Summer Shifter Days

by V. Vaughn

  The quad was empty that day. Perhaps the sun was a bit too warm. Perhaps everyone had spent the night partying a little too hard and was sleeping it off. Or perhaps the universe had just decided to give Cassie and Mal the space they needed for one bright morning.

  “I can help you,” Cassie said. “Really and truly. I can help you control your wolf so that you can play your music.”

  Mal rolled over onto his side and squinted at her. “Yeah, right.”

  “A lot of powerful magicians go through a period of adjustment, where their potential outstrips their control. When I was a little girl, I used to draw a lot. Like everywhere. I always had a box of crayons and a notebook with me. I drew houses and people and horses, all the usual stuff. But one day my drawings started picking themselves up off the page and walking away. Little crayon horses, all purple and wobbly, just running around the house leaving these smears of colors on everything they touched.” Cassie laughed. “I got in so much trouble when my mom came home and saw what had happened. She thought I’d drawn all over the antique wallpaper on purpose. Neither of my parents believed me when I told them my drawings came to life, until they saw a pink crayon unicorn gallop across the kitchen floor. I enrolled in the academy the next day to learn better control.”

  As Cassie spoke, an odd thing happened. The clods of grass that Mal had plucked from the ground wove themselves into little unicorns and horses and people and chased each other around in a circle.

  “How are you doing that?” Cassie gasped.

  “What? This?” Mal nodded at the grass people. “Doesn’t this sort of thing happen to all witches? I just thought about your story and then . . . Poof.”

  It shouldn’t have been possible. The amount of raw talent to animate nature in such a way, it was unheard of.

  Cassie seized Mal’s hand and blurted out, “If you could do one thing right now, if you had perfect control, what would you do?”

  The little grass people rode off on their horses and unicorns, seeking greener pastures.

  “I don’t know,” Mal said.

  “Yes you do, I can see it in your eyes. Tell me.”

  “I, well, I’d go see this band that’s playing next week, Perfect Day. They’re easily my favorite. No contest at all. And yeah, hearing they were gonna be playing nearby and that I couldn’t see them, it got me down.”

  “What if I said with my help, you could see them?” Cassie grinned at Mal. She was still holding his hand. It was oddly comforting, warm and strong.

  “I don’t believe you,” Mal said. “But for Perfect Day, I’d give it a try.”

  8

  For days he did nothing but practice. Mal had never been a big fan of school, not even normal people school where no one tried to set you on fire with their mind. But the way she looked at him, the promise in her eyes of better days, convinced him he had to try.

  The days were a blur of self-control charms and magic theory. Everything Cassie said either went over his head or was magic for babies, but he didn’t care. If he could play music again, if he could go to shows and dance and swing and not turn into a murderous wolf monster—that meant there was actually something in his future to look forward to.

  He hadn’t realized what he was missing until Cassie gave it to him—hope.

  Also, a wand.

  “This was my old wand from elementary school,” she said, passing it over to him during their picnic lunch on the quad. She was eating some vegan sushi thing that smelled both delicious and horrifying at once. He’d packed beef jerky, potato chips, a jar of peanut butter and three sodas. At first he tried to ignore the disgusted look Cassie gave his food, but then he began to relish it. Teasing her, seeing the red blush explode in her cheeks like a sunrise, was the most fun he’d had in weeks. He even dipped his beef jerky into the peanut butter once—a terrible idea—just to see the shocked expression on her face. Whenever she questioned him about the food, he swore that all muggles ate like him.

  The wand was white wood and very thick, like a comically large pencil. Rainbow stickers, faded from age, were plastered up and down its shaft.

  “This will match my pajamas perfectly,” Mal said.

  “Oh hush,” Cassie laughed. “That is a perfectly good wand to learn with. It has wards worked into the wood that will prevent you from harming yourself or others with magic. Or setting fires.”

  “They told me that Afflicteds like me don’t need wands,” Mal swung the wand in lazy circles. He could feel power in it, dragging behind the wand. It was like trying to run underwater.

