He shuddered as he took in a sharp breath, breaking it into three small gasps, and suppressed another shudder as the chill of the morning air started to yield to the summer sun. He forced his eyes away from the swaying treetops and turned back to the small wooden door leading back into the clock tower. He fished Dean Walter’s note out of his coat pocket again and scanned it for the hundredth time, looking for some hidden message, before giving up.
Meet me where I caught you rascals smoking the first time. Sunrise, this Sunday.
The Wardens found Kate Hart.
—Dean W
He turned back to the old oaks and breathed in, trying to calm his heart with deep breaths of forest air, but the ache in his chest would not abate.
Unoiled hinges creaked as the door swung open and slammed against the wall as the wind caught it. Dean Walters half stumbled out of the narrow stairwell as he hunched to get through the small door. His waxed, polished Oxfords clacked on the slate shingles as he steadied his footing on the gently sloping tower roof. He wore a simple grey suit, a white shirt with a red tie, and his hair, painted a solid black, stood at odds with the signs of age on his clean-shaven face. He had the kind yet formal smile that he always wore, and turned to offer his hand to a young woman who had followed him up the stairs as they stepped out onto the cramped rooftop. She thanked the dean as she steadied herself on the rooftop and brushed the blonde hair from her face as the wind whipped it up. She wore a lapis-blue uniform suit, with the college’s golden Pegasus on both lapels, and shivered in the morning chill. She had tried to look presentable, but her neat, well-ironed uniform contrasted with her pale face and the deep shades under her eyes.
“Mr. Trevelyan,” the young woman said with a tired smile.
He recognised the woman as young Anna Hart, and resolved to suppress his own troubles for a moment to focus on her.
“Hello,” he answered as calmly as he could manage, “you must be young Anna.” He stopped and tried to think of anything at all he could say. As she stared back at him, he recognised the same fresh wound in her heart, the same pain written on her face as his own. “I’m so sorry, Anna. We”—he paused again to steady his voice—“my wife and I were both very fond of your sister. She would have been a brilliant Magistra.”
Anna nodded and took in a deep breath as she looked down to her feet.
“Ah,” she started, “Kate always loved working with Magistra Trish—”
“That’s Magister Trevelyan, Anna,” Dean Walters interrupted by her side.
She paused and caught herself, her face falling. “Oh, I’m sorry, Magister Trevelyan.”
John smiled and shook his head. She was in mourning, and Dean Walters was standing on the bloody formalities. He suppressed a scoff. “If you called her Magistra Trish, then she’s Magistra Trish to me. I don’t remember any formalities between her and Kate.”
Anna’s face rose a touch, and John’s heart eased at the first sign of a genuine smile in her tired eyes.
“Oh, no,” he continued, “quite the opposite. Kate was more of a friend than a student to Trish. They were always around the house working on some project or another.”
Anna nodded, smiled wider, and pulled something from her jacket’s inner pocket that sobered the mood in an instant. It was wrapped in white silk, but he could make out the rough outline of a blood vial. His heart sank. Anna stepped past Dean Walters, clutching the silk bundle with care in both hands as she found her footing on the sloped roof and made it the five or six steps over to him. He held out his hand to steady her, but she wouldn’t release the bundle and came to lean next to him against the wall lining the tower’s edge.
“My dad,” she said in a dull, rehearsed tone, “wants you to take Anna’s blood vial today. He needs to know for certain that the remains they’ve found are his daughter’s, and her blood vial is the only way you can be sure. He also said if Kate’s gone, you don’t have any reason to help us now, and he would like to thank you for all you’ve done to support us.”
Money? She held her sister’s blood vial in her hands, and her dad was worried about money? John sighed and had to stop himself from giving Anna a hug.
“Don’t be daft,” he said. “If I even think about not helping you, Trish would kill me.”
Anna looked up confused. “But—”
“Oh, don’t be fooled.” John looked down at Anna and plastered on the warmest smile he could. “My dad used to say that, alive or dead, a Trevelyan must never stop fearing his wife.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. “And he’s right. Besides, Trish and I paid your tuition in full when we paid for Kate’s. She loved you very much.” John paused to let Anna steady herself as her knee buckled for a moment. “And,” he continued, “there’s an internship waiting for you, when you’re ready, at The Grove, if you’re still a Botanist, or anywhere else you’d like.”
