by S. W. Clarke
“What’s happened to your forehead?” Florian asked, reaching toward her hair. “You’re bloody. Come into the kitchen.”
“It’s nothing.” Nissa waved him off, even as she allowed him to lead her into the kitchen, where he sat her down on a chair. “A bramble must have cut me.”
“Why were you flying in the city?” Florian asked, already at the sink and wetting a dishtowel. I couldn’t help but admire his dedication to his wife. “Eva said something about ill intent at the market.”
Nissa glanced at Eva. “That’s right. I sensed someone—a ripple of magic. He followed us out of the market.”
A ripple of magic. So all guardians could sense them.
“Who?” Florian asked, turning and coming to kneel in front of Nissa with the towel. He dabbed at her forehead.
Now Nissa’s eyes found me. “I don’t know—I couldn’t get close enough to him. But I suspect I know who he was after.”
I stood as still as a statue. Even here in this protected home, I felt suddenly vulnerable. Exposed.
Nissa reached toward me as she had done at the market. “I’m afraid we can’t take you out into the city at night, Clementine.”
We went to sleep not long after Florian and Nissa arrived, and Eva and I both lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling as her parents’ voices rose from downstairs, where they had been in intense discussion for an hour.
I knew Eva wasn’t asleep; she kept moving around. And so did I.
And every time one of us shifted, Loki groaned from where he lay curled up at our feet.
Finally, I sighed. “I can’t sleep.”
“Me either,” Eva said.
My eyes drifted to the window over her bed. Outside, a blanket of stars gleamed. “Are your parents always so tight-lipped?”
“No,” Eva said. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell us more. They seemed…nervous.”
So it hadn’t just been my impression. Tonight’s events had made her parents—a pair of long-time guardians—nervous. That meant something.
I touched the pendant at my neck. “How could someone have been watching me? I’m hidden from the Shade.”
“Do you know how someone becomes evil, Clementine?” Eva asked.
“Their parents die, they shave their head, and they’ve got an alliterative name that screams villain?”
She paused. “Did you just make a Lex Luthor reference?”
I lifted my head. “You know about Superman?”
“Of course,” she huffed. “Gods, I’m a fae who grew up in Vienna.”
“Fair enough.”
“The way someone turns evil, Clem, isn’t all at once. You don’t stand in a halo of light in one moment and serve the darkness in the next. The change happens slowly, through a series of choices.”
I was getting a sense of where she was going with this.
“Lex Luthor didn’t become Lex Luthor all at once,” I said.
“That’s right. And I suspect whoever was watching you in the market tonight hasn’t made enough wrong choices to become one of the Shade’s denizens—yet. Or maybe they’re uncertain about their allegiances.”
My mind strayed back to the creatures that had abducted on that awful night. To the awful things I’d seen running and crawling across the Anacostia bridge. The girl with red eyes. “How do you end up as a denizen in the underworld, anyway?”
Eva’s head lifted. “How do you know it’s called the underworld?”
Apparently I wasn’t supposed to know that. “Uh, Milonakis talked about it in Rescue class.”
“No she didn’t. I took her class, and she doesn’t call it the underworld. Nobody does.”
I cleared my throat. “So what is it called, then?”
“The Shade’s realm, or Hell.”
I shrugged. “Well, how do you know it’s called the underworld?”
“My dad told me. It’s part of ancient lore, and my father’s a history buff. That term is hundreds of years old.” She paused. “But how would you know about it?” she pressed.
I couldn’t tell her about Raven Murkwood’s book. Aiden had given it to me under strict orders to share it with no one, and after he’d been the first—and, at that moment, only—one to stand up during my induction to House Spark, I felt I owed it to him.
I needed to keep my promise.
“Aiden told me,” I said instead. “During one of our history lessons.”
“Oh. Makes sense.” Then she rolled away, facing the wall as though recognizing my dishonesty. We could still hear her parents’ voices downstairs. “Well, we ought to sleep.”
“Sure,” I said. But even as Eva slept, I kept staring out the window long into the night, my hand over my pendant. Every nerve in my body was lit with nervous energy.
I wondered if this feeling was something my mother—one of the world’s last witches—had felt before she’d disappeared. I wondered if she’d been taken like I had that one night. She and my sister.
I wondered if I would ever know the answers to those questions.
And finally, I wondered if my life would ever be my own again. It seemed everyone expected things of me, and some people wanted things of me. And I had never understood how wonderful it was for neither of those things to be true, to simply exist along with the world, to be in it without standing under a microscope.
That was how I fell asleep every night thereafter in Vienna: with my hand on my pendant. I never realized when my eyes closed; they just did. And though Eva—and sometimes her mother or her father and her brother—took me out into the city during the day, and we went to museums and coffee houses and clothes shopping, we never let our guard down again. None of us.
Whoever had watched me that night at the market didn’t come back. Or if he did, he hid himself better.
And Nissa and Florian? They were kind and gentle and generous toward me, but they didn’t bring up what had happened that night. The most Nissa ever said was, “You’re the only witch left in this world, Clementine. Humans and some fae will always want something of you, for good or bad.”