  “Yes, your whole body is one huge wand,” Cassie agreed, then immediately blushed again. After spending so much time with her, Mal was beginning to pick up on her scents. He could sense her anger, her confusion, her surprise. They all smelled different, like different flowers blooming brightly. But when she blushed that way, a deeper scent came to him. Something earthy and exciting and just out of reach. It was like a forgotten memory, or a word on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to press her down against the soil and hold her still while he sniffed every inch of her to find the source of the scent. But he didn’t, because that would be weird.

  And anyway, she had a fiancé.

  With the wand in his hand, Cassie taught him control charms. Spells and rituals for locking and channeling his magic. Some were nearly instantaneous—just thinking a word of power in his head pushed the wolf deeper and brought more control to him. Others were elaborate dances that lasted over an hour, with precise footwork and wand placement. One wrong motion and he’d need to begin again.

  He made lots of wrong steps. Cassie explained to him every time exactly what he’d done wrong. To her credit, she never gave up. She never sounded exasperated. He wouldn’t have had nearly the same patience with himself. But her belief in him made him want to try harder. She saw a potential in him—more than just a project to get extra-credit with her mom—and he didn’t want to let her down.

  He also didn’t want to miss the show.

  “Again,” Cassie said. “This time, remember to hold the wand in the salute the moon position and to place your feet in coiled snake pose.” She clapped her hands. “From the top!”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Mal said after his sixth hour of trying. “I need a rest.”

  “Very well.” Cassie glanced up at the massive campus clock tower. “Let’s take ten minutes. We can drink some water, stretch our legs, and try again on Mordenkainen’s Mastery of Self.”

  Whoever Mordenkainen was, Malcolm was sure the man was a sadist. It was impossible to learn a ritual so complex in a day, or even two. According to Cassie, it was one of the greater techniques in the wizard’s arsenal. But the way she did it, it looked like a robot trying to swat a fly while avoiding stepping on hot coals. There was no rhythm, no art to her motions.

  “Other witches, they move differently from you,” Mal said. The sun was beating down on him and he stripped off his jacket and shirt. There was no breeze at all, but it seemed to help.

  Cassie was looking away from him, studying a book in her lap. “I am very precise in my motions. Precision is the witch’s best friend. But you aren’t the first to say that to me, in fact—” she glanced up at him and blinked. Her eyes roved over his bare torso, taking it all in. The scar from the bite was a deep red C-shape in his side, undoubtedly she was looking at that. But a deep blush exploded in her cheeks and that delicious earthy smell came to him again. What was it? He’d never smelled anything like it before in his life. It was like chocolate and caramel and coffee all had a baby together.

  “What was I saying?” Cassie asked.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” Mal said. “A change of scenery might do me good.”

  Cassie nodded crisply, but she couldn’t take her eyes off his scar. “Where shall we go?”

  “Let’s go back to my dorm room,” he said. “I have an idea.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She bit her perfect pink lower lip and gave him a worried look. “We really
need to work on these skills and if this turns into some sort of blow off thing where we sit around your dorm room watching movies or that Netflix thing or whatever it is you do, then I’ll have to refuse.”

  “We’ll practice more, I promise.”

  “Because even though you’ve made some real progress, you still have quite a long ways to go in order to match up to even an incoming freshman.” She spoke the words like a disappointed grade school teacher and a searing flash of annoyance burned through him. Would she ever stop speaking to him like that? Would there come a point where she saw him as an equal, or would he always be a charity case? A poor little Afflicted, too dumb to know which end of the wand to hold.

  “Cassie,” he growled. “I need you to trust me.”

  She stared at him with an unreadable expression, then got to her feet.

  “One hour,” she said. “Just one hour.”

