by Aria Sparke
‘Despar’s gone to lunch,’ Flynn said holding up a cardboard sign propped by a coffee mug on the librarian’s desk.
Arianna Despar was the small stoop-backed librarian, who looked about 70 years old, yet Anya had told me she was dhampiric and supposedly closer to 300. She was strict and no nonsense and loved her books with a passion. Given her age, no wonder she knew every book in the library.
‘Perfect,’ I said.
‘Come on, I’ll show you where the spell books are. Only your kind is interested in them.’
‘Your kind?’
‘Witches. The spells are useless to dhampirs and ordinary mortals.’
Flynn led me to the corner where I often chose to study. Behind the shelves of books on the back wall was a large glass case. I remembered seeing it before but not paying it much attention.
‘See, here they are, but students aren’t allowed to borrow them, though I’ve seen Ces browsing through them.’
‘Let’s check the librarian’s desk for a key,’ I said feeling daring.
Flynn raised his eyebrows. ‘What if Despar comes back?’
‘We’ll be quick.’ I dashed across the polished wood skidding to a halt beside the librarian’s desk. After quickly surveying the desk, I realized the keys weren’t there, so I opened the main drawer. A keyring with half a dozen keys attached was lying under some notes. I grabbed it and raced back to the cabinet. The third key I tried opened the door.
‘Wow, it’s a goldmine. Which should I borrow?’ Thrilled, I ran my finger along the book spines reading their titles. ‘Healing Spells, Kragg’s Vampiric Anatomy and Physiology, Witchcraft: Wards and Bewitchments, Mallora’s Lore of Magic, and Perfect Potions. There are about fifty books here.’ I turned to Flynn trying to contain my excitement. ‘Which one?’ It was like being a little kid asked to choose in a candy store.
He skimmed over the titles. ‘I’ve heard about this one.’ After teasing a fat, soft-bound volume from the stack, he handed it to me.
‘The Art of Protection: A witch’s guide by Sister Agnes Alabaster. It sounds like a good choice.’ I leafed through the volume filled with beautiful hand-painted illustrations, symbols and text. ‘Okay, just shut the cabinet. Don’t lock it.’
‘No way,’ Flynn said and locked the cabinet but then unhooked the key. ‘Tomorrow I’ll drive to Wicklow and get the key copied. In the meantime, examine the book and photocopy the best spells.’
‘What if Mrs. Despar finds the key missing?’
‘We have to risk it.’
After dinner on the following evening, Flynn dropped by my room and flicked me the new key.
‘Thanks!’ I said, delighted at the prospect of delving into the spell books. ‘Did you get the original back in Mrs. Despar’s desk?’
He nodded. ‘Have you copied any of the spells from the book you borrowed?’
I showed him a sheaf of paper. ‘I picked ten spells. This one’s the absolute best.’ I flicked through the papers and showed him a memory spell. ‘You have to use it just before you begin a session of reading and it’s good for about fifteen minutes.’
Flynn looked at me with an astonished expression. ‘You’ll be able to memorize the contents of the cabinet and use it for study as well.’
‘Hmm, yes, but there’s a catch and I only discovered it after reading the introduction, which says there’s a price for practicing magic and it varies from spell to spell and for the witch performing it. The worst part is that there’s no real way of predicting what that is although Sister Agnes has given many of the spells ratings according to anecdotal experiences of other witches. She believes the price varies from a hair falling from your head, boils, burns and even death or worse.’
‘Worse?’
‘You might change form.’
‘To what?’
‘I don’t know. She’s a bit hazy on the topic.’
‘These forms exist, yet whether performing magic could do that to you, I’ve no idea.’
‘Bella told me a story yesterday that Ces told them about a boy turning into a hamster after dabbling in advanced magic. Is that possible?’
Flynn let out a long low whistle. ‘No wonder Ces keeps the cabinet locked. Promise me you’ll be careful?’
