A Spell for Death: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts

by B. C. Palmer

  I had a horrific vision of making the wrong choice in a panicked instant, and seeing Amelia struck by lightning, burned by fire, thrown through one of the headmaster’s windows, or losing an arm to frostbite. I shook my head. “Not reliably. But maybe we only need to immobilize him. I’ve got something for that, but I can’t cast it quickly. We’ll need to time it.”

  “So we go in covered,” Isaac said, “I interrupt, you grab him, we get Amelia out, and we take her straight to security. And hopefully Sinclaire doesn’t do to us what he did to Lucas.”

  “Security,” I said. “That could be it. They’ll have the right training. We signal them just before we go in. They’ll show up, and we put them between us and Sinclaire.”

  Isaac nodded slowly. “Sure. That could work. Especially if he does come after us. If it’s his magic afflicting Lucas, they’ll be obligated to at least test it.”

  “And then we get expelled for raiding his office,” I said. Fuck, this was a lot of shit to deal with.

  Isaac shrugged. “Better that than dead or… worse.”

  “That’s two,” Serena muttered. “Two more. That’s it, pretty girl, spread those legs for mami Serena…”

  “How much longer will this take?” I asked her.

  She didn’t look up from her work. “A lot longer if I have to stop and answer questions about how long it’s gonna take. Life’s funny like that.”

  Isaac shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Can you make us invisible just as we open the door?”

  “For Amelia, I can turn us into a swarm of hungry flying scorpions,” she said. “Yeah, I can do invisible. I’ve done it for plenty of groups.”

  She was never not on, that one. I rolled my eyes. “Well, cover us just as we open the door. Isaac and I will do the rest.”

  “Sure, why not,” she murmured. “I always kind of hoped I’d die on a Friday, at a party, but breaking and entering on a Tuesday is probably street enough to get me into the right part of Hell. That’s three, better stay close. Oh, also security is gonna be up our asses in like three minutes, so. Maybe keep an eye out to make with a delay.”

  “Fuck,” I grunted. “All right… ah… delay, then.”

  I turned to face the end of the hallway and put my hands together to cast an ice-shaper spell. Generally, it was for art, but ice was ice. I pulled the magic up from my middle and breathed it into the words, pushing hard to pull what little moisture there was in the air, the walls, the wood of the floor. Frost rimmed around the end of the hallway, and then with the final words and the execution gesture, the wood under our feet and along the entire hallway groaned and cracked as beads of moisture squeezed out, the temperature in the hallway plummeted, and a wall of ice congealed. My lips cracked almost immediately, and my mouth dried. I kept pushing until there was a wall two or three feet thick blocking the end of the hall. After that, there just wasn’t any moisture left within reach.

  My knees shook as I let the magic go. “That won’t buy us much time.”

  “Hopefully it’s enough,” Isaac muttered. “Serena?”

  “Men never listen,” she huffed at the door like it was listening to her. But a moment later she finally gave a pleased little chuckle. “Just about got it. You boys ready?”

  We moved to stand beside her. Beyond the wall of ice, there were already muffled voices. Hopefully none of them were competent elementalists.

  Serena stood slowly, her hands held in a final position, and kicked her high heels off. “Now.”

  She twisted something invisible, and the final lock on the door broke with a ping of magic slipping loose the wrong way. There was an accompanying burst of greenish light, and before it had even faded, she wove her fingers for an invisibility spell. The light around us warped, and Isaac touched the doorknob once with the back of his hand before he flung the door open and we charged through.

  I was halfway through my binding spell before we realized the office was empty.

  “Fuck,” I spat.

  Behind us, the ice cracked and then exploded inward, showering us with brittle, freezing needles and water.

  “Move with me,” Serena whispered.

  “Security,” a woman barked—the blonde from before. “Everyone stay where you are and put your hands out to your sides!”

  We crept away from the door, into the office and along the wall with Serena while she maintained the invisibility spell. It wouldn’t take more than a second- or third-level revelation to show us there, if they bothered to look—which I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t.

