by Sarina Dorie
“I told you to wait in my office,” Thatch said coolly.
Her voice was high and full of panic. “I need you to hurry. I can’t find Clarissa anywhere. Or Vega. Khaba said Vega left right after he caught her in her dorm room with her Fae boyfriend. That’s Clarissa’s ex-boyfriend. Vega hasn’t returned. Clarissa wasn’t in her dorm or the infirmary—”
Thatch’s voice grew louder. “Stop. Out of my private quarters. You can’t just barge in here uninvited.”
I hated that Josie was so worried about me. I wished I could tell her the truth instead of sneaking around. Thatch had asked me to wait a couple more weeks, and I had agreed, but every moment of my relationship with Thatch that I kept secret ate at my conscience.
“Stop being such a dick and listen to me,” Josie said. “I need your help finding Clarissa.”
“Calm down. Miss Lawrence is alive and well. I saw her some time ago. She’s probably sleeping,” Thatch said. “Let us go to my office to discuss this matter further there.”
The fear that had been there moments ago in Josie’s voice was replaced by suspicion. “Why do you have Clarissa’s shoe?”
I hugged the other shoe to my chest. I was a regular Cinderella all right.
Thatch’s voice was a low rumble in response. “That isn’t Miss Lawrence’s shoe.”
“Yes, it is. It’s a size six. We’re the same size.”
“You are mistaken.”
“Stop lying!”
Something thudded, soft and muffled like a fist on flesh.
“Ow,” Thatch said in an unexcited monotone. Considering his pain affinity, he’d probably enjoyed that.
Josie yelled, her high voice turning deep and edging on demonic. “Why do you have her shoe? Tell me. Right now.”
“I admit it.” Thatch sighed. “You’ve caught me, Miss Kimura.”
I waited for him to admit the truth. My heart thudded more quickly in excitement. A mixture of trepidation and hope swelled inside me. I could stop lying to her. Only, I needed to be the one to tell her. He would probably say it in some way that would hurt her feelings and make her hate me.
I stared at the doorknob, hesitating. If I left the bathroom, I didn’t know whether I would make things worse. If I didn’t, he might make things worse.
Instead of going where I thought he would, Thatch said, “I stole it. I happen to know Miss Lawrence is perfectly fine because she came to me twice tonight looking for her shoe, and I sent her back to the infirmary. She’s wandering about in the school wearing one shoe, looking for the match.”
“I cannot believe you. Give that to me. Why do you have to be such a big jerk?” The door slammed.
I listened to make sure she truly was gone this time.
The door opened again, and Thatch left, taking with him my momentary excitement that I might have an excuse to tell Josie the truth. I understood Thatch’s concern. Not only did Josie despise him for spurning her love, but she was friends with Khaba—and she was unable to keep a secret under the best of circumstances. And Thatch didn’t trust Khaba. So ultimately if I was going to convince Thatch that it was safe to tell Josie, he needed to see that Khaba wasn’t looking for reasons to get him fired.
Unfortunately Khaba did want to fire him because he thought Thatch was behind Derrick’s and Brogan’s deaths. He was convinced Thatch still worked for the Raven Queen. I hadn’t helped the matter when I’d confided to him about the bargain between Thatch and Elric, which had made Thatch look like a big jerk.
I realized then I was going to have to prove Thatch’s innocence to Khaba.
CHAPTER THREE
With This Next Magic Trick, She’ll Make Her Problem Completely Disappear
I would have gone straight to my room to sleep, but Thatch had wanted me to use the secret passage leading up a stairwell past supply closets to my classroom. I carried my right shoe under my arm since I still didn’t have the left shoe, holding a fireball spell just above my palm to light my way and burn away any spiderwebs in my path. There were enough spiders in the passage to fulfill a jorogumo’s fantasies. I used my key to unlock the door from the stairwell to the back of my classroom.
As I exited from the door at the front of my classroom and headed down to the main floor via the public stairs, Josie found me. Hurriedly, I extinguished my fire spell before she spotted it. No one was supposed to know my magic was back.
