by V. Vaughn
Ash stepped forward, beaming. “Well, any tutor friend of Mal’s is welcome here.” He shook Cassie’s hand with his great bear-like mitts. The man was enormous. It was easy to forget because he spent so much time curled up around his guitar in a beanbag chair, but standing next to her—Ash was three times her size. Ash glanced up at Mal, his eyes asking the question Are you sure she’s cool? Mal nodded reassurance and Ash smiled more broadly.
Nico waved from his seat. Before him was the game table he and Ash had been working on. They had it flipped over, so the bottom was exposed and Mal could see thousands of tiny runes etched in gold, wrapped in interlocking circles. It looked like circuitry, but it was just words. When Nico saw Cassie’s interest in the board, he threw a blanket over it and glared at her.
“What are you working on?” she asked, her voice full of wonder. “That runework was exceptional.”
Nico watched his feet. “Thank you,” he said in a quiet voice. The dude did not do super well around normal people, let alone normal girls.
“It’s our independent project,” Ash said in his booming voice. He sat down opposite Nico, and even sitting he was larger than Cassie.
“Nico is an artificer,” Mal said. “Our resident mad scientist. And Ash is studying bardic magic. They’re pooling their efforts on a group project.”
“It’s going to revolutionize the world,” Nico muttered.
“We haven’t slept in six days,” Ash said with a laugh. “Forgive us our appearance and that of our room. We tend to keep a tidier house, but the deadline for our prototype grows closer every day and we are far from done.”
Cassie stood very still, as if she was afraid to step deeper into Mal’s world. Or maybe it was just the pizza boxes, piles of dirty underwear, bubbling beakers and stringed instruments all over the floor that made her reluctant to step anywhere.
“Six days? How can you focus for six days?” Cassie asked. “After two I get burnt out and can’t focus enough to cast at all.”
Nico’s eyes lit up. “The secret is to take turns. We have four methods for staying awake that we rotate between.”
“One of them,” Mal added, “is caffeine.”
“And my potions,” Nico said, warming to Cassie now that he could talk about technical matters. “The recipe is actually quite ingenious.”
“And I have an inspirational song that I wrote, based on a classic marching tune but repurposed for the modern era,” Ash said. His eyes were wider than usual and a hint of mania played in his smile. “There are side effects though. Irritability. Emotionality. Some slight hallucinations. Verbal echoes. Some slight hallucinations.”
“Fascinating,” Cassie said. “I wonder if adding in other methods could let you last even longer without sleep.”
“That’s sort of why we’re here. Cassie is helping me cram twelve years of magical education into like a week. I could really use some of your magical Adderall.”
“Really?” Nico jumped out of his chair. “You’re usually so skittish about substances. I mean, this is great! A breakthrough! Nico whirled around the room in a hurry, throwing aside piles of clothes and toppling carefully balanced stacks of books until he found what he was looking for. He held up a vial of sparkling sand. “Powdered moonlight. It should enhance your memory, fight fatigue, clear up your acne.”
“I don’t have any acne.”
“Ease digestion.”
“Not a problem.”
“And appease your wolf. It’s a little bit like catnip for shifters, but cut with enough other stuff to let you concentrate. The goal is to get your wolf high, so the man can focus.”
Cassie took the vial from him and muttered a charm while flicking with her wand. It was the same spell she’d cast outside and her eyes had the same faraway look. “I can’t identify these ingredients. What’s in here?” But Nico refused to answer.
Ash squinted at Cassie. “Your wand technique,” he said.
“Classically trained,” Cassie replied with a curt smile.
“It’s awful,” Ash said, shaking his head. “Your form is very stiff. You look like a robot trying to give directions to a hive of bees.”
“Ash,” Mal growled. His wolf leapt into his throat. It wanted to attack Ash, to make him pay for the insult. It was oddly protective of Cassie.
“Goddess, I’m sorry. It’s these side-effects. One of them unfortunately is that I can be an asshole sometimes.” He apologized with a sheepish shrug and sat back on the floor.
