A Handful of Hexes

by Sarina Dorie

  Was Thatch really making Vega my teacher? I needed to know what was going on in that stubborn head of his.

  I gathered up my courage. Instead of exiting and going upstairs, I closed the door so Vega wouldn’t hear what I was about to say. “I thought you were going to teach me to protect myself.”

  Thatch stood, his full height making him loom over the desk like a stick figure. A stick figure with really nice hair. “Now isn’t the best time to discuss this.” He lowered his voice. “By simply closing that door, you’ve likely sparked Miss Bloodmire’s curiosity.”

  Vega was the last person I wanted to know my secrets. She was the most morally challenged person on staff. Who knew what she would do if she found out what I was.

  “Use one of your special deafening spells,” I whispered. “We need to talk about my education.”

  He grimaced. The quill in his hand melted into the shape of a wand. He flicked it at the door. A wave of blue emanated from the twisted stick of wood, casting the room in a blue light that made it look like we were underwater. Lights danced across the shield that separated us from the door.

  Thatch sat down and steepled his fingers. “Pray, tell me you haven’t asked me to waste my magic for you to whine about your situation.”

  “I am not going to whine.” I tried to keep my voice even and pitched low so he wouldn’t later claim I had whined. “I just want you to explain why Vega’s teaching me instead of you.” Vega wasn’t a Red like I was. She was normal. Aside from the bitch factor.

  “In order to be professional and not put myself in any awkward situations with a female staff member, it’s in my best interest to limit time spent alone with you.”

  “Oh.”

  His best interest. Limit his time spent alone with me.

  The meaning of those words stung. Was he referring to that almost-kiss only days before when he’d caressed my arm and shown me how to heal myself? Maybe that touch hadn’t been what I’d thought. Maybe he saw pining in my eyes and was trying to keep me at an arm’s length like he had done with Josie.

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Don’t do that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  He waved a hand at me. “That face you’re making. Stop it. I can see I’ve hurt your delicate feelings. If you don’t learn to grow a thicker skin and conceal your emotions better, someone like the Raven Queen will use them against you.”

  The Fae queen of pleasure and pain was the last person I wanted to use me. Thatch had a history with the Raven Court. Even now, I wasn’t sure what his relationship was with the queen, or if she still employed him as her spy. I could only imagine how traumatic being in her service might have been.

  “Is that why you pretend you don’t have feelings?” I asked. “So that Fae don’t use them against you?”

  “That is none of your concern.” He stood. “We’re done. You’re dismissed.”

  “What about training me in my affinity? Who is going to do that? Or should I ask Miss Perfect-at-Everything if she’ll show me how to use the Red affinity too?”

  He grimaced. “Which you almost gave away today.”

  True. I wasn’t the best at keeping secrets, and this one was a doozy. I wouldn’t put it past Vega to lock me in her coffin if she found out what I was, only taking me out when she wanted me to fuel her Celestor magic and make her stronger.

  “You can’t rely on your affinity to solve your problems,” he said. “You need to learn other forms of magic. If you don’t, you’ll accidentally use the Red affinity in public and expose yourself. It’s better for you to study other affinities so we can figure out how to best disguise what you are.”

  He was forgetting one important detail. “Okay, I get it. I need to try to look like a fertility sprite or nymph or lightning fury so people don’t suspect I’m actually a succubus, but—”

  “You are not a succubus,” he said firmly. “You simply have a way with the electrical impulses within the human body that result in an increased sensitivity to touch.”

  A succubus sounded sexier, but whatever.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I can’t control my magic. How am I supposed to not use it if I don’t know how to control it? I’m going to blow something up again.”

  Like I had with Julian. Or with the plant magic that Julian had tried to teach me. I’d electrocuted a flower without meaning to. Of course, his curse had also negatively affected my magic, making everything go haywire. I tried not to think about him and what a disgusting sexual predator he’d been.

  Thatch tilted his head to the side, studying me. “No, I don’t think you will. If you have enough control over your affinity to use it to defend yourself, you can also contain it.”

  “You told me I needed to learn to use my magic to help students.” And I would, once I knew anything worth teaching. “How am I supposed to help Imani with her affinity if I don’t understand mine?”

  I didn’t even know if Imani knew what she was.

  Thatch drummed his fingers on his desk, looking like his daily supply of patience had run out. Any moment now I was sure he was going to evict me from the office forcibly with a wave of his wand.

  “You aren’t ready,” he said. “You can help others after you’ve learned to help yourself. In the meantime, you need to conceal what you are.”

  “I’ve been ready my entire life. Show me how to help myself. Please.” He was the only trained Red affinity I knew.

  He shook his head. I waited for him to say something, anything. The bird in the cage ruffled its feathers.

  “If Julian Thistledown could recognize your affinity, so will other Fae. Some will want to kill you for it. Others will want to enslave you. I cannot impress upon you enough the importance of learning to blend in.”

  Hearing Julian’s name spoken out loud sent shivers through me, like it had resurrected the ghost of him from the grave.