For the first time, Anna’s exterior started to fray, and tears started to form at the corners of her eyes.
“Kate wasn’t only her first student. She was family to us. My Lizzie called her Auntie Kate, and one of her favourite things to do was go to the soft-play centre with her. Please tell your father that. We loved Kate. You’re family to us.” He took his hand from her shoulder and gave her a few moments to recover. Dean Walters stared on from the door, his face still calm and professional, and indicated the vial.
John put his hand out, and Anna put the silk wrapped vial in his hand and nodded. Its warmth immediately shot up his arm; he shuddered as Kate Hart’s life essence filled his mind. She was so warm, so kind; she didn’t deserve to—
“Alright,” John said, steadying himself. “I’ve got the image of her.” He put the vial back into Anna’s hands and turned to Dean Walters. “You’ll lend her use of the college apparture? She should take the blood vial home where it belongs.”
Dean Walters paused for a moment but nodded. It was a waste of power to teleport one student home and back again, but if anything happened to that blood vial, filled with Kate’s essence at birth, her parents would lose the only link left to her.
“Alright, Anna. Thank you,” Dean Walters said. “Run along to the sheriff’s office, and she’ll start the apparture for you.”
Anna nodded, turned to give John one last smile, and walked back to the tower, where she stopped, said, “Thank you,” and ducked through the door. As she descended out of sight, he was filled with the inescapable thought that she and her family didn’t deserve this. No one did.
For the hundredth time that day, he had to fight down the urge to abandon every law he knew and chase down vengeance himself, Wardens and prison be damned. The only thing that stopped him was the thought of Lizzie growing up with a bunch of hags as he spent his life locked in a prison.
He had hardly finished the thought as his mother-in-law, Chief Warden Agatha, swooped down onto the tower, hopped off her broom like a woman a third her age and sauntered over to him, her sardonic smile barely veiled. She wore long flowing purple and rose robes, had her hair pinned up in an oval swirl, and enough brightly coloured makeup plastered on her wrinkles to paint a dozen regular faces. His stomach lurched.
“I tried to refuse this,” she said in her elegant tone, her accent closer to an Oxford-trained witch than to the Mississippi river hag she was. She hid it so well. “But Mr. Hart would only give a sample of his daughter’s umbilical blood to you. I trust you have a picture of her essence, now?”
John glanced over to Dean Walters, who shrugged and gestured to the emblem of the Wardens, a white willow tree symbolising the Star Mother, painted on Agatha’s broomstick. He turned away and took a moment to study the treetops again, watching the leaves as they swayed back and forth in the wind as he thought back to the phantom threat he’d felt in those trees. He wanted to leave, but couldn’t. Besides, this fear was folly.
“Why did her parents refuse to come themselves?” John asked.
“They didn’t,” Agatha answered. “I advised them not to. There, ah,” she paused
and stared up at the sky, holding her chin with an extended index finger, her nails painted a bright red. “There isn’t much of her to identify. I thought it best to spare them that. I didn’t know they’d ask for you.”
John sighed hard, stretched out the ache in his neck and shoulders, and held out his arm, gesturing for Agatha to lead the way. She curled her lips into the barest smile, swirled her dress as she swung her leg over the broomstick, and led the way out over the trees.
John hesitated for a moment. Surely the distance would be too great by feather or broomstick, but she seemed sure of the direction. He shrugged, pulled a small dove feather from his inner pocket, and took up his wand, which hung by his side from a leather thong. He consumed the feather into his wand and floated out over the tower wall. Dean Walters joined him a moment later, and the three of them rode in silence over the college and towards the edge of the surrounding forest.
Again, John failed to keep the gravity of what he was here to do from his mind, and when he saw where Agatha was leading, he lost concentration and nearly fell out of the air. There were specks of blood at the treeline.
