I screamed when the flames ate me whole, the remnants of a ballet skirt dancing at the edges of my vision. The ballerina teased me even in my final seconds.
***
My clothes clung to my body when I woke up and sweat drenched my sheet. I ran to my bathroom, desperate for water. Cool, refreshing water to put out the fire. Water to put me out. I nearly stumbled over a step, heaving and clawing at my throat. Was this what a panic attack felt like? Like your insides were trying to escape your body, break free of their fleshy prison? I wanted to cry, but no tears came. Did the heat dry them out? Did they get sick of me and refuse to listen, just like the flames did?
I opened the cold water in the shower, stepping under it without shedding my clothes. My stomach turned and twisted, and a burning sensation rose in my throat. It felt as if a volcano had erupted in my chest, pushing the molten rock up, up, up until it eventually reached my mouth. The vile taste was no better than the sensation of dying in my dreams. I opened my mouth, letting the water of the shower fill it up before I swallowed heavily. I could feel the cold water soothing my throat as it made its way down into my stomach.
On the outside, I barely felt the water; it seemed to evaporate before it even hit my body. Just like Mr. Henry’s waves, just like the day I got close to the burnout. Nothing could pierce the heat; nothing could put out the fire.
My tears burned like acid, but I didn’t care. The nightmare, that cruel, cruel nightmare had my nerves in shambles. I was afraid of my magic, I knew that. It could sense my fear and now it teased me, bullied me, determined to make my life a living hell. It sure felt like I was in hell… The flames were hotter than normal ones, bigger, brighter. It was exactly what I imagined hell’s flames to be.
Finally, the water broke through, sizzling on my skin. It took a few minutes for me to fully cool down, and the cold water was refreshing, like stumbling upon an oasis after wandering the desert for days. I opened my mouth again to take another mouthful of water. It tasted sweeter than it had a moment before, and I kept on gulping it down like it was a drug and I was an addict. I drank until my stomach ached and cried out for me to stop. Only then did I turn off the water and get out the shower. Only then was I satisfied and drenched enough to keep the fire away for a little while.
Only then did I feel safe enough to leave the security the water gave me, and head back into my room.
I didn’t bother changing before I went back to bed. At least being soaked meant that it would be harder to ignite. There was a clear outline on my bed where my body had been—a perfect, black burn. At least I hadn’t burned through to the mattress.
Not bothering with changing the sheets, I got back into bed, shivering. Good, I wanted to be cold. I wanted to freeze. I looked at the ceiling above my head, at the stars I had painted on it when I was a child. They had glowed in the dark, once upon a time, but the glow had long since expired. They were only white stars on a black ceiling, now. I’d been sleeping on this same single bed since I was a child. In fact, the entire room was the same. I wasn’t one for decorating. It was plain, generic, like something a video game auto-generated for an NPC.
I didn’t sleep again that night; instead, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering how in the seven hells I was going to control this damned magic.
Chapter 5: Past
I knocked on the large oak door in front of me. It was an ornate door, with a golden knob and hinges to match. Intricate designs were carved into the wood, designs similar to those on the rest of the doors in the southern “class” side of the academy. The doors on this side gave the person outside a glimpse of what they could expect to find behind the door.
The headmistress’s door had a large carved elk, with smaller animals at both sides. Some were gazelles and some were birds. Those represented the teachers. Before them was a crowd of rabbits, otters, squirrels, and anteaters. Those were the students. The elk stood above them all, bigger and more detailed than the rest. This was the headmistress, beautiful and ethereal. It was an accurate representation of the real headmistress. The doors were the only remnants of the old building, and looked out of place in the modern hall. I tried to imagine the doors in the building’s original state, tried to imagine the hallways as they were supposed to be—like the ones in the west wing, stone and marble with ornate windows. Yes, that suited the doors much better.
“Come in,” a feminine voice called, and I stepped inside.
The headmistress’ office was as ornate as the door, with large oak furniture and golden finishes. Books lined every single wall, and on the desk sat a slim, blonde woman. She didn’t look a day over 40, even though she’d been around before any of the teachers. Some teachers even told the students that the headmistress was at her post when they had attended the academy, as well.
She was an ancient beauty, but her face didn’t give any inclination of her actual age or wisdom. But her eyes, her chocolate eyes held a wealth of stories. It was easy to miss her ancient status, but one look into her eyes told you enough. They shone like stars at midnight, telling tales and sharing wisdom. Her eyes were the only things that told a person of her age and it was unsettling. It didn’t match her pixie-like face, with her sharp chin and small nose. It didn’t match her long curly hair that shifted from gold to platinum, depending on the light. It didn’t match her slim figure and the heels she favored—higher than I could ever sport.
“You look like you’ve seen better days,” she said, her face softening.
