by Sarina Dorie
Safe from me.
My misery made it difficult to breathe.
“I can’t help you.” If I did, it wouldn’t be the King of the Pacific who would want to use Maddy. It would be the Raven Queen. As horrible as her fate might be with an undersea monster, the Queen of Pleasure and Pain was far worse.
“Please,” Maddy said.
Solving the Fae Fertility Paradox would only bring her greater problems. I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Mr. Thatch and I will go to the King of the Pacific and negotiate a new bargain.”
Her façade of sternness crumbled. Desperation leaked into her voice. “You have to help me. You helped Miss Bloodmire. Don’t you care about me? I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you, Maddy. That’s why I don’t want to do this to you.” I hugged her around the shoulder. “I almost killed Miss Bloodmire. I might kill you.”
Tears filled her eyes. She threw her arms around me, squashing her canvas between us. “Please. You’re the only one who can do this for me.”
The edge of a stretcher bar from Maddy’s painting dug uncomfortably into my side.
I hated to see her so afraid. “I don’t have the ingredients for the spell.”
Maddy’s wet tears spilled down her cheeks and into my hair. “I’ll gather the ingredients. I have friends. They’ll help me. Please. I would do anything for this. I’ll owe you a favor. I can make a formal oath that I’ll do something for you. Please. I really will do anything.”
“I don’t want you to make a magical oath.” I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her if she broke it. She thought her problems could be solved by using Alouette Loraline’s secrets to make her fertile. What she didn’t understand was that if we used the Fae Fertility Paradox, I would use magic to make her a Red affinity. Then her true problems would begin.
I took her firmly by the shoulders. “I will help you find a solution to this problem. I promise. But I need you to let me think about this. The cure for a Witchkin’s infertility comes with a high price. Let me figure out if there’s another way first. We have over a year. There’s no rush. As long as you can conceive next year, you’ll be safe.”
She nodded, a tentative smile twitching the corners of her mouth upward. “Thank you, Ms. Lawrence. I was right to count on you.”
I knew I should remind her about the danger of thanking people in this realm. Before I could get a word out, Maddy’s painting dropped down the stairs. I ducked to grab it, getting a face full of spiderwebs, and handed it to her. She darted up the stairs to the classroom and opened the door to exit.
The load on Maddy’s shoulders looked lighter as she stepped into the rays of sunshine. She glowed with a confident beauty.
The burden she’d dropped was now piled onto my shoulders, the weight too heavy to bear alone. I trudged up the steps after her.
I would need to get help with this. I needed a Witchkin more skilled than me to assist me in making the potion. I could ask Thatch, but he would probably object. If I asked Vega, I didn’t know how she would react. I saw so little of her, now that I’d moved out of our shared dorm room.
I told myself it was the barbs in her prickly personality that kept me away, but in reality, it was the blame I suspected I would see in her eyes.
Surely Vega still had to be hurting emotionally over her miscarriage. I could imagine how she would loathe me for her unborn baby’s death. If she was willing to help me, the price would be high. I was more likely to solicit her help if she thought the idea was her own—if she thought she had something to gain from it.
Easier said than done. I had a lot to do.
“What happened to you?” Imani gestured at me.
I looked down. A red glob of paint was smeared across my clothes. It looked like someone had stabbed me.
“I guess that was me. My artwork.” Maddy laughed nervously, showing me her painting. The canvas was covered in crimson hearts. One of them was now smeared.
“Are you using oil paints?” I asked. “Acrylics don’t do that. They dry in a minute.”
Trevor held up a crumpled tube of brown paint. “This one says oil.” He was still small and skinny, but he’d grown four inches over the school year, now surpassing me in height.
Something brown was smeared on one side of his mouth.
“Did you just eat that oil paint?” I asked.
“No,” he said indignantly.
I eyed the brown smudges on his fingers, uncertain whether it was the same shade as the paint crusted around the cap on the burnt sienna he had shown me. “Oil paints have minerals in them that can be toxic to the human digestive system. Those supplies aren’t meant to be ingested. They’ll make you sick.”