A mask of professional distance had snapped back into place on Cassie’s face. She regarded Mal and his friends with a haughty expression. “Very well. This has been educational, but we should get back to work.”
“At least let me inspire you, before you go,” Ash said. “It should help with your studying.”
Mal glanced at Cassie, but she was unreadable. She’d retreated into herself and was almost unrecognizable. It’d been a mistake to bring her to his room with his friends here, but they never left and these days they never stopped arguing either. And if he was going to master the self control charms, he’d need a little extra help.
“Okay, inspire me, Ash.” Mal said.
“I’ll wait outside, thank you.” Cassie slipped out the door like a whisper, and with her gone the room seemed dimmer and dingier.
“I’m so sorry,” Ash said. “It just slipped out. But have you seen how she casts spells? Girl needs to loosen up.”
Mal sighed and closed his eyes. He wanted to berate Ash, to yell at him for hurting Cassie like that. But freaking out on him wouldn’t solve anything, and it would surely bring his wolf out. “Just hit me with your best shot, okay?”
Ash grinned and nodded. “Okay, this is a new one I’ve been working on. I’ve embedded magical—y’know what, never mind the details. Let’s just say I weaponized a Taylor Swift earworm for maximum potential effect.”
“Taylor Swift? I don’t want Taylor Swift in my head,” Mal said, but it was too late. Ash had a mic in his hand and his laptop burst out a the chorus to a Taylor Swift song. He sang under and over and through the lyrics, adding subtle resonances and magical refrains that were inaudible but sank into Mal’s blood.
The whole bardic spell took less than a minute, and would last an entire day.
“That’s it?” Mal asked. Near as he could tell, all that had happened was that he couldn’t stop humming the lyrics to “Bad Blood,” which he’d never heard before but now knew all the lyrics to.
“The effect builds,” Nico said. “If it gets overpowering, try to listen to other music or to sing something.”
“Just don’t listen to any Katy Perry,” Ash warned. “The enchantment doesn’t play nice with Katy Perry.”
Mal nodded his thanks and met Cassie in the hall. On the way out he grabbed his guitar case from the end of his bed.
Cassie was waiting for him in the hallway. She was reaching out and sinking her fingers into the tantric field, pushing deep into it. She had a half-smile that vanished when she turned and saw him.
“It feels pretty cool, right? Like a sunbeam?” he asked.
“Let’s get back to work,” she said. “And this time, I think I’ll walk under my own power, thank you.”
With Taylor Swift in his head and a guitar in his hand, Malcolm followed Cassie back to the quad.
9
When Mal finally completed the concentration ritual correctly Cassie didn’t even notice, she was too busy stewing about what his roommate had said to her.
How dare he? How dare he! She was arguably the finest witch in her year. She’d mastered incantations and rituals that grad students had struggled with. Her form was letter-perfect. She accomplished spells on the first try that took others weeks to master.
And yet what he’d said wasn’t wrong. Teacher after teacher had criticized her as being stiff. Her form was robotic or technically perfect but lacking. They’d never been able to really say what she’d been lacking, so she’d written it off as jealousy or the need to give
some sort of negative feedback on her performance.
But watching Malcolm and seeing him feel his way through enchantments that should have been impossible without months of preparation—it was clear that she was missing something. She’d never felt her way through anything and yet this untrained Afflicted werewolf cast charms by thinking them, by wishing for them. He was harnessing magic on a fundamental level and she wished she could have written it off as the effect of Mal being a supernatural creature, but her mind kept going back to that day as a child when her drawings had come to life.
There’d been no spell. She’d just wanted friends more than anything else in the world, and she’d made them. She’d reached out with pure heart and shaped the world. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? The old stories had witches in them who improvised. They wove fate on the fly and changed the world. Where were they now?
And more importantly, why couldn’t Cassie do that?
