by Lucia Ashta
I wasn’t sure if Sadie had come to the room to shadow me, but it was likely, and I could use an ally with Professor Hate-on at my other side.
“Tell me all about it,” Sadie said, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Professor Hapblomb. She appeared to have identified her as my enemy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure I could disagree.
When the teacher led the way with Stacy in tow, Sadie and I followed, the room erupting into dozens of different conversations behind us, all at once.
14
We were nearing the end of February and not a day had gone by when I wasn’t grateful that I only had Basic Defense and Attack Spells on Tuesdays and Thursdays instead of Monday through Friday like the rest of my classes. Professor Hapblomb seemed to go out of her way to stare down her long, pointy nose at me whenever we crossed paths through the halls, which was often enough to make me wonder if she was going out of her way just to glare at me. Though she was only an inch or two taller than me, she maximized her height advantage with her rigid posture and lofty airs.
When she’d marched me into Sir Lancelot’s office and demanded he discipline me after the spell I’d performed had misfired in her class, the headmaster had apparently shocked her by suggesting that it was she—and not me—who was at fault for demanding I perform a spell I wasn’t yet qualified to carry out. He further suggested she shouldn’t expect students who’d never studied Latin before to pronounce the words of such spells with exactitude, and that it’d be safer all around if we kept to English for any future spells.
Professor Hapblomb had scoffed at the notion, but evidently her respect for the headmaster ran deep, because she let it go with little fuss—and instead directed the remainder of her frustration at me. But since Sir Lancelot had declared me innocent of all the charges she’d pressed against me, there was little she could do but glare. Luckily for her, it seemed to be one of her favorite activities. Unluckily for me, she seemed to have some kind of magical ability to track my whereabouts, and at a school like this one, it was entirely possible she’d actually spelled me in some way.
Despite the passing days, the mystery as to why she disliked me so particularly didn’t clarify itself. I couldn’t decide if I dreaded seeing her or Stacy more. Despite every ministration Melinda could come up with, and every spell and counterspell Nancy could think of, Stacy retained the verbal aptitude of a small dog. Apparently, magicians weren’t supposed to make up spells on the cuff, or vary actual spells, without taking precautions and preparing for ill outcomes. As I’d altered the spell quite by accident, no one, not even the experienced staff witch Nancy, could figure out what I’d done to cause the unfortunate result.
We’d gathered that since Stacy had caught my eye first after I’d finished enunciating the spell, she’d become the target of the spell, but without knowing what exactly I’d done to make her dog-like, the mages struggled to solve the problem, especially since the result had so little to do with the intended stunning the spell was supposed to deliver. Even though most of the ten mages the Magical Arts Academy had sent to help us while the Academy Spell malfunctioned worked on Stacy’s issue as often as they could, there’d been no progress.
“I want you to try again, lass,” Professor McGinty said, pulling me away from my thoughts with a start.
When I looked up at him, he grinned, knowing he’d caught me fully distracted. When he smiled like that, he seemed years younger.
“Try what again, Professor?” I asked, shooting a confused look at Jas and Wren, who sat on either side of me. Though Jas’ leg cast had finally come off this week, and Wren continued to improve, neither was fit for active class participation. They’d joined me in sitting on the sidelines of Intermediate Shifting for weeks. Three chairs had been brought in just for us.
Professor McGinty crouched in front of me, placing beefy forearms along bulging thigh muscles. I still had never seen him shift, though I had no doubt he was powerful, whatever his animal form was.
“I want you to try to shift, lass,” he said, his voice gentle despite the fierce look of determination brimming beneath his messy auburn hair and full beard.
“B-but…” I stared at him for a few beats before trying again in a hushed voice. “You know I lost my mountain lion, and you know how I lost her. I can’t shift.”
Wren fidgeted uncomfortably on the chair next to me, while Jas rearranged her injured leg, jutting out in front of her.
But McGinty was shaking his head. “I understand that’s what ya believe, lass, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case.”
Jas narrowed her eyes at him, looking more deranged than usual with the undereye circles that had been a permanent fixture on her face since her leg injury. “Did Professor Hapblomb put you up to this?”
“I don’t know what ya mean, lass. I’d never take part in spite, or at least not with a professor of her caliber.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but it wasn’t that difficult to deduce that he didn’t particularly like the uptight professor. It made me appreciate him all the more.
He pinned his attention back on me. “What I’m getting at, lass, is have ya tried to shift since Rage and Fury took ya?”
I shook my head, sadness rushing through me like an ocean wave. I’d thought I had better control of my grief by now, but no, apparently I didn’t. My face fell and I blinked heavy eyes at the instructor.
“What are you suggesting, Professor?” Wren asked, trying to sit up before wincing and resuming her slouched position against the hard-back chair. Poor Wren, she still moved like a centenarian. Her injuries had been as serious as Jas’, her recovery equally pained and slow.
“I’m simply suggesting,” he said, “that nothing should be taken for granted, especially not when we’re dealing with someone like Rina.”
I stared at him dumbly, my heart thudding jerkily in my chest just once.
“What do you mean?” Wren asked, when it became clear that I couldn’t.