“I didn’t eat any paint today!” Trevor insisted.
Greenie leaned in toward him and sniffed. “It’s okay, Ms. Lawrence. It’s chocolate.”
He crossed his arms, sulking. “This is so insulting. You treat me like I have no will power. When is the last time I ate your art supplies?”
I examined Trevor’s tube of paint. It definitely was oil. He pulled a crayon out of his pocket, trying to subtly nibble on it without anyone noticing.
None of our donated paints had been oils, but perhaps some older paint had gotten mixed in from what I’d purchased from the teacher supply thrift store. I’d gathered a small crate of half-used materials from MECCA.
I waved my hand to get everyone’s attention. “Art Club students, stop what you’re doing. Examine the paints you grabbed. You aren’t supposed to mix oils and acrylics. Nor do we have the proper chemicals to dissolve oil paints and properly clean your brushes.”
“It’s okay,” Maddy said. “I used magic to clean my brush last time.”
She held up a stained paintbrush that was definitely still crimson with oil paint. Her spell must have been water soluble. It hadn’t cleaned her brush.
It was a relief to focus on the small problem of using the incorrect art supplies for a few minutes rather than trying to solve the problems of underaged teens wanting to get pregnant despite my moral compass pointing me in the opposite direction. It was nice to think about something I had the power and the skills to fix instead of politics and magic in the Unseen Realm.
After sorting out the paints, I focused on the stain on my polka-dot blouse.
I hadn’t brought up my apron today. I’d placed it in the hamper to be washed. I hadn’t thought I would need it because I wasn’t using acrylic paints. My own painting medium of choice was watercolors. Even so, I should have known.
I washed the stain off the best I could at the sink. Josie had taught me a spell to use magic, but I didn’t want to use it on synthetic materials. Magic tended to react poorly on Morty-crafted fabrics.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going to get my apron from downstairs,” I said.
I used the student stairwell at the front of the classroom to head down to the dungeon. The back stairs past the closet was a spider den that few people used. Thatch might occasionally venture up the back stairs, using magic to clear his path, but I didn’t have that skill. Not without injuring the spiders. And I didn’t want to provoke Josie’s wrath if I murdered any of her little friends.
On the landing to the ground-level floor, movement caught the corner of my eye. My biological mother’s portrait on the wall drew my attention. Alouette Loraline was depicted in her youth and beauty. Emerald snakes coiled around the black sleeves of her high-collared dress, reminiscent of the green-and-black striped leggings I wore. A pointed witch hat topped her head, her dark hair flowing in an invisible breeze. It was difficult to tell the color of her hair, black with red highlights or a dark shade of auburn cloaked in shadows. Her face was much like mine, only her creamy skin was smooth and unblemished with freckles.
When I looked directly at her, Alouette Loraline’s smile was confident. Her lips were sealed together, as though she meant to conceal a secret. It was only out of the corner of my
eye that I noticed the raven in the corner flicker as though it were in flight. My biological mother’s expression wasn’t so much one of certainty as haughtiness. She seemed to be looking down at me, a hint of cruelty in her eyes that spoke of her wicked side.
I shivered under her stare. I wouldn’t be a wicked witch like her. I had been given a choice in life and had refused the dark side. I would do what was right. I would help my students learn to protect themselves against Fae and their bargains.
Alouette Loraline had experimented on people to try to prove her theories about the Fae Fertility Paradox. Perhaps she had started off with good intentions before she’d turned bad. I would use her knowledge for the purposes of good, not evil.
That’s what I told myself anyway. Yet out of the corner of my eye, I would swear I saw her smile spread larger, a knowing there that told me she would have said otherwise.
