by Eva Chase
I could almost see in the hunch of her shoulders the way Victory or her lackeys must have taken their jabs at Shelby over this like so many other things. The only thing they seemed to enjoy more than hassling me was intimidating the Nary students in every way they could.
“Well, don’t stop practicing on my account,” I said. “I’d love to hear more.”
I must have said it emphatically enough, because a smile crossed Shelby’s face. “Wait until you hear us all together,” she said. “Just a few more weeks until the annual concert.”
I grinned back at her and patted the phone pocket on my purse. “I’ve already got it written in my calendar.”
She lifted her bow again. The delicate glide of it across the strings sent an appreciative shiver down my back. She must have worked her ass off to make it into the music program here, one of the special streams Bloodstone University offered just to their nonmagical scholarship students. According to Shelby, the opportunities anyone who graduated got were incomparable, which they’d have to be for anyone to put up with the crap the rest of the student body put them through.
I went to the kitchen to grab a snack. Surprise, surprise, one chunk of cheese and a couple of yogurts I’d left in my section of the fridge had gone sour and spotted with mold. After the second time I’d seen that happen, it’d been obvious someone was messing with my food as yet another power play. Now, with the fifth time, I couldn’t even be bothered to get angry about it.
I chucked those items in the garbage and reached for the apples farther back that I’d cast a concealing illusion on. Victory and the others couldn’t spoil what they didn’t know was there. I had enough of a budget to afford to buy a few decoys. Not letting them get to me felt like the best possible revenge.
When I came into my bedroom, the smell of the cut apple brought Deborah out of the nest she’d built for herself in the wall. I set her half on the bed beside me and took a bite of mine while she started to nibble. The juice that flooded my mouth was perfectly tart, but the ache inside me expanded again with the cello song seeping through the door. My other hand crept up to curl around my dragon bead on its chain.
Courage and strength—that’s what I’d told Mom it meant to me. I needed both right now.
“Deborah,” I said quietly, “what do you know about the confrontation with the fearmancers where the joymancers took me?”
She paused, and I thought her little muscles tensed just slightly between her sleek white fur. I didn’t have any part in it. I didn’t know the Conclave had taken in a fearmancer child at all until they extended the offer of getting out of my cancer-addled body. Those kinds of missions weren’t general knowledge if you didn’t work closely with the Conclave.
“But it didn’t surprise you that it could have happened. That they could have killed fearmancers and taken one of their kids.”
One of our duties as joymancers is to stand up against those who’d destroy the happiness people can find in the world. If we have an opportunity to interfere with a malicious plan, whether it’s orchestrated by fearmancers or Naries, we take it.
That was exactly the kind of thing I figured she’d say. I let out a slow breath, my hand dropping to rest on my purse. My purse that contained the printed-out report Declan had given me yesterday. I’d read it at least ten times since then. It hadn’t sat any better with me this morning than it had last night.
“According to the fearmancers’ report on the fight… my birth parents and the other fearmancers in the building were just there to consider buying the place. That was why the joymancers were able to get the better of them—they weren’t expecting any conflict. They hadn’t brought along anyone to defend them. They brought me along. Obviously they wouldn’t have done that if they’d thought they might be walking into a battle.”
No doubt they would have used that building for some nefarious purpose, Deborah said. These people don’t know how to do anything other than nefarious.
“I know,” I said, even though I couldn’t have said that was completely true. I didn’t think Imogen was a bad person, even if she’d hurt me. The more time I spent with Declan, the more sure I was that he was doing his best given his circumstances. Like Jude had said the other day, everyone here had simply grown up with different priorities and a different way of looking at the world than I had. That didn’t make every single thing they did evil.
Any more than every single thing any joymancer did was necessarily good.
“It just seems pretty… vicious to attack a bunch of people going about their business—with their kid right there too—when those people aren’t hurting anyone right then, you know?” I went on after a moment’s hesitation. “Shouldn’t we be better than that?”
I don’t know all the ins and outs of the situation. I’m sure there was more to it. Why don’t you put that away, sweetheart? You’ve had enough to worry about without adding to it with events from years and years ago.
I knew what she meant. This morning I’d woken up again with a sore throat, a mug I’d left on my desk smashed, and nervous glances when I’d come out of my bedroom. Deborah had darted off as soon as I’d started yelling, but she hadn’t been able to identify the cause. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought the episodes were my toxic fearmancer magic messing with me from the inside out and not an attack. I didn’t really want to think too closely about that possibility.
“I’m not saying they didn’t have any good reasons,” I said. “I’m not even necessarily saying the joymancers are wrong to stop the fearmancers any way they can. I just—maybe it’s not totally bizarre that everyone here hates joymancers as much as they do. If you look at things from their perspective.”
And a warped perspective that is, Deborah muttered, digging into her apple again. Don’t let them get in your head, Lorelei. You were raised to be better than that.
She didn’t say that I was better. Only that I’d been raised better. I looked down at her for a moment, my stomach rejecting the thought of eating any more of my own piece of apple.
