I turned back to my breakfast, contemplated another bite, then stood and approached the nearest trash deposit area. I sorted out the recyclables into the appropriate bins and dumped the rest into a large rectangular trash can nearby. At once the plastic lining the bin started to rustle, but I paid it no mind. That was just the trash troll, a small, ugly creature that lived inside the bin and fed on the waste. Nearly all the trash cans at Arkwell contained trash trolls. They were mostly harmless, unlike their giant-sized kin that lived in the more remote areas of the world. Even still, it was a bad idea to try and fetch something out of a trash can once you tossed it in. At least one student in my year had lost a finger that way.
“Geez, Dusty,” said Selene as I returned to the table. “Why do you look like someone just broke your favorite spell?”
“Well, I’m not exactly excited about Lance and his cronies getting a firsthand account every time I screw up dream-walking.” Lance was the school jokester, the king of pranks and rumors. I could hear it now—jokes about how much I weighed, jokes about my lack of sex appeal, because let’s face it, even though there was nothing sexual about dream-feeding, the mechanics of it were a little kinky.
Selene shook her head. “You don’t know that’ll happen. Eli might not tell those guys anything.”
“Sure, and Lance is going to ask me to homecoming.”
“What’s homecoming?”
I sighed, hating it when I mixed up magickind traditions with ordinary ones. “It’s like the Samhain dance.”
“Oh, that’s right. I knew that.” Selene wrinkled her nose. “Well, who cares what he says one way or another? You shouldn’t worry so much about what people think. If you want my advice you should sit back and enjoy the ride.”
This painted far too vivid—and accurate—an image in my mind. “Ugh, I think I’m going to be sick.” I gathered up my things, ignoring Selene’s bemused stare. There was nothing I could say that would make her understand. I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t just bat my eyes and pout my lips and make Eli adore me. She hadn’t heard the way he’d called me a freak. She couldn’t understand how much he intimidated me on a purely physical level.
Selene patted my arm. “If it bothers you that much, why don’t you try really hard to get good at this dream-seer stuff. Maybe once you catch the killer, the senate will let up and you can go back to normal.”
“Yeah, sure. Because my life used to be so normal.”
I slung my backpack over my shoulder and hurried for the door, doing my best not to glance at Eli. I felt better once I was out of the cafeteria. I shouldn’t have to worry about seeing Eli again anytime soon. Arkwell was big enough that chances were good he wouldn’t be in any of my classes.
Except three minutes before the homeroom bell rang, Eli walked in. I froze in my chair, braced for another glare from him, but he didn’t even look at me as he walked past and took an empty seat in the far corner. Knowing he was there made my skin prickle. For a second I contemplated moving to the other side of the room, but I didn’t want to look like a coward. Plus, I was too chicken to move.
When the class started a few minutes later, I decided to pretend he didn’t exist. It was just homeroom, after all. I could handle twenty minutes. I lingered after the bell, making sure he left the classroom before I did. As soon as he was gone, I took a deep breath. No more Eli.
But when I walked into Miss Norton’s classroom, there he was sitting next to Katarina. I told myself this wasn’t a pattern, just coincidence. No matter my principal belief that there was no such thing as coincidence in the magical world.
Sometimes I really hate being right.
Eli followed me to spell casting and then to history afterward. I would’ve seen him at lunch, too, except I decided to skip it and head to the library to do some research on Keepers. The place was practically deserted at this time of day, giving me my pick of computer terminals. I sat down at one in the corner and woke up the screen with a push of the mouse. A pop-up box with a smiley face and the words “Hello, student!” immediately displayed on the screen. The animation phenomenon was particularly prevalent in the library.
I gritted my teeth and contemplated switching to another terminal in the hopes that it would be less lively than this one, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. None of the computers in here were new.
In the text box below the greeting I typed “hi thanks” and pressed enter.
The pop-up disappeared, giving me access to the library’s custom search engine. I typed “keeper” and “ring” in the box and pressed the search button.
Another pop-up appeared on the screen: “Are you sure you want to search for that?”
“Yes,” I typed.
“Lots of people aren’t, you know, sure.” The smile on the smiley face widened.
“I’m sure.”
“Sure, sure?”
“YES!!!” I pounded on the keys, trying to get the point across.
The smiley face frowned. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
At last, the stupid thing displayed the results, and I sighed in relief. There were three sets, one from the library archives, one from the ordinary Internet, and one from the e-net, which was magickind’s version of the Internet. The “e” stood for enchantment, naturally.
I scanned the library results and selected one that looked like an encyclopedia entry:
A Keeper is a generic term reserved for a living being whose life force or force of will has been used as a key component in a magical spell. The binding of such a force makes the spell unbreakable for as long as the being in question remains alive, or in the case of the latter, remains committed to holding the spell. Death is usually the only effective means of breaking a Keeper spell.
Oftentimes, magical objects such as a ring, necklace, bracelet, or in rare cases, tattoos were used as the primary lynchpin of the spell. Generally, the lynchpins would seal themselves to the Keeper’s body, requiring force to be removed. These lynchpins were virtually undetectable and impervious to many spells and charms, including those to locate, vanish, break, etc. Widely considered to be a form of black magic, the practice of using Keepers was banned by the Black Magic Purge Act of 1349.