And through it all, in little pockets of time when I was certain I was alone, I would sit in Eva’s bedroom and read Raven Murkwood’s book. This felt like the key to harnessing my magic, to being able to live in this new world without fear.
When I was a regular human, I’d learned how to defend myself from other regular humans. Now I needed different defenses. Better ones.
I needed fire.
On New Year’s night, we sat in their living room, all of us around the fireplace, and played a game similar to charades until the toadstool clock hit midnight. And then, everyone sitting and breathless, Florian clapped his hands on his thighs and said, “All right. Time for resolutions.”
“Resolutions?” I said.
“You know,” Eva said. “‘This year I’ll join a gym.’ That kind of thing.”
Oh, resolutions.
I hadn’t made New Year’s resolutions since I was twelve. Since I’d last had a real family.
Everyone in the Whitewillow family made their resolutions. Nissa would be kinder to the neighbors. Florian would take on more rescues of non-fae. Eva would pass the qualifiers to be a guardian. Even Oberon had a resolution: to learn to fly higher.
And me?
I drank a long sip of my cocoa and stared into the fire, at the licking flames. I knew what my resolution was, but it felt shameful—even scary—to say.
So instead, I turned back to the Whitewillow family. “I resolve to join a gym,” I said, and everyone laughed.
Only Loki stared at me from across the room without so much as a cat’s smile. He knew what was in my heart.
Chapter Thirty-Two
In the second week of January, Eva and Loki and I returned to the academy.
The day we passed through the veil, we stepped into the forest outside the academy and found a foot of snow had fallen. Actually, Loki plowed right through the veil and into it. And then his muffled cries came to me
from my feet, begging me to pick him up.
I did, and he crawled under my cloak. I’d put on the academy cloak and uniform just before we’d returned to the campus, and here it felt strangely warmer than the puffer jacket Nissa had gifted me back in Vienna. It was packed now into my satchel, which she had manipulated to hold far more than it seemed capable of, just like Eva’s backpack.
“Bet you’re grateful you wore those tall boots,” Eva said as we picked our way through the snow. We trailed our way through dozens of other footprints, likely all students making their way back.
“I’m grateful for weather forecasters and the internet,” I murmured, my mind only half on the conversation. Truth was, I was trying to figure out the feeling inside me.
Since I’d turned thirteen, I had never looked forward to school. I wasn’t a great student, and I relished my winter and summer breaks.
I had expected the same to be true of this break, too. But it hadn’t been.
Of course I’d loved Vienna. I liked Eva’s family, too; they’d treated me like a daughter. They were normal people—as much as guardians could be. I needed normal in my life.
All the same, when the academy came into view, I finally recognized the feeling in my gut. I’d had it since I’d woken that morning.
This was where I wanted to be.
This was the only place where I could become the witch I had always been. Was meant to be.
And here, I knew, I didn’t need the pendant. This was the only place in the world where I could take it off without them coming for me.
I wouldn’t call it home—not nearly—but I was glad to return to Shadow’s End Academy.
A snowball thumped me in the back.
I spun, only to spy a laughing fae disappearing up into the canopy. “Don’t burn me, fire witch,” he cried as he vanished from view.
I pointed a finger into the trees. “Don’t tempt the goddamn fire witch!”
Eva rubbed the snow off my back. “I swear, some fae were born from pigs.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. I’m leaning into it.”
“Leaning into what?”
“Fire witchery. If I’ve got a bad rap, that just makes me more intimidating in combat.”
A grin appeared. “Not to me.”
“You’re still my combat trainer this semester,” I reminded her.
“Am I?” she said as we weaved through the grounds toward our dorm. “Seems you’ve gotten much better.”
“Yeah, until I can fight you with real magic.”
She hesitated. “I’ll teach you until I think you’re ready.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask what she considered “ready.” Just as we were passing the headmistress’s office, one of the massive double doors opened. Out came Umbra herself, her staff clapping the frozen ground.
“Clementine,” she said, eyes fixing on me as though she’d expected to see me there. “Come in. We need to speak.”
I exchanged glances with Eva, then handed a sleepy Loki over to her. “See you at the dorm.”
When I followed Umbra into the enormous antechamber and the door closed behind us, my gaze lifted straight to the wisps by the ceiling.
There they hovered, high up and as animated as ever.
“Follow, please,” Umbra said as the steps slotted out before her, and she took them straight up to the landing. The stairs seemed to react to her presence, somehow.
I followed without a word. The last time I’d seen her she had used her magic to intimidate me, backing me against a wall; I didn’t exactly have much to say to her.
When we came into her office, it had changed.
I couldn’t exactly pinpoint how, but I sensed the drawings on the walls were different, or some had been replaced. I didn’t have time to inspect each one before she pointed at the seat across from her desk.
“Have I done something wrong?” I asked as I sat.
She took her seat in the headmistress’s chair. No tea and baked goods on offer this time. “Nissa and Florian told me what happened in Vienna.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Oh?”
