Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2)

by Jacqueline Sweet

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

  The next weeks for Tamsin passed in a blur. Her schedule was evenly split between normal university classes like Calculus and Introduction to Post-War American Literature, and magical classes. She had a six hour block three days a week that was Introduction to Magic. It was three hours of lecture from a rotating group of teachers and three hours of practical lab taught by a small army of bored grad students. Tamsin found the normal classes exciting and challenging, and the magical classes frustrating to the point of exhaustion.

  She found every excuse possible to not go back to her dorm room those weeks. She studied in cafés. She read her course material in the common rooms. And she and Rachel and Suresh formed a cozy little work group. Her new friends had more experience than her, but not much. They were all in the same unprepared, inexperienced, about-to-sink boat.

  The difference was that Rachel and Suresh had cool, helpful roommates coaching them through the harder parts of the practical magic. They didn't have MacKenzie glaring at them every time they turned a page too loudly or Hannah, whose every word undermined Tamsin's shrinking self-esteem. Rachel and Suresh may have started at the same level as Tamsin, but they quickly overshot her to the point where she felt embarrassed to show her face at the study group.

  She also rarely saw the boys next door.

  Cash seemed to run away from her whenever he laid eyes on her.

  Rye was on an opposite schedule from her, so their interactions were reduced to quick chats while racing in opposite directions.

  But once, while crossing campus, she came upon Gray. He was sitting on a park bench, beneath a huge oak tree in the central park area that the school called the Quad. He was dressed in a gray silk suit and cape and staring at a letter. It was handwritten in loopy cursive. Gray was glaring at it like he wished it would explode. When she called his name though, he leapt up from the bench, swept himself into a deep bow, begged her forgiveness, and quickly left.

  But Professor Schoenherr let her use his computer to email her family, which helped a bit with the culture shock. Phone calls were off limits, he explained, for security purposes. It wasn’t that they cared about students telling their families about Penrose—they encouraged it, in fact. No, it was that they knew the calls would be intercepted by the governments and the phone companies and that couldn’t happen.

  Still, as the weeks went by Tamsin’s mood grew darker.

  In a moment of desperation and loneliness, she knocked on the boys’ door.

  If Tamsin was being honest with herself, she would have admitted that she was hoping to find Cash in the room. Just Cash, all alone. She’d hadn’t had a moment alone with him since that first night and she was aching for human contact. Maybe the two of them, for just a night, could push the loneliness aside?

  Maybe even for more than one night.

  But Rye answered the door. He opened it with the universal gesture of a person who had somebody else with them in the room that they didn't want you to know about.

  "Oh, I'm sorry to bother you, I didn't know you had someone over." Tamsin smiled. She wasn’t actually sorry. Even seeing Rye’s face for a moment felt reassuring.

  "No. It's okay. I am alone." Something crashed and toppled over in the room behind him. "But it is not a good time?” he said, flashing her his shy smile before closing the door and yelling loudly at someone in his native tongue.

  It was over a month before she saw Cash alone again, but it wasn’t under the best of circumstances. She had spent all day trying to make a candle flame turn blue. It was basic magic—kiddie stuff. And while at first it seemed trivial to her—who needs to turn a candle flame blue?—it became clear that it was one of the building blocks for every spell that followed.

  And she couldn’t do it.

  She had her school-issued wand.

  She had the spellbook.

  She moved her fingers with precision and grace in the exact neccessary forms.

  She had lecture notes and Rachel and Suresh’s patient help.

  But she couldn’t do it.

  The flame wouldn’t change colors.

  She couldn’t even manage to make it go out.

  Every other student could do it. Thirty-five students in the lab could do it.

  But not her.

  She spent hours saying the incantation and flicking her wrist.

  But nothing happened.

  She’d performed other spells correctly. Mostly very minor charms.

  When she asked Schoenherr about it, he’d handed her a large quartz crystal to hold. And then he frowned as the color of the crystal seemed to dim.

