A Spell for Death: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts

by B. C. Palmer

  It took almost an hour to complete the spell. One by one, the materials around the ritual space caught fire and burned without damaging the floor, their smoke curling into the spell and hovering over the different lines of the circle itself until there was a hovering, ghostly copy of each figure in the air. When at last Lucas spoke the final word and made a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers, hands spread, and pushed down against the smoke, it seemed to wrap itself around the book and vanish into it with a dull orange glow that faded a second later.

  To the naked eye, the book was still just a plain old book.

  To a simple revelation spell from the primer, it was anything but. The outline of the spell remained, in the same shape as the lines of the circle but wrapped around the book. I gave a curious grunt, peering through the circle made by my thumb and forefinger. It was the first time I’d been involved in a spell that left this kind of signature on an object. We covered analysis in thaumaturgy but only in principle, with diagrams drawn on the chalkboard or in books. Seeing it made all the difference.

  “That’s about as good a spell as one can expect,” Isaac said, peering through his own hands in three different configurations as he examined different levels of the spell.

  Lucas exhaled a long, slow breath. “It’s keyed to the caster, so…”

  When he reached for it bare-handed, I gasped and jerked forward to stop him. Hunter’s arm blocked me, and Lucas picked the book up, turned it over, opened it and flipped through the pages. I let the air in my lungs go. “So it doesn’t defend itself against you. Jesus, Lucas, you could have finished your thought. So now we test it. Right?”

  Isaac picked up the folded swatch of cloth as Lucas put the book down. With care, he spread it out and dropped it over the book. “Okay,” he muttered. “Here goes nothing…”

  His hands shook slightly as he reached for the cloth-covered book. He licked his lips and lighted his fingers on the surface as if it might be poisonous. Which was distinctly possible. Egyptian curses were all about vipers and scorpions; turns out they were pretty one-note magicians.

  Isaac, luckily, didn’t suffer a sudden bout of anaphylactic shock. He gave a short, quiet moan of relief, and then chuckled as he tucked the cloth under the edges of the book and hefted it.

  “Possible the spell just isn’t working,” Hunter said. “We should probably test that to make sure.”

  Lucas narrowed his eyes at Hunter and scoffed. “It’s working just fine, thank you. We can see the magic on it, that’s plenty. Let’s not hospitalize someone for no reason.”

  Hunter shrugged. “All right, so let’s say it works. There’s still the actual heist to pull off. This is a good trick, but it’s not the real thing. What happens next?”

  Isaac put the cloth-covered book down and tugged the cloth away to fold it up. “Next, I make a pair of gloves.”

  “And after that,” I said, “I… go to class. And steal from the headmaster. I don’t know exactly when I’ll have a chance—he doesn’t teach from a book. So I’ll have to get him talking, and ask a question he has to pull some reference for. If he even has one. If his books are protected, then he shouldn’t be that worried that I might steal one. I give the signal and you three had better be ready.”

  Lucas grinned. “We will be.”

  I desperately wished Sinclaire would update his primary teaching tool to a whiteboard. The scratch of the chalk under my fingers always irritated me. The tap-tap of the chalk and the scratching of the stuff over the blue-black surface made my fingernails vibrate uncomfortably. Not to mention, I sneezed almost constantly.

  Sinclaire looked over my equations and shook his head slowly. “No,” he muttered. “Go through it again. Tell me what your mistake is.”

  I groaned as I stepped back from the board. “Damn it. Is it here?”

  He looked at the portion I pointed to. An intentional mistake I had slipped in.

  “Yes,” he said, “but there’s another.”

  Another? I kept my face impassive and scanned the equations, redoing bits of math in my head until finally Sinclaire waved a hand at the arcane formulae I had spent the last hour charting out. “Erase it,” he said. “Start from the beginning, go slower, think more carefully.”

