“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Harris hissed at her.
“I’ll get to bed early tonight,” she said. “Where’s Montague?”
“He takes alchemy in this period,” Alec said in his low voice. “Vampires can’t take the necromancy class.”
“I am Professor McGuinness, and…I have just been informed about the death of one of our most…distinguished alumni…Samuel Caruthers.” He sounded breathless with agony. “Mr. Caruthers and I were students together. It was a brief, but treasured time in my life. He was the most talented young man at school at that time. And so charismatic, our Samuel. I remember those days like a Merchant Ivory film…like a dream. Excuse me, gentlemen.” He left the room.
There was a general grumbling. Some guys looked back at Charlotte again.
“Man, I didn’t know Samuel Caruthers was gay,” said one boy with a buzz cut—the only such severe hairstyle in the room—and the look of someone who stirred trouble just for fun.
Charlotte hesitated only a second before saying, “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Nah. Just saying.”
“‘Just saying’, why? Do you know if he was gay?”
“Well—“
“You think Professor McGuinness is gay because he’s sad his friend died? And it matters, for some reason?”
“I—I dunno—“
“Then that whole comment was pointless, wasn’t it?” She tossed her head away from the boy. “Samuel Caruthers was my family.”
I could practically smell the bristling of a room of boys who had never had their world challenged before.
“You didn’t know him, did you?” Harris said. “I thought you didn’t even know about magic.”
“No, but maybe I would have liked to have known him.”
Left unattended, the guys started leaving their chairs and getting closer to her like a circling pack. “So how did you get in here? Doesn’t make any sense.”
“They’re going to let a girl do warlock spells?”
“I heard you and Harris got into it at the restaurant.”
“We didn’t get into it,” Harris said. “We just made a little bet.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I don’t think she can handle summoning a demon.”
“Ohhh.” “Definitely not.” “She’ll probably fall in love with the demon.” Someone shoved Alec. “Here’s a demon for you right here.”
Alec ignored the shove except for his eyes, which took a hard turn toward the shover. “Too late,” he said. “I have already been summoned.”
“Don’t make this about Alec,” Harris said. “He’s one of us. But this girl, on the other hand…needs to go to Morgana like a good little witch. I don’t think we should be bending the rules for her.”
I could see Charlotte’s shoulders shiver just a little. They were making her nervous. She was bullied in middle school, so I was afraid she knew this feeling. Charlotte had an inner strength that kept her steady through a lifetime of her dad’s anxiety, and that allowed her to cast a hell of an impressive fire spell—which she’d get much better at containing with a little practice. In fact, I’d bet part of their cruelty to her stemmed from jealousy. They knew she was going to be a force to reckon with. And witches didn’t play with fire.
But right now, she was just one girl thrown into a strange world, surrounded by unfriendly faces. The one family member who might have answered her questions had just died. Hints of future danger had already surfaced.
How was I just supposed to sit back and observe?
“She’s here to stay,” I said. “Like it or not. And I’ll be watching every moment. If any of you hurt Charlotte, I won’t hesitate to involve myself. You can snicker all you like. It won’t protect you from our magic. Or my jaws.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes,” I said. “I must say, the way you’re all jeering at her is so…revealing.”
“I don’t like the way you talk, familiar,” one of them said.
Harris scoffed. “No, the fox is right. Fighting with them is stupid. I maintain that Charlotte doesn’t belong here. But I will go through the proper channels.”
It was probably a good thing that Professor McGuinness returned just then, looking more composed. If I got into a fight with warlocks on my own initiative, the council would probably be having a word with me.
Chapter Fifteen
Charlotte
“I’m sorry. I was very shocked by that news. The truth is, Samuel Caruthers was one of the greats. In the history of magic, he was the only white necromancer we’ve seen in a century. To be a white necromancer is to maintain an impossible balance. To deal with the dead, without succumbing to the temptations of darker forces…well, that is something special. But…I hear you are related, Miss Byrne?”
“I never met him,” I said. “I’ve never met any of the Caruthers. I really wish I had, but…I don’t even remember my mom. But Master Blair suggested that maybe Samuel wanted his power to go to me when he died.”
“Yes…I have reviewed your file,” Professor McGuinness said. “The strange thing is, I remember when you came here to take your test. Or—a boy who looked just like you, anyway. You were recommended by Samuel…”
“Are we so sure that Samuel Caruthers was a white necromancer?” Harris asked.
“What?” Professor McGuinness looked offended. “You, of all people, should know his reputation!”
“I know he’s a famous student of Merlin,” Harris said. “But he was considered at risk of turning dark. He was drawn to necromancy. And why is no one asking why Charlotte is a girl, recommended to this school by Samuel, who then immediately dies?”
“We are looking into it,” Professor McGuinness said. “We’re not idiots. But in the meantime, Master Blair wants to keep Charlotte under our protection. We could send her to the witches, but then her power would be in their hands.”
“That’s fine by me,” Harris said. “She’s a witch. She already proved that she can’t handle our magic. She burned down a building!”
“It was just one room,” I said.