  “You have low magic,” he pronounced. He could’ve been telling her that her car tire was flat for all the emphasis he put into it.

  “What do I do?”

  “Are you eating well? Sleeping enough? Under a lot of stress?”

  Tamsin held the door shut inside her. “Let me think about that. The answers are: No, No and Yes.”

  “Hey, did you remember who that opener was?” he said, changing the subject. “I haven’t been able to find her.”

  “You’ve been asking around?”

  “I’ve been asking around. No one has heard about an opener.”

  Tamsin shrugged. “How do I get, like, high magic? Or even just normal magic levels?”

  “Practice,” Schoenherr grunted. He wasn’t even paying attention to her. “Maybe you should take a few years off? Exercise your magical muscles? Develop your chops? Get some life experience under your belt?”

  “My dad doesn’t have that long,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, kid.”

  Tamsin stormed out and nearly ran into Janet waiting outside. The girl had the appointment after hers but even when Tamsin left early, she was there waiting.

  “I know a way to get more magic,” she said. “If you have the balls for it.”

  Tamsin eyed her warily. Janet had chosen to be silent in class, except for the occasional sarcastic laugh. Her attitude undermined everything.

  “Are you really an opener?” she asked. In her black eyes there was fire.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “C’mon, girl. The Beard might not get it, but I do.”

  The door inside her shook. Flames licked at the edges. Tamsin had kept it shut since that first day, but it was getting so hard to keep it closed. “Have you been spying on me?”

  Janet laughed. “My gift is sensory magic. I can effortlessly hear and taste and smell everything near me. You didn’t know that? Isn’t Beardface in there telling you anything useful?”

  “Schoenherr tells you about other students’ gifts? What does he say about me?”

  Janet grinned at her wickedly. “Oh, he has no idea about you, girl. He thinks you’re going to be a, well, it rhymes with schmop-out. But hey, it could be really useful knowing someone like you. I’d hate to see you fall out of this life just because this clown was too afraid of boogeymen to help you. So look me up if you want to get serious about this.”

  It was after this frustrating conversation with Schoenherr and Janet that Tamsin, desperate for a friendly face, returned to her hall. She wanted to see Cash. It’d been a month since she’d seem him closer than fifty feet away and in that time she had—she knew—built him up in her mind into an unreasonably perfect avatar of trustworthy masculinity. The Cash in her mind was perfect. It became a mantra in her head. “If only Cash were here, he could help me.” He’d listen to her problems. He’d offer her a drink. He’d say something wise and witty. And then, in her idle thoughts, he’d spread her thighs apart and bury his face between them.

  Thomas had never been particularly good at giving her orgasms. Sex with him had been like watching a British tv show—short, irregular, and with too much crying.

  Cash, she just knew, would be phenomenal at it.

  It wasn’t even possible for her to masturbate properly, what with MacKenzie never ever leaving the room or sleeping.

  But when she went
to see Cash, after her incredibly frustrating day, she found Rye. He was outside the room, sitting on the floor with his back against the door to his room. He had a huge sketchpad balanced on his knees and he was drawing with nubs of charcoal. When Tamsin approached, he hurriedly flipped the book shut.

  “I can’t see?” she asked.

  “Not until it is done.” His accent was like velvet on her skin.

  He smiled at her with his slow, shy smile. “Do you want a drink?” He offered her a mason jar filled with something clear. It wasn’t water. It smelled like if she spilled it, it would melt a hole down to the basement.

  “Dear god, what is that?” The acrid odor made Tamsin cough.

  “My own creation. But it is based on an old recipe of my people, called kvass.” He sipped the burning mixture without a reaction. “Originally, it was like sun tea? That’s a thing you have here, yes? But kvass is made from wheat and grass and whatever the farmers had at hand.” He held up the jar. “This is better. I take the same idea, but I am fermenting magic itself.”

