A Spell for Death: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts

by B. C. Palmer

  He pulled away and I found myself following him, confusion coursing through me. He huffed out a quiet laugh as he pulled the damn gloves from my panties, an eyebrow raised in question.

  “I didn’t have anywhere else to put them!” I defended myself.

  “Quick thinking,” Isaac said as he tossed the magical gloves onto the table beside the bed.

  “Right now I’m thinking you’d better get back to what you were doing.” I shimmied against him and he dropped his head back against the headboard. I leaned forward, unable to resist the temptation he offered, licking up his neck until I could capture his ear between my lips.

  He growled, the sound coming from deep within his chest and spurring me higher. All I could think about was him, and needing him in me. He wrapped his hands around my waist, his fingers pressing into my flesh, as he pushed me backwards, covering my body with his.

  I looked up at him, his face flushed with desire, his lips plump from my kisses, and I was so fucking grateful I chose to stay. I reached between us, freeing his cock even as he muttered the basic contraceptive spell—we didn’t have the patience for exploration right now.

  I lifted my hips and legs as he pulled down my underwear, wrapping my legs around his waist as he settled back over me. He dragged his cock against my pussy once, twice, then sank into me in one smooth stroke.

  Isaac pulled my legs over his arms, tilting my hips off the bed, and then he drove into me. It was frantic, adrenaline-fueled, and exactly what I craved. Hell, we were still dressed for the most part. And Isaac, always well put together Isaac, looking disheveled as he fucked into me? It was nearly enough to send me into an orgasm alone.

  I could feel how close I was and I slipped my fingers between us, teasing my clit as Isaac watched. My orgasm was right there, but still just out of reach. I knew Isaac was holding his own back, waiting for me, because even like this he was a damn gentleman.

  The door opened and my heart leaped into my throat as I turned to see who walked in.

  Hunter.

  We met eyes, his wide with surprise, and then… desire.

  My orgasm washed over me, a cry tearing its way out of my throat as I closed my eyes against the onslaught of pleasure. Isaac followed me, his own groan harmonizing with mine.

  When I opened my eyes again, the door was shut and Hunter was gone.

  I wasn’t expecting the stab of pain that I felt so viscerally.

  Isaac sighed, and I wondered if he felt similar.

  He leaned over me, kissing me gently as he brushed my hair out of my face. We were both a sweaty mess. “I should have warded the door,” he apologized.

  “It’s what it is,” I whispered back. I probably would have been upset had it been anyone else.

  He slipped out of me and helped me fix my skirt before cleaning himself up. He was belting his pants when he jerked his head toward the door. “Want me to go get him?”

  I pushed off the bed, shaking my head. If the man wasn’t interested, he wasn’t interested. I refused to feel ashamed for being caught with Isaac by him. “No, I will.”

  When I opened the door, Hunter was still there, leaning against the opposite wall. At least he hadn’t stormed off. “I’m so sorry,” I said, suddenly needing to explain myself, “it was just… with the adrenaline and the win, I guess I just—”

  He waved a hand. “You don’t need to explain,” he said and pushed off the wall. “You three are involved, and I’m aware of it. I should have knocked and waited. It’s my own fault; I didn’t mean to walk in on you… like that.”

  “It’s fine,” I assured him, “really, I—”

  “Next time I’ll be more careful,” he said. “Are you two done?”

  I wondered whether the new wards on the room damped down the sound enough. “You can come in,” I said. “Um… so you got the book finished?”

  “I did,” he said as I stepped aside and let him in. “I guess Lucas hasn’t made it back. The book is in our room, hidden for the moment. Did Sinclaire seem like he suspected anything?”

  “He didn’t see the gloves,” I said. “Even if he did think I was up to something, I can’t imagine he thinks I somehow managed to dispel and reset his magic. I think he might suspect I tried, but probably that’s expected.”

  Isaac still had his shirt untucked. I couldn’t tell if Hunter even noticed. Then again, I supposed he’d seen everything there was to see already—even before he caught us in the act. It certainly seemed like Isaac noticed. He lounged against the headboard and I swear there was a distant look of longing in his eyes.