“I mean, when Rina first discovered her mountain lion, it was unusual. She didn’t manifest her shifter powers at the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, like most of ya, and when she finally did shift, she skipped the blur, flicker, vibrate pattern entirely. And she didn’t snap, crackle, pop like the other shifters of lesser magic levels. She simply did it her own way.”
I was aware of every breath as it labored through me. I didn’t dare hope; I refused. The disappointment would break me entirely. Though I’d made great progress since losing my lion, I didn’t deceive myself into thinking I’d gotten over it. I’d simply learned to move on as best as I could, and to lock away my grief so it wouldn’t swamp me.
But Wren was hoping, I could tell. She reached over to grab my hand and squeezed it.
“But even if she did things her own way,” Jas said, “if a dark sorcerer transferred her shifter magic to another, it wouldn’t matter how she did things, her power would still be gone.” She hesitated, rubbing absently at her dangling nose ring. “Wouldn’t it?”
“Logically, yes,” McGinty said, flicking his gaze across the three of us while the rest of the class continued with their partnered shifting exercises. Dave was a full-on bobcat, not a single human part in sight. It was glorious.
McGinty’s stare settled on me. I cracked a half-hearted smile. “Are you suggesting I’m not logical?”
He smiled back. “Yes. What do you have to lose by trying?” he asked.
How about the careful resolve I’d built over the last couple of months? Or how about my determination to continue at a school for magical creatures when I no longer was one?
“Your mountain lion is definitely worth one more shot, isn’t she?” he persisted.
Twisting my fingers in my lap, I pinned my attention on them. When he didn’t give up and go away, I sighed heavily, and looked up again. “I can’t go through losing her again.” I brushed my fidgety fingers along the pleats of my skirt.
“Ya can’t lose ‘er again if she’s already go
ne. But by trying, you at least can be certain there’s no chance of recovering her.”
Jas elbowed me in the left ribs. “He has a point. You’ve got nothing now, so you’ve got nothing to lose anymore.”
Jas. I could always count on her to fail miserably at a pep talk.
McGinty stood and beckoned me from the security of my wooden chair to the center of the large gymnasium, onto the padded blue mats. “Come on, lass. You’ll be safe all the way.”
Jas and Wren blinked at him until he flushed, pink creeping onto the tops of his cheekbones, matching hues with his beard.
“I do feel very badly about what happened to the two of ya, lasses. So I guess I’ll just promise not ta leave your side, no matter what.”
In a school for magical creatures, where the improbable happened on a daily basis, I supposed that was the best I was going to get.
“Go on, Rina,” Wren said, smiling gently. She no longer hid her face behind the long sheets of her brown hair as often.
Despite the fact that my mind was arguing that I should keep my butt firmly parked in my chair, the rest of me moved before I could stop myself. Before I’d fully registered what I was doing, and what McGinty might expect of me, I stood on one of the mats off to the side of the large room. Even so, a flurry of whispers circled the rest of the class, and students—half of whom looked like humans, the other half like animals—flicked curious glances my way, some of them outright staring.
I huffed, blowing stray strands of hair from my face. I was so sick of being the center of attention; it was never for good reasons.
McGinty drew close. “Don’t worry about them. Pretend they aren’t there. This is between you and your shifter animal.”
I grimaced, then tried to turn it into a smile for his sake. I’d been working very hard to stop thinking of my lion as mine.
Glancing at Jas and Wren on the sidelines, and the empty chair between them, I pushed away the urge to cower from the challenge and go join them. Nodding feverishly, I worked to convince myself that this was worth doing, even if it was just to get McGinty off my back. After I proved that Jevan had funneled all of my shifter magic into Fury, he’d leave me alone. He’d join the rest of the staff in sending me pitying looks when they thought I wouldn’t notice.
“All right,” I announced. “I’ll try.”
McGinty’s brown eyes gleamed with pleasure. “That’s the way, lass. Gotta exhaust all possibilities before we accept defeat. You’re strong inside, I can tell.”
With that, he took a few steps back, giving me the floor—in other words, the smelly mat.
Right away, I closed my eyes to block out the curious stares of my classmates. I debated for a few moments whether I should just go through the motions. McGinty wouldn’t know the difference, and I wouldn’t have to feel the vast empty space inside me that my lion had once occupied. But no, that wouldn’t be fair to the professor who’d been duly compassionate and understanding of my circumstances. I’d mostly sat during the daily classes, watching all the other shifters go through his assigned exercises, while he allowed me room to recover from my losses.
Shit. I owed him an attempt at least.
Better to get on with it, then…
I didn’t waste time. I delved into the depths of my being, right for the place where I used to feel my lion. Even without her, I’d never forget where she used to rest, coiled and ready for me to call on her there at the end, when I’d finally grown to understand that she was always a part of me.
Until now.
My breath hitched and I had to force myself to keep going—though this was ridiculous. She was gone. Didn’t McGinty think I’d know it if any part of my lion had remained?
When I reached the spot where I used to feel her, I hesitated for a moment, but then continued on. There, she used to rest, deep inside me, as indelibly a part of my spirit as my personality.