A shiver rippled up my spine. ‘I’ll be very selective with the spells I choose to memorize and I won’t be using them unless I absolutely have to and I’m certain of their side effects. In the meantime I’m going to read as many of the books as I can.’
* * *
CHAPTER 31
Premonitions
Now that finals were over, I had a few weeks before deciding whether to head for a new college. I’d done well and my GPA was excellent. However, I worried my results wouldn’t be strong enough when the time came to apply for medical school compared with others who’d studied at more competitive colleges. I’d had several scholarship offers from some fine colleges and spent hours researching them and their cities on the internet. I was hoping desperately Flynn would come with me to the new college once he knew how much I needed to follow my dream of becoming a doctor.
With the pressure of exams behind me, I was also enjoying researching the spell books while continuing to work with Ces on magic and with Alexis in the gym. But most of all I loved being with Flynn, and it tore me inside as the day approached when we would both have to decide. How would I cope without him if he didn’t want to come? Did he love me as much as I loved him? If I went without him, perhaps we could visit each other for the next couple of years. Would a long distance relationship work? Was I being too selfish wanting both a career and him? I was drowning in questions and dreading the future.
This morning I’d decided to confront Flynn and ask if he would come to the college I had finally settled on.
* * *
CHAPTER 32
Flynn: Disturbance
I sat across from Lily at the picnic bench on the far oval of the Anubis grounds under gray skies. She tugged at her fingers and barely met my gaze.
Expecting bad news, I felt my throat constrict. Was she finally going to break up with me? I tried to throw her off guard by smiling although I felt like an alligator, all teeth and tense muscles. Just say it, you idiot. Tell her you love her and always will. I reached across the table and folded my hands over hers. They were icy.
‘Are you cold?’ What a heartfelt beginning. Try again. ‘Here take my jacket.’ I took it off and walked around the table to drape it over her shoulders like they did in old movies.
‘I’ve got college offers from some of the best in the country, really good ones with full scholarships.’
‘Wow, that’s great, Lily.’ Now I was perplexed because we were obviously still good.
‘It means leaving here.’
Reality hit me like a brick. How stupid could I be? Since Tarek had married Bella, I had hoped she would settle and stay. Now I understood why she was so uptight. Why today? It couldn’t have come at a worse time. She seemed puzzled—probably by my lack of reaction.
‘Sorry, Lily, now I understand. You’re worried about leaving here?’
Her bottom lip trembled. ‘Aren’t you?’
What could I say? There was no way she could leave safely to go to one of these colleges. I’d broached the subject with Alexis and he’d said there was no way we could provide enough protection to ensure Lily’s safety. Medical school was another matter. With sufficient training and her own dhampir group, Alexis had said it might be a possibility in a couple of years. Alexis had promised me he would talk to Lily but hadn’t because of the latest developments.
‘Of course I am. Don’t worry about it, Lily. I’ll be by your side wherever you are.’ That was true, but I was hiding the larger truth and it made me feel deceitful and guilty.
She beamed. ‘Will you come by my room later and look at the brochures? I want to make the right choice so we’re both happy. Do you want to study too? You’re so good at everything; you could choose whatever you wanted.’
‘Sure. I was thinking of creative writing.’ Why was I prolonging this ridiculous fantasy?
‘That’s a great idea. What about Anya and Martin? Will they come too?’
Never. Like me, their assignment was to keep track of the Berisha clan and during the last four years they had settled deeply into the Wicklow community. ‘I’ll ask them.’ Again I felt deceptive. Damn Alexis. He insisted he’d be the one to tell Lily. His age did give him charisma and a slick way with words. He had a gentle persuasiveness that I knew Lily respected. Sometimes I wondered if it wouldn’t hurt to age a decade just to gain that perspective and maturity.
She seemed content as we walked across the oval hand in hand. I couldn’t help snatching looks over the wall and at the sky. Last week Ces had warned us of an imminent attack on the grounds and surrounding forest. Several of her students had received echoes of her vision during exams. Lily hadn’t attended witchcraft lessons with the group over the exam period, preferring to concentrate fully on her study for finals. She hadn’t mentioned the attacks, so I decided not to alarm her. Instead, I was going to make sure she was safely locked up in the dorms tonight—the night of the predicted attack. I hated keeping secrets from her. But I couldn’t bear the thought of her trying to help us by performing spells she wasn’t ready for, especially knowing now they could harm her.