  “Then we should hurry.” Mal took her hand in his, surprised for just a moment at how easily their fingers threaded together and how cool she felt against his burning skin. And then he ran all the way to his dorm room with Cassie in tow. She grumbled at first that they were running too fast, that it wasn’t safe, that he wasn’t being careful of traffic. But when they came to Rothfuss street, which was choked with traffic for the big Labyrinth game that day, he scooped her up into his arms and leapt, flying, letting his shifter strength carry them up over the four lanes of cars.

  Cassie cheered with unchecked glee as they soared through the air. Mal risked a look at her. It was first time he’d seen her with her guard down—the first time he’d gotten a glimpse of the real Cassie, and she was beautiful. When she laughed she was transformed, all of the primness and dour caution fell away, she was all bright smiles and big brown eyes and she smelled like moonlight.

  Mal was so distracted, he almost botched the landing. But he didn’t, instead he landed in a loping run, and he kept carrying Cassie all the way to Spenser Hall.

  “That was incredible,” she said.

  “Thanks, I’ve never done that with a passenger before.”

  “Where did you learn Aira’s Rejection of Gravity?”

  “Where did I what?”

  “That spell you cast. The jumping spell. I learned it last year, but I could never manage to get more than ten feet, which was still an A of course, it’s a very difficult spell and ten feet is a perfectly acceptable distance.”

  Mal set her down on his feet. His body felt too warm now, without her in his arms. His wolf scratched at him, newly agitated. “I didn’t cast a spell. I just used my shifter legs.”

  Cassie cocked her head to one side and muttered a charm. Her eyes unfocused, like she was reading a book dangling in front of his face. “You didn’t even cast it on purpose,” she muttered. “How amazing. You’ve been performing high-level magic purely on instinct.”

  “Stop looking at me like I’m an experiment and come inside,” Mal said. He fished around in his pockets for the key card.

  “I’ve never been inside Spenser before,” Cassie said. “Are the rumors true?”

  “Probably,” Mal responded. “The rooms rearrange themselves at night. Everyone invents new drugs and ways to get high all the time. If you’re aren’t sort of queer when you start living here already, then by the time you leave you’re totally bisexual. Oh, and we have weekly orgies in the common rooms.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “Do you ever get tired of making fun of me?”

  “One of those is absolutely true,” Mal said. He loved watching the blush explode on her cheeks.

  Living in Spenser Hall—the Dispensery—was unlike anything else Mal had experienced. Amongst the students, there was both a sense of freedom and a crushing awareness that their time there was limited. Over the front desk the words Carpe Diem had been crossed off, and YOLO written next to them in burning letters. Mal’s part of the dorm didn’t look unusual, it was old and wooden, with rooms that seemed slightly too small as if when the dorm was built people weren’t quite as tall. His roommate Ash had to stoop to get through some of the doorways. The hallways had garish, busy rugs and tapestries depicting forgotten events of wizarding history.

  The hanging outside Mal’s room showed four witches in pilgrim garb, words of power floating around them, standing between a village of children and an oncoming militia. He’d asked Nico what it was about, but Nico wasn’t up on his history either.

  Cassie walked through Spenser like she was afraid she’d catch something, sticking to the exact middle of the hallway and staying so close to Mal that she kept bumping into him, which he really didn’t mind. He tried for a moment to see the dorm through her eyes. Her world was orderly and proper. Spells worked a certain way. There were words and gestures that when articulated caused events. She didn’t think about jumping and then leap over forty feet of cars. That trick would have taken her an hour and she would have landed on an oncoming SUV. There were paths of power, old families, polite ways of speaking and moving that served as a social armor. Spenser was the opposite of her world.

  Smoke drifted out from under several doors they passed, some of it was from pot or vaping or old fashioned cigarettes, but not all of it. Some of the smoke resolved into flowers that bloomed, color exploding from the gray vapor, before fading away again.

  Two first-year students ran past, their naked bodies painted in school colors for the Labyrinth game, whooping and screaming out what they thought was the school’s fight song.