Now that spot was empty, as vacant-feeling as an abandoned building coated in cobwebs and dust. Nothing else had filled the space, marking it forever as the place she’d occupied … and would no longer. Nothing remained of her to connect to. The feel of her lingered, but not enough for me to grab on to, nothing for me to feel into or project in my mind’s eye so that I could merge with the vision in my imagination.
The loss of my shifter magic and animal irrevocably confirmed, I hastened to retreat, tugging on my mind’s eye until it was firmly back in the gymnasium of Bundry Hall. Immediately, I popped open my eyes, eager to be done with this exercise and admit to my failure.
McGinty was staring at me. As was the rest of the class.
“She’s gone. There’s nothing left of my mountain lion.”
But the shifter professor merely arched both eyebrows at me.
So I continued. “I couldn’t shift. I have no shifter magic.”
His eyebrows crept even higher.
“I shouldn’t even be in this class anymore.” My shoulders slumped. I almost definitely shouldn’t be at the academy anymore. Maybe I only was because the Academy Spell was all upside down and sideways.
“Do ya really believe that, lass?” McGinty finally asked.
“I do.”
“Ah, well, then, I guess what you say is true.”
“Wait. What do you mean?” It was my turn to narrow my eyes at him.
He lowered his brows amid a twinkle of mischief that illuminated his brown eyes. “Oh, nothing. I just have the pesky feeling that you might surprise yourself.”
What the hell does that mean? When I looked to Jas and Wren for some explanation, they both were looking at me as strangely as our professor had.
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
Dave moved over to join Jas and Wren, and when I approached, the three of them were smiling.
“You just lit up like a damn Christmas tree,” Jas said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “And you’d better not be messing with me, Jas, because I swear, today is not the day for that. I’ve been through enough without your shit—”
“She’s not messing with you,” Wren interjected. “You didn’t exactly light up like a Christmas tree, but something definitely happened.”
“What? What happened?”
“I have no idea,” Dave said. “But you’ve definitely got magic, that’s for damn sure. A yellowish light pulsed in the center of your chest a couple of times before it went out.”
My mouth wobbled open, and when I finally got it to work properly again, that was the best explanation I’d get. Not even Professor McGinty knew what to make of my little display other than to say that it didn’t look like any kind of shifter magic he’d ever seen.
That’s because no matter what the light was, I still wasn’t a shifter. My mountain lion was gone.
15
I hadn’t finished deciding what the flashes of golden light might mean before I had bigger things to worry about. Despite the addition of the ten mages from the Magical Arts Academy and now a handful of Enforcers, the Academy Spell was wonkier than ever.
The beginning and end of classes, which had always been strict, had become necessarily lax. The school bell continued to ring only on occasion, and when it did it was invariably at the wrong time. Even our personal alarm clocks didn’t keep time properly. The professors gave up on taking attendance until halfway through their classes.
Regardless, if you were late to class, you missed out on class material, and now more than ever I didn’t want to miss a thing. The golden light hadn’t flashed within me again, but I knew it had to have meaning. Something strange was definitely happening to me. Half the time I felt like a menopausal woman experiencing hot flashes. The rest of the time I was uncustomarily twitchy, expecting something to happen—and I had no idea what.
I knew the exact moment Stacy, Tracy, and Swan entered the small auditorium in Irele Hall. Their stares pricked against my awareness, dragging my gaze toward theirs. Tracy and Swan were apparently trying to fry me to a crisp right where
I sat with the power of their hatred alone, but Stacy was worse. The usually animated redhead with a sneer always at the ready appeared despondent; even her bouncy curls fell flat, her lips pursed sadly together.
There’d been no solution to her barking problem, and I had less of an idea how to help her than the team of professors assigned to the task—the same ones assigned to solving the Academy Spell problem—who were entirely overwhelmed.
“Come on, students,” Marcy June called out from the head of the room, ready to get her Defensive Creature Magic class started. “Hurry it up before the door locks itself and some of you are stuck outside. Despite what the Academy Spell seems to think, we’ve got shit to do around here.”
As if the Academy Spell had registered the slight, the door to the Illumination Room slammed shut, separating a line of students who’d been heading inside. Dave peered through the glass on the other side; he was locked out.
Marcy June muttered curses under her breath. My skunk shifter friend in the seat to my left grinned as if Marcy June had just made her day with her mouthful of foul sailor talk. The professor stalked toward the door, wrenching on the handle with her shifter strength. When the door didn’t budge but the handle popped off, she threw her hands in the air and cursed some more until Jas stared at her with wide-eyed admiration.
She spun on the class. “How the hell am I expected to conduct classes like this? This is fucking outrageous!” Her nostrils flared while she paced angrily across the front of the room.
When she started taking deep breaths and straightened her shoulders, I knew she could teach classes in composure. She’d gone from furious to proper—or as close to it as the professor got—in less than thirty seconds.
Looking up at the half full classroom, she smiled tightly. “I’d appreciate it if you’d share what I teach you in class today with the others. We can’t afford to get behind in our lessons. If the Academy Spell is acting like this, then you can bet your grandma’s garter belt that something fishy is going on. No one’s safe with all this happening, no one.”