I sighed, taking a seat in the large, uncomfortable chair in front of her desk. She always knew when something was bothering me. Not the usual, teenage drama, no. She could tell when there was something deeper, something in my soul making me unhappy. That was why she sent for me before school. She wanted to talk, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about talking. Not after last night. Not after the dream that consumed me. The images of flames, of teasing skirts, had wormed themselves into my mind ever since. I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t even eat my breakfast without my mouth tasting like ash after every bite I took. The toast was in the trash now, along with Wendy’s uneaten cereal.
“I can tell that you don’t want to talk,” she continued, then came to sit on the chair next to mine. She turned to face me, her legs stretched out in front of her. Those legs took up most of her body, and if she were cast in some big, Hollywood movie, she would have portrayed the fashion model.
“How can you tell these things?” I asked, annoyed that she knew so much.
She chuckled. The sound was sweet, like a birdsong. “I raised you, Cornelia. I know every hint, every twitch, every facial expression. Now, tell me, what’s got that pretty face of yours in a scowl?”
I instinctively slackened my face, not having realized that I was scowling until she’d pointed it out. It was an annoying habit of mine. Wendy always said I had a resting bitch face. I didn’t tell her that she had one, too.
“Do you think my parents had the same magic as me?” The question was out of my mouth before I could stop myself, before I could think further. This was her one rule, the one thing she told me not to ask about: my parents. She said that she didn’t know anything and it broke her heart every time she had to tell me. This time, the question didn’t seem to upset her, though. Instead, she smiled softly.
The headmistress tilted her head to the side, considering the question. “It’s impossible for me to say. I found you in the remains of a burned-down building, and you were only seven at the time.” I knew this story inside-out, but I let her go on regardless. It was the story she hated to tell, but once she started, there was no stopping her.
“It’s possible that a family member started the fire, yes. But there were no other remains in the building. It was completely empty, save for you,” she explained. “You kept mumbling something about losing your mom and sister, but you said nothing else. Nothing to give any indication of where they might have been or who they were. I tried to track down any possible family, but there was
no one to be found. I sensed that you had a great power within you that you wouldn’t have gotten until you reached the age of nine. I sensed your flames lingering below the surface, waiting for the day they could be free. I knew that I had to help you control them—or, at least, teach you about magic. If you ended up in the system, who knew how wild your magic could have become? So, I adopted you.”
Yes, she adopted me. She raised me at the academy, her study becoming my little room as she filled my childhood with knowledge that was far too complicated for my young brain to comprehend. She was too intelligent, too all-knowing for it to ever have crossed her mind that the information she was sharing made no sense to a child. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that as a kid, and so I’d worked extra hard to learn it all. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her that now, either.
There was nothing she could tell me of this story that I didn’t already know. I didn’t know why she felt the need to tell it to me yet again, not after I’d asked her a simple question.
“You aren’t answering my question,” I pointed out, an eyebrow raised.
She sighed. “No, I suppose I am not. The thing is, Cornelia, I cannot tell you where you come from or what gave you the power that you have. Fire magic, it is so incredibly rare. In most cases, it’s not hereditary—it’s not something that gets passed down. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me that the elemental magics were gifts from the gods. She said that each god came down to Earth to give a selected few a droplet of their own powers, the powers that kept the world alive. The sun goddess herself gave the power of flames, but she grew tired of the human race misusing her magic so much that she stopped giving her gift as often. Now, there is only one, maybe two every 100 years.”
“Fiona and me,” I mumbled, and she nodded.
“Fiona’s magic was too much for her to handle.”
“My magic is too much for me to handle,” I said, suddenly finding the hem of my skirt incredibly interesting. I examined it closely, avoiding eye contact.
“Oh, honey,” she cooed, her small hand on my back. “You are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for. You can control the flames; you can control your magic. You possess a power that even I don’t fully understand. You just have to stop being afraid of it and get to know it.”
“Mr. Henry said a similar thing.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Ah, yes. I hear that you have finally accepted his offer to help you.” I opened my mouth to ask her how she knew, but she cut me off before I could say a single word. “I know everything, Lia; I have known of your visits to the forest for months. Who do you think sent Mr. Henry to keep an eye on you in the first place?”
“You knew and you didn’t stop me?”
“I knew that you needed a place to practice, and it couldn’t be in the academy. I let you go out there but I always kept an eye out for danger. Flames are so easy to lose control of, as you already know.”
I sighed, defeated by the fact that I wasn’t nearly as sneaky as I would have liked to believe I was. “So, what now?”
The headmistress frowned at me. “I am not going to punish you, if that’s what you’re asking. You’re going to practice with Mr. Henry, and sometimes I might join in to help you. I couldn’t before, because you didn’t want help. But now that you’re open to the idea, now that you realize how dangerous your magic can become, now I can help you.”
“You should have forced me into practicing with you,” I told her.
The headmistress laughed. “I cannot force you to do anything you don’t want to, Cornelia. Especially not where your magic is concerned. Magic can feel the unhappiness of its caster. And that’s when it gets dangerous. It’s trying to protect the witch or warlock and grows out of control to get rid of anything that might be causing the discontent. With normal students, the magic is easy to suppress. It’s easy to block or snuff it out before it gets dangerous. Your magic, though… It will go to extreme lengths to protect you and itself.”