  I began erasing, my jaw clenched, but paused halfway through the task. Fighting off a sneeze, but also imagining a potential opening. “Headmaster,” I said, “I know that I’m this close to getting it. Maybe if I saw it written down? I do better when I can read it on top of hearing and practicing.”

  Sinclaire furrowed his brow, set his jaw, and frowned thoughtfully. “I can write down what you need to know, I suppose,” he said. “It’s best that you master one fundamental at a time, you see.”

  “So there is a book?” I asked, trying for nonchalance.

  He nodded. “Certainly there is. I don’t think you’re quite ready for it, however. There are certain… preparations that are necessary beforehand.”

  “Okay,” I said, hands on my hips, fully interested. “What are they?”

  His eyes narrowed as he looked me over, but he chuckled finally as he turned away and strolled the bookshelf. He didn’t take a book down, but he looked them over. “You are certainly eager. I might have imagined you would be.”

  “I am,” I said, pressing what I thought was an advantage showing itself. “I really am, Headmaster. For the first time, when I’m doing this it feels like this kind of magic is what I’m meant for. I know I’m making slow progress—”

  “That really isn’t true,” he laughed softly.

  “—but compared to everything else I’ve been learning here,” I went on, “this is actually exciting. I want to learn more, I want to be good at something. I want to make you proud of me.”

  Sinclaire turned slowly to assess me. “I’m pleased that you’re so driven,” he said gently. “Finding one’s true path, the magic that wakes up our deepest potential… it’s intoxicating, I know. And I am quite proud of your progress, Amelia. I suppose…”

  Please show me the book, I thought at him, as hard as I could.

  “…we can begin some of that preparation,” he said finally. “However, it will mean longer hours. Greater commitment than you have even now. And if you show yourself to be exacting, and skilled, and committed, then I believe you can go quite far. By the end of this year, you may even be ready to summon your patron.”

  That was a new term. If I wasn’t going to get the book today I was determined to at least come away with something new and useful. “Patron? What does that mean?”

  Sinclaire gestured at one of the chairs in front of his desk for me to sit. I did, and he took the other, steepling his fingers. “Every summoner has a patron. This is a being with whom you have a particular relationship with. Where other magicians must learn their art slowly, and practice ultimately alone—even in a group effort—the summoner’s patron grants them access to unique knowledge, even certain skills, and assists in more powerful magic. Beings beyond our own plane of existence often have keen insight into laws of magic that are not easily grasped here but are laid bare from those other places.”

  “Like a special teacher?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly. “More like a long-term partner. The true boon of summoning is found in the making of deals. But, in order to negotiate better terms, well… think of your patron as your agent, able to negotiate on your behalf. The more powerful the patron, the more effective those negotiations. I suspect that with your natural talent you can attract quite a powerful patron.”

  My heart was pounding. I had to struggle to keep my breathing even and slow. Something about that, about how he said it, made me incredibly nervous. And also excited. But the excitement was… distant. Disconnected. As if it wasn’t really mine. Mine, the voice from the bathroom all those months ago echoed in my memory. “I, ah… That sounds amazing. I really want to go as far as I can, Headmaster.”

  “Good,” he said. He leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. “I trul
y believe you will, Amelia. I think you could go just as far as is possible.”

  He stood and went to the bookshelf again. He reached up and caressed the spine of a book, unlabeled, which all of them were. “You’re almost ready, Miss Cresswin.”

  That was the book. It had to be. I stood and returned to the blackboard, picked up the eraser, and began to finish. While I did, I reached into my pocket and snapped a small clay disk, only about the size of a quarter. Elsewhere in the Academy, its twin hopefully snapped at the same time, signaling Lucas and Hunter that I was ready. Even if I wasn’t.

  A moment later, as I muttered to myself and chalked out the formulae again one after the other, there was a knock at the door.

  “Yes?” Sinclaire called.

  “Sir? It’s Lucas,” Lucas called through. “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s been an incident.”

