by Hadley Holt
“What the—?” Hugo yelled. “What the hell was that? Did you do that, Addie?”
“She did!” Izzy exclaimed with excitement. “She did it! She did it again!” Izzy jumped up and down.
I sighed and slumped further into the folding chair, resting an elbow on the chair arm and propping my head against my fist. This meant it hadn’t been a fluke earlier.
“Addie, that’s big magic. Do you realize the sheer physics behind that? I can’t even perform telekinesis on that scale yet. I’m still working on moving dominoes around a table.”
“How would I know?” I muttered. My ability to stay in denial was being ripped away from me.
“This is huge!” It was Hugo’s turn to pace. “It is epic.”
“I told you!” Izzy exclaimed. “It’s history in the making.” Izzy beamed at Hugo.
It’s a desecration, I thought to myself.
“We can’t tell anyone yet,” Hugo said in hushed tones, as if anyone could hear us.
“We already figured that one out,” Izzy agreed, rolling her eyes.
“What are we going to do?” Hugo asked Izzy.
“You’re asking me? I don’t know, but we have to keep Addie safe. You know what could happen to her.”
“Council prisoner, a lab rat or she gets retrained,” he replied.
The catchphrase from the Virgin Mobil commercial ran through my head: it’s time to retrain your brain. I swallowed back a hysterical giggle.
“See, Addie?” Izzy met my eyes. “We’ve got to keep this quiet.”
As if I needed telling. “Why do you think I would tell anyone when all I want is for it to go away?”
Izzy and Hugo both started pacing back and forth in opposite directions.
“Hugs.” Izzy paused in her pacing, meeting him in the middle. “Didn’t you tell me about some prophecy about a wizard woman with magic?”
“You don’t think…Addie? I mean it could be—” Hugo glanced from Izzy to me. “But that would mean—”
“Just spill it already!” Izzy yelled.
Hugo turned serious eyes on me, and then Izzy. “Addie might be the Millennial Wizard Queen!”
“I thought so. But what does that really mean?” Izzy asked. “I can’t remember what you told me.”
“Let me look it up to make sure before I say anything else. But maybe Addie will change things.” Hugo glanced my way and then looked back at Izzy. “She just needs more…confidence.”
Izzy put her hands on her hips. “Tell me about it! She needs more fight, too.”
They just kept talking as if I wasn’t there; as if there were something to be done to change me. I couldn’t blame them, really. I’d never been a person of action. That had always been Izzy. I was, other than my friendship with Izzy and Hugo, the model daughter and student. I wasn’t cut out to be a wizard queen, whatever that was, or the agent of change they were making me out to be. I didn’t like to cause trouble. I didn’t want to be in trouble.
“I say for now we all lie low about this,” Hugo suggested.
“Sounds like a plan to me.” I finally added a few words to the conversation. “I need to get through this party tonight.”
“Uh-oh,” Hugo whispered.
I stood up, not liking the sound of that. “Uh-oh? Hugo, what do you mean by uh-oh?”
“Well, I was just thinking about what happens to wizards on their sixteenth birthday.”
“Zarius will be formally declared a wizard,” Izzy responded.
“And his familiar will come forth and bond with him,” I finished.
“Exactly,” Hugo said, going a little pale, like he’d swallowed a worm. “What if a familiar presents itself to Addie?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Hugo,” I paused, then laughed some more. “That’s ridiculous.”
I glanced at Izzy to see if she was as amused as me, but her eyes were wide with dread. “Addie, you’re a wizard, too, and it’s also your sixteenth birthday.”
“A familiar could come forward and choose you,” Hugo concluded.
I shook my head like before, but stopped laughing altogether. “I think it’s safe to say that would be really bad. As in really, really bad.” Could today really get that much worse?
Hugo and Izzy only nodded. They chose that moment to finally stop talking.