A chill went through me as I finished reading. So Rosemary had been the Keeper of some kind of spell that the killer wanted to break. Well, that explained Lady Elaine’s comment about Rosemary’s age. Eighteen seemed awfully young to commit to a spell where the only way out of it was dying.
I skimmed through the rest of the library results, hoping for something more detailed, but found nothing. Next I tried the e-net results, but they contained only more simple definitions. Not that this was a big surprise, considering the practice of Keeper spells was illegal. The magickind government blocked any questionable material on the e-net.
With zero expectations, I clicked on the Internet results. The first few were advertisements for rings designed to keep other rings in place. One was for a romance novel for sale on Amazon. A couple more had to do with World of Warcraft.
The title of the last entry on the page stopped me cold:
Death at Coleville, First Seal Broken
What was something like that doing on the Internet? I clicked the Web link, taking in the name of the website as I did. Reckthaworlde.com didn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy.
Another pop-up message from the computer appeared on the screen, the smiley face frowning again. “Sorry, Charlie. No can do.”
“Why?” I typed.
“That site is restricted. No social media access in the library.”
I frowned. Was Reckthaworlde.com some kind of antisocial Facebook? Seemed a little contradictory.
I closed the search engine on the library terminal, then pulled the eTab out of my bag. Social networking sites were perfectly allowable on personal devices. I performed the same search and clicked on the link again, appreciating how fast and normal the eTab responded. I wondered if it would ever show symptoms of animation. If it did, I
bet it would have a cool personality. That would be nice. My desktop computer back in my dorm had already been two years past warranty when I moved in last spring, which meant it now had the personality of a crotchety old man, constantly complaining about how tired and overworked it was and always going to sleep on me the second I stopped using it.
This time the screen popped up with a log-in box asking me to either enter my username and password or register as a new user. I clicked the latter and typed in my throwaway e-mail address. Another message appeared on the screen:
Welcome, [email protected]. In order to complete your registration, please enter the name of your initiator.
Say what? I’d never heard of such a thing. Was this some kind of online secret society?
Frustrated, I set the eTab down on the table harder than I meant to, almost dropping it.
“You might want to be more careful with that,” someone said from behind me. “Those things can be pretty fragile.”
Both startled and annoyed at the interruption, I said, “Really? And here I thought it was made out of rubber.”
“Yeah, people make that mistake all the time.”
I looked over my shoulder and did a mental stutter. The speaker was a seriously good-looking guy, maybe seventeen or eighteen, a senior probably. He was standing in front of a cart loaded down with library books ready to be shelved. He was tall and on the thin side, but still muscled. He wore his blond hair in a short ponytail at the base of his neck, but some of the strands had worked loose and now hung in his eyes. Cute. I realized I was staring and blushed.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Did you just get it? The eTab, I mean.”
“Yeah.” Okay, Dusty. You’ve got to do better than the one-word sentence.
“Mind if I take a look? I’ve been thinking of getting one.”
“Sure.” I picked up the eTab, pressed the home button, and handed it to him.
He took it, an eager expression on his face. I watched as his adept fingers moved across the touch screen, opening apps, closing them again. He clearly knew his way around electronic devices. He handed it back to me a moment later. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” A two-word response. Fifty percent improvement, but still a long way from where I wanted to be. I tried to think of what Selene would say and decided to go for honesty. “I’m surprised you know so much about using it.”
“Sure. I guess I’m a geek that way.”
I smiled. “You are definitely not a geek.”
He grinned. “Hel-lo,” he said, pointing at himself. “Student library aide.”
I laughed, half-tempted to point out that at least he was a hot library aide. And he definitely didn’t get those bulging muscles in his forearms by shelving books. “Could be worse. You could be a hall monitor.”
His grin broadened. “I’m Paul.”
“Dusty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
He brushed the hair back from his eyes. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“Oh, I get it. Your parents went to school with my mom, right? And they’ve warned you that any daughter of hers must be a real nightmare.”
Paul chuckled. “Well, you don’t look scary to me. Just the opposite.”
A warm flutter passed through my stomach. The air felt charged with electricity, like in those rare moments when you know the person looking at you thinks you’re attractive, and the even rarer moments when the feeling is mutual. Now at a complete loss for what to say, I was both saved and foiled by the warning bell.
“I guess you’d better go,” Paul said, putting his hands on the library cart.
I smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“See you around.” He walked away, disappearing behind a row of books.
I took a moment to catch my breath, then headed off for my psionics class. In the excitement of my brief interlude with Paul, I’d almost forgotten about Eli until I spotted him sitting in the top right-hand row beside Lance. The classroom had an auditorium setup that was more common in colleges than high schools. I took my usual seat in the left-hand side of the second row, determined not to let his presence unnerve me.
Our teacher, Mr. Ankil, arrived a few minutes late as usual, announcing a pop quiz as he came through the door. The whole class groaned.
Ankil put his hands on his hips and pretended to be disappointed. “Come on, guys. We have a new addition to our illustrious ranks, and the last thing we want to do is make Elijah think we don’t have a blast in here. Am I right?”