  Before it could get any more awkward, Lucas rounded the doorframe and gave a relieved laugh as he swept me into a hug and planted a long kiss on my lips. He smoothed my hair with his hands as he pulled away, smiling, then slowly raised an eyebrow. “What’s all this?” he asked. “Have you been—”

  “We got the book,” Hunter cut in. “I haven’t really gone through it yet. It plays hell with the eyes and gives a killer headache. We’re going to have to think about breaking it up.”

  Lucas grunted quietly, winked at me, and gave Hunter a nod. “That seems prudent. We can get to work on it tonight.”

  “Now that you’re all here,” I said, and moved so that I could see all three of them, “there is something else. Something Sinclaire said during our lesson today. Did Nathan ever mention anything about a ‘patron’? It’s like a magical being that helps you out with magic, I guess. Sinclaire said that he hoped I would be able to summon mine sometime soon. I don’t know what soon means—this year, or maybe next or… he wasn’t specific. Is that familiar at all?”

  Lucas shook his head. Hunter echoed the gesture. “It’s not in his notes,” Hunter said.

  Isaac was notably silent. We turned to him and found him frowning. After a moment, he nodded slowly and looked up at us from whatever memories he’d been searching. “That’s not quite right,” he said to Lucas. “During the ritual itself, remember? He used a phrase several times: patronus tenebris. As a… plea, or an invocation.”

  “So you think he was trying to summon this… patron of darkness?” I asked.

  “No,” Lucas said quietly, “no, he wasn’t summoning a patron with that. He was invoking. Think of the structure of his ritual. The first part is for collecting power to carry the rest out. Like powering up a battery… he wasn’t trying to summon a patron…”

  I caught up, and shivered. Sinclaire had to be lying about his involvement with Nathan. It was the only way. “He wasn’t summoning a patron,” I finished Lucas’s thought, “because he already had one.”

  Lucas

  The book, which had no title and no listed author, was what we expected. A manual of summoning magic focused particularly on the summoning of a patron. From the first day we began to parse it out, it made my skin crawl.

  There are some books which, by virtue of their creation, are ‘cursed’ for lack of a better term. Just having them can cause you problems, much less reading them. Sometimes, the text of such a tome is itself the spell, meant to create changes in the reader. In cases like those, however, the preparation of the volume is long, involved, and you can frequently spot them a mile away. Binding such objects with human skin is a classic giveaway.

  This book was a copy. It wasn’t the construction or some ancient curse that gave it power—it was the knowledge itself that affected the mind.

  Our method was simple enough. Each of us would study and commit to memory one page at a time, alternating, so that we shared the burden. Then, working together, we applied what parts we knew in order to continue unraveling Nathan’s ritual. The progress was immediate, and terrifying. And so were the minor effects of studying the material.

  “I’m having nightmares,” Isaac admitted, weeks after we began picking the book apart.

  We were in the library, reviewing some of the offshoots of early Babylonian, which much of the book was written in. There were obscure terms that none of us knew, so it was into the stacks and the Academy
’s many dictionaries. It was just me and Isaac at the moment. Amelia was meant to join us after her lesson with Sinclaire.

  “I know,” I said gently. “Me too. I can’t imagine what reading the whole book would cause.”

  “I can,” he said. “Insanity. What are your nightmares about? Mine are about shadows. I’ll be walking down the hall, or through my childhood home, and they’re everywhere, moving in corners, creeping closer.”

  I shuddered involuntarily. Shadows. I couldn’t help thinking of Amelia’s illusory attack. It seemed far less illusory now. “Mine are similar,” I told him. “I wake up in our room, sometimes with you and sometimes by myself. The shadows are under the bed, or creeping out from behind the desk or under the door.”

  “That can’t be coincidence,” Isaac said. He looked down at the page but couldn’t make himself read more. He slipped the ribbon bookmark into the page and closed the book. “Generic insanity would manifest our deepest fears, something private, some insecurity of the identity. These are shared, and specific, and that points to a specific cause. I’ve been thinking…”

  “Often a recipe for anxiety,” I muttered. “I try to avoid it.”