  “Have you been doing the exercises from Lucid Dreams and Subconscious Messages every day?” he asked. “The meditations and visualizations? The dream journal?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you recognize the difference between reality and dreams? Have you achieved the ability to control your dreams yet?”

  “Sometimes.” By sometimes, I meant never. “What do the lucid-dreaming exercises have to do with my affinity?”

  “If you can tell your conscious and subconscious desires from someone else’s, you will know when someone else is trying to control you and your affinity. Can you tell the difference between your magic and someone else’s?”

  Thatch had never told me why he wanted me to learn to control my dreams. I had assumed he’d been mad I’d pulled him into that pornado dream, but I now saw it was because he’d been trying to help me.

  Every time I thought of Julian Thistledown and what he’d done days before, it made me sick. Not only had my former boyfriend been a Fae using his green-man magic to bewitch students, but he’d used me to draw out his powers I hadn’t known he’d been seducing me with my own touch magic until it had been too late. If I learned to recognize the difference between my desires and someone else using my affinity to control me, I could prevent someone using me for my magic in the future. I needed to be able to recognize the signs.

  “Others will want to use your affinity to further their agenda,” Thatch said. “Not individuals like Julian Thistledown, but entire Fae courts. You’re fortunate the Raven Court only suspects what you could be. They don’t know the full extent of your usefulness to them, or else the Raven Queen would never have allowed you to get away.”

  I hugged my arms around myself. “Because my affinity somehow solves the Fae Fertility Paradox my mother was experimenting with?”

  I didn’t know much about Alouette Loraline’s experiments other than she had blown out a back wall of the school, and she’d been using electricity—which I now realized must have been because she was a Red affinity.

  “Why is it eve
n called the Fae Fertility Paradox?” Fae had a fertility problem. The title alluded to something that enabled them to have children, but it would at the same time disable them from having children.

  “State what you know about Fae fertility.” He said it with the bored indifference of a history teacher who was burned-out on the subject matter, though I doubted that was the case.

  “Fae are immortal and they pretty much live forever, but their birthrates have been in decline since the Industrial Revolution, so it seems like their population is going to stay the same.”

  “Wrong,” he said loud enough to make me jump. “You fail to deduce. The Fae population would remain the same if they weren’t so fond of killing each other. Already some species of Fae have gone extinct, like the sylphs and the undine.”

  “I haven’t ever heard of those.”

  “My point exactly.” He leaned forward, his hair rakishly falling into his eyes. “Witchkin are the part-Fae, part-human offspring who can have children. Your mother investigated why some Fae lineages continue to have children and some don’t. That is all you need to know.”

  “But why was she researching this? She wasn’t Fae.”

  “I don’t know.” His tone remained neutral, but he spoke a little too quickly. “You needn’t concern yourself with any more of this frivolous fancy. There are more practical matters to discuss.”

  That was what Mr. Avoidance said about everything he didn’t want to talk about. I wondered if Thatch had been part of my mother’s experiments as a colleague—or a test subject. It was unlikely he would ever admit to either.

  I sighed in exasperation. I wasn’t going to learn how to use my magic. He wasn’t forthcoming with answers about my biological mother and what she’d been up to—or how it related to me—and I had to put up with Vega.

  His face softened. “I know you want to learn wards and Red affinity magic, but you aren’t equipped to handle that kind of power yet.” Thatch walked around his desk and sat on the edge. He gestured to the metal torture chair. “Do you truly think you’re ready to sit in that chair again and resume our previous exercises?”

  “Yes.”

  He raised an eyebrow, doubt painting his face. “That chair is for summoning fears and testing your limits. You will have to face your demons, and when you do, the work will be taxing and onerous after all you’ve been through. It isn’t going to be as easy as it was before.”

  It had never been easy in the first place.

  “It’s in your best interest to continue with your lucid-dreaming exercises to prepare yourself for the next step in your studies. We’ll continue with your affinity training in another month. That is, if I think you’re making progress with your other teachers.”

  “Okay,” I said in resignation.

  I just had to prove to him and my new mentor how worthy I was for real magic. Thatch waved a hand at the watery blue light shimmering between us and the door, and it dissipated. I trudged to the exit, disappointment heavy on my shoulders.

  The moment I opened the door, Vega stumbled forward, caught off guard.

  It looked like she’d been eavesdropping—or trying to.

  Her pale cheeks flushed red. “Pardon me. I was just about to knock. I came back because I thought I’d left my … wand.”

  Thatch crossed his arms. “You’re as pathetic as Miss Lawrence. The two of you will get along splendidly.”

  Vega glowered at me in disgust.

  Right. We were two peas in a pod, Vega and me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Alouette Loraline’s Secrets

  My best friend, Josephine Kimura, placed her hands on her hips, imitating Thatch’s British monotone. “It isn’t a Halloween party. It’s the All Hallows’ Eve Open House. There’s a difference.”

  We both laughed at her stuffy imitation.

