by Rain Oxford
“Some of you have already started on your chosen profession, some of you are here because you do not know what to do with your life, and some of you believe magic is exciting. Someone give me an example of how your life can revolve around magic.”
After a moment, a woman in the front raised her hand. “You can be a teacher in magic,” she answered.
“That is a fair answer. Is teaching what you want to do?”
She shook her head slowly, as if afraid of offending him. “I want to be a doctor.”
“How can you be a doctor when your magic makes the electronic equipment blow out? You have two choices; stick to being a healer in the paranormal community, or give up magic to work in the human world.”
“Why does there have to be a distinction?” the guy next to her asked. “Why can’t we have a job in the human world without giving up magic?”
“There are two answers to your question. First, I will explain that neither a wizard nor fae can truly give up their magic. Your magic is part of your soul and it will only remain with you until you die. If someone offers to take your power, they mean to either suppress it or kill you.”
“Why would anyone want that?” Darwin asked with a very serious expression.
“For some, magic is too great a burden to carry, Mr. Mason. The second answer to Mr. Garret’s question is that there does not always have to be a distinction. That is what this class is about; I can teach you ways to use your magic in the human world. Those of you who want to live primarily in the paranormal world should take my class in your second semester.”
“What is the job market like in the paranormal world?” the first woman asked.
“Not as widespread as the human job market. The fae tribes, who try very hard to adhere to their traditions, usually shun everyone outside of their tribe. Your best opportunity to work with them, if you aren’t fae and from their tribe, is to be a peace-keeper. Shifters are great at healing themselves in their shifted form, but accidents happen and they can’t go to normal hospitals. Therefore, if you can learn their unique needs, being a healer for them can be a great career.”
“Fae are normally the best healers,” Darwin whispered to me.
“Of course, there is also the wizard council, but there are only ever thirteen members. Although you can work for them, the only way to become a member is to be the next in line when one of them dies. Now, back to the matter at hand. Everyone partner up and spend five minutes each talking about your job choices. Bounce ideas off each other on how you can use magic in your everyday life.”
Darwin and I looked at each other and there was silence between us before we both turned away from each other.
* * *
After class, we had time for a snack, so we headed to the dining room. We had just stepped out of the castle when the shifter who had challenged Flagstone blocked our path. “Can you really sense vampires?” he asked, more doubtful than curious.
“Yes.”
“I’m Van. You might be able to help me find some vampires to kill. What do you say?”
“No, thanks,” I answered, walking past him. Darwin hurried to keep up.
“That cat, Henry… he’s your roommate, right? I would sleep with one eye open if I were you. Cats can’t be trusted. He’ll eat you when you die. Now wolves are another story; we protect each other.”
“Thanks for the heads up.” I rolled my eyes.
When we got to the dining room, Henry joined us and Darwin told him about the vampire. Of course, he embellished it until it sounded like the teachers needed my help. “He just zapped her fanged butt out of here with his super wizard skills!” Darwin said.
Henry looked thoughtful, but said nothing.
After eating, Henry and I headed to martial arts. From the inside, the classroom looked just like any other exercise room; it was well lit, the floor was waxed wood with mats, and there was a mirror along the far wall.
We were early, so we watched the instructor, who was the Asian woman from the school board meeting, work with some other highly trained students. Tanaka-sensei was extremely fast, fluent, and made what I thought was a combative sport into what looked more like artwork.
I couldn’t say the same for all of her students. A wolf shifter and Zhang Wei were sparring. As tranquil as the tiger shifter was, the wolf was no match for him, because the wolf fought with anger and desperation. When Zhang Wei kicked the younger shifter in the chest, the man shifted into his brown wolf form. He snarled at the tiger shifter and prepared to attack, but there was a guard at the ready. Stationed throughout the room were men in black ninja-like suits. The closest instantly shifted into a massive ball python and coiled around the wolf.
The wolf whimpered and thrashed as much as he could, but the constrictor just squeezed harder until the wolf finally went limp. Slowly, the snake shifted back into a man… with his outfit intact. I had never seen a shifter who was able to save his clothing in a transition before.
The wolf shifter returned to his human form and Zhang Wei bowed to his enemy, as if the wolf had fought honorably. Zhang Wei greeted me warmly when he saw me and beckoned Tanaka-sensei to me. Then he introduced me as his friend, which I thought was high praise from a near stranger who was Chinese. Of course, I wasn’t particularly educated in foreign relations.
We did stretches to start with and learned the routine exercises we would be using for the rest of the semester. By the end of it, I was sore, but I was much better off than some of the other wizards. Then again, all of the shifters made it seem like child’s play, including Henry, who managed to appear elegant through the entire class.
It turned out that Zhang Wei was Tanaka-sensei’s assistant. He was also extremely hard on Li Na, who was taking the class with Henry and me. There were ten other students, but Li Na had to work much harder just to get Zhang Wei off her back.