“Did you see that?” Mal whooped. “I did it! Mordenkainen’s Ritual of Whatever it Was. I did it!” He jumped up and down with joy. Sure enough, the telltale golden lines of power wound about his wrists and ankles. But whereas hers were barely noticeable, like tricks of the light, his blazed like the sun. Mal was wearing a shirt again, thankfully. It was too distracting when he was half-naked. She couldn’t stop herself from admiring his form. His body was nearly perfect, like an example of what others strived for, marred only by the red scars of the wolf who bit him. If anything, the scars made him even more hot.
It was good he was dressed again. Cassie didn’t need any more distractions.
“Y’know what the trick was,” Mal continued, smiling at her. “I thought of it like a song. I mean, doing a ritual for an hour without screwing up at all sounds hard, but it’s not much different from playing a setlist, y’know? So once I realized that, it was just the matter of lining it all up in my head the right way.”
Cassie pushed aside Ash’s critique and focused on her student. She summoned up her analysis spell again, and suddenly the world was full of golden labels wherever she looked. It was perfect for analyzing the failed invisibility spell of some jackass student or for looking for flaws in your friend’s ritual of concentration. Behind Mal, across the quad a couple walked hand in hand. Cassie could see the spells floating around them—simple date charms to make yourself smell better, find great lighting, not be too hungry or tired. They seemed like lies. That couple had cloaked themselves in dishonesty before leaving the house together. It reminded her too much of her mother and the rituals her mother had taught her to use at a young age.
Mal didn’t have any glamours on him. He was as he appeared, except for the wolf that lived in her heart, of course. She saw three effects on his body: the anti-scrying charm she’d given him; Ash’s song of inspiration, fluttering around his ears like a swarm of butterflies; and the concentration ritual glowing like golden armor.
“It looks good,” she said. “Great, even. You’re a natural at this.”
“Well I have a great teacher,” he said slyly.
“Stop it, okay,” she snapped. “Just stop it. We both know that next week, when class resumes agains we’re not going to be friends. You’re going to hang out with your freaks and artists and sex addicts and play music and howl at the moon. And I’m going to graduate with honors, marry Anoxamander, get a job with a prestigious firm cataloging artifacts or arguing the finer points of magical theory and we’re never going to see each other again. So let’s just do the work and get to it, okay? We both have lives to get back to and pretending that we’re friends or trying to make some sort of connection here between us, it’s just going to fade away next week. So why bother?”
She needed to tear the band-aid off fast. To eat the frog, as her father said. She knew they could never be friends and anyway, she was engaged to Anoxamander. She and Mal could certainly never be lovers. He was almost there, with his studies, the concentration ritual would keep his wolf in check and focus his mind enough that everything else would come to him soon enough. She’d seen it. He didn’t need her anymore and he could stop pretending like he did.
“What just happened?” Mal asked. “Did I say something? Is this because Ash was being an ass? I swear he’s not usually like that, it’s just after being up for a week straight he turns into a monster.” Mal’s ears lengthened into points. His eyes blazed and changed into the unreadable animal eyes of a wolf. His teeth sharpened into dagger points.
“Well, then you have that in common, don’t you?” Cassie said. With a stiff jerk of her wand the picnic folded itself up into a tidy bag that leapt into her hands. She walked away quickly so that Mal couldn’t see the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She fled to the first safe place she could think of, the library. It wasn’t safe by any rational measurement, but she knew her way around. Knew the paths to walk to keep out of the way of the older books and the hungrier librarians.
The cool dry air of the library welcomed her. The dim light and deep shadows pulled at her. Nothing judged you in the library. No one expected anything but silence. When a librarian approached, Cassie held out two pennies as payment, but instead the robed woman drifted close to Cassie’s face. And stared with birdlike wonder at the tears she saw there.
The analysis spell was still active, and Cassie could see the golden chains of enchantment that bound the librarian to the library. Looped around the woman’s neck and feet, they sank deep into the floor like kite strings woven of words.