CHAPTER 4
That Could Get You Killed
We walked out of the cave in silence, until we approached Hugo’s dome-shaped ward. I remembered I’d wanted to talk to Hugo about it.
“Hugo, I can see your ward.”
He paused, his eyebrows furrowed in an incredulous look. “You can see my ward?”
“Yes. It’s beautiful. It has a shimmery, translucent pearl color.”
“Are you saying you can actually see magic?” Izzy asked.
“I think so.”
“Oh, man.” Hugo wiped his palm across his forehead and then stared at me, dazed. “Earlier, when I was using my magic, could you see it?”
I nodded. “It was a glowing aqua color.”
“My favorite color!” Izzy chimed, clapping her hands together before dropping them to her sides, pausing as her cheeks went bright red. “Sorry. The girly-girl got loose for a second.”
I laughed. Even at a time like this, Izzy could make me laugh.
“My magic was aqua?” Hugo asked, standing a little straighter. Not waiting for a reply, he continued, “Wow. I thought it would look green…”
“Okay, explain green vs. aqua,” Izzy prodded.
“Well, it’s all pretty theoretical,” Hugo said.
“What do you mean by theoretical?” I asked.
“It’s been so long since anyone could see the color of magic. It used to be a more common magical talent. In fact, one of the most famous wizards who possessed that ability was Leonardo Da Vinci.”
“Of course, Da Vinci could do it. He could do almost everything.” Izzy smiled brightly. “He was my ancestor, after all.”
“Hugo, don’t get her started on being in the house of Da Vinci, please,” I begged, using my best long-suffering voice. We started walking again, and I ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch.
“Darn, I forgot. Sorry, Addie.” Hugo winked at me.
“Oh, you two just stop. Get on with it, Hugo,” Izzy demanded, but with a grin.
Hugo laughed. “Okay, Da Vinci created the first color wheel of magic. But the most amazing thing is if a wizard can see magic, he—” Hugo stopped mid-sentence, glancing at me with a guilty half smile, “—or now, that would be she, can tell if the magic is sorcery. A sorcerer’s magic is red, blood-red, or maroon, and the most powerful and darkest sorcerers have streaks of black in the red, or even solid black.”
“So you can tell if someone is a sorcerer when they use their magic,” Izzy restated in a hushed tone. “That’s amazing.”
“And—” Hugo grimaced my way— “dangerous, too.”
“Why dangerous?” I asked. “I mean, if you could actually know if someone were a sorcerer, you could warn people. Maybe you could even see when someone is changing into a sorcerer.”
“Exactly!” Hugo exclaimed. “Supposedly, when they’re changing, their magic could have streaks of a muddy-rust color, like the mix of red and green, or streaks of dark red or maroon. Do you think a sorcerer would want you to reveal them or detect when they’re transforming? Not on your life. In fact, they’d probably do just about anything to prevent it.”
I stumbled and righted myself. I didn’t know how much more “good” news I could take today.
“She’d be a big threat.” Izzy quietly breathed the words. “They’d want her out of the way.”
“Yeah, that’s why there aren’t many wizards who can see magic.” Hugo paused, his eyes downcast. “Not many who have survived, anyway. They were usually killed before they could pass their gift on to their children.”
I fell against the trunk of a pine tree. “Oh Shih-Tzu! This just keeps getting better and better.”
&nbs
p; “It’s bad! She cussed,” Izzy silently mouthed at Hugo.
“I’m sorry, Addie.” Hugo stepped closer to me, his features softening with sympathy. “I know this must all be very hard to hear, and we don’t mean to scare you, but we want you to stay safe.”
I sighed. It was overwhelming. Having magic made me a desecration and could get me locked up, and now being able to see magic could get me killed. And on top of that, there was the whole enigmatic wizard queen thing. By Archimedes’ screw, I didn’t want any of this. Why was it happening to me?
However, being in the dark about things wasn’t going to help me survive this. “Hugo.” I stared up at him, and the pity on his face almost undid me. “I need to hear the rest. What about the color spectrum of wizard magic? Why did you think your magic would be green?”
