I blushed a little to hear him introducing me that way and shook the hands of both students. Sam was a portly young man in a maroon suit with a black shirt. His hand was warm, so probably not another vampire.
“Goldhaven,” he offered as if reading my mind. “Pleasure to meet you, I’m Sam Blake.”
“Mary Creekspell,” the other one said as she gave a curtsy. She wore a pants suit that, on my brief inspection, looked like it might be made out of very dense moss. “Merryweather.”
“You’re a witch,” I said with some interest as she smiled. “And Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “Just got a small talent for prophetic dreams is all,” he said. “Don’t know if anyone’s told you, but Goldhaven is where they send the ones that don’t quite fit anywhere else.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that exactly, so I avoided it. “My roommate, Pete, was there,” I said, “before he… transferred, I guess.”
“Pete Campbell,” Sam said, nodding. “Yeah… it’s good he’s here. Definitely good.”
I wanted to ask about that, and about the look on Sam’s face—like he was genuinely relieved—but Lucas looked up at something behind me and I turned to see what it was.
Hunter was coming our direction with Nathan. He didn’t look at all comfortable in this place, but Nathan may as well have been born to it. He nodded and exchanged brief greetings with students and faculty alike as he and Hunter went, until the two of them were standing with our little group.
As much as I wanted to loath the man, I felt the same pull toward him that everyone else seemed to feel. Eyes followed him, intrigue and desire plain on some of the less careful observers. He bristled with cold arrogant power and I realized he was basically a magical Mr. Darcy. I looked back at Hunter, wondering whose role he played.
“You made it,” I said to Hunter as he gave a tight-lipped smiled and waved at Sam and Mary. He looked down at me, then glanced at Nathan. “Yeah, well. Only happens once while you’re here. And I couldn’t miss seeing you like this. You look… nice.”
I swayed a little, looking down at the dress. “Yeah, I guess I do. Thank Serena for that; it was all her doing.”
As if summoned, Serena swept by us with Pete in hand, practically running down one of the constructs with champagne flutes on a tray. She winked at me as they passed.
Pete seemed to be in a daze, as always, but he managed to wave to Sam as he passed. “Hey, Sam…”
“Hi,” Sam said, trailing off as Pete and Serena disappeared to, I assumed, tackle one of the fairy servers. He stared after them a moment longer. “Pete’s got a girl?”
“I think it’s more that the girl has him,” I mused. “But, yeah. He and Serena. Months now, it’s… unique.”
The music changed again, to something a little upbeat. I grinned at Isaac and Lucas and held a hand out. “Who wants to dance again?”
“You’ve got a taste for it now, hm?” Lucas asked
Before either of them could take me up on it, though, Nathan stepped past Hunter and put his arm under my hand. “May I?”
He looked to Lucas and Isaac, rather than asking me. The boys, however, looked to me, their expressions letting me know that they’d handle it if I said no.
But… we’d made some progress, I felt. And maybe this was something of an olive branch, now that we’d been spending time together in lessons. Had I finally made real strides with Nathan Crowley? If I had, well, there was probably nothing I couldn’t do. “Sure,” I said. “But I should warn you—I only just learned to waltz, much less anything else.”
“I believe I’ve shown myself to be an apt teacher,” Nathan said.
I spared a final look for Hunter, who seemed concerned about the idea but said nothing as Nathan stepped away and drew me after him.
It wasn’t the up-close, hip to hip, romantic kind of dance I’d shared with Lucas and Isaac, which I realized was part of the fun of the exercise as Nathan kept me at arm’s length while we drifted in small circles among the others. He moved with precision and was a little pushy with his body to get me into step with him but I didn’t so much mind.
“You cut a nice suit,” I offered, looking him over quickly.
“You take a polish yourself,” he replied, sounding sincere. “A compelling choice of color and cut. And the alchemical effect is magnificent, really.”
I furrowed my brow. “I… what effect?”