I now shared quarters with my husband in one of the nicest rooms in the school. The dungeon might not give that impression with the black mold growing on the walls and the colony of mushrooms taking up residence on the ceiling. Sconces lit the walls with blue flames that made the stairwell look even more ominous. At the bottom of the stairs, I headed into Felix Thatch’s classroom, a windowless room with black lab counters in the back like a chemistry class might have. Only, instead of microscopes and Bunsen burners, the equipment consisted of cauldrons and spell books.
Behind the teacher’s desk was a closed door that might have been a closet. Thatch’s desk was everything mine wasn’t. Files were stacked neatly in piles with a lesson-plan book closed on top. An ink quill rested next to a blotter pad.
Two students sat at desks furiously writing essays. Neither looked up at me. Dripping echoed somewhere in the distance, enhancing the eerie effect of a dungeon where people might be tortured.
Thatch wasn’t seated behind his desk, which meant he was probably somewhere nearby. I passed through his classroom to the far door. The short hallway beyond led to a detention room.
A teenage voice in the next room said something in a snotty tone that told me the detention room was occupied. Felix Thatch paced before a trio of students chained to the walls. His dark hair cascaded rakishly over his shoulders, blending in with the dark gray tweed of his jacket in the gloomy shadows. My husband’s stern expression and rigid posture hinted that it had been quite the day.
I was newly married. I should have felt joy at seeing my husband. At one time, when I’d gazed at his face, I’d seen beauty and affection. These days, it was difficult to see him and not think about the cunning in those eyes. This was the man who had tricked me into staying at Womby’s with an oath instead of leaving to rescue my mom. Again and again in the past, he had lied to me and manipulated me. I wanted to believe those days of deceit were over, but I couldn’t get past it.
A freshman boy I’d been lucky enough to avoid having in my classroom screamed and writhed, whipping his brown hair this way and that. Snow fell on him from an invisible cloud, and he shook it off.
“Please! No more!” he screamed. “How long are you going to torture us like this?”
Thatch didn’t even glance at him as he paced. “As long as it takes for you to … cool off.”
I continued walking forward, uncertain whether now was a good time to walk past to fetch my apron. I would rather have gotten more paint on me than provoke Felix Thatch’s bad mood.
“Hi, Ms. Lawrence,” Balthasar Llewelyn said, grinning at me jovially. His elf ears poked out of his dark mop of hair. “Are you here for kissy-time with Mr. Thatch?”
“Silence,” Thatch said in a crisp British monotone that would have chilled the infernos of hell. “If you are able to talk, it means you must not be suffering enough.”
He aimed his wand at Balthasar’s feet. The troublemaker opened his mouth, looking like he was about to say something sassy, but the flames crackling around his feet stole his attention. He squeezed his eyes closed and growled. Fire was his affinity’s weakness.
Balthasar shook in silence. At least his school uniform was intact. This fire must have been some kind of illusion, like a mirage that he could feel. Balthasar had never been one of my good students. In my time at the school, he’d cursed at me—as in using profanity. He’d also tried to curse me—as in hex me. He’d skipped my classes and spied on me when I’d been dating Elric, a Fae prince.
Despite the many ways Balthasar had proven himself to be a pain in the rear end, it was painful to watch him suffer. He’d had a difficult year that included his sister’s death.
Sometimes Thatch’s detention methods were overkill. It was hard to tell how much of the Red affinity in him enjoyed the suffering of others. I wanted to believe he was completely in control of himself and his pain magic. Perhaps Derrick was the one who had put the idea in my head that Thatch wasn’t a master of his magic.
I pushed away the rising tide of guilt and bitterness that Derrick had caused me. I would not think of him. This wasn’t the time to fall into that pit of grief.
Thatch had a full wall today. A third student, a girl with a curtain of curly black hair obscuring all but her pointed nose, watched me. Flowers—or perhaps the illusion of them—blossomed all around her. The air smelled of roses and pine trees. I couldn’t guess her affinity. I didn’t know what kind of creature’s weakness would be plants. Obviously she wasn’t Amni Plandai. Maybe she was a Celestor and drew her power from the stars instead of things that grew from the earth.