  Isaac began to move his hands. I nudged him with my elbow. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Hiding us,” he whispered back.

  “We’re already invisible; you’re going to draw attention,” I said.

  He began muttering a spell, something I didn’t recognize. Serena apparently did. She snorted quietly. “Clever.”

  A second later, Isaac finished and put a hand against the wall to speak the last word. As the security magicians pushed through the door, the room’s appearance changed. The walls, floor, and ceiling took on wild colors. Illusory lights flickered over the ceiling, and bubbles began to appear in the air. At the last second, just as it took effect, I focused my attention on one of the windows along the far wall and cast a quick spell of opening. The lock swiveled out of place, and the window raised a few inches up.

  As soon as security was in the room, they began looking through revelation spells, but it was clear they didn’t like what they saw. Magic this pervasive would put off a bright, dazzling aura that would make plenty of other unobtrusive spells difficult to see.

  Serena pointed at Sinclaire’s desk, then mimed hiding under her hands. About that time, the shorter magician began casting a dispel to get rid of the party illusion.

  We moved quickly, and as quietly as possible, across the side of the room and to Sinclaire’s desk. It was large but fitting us all under it would be close to impossible. Serena went first, then Isaac. I followed him and crammed myself up against both of them. Just in time. There was a whoosh of unraveling magic and the room returned to normal. The light around the three of us reverted as well—a mass dispel to simply clear the room of basic magic. Somewhere against the wall, there was a sound like tearing metal.

  “Gods damn it, Gershwin,” the female security magician complained. “Check those books and make sure you didn’t unhinge something. If you tangled up Sinclaire’s wards, he’s gonna put his foot up your ass.”

  “I wanted to be thorough,” Gershwin shot back. A moment later he breathed a loud sigh of relief. “They’re fine, stop complaining.”

  “Look,” the woman said, “the window.”

  Footsteps padded across the floor. “Fuck. Find Sinclaire. We need to see if anything is missing. And take some of that ice to the office; have Anna run it against the student profiles.”

  “Obviously,” Gershwin said.

  “Can you not?” his partner asked.

  Whatever beef was between them, it didn’t play out much longer. Heavy, irritated footsteps grew distant, leaving the room, while the other magician paced along one wall. “Sloppy,” she muttered.

  I nudged Serena and pointed at my eyes, then in the direction of the voice.

  She made a face as she indicated our cramped quarters with wide, irritated eyes. She couldn’t cast effectively like this. Instead, I risked leaning out slightly, and when I couldn’t see the blonde magician yet, I crept out from cover and peeked around the edge of the desk to see her kneeling, examining something through a simple revelation spell at an object in her hand.

  “Amelia Cresswin,” she sighed. “It’s always a dumb freshman.”

  Whatever she picked up, she pocketed as she stood, then turned away. “I’m locking it down,” she called to her partner. “Get someone searching the grounds. Found a pin, belongs to the Cresswin girl.”

  The door closed a moment later.

  We all continued to hold our breath for several more seconds until
, finally, we were confident the door was locked and they had either gone or, at worst, posted someone outside.

  Serena examined the walls through her fingers as we stood. “Shit,” she whispered. “That’s a hell of a lockdown. We’re not going anywhere. Doors, windows, everything’s solid. Alarms, too.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Amelia was in this room. She left somehow, with Sinclaire. Teleport? Portal?”

  Isaac shook his head. “Not from in here unless he’s got some kind of anchor.”

  “Or magic we don’t know about,” I muttered. I went to where Amelia’s pin was found and peeked through a simple revelation spell at the built-in bookcase on that wall. “Or maybe it’s simpler than anything like that…”

  I shifted aside as Isaac joined me. Serena followed and started tested objects on the shelves. “What, like a fake wall? Secret door? Bet there’s a dungeon under Sinclaire’s office. He seems like the type that would keep a gimp.”

  “Sinclaire?” Isaac asked, searching the wall behind the shelves for clues. “Sinclaire’s so uptight, I’m not sure he even touches his own dick.”