“You’d have to see it from a distance,” he muttered, and turned us toward a small empty space before muttering something under his breath and twitching his fingers while they were still in contact with me. A misty image of myself appeared in the empty space, solidifying slowly until I could see what he meant.
The dress shimmered with prismatic light as I moved. Patterns lit up and flowed over it before fading away, until a slight turn caught another reflected light from above and set of another cascade. It was breathless to watch, and I was disappointed I hadn’t noticed before.
I was also a little caught off guard by Nathan. First, that he’d extended a compliment—literally any compliment—and then that he’d cast with such minimalist movements. “How did you do that?”
“Practice,” he said as the image vanished. “Small muscle movements, precision timing between somatic and semantic components, and of course a fully focused will and intention.”
“Is that something you can teach?” I asked.
He lifted one shoulder, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Highly dependent on the student, I imagine.”
It was impossible to tell how he meant it, so I took it to be one of his neutral, universal barbs that was meant for people in general rather than me specifically. “And what do you think of me as a student so far?”
“Passable,” he muttered. “You’ve certainly got some talent, but then, that’s the point of you, I suspect.”
And there it was. I sighed. “Here I thought we’d made some progress.”
“I’ve made considerable progress,” Nathan said as he pulled me just close enough to let another couple spin slowly past us. I was back to arm’s length a second later.
“What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?” I tugged him a little bit as I spotted another couple coming up behind him, and he followed as I turned us. I managed, thankfully, not to throw our rhythm off. “You’re figuring out my evil plan?”
He shook his head more like he was disappointed than disagreeing. “I’m well aware you don’t harbor evil intentions, Amelia. It’s not your intentions that concern me. It’s your hubris.”
Well, that was a new one. “Hubris?” I scoffed. “Uh… have we met? Where exactly are you getting that?”
“From all of you,” he answered. “This foolish idea that you must fully cooperate with Az-Harad in order to see her will done. You don’t. Your hubris is that you believe you can contravene her will for you. And believe me, Amelia, I’d love to see you manage that—but if I have to gamble the world on it, I’m afraid I have to give the ancient timeless deity from before the dawn of creation the odds. One day, she’ll push. Hard. And I simply am not willing to put all of creation on your number when that day comes.”
I shivered even though it wasn’t cold, and almost felt a need to cover my shoulders. “You must think I never worry about that,” I said quietly. Lucas, Isaac, and Hunter all watched us, as if ready to step in and end it when I gave the signal. I almost did, but… I couldn’t not say my piece while I had Nathan’s attention outside of his rigidly focused lesson plan.
“You don’t worry enough,” Nathan said. “Otherwise I don’t think we’d be here and having this conversation. You’d have done the safe thing already.”
“And that is?” I fumbled from between my clenched teeth.
He spun us once, and again before answering. “As long as you’re in this plane of existence,” he said, “you’re a threat to everyone.”
“So I should kill myself,” I spat. “Is that it?”
“Of course not,” he breathed. “Don’t you
know anything yet? That wouldn’t help. I’m not even sure you can do such a thing. No, that won’t remove you from creation. You’d have to do what I did. Throw yourself into the Abyss for the greater good.”
I let him go and took a step back. He stood a couple of feet away, one eyebrow raised. “I knew it,” I whispered, and jabbed a finger at him. “You did it on purpose. And you’re trying to get me to do the same thing. Is that your whole plan? Your modus operandi—things seem impossible so, may as well check out. Eliminate the need for a fight instead of putting up any kind of fight at all.”
He spread his hands. “It is the only tactic guaranteed success. If you don’t believe you can win the battle, make the need for one obsolete.”
“Well pardon me,” I snapped, “but fuck your philosophy right in the ass.”
That drew a number of critical looked from the faculty closest to us, and Nathan’s eyes shot past me to where I suspected the boys were coming to separate us. I was a little past caring, though, and now that it was coming out, I wasn’t going to shut myself off. I took a step toward Nathan. “You know what that sounds like to me? Cowardice. You were afraid to face whatever was coming, and you took the coward’s way out.”