“Enough,” Alec said, looking at me. “You’ve made your point, Harris.”
Okay, so we had thoroughly established that I didn’t belong here. Finally, we started moving on.
“In honor of Samuel, today’s lesson will be about a spell that he always found particularly fascinating,” Professor McGuinness said. “And, as it so happens, we might even have evidence of his fascination with us today in the form of Charlotte. It has to do with magical trades. When it comes to dealing with darker forces, especially demons or the undead, you will undoubtedly encounter a trade. This occurs when a demon asks you to give them something in exchange for a favor. The first rule of trades is like the first rule of drugs: Just. Say. No.” He wrote that on the board and underlined it.
One boy raised his hand in a very measured sort of way.
“Yes, Irving?”
“I don’t think that’s the rule anymore. I just read an article in Four Elements magazine about how warlocks in Europe are using ecstasy—“
“Thank you, Irving, but you know what I’m trying to get at. Please remember, your professors are old. We can’t keep up. Someday you’ll be old too and you won’t be able to keep up either. And I hope you’re not taking ecstasy. That is not allowed on campus, no matter what they’re doing in Europe. Anyway, my point: do not make a trade with a demon or a dead spirit. Not unless you are experienced enough to teach this class and even then, maybe not.”
“What if an ethereal spirit wants to make a trade?” Irving asked. I guess he was the facts and questions kid.
“They rarely do. Because trades are tricks. Remember that. Trades…are…tricks.” He waved a pencil like a baton.
I raised my hand. “Why was Samuel so interested in trades, then?”
“Well…Samuel was very skilled, of course. But he also just died, so…I would take his life course as a warning.”
“What sort of trades
?” Alec asked.
“Demons and the dead aren’t just going to ask for some extra garden mulch or old children’s books,” Professor McGuinness said, indicating to me that warlocks totally had freecycle groups. “They will ask for things that are supremely precious to you, or they’ll ask for things that are crucially important to them.”
“Are all dead people dangerous?” I asked.
“All the ones that ask for things,” he said.
“What if the thing they’re offering you is worth it?” Alec asked.
“It’s not worth it,” the professor said, in a very honest voice that made Alec nod soberly.
He had us run through some potential scenarios, like a demon asking for your first child. The boy he called on suggested he just wouldn’t have any children. Professor McGuinness suggested several ways this could turn out to be a trick, from a child you didn’t know you had to an accidental pregnancy later on to a beloved pet that you refer to as “your child”.
“It sounds like something out of a fairy tale,” I said. “You have to be careful of how you use your words.”
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “Even with ethereal spirits, you need to be careful. They will have good intentions, but they don’t always take things the way you intend them. They expect you to keep bargains. Speak clearly and mindfully with all magical beings.”
I waited until after the class was over but lingered in my chair, pretending to look at my schedule and dig in my backpack until the guys all filed out—with a few more nasty or lusty looks.
“Charlotte, did you want to talk to me about something?” Prof. McGuinness asked, shutting the door behind them.
“Yes.” I shrugged. I didn’t really know who I could or should talk to in this place, but I felt like it definitely wasn’t Master Blair. “I was just curious. How does a warlock give their powers to someone else? Is that a type of trade?”
“You mean, why did Samuel give his powers to you? That’s not a trade, Charlotte. It’s a gift.”
“But why? And why would he have been killed right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a way to ask him, even after he’s dead?”
“You’ll have to keep attending class,” he said. “But I’ll say this. Summoning the dead isn’t something you just do casually. Even white necromancy is very draining on the caster. It will cause you pain and weakness. It might hurt him, too.”
Firian glanced at me nervously. “You’d better get to your next class.”
“Ahem. I need to know this stuff.” Sometimes Firian was a little too bossy.
Still, I was really glad he was there.
Chapter Sixteen
Charlotte
So I ate lunch with Firian. Then Magical History, where I was completely lost, as they were talking about stuff that happened in the 1600s and I had never heard of any of these events, like the “Savannah Pirate Raid” (in 1925! I wrote down “Jazz Pirates”) or some alliance between French warlocks in Quebec and Native American warlocks and the Good Witches of the Colonies. I couldn’t even remember who was with or against who. I perked up whenever Salem was mentioned because my brain went, I know what that is!
Otherwise it was a blur.
Then we had Enchantment and Illusion, where everyone was learning the finer points of making enchanted clothes appear on their bodies, and Theurgy, which I needed to be good at so I could show up Harris and his stupid demon summoning.
Since the year was just getting started, all the classes were mostly talk and overview, but I could tell it was going to take a lot of hard work and deep concentration. By the end of the day, I was utterly spent. There was so much to absorb in a magic class.
Luckily, I was good at those things. I was awesome at yoga. I mean, not to brag, but you know how people are usually like, oh, I need to do more yoga? Well, I really do it. Every day. For an hour. All alone, no classes or anything, just me and a very old yoga VCR tape. It used to be my mom’s.