She howled in agony and thrashed as I walked by. “Please, help me. Miss Lawrence, please!”
Not another entreaty to save someone’s soul. There was only so much I could handle in one day. I didn’t even know who this girl was, but apparently she knew me. Not well enough to get my title right, so she was probably a new student.
Thatch waved a hand at her, the intensity of the flower aroma increasing. She howled.
I tugged on the sleeve of Thatch’s tweed jacket, standing on my tiptoes to whisper closer to his ear. “Hey, those students look like they’re in serious pain. Isn’t this method of discipline a little, you know, extreme? They’re just kids.”
“Don’t let their tears fool you. They only do that because they think I might go easier on them. This punishment uses much of their affinity magic fighting the elements that weaken them most. Their true torment is … boredom.” He spoke slowly, stretching out the words, his tone absent of emotion.
This wasn’t so different from his lessons with me to teach me to fight my weakness of pain. What I hadn’t mastered yet was what fueled my magic. Too much pleasure made me putty in anyone’s hands. Then again, I had mastered myself enough to overcome my feelings for Derrick. I’d formed a plan and executed it to keep myself from being captured by the Raven Queen. Doing so had turned me into the kind of wicked witch my biological mother would have been proud to raise.
I didn’t like knowing I was capable of such horrible deeds. I forced myself to smile and pretend I wasn’t mentally beating myself up again.
“Are you here for business or pleasure?” Thatch asked, a hint of a smile lacing his lips.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was just on my way to our room to grab my apron.” I backed away.
“Don’t leave us! Please, Ms. Lawrence! Don’t let him hurt us,” Balthasar shouted to me.
I tried to block out the desperation in his voice as I headed into the next room. Thatch wouldn’t actually do anything to hurt the students.
So why did doubt needle at my mind?
I stepped into another chamber with antique torture instruments on display, which I’d been told was Thatch’s relaxing room—it was my friend Josie who’d told me, and I didn’t know how much of that was a joke, knowing his affinity.
The cries of the students echoed in the dungeon, amplifying and warping, sounding older, more feminine. It made me think of Abigail Lawrence in the Raven Queen’s dungeon. Thatch had assured me she was safe from physical torture.
I had time to build my magical skills before we went to rescue her.
“That stupid bitch isn’t going to help you,” the female student said. “All the teachers are stupid assholes who just want to—”
“Language,” Thatch said. “I will not permit you to use such disrespectful vocabulary when referring to your teachers. Perhaps you have never heard the idiom: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
The teenage girl’s voice grew muffled. Balthasar laughed loudly. It wouldn’t surprise me if Thatch had glued her mouth closed.
“Quiet, or you’ll be next,” Thatch said. “Now focus on subduing your weaknesses.”
As I stepped past the display room and into his office, the voices grew more distant. A metal torture chair across from his desk shone under a chandelier; the focused lighting reminded me of a spotlight. His desk chair was a comfy cushioned one, modern, with padded armrests and made from a combination of metal, fabric, and plastic that felt out of place in a medieval dungeon.
Priscilla, Thatch’s raven, pecked at the metal latch of her cage, wanting out. His familiar stopped when she saw me approach, her beady eyes wary. Even after I had been at the school for three years and had married Felix Thatch, I had a feeling she would gouge out my eyeballs with her talons if she had the opportunity.
No student would ever dare to go this far into the belly of the dungeon voluntarily. It was unlikely Thatch needed a lock or magical ward on his door. Fae, on the other hand, were a different story. I placed my hand on the doorknob, waiting to be permitted entry. Purple stars flickered in the air around me, tingling against my hand as if tasting my essence. The air smelled of moonlight and winter air.
The latch popped, and the door opened.
Immediately, I headed to the hamper in the adjoining room. It was a classy bathroom with creamy marble and mosaics that made it look like a Grecian palace, so different from the rest of the dungeon. Water trickled from the sauna and soaking bath in the room past this one.