“I simply know the magnitude of the power that opposes us,” he said calmly, though there was the slightest twitch at the corner of his eye. “Strength isn’t just a matter of winning fights. It’s also about doing what needs to be done.”
“Said every dictator ever,” I shot back.
The boys came up behind me, and one of them put a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe this isn’t the place to have this particular argument?” one of them asked. I was so furious I couldn’t tell which one said it.
“My destiny is in my own hands,” I went on, and waved at Nathan with disgust. “You think it’s all just written down in stone, and if that’s the case then why even bother at all? You can hide or run however you want, but when it comes time for it, I promise you that I will stand my ground and pick my fate. No one makes decision for me, Nathan, not her and not you and fuck you for thinking otherwise!”
“Amelia,” Hunter urged as he pulled me back.
Nathan gave a derisive snort and looked away, then around at the gathered crowd momentarily before he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose, shaking his head slowly. “You’re such a simple girl,” he breathed. “You have no idea… no idea what you… you’re… damn it. Wrong. It’s the wrong… I… this isn’t what…”
He looked up, eyes staring through me and maybe through the entire room, and took a stumbling step to one side. Hunter rushed to him and steadied him. “I should get him out of here,” he said. “He needs—”
Before Hunter could do any such thing, or I could even have time to feel bad that I’d apparently sent him into a seizure, someone on the other side of the ballroom screamed.
Almost immediately, all hell broke loose.
Amelia
Like everyone else in the room, my head whipped around to look in the direction of the screaming. It was a male student, I think, but it was such a high-pitched shriek that I wasn’t entirely sure of that. Automatically, I turned back to Nathan, mouth open to tell him we had to do something.
Standing behind his left shoulder, Sadie Chapman grinned at me with blackened teeth. Abyssal slime oozed over her cheeks and chin, dripping onto her shirt and the floor.
I was dreaming. I had to be. I clenched my hands into tight fists to keep from casting and tried to will myself to wake up before something terrible happened.
Except, Nathan rushed forward, clearly recovered, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Come with me!”
He pulled me into the crowd toward the source of commotion. It wasn’t hard to find—it was the place all the other students and faculty were running from in a panic. All around us, defensive magic snapped up as a couple of hundred magicians put up shields, wards, made themselves invisible, or tried anything else they could think of to keep themselves safe. The air stung my skin, the magic was so thick and sudden. You’d think they’d be trying to help. Maybe it was like an oxygen mask on an airplane, help yourself before helping others. Well. Hopefully I didn’t need the magical equivalent of an oxygen mask.
The boys were right behind us, and when they caught up Hunter grabbed Nathan while Lucas and Isaac pulled me away from him. “This way,” Lucas shouted over the noise.
Nathan had turned to shove Hunter off of him, snarling. “We can stop this, and we have a chance right in front of us; get off me!” His furious eyes settled on me. “Amelia!”
It didn’t matter which direction I looked in; Sadie was there, getting more grotesque each time I saw her in a different part of the room, amid a different chunk of the crowd. Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Or maybe the dreams were bleeding into the real world, making it impossible to know whether helping Nathan was safe or not.
Either way, I couldn’t do nothing. I pried Lucas’s hand off my wrist. “You all get out of here; let me and Nathan see what we can do.”
He looked at me like I was insane, but that disbelief quickly turned to resolve. He groaned and waved me after Nathan as I pulled away from Isaac and they started speaking. I couldn’t hear what it was, and we didn’t have much time, so I tore my attention away and raced after Nathan.
The doors leading to the courtyard had been torn almost entirely off their hinges. There was a student on his back just before the entrance, clawing at a cloud of darkness above him, trying to shout spells. Each time he did, though, the thick cloud shot toward his mouth and he had to snap it shut and turn his head away. Tendrils of it dug at his body, pried at his face, and slithered around his ears as if trying to get in.
“The banishing we discussed last week,” Nathan snapped. “I’ll attempt to keep it in place.”