  “Again,” Sinclaire sighed. “Amelia, you can go—”

  “I’m close,” I said, waving the chalk at the equations. “Just let me finish these? I’ll leave them for you to look over but I think I’ve got it this time.”

  He glanced at the symbols on the board and seemed like he would insist I pick it up tomorrow but finally gave a quiet laugh and nodded. “Certainly. The door will lock behind you—see that you don’t leave anything here, hm?”

  He opened the door and slipped out. If everyone was doing what they were meant to do, Hunter would be in the room two doors down, waiting.

  As soon as the door closed, I rushed to the shelf and pulled the gloves out of my bra and slipped them on. My heart fluttered when my fingers neared the black book, but when I touched the spine nothing happened. I began to pull it out but paused. A few volumes down, the spine of a different book was older, the leather cracked in two places. I hesitated, but pulled the black book from the shelf and flipped through the pages.

  It was a codex of some kind—no math, no diagrams, no reference to summoning. I slipped it back into place and trusted my gut about the other book. When I pulled it, my fingers tingled. Whatever protection was on this one, it was a lot stronger than the Alexandrian spell Lucas had used to test the cloth. Still, I wasn’t turned to stone or reduced to ash or something.

  I opened the book to the first few pages.

  Yes, Amelia…

  I startled, and nearly pressed the book to my chest before realizing what a terrible idea that was. The page I opened to had a diagram. It was the template, surrounded by text in a language I didn’t recognize.

  It was an effort to tear my eyes away. I closed the book and wrote the whispering off as a weakened effect of Sinclaire’s protection on the book. There wouldn’t be much time, so I rushed to the door and opened it, then left my shoe between it and the doorframe to keep it from closing.

  And just like that, I stole a cursed book from the headmaster.

  Amelia

  Making the copy was tedious, and we didn’t have much time. In my other pocket, I waited for the feeling of the second clay disk breaking, to let us know Lucas and Sinclaire were on the way back from the manufactured crisis that Lucas and Isaac had set up.

  “Next page,” Hunter muttered. I turned the page in the ‘borrowed’ book at the same time he turned the page in his blank tome, specially prepared for the task. His hands flashed frantically through the spell as he muttered it, spilled a bit of ink from a pen, and waited for the swirling black liquid to settle into place as a copy of the opened page. “Next.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” I warned him.

  He shot me a brief, irritated look. “I’m going as fast as I can.”

  “I know,” I breathed. “Sorry. Here.”

  I turned the page, he copied it, and we kept that up as quickly as we could. When the disk finally broke, there were still at least twenty left. “They’re on the way back. I have to get the book back into his office.”

  “Not yet,” Hunter insisted, and copied another page. “Keep turning, I can do it.”

  “Hunter, we’ve barely got ten minutes and I have to be out of there before Sinclaire gets back.” I strained to hear outside the little storeroom we were using, dreading the sound of two sets of footsteps headed toward us.

  “The book could be useless if we don’t get it all,” Hunter grumbled as he turned to another blank page. “You can’t just use half a magic book. Tell Lucas to stall him.”

  Hunter wasn’t about to let it go and was probably right. I hadn’t expected the spell to take so long each time, or for the book to be as big. It was easily a hundred pages, maybe more. I turned to the next page and left the book open for Hunter while I quickly cast a Whisper to Lucas. “Longer book than expected. Hunter still copying. Stall.”

  Almost immediately, Lucas’s voice drifted to the door from the end of the hallway. Hunter paused when he heard it and then pushed himself to go faster. “Headmaster, if I may—since I have you, I have a question about a student file that I thought I should bring to your attention…”

  Their voices grew a bit more distant as, I hoped, Lucas led Sinclaire to his own little office. Please think to close the door…

  It bought us time, but not a lot of it. I turned to the last page. Hunter copied it. The ink settled.

  “Go,” he said. “Quickly.”

  He didn’t really have to tell me. I was already part of the way to the door. I opened it, peeked out and heard Lucas reassuring the headmaster that he had only wanted to be thorough.