Another secret I was keeping from my best friend.
Josie’s wand glowed buttery gold, light radiating three times as far as my fire spell had. She hugged me and handed me my other shoe. “That bag of dicks stole this.” She used her usual endearment for Thatch.
“Thanks,” I said. Reluctantly I drew farther back, under the premise of putting on my shoes. I didn’t want to hug her too long and set off her affinity.
She removed her black-rimmed glasses and wiped them off on one of the mismatched patches of her loose bohemian dress. Josie’s hair was long and black with lavender streaks threaded throughout that matched her lacy witch hat. She hailed from Seattle, but her secret jorogumo nature came from her Japanese ancestry.
“So, are you going to tell me what’s up with all these rumors about Vega murdering you?” she asked.
“That’s not what happened. I was the one who killed her. Almost killed her.” I crouched to buckle my shoes.
She laughed. “No way! How did little ol’ you do that?”
“I was trying to use a magic technique that Thatch is teaching me.” I considered how much it was safe to tell Josie without revealing my affinity and endangering her with knowledge of what I was. The fewer who knew about my Red affinity, the less likely it was the Raven Court might torture them later.
“How can you use any magic? You were drained.” Josie pursed her lips. “Please don’t tell me that jerk told you it’s possible to regain your magic. I already told you it’s impossible.”
The best way to lie was to sandwich it between two truths. I hoped. “It isn’t impossible. Gertrude Periwinkle, our librarian, regained her magic. So did Ludomil Sokoloff, the custodian. It took a long time. But Thatch got his back more quickly. He’s helping me, using some Celestor techniques.”
“But he’s obviously not doing a very good job of it.”
I stood, trying not to fidget like a guilty liar would. “The problem isn’t the teacher. I’m just a horrible student.” It sounded like a reasonable excuse. “He showed me some Celestor magic. Some telepathy-empathy stuff. I was trying to use it on Vega to persuade her not to blackmail me. I guess I did it wrong, and I stopped her heart.”
“No, you didn’t. Sorry to say, she’s still alive.” Josie looped an arm through mine and ushered me down the stairs.
I didn’t see an easy way to avoid touching Josie without offending her.
“Actually, her heart did stop. She wasn’t breathing. I called for help, but no one was around, so I used CPR to resuscitate her.” I left out the part about me using electricity to Frankenstein her heart back to life. “Jackie Frost came in and saw me doing first aid and assumed I was doing necromancy or something.”
“Wow. So you were the one using forbidden arts, not Vega. She’ll be so jealous.” Josie winked at me, her dark brown eyes sparkling with delight. “There’s nothing worse than Morty science.”
“Yeah, well, that isn’t the end of the story. I woke up, and Elric was in my room. He and Vega started making out. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went downstairs—”
Josie made a face. “I wouldn’t be feeling well either if I saw my evil roommate sucking on my ex-boyfriend’s face.”
I nudged her with my shoulder. “I wasn’t feeling well because I was having magical problems. One of my students went to get Thatch, and he had to do some fancy Celestor spell to get my magical system working again because my soul kept wanting to leave my body.”
Josie shook her head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who evicted your soul from your body in t
he first place as some kind of joke.”
We passed posters advertising Josie’s knitting club and my art club. Shadows shifted around us. A creak on the steps behind us drew my attention. I glanced over my shoulder. No one was there—unless it was Thatch following to make sure I safely returned to my room, and he was using an invisibility spell.
“Felix Thatch isn’t like that,” I said. “He’s saved my life a few times now.” I wanted her to understand he wasn’t evil. I wanted to tell her he was my boyfriend now, though I knew he wouldn’t want that. I settled for trying to acclimate her to the idea that he was a decent human being. “He can actually be really nice when he wants to be.”
“You mean when he isn’t stealing your shoes?”
“That was a joke. I don’t care about that. It’s actually pretty funny.” I laughed, but it sounded forced.