“Protect me? I feel like it’s trying to consume me, instead.”
“Perhaps that’s because you are causing your own unhappiness.” The headmistress got to her feet, straightened her pencil skirt, and held her hand out to me. I took it and stood. “You are trying to suppress your magic, and that is why it is retaliating. It’s going against you because it sees you as the enemy. You do everything in your power to get rid of it, to hide it away and ignore it, when actually, it should be a part of you. You have split yourself from the magic, and now your magic is confused. It knows it has to protect itself but without you being one with it, it is attacking you instead.”
Was what she said true? Of course, it was true, she was all-knowing. She knew magic better than magic knew itself. She wasn’t the head sorcerer of her generation for nothing. What she said was true, but I had no idea how to fix it. How could I become one with the very thing that was trying to consume me? How was I supposed to become the flame? It terrified me, and I had no idea where to even begin.
“How do I do this?” I asked.
The headmistress smiled. “You need to get to know your magic first.”
Chapter 6: Mean Girls
The cauldron in the middle of the classroom boiled and bubbles escaped, flying out and popping overhead. It was a sweet scent—not the scent that came with magic, but one that came with a certain potion that helped clear the mind. There was an overwhelming fragrance of hibiscus and lavender, and it made the back of my throat burn. There was an abnormal amount of honey in the cauldron, too, which made for a very interesting aroma. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to get used to.
Mrs. Finnick, the potions professor, was a frail old woman with glasses as thick as her thumbs. No one liked her very much, and she had the tendency to ask questions in tests about things that didn’t even exist. She often said that modern-day witches didn’t deserve to be called witches and did everything in her power to prove her point. She never succeeded.
Her mouse-brown hair was pulled into a tight bun and her crooked fingers pointed toward a kid at the back of the group of students who circled around the cauldron. “You, in the back,” she croaked, her voice high-pitched. “You must know these potions back to front. Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there, chatting the entire time. Mind telling me what the secret ingredient is?”
Even though the kid hadn’t actually spoken during her lecture, he didn’t give up the opportunity to backtalk. It was how this class usually went. Mrs. Finnick called someone out for something they didn’t do and the kid lost his patience with her, typically buying him detention.
“If I knew the secret ingredient, it wouldn’t be a secret ingredient, now would it, Mrs. Finnick?” he retorted.
The professor’s eye twitched and for a moment I was certain she was going to grow talons and rip the kid’s throat out. “You think that you are very clever, don’t you, Mr. Harris? You think that this is all a joke?”
“This class is a joke,” he said, crossing his arms. “It’s not as if you actually teach us anything. Nothing we know about potions was taught by you; it was read in the tomes in the library.”
He was telling the truth. We hadn’t really learned anything in this class. There was an entire potion section in the library that most of us had nearly memorized, just so we could pass the nearly impossible tests that Mrs. Finnick gave us. If we flunked potions, we had to spend another term in her class, and no one wanted that.
I’d spoken to the headmistress about Mrs. Finnick, but she didn’t want to hear it. She’d said that this miserable old broad was the best potions master in the country. That didn’t help much, if she didn’t want to teach any of us. I’d said as much to the headmistress as well, but she had dismissed it right away. No one wanted to hear how awful this woman was, and it was infuriating.
“You’ve just bought yourself a week’s worth of detention, Mr. Harris. Does anyone else feel like joining him?”
The class was silent. Detention meant extra time with her, being lectured and scolded to her heart’s content. No one wanted that, but she seemed to enjoy it so much that she was determined to get at least two students in detention per week, no matter how innocent they might have been in the situation.
I bit the insides of my cheeks, forcing myself not to say anything. The fire in my belly burned but I forced it to stay right there. It wasn’t going to come out in a room full of students. That would have been catastrophic. Wendy elbowed me in the ribs, letting me know that she was thinking that same thing as I was.
She had been there, the day of my burnout. She had been there the day I’d nearly set the entire forest on fire. She knew that this unfairness, this cruelty was something that triggered me. Like everyone else, I despised mean people, but I supposed it was different for all of us. Margot, the tramp across from me in the circle, seemed very satisfied with herself. She enjoyed seeing others suffer. She winked at me, and Wendy flipped her the bird. Some people enjoyed mean people, as long as the mean people weren’t mean to them. I, on the other hand, knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a bully’s wrath. I knew the anxiety; I knew the humiliation. And I couldn’t bear seeing anyone else in that situation.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, smiling as if she was actually proud of her childish behavior. I could never understand that; people who became teachers who didn’t actually enjoy teaching.
They went out of their way to make the students’ lives miserable, and for what? We already hated school. No sane-minded person would actually enjoy school more than having free time, so why did they have to make it extra horrible? Why did they feel the need to terrorize kids that were a third of their ages? Perhaps they felt small, lonely, and powerless. Perhaps picking on people who couldn’t defend themselves gave them a thrill. It was cowardly and weak.
Enchanter Witch Academy Page 3