Izzy nodded her encouragement, patting my shoulder.
“Okay.” Hugo sighed. “The weakest wizard magic is a pale green, usually for a young wizard just coming into his magic. As a wizard grows, the green gets deeper, more vivid. And depending on the wizard’s innate talent, it can even get into the aqua and then blue spectrum, with the most powerful being a deep royal blue.”
“So you’re pretty powerful for a young wizard?” Izzy asked.
“Apparently so, but I didn’t realize it.”
“So what about witches, human mages, and shamans?” I asked.
“White witches can be white or silver. And both human mages and shamans are gold or amber or even topaz.”
“What about the Fae…fairies or pixies?” I asked.
“Let me think.” He grimaced as he tried to remember. “I believe pixies and fairies break the rules and have rainbow opalescent colors to their magic.”
“What about dark witches or mages?” Izzy asked.
Hugo tapped a finger to his chin. “They fall more in the black spectrum.” Hugo tilted his head, apparently considering things. Then his eyes met mine. “Could you see the color of your own magic, Addie?”
I blushed and stared down at the pine needles covering the ground before returning Hugo’s gaze. “Yes.”
“What color?” Izzy asked with a gasp.
“I guess you’d call it…royal blue,” I replied with a sigh.
“The most powerful,” Hugo whispered.
I only shrugged.
“That settles it,” Izzy proclaimed. “Hugo, you are officially Addie’s tutor for Wizarding 101. She needs to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Part of me wanted to disagree, to deny everything and pretend none of this was happening, but my survival instincts kicked in. “I guess I do need you to teach me if I want to stay alive.”
“Okay,” Hugo agreed. “I’ll do it. What was it my grandmother used to say? In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“By the moons of Galileo, what does that mean?” Izzy blurted.
“I don’t know,” Hugo said with a shrug. “But it seemed fitting.”
Izzy gave Hugo a particularly dramatic eye roll and then noticed the watch on her wrist. “It’s late! We need to hurry and get to the transport pads.”
Hugo looked up at the sky. “You’re right.”
And with that, we rushed back toward the school campus and the transport pads.
By the time we returned to the school, the lines for the pads had died down.
I used the transport pads almost every day of my life, but I never stopped respecting what could go wrong. I’d heard too many horror stories as a child.
Transport pads were positioned all over the wizard stronghold, and connected to other strongholds. The pads also connected wizards to various countries around the globe. I guessed it was something like “beam me up, Scottie,” on Star Trek. A person was split into particles and transmitted to their destination pad, where they were reassembled. The pads, like so much of wizardry, involved an intricately interwoven balance of physical science and magic.
The pads at the school had a near-perfect safety record; there hadn’t been any accidents for over twenty years. Being a pad operator was an important position for young wizards as they worked their way up the ladder of wizard responsibilities. Hugo’s brother, Horatio, was a pad operator at the school. He attended the university in the early morning, then interned at Allied Alchemy International until he reported to the pads in the afternoon.
We always waited in Horatio’s line. Unlike so many of the other entitled young wizards, he was nice to all three of us. And Horatio loved his brother. It was easy to see in the way he looked at Hugo—there was love there, and fierce protectiveness, too. No one, not even my brother, messed with Hugo when Horatio was around. Sometimes, I was almost jealous of Hugo for having a loving brother. I didn’t know what that felt like. But Hugo had other things to deal with. Really tough things. I could never begrudge him that kind of happiness, even if I was the tiniest bit envious.
My brother pretty much hated me. My mother was all about taking care of my father and brother. And as far as my father goes, well, he doted on me, but it wasn’t like what Hugo and Horatio shared. It didn’t feel like it was the same kind of love at all.
“Hey, three musketeers, aren’t you all cutting it a little close today, what with the party tonight?” Horatio asked as we made it to the front of his line.