As we came out to the main floor, the light of Josie’s wand fell on the painting of my biological mother. Alouette Loraline’s eyes watched us emerge into the hallway. She wore a high-collared Victorian gown, the brim of her witch hat shrouding her eyes in shadows. Green snakes circled around her arms, the emerald and black not so different from the stripes of my leggings. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the snakes slither and shift.
The last time I’d passed this painting in the middle of the night I had been using my awareness to reach out beyond myself. I had felt a woman’s presence, full of animosity and hate. I now assumed that had been Vega, angry about every supposed wrong I’d unwittingly done to her.
I didn’t want to reach outside myself. I was afraid if I did, I might get stuck outside my body again and not be able to get back in without Thatch’s help. But looking at my biological mother’s painting out of the corner of my eye and seeing her lips move tempted me.
There was just something uncanny about that painting of Alouette Loraline. The more I stared at it, the more I would swear it wanted to draw me in to tell me a secret.
Josie followed my gaze. “Do you think he hates you because he really was in love with her like they say?”
I blinked. “What? Who?”
She smacked me in the shoulder. “Thatch, dummy. He was supposedly in love with Loraline. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard it, is it?”
I drew back, rubbing my arm. There was nothing like pain to bring me into the present. A scuff on the stairs we’d exited drew my attention. I squinted into the shadows. No one was there.
I looked back to Josie. “I guess he might have been in love with her, but he’s over her. He said so.”
“Right,” Josie said. “Because as we know, Professor Butthead always tells the truth.”
My confidence faltered. It was true Thatch didn’t always tell the truth.
A flicker of movement from the painting caught my eye. “Felix Thatch used to hate me when I first started here. He didn’t want to work with me, but he’s over that. We’re friends now.”
“Did he tell you that you’re friends, or is that your assumption?” She placed a hand on her hip. “Because he doesn’t do friendship. He has associates and . . . colleagues.” She imitated his British accent.
It was hard not to laugh at her exaggeration of his speech pattern. The light shifted, our shadows shifting along the walls like phantoms. The sneaky smile on Alouette Loraline’s face in the painting seemed to shift from cunning to surprise.
“What the hell?” Josie said. “Are you doing that?”
A whisper came from beside me, and I started. The hiss of air echoed first from my mother’s portrait, then to the stairway, to the dark passage, and then the painting again. Light swirled in front of us, spiraling and snaking in streaks of silver and gold. I stumbled back from the painting. I smelled winter and starlight.
A woman’s voice, deep and resonant, a hint of an accent lacing her tone, said, “Roses are red. Magic is blue. I took her head, now I’ll have yours and your boyfriend’s too.”
The light died away.
Josie and I both screamed and ran.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Woman of Mystery
Josie grabbed my hand as we ran down the hall and up the stairs to the women’s dorms. I followed, my heart seizing in panic. That voice in the dark had been like the bogeyman in the closet, giving voice to all my fears. Someone wanted me dead—and Felix Thatch too.
This could have been Vega playing a trick on me. I’d assumed she’d sent me the flowers and the last note. The verse of this one was similar, but darker. It had a reference to removing someone’s head—I assumed Alouette Loraline’s. That was what the Princess of Lies and Truth had written in her letter to Jeb. It was what she said she would do to my mother, take her head and send it to the Raven Queen. Who else knew about that note besides Khaba and Thatch?
Did that mean this phantom in the stairwell was a Fae enemy, the Princess of Lies and Truth? Not Vega extending a joke?
I followed Josie, trusting she would get me safely to our destination. Only when she shoved me through the door to my dorm room and I locked it behind us did I wonder if maybe being alone in a closed space with her again might be a bad idea. I didn’t want another incident of my affinity drawing out hers and turning her into a giant hungry spider—unless she was going to eat my enemy, whoever that was. If Josie shifted into her jorogumo self like she had before she’d eaten Jeb, I didn’t know whether she’d be able to stop there or she’d eat me too this time.
Josie leaned against the door. Her black glasses sat askew on her nose, and she’d lost her lacy witch hat.
I collapsed onto the nearest bed, which happened to be Vega’s. That would never have been permissible if my roommate had been present, but she wasn’t in.