  “That sounds like a terrible idea.”

  Rye laughed loudly. “Oh yes. Very terrible. The best ideas though are terrible ideas.” He gulped a huge mouthful and swallowed. His body trembled afterward and Tamsin felt like she could get drunk just standing near him.

  There was an unusual sadness in his eyes. “Is something wrong? Rye, if you need to talk, you can talk to me.”

  “A great many things are wrong. That is the nature of our world. And there are extraordinarily few that we can do anything about.”

  “Are your classes going well?”

  He nodded. “They teach me little that I do not already know. And the things I ask about—they tell me I am not ready to know them yet.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  He shook his head. “There are secrets I carry. And even if I wanted to tell them, I could not.” He pulled down the hem of his shirt to reveal a tattoo near his heart on his wide flat chest. Magical characters shone there, the runes taking the shape of a lock.

  “That tattoo. That—what did you call it—glyph? That keeps you from sharing a secret?”

  “Yes.” His eyes were so very blue, and so very drunk.

  “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  “I am not the one who painted this glyph on my skin.”

  “Who did?”

  “I cannot say.”

  It was a lock. And she, if her counselor was right, was an opener. But how did that even work?

  The hand that she felt inside herself—the one that held the door shut—she let go of the door and pushed the hand outwards, grasping for Rye’s locked heart.

  At first she felt nothing, and then a rush of energy flowed through her, spilling delightfully across her skin like warm champagne.

  She bit her lip at the sensation. Did magic always feel like this?

  She could almost see the force emerging from her as if it were a golden key slowly sailing through the air. Rye didn’t see it. He was watching her with distant eyes.

  She took the key and pushed it into him.

  The sensation within her doubled. Her blood tickled. Her skin thrummed. Her heart beat a thousand times a minute.

  The lock on Rye’s heart opened.

  Rye’s eyes sharpened. “My sister, Dynara, did this,” he said. “She is younger than me by a year but has always been so much brighter than I am. You would love her. She is devious and brilliant. Half of these symbols on my skin are her handiwork. She outgrew what my village elders knew by the time she was seven. She could do things with magic that you would not believe. Stepping between worlds. Speaking to the spirits of creatures long dead. Once she even visited the moon to speak to the faeries that live there.”

  “The moon? There are fairies on the moon?”

  Rye laughed. “Dynara stole from them a serving spoon and slipped back down to earth. I was there to catch her when she fell. Protecting her was my whole life. But then I failed.” He drank the rest of the contents of the jar. That much alcohol would have put Tamsin into a coma.

  Tamsin knelt before him. How far could her opening magic go?

  “What happened? How did you fail?”

  Rye opened his mouth to speak, but then the door behind him opened and he fell backwards into the room.

  Cash was standing there, dripping with sweat. He smelled incredible. It was a good thing Tamsin was kneeling, or she would have fallen down.

  “Hi,” Tamsin said.

  “Oh hey, Tamsin. I thought you were the pizza guy.” Cash leaned out the door and looked down the hall. “Is he here?”

  Behind him in the room, Tamsin saw a leggy blonde sprawled naked across the couch. Her skin had that vaguely plastic sheen that Tamsin recognized as a glamour.

  “Cash, my friend,” Rye said from the floor. “Does this mean my long, cold sexile is over?”

  Tamsin’s blood boiled. She had no hand holding her door shut now. It was holding the key, still inside Rye. She’d only spoken to Cash once. One time! And yet she’d let herself fall into the trap of imagining him as some mythical super boyfriend.

  But he was just a guy like any other.

  Cash glanced back into the room.

  The leggy blonde stirred.

  “Yeah, about that,” Cash said and closed the door, pushing Rye sideways into the hall.

  Rye sighed. Tamsin got the idea that was sexiled often.

  “I’d invite you to sleep in my room,” Tamsin began, “but MacKenzie would literally kill me.”