  “Oh, those are always the ones,” she said. “Guarantee it. Oh, hey—look at this. Magnetic base on this sculpture. I bet you…”

  She pressed down on the shelf, and it gave. On instinct, Isaac and I both shot hands out to catch falling artwork and artifacts before they made too much racket and attracted the security back inside—but nothing fell. There was a soft click. I tested the other shelves, and sure enough there was a second. The wall gave way.

  Behind it, there was a dim hallway leading steeply down into some kind of sublevel.

  “Told ya,” Serena said. “Guys like Sinclaire always have a dungeon.”

  “No,” I muttered, and looked to Isaac. His face had gone just as pale as mine likely was. Something radiated from the depths, well beyond the faint torchlight that lit the stairs. Something dark, and familiar. And Amelia was down there this time. “No, it’s not a dungeon…”

  Isaac exhaled, and his breath clouded in the cold aura that swept up from the darkness. “No,” he whispered. “No, not again.”

  “What?” Serena asked. “What is that? Feels like…”

  “Like a hole in the world,” Isaac said. He looked up at me, eyes determined, but clearly frightened. “The last time I felt that… it was the night Nathan disappeared. It’s happening again.”

  Amelia

  “Clever brats,” Sinclaire said, casting his gaze away from me and to the entrance to the wide, domed room. “You’ll be pleased to know your friends are at least attempting a rescue. Pray they don’t make it in time. I suspect Mr. Turner has already sustained considerable, lasting damage. I shudder to think what another few hours would cost him.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” I grumbled. And I was. If I’d thought he’d been a hard teacher before, this was a new level of punishment. Using Sinclaire’s variables, I rushed through the massive diagram as quickly as I was able, drawing long lines with the pale yellow chalk he provided. What it was made of, I didn’t want to know, but it had an oily texture to it and came off in crumbles if I pushed too hard against the smooth stone floor.

  We were deep under the Academy. The walk down had been over a hundred steps—I’d lost count when I stumbled once, but I had gotten as far as 106. The air here was damp and stale, and there was an aura of penetrating cold that seemed to pervade everything. Not just the cool of something under the earth, but a kind of heat sink. The light of the torches barely lit the carvings on the walls around us and I was glad I couldn’t see them clearly. The glimpse I’d gotten when we first emerged into the temple-like structure was bad enough. They were friezes of some kind, depicting a creature with countless tentacles grasping humans and animals near the door. What the rest looked like I never wanted to find out. It was creepy as fuck. I realized I’d much rather be stuck with the serial killer with the obsession with lotion.

  “Carefully,” Sinclaire warned. “No mistakes. The results would be catastrophic, and I assure you that you do not want to end up the way Mr. Crowley did.”

  “Dead?” I asked as I nearly terminated a line segment in the wrong place. I drew more carefully and marked the end off with a circle and chalked the appropriate sigil inside it.

  “One can only hope,” he said softly, real sincerity in his voice. “Good. Now, the eastern quadrant.”

  I glanced up at him and saw him staring at the entrance. Maybe waiting for whoever was coming. I hoped Hunter and Isaac had alerted the entire faculty, and that any moment they’d come charging down to force Sinclaire to release Lucas. That seemed like a bit much to hope for, but his distraction gave me my first inkling of an idea. “The chalk,” I said. “What is it?”

  “It’s better that you not know, I think,” he said.

  “Context is everything,” I shot back as I stood. My back hurt from bending over, and my feet were numb from the cold. My shoes would scuff the lines, so I’d taken them off as the figure became more complex and places to stand grew sparse. “How can I cast accurately if I don’t know the materials?”

  He cast his eyes at me, seemingly amused. “Fair enough… it’s a mixture of human fat and bone. It takes some time to prepare. The Abyss is an inversion of creation. Therefore, the materials involved are various inversions of that which makes creation what it is. Life and death. Light and darkness. Warmth and cold. Now please—continue.”