“What in Nafarin’s name is that?” John asked, unable to keep the shock from his voice.
Almost as he finished the sentence, a speck of red—barely the size of a fingernail—rang out at his mind, its pattern echoing in Kate Hart’s essence. It was her blood.
“There’s more splatter like it for twenty-five miles coming from the southwest,” Agatha said, her tone level and calm.
This made no sense at all. Why would Kate have been corporeal at the time of death? There should be no evidence of her in the physical world at all. No witch, however young, would die without trying to escape into an ether wind.
They were at the outer edge of the forest, looking down at a clearing through which a deep stream trickled softly. Some unattuned were already in the distance, setting up fishing lines and unpacking what seemed to be a small camp, placing crates of beer into an ice cooler at six in the morning. John reinforced the wards keeping him hidden and turned back to Kate’s blood splattered onto an oak leaf at the edge of college grounds. What was she doing here?
“We’re investigating why her blood is here, in corporeal form,” Agatha said, “but we need you to confirm that—”
“It’s her,” John said, “that’s Kate Hart’s blood.” He turned to Agatha and Dean Walters, but neither had any answers for him. None of this made any sense.
“Alright,” Agatha said. She gestured to Dean Walters. “Get him back to the college.”
She paused and turned to him, and John sighed as he realised she was about to try to be sensitive again. It stood so far against her nature that the effort seemed farcical, as though she was trying to mock him rather than comfort him. To his relief, she turned away and closed her eyes.
“I’ll see you tonight, John,” she said as she turned, nodded to them both, and flew up and away.
JOHN HURRIED UP the stairs to his front doors, his shoes clacking on the marble as he climbed three steps at a time. He had promised Lizzie that he wouldn’t miss another school shuttle, and he intended to keep that promise. He tapped his wand against the lock, swung in the heavy oak double doors, and ran towards the aviary tower where Lizzie would be landing in a few moments on her school broom. Damn it, Trish, why’d you make me build the house so big?
He dashed through the family room, passed the kitchen, skirted around his workshops, and ran as fast as he could up the stone spiral steps to the aviary’s peak. Their pet griffon squawked and snapped her beak for food as he passed, but he wanted Lizzie to feed her. He felt guilty for not having been there to see her off, as he’d promised, but Dean Walter’s note took priority.
He swung the door open a few moments too late, and felt a pang of guilt as he saw Lizzie looking around the room for him, a stoic look on her face. He needn’t have worried. The moment they locked eyes, and for the first time since her mother’s passing, her face lit up. John couldn’t understand why there was this sudden shift in her, but her amber eyes shone, her heart-shaped face smiled in its entirety, and her gap-toothed grin filled him with warmth from head to toe. He hadn’t seen her like this in over a month. Not since Trisha was last home.
Her chestnut hair was tied in a ponytail as Trisha used to tie it, and she wore her pink polka-dot dress; the last dress Trisha had bought her. He had to remember to thank Claire, his secretary, for coming to his house so early to send his daughter off to school. He felt uncomfortable having to rely on so many other people to look after his daughter, but he couldn’t avoid being away this morning.
“Daddy!” she screamed. “You’re here! Can we go feed baby Daria?”
John had bought Daria as a freshly weaned cub to try and distract Lizzie from her mourning. It hadn’t worked, even though she had asked for a baby griffon for almost two years. Why the sudden interest?
Mrs. Murphy, her class witch, turned to check on the restraining spell keeping her broom steady as it floated above the aviary’s landing, and descended to the floor. She brushed her hand over Lizzie’s hair and gestured for her to go and bring a feed sack for the griffon. There was clearly something on her mind. She wore the black and gold robes of a school-witch, her blonde hair was tied in a bun, and everything from her warm eyes to her smile spoke to her profession, kind and nurturing.
He let her lead him to the side of the oval room and leaned in close to her as she gestured with a concerned look and shook her head. John looked back to her broom and had to look again as he saw it empty. There would normally be seven other girls there as Mrs. Murphy made her rounds, taking her charges home. Where were the other children?
“Mr. Trevelyan,” she said softly, “I’m so sorry to burden you with this, but it’s starting to be a problem.”
