’s gaze. “Nathan? What’s this about?”
Nathan didn’t make an effort to get free of Lucas or protect himself. Amelia did, however, slipping past us to tug at Lucas’s arm.
“Lucas,” she said softly, “I’m telling you, I don’t think—”
“I want to hear it from him,” Lucas growled. “And it had better be convincing.”
“What exactly is it I’m being accused of?” Nathan asked. “It would help if you could be more specific.”
“You know,” Isaac said, his eyes still on me as he turned his head enough to be heard clearly.
“I really don’t,” Nathan said.
“Enlighten me. If I’m guilty, I’ll cop to it.”
Lucas gave him a hard shake. “You’ve been tormenting Amelia,” he barked. “Sending apparitions of Sadie Chapman after her because you’re convinced Amelia was responsible for her death. Tell me I’m wrong.”
My stomach clenched as Nathan didn’t immediately answer. His jaw flexed, and he glanced quickly at Amelia. “Nathan?” I asked. “Is this… is he right?”
Nathan raised his hands and put them on Lucas’s. “You’re wrong,” he said quietly. “Now if you wouldn’t mind letting me go?”
“I’m not convinced,” Lucas hissed, pulling Nathan close to him. “I don’t know what you’ve been through or how fucked-up you are, but it’s apparently a lot more than I thought. I tried to be diplomatic, Isaac and I both did, but you’ve stepped over a line, Nathan. Your fucking condition is no excuse for this.”
Amelia winced and pulled at Lucas’s arm until he finally let Nathan go. “Lucas, please. I don’t want this.”
Lucas looked like he might spit as he turned away from Nathan to face me. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s what you’re protecting.”
“May I attempt to explain?” Nathan asked.
Isaac and Lucas both turned toward him, arms folded, as Nathan smoothed his blazer and clasped his hands behind his back. When he had their attention, he inclined his head toward Amelia. “Whatever plagues Amelia has nothing to do with me. In fact, I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about. And for a variety of reasons… that is upsetting on multiple levels. Can you please, I implore you, explain to me what brought this on?”
Lucas raised a finger and took a menacing step forward, but Amelia held her arm out in front of him. She and Nathan looked at one another for a long moment before she spoke. “I’ve been seeing Sadie Chapman,” she said.
When she laid the rest of it out—the first encounter in her room, and the second just tonight, along with a strange and horrifying waking dream—Nathan’s expression gradually flattened, his eyes hardening, until he was brooding and pensive and pacing what little space was left in the room.
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 13