  I forced my fingers to hold on to the stick of chalk, and had to breathe deep and slow to keep from throwing up. I distracted myself with some quick calculations. As I knelt to draw the next line, I checked that Sinclaire was still watching the entrance. He met my gaze, smiled, and looked away as I bent to the task.

  Turning my back to him to mark down the next line, I paused and whispered the equation to myself loudly enough that he could hear me. “So that would mean…”

  I lowered my voice to nothing more than the barest breath and spoke the living ink spell, modified like I had before with the chalk but accounting for these awful materials. As a test, I scraped out the rest of the line crooked but imagined it straight, feeding my intention into it. The pale line shifted. In the back of my mind I set to work doing a new set of calculations and prayed I was smarter than he thought I was.

  Sinclaire gave a displeased grunt. The air shifted ever so slightly, a single, brief breeze in an otherwise dead-still room. “Enterprising,” he said. “Keep to your work, Amelia. No matter what happens. Think of your dear Lucas.”

  He strode to the entrance and began muttering spells, one after the other. Protecting the entrance, I decided. That was fine—Hunter and Isaac would expect that; they were smart. They’d come down cautiously, check for traps. Or it was security. Please be security.

  I had to believe that someone, anyone, was a potential match for Sinclaire. It was too easy to think that whatever power this Az-Harad gave him made him impossible to stop. That way was despair, and I wasn’t about to give in to it. No one was impossible to beat; every magician had weaknesses and blind spots. Even ones like the headmaster.

  Alternating between two sets of calculations was making my head hurt, as if my neurons were literally overheating from the exertion. Twice I caught myself mixing them up and almost lost my nerve. I worked through the eastern quadrant steadily until a familiar voice came from the stairs. “Amelia, we’re here!”

  My back straightened, and I nearly rushed to Hunter as he, Isaac, and Serena, of all people, emerged from the darkness of the hallway into the gloomy half-light of the temple. I almost laughed with relief, but it choked off as Sinclaire raised a finger.

  “Now,” he said, glancing between them and me, “this will make the whole process much easier. Amelia will continue her work and finish the ritual—or I will kill the lot of you painfully and slowly in front of her.”

  “Sinclaire,” Hunter warned, stalking right up to the edge of the stairs, “we’ve already informed the faculty. They’re on the way behind
us to put a stop to whatever you’re doing. You can’t win against all of them.”

  Sinclaire scoffed a bitter laugh. “Come now, Mr. Webb. I’m not half as foolish as you seem to think. The faculty wouldn’t have allowed a gaggle of sophomores to come down here if they knew what was going on. No… you’ve avoided engaging them because you’d have to explain yourselves, am I right? And laying out those pieces would mean admitting to accessing the book of Az-Harad. You wouldn’t be here at all—you’d already be imprisoned for everyone’s safety. Furthermore, security would have been alerted when you broke my locks. You haven’t been detained, which means you found a way to slip their notice. Protocol is to lock down when there’s an intrusion—therefore, there is no one behind you, and the three of you have come down here alone. You are precisely as foolish as I believe you to be and should have thought this through. I’m rather disappointed, in fact. This institution simply doesn’t produce the same caliber of magicians it once did. Millennials. So entitled.”

  Asshole. I licked my lips and finished the calculations. The last few lines were in place, and I stood, still gripping the chalk. “Sinclaire, I’m done. Don’t hurt them.”

  He turned his head to look at me before examining the diagram. It was a twisted spider’s web on the floor, hung inside a thick circle of black stone. Staring at the center made my head spin. The effect of all those lines was to create the illusion of a series of cracks in the world. Not in the floor alone, somehow—the color of the chalk or just the optical effect of the diagram itself made the pattern look sunken into the ground, as if it would fall away any moment and reveal a gaping wound in the universe.

  “Excellent,” he breathed. “Perfect. I knew you had the skill, Amelia. Now. Begin the ritual. No matter what happens, do not stop. If you do…”

  He raised a hand and curled his fingers, uttering another of those ear-scraping words. Hunter gasped. Isaac and Serena had to catch him as he fell, and he clawed at his chest. Darkness spread like veins up his neck and down to his hands.