  “Do not worry. I have a glyph here that creates a magic pillow and makes the ground as soft as a mattress.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” Rye smiled. “The ground is as cold and uncomfortable as ever. But the company is nice.” He closed his eyes and let the copious amounts of fermented magic pull him down into slumber.

  Tamsin went into her room and got her extra blanket for him.

  MacKenzie hissed at the interruption.

  When she put her duvet over the big man it barely covered half of him. There was a spell to make it bigger, but she couldn’t do it.

  Tamsin pulled his sketchpad aside from where it had fallen when Cash opened the door.

  The flames still raged inside her.

  The sketchpad fell open to the page where Rye had been working and there, staring back up at her, was a lovingly rendered charcoal drawing of Tamsin. She was on fire and looking like a goddess.

  16

  The Dragon Hill Inn

  It was late July and the skies were annoyingly blue with not a cloud in sight. The summer heat smothered Tamsin like a wet towel. Absolutely no one was in Sixth Bentham, with the exception of Mackenzie and their hard ass Residential Advisor, Chester. Tamsin didn't see Chester the RA much, but according to her hall neighbors, he was obsessed with catching students breaking the rules. Tamsin never broke any rules, so she didn't worry about it, but Rye and Gray and Cash were always on the lookout for Chester

  Every air-conditioned café, study lounge, and restaurant table were occupied by students beating the heat. Tamsin couldn’t find comfort anywhere. So, desperate for a place to study, she decided to try somewhere new—a townie bar.

  The points against her plan was that it was a half hour walk and outside the runic shield. The points for her plan was it was a place one could go to get served proper drinks. This was Canada after all and the drinking age was nineteen. She'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.

  The walk wasn't unpleasant. A thin breeze blew from the west just enough to pull Tamsin on toward the promise of a cool atmosphere and colder drinks. She hadn't had a chance to explore the land around Penrose, so the walk to the bar was a nice excuse. She’d spent all her time at Penrose venturing no more than a three block radius from her dorm. She was surprised that past the campus buildings were a handful of decent-looking restaurants and shops. And then there was dense neighborhoods of student and faculty housing with a dazzling variety of architectural styles
.

  But once she crossed the golden line of the runic shield, the neighborhoods were pure pacific northwest. And on the way out, the shield let her through without incident.

  What did the townies think about the shield? Could they even see it? Or did some strange magic make their eyes slide away? Students were free to visit the town, which was called Dragon Hill, but they were to remain incognito. Some in the little town knew about magic, but most did not.

  The bar—the Dragon Hill Inn—was another eight blocks past the shield. It was a stand-alone building of no particular charm. It stood rectangular and squat and could've housed anything—an insurance company, a post office, or a dive bar.

  Tamsin pushed the door open and shivered as the cool blast of the air conditioning licked her skin. She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the gloom and then made her way to the bar.

  For a weekday afternoon it was not very busy. Three upperclassman, clearly from Penrose even though they were trying to blend in with the townies, sat at a table in the back with a pile of books between them. A scraggly little man wearing flannel sat at the bar with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. As far away as possible from the scraggly man at the bat sat a woman with bright red cheeks and bleary eyes who was scratching off a pile of lottery tickets.

  For her first time in a bar, it was a bit of a letdown. Tamsin had expected something rowdier or sexier than this. But it was cool and quiet. And absent from the heat, her mind began to clear. She picked the stool closest to the door and hopped onto it. But there was no bartender present. Was she supposed to ring a bell? Was there an app for this?

  A hatch in the floor behind the bar popped open. From the basment, the bartender emerged lugging a crate of vodka bottles. Something about the bartender seemed immediately familiar. It was in the way he moved—it was very familair. His back was to Tamsin as he poured a drink for the scraggly man.

  But then he turned, and it was Gray.

  Gray from next door.

  Gray who seemed so highborn.

  Gray who she never saw in the cafeteria because he always ate in the special student lounge for the old wizard families.