Umbra sensed my standoffishness. She lowered her chin. “It isn’t safe for you out in the world, I’m afraid. Even with the moonstone.”
“And what does that mean? I can’t leave the academy?”
“Not can’t, but shouldn’t.”
“I’m nineteen years old. I’m an adult.”
One ancient eyebrow lifted. “And?”
“I have autonomy. I’m not under your thumb.”
“Certainly you do.” Umbra’s hands clasped on the desk. “And as I said, I haven’t forbidden you. But know that if you do leave, I will not be present to rescue you twice. And I will not ask the guardians to do so.”
“Who’s to say I’ll need rescuing?”
“I don’t suppose you fully understand what happened at the fae solstice market,” Umbra said, her eyes glazing.
“No, I don’t. Because Nissa and Florian wouldn’t talk about it.” Then, “And you aren’t going to tell me either, are you?”
Umbra sighed. “A meeting of guardians was called because of that incident, Clementine. Dark magic entered that market, and whoever possessed it had come seeking you. That was unprecedented.”
Now, finally, we were getting somewhere. “Unprecedented how?”
Her jaw hardened. “Never since the Shade walked the world has anyone been capable of penetrating fae magic. To enter the solstice market required immense power.”
My back left the seat. “Why didn’t this person of immense power make a move?”
“That,” Umbra said, “is a very good question.”
Silence fell between us. For the first time I noticed a stubby wooden clock on her desk, its second hand tocking away.
I understood now.
Maybe Aiden was right. Maybe Umbra was afraid.
She couldn’t ask the guardians to rescue me if I left the academy and got into trouble because it was too dangerous. Too lethal.
And whoever possessed this power wanted me.
When I told Eva and Aiden about what Umbra had said, they both stared at me over their dinners. Around us, the dining hall was loud with reunions and laughter.
“But that’s impossible,” Eva said again. “No one’s powerful enough to walk into a fae market like that.”
“Except another fae,” Aiden said.
“Already been ruled out,” I said with a forkful of mashed potatoes pointed at him. “The fae are too goody-goody to bear ill intent. Except for Liara.”
Aiden’s eyebrows lowered.
“Hey,” I said, “she couldn’t hear me. She’s not even in the dining hall.”
“That’s not it,” he said, half in distraction. “I just had a thought.”
I twirled my fork for him to speak. “Do tell.”
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”
“I don’t mind conclusions.” I glanced at Eva. “Do you?”
“This is a big conclusion,” Aiden said. “An unlikely one.”
“Just spit it out,” I said, finally eating my potatoes.
“There is one type of magic user who’s capable of penetrating a place like a fae market.”
“The Shade?” I offered.
“She’s stuck in Hell,” Aiden said. “For the past five hundred years. If she could escape and come to the surface, it would be all-out war.”
Now I lowered my fork. “And nobody bothered to tell me this? Not even my magical history instructor?” I stared pointedly at the guy in question.
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said, cheeks tinging red with agitation. “There’s a structure to our lessons.”
“Can you please just tell us who you think entered the fae market?” Eva said.
Aiden’s gaze shifted to her. “I’m not at all sure about this, but I’ve read demons have that power.”
My eyebrows lifted. “Aren’t demons just the Shade’s denizens?”
“No,” Ev
a and Aiden said at once.
“The Shade’s creatures are the reanimated souls she calls to do her bidding,” Aiden said. “Demons serve her, but they aren’t fully under her power. They choose to work with her.”
“You never see demons in the world anymore,” Eva said. “Not for hundreds of years. I heard they all followed the Shade to Hell.”
“So did I,” Aiden said. “That’s why I called it unlikely.”
I fixed Aiden with a steady eye. “Why do you think it’s a demon, then?”
“I read they’re able to perceive what most cannot,” he said. “They can see through all illusions, sense all types of magic. And they’re powerful enough to go largely undetected as demons except by the most perceptive mages.”
“Like your mom,” I said to Eva, whose cheeks immediately went pink.
“Right,” Aiden said, “in this unlikely scenario.”
Another thing occurred to me: if that was true, that explained how my follower had seen through my moonstone.
“So I’m being followed by a demon,” I said. “Well, this calls for another chocolate mousse.”
“It’s just a theory,” Aiden said. “In any case, the point is this: you need to be ready for the day you tap into your magic, Clem. The more prepared you are, the safer you’ll be.”
“And how do you propose I do that?”
“Study. Pay attention in class.” He gave me a particularly intense look. “Read the books I give you.”
He didn’t just mean any book.
He meant The Witching World; he was referencing it without clueing Eva in.
And if she caught on, she didn’t show it. Her eyes had drifted to Torsten, sitting with a group of Gaia students.
Someday I needed to play matchmaker with those two, because she was way too shy about approaching him. Or talking to him. Or even meeting eyes.
I set a hand to my chest. “Aiden, do you doubt my studiousness?”
He eyed me. “Did you read the chapters I gave you over winter recess?”
“Yes,” I said at once, my throat tightening.
He lowered his chin.
“No,” I said. “But it’s still technically winter recess.”
“It’s not.”