* * *
After dinner, we retired to our rooms. Darwin arrived a few minutes later with a stack of books. Once he set them down, he took off his gray hoodie and adjusted his sweaty white t-shirt. I studied his wrists, arms, and neck, and saw no signs of abuse. “Why do you wear the hoodie when it’s too warm for one?” Henry asked before I could.
Darwin shrugged. “I don’t like to be touched.”
Henry and Darwin began studying, but I couldn’t imagine that it would do me any good. Instead, I pulled out my notebook and tried to work on the case. Ten minutes into it, my notebook still had nothing on it.
My instincts were normally uncanny; I never took more than a week on a case unless it required long-term surveillance or computer software. Here I was on my second day… I wrote down the information about the five students who were killed as well as the vampire I confronted, just to get something down. Then, because I couldn’t think of any more clues, I drew the vampire I had seen… only, what I drew wasn’t right. My sketch resembled her more than the stranger.
Damn…
This was why I never got involved with supernatural cases; everything was lost in my head and I would start thinking of Astrid.
I sat up straight, startled at the thought that surfaced in my mind, and wrote down a question I didn’t know had been bugging me. Who is Vincent Kingston Knight? I skipped a few lines. To find my answers, I needed to know the right questions to ask.
Why are vampires killing paranormals? Surely they knew they couldn’t win a war against every single paranormal being. My hand moved of its own accord as my instincts pushed against my consciousness. I crossed out “are vampires” and wrote, “is someone.” Yes. It was a better question; less specific, so it was less likely to be wrong.
Why hasn’t anyone threatened me over Regan’s crime scene? Someone knew what I found. Was nobody trying to keep it a secret? Or maybe I was supposed to know. Maybe me finding her body was a threat in itself. Back off.
Who here has anything to gain by giving information to the vampires? Jealous classmates? But the school was probably closed to students during the time when the records c
ould have been stolen. I pulled a heavy book from my small bookshelf, snuck a glance at my roommates to make sure they were engrossed in their own work, and then opened it to the files I had gotten from Hunt the night before. Since my roommates had been asleep by the time I was done with the meeting, I tried to get fingerprints, but all five files were completely clean.
Why would vampires want to kill you? Normally, ideas came to me when I looked at pictures like this or studied crime scenes. Vampires were ruthless killers, yeah, but why these people? If it was because of their power, why not go after the wizard council, the fae tribes, or the shifter alphas?
I stood up before I realized what I was doing. “I’m going to the library,” I said, discreetly slipping the files and pictures back into the old book. With any luck, there would be texts on vampires. Maybe I would come up with a new angle.
“Oh, I’ll go with you,” Darwin said quickly. “This place is creepy at night and I need some more books.” He stood and grabbed his hoodie.
I nodded, since there was no viable reason to argue. Plus, he was right; it was creepy.
We wandered through hallway after hallway, finding nobody and no library. “I thought you said you knew where it was,” I said.
“I do, bro. I was there earlier.”
Unfortunately, I had the sneaking suspicion that the rooms were not always in the same location. Now, I had never rejected the supernatural, but rooms that relocated at will were a little too much for me.
I heard a hushed conversation in one of the rooms we were about to pass. Without thinking, I grabbed the back of Darwin’s hoodie and pulled him to the floor, careful not to touch anything but his clothes. He looked at me, startled, and I put my finger to my lips.
“Why are we hiding?” he whispered.
“Are we allowed out of the dorms at night?”
He considered it for a minute. “I don’t know. I didn’t read the handbook.”
“Neither did I, so shut up and listen.” The door to the room was closed, but the window into the classroom was open just a crack.
“We need to tell Logan that a vampire was in the school,” a woman said. It only took me a second to place her voice. Professor April Nightshade.
“I told you; he would shut down the school,” another woman said. This was a voice I didn’t recognize. Her voice was sharp; the kind that warned against any nonsense.
“If she got past his wards, then others can, too,” Professor Nightshade said. “I trusted you the first time this happened, but you didn’t do anything about it. Who knows how many vampires there could be hiding in the school?”
“Who did you say uncovered the vampire?”
“Devon Sanders. I didn’t think he had an ounce of talent in him, but he’s all the other students are talking about. He’s got some psychic ability over animals and shifters, but---”
“Any shifters? Does he know what you are?”
“I don’t think so. Deja is too powerful to succumb to mind tricks. She sleeps most of the day, but she did take notice of Devon at the meeting. I don’t see what they have to do with each other. We should take this to Logan.”
“No. He doesn’t fear vampires like the council, but he would not think twice when it comes to the safety of the students. He would shut down the school, the council would investigate, and what do you think they would say about you? How will they react when they find out you’re still alive?”
I heard footsteps and instantly backpedaled around the corner with Darwin right behind me. Once we were a few feet away, I stopped, causing Darwin to halt, and turned around. “Now we just act like we are coming from the dorms,” I whispered. We were rounding the corner again just as Professor Nightshade and Mrs. Ashcraft reached it. “Good evening, Mrs. Ashcraft, Professor Nightshade,” I said as brightly as I could.