  Isaac rapped the table with his knuckles. “Don’t make light,” he snapped—quietly, ever aware of the library rules. “You always do that.”

  I sighed and closed the book in front of me to give him my full attention, as seriously as I was able. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Nathan already had a patron,” Isaac said, drumming his fingers on the table, “which means he wasn’t using this particular book for his ritual. Hunter thinks he was picking some kind of dimensional lock. Both of those things… they make me wonder how well we knew him. I keep going over everything he did and said those months leading up to the night he… tried whatever it is he tried. Knowing what we know now, it’s a little more clear that he was not just keeping secrets—he was drifting away from us. I should have seen it, but with classes, and studying… did you see it?”

  “No,” I said softly, my heart aching. I’d been reviewing the same material. “Hunter did. I’m sure of it. It’s why he refused to help Nathan to begin with, I think. He knew Nathan was on a dark path. I didn’t want to see it.”

  “Neither did I, I suppose.” He stared at the cover of his most recent Babylonian grammar. “And I… I think it might be more dangerous than we realized to try and recreate his ritual. Let’s say Hunter is right—that Nathan is out there, somewhere. That we could bring him back. This knowledge is dark, Lucas. I know all magic is meant to be neutral, that it isn’t inherently evil but that’s not the sense I get from this at all. If there is evil knowledge, this is it.”

  I understood. I felt it too. I leaned against the table and reached across to take his hand. It didn’t seem very comforting—it barely comforted me just then, though it usually did. “You’re worried what Nathan would be like if we did get him back.”

  Isaac nodded. “It’s horrible of me. To think that he could… What if he was already dark when he disappeared? What if it’s better that he’s there, wherever ‘there’ is? Am I awful for thinking that?”

  “No, my love,” I whispered. “And you’re not alone. But I don’t think that changes anything.”

  He squeezed my hand tight. “I guess it doesn’t. I just don’t want to make the wrong decision.”

  “About what?” Amelia asked.

  She emerged from the shadow of the bookshelf. There were circles under her eyes that had been getting gradually darker over time. Both the book and Sinclaire’s lessons were taking their toll, and we could all see it. When we brought it up, she insisted that she was handling herself just fine. She wasn’t—but she was stubborn.

  “Just discussing the pros and cons of dabbling in dark magic,” I said. “How was Sinclaire’s?”

  “Grueling as ever,” she said as she passed behind me and kissed the top of my head, then gave Isaac the same before tossing her backpack on the table and flopping into the chair on the end of the table between us. “Where’s Hunter?”

  “Buried in his most recent page, I imagine,” Isaac said. “Anything useful today?”

  “Sort of,” Amelia said. She rubbed her forehead, then her eyes, and rested her elbows on the table. “Sinclaire gave me a series of formulae to memorize. I must have run them fifty times. He says I’m about ninety percent of the way there, and I’m making fewer mistakes. I haven’t been sleeping, though. Maybe a few hours a night? And usually they’re full of bad dreams. Worse dreams, even.”

  “Shadow people?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No… I don’t really remember them. I just wake up with this sense of dread, like there’s something behind me. Watching me. It stays with me for a few hours after I get up. I think it’s the book. The more of those pages I learn, the worse it gets.”

  And yet, her experience was different than ours. I wondered if Hunter was having the same dreams as Isaac and me—and why Amelia’s were different, why they followed her into waking.

  The obvious answer, of course, was that they weren’t dreams at all.

  I touched her elbow. “Maybe we should take a bre—”

  “Lucas, when you have a moment I have a few things for you,” Sinclaire’s voice said in my ear. “Nothing urgent, but tonight.”

  I sighed. “Speaking of breaks. Sinclaire has work for me. Probably filing. I should see what it’s about. We found a few good books. You and Isaac decide which are best and take them to Hunter. I don’t think he should be alone right now. Maybe none of us should be.”