Did she really trust me even now, or was she just as wary of me turning into some kind of monster as the joymancers who’d taken me must have been? She hadn’t even liked the idea of me leaving campus to visit the places I’d inherited.
I didn’t know how to bring up the other part that had stuck in my head: the pictures of my birth mother and father after the slaughter. And it had looked like a slaughter. They’d been burned to the bone, their skin and clothes crackled black in swaths across their bodies, my father’s neck gaping open like a dark second mouth. The building’s polished tile floor had been smeared with ash.
In one of the pictures, I’d been able to make out a tiny toddler footprint in that ash where two-year-old me must have stood next to my mother’s charred body. The seared remains of her arm had been stretched toward that spot.
My real parents hadn’t deserved to be murdered by the blacksuits, blood splashed all over our kitchen. But maybe that violence hadn’t been automatic brutality so much as the fearmancers’ idea of payback.
Declan’s mother had been in those pictures too, her body just as ruined. He must be old enough to remember at least a little about her, even though my memory of the attack was a blank.
The cello music halted. I lifted my head to catch the voices that filtered in from the common room. That sounded like Imogen. I shook away the tension inside me. Now was my chance to dig a little deeper into the possible magical payback that might be happening right here.
When I stepped out of my bedroom, Shelby was just ducking out of the dorm with her cello. Imogen caught my eye and shrugged. “I didn’t ask her to stop. I guess she’s self-conscious.”
And maybe Imogen hadn’t always been the friendliest in the past. She’d been tentatively warm when I’d included Shelby in some of our conversations and outings, but she hadn’t seemed all that enthusiastic about socializing with a Nary.
That fact served as a useful reminder to be careful how I treaded wit
h her.
“Hey,” I said. “I actually wanted to ask you about something… You said you’re studying the medical side of physicality magic, right?”
Imogen nodded, curiosity mixing with the wariness in her expression. “Is this about— I know you having been sleeping all that well.”
Was she going to be weird about my morning episodes, steering clear of me the way the other girls had even more than usual? Shelby hadn’t withdrawn from me, but then, she spent as little time as possible in the common room, so she might not have even realized which bedroom the disturbance had been coming from.
“No,” I said tentatively. “Well, maybe it’d be useful for that too, but I’m mostly thinking of someone else. Can a mage make a person sick using magic? And if they can, how would that work? Like, are there ways to tell whether it’s magical?”
Imogen’s eyes widened. She sat down on one of the sofas, and I followed suit. “Why are you asking?”
“The professor who’s my mentor came down with something that seemed serious the other day, and I’m probably just being paranoid, but I can’t help wondering about that possibility, after everything that’s already happened. So it is possible, then?”
Thankfully, I didn’t need to explain to Imogen why I’d be paranoid about people targeting someone who’d supported me. She’d been on the receiving end herself not that long ago. She brought her hand to her mouth as she considered.
“It’s definitely possible. It’s actually one of the most common methods of quietly… interfering with people someone wants out of the way but can’t challenge openly.” She paused. “You’ve heard about Connar Stormhurst’s family, haven’t you?”
An icy prickle shot through my stomach. “No, nothing to do with challenges or whatever. Why? What did he do?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t have been him. It happened when I was, like, six or seven, so he wouldn’t have been much older—no magic yet.” Her gaze darted through the room and came back to rest on me. “I’m not saying this to criticize the baron, just to be clear. Everyone knows about it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t too.”
“What?”
She swept her tawny hair back behind her ears, making her silver dragonfly clip bob. “His mother wasn’t always the Stormhurst baron. Her brother was the one who inherited the position. But there was an… accident that killed him and injured his wife badly, and then their one kid, the scion, got sick… No one could prove it was magic, but she didn’t respond to any regular treatments either.”
“Their daughter died too?” I said, the chill congealing into a pool of nausea. “Connar’s mom wiped out the competition so she could have the baron spot?”
Imogen clasped her hands in her lap. “Like I said, no one could prove anything. If they could, there’d have been sanctions. But everyone knows. It’s happened before. And then there’s the whole thing with Connar and his brother.”
I braced myself. “What about them?”
“It’s only rumors what exactly happened. But he definitely has a twin brother. I guess if things had gone by official policy, their performance here at the university would have decided who was named the scion. But before their magic kicked in, they had some kind of fight… No one’s really seen his brother since then. He was messed up so badly he couldn’t come to Blood U. Apparently he's still alive, but…” She worried at her lip with her teeth.
Connar had hurt his own brother so badly the guy was a permanent invalid? I restrained a shudder. I wouldn’t have thought the guy I’d gotten to know was capable of that… but I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of making the caustic remarks he had the day after we’d had sex. He had a brutal side, that was for sure. I’d let myself forget it when we were away from everyone else, but maybe he was the worst of my fellow scions.
“That’s awful,” I said.