Professor Nightshade was clearly surprised to see me, but Mrs. Ashcraft’s smile was natural. “Good evening, Devon. Isn’t it a little late to be going for a stroll?” the deputy principal asked. She was the woman who had been arguing against going to Hunt with information on the vampire.
“Actually, we were just heading to the library. You wouldn’t happen to be able to point it out to us, would you?”
“Not a problem.” She pointed to a large, rounded doorway in front of us. “That’s the one most suited to Circle One students. I’m glad to see you are taking your studies so seriously. Have a good night.” She walked off and Professor Nightshade followed hesitantly.
“That door wasn’t there a second ago,” Darwin whispered.
I opened the heavy wooden door and hesitated. There was no light.
“What’s wrong?” Darwin asked, trying to peer around me.
“I guess it’s closed for the night.”
“The library doesn’t close, bro.”
When I stepped through the threshold, a torch on either side of the door caught fire. The library was about twenty-four-by-twenty-four and every inch of the walls was lined with ten feet tall floor-to-ceiling shelves. There were also three columns and six rows of bookshelves, so that the walkways had barely enough room for two people to pass each other.
I pulled the torch out of the sconce on my right and went in search of my book. There were no section headings, but I soon figured out that the books were organized in a relatively normal fashion. Among others, I found a section on fiction, a section of textbooks, and a section on spells and potions. As I scanned for titles on vampires in the history section, Darwin was pulling down every book that caught his eye, only to put it back a few seconds later.
“Hey, check this out,” he said after a while. I looked at the big, leather bound book in his hands. “This is on the history of this place. Logan Hunt bought it in 1960 and made it into the school.”
“That’s not possible. Hunt would have to be over eighty years old.”
He shot me a look. “Wizard, yo. Anyway, it says here that Heinrich Baldauf, born 1850 in Germany, died 1876 in the United States, was obsessed with the supernatural. He married when he was fourteen, but his wife died within a year of unknown causes. He remarried a month later… and she died within six months. Publicly, he said both girls were frightened to death by poltergeists. There were no physical signs of injury, but the second wife was documented to be severely malnourished.”
“That sounds suspicious.”
“It gets worse,” he said, sitting on the floor while still reading. “He moved to the United States and married again. She became pregnant almost immediately, but within two months, she committed suicide by jumping off a building. Heinrich said it was the baby that made her do it; that the dead were trying to get out by possessing her unborn baby, and the other babies before that.”
“So he marries a woman, she gets pregnant, and then she dies? Was he a wizard?”
“No, but if he was correct, he had to has some sort of connection with the dead to know what he did. He wrote a book after this about summoning and exorcising demonic spirits. His twelfth wife was apparently the keeper. She gave birth to a boy and then a little girl a year later. By then, Heinrich was obsessed with keeping them all safe and ‘clean’ from evil forces.
“He designed the house and oversaw its construction in 1870. Many of the builders were killed during the construction due to the unorthodox designs. One room was built with no doors or windows, but one of the construction workers fell from the rooftop, was rendered unconscious, and was mistakenly sealed inside. His body was found many years later when a door was put in.”
“And nobody thought his disappearance was odd?”
“Apparently, there were as many strange disappearances as deaths. There are rooms with traps in order to kill intruders. In fact, as the years passed, the construction workers worried that they were never getting any closer to being finished because Heinrich continued adding things to the plan.”
“What about that book on demonic spirits?”
He read on for a few minutes. “He continued writing books, which became more si
nister until his last one, which was all about commanding demons and using their power. His kids, though…” he turned the book so I could see the black and white pictures of the creepiest boy and girl I had ever seen in my life.
Both of them were pasty white in complexion and emaciated with oily black hair, deep set, black eyes, and scowls. “Yeah, I see your point.”
“It sounds like Heinrich was afraid of them. In 1876, the entire family was found dead with the house unfinished.”
“And who got the bright idea to turn it into a school?”
“Well, it was supposedly cleansed of evil and a man from England took it over in 1894. He supposedly was a powerful member of a famous occult society founded in England in 1888. He… died, too, in 1897, but he was stabbed by an exotic dancer thousands of miles away from the house. The wizard council actually attained it then and finished the designs. Hunt bought it off of them and opened it as a school…”
“What’s wrong?” I asked as he trailed off.
He ran his fingers down the inside margin and I saw what stopped him. “After the Englishman got it, but before he died…” The uneven edges in the margin were obvious. “The pages are torn out.”
“The only reason for pages in a history book to be torn out is if someone didn’t want that information known. What was the Englishman’s name?”
“The name is scratched out with a pen. It jumps from him buying the place to him dying.”
“Maybe there is another copy of the book somewhere,” I suggested.
“Do we really want to know? I’m already going to have trouble sleeping tonight when the exotic dancers in my dreams try to stab me.”
“There’s another library upstairs. Let’s try that.”
“Dude, there’s like, twenty libraries in this school. Let’s do that tomorrow when it’s daylight.”
“Okay.” We returned to our room after that. Darwin immediately shared every detail about the conversation we overheard with Henry. I didn’t know whether he was very trusting of the shifter, or very bad at keeping secrets.