I sighed. At times I wished we were both simple humans growing old together in a town. I imagined the house, its garden, our children, a dog and the white picket fence. Was it too much to ask?
‘Are you okay?’ she asked in her sweet voice.
‘Yes, always when I’m with you.’
* * *
At 10 pm, Martin and Anya came by my room to collect me. We all hated the hunt, but being targeted and attacked was worse. To be on the back foot, not really knowing what our enemy had planned was chilling. Ces had given us a brief sketch of the Berishas’ strategy last week, but none of the other witches had visualized her scenario. This wasn’t a surprise. Cecilia, like Lily’s mom, possessed a deeper sight—or rather, Elise had. Often I wondered how long it would be before Lily showed the same skill.
‘Are you ready?’ Anya asked.
I nodded despite feeling sick to the stomach. It was normal for the occasion and I knew my siblings felt the same. We shared what felt like telepathy when it came to raids. I could see it in the way Anya’s jaw muscles tightened and hear it in Martin’s dark jokes. I knew them like myself. No matter what, I would defend and protect them to the death if a Berisha crossed their path and threatened them. I trusted them to do the same for me.
As we crept from my room to the foyer of Anubis, I felt a longing to return to Lily to see her and kiss her in case it was the last time.
‘Come on,’ Anya urged me.
I knew she understood my hesitation.
‘She’ll be here when you get back,’ Anya said.
There were no secrets between us.
‘And you’ll get back to her in one piece so long as you focus on the task,’ Martin said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Lily’s talk about leaving Anubis and fleeing to some college far away tugged at me. If only my life and choices were so easy. In many ways I envied humans and their straightforward lives.
Alexis and half a dozen dhampirs were waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. A couple were checking their knives, and another was stretching. When we joined the group, Alexis made us wait to give us the latest update from Cecilia.
He raised his hand to quieten us. ‘There’s been a slight shift in Cecilia’s information. She believes the attack will come from the eastern side of the college about a mile from the wall.’
‘How many vamps?’ I asked. The Berisha had fewer dhampirs in their ranks. Although two vampires couldn’t produce offspring, the Berisha mated with humans and produced their own dhampirs and once they were mature, changed many of them into vampires. They rarely turned humans, preferring to feed from them.
‘At least two—and they have wolves,’ Alexis said.
Damn, vamps were bad enough, but wolves were a nasty extra—silent, vicious and efficient. The Berisha trained them to hunt for dhampirs using their own to blood them, which only underlined how barbaric they were. To put the wolves off, Ces would use witchcraft to mask our natural scent.
‘There you are,’ Alexis said when Ces joined us in the foyer.
‘Sorry, I was just preparing the scents when I had another vision,’ she said as she sprayed each of us with green fluid in a glass bottle, which smelled of pine, soil and rotting leaves. ‘I counted four wolves and two vamps.’
‘Did you see who the vamps were?’ Alexis asked in a tense voice.
‘Yes—Odeta and Samir.’ Behind Vincent Berisha, his sister and brother were the most dangerous vampires in the clan.
Alexis rubbed his forehead with a worried expression. ‘I think we’ll need more hunters.’ He turned to Cecilia. ‘We’ll leave now on foot, but would you collect another half dozen dhampirs?’
‘I want to come with you,’ she said.
‘Not tonight.’
Once they had been lovers, enough for Alexis to surrender his youth, but she had betrayed him, falling for a mortal. They had separated, but even now, he protected her. I knew he still loved her.
As we set off down the drive to the gates, I felt the wind behind us. Once outside the college, we ran in close formation to the east. Even though our scents were masked, I felt safer knowing the wind was blowing from the east. There would be no chance for the wolves to sniff the wind and detect our approach. Now all we had to worry about was the acute hearing of the vamps and their wolves.
