Good Witches Don't Steal (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 4)
Page 31
Evanora Whitewillow and Aidan North would never, never leave me.
I swallowed back my speech, leaned forward, and wrapped my arms around Eva, squeezing her. Not saying anything.
“Don’t cry,” she murmured, patting my back. “We haven’t even gotten to Hell yet.”
I laughed, realized I was crying a little. When I leaned back, I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands. “We need to bring Callum with us.”
“Easy enough.” Eva turned toward our dorm, preparing to take flight. “We may need the twins to help us get him in the tent, but after that, we fold him up and go.”
“Fold him up?” I called after her, but she was already flying back to our dorm.
“Don’t worry,” Loki said, dropping to a seat beside me. “It’s much less gruesome than it sounds.”
Two days later, we left Shadow’s End at night.
Our first stop was the infirmary, where Callum still lay—soulless, asleep. Nurse Neverwink was asleep in her home above the infirmary, so I’d had to enshroud the three of us as we snuck in and over to Callum’s bed. Loki waited outside, sitting on a tree branch, keeping watch.
When the three of us stood around him, staring down at the man who weighed more than two of Eva, I’d lifted my eyes to her. “This can’t possibly work.”
She removed the tent from her backpack, a bundle of olive-green cloth like any other tent from my old life. When she crossed to the aisle and began setting it up, she said, “Oh ye of little faith.”
Aidan and I helped, pulling together the skeleton and clipping it all on. When we’d finished, Eva gestured. “Take a look.”
I knelt, pushed aside the flap, and found myself at the entryway to a much larger field medic’s tent. Inside, six cots were spread at intervals.
I leaned back out, pointing at the thing. “Don’t tell me mages didn’t steal this concept from pop culture.”
Eva leaned close. “Clementine, my dear, pop culture stole it from us.” She gestured at the tent. “I know it’s simple. But I plan to make it bigger, add some rooms, even a kitchenette—”
“It’s insane,” I said, rising. “You did all that in a year?”
Eva smiled. “More like eight months.”
So she had been working on this since the start of the school year. God bless Evanora Whitewillow.
Together, the three of us worked to lift Callum from the bed, and dragged-pushed him into the tent on the floor. God, he was heavy; how had I managed to drag him through the veil myself? Even three of us struggled.
When he was inside, Eva stood. “Good enough for now.”
I hesitated. “We should get him onto a bed in there, at least.”
When he was inside, Eva stood. “Good enough for now.”
I hesitated. “We should get him onto a bed in there, at least.”
They assented, helped me lift him onto one of the cots in the corner. His feet hung off the end, and Eva groaned. “Now I have to resize all my furniture plans,” she grumbled as she crawled back out.
When the other two had left me alone with Callum, I got on my knees beside his cot, took one of his hands in both of mine. I rubbed my thumb over his knuckles and found they were scarred—each and every one.
But he wasn’t here to tell me why, or how they’d become that way.
And I wanted to know. I wanted to know all those little stories.
“You saved me,” I said to him. “More than once, you saved me. Now it’s my turn to save you.”
I kissed his knuckles, and then I left him there on the cot.
When I was outside, Aidan began disassembling the tent. I watched queasily as Eva bunched it all up and handed it to me for safekeeping. Even if I had crafted one myself, pockets in the veil didn’t jibe with my basic instincts: big man doesn’t fit in tiny space.
“Don’t worry.” Eva patted my back, quelling my anxiety for once. “He’s fine in there.”
After the infirmary, we had one thing left to do.
Eva waited, still enshrouded in the clearing, as Aidan and I snuck together to the stables. Each of us took a horse: he chose Siren, and I, of course, chose Noir. It wasn’t a difficult heist: no one was around, or had been around the stables for days. Even the quartermistress had only shown up twice a day to care for the animals, but everything else was otherwise silent, still.
Classes had stopped when Umbra disappeared. Everything had stopped.
At least one good thing had come of all this: Professor Goodbarrel had become Interim Headmaster Goodbarrel. He somehow managed to smile at students when he passed them, tried to make the world feel as safe as we all knew it wasn’t.
Over the past two days, I’d prepared. Gathered my few belongings. Gotten Eva to heal my wounds, which she found bafflingly resistant to her magic. Helped Aidan figure out exactly what he wanted to say to Saoirse, whom he’d promised he’d come back to. Learned how to command the will-o-wisps.