  I dashed down the hallway to the headmaster’s office and pulled it open, careful not to drop the book while I held it one-handed. I knelt to retrieve my shoe, tossed it inside, and let the door close.

  There was a static sound of locking spells snapping into place. I paled and stared at the door. Fuck. Sinclaire was going to know I opened and closed it, and would want to know why. What would I say?

  I could think of that later. I shuffled to the bookshelf, replaced the tome, and then snatch up my shoe from the floor to put it on. Sinclaire’s voice came from the other side, muttering words in six different languages to release the locks on his doors. I ran to the blackboard and grabbed the chalk and in a panic muttered the living ink spell with a small change, then streaked the chalk back and forth over it. I ran through the equations in my head. Most of it was wrong—very, very wrong—but I’d spent so much time with them they at least showed clearly in my mind.

  Chalk shifted, equations appeared on the board, and the door opened.

  I still had the gloves on.

  “Ah, Amelia—”

  I stripped them in a panic and stuffed them into my panties just a second before I turned to see Sinclaire coming around the door. “Headmaster,” I said, breathless. “I… I forgot my book bag. I opened the door, and then turned around to get it, and it locked behind me. Stupid, I know. I’m sorry. Then I realized I… messed up, again, and was going to fix it.”

  He eyed me, and then the board, and for a split second, the bookshelf. When he looked back to the board, he frowned. “I should say so. You’re clearly exhausted. You should go and get some rest. I expect to see you do better tomorrow, hm?”

  “I’ll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” I assured him, and strode to the desk to retrieve my book bag. Sinclaire watched me carefully the whole time, right up until I gave him a final, murmured ‘good evening’, and slipped out the door, my heart thudding in my ears.

  “I can’t decide if I never want to do that again,” I told Isaac when we convened in his and Lucas’s room to wait for the others, “or if I can’t wait to do it again. Is that bad?”

  “That you’re a budding cat burglar in the making?” he asked, amused. We were slouched on his bed together. “Guess it depends on your point of view. I’m just glad you’re safe. Hunter got all of it?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. And the protections on it were strong enough that I could feel them through the gloves. Made my hands go numb. As if it didn’t entirely keep them from working on me.”

  Isaac went wide-eyed. “They didn’t? Oh,
Amelia, I’m so—”

  “No, no,” I said quickly, and took his hands as he reached out as if he meant to check up on me. “It was just some side effect kind of… mental projection or something. A voice. Creepy, scare-you-off-first kind of thing, probably.”

  “And without any protection,” he said, “enough to drive you to madness perhaps. I’m glad you’re okay. If it’s all the same, I think I’d rather you not participate in further heists. I was beside myself with worry for you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Roth, I’m not precisely sure how to take that comment.”

  He chuckled and pulled me to him. “Take it to mean I don’t wish to see you harmed,” he said. “I’m well aware that you are eminently capable and steadfastly immovable. That’s what worried me.”

  I hummed thoughtfully and let him brush his lips against mine. When he didn’t push further, I pressed against him more firmly and caught his lower lip. My heart hadn’t stopped pounding since fleeing from Sinclaire’s office, and when Isaac kissed me, it was like my adrenaline turned into total panting lust.

  Each time I’d been with Isaac, Lucas had always been with us. I really, really hoped he’d be fine flying solo with me because I really, really needed him.

  Evidently, he was totally fine going down this road without our trusty companion, as he deepened the kiss, his hands sliding down my back to grab my hips and tug me onto his lap. I pulled his shirt from where it was tucked into his pants and fumbled with his belt.

  Isaac pulled my hips down to grind against me and make me gasp, breaking our kiss. His mouth went right to my neck and I had to brace myself against him as desire rushed through me. Isaac’s mouth was straight sin and hellfire—and fuck all, I was addicted. I craved him like a junkie on a binge.

  I arched against him, my breasts aching to be in that mouth, but his hands went to the hem of my skirt, pushing it up.