“You’re right,” Lance said, giving him the finger-gun salute and doing a perfect imitation of Ankil’s flamboyant, over-the-top style.
Mr. Ankil grinned. He was one of those teachers always trying to act like your friend rather than an authority figure. For the most part, he pulled it off. It didn’t hurt that he wore his hair long and unkempt and favored the jeans-and-sandals look. He also sported multiple piercings in both ears, and he wore rings on all his fingers, including his thumbs.
Most of his success, though, could be attributed to his ability to influence our emotions with his empathic abilities. Ankil was a psychic, extremely gifted in all types of mind-magic—telepathy, telekinesis, and so on. Perfect for psionics, the study of mind-magic.
I wasn’t very happy about the quiz. Psionics was my best magic-based subject, but it required a calm, focused state of being, something I sorely lacked today.
“Now, all you have to do is place your tennis balls inside the basket with no hands.” Ankil motioned toward the storage closet on the other side of the room, and the door opened at once. At least twenty bright yellow Wilson balls flew out from it and began distributing themselves to all the students. Then Mr. Ankil summoned his wastebasket from beside his desk and placed it in the center of the room in front of us.
As pop quizzes went, this one was absurdly easy and well below even my skill level, but it was typical Ankil. He liked any excuse to give everybody a passing grade.
Easy or not, I still managed to bomb it.
I started off okay, lifting the ball into the air just by thinking about it, but then I heard Lance whisper loudly, “Be careful, Eli. There’s no telling where this thing might go.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” Eli said. “I’ve seen her in action.”
Mortified, my concentration broke as memories of my disastrous encounter with him two nights ago flashed in my brain. I lost control of the ball, spiking it upward. It zoomed across the room like a yellow missile and smacked Lance in the forehead. I sunk down in my seat as several people laughed at my unintentional bull’s eye.
His face flushed in anger, Lance picked up his tennis ball and winged it at me. There wasn’t time to catch it, but I managed to swat it away with the back of my hand. It went flying again, and this time struck Mr. Ankil square in the chest.
Mr. Ankil shrugged it off like it was no big deal, but he summoned Lance’s ball with his telekinesis and sent it sailing across the room where he set it on the desk in front of Lance.
“Since you seem so keen on throwing the ball,” Mr. Ankil said, “why don’t you try and make it into the basket using just your hands and no mind-magic.”
Everybody recognized the challenge in the task and the chatter of voices from my classmates reacting to the scene died away, leaving an almost breathless silence. For me, I couldn’t help but feel a swell of affection for Mr. Ankil. I knew as well as he did that Lance would miss. Magickind—wizards and witches in particular—weren’t very skilled at hand-eye coordination.
Lance flubbed it. I mean, that sucker wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as the wastebasket. I grinned in triumph at Lance.
Beside him, Eli picked up another tennis ball, and then with a casual gesture sent it soaring across the room and right into the basket as easily as if he had used magic.
Show-off. Go figure that the new guy, the I-can’t-even-do-magic guy, would pass the quiz when I didn’t.
After class, Mr. Ankil asked me
to stay behind. I waited near his desk while the other students left, trying not to look nervous about whatever I must’ve done to warrant an after-class lecture.
Mr. Ankil said, “Lance picks on you a lot, doesn’t he?”
I blinked at him, surprised. “Well, yeah, but Lance picks on everybody.”
“So I’ve noticed. I went to school with guys like him. Wizards have a tendency to be full of themselves, arrogant to the point of stupid.”
I grinned in total agreement.
Ankil grinned back. “How ’bout I show you a little trick you can use on the trickster?”
“Okay.”
He turned and walked to the closet, pulling out one of the head-and-hand dummies. The dummy was a mannequin of a man’s head and upper body that we sometimes used to practice more difficult skills. Ankil set the dummy on his desk and wedged a pencil into one of its hands.
“I was picked on a lot when I was a kid,” Ankil said. “Shocking, I know, considering how cool I am now.” He winked. “But seriously, psychics are often regarded as lower on the food chain than other witchkind.”
I nodded. There were all kinds of tiers and levels among magickind based on their obsession with perceived power.
Ankil said, “The attitude stems from the belief that because mind-magic must obey the laws of physics, it is somehow weaker than spells that only obey the laws of the spell itself and nothing else.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yep, and utter nonsense. Mind-magic simply requires more practice, and a basic understanding of physics. When you’ve got that, you can do lots of things with it that spells can’t. For example, you can use what I like to call the ‘snatch-and-smack.’”
He faced the dummy then flicked his wrist. The pencil flew out of its hand, spun like a boomerang, and hit the dummy in the forehead.
“Did you see what I did there?” Ankil asked.
“Not really.”
“Aha, but that’s why it’s so effective. As you well know, The Will wouldn’t let you use magic to perform any act of violence against someone else. The Will can anticipate nearly all of our actions, both physical and magical. But if you break up the action, The Will can’t guess your next move or prevent the laws of physics from doing their part. What I did was yank the pencil out but not hold on to it. As soon as it started to fall, I struck the tip of it, causing it to spin and then wham!”
The Nightmare Affair Page 5