This librarian was young, hardly older than Cassie. She had a pretty face with plump red lips and eyes the color of autumn. Her robes of office were tidy and unstained. The librarian reached out with her dry fingers and caught the tears from Cassie’s cheek. “Payment,” she whispered, in a voice musical and bright. The librarian tipped her head backwards and wiggled her long fingers until Cassie’s captured tears rolled down and dropped into the librarian’s eyes.
The robed woman hissed when they hit. She convulsed in the air, like a tissue in a tornado. When the storm ended, the librarian gazed at her with adoring eyes. “Thank you,” she said in her glowing quiet voice. “I’d forgotten.”
“Any time,” Cassie said. Then, struck by an impulse she held out her hand. “My name is Cassie. Cassiopeia, actually. But everyone calls me Cassie.”
The librarian looked down at Cassie’s hand like she didn’t know what it was for. Then, tentatively, she reached out and shook it with a cool firmness. “Lily,” she said. “My name is Lily.” The librarian smiled at her with a gentle lopsided smile that made her pretty face beautiful with the imperfection. “Thank you for your tears. When you choose your study room, try to avoid the seven-hundreds. The books are angry in the seven hundreds today.”
Cassie nodded at the woman. She’d thought the librarians could barely speak, that they were little more than ghosts chained in service to the university. But Lily was no ghost. There was life in her eyes. Why had she never spoken to the librarians as people before? Not a week had gone by in all her time at Penrose that she hadn’t come to the library. Why had it taken her until now to see the humanity in the librarians?
Cassie was happy to have this puzzle to consider—anything to take her mind off of Malcolm—she very nearly walked down the seven-hundreds aisle, too, but stopped at the last minute and took a detour to her favorite study carrel.
Yes, the same carrel she’d taken Mal to on their first study date. She tried to push that memory away. She’d been in the carrel a hundred times—maybe a thousand—so why was the memory of being in their with Mal so powerful? It was as if he was haunting the room as she pulled out her notebooks and tried to spend some serious time with her project. Every time she thought she was starting to focus, her mind slipped sideways and she saw his sly smile, his messy black hair hanging in his eyes, or the lines of muscle that made sweet little V shapes pointing right down his hips.
She banged her head against the table. He was in her head. Seriously and irrevocably in her head. And
when it wasn’t Mal smiling at her, taking her hand, or lifting her in his supernaturally strong arms and flying her to his room, it was Ash in her head.
He was right. She knew he was right. There was a stiffness to her form that she’d never been able to shake, a rigidness to her ideas that made her work twice as hard as other students. But how do you overcome that? How can you practice your way out of being over-practiced?
A librarian floated by the window in a white robe. It was Lily. She gave Cassie a smile and tiny wave of her fingers and Cassie waved back.
Had she made a friend? Or was it just some lingering effect of the librarian drinking her tears?
Cassie slid another notebook out from her bag and opened it to get to work.
But what was Mal doing right then? For a moment, Cassie considered casting a scrying spell just to check up on him, but he was still wearing her charm. It’d be impossible. What if he was hurting? What if she’d made him so angry that he’d fully wolfed out and was running around campus biting people?
She needed to take her mind off Mal and Ash and their whole weird world. She had her own world, didn’t she? Her own friends? A fiancee she was dying to marry? Or at least, pleasantly looking forward to marrying? Well, marrying him would definitely be the sensible thing to do. That was for sure.
She should have turned off the analysis spell. Wearing the enchantment for too long was tiring and hard on her eyes. But seeing the golden words of power etched on the face of the world was comforting. There was a plan. There was order. She could see the silence bubble that wrapped the study carrel. She could see the guardian charms that protected the books from defacement writhing like angry bees on the covers of all the books. Her head pounded with the effort to keep the spell going, but turning it off would have meant accepting the chaos that dwelt underneath the surface of the world, and she couldn’t do that. Not ever.
Cassie fished out her phone—active enchantments included a charm to make the screen unbreakable, a ward to prevent theft, and a rune that boosted the wi-fi to absurd speeds—and called Anoxamander. How long had it been since they’d spoken? Since Christmas? Could it really have been so long.