His hands came up, and I was momentarily entranced by the utterly perfect, snappy way his hands and fingers moved. Magic sent a cascade of electric tingles over my skin as he bit off the words too quickly for me to even catch them clearly.
Before I managed to get my arms up, the student under the black fog was pressed to the ground, not by the phantasm itself, but Nathan’s spell as space expanded between the two of them. Four more invisible walls made an open box around the darkness, and when it rushed up to escape it struck another one. Invisible walls gave off a faint glow wherever the black cloud pressed to seek escape.
He had it. Holy shit.
“Cast, damn it!” Nathan shouted at me.
I was shocked out of amazement, and the words came to me in a tumble as I snapped my hands out and clapped hard and loud enough that my hands were going to ache after this. I spoke in choppy, guttural Sumerian and tried not to be distracted by the now much brighter flashes of light coming from the containment. It was about to escape.
That was, until Lucas, Isaac, and Hunter stepped up behind us and began chanting; an augmentation spell—a safe additive to any group ritual. The flashes of light waned as Nathan’s spell stabilized with the added strength of three more magicians, and I danced forward and backward with the ancient, full-body movements of one of the oldest banishing spells in existence according to Nathan.
“Barra, barra,” I called and spread my arms wide before I clapped hard again and barked the final words. “Banrabisu, barra!”
At almost the same instant that I spoke it, the containment spell gave off a blinding flash of light. Magic rushed from me in a torrent that I barely managed to keep myself standing under. The containment spell shattered, and the darkness tried to pour itself into the student as he scrabbled for purchase on the ancient, smooth hardwood floors.
The banishing struck the black cloud, and for once it seemed like it could work. It curled in on itself, and parted, and for a split second I saw the image of Sadie Chapman screaming at me as the darkness rushed toward me, furious and intent on taking me down with it—
—and vanished.
I only realized once it was dissipated that I was on the ground, one arm over my face. M
y heart pounded so fast, so hard, that I couldn’t feel the space between heartbeats. I was hyperventilating, my lungs on automatic and in a panic to get more air into me.
“Amelia.” Isaac breathed my name like a prayer as he and Lucas knelt to my side, wide-eyed with concern. “Are you all right? What’s wrong? Look at me, Amelia, try and focus on one thing; just look at me.”
“You’re okay,” Lucas urged as he pulled me to him and stroked my hair with a hand as I tried to keep my eyes on Isaac’s, to focus on them to the exclusion of everything else. My mind had gone nearly blank. It was just raw, wordless panic at this point.
“It’s gone,” Isaac assured me as he held my gaze. “You banished it. You were incredible, Amelia, and it’s all over now, all right? Try to breathe deep and hold it…”
I did. It took several moments, and my diaphragm still seemed to struggle against me. When I did finally manage to take a deep enough breath and hold it, my heart slowed immediately down to a lazy gallop rather than a breakneck sprint. Progress.
Beyond them, I realized that Nathan was on his knees, holding his head. Hunter was beside him, practically cradling him as his lips moved. Nathan pushed against him as if to throw him off, but he was apparently weak, and Hunter was determined. He looked up and gave me a pained look thick with sympathy. I thought maybe he deserved it more than me. The backlash from the broken containment spell, maybe, mixed with Nathan’s inevitable fury at not having been able to hold it himself had to be a lot for the young man.
I only became aware of the rest of the room when Hayes’ voice snapped me to full awareness. “Everyone please, be calm and exit the ballroom in an orderly fashion. All students with injuries, whatever the cause, please proceed to the clinic. I said orderly, students!”
People were still in a panic. They funneled out of the dining room-come-ballroom stuck in a herd mentality, barely controlled by the handful of faculties from the five academies who tried to keep them moving and not tramping one another.
All but the one on the ground staring at the ceiling with wide, frightened eyes by the door. “Go check on him,” I told Lucas, giving him a little push in that direction. “Go. I’m okay. He’s in shock or something.”
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 18