I guess that might have something to do with my yoga discipline. Dad said that Mom used to do baby yoga with me and it was possible the yoga tape became some sort of surrogate for my mom. If I put it that way, it didn’t sound worth bragging about at all…
But if yoga was sort of like magical training, maybe that was why she did it with me. She bound my powers, but I wonder if some part of her actually wanted me to be a witch someday.
Thinking about Mom hurt. I always wondered why she left, and Dad’s explanations were vague. I probably should have been more upset at him for lying to me, but instead I just felt angry at her for abandoning him.
And me.
For dark magic? What a stupid reason. The more I thought about it, the more I felt insulted that they had even put me in the dorm for potential dark warlocks. I wasn’t interested.
I actually had trouble concentrating on yoga that night, even though Alec was out. Probably because I didn’t have my VCR tape. I knew every move by heart, obviously, but it was part of my ritual to hear the voice of the instructor say, “Be where you are, because you’re already there…”
The rest of the week passed without too much incident, as these things go. I went to class. I felt constantly confused and was assigned twenty tons of books to read to help me catch up. Alec was hot enough to leave me eternally flustered but he was a quiet sleeper. And also, quiet while he was awake, which is more than I could say for a lot of the other guys. They made sexual jokes about me in the dining hall, until Firian snapped, turned into a fox, and bit one of them on the arm.
I called Dad and didn’t cry. Well, I didn’t cry much.
Okay, I didn’t ugly cry. I just cried in a normal way.
I just felt very out of place, almost like I was attending school with aliens. They weren’t just boys, they were culturally in another world. They had completely different concerns than the kids at my high school. They were rude to me, but also very formal. They knew very little about pop culture. Some were devoted to the ‘old ways’, which seemed Wiccan. They had their own little rituals and rules. Others went to the campus chapel on Sunday. Montague told me most warlocks in St. Augustine were Catholic.
“Just think about the Vatican,” he said. “Doesn’t it seem kind of warlocky with all the mysteries and gold and rituals?”
The school also had a handful of Jewish and Hindu students, plus two brothers who followed the Nordic gods. It was all kept very private. This was very different from my high school where we had a lot of devout Evangelical kids who were always battling with Kayleigh Patterson the loud atheist girl, plus a tight contingent of hippies who lived in the dome house community on one of the mountains. My high school was full of opinions, whereas Merlin College had this upper-crust boarding school feel where ‘opinions’ were not very polite, unless they were old-fashioned.
The warlocks were surprisingly multicultural, as a whole. Firian said that power had always been divided up differently in the magical world, and interracial marriage had never been taboo. But they were as classist as the cast of Downton Abbey; any naive hope in my mind that a utopian world was possible if people from all around the world joined hands was dashed by one week at Merlin College.
Over the weekend, where I was totally trapped there, the history teacher pulled me aside into his empty classroom and told me that he’d heard my familiar had bitten Guillame de Brigue, who I guess was somebody from the de Brigue witch family.
“De Brigue blah blah,” I snapped. “He told me I should wear skirts more often.”
The history teacher Professor Gruben, a white-haired man who always wore a hat outside but removed it when he entered a room, said, “Well, you are a young lady, so he’s probably right about that.”
“This is the uniform!”
“Oh.” He sniffed. “We can’t get you anything more feminine?”
“How old are you, anyway!?”
“One hundred and ten, my dear, not that it’s any of your business.”
There was no use arg
uing with him, that seemed obvious. One hundred and ten? I hadn’t even been able to get my Grandma to acknowledge that my short haircut in seventh grade was pretty adorable because she thought girls should have long hair.
Firian made a low growling sound. “I’m this close to taking you out of this school,” he said, in a voice that made the old man’s sagging eyes snap open.
“Young lady, you need to be careful about this familiar you have staying so close to your side. I will not have a repeat of the scandals that have plagued other communities. If familiars should have sexual relations with the witches, we have trouble,” he said, waving a bony finger at me.
My cheeks must have caught fire. Especially the way he said it, which conjured up an image of Firian…doing things to me. “We’re not.” I laughed nervously. “We play computer games together. We’re nerds. Friends. Friends without any benefits ever.”
“Friends is almost as bad!”
“Sir, she understands,” Firian said. He gave me a hard look. He wanted me to just take the advice and go, I think. I nodded nervously and left the room. We stepped outside into the sun, a brisk mountain wind making me quickly button my sweater.
“I’ve heard the story of your grandmother’s familiar,” he said. “When your grandmother was stricken from the record, her familiar married a human. She became a human, basically. Sometimes, when witches leave the community, their familiars join them, and then all the other familiars stop saying their name. But even that’s not as bad as when a familiar and a witch…”
“I get the picture, Firian. One hundred percent. And it’s fine. We’re not like that anyway. We had a little thing going on in the game, but it was really tame.”
“Definitely.” He cast me a furtive look. “I shouldn’t have even done that. Just needed to get to know you. That was my job.”
“Right. My fox stalker.”
He had a weird look on his face.
I wondered if that was really all. If he really had no feelings for me. Because, on my end…
A Witch Among Warlocks- The Complete Series Box Set Page 9