“Lost track of time,” Hugo answered.
“You better not be late to the party, little brother,” Horatio warned as he ruffled Hugo’s hair. He was only able to manage that because he was one of the few people taller than Hugo, which pretty much made him a giant.
“No worries. I’ll be on time,” Hugo assured Horatio.
“Okay, little Nostradamus, let’s start with you.” Horatio smiled kindly. “You probably have the most to do to get ready, since it’s your birthday, too.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks, Horatio.” Aside from Hugo, no other wizard male had acknowledged today as my birthday, even though everyone knew I was Zarius’ twin.
“Be careful, Addie,” Izzy warned as she gave me a quick hug.
I nodded in reply.
Horatio tilted his head, his eyes curious, but he didn’t ask why I would need to be careful.
“Call me if you need to talk,” Hugo added in a hushed tone. “We’ll see you tonight. We’ll be there for you, Addie.”
“Whatever’s going on, I’m not asking,” Horatio said. “Better if I don’t know. So happy birthday, little Nostradamus.”
And with that, Horatio chanted under his breath and pulled the lever.
Everything faded away until my mind and sight reassembled to the familiar view of my parents’ home, the Nostradamus keep. The first thing I heard was Zarius taunting my secret and forbidden crush, Rory Devlin.
CHAPTER 5
Crushing on a Sorcerer?
“I grow tired of seeing Lady Acacia’s human pet,” Zarius sneered. “Must you accompany her on every visit to my father?”
Zarius said the word human as if it were a vile insult. Norms were important to the everyday running of wizard society. They performed the jobs that wizards didn’t want to be bothered with. Ours was a symbiotic relationship. Besides, I didn’t think of Rory as a norm. He was just Rory. That was the problem. I had to regularly remind myself that he was a human and therefore out of bounds to me.
“It is as my lady desires, sir wizard,” Rory calmly replied as I rounded the corner, walking toward them. “Would you have me disobey the Lady Acacia?”
“Of course not.” Zarius rolled his eyes and as he did, Rory gave me a secret wink, flashing a quick half-grin before turning his attention back to my brother.
In the aftermath of that grin and the mesmerizing depth of his amethyst eyes, my stomach did that familiar flip-flop and my heart beat a little faster.
Rory Devlin stood at least six feet tall, and the sun glinted off the golden highlights of his chestnut-brown hair. He was dressed like other norms, in a uniform of solid black, but the clothing did nothing to hide the muscular definition of his shoul
ders, chest, and thighs.
As usual, I had to remind myself that Rory was totally off limits. But at the moment, I wanted to do something, anything, to thwart my brother’s harassment.
Rory appeared composed and collected, but I noticed the telltale clenching of his jaw.
“Why don’t you make yourself scarce like the other norms?” Zarius suggested, but using a tone that implied a command.
“Lady Acacia asked me to wait here by the doors.”
“Rory, it is so nice to see you,” I said as I got closer, desperate to distract my brother from his rant. I wasn’t usually this bold, but I reached out to shake his hand.
Rory turned his now tentative amethyst eyes my way, but didn’t lift his hand. I had an instant to wonder at the mortification I’d feel if he didn’t return my handshake, before his hand came up and took mine into his. His large tanned hand enveloped mine with warmth. The way it curved around mine made me wonder what it would feel like to be enfolded in his arms.
“You dare touch my sister?” Zarius closed the distance between himself and Rory.
I dropped Rory’s hand, realizing my unbelievable mistake as my brother’s accusation sank in.
“Norms do not touch wizards.”
And boys didn’t touch girls! How could I have been so stupid as to put Rory in that position? What had I been thinking? I hadn’t thought.
Rory closed his eyes for a second, his expression betraying that he’d known what would happen when he touched me. “My apologies, sir wizard.” He met Zarius’ angry glare with a calm gaze. “I did not wish to embarrass your sister by not returning her kind welcome.”