  Josie was only a few inches taller than me, but her witch hat towered over me. Today’s hat was made from patches of mauve, lavender, and pink lace, matching her flowy, shabby-chic dress. Between the purples streak in her ink-black hair, her black-rimmed nerdy glasses, and her penchant for treating all life with compassion—spiders included—she was the most bohemian witch at the school.

  I would have liked Josie even if I hadn’t admired her fashion sense. We shared common interests and had both been raised in the Pacific Northwest. But more than that, she put up with my never-ending supply of questions and my lack of magical abilities.

  High school students dressed in black-and-gray uniforms buzzed around the great hall, using their magical skills to transform the school’s avocado-green walls for tonight’s party. We had worked at it for hours, but still weren’t done. We needed to finish in time for the afternoon’s festivities.

  The great hall served as a cafeteria most of the time. Today the circular room had been repurposed into a theater, with the dais at the front of the room where the teachers usually ate transformed into a stage, and benches set out in front of it. Chairs from classrooms had been brought down to make more room for parents, alumni, and community members. The tables against the walls displayed art from my classes, cauldrons of award-winning potions, and various charms to showcase student talents.

  A group of Elementia clustered at the archways. Two boys with ice affinities decorated each of the Stonehenge-like archways supporting the walls. Rex Smith waved to me and pointed at the intricate patterns of frost that almost disguised the seventies-era mustard-yellow paint, clearly proud of his handiwork. Jenny Peterson, a senior with a fire affinity, worked with two girls I didn’t know, making streamers of fire that they hung from the cone-shaped ceiling. The flames licked precariously close to a flag on the wall that displayed the Celestor team emblem of yellow stars on a purple background. Two seconds later the fabric caught fire.

  Josie ran off, wand raised in the air to put out the most recent student mishap.

  Considering my hidden talent consisted of shooting rainbows out my vagina when I was aroused—and lightning from my hands when I was threatened—neither were useful or appropriate at a school function. But as the art teacher, I’d been given the task of overseeing the aesthetics of the hall by Principal Jebediah Ebenezer Bumblebub.

  I did the one thing I knew how to do as an art teacher: boss teenagers around.

  By three o’clock, most of the students were done with the decorations and headed upstairs to change and rest before the evening’s festivities. Music students and theater students crowded around the front of the room, fighting for the stage to rehearse. I walked along the perimeter of the hall, admiring the magical decorations.

  The display of graphite drawings my art students had made were the best examples of pattern, shading, and perspective, yet they looked paltry compared to the streamers made of flowers and the frosted glass on the windows students had created with magic from their other classes’ lessons. A group of girls and boys left a table, high-fiving each other, clearly proud of their fire bouquets.

  I paused at the table. The students that had just vacated it had left crumpled-up papers and a book behind. I scooped up the trash and waved the book at them.

  “One of you left this,” I called.

  The surface of the hardback book was pale leather that looked like calfskin.

  One of the boys shook his head at me. “It isn’t mine.”

  “Not mine either,” Chase Othello, a sophomore with bright purple hair said.

  I tucked the book under my arm and glanced at the crumpled papers. Two of them were the kind of immature stuff one expected to find at a high school, a note that had probably been passed back and forth discussing how stupid curfew was and why certain boys were annoying. There was even a comment about “Mr. T” being a bitch. I assumed they meant Thatch.

  One of the crumpled papers was on quality cold-pressed parchment, probably acid-free by the feel of it. I hated it when my students crumpled up their art and wasted good paper. I always tried to tell them they could use an eraser—whic
h unfortunately we were almost out of. Or they could have turned the paper over. At least this student had done that.

  The paper tingled in my fingers as I uncrumpled it to see what had been drawn. For the briefest moment, flashes of letters and symbols flickered across the white page, covering the lines of what had been sketched, but the writing vanished a moment later. Perhaps the students had concealed a secret with a spell.

  I smoothed out the paper on a table. On one side was an incomplete sketch of a tentacle monster. It was hard to tell if it was a kraken or Lovecraft’s elder god Cthulhu. Probably since it was in space and the tentacles were wrapped around the Earth, it was the elder god.

  My high school sweetheart and best friend, Derrick, had once been obsessed with Cthulhu. We had spent many lunches in the art room, drawing together and whispering our secrets. If it hadn’t been for Derrick, I would never have known magic was possible—and not something to be feared. He had understood me like no one else had and accepted me for who I was, Harry Potter obsession and all.

  I turned the paper over, gasping as I gazed at the caricature.

  It was me. I had been given plenty of unflattering renditions of my face made by students, sometimes even in attempts to be compliments but failing. This was cute and well done. It was professional quality with Copic markers like Derrick used to use. The eyelashes were a little too long, and the freckled nose too upturned. My hair was an undefinable color, somewhere in between my natural red and the pink it was currently dyed. This cute pixie version of myself was flattering. Between the pink hair and striped sleeves on the arms, it was obviously me.

  I turned to see if any of the students who might have drawn this lingered, but they weren’t here.

  Anyone could have made this. It wasn’t like Derrick was the only person who drew caricatures with Copic markers. He wasn’t the only person in the world who was inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. There was no signature. Even so, I knew.