We ran silently for about half a mile and then slowed to a walk. A lone wolf howled in the distance. Whether it was a Berisha beast or a feral animal, we had no way of knowing. Alexis split us into pairs and we spread out as we walked further into the forest between rows of towering pines. I walked with Anya and we ran from tree to tree, all the while listening and looking for any signs of life.
I hated it, the heightening anticipation and the growing fear. At any moment a demonic wolf could come leaping at your throat or a silver blade might come hurtling for your chest. But we knew they feared us too.
Either side of us, I monitored the blurring movement of our dhampirs while constantly checking ahead and behind.
‘Stop,’ I whispered to Anya, who froze behind a tree trunk. ‘Ahead.’ I’d caught the glint of amber eyes in the darkness, watching and waiting.
The wolf crouched and growled.
Anya slowly reached for her blade but before she could whip it from her side holster, the wolf ran and leaped. Just before it reached her, a blade streaked from behind a tree and the creature yelped before it fell to the forest floor with the knife in its side.
Approaching cautiously, I kicked it over to ensure it was dead.
‘It has no markings,’ Anya whispered.
I blew a sigh of relief. All the Berisha wolves were dark-muzzled and bore tattooed patterns up their gray limbs. This was merely a feral wolf.
We wandered deeper into the forest until we came upon the remnants of a fire still warm with a pile of bones and fur lying in the undergrowth. It was as though those sitting by it had scrambled and left in a hurry, not bothering to extinguish the embers and leaving the half-eaten remains of rabbits that their dogs or wolves had been feeding on.
A few of our group gathered at the fireplace. Alexis scraped a pile of pine needles with his foot and uncovered a metal plate with splotches of stew still sticking to it.
‘This was a fire tended by humans or dhampirs. No vampire eats stew,’ he murmured. ‘Come, we’ll head back toward the college, but each pair is to spread out further, so we cover more ground.’
We had gone about a quarter of the way back up the slope when Martin whistled. Everyone froze. Anya and I slipped across the slope to the tree he was standing behind. We checked behind and around us, but there was no sign of vampires. Martin pointed toward a cleari
ng as Alexis and the others joined us. Venturing forward, we spotted two men lying on the pine needles.
‘Watch for me,’ Alexis whispered obviously fearful it might be a trap. He inched forward until he reached the foot of one of the men. Crouching, he rolled the man over and inspected his neck before doing the same with the other man.
I held my breath trying to listen for the telltale signs of vamps and wolves moving in the surrounding darkness, but only the wind whistled through the pine needles like chattering ghosts.
Alexis returned to us. ‘We were too late, they’ve been and gone. The vamps fed on these men and then fled. There’s nothing we can do for them. Their dogs must have escaped because I see no sign of them.’
Dejected by our failure to help the humans, we trudged slowly back to college, yet kept a wary eye out for the vampires. As we approached the back wall of the college, we heard voices singing out and shouting, so we hid behind tree trunks to assess the situation.
A blade whistled through the air and hit a tree near where Anya and I crouched. I pulled it from the trunk of the pine tree and recognized the Ruberio insignia on its hilt and showed Anya, who threw it across the ground to Alexis.
Shaking his head, he shouted to the dhampirs hiding behind trees near the wall ahead of us. ‘Hold your weapons. It’s me, Alexis.’
The dhampirs protecting the wall emerged from behind trees and crept forward.
‘Sorry, we were attacked by vamps earlier,’ said Liam, who led the group. ‘They broke through the wards on the outside of the wall here. They would’ve got into the grounds if some of the dhampirs on second floor hadn’t noticed them coming over the wall. We had to call on twenty or more students to defend the outside grounds beyond the wall and more to protect Anubis on the other side.’
Horrified, Alexis beckoned for the group to gather and we climbed over the back wall. ‘Where’s Cecilia?’
‘She’s already been here to patch the damaged wards,’ Liam said