  As they walked down the hall toward his room, Mal took Cassie hand and pulled her to one side of the hallway. A first year student named Yob Tiggle was stopped in mid-step outside an open door. Blazing light spilled out from within. “Careful,” Mal said, “you need to get to the far side of the hall when you pass that room. Everyone here learns that the hard way.”

  “What’s going on in there?” Cassie asked, squinting. She fished around in her bag and pulled out some large sunglasses with pink plastic frames and when she put them on she gasped and whipped them off. She was blushing again and giving off that delicious earthy scent.

  “They say it happened last year. Two seniors working on a tantric ritual created a pocket of slow time.”

  “That’s, I mean, that is, I’ve heard but never seen . . . ” She trailed off then shook her head. “That’s sex magic.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not exactly illegal, but it’s quite frowned upon in the wizarding world.” She crossed her arms defiantly. “That is not proper magic. Someone should do something.”

  “Oh, I’m sure someone’s coming,” Mal said, but she didn’t get the joke.

  Once they were past the bubble of tantric time, he motioned for Cassie to wait. Then Mal slid his belt out of his jeans. Cassie looked away, then looked back, then looked away again. “We need to rescue this kid. He’s probably having the time of his life in there, but the guy might have a plane to catch or people to see.” Mal fashioned his belt into a loop and tossed it over the student’s outstretched arm. He could feel the edge of the bubble, it was like warm soapy bath water. It wouldn’t stop him unless he was foolish enough to get his head into it.

  “When I first moved in, we’d take turns sticking our heads into the tantric field and then getting yanked out. It was a fun way to spend a Friday night, y’know? Only some people who don’t live on this particular hall don’t know about it and get stuck, or sometimes the assholes who live across from me shove people into it.” Mal pulled the belt and it seized the student’s arm. He tugged and the guy moved slowly, it was like trying to move a parked car. But as soon as his head exited the field he popped free.

  Yob was breathing hard and his face was flushed. His eyes were half-lidded from the concentrated dose of sex magic he’d been marinating in. Yob looked at Mal and Cassie, blinked owlishly behind his glasses, and ran off.

  “You’re welcome!” Mal shouted at his back.

  “Well that was rude,” Cassie said. “Also he stole your belt.”

  Mal shrugg
ed. “After being that close to sex magic, I’m sure he has something important to take care of.” He winked at Cassie but again she didn’t get the joke. Mal was beginning to suspect that she really was a virgin, and it wasn’t just some purity act she put on. “Anyways, this is my room.”

  Mal pushed open the door. He could already hear the arguing voices from within. Nico and Ash had been working on their game for days, refining and arguing and tweaking the rules.

  Cassie did a half bow to Mal, something formal and ancient that sent chills down his spine. What was he doing bringing her here to his room? She was a princess, high-born magic royalty, or as close to it as there was in the twenty-first century. How could he bring her to his grubby dorm room? Surely she’d take one look at the mess, cover her mouth with a scented handkerchief, and run away.

  “Enter freely and of your own will,” Mal said, sweeping his arm before him. His wolf was being calm, weirdly calm. For the first time in months he felt almost normal. The beast seemed to calm down around Cassie, except when it didn’t.

  Nico and Ash stopped bickering the moment Cassie walked in. If it’d been Mal alone they would have pulled him into their dispute and tried to get him to act as arbiter. But when a beautiful highborn strides in like a walking moonbeam, it’s a bit disruptive.

  “Hi? Can we help you?” Nico offered.

  “Oh shit, are you from the administration? How did you find out?” Ash jumped to his feet.

  Cassie smiled at them politely and turned to take in the room. “Your triples are bigger than ours,” she said. “In The Keep, we have less space. But higher ceilings.”

  Mal slipped in behind her. “Hi guys, this is my—” he fought for the right word for what to call Cassie.

  “Tutor,” she offered.

  “Friend,” Mal said at the same time. They both glanced at each other and Mal saw something new in Cassie’s eyes, a flicker of something dark and hungry and scared inside her.