Imogen shrugged stiffly, her expression still tight. “It’s how things go. Prove your strength, hold onto your power—or grab it from someone else. Sometimes I wish my family was respected enough that people would care what I think… but a lot of the time I’m glad to pretty much fly under the radar.”
Not an option I could take. Maybe my assessment had gotten the casual bullies to back off, but it’d clearly also pointed an even bigger spotlight on me than I’d already had as simply the long-lost Bloodstone scion.
Malcolm had told me once that the only real rule here was to avoid getting caught if you broke one of the other rules. It sounded like that applied to all fearmancer society.
“If no one could prove what happened with his cousin, then I guess that kind of spell isn’t easy to identify?” I said.
Imogen shook her head. “Not from what I’ve read and seen. The magic usually kicks off the problem, but a… ‘good’ spell of that type will set in motion a bunch of effects that will feed off each other naturally once they’re going. Unless you’re there to catch the original spell when it activates the process, there’s nothing to trace.”
I sighed and leaned back on the couch. “Do you think even the victim would be able to tell the difference between a real illness and a magical attack?”
“Probably not. But it doesn’t happen so often—or leave people living and able to talk about it enough—that we’ve got a lot of examples. Sometimes you can guess based on the symptoms or the after effects, if they don’t totally align with a regular illness.”
That was something. I considered her. “Would you know what to look for?”
“I have a basic idea. Why?”
I motioned toward the door. “I was going to go pay Professor Banefield a visit—see how he’s doing, bring him one of those double-chocolate brownies Shelby got me addicted to. It’s the first day since he got sick I’m allowed to drop in. I don’t have any idea what signs to look for, but if you’re up for coming along… If only just to get my paranoia in check? I’d really appreciate it.”
Imogen stared at me for a second as if she expected me to take back the invite. Then she got up with a flash of a smile, looking as pleased as if I’d offered to get her into the hottest party of the month and not to visit a still slightly under-the-weather professor. “Of course,” she said. “If you think I might be able to help. I owe you about a thousand times over.”
My violent morning episodes obviously hadn’t stopped her from wanting patch up our friendship. She was happy I trusted her enough to bring her along. I hadn’t actually trusted her enough to admit the full extent of my fears about what had happened to Professor Banefield, but she didn’t need to know that.
I smiled back at her. “Let me just grab that brownie, and we can get going, then.”
I’d given Banefield plenty of time to get back to his office after his morning seminar. He answered the door immediately at my knock, looking pretty much his usual stout, messy-haired self if maybe a little paler than usual. His forehead furrowed when he took in Imogen beside me.
“It’s good to see you, Rory, and… Miss Wakeburn, is it?”
“Good memory,” Imogen said brightly. She’d told me on the way over that she hadn’t had class with Banefield in over a year.
“We won’t stay long if you’ve got catching up to do.” I held out the brownie in its clear plastic bag. “I brought you a get-well treat. Or, I guess it’s an ‘I’m glad you got well’ treat at this point.”
Banefield chuckled as he accepted the brownie. “Really not necessary. I have to apologize for our last meeting. I’m sure I gave you quite a scare.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “You’re really feeling better?”
“Almost one hundred percent.” He shifted his weight as if he were going to step back and invite us into the office, but then he stopped. “Has anything come up that you need my assistance with right now?”
I wanted to know what the hell he’d been about to tell me when he’d gotten sick, but I definitely didn’t trust Imogen enough to bring that up with her around. Damn it.
“I didn’t get to ask you before how your tri
p was,” I said. “I was thinking of traveling off campus when I have the chance. Maybe you can give me some tips on spots to visit.”
It was the best way I could think of to prod him to tell me where he’d gone without outright asking a question that was none of my business.
Banefield chuckled again. Was the sound terser this time? I itched to try an Insight spell on him, but the chances of my pulling that off without getting into trouble for working magic on a professor seemed pretty slim, given that Insight was his specialty too.
“It was more of an errand I had to run than anything like a vacation,” he said in a tone that didn’t invite further conversation. “I’d imagine your peers could advise you best on the most trendy leisure spots in the area. Thank you for coming by, Rory, and for the treat.”
I’d been hoping for a bit more of a chat than that, but I wasn’t going to hassle a guy I’d watched collapse just last week. Had he forgotten what he’d started saying? Maybe he’d only said it at all because of the sickness coming on—maybe it hadn’t even been true, only some wild fever dream.
“I’ll see you for our usual session,” I said.
As we meandered back down the hall, I glanced at Imogen. She knew what I was wondering before I had to say the question out loud.
“I’m really not an expert on this or anything,” she said, “so I can’t make any promises. But I didn’t notice anything that gave me a bad feeling. At least nothing to do with him being sick.”
I stopped in the second floor landing. “What do you mean? Did it seem like something else was wrong?”
Imogen frowned. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe he’s just unsteady after that illness. I never got into any trouble when I was in his class, so I’ve got no idea what else it could be. A couple times when he looked at me, I felt…” She touched the base of her throat. “He was afraid of me.”
Chapter Eleven