As it turned out, the wisps would do exactly what I wished. I didn’t even have to say it; I only had to think it. If I wished for them to stay in my dorm while I snuck out, they hovered obediently near the ceiling. If they had a tether, I hadn’t yet figured out how long it was.
Aidan asked me many times over those two days how I’d gotten back to the academy from the vaults. How I’d parted the veil without a nearby point of power. He’d theorized that I might have been over a leyline, but I knew that wasn’t the case; no leylines crossed under the room where Callum had been imprisoned.
I only knew one thing: I couldn’t have done it before I’d assembled the Backbiter, and I could do it after. And I’d tried multiple times to part the veil with it over the past forty-eight hours, to no avail.
I was missing something.
Mostly, I tried not to think about Tamzin. About where she was, and how she was, and what she was feeling. I failed, of course. I thought about her in what felt like an endless stream, seeing her face, hearing her voice. Wondering if I would ever see her again.
When I brought Noir out of his stall, he jerked his head, eyes gleaming in the moonlight in the aisle. One foot stamped, and from Siren’s stall, Aidan said, “Can’t you keep him quiet?”
“Nope.” I began leading Noir down the aisle, toward the back paddock. There, I mounted up and turned to wait for him. “Better get used to it, North.”
When we arrived in the clearing, I came unenshrouded for a moment, clicking my tongue at Loki. He dropped to the ground and took a running leap to catch the end of my cloak, climbing his way up to my shoulder.
“See anyone?” I asked him.
“Nobody,” he said. “Well, maybe a fae.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Eva?”
He tsked. “Don’t insult me.”
Eva approached us. “You’re ready?”
Beside me, Aidan nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”
Noir stamped on the grass, and I patted his neck. “Time to go, then.” I started Noir forward, Aidan fell into step with Siren, and Eva took to the air above us
With a thought, the will-o-wisps appeared from my dorm and came rushing toward me. They could slip through any crack, I’d found. And if there were no cracks, they could pass through any wall. They could travel at incredible speeds—from the academy all the way to Edinburgh in minutes—and best of all, my magic came easier.
And I could enshroud them along with me.
As I was sending the enshroudment over all of us, someone stepped out from the shadows, stood with hands on hips, staring us down.
I sent the wisps over to provide some light, and they illuminated Liara’s severe face in blue.
Her eyes lifted. “You going to sic them on me again?”
“What are you doing out here?” I whisper-hissed, the wisps flying back to me.
She came closer, arms folding now. “You don’t really expect to leave without me.”
“And why’s that?”
“Do you even have any idea where to go first?” Her head tilted. “Be honest.”
“And you do?” Aidan said from atop Siren.
“I do, actually.” Her wings brought her up to a hover, and I glimpsed a satchel over her shoulder, her cloak waving in the breeze.
She had prepared for this, too.
Liara’s chin lowered as she stared at me. “There’s someone you need to meet, Clementine.”
END OF BOOK 4
BOOK 5: She's a bad, bad witch, and even Hell can't hold her. Clementine’s adventure as a fire witch concludes in the fifth and final novel in the Academy of Shadowed Magic series.
Good Witches Don’t Die is now available for preorder on Amazon.
FREE SHORT STORY: Liara Youngblood and Lucian the demon prince clash in the prequel story The Fae and the Demon.
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Afterword
Hello Reader—
Long ago, I learned the concept of writing what you know. And while it was taught to me as a kind of instruction—you should write what you know—it’s with this series I came to a realization:
It’s not an instruction. It’s a prophecy.
Because no matter who my characters are, or where on Earth I put them, I’m always circling (obsessively, endlessly) one concept: Safety. What it means to be safe. To trust. To be good.
Because what I knew early on in life was a lack of safety, a lack of trust in myself and others. It’s why I create moonstones. Enchanted bubbles. Enshroudments.
Maybe you know what I mean. It’s why certain books—movies—music speak to us, why we keep revisiting the same concepts throughout our lives.
They are what we know, and if you’ve struggled with feeling safe, with feeling trust, then maybe you’ve felt the deep and strangely comforting/discomforting dichotomy of experiencing what we know in other people’s art.
For those of you who have struggled—or are struggling—like Clementine: I see you. I see you.
As promised, here’s the soundtrack to Good Witches Don’t Steal: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6QaIf4JXeNWeOECzyIGJCB?si=626c4571e2504917.
Until next time—
Shavonne
About the Author
S.W. Clarke lives in Houston, Texas with her partner and two identical—unrelated—cats. (Yes, they judge her every day.) She writes to inhabit the lives of the smartest, bravest women her brain can conjure.
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