My room reminded me of somewhere schoolmarms might have lived two hundred years ago, with two single beds sharing a nightstand and wardrobes across from the foot of each bed. It was hard to pinpoint what about Vega’s decorative touch gave it a homicidal gothic Victorian feel. An old-fashioned cuckoo clock rested on the wall between beds, not so different from the one my grandma had in her house. Every shelf on the wall was filled with Vega’s books, including the spaces I’d hoped to fill, and paintings of macabre subjects like skeletons adorned the walls.
“We need to tell someone about what just happened,” I said. “Can you use that magic mirror trick to contact Thatch?”
She crinkled up her nose at me. “Are you kidding me? What’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know. Investigate.”
“We’re telling Khaba.” Josie strode over to the long oval mirror in the corner behind a mound of Vega’s fringed dresses on the floor that smelled of cigarettes and alcohol. She waved her hand in front of the mirror. The surface rippled like water. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, show me Khaba, graceful and tall.”
I sucked in a breath, in awe of the magic. Even after living in the Unseen Realm for two years, it didn’t cease to amaze me all the cool tricks witches could do.
Khaba came into view. Candlelight flickered across the bronze skin of his face and black beard, light catching on his bald head. He still wore the hot-pink tracksuit I’d seen him wearing earlier.
His gaze shifted from something in the distance and came to focus on Josie. Annoyance flickered across his face. “I told you earlier, honey, I don’t have time to talk to you about Clarissa. I’ve been up to my neck in repairs on our wards.”
I stepped forward so Khaba could see me. “That’s what I need to talk to you about. We encountered an intruder.”
“Who’s that?” a high, nasally voice asked.
It sounded like Pinky. My suspicions were confirmed when our sasquatch staff member stuck his face closer to Khaba’s, crowding the djinn so that he was forced to scoot aside.
“Hi, Josie! Hi, Clarissa!” Pinky grinned, his teeth gleaming white against the sable of his fur. “I’m helping Dean Khaba with wards. We’ve already repaired three—”
Josie cut in. “Someone just th
reatened us in the main corridor outside the stairwell to Clarissa’s classroom.”
Khaba’s thick brows drew together. “What kind of threat?”
I hesitated, uncertain whether reciting the poem was going to give away my relationship with Thatch. And even if it did, Khaba had to know as much as possible so he could catch this Fae. I prayed I wasn’t making a mistake. I recited the poem.
Khaba’s eyed narrowed. I looked away. Surely he had to suspect now.
“What did the intruder look like? Was he one of the Raven Court’s emissaries?” He peppered me with questions. “Are you still dating Elric of the Silver Court?”
“No.” I didn’t volunteer whom I was dating. “The intruder was a woman.”
“Vega’s dating Elric,” Pinky said.
Josie shook her head adamantly. “No, she isn’t. It’s just a sham to make Clarissa jealous. Elric still loves her.”
“Was it Vega?” Pinky asked. “Did she threaten you? I heard this rumor—”
“No!” I said. “And those rumors weren’t true.”
I didn’t think it was Vega. But if it wasn’t her, who was it? Who knew about me and Thatch? The voice had spoken in front of my mother’s painting. Previously when I’d passed the painting, I’d felt a presence full of animosity.
Goosebumps rose on my arm as I considered whether the painting could have spoken. Could my mother still be alive? A small part of her could have been trapped—or escaped—from that painting.
“So this is about you and Elric.” Khaba rubbed his bald head. “Great. Now I have to get the Silver Court involved in this matter because a threat has been made on a royal pain in the ass’s life. I hate dealing with Fae.”
The offhanded remark was laughable considering he was Fae. Pinky, for all his disdain for Fae, was technically considered Fae since he was a full-blooded sasquatch.
“Where are you?” Khaba asked.
“Clarissa’s room,” Josie said.
Khaba and Pinky exchanged uneasy looks. I knew what they were afraid of. I was uneasy myself, not knowing if Josie might explode into full spider dominatrix at any moment.