  “Probably right about that,” Amelia said. “Come find us when you’re done?”

  I smiled as I stood and bent to kiss her. “Always. Don’t let Isaac talk too much. His mood is catching.”

  Isaac scoffed, but accepted a kiss when I rounded the table to his side. “There’s only forward, hm?”

  He nodded. “I suppose. See you.”

  I left them, and gave Mara a nod when I passed her. “Don’t let those two get stuck here.”

  She gave a grunt and waved me off. “I am not a babysitter.”

  Chuckling, I pushed through the library doors and made my way up the eastern hall, quickly sinking into my own thoughts and memories.

  I couldn’t deny that Isaac had a point. I didn’t know what the end goal of unlocking Nathan’s ritual was, but all the pieces did point to a probable outcome: to correct whatever mistakes he made—if there were mistakes—and try it again with the four of us, more carefully, to undo or finish whatever he started. It was more than curiosity, more than closure, even. At this point, it felt inevitable, like the only thing we could do. And that, I knew, was dangerous. It smacked of how Nathan spoke leading up to that night.

  “Hunter doesn’t understand,” Nathan had said, furious at Hunter’s withdrawal, which he saw as a betrayal. “He doesn’t trust me, doesn’t trust my skill. I could do this on my own, if I had to, you know. I don’t need the three of you. But I want the backup, I want you there, just in case. You’re the only people I trust.”

  “Then why not let us all go over it together?” I suggested. “Maybe if Hunter understood—”

  But Nathan had scoffed at the idea. “You’re all talented, Lucas,” he said. “But it would take months to get you up to speed. Maybe more, I don’t know.”

  “Summer is only a few months away,” I argued. “If we can just wait, we can talk Hunter around. He loves you, Nathan. More than me or Isaac. You know that.”

  Nathan had grown sullen and dark. More than he had been, anyway. “I’m not waiting that long. Do you trust me, Lucas? Does Isaac? I have to do this. I have to finish it, now that it’s begun. It’s the only way.”

  “Finish what, Nathan?” I had held his face in my hands, kissed him, pressed my forehead to his. “Just talk to us. Talk to me. You can trust me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he whispered. “I want you to be safe. That’s all. You’ll help me?”
r />   I had done the only thing I could do. Told him I would. Of course I would—I loved him. Nathan could do anything, and do it better than anyone. Everything would be fine.

  Except, it hadn’t been.

  I remembered the brilliant light, and the darkness that swallowed it up. I remembered Nathan’s pitched incantation. He’d shouted it right up until the end. And then… he was just gone.

  I knocked on Sinclaire’s door. “Headmaster? It’s Lucas.”

  “Come on in, my boy,” Sinclaire answered. “Just finishing up a few things.”

  “I can come back,” I said as I opened the door, “but I was free, and thought I may as well come by.”

  Sinclaire looked up from a paper on his desk, then turned it over and looked over the next sheet in the stack. Requisition papers from various departments, probably. I filed plenty of them, routing them to the appropriate vendors for everything from food to supplies for the classrooms. “Have a seat, Lucas.”

  Already, I was wary of the man. I rarely had cause to sit and talk with him. Typically, he just had work delivered to my modest office. I took my seat as casually as I was able. “Sir?”

  He signed the next paper, flipped it over to join the other, capped his pen, and clasped his hands on the stack. A weary smile accentuated the fine lines around his mouth. “I understand you’re doing quite well with your classes. All of your instructors have given you very high praise.”

  “I’m middling at best, Headmaster,” I said, spreading my hands. “But I’m glad I’m well liked. I try not to make trouble, at least.”

  “I doubt that’s entirely true,” he said ruefully, his smile widening. “I recall being your age, being at this place. Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure you know the rules here are meant to be challenges more than strict regulations.”

  My soft chuckle was nervous, and manufactured. Stupid. I dipped my head. “I try not to let it get in the way of classes, at least.”

  “Mm,” he said. He glanced at the bookshelf. “You have a key to my office, yes?”