His heart skipped a beat. What? What was wrong?
“Lizzie keeps speaking of her mother.” Mrs. Murphy’s glance dropped to the ground, and she sighed as she shook her head again. “I’m so sorry for you both, but it’s not healthy to let her have her mother as an imaginary friend. I know she’s been happy again for the past two days, but these repeated mentions of seeing her mother through windows—”
“Wh—” John tried to say but found his voice wasn’t coming. Fire and bile rose from his gut and swamped his chest. He leaned on the aviary’s plastered stone wall to keep from falling backward. “What?”
Mrs. Murphy furrowed her brows and paused for a moment. She leaned in even closer. “Since yesterday, we’ve heard her speak to the other children about seeing her mother. It’s all in her imagination, we’re sure, but she’s talking about very little else.”
“Her mother’s dead, Mrs. Murphy.” His gut churned; he nearly heaved his half-eaten lunch out over Mrs. Murphy’s robes.
“It’s nothing like that, Mr. Trevelyan.” She clasped his shoulder and squeezed it, and despite himself, he felt a touch of calm. “Our schools are the safest in the world. There is no malice, no evil intent anywhere near her, I can promise you that. We’ve asked the Wardens to search the school in full. Only the Star Mother’s power exists there.”
He wanted to believe her, but a warning in his mind would not abate.
“Anyway,” Mrs. Murphy continued as she looked back at her broom. She smiled as Lizzie brought Daria’s feed sack over, struggling to haul the thing—it was almost half again as large as she was—with a determined look on her face. “I have to go, but please speak to her? She isn’t haunted, but we are very concerned.”
John shuddered for a moment but nodded. “Thank you,” he breathed out in a hushed tone. Mrs. Murphy turned back to her broom, but Lizzie placed the feed sack down and ran over to pull at her robes.
“Please, will you come, Mrs. Murphy?” Lizzie asked as she stared up at her teacher.
Mrs. Murphy smiled and sighed out.
“Alright,” she said, nodding her head. “But only for a moment. I have to get back to the school now, Lizzie.”
John thought t
hat he should apologise to the teacher, and stop Lizzie from taking any more of her time, but he stood there as he tried to absorb what he had heard.
He let Mrs. Murphy lead him down the spiral steps to Daria’s roost and swung in the steel grate door. He picked up Lizzie, let Mrs. Murphy walk in ahead of them, took one step in, and froze.
“Hi,” Trisha said, standing by the griffon’s head, stroking it. “John? John, why am I here?” Her voice brimmed with fear and confusion. “What’s going on?”
“Mummy!” Lizzie shouted. She struggled free and ran to the spirit.
Chapter Two
JOHN FOUGHT DOWN bile again, trying not to retch. He rubbed his temples to stop his head spinning and tried to focus on calming his short breaths as his wand, raised over his right shoulder, shackled the corporeal spirit to the sofa.
A fresh chill crawled up his arms and down his spine, and this time he nearly lost control of his binding spell as his stomach, no longer under his control, heaved up his lunch onto his living room carpet. Where in Nafarin’s warded ass is Agatha? He couldn’t hold on for much longer.
He threw three more bindings around the spirit, pinning it down harder onto the sofa, wiped the bile from his mouth and tried to stand, but found his legs wouldn’t acquiesce. He sighed, and despite himself, looked up.
Trish stared back at him, trembling, her lips locked in a firm line and her amber eyes awash in terror and confusion. John knew that the spirit had taken his wife’s form to throw him off and make it past his defenses, and it had nearly worked. He breathed a prayer of thanks to the Sky Mother that Mrs. Murphy had been there with him.
The school-witch stood firm, with her knees slightly bent and her right arm outstretched as she kept her ward in place. Trish had picked her well: she knew her work. The forward guards of her ward didn’t so much as flicker as she held them outstretched, the power emanating from her fingertips. Her left hand, held over her shoulder, hovered gingerly above Lizzie’s hair as she kept her asleep, bound to her back. School-witches didn’t hold much by way of power, but in protecting children, they were second to none.
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