Tarot Academy 1: Spells of Iron and Bone

by Sarah Piper

  “What happened?” Kirin demands, arms crossed over his chest.

  “I had a vision,” Baz says. “Well, had isn’t the right word. More like, I was sucked into it.”

  “What did you see?” Devane asks. His voice is tight with concern, though I can’t tell whether it’s for me, for Baz, or for himself.

  “It was Stevie, but not,” Baz says. “I felt her calling to me. I followed the pull down a path through the forest. It was night time, and the moon was just a sliver. The stars were so bright, and I was staring up at them for a long time. By the time I looked down again, there was a lake, and Stevie was there. Totally naked in the shallow part of the water.” Baz takes a breath, shakes his head as if he still can’t believe what he saw. “She was kneeling on a rock, her other foot in the water. She had two urns, and she poured water from both of them—one onto the rocks, the other back into the lake.”

  “Was there a circle of standing stones behind her?” Devane asks.

  Baz nods, and for a moment, no one speaks.

  It sounds eerily similar to the vision Dr. Devane told me about in his class—the one I supposedly pulled him into.

  “After she came to,” Baz continues, “she said some real weird shit. Seems she had a vision, too.”

  He tells them about my dream with Cernunnos.

  “Holy shit,” Ani whispers.

  Kirin shoves back his hood, revealing a shocked face. “How is this possible?”

  “I knew it,” Ani says, and now he’s grinning. “I didn’t have a vision, but I felt the connection from the first time I met her. I knew it!”

  What the fuck is going on?

  “I don’t buy it,” Kirin says. “She’s uninitiated, spent her entire life in isolation from magick… That kind of power wouldn’t just lie dormant all those years. No. No way.”

  “I’ve seen it too, Kirin.” Dr. Devane puts his hand on Kirin’s shoulder, as if to offer comfort. “The first day I met her. We had an intense moment in the prison—not physical, the way Baz describes—but a connection nevertheless. I saw the same vision at the lake. I tried to convince myself it was coincidence, but it happened again in my class yesterday.”

  “Dreamcasting,” Baz says.

  “Yes, that was my first thought,” Dr. Devane says. “But now I don’t believe it’s as simple as all that. How can it be? If what you’re telling me is accurate, then she’s seen our true forms, Baz. My wolf spirit. Your horned god.”

  True forms? Wolf spirit? Horned god?

  There was a wolf in that ocean vision I had in Devane’s class. And after my dream at the river, Baz told me Cernunnos was the horned god of Celtic myth.

  But what does that have to do with them?

  True forms? Are they saying Devane is a freaking wolf, and Baz is a god?

  Baz is pacing now, his energy anxious. “That means the things we’re seeing… The lake, and the standing stones… She’s giving us a glimpse of her true spirit as well.”

  So he’s a Celtic god, the good doctor’s a wolf, and I’m a lake? Okay, I may experiment with a lot of herbs in my tea blends, but even I’m not perpetually high enough to buy that.

  “No way,” Ani says, still smiling. “No fucking way. Guys, this is awesome.”

  “You say that about everything,” Baz says.

  Ani’s practically bouncing on his toes. Kirin looks like he’s about to throw up. Baz looks dazed, and—if I’m being honest—a little turned on. And Devane? He looks like he just figured out I’m the bringer of the Goddess-damned apocalypse.

  “Cass,” Baz says, and Devane just goes, “I know, Baz. I fucking know.”

  My heart is beating wildly—I don’t know whether it’s mine or the owl’s, or some strange interlocked spirit we both share.

  What do you know? I want to shout.

  As if he can read my thoughts, Devane sighs and says, “Starla Milan isn’t just the witch who can translate her mother’s prophecies. She’s the—”

  The owl takes flight, and the vision vanishes in an instant.

  I awaken in my bed with a start, bolting upright, my heart still hammering.

  On the pillow next to me, glowing in the moonlight filtering in through the window, is an owl feather.

  Thirty-Two

  STEVIE

  Armed with a giant travel mug of black tea blended with crushed vanilla bean, fresh mint leaves, and a dash of black pepper—yes girl, my tea game is on point—I head out the next morning for the library.

  After the crazy owl incident, I didn’t sleep at all, too afraid that if I closed my eyes, my feather would disappear and I’d have to accept it was all a dream.

  But when the sun finally rose, the feather was still there, soft and beautiful and as real as the pillow it rested upon.

  As for everything else that happened last night?

  My head is still spinning. Baz saved my life, and there was a moment there in the common room when I could’ve sworn he wanted to kiss me. Not just in that flirty, constantly-sexualizing-every-word kind of way I’ve come to expect from him, either. There’s some kind of connection between us, and every time I think of him, I can’t help but recall that strange dream in the meadow. The man with the beautiful tattoos, with the same color eyes as Baz. His sensual kisses, his moans, the way his every touch set my body on fire…

  Cernunnos…

  Goddess, my core aches just to think of it again. But those are dangerous thoughts—totally forbidden from this moment on. Because now I know the cold, hard truth: For whatever reason, four Academy mages—including the illustrious Dr. Devane—are hiding something from me.

  Something about me.

  It’s enough to set my blood boiling, and I’m this close to blowing the lid off the whole thing, demanding a full explanation, and refusing to do a single line of translation on the prophecies until I have my answers.

  But when Kirin opens the door to his office, his smile and energy wrapping me in a warm welcome, my anger turns into something much worse.

  Pain.

  Looking into his green-gold eyes—eyes whose mesmerizing beauty captured my heart months ago—I try unsuccessfully to keep the sting of betrayal from eating away at my heart.

  We’re supposed to be a team—Kirin said as much.

  So how come I feel like I’ve just signed a deal with the devil and missed most of the fine print?

  “Good morning,” he says brightly, stepping aside to welcome me in. “You ready to hit the books?”

  I’m ready to hit something, but I rein it in. Going ballistic isn’t going to bring me any closer to the truth—not to the ones in Mom’s prophecies or the ones hiding behind Kirin’s sexy smile.

  “How was the party?” he asks as we climb the stairs to the archives.

  “You didn’t hear?”

  The way Baz was talking about it in the cave last night, it was clear he and Ani had already told Kirin and Doc what happened at the river.

  “Hear what? I was in the archives until about three or four in the morning, totally secluded. Crashed in my office after that. In fact, I just woke up about ten minutes before you got here—hence the bedhead. Well, to be more accurate, office-chair-head.”

  “Nice.” I force a laugh. “Anyway, the party was okay. Nothing to write home about.”

  I watch for a reaction. A raised eyebrow, a twitch, but there’s nothing but fake morning pleasantries in his eyes.

  “Kirin,” I say, fighting to keep the irritation from my tone, “Last night… Did you guys go out? After the party, I mean?”

  Something finally flashes behind Kirin’s gaze, and his energy shifts. Suddenly it seems like an effort for him to hold that smile in place, and I know right then and there that his next breath is going to be a lie.

  “Me? No. Baz and Ani didn’t mention anything either. They’re probably still sleeping—they were pretty wrecked after the party.”

  “What about Dr. Devane?”

  “I’m not really up on his social calendar, but I’m pret
ty sure he doesn’t have one. Why are you asking about this?”

  My heart sinks into my stomach.

  It’s one thing to tell myself I don’t know them all that well, and I’m misunderstanding things. Or that there are so many people on campus, maybe I’m getting their energies mixed up.

  But Kirin is flat-out lying to me, and I don’t know why.

  I do know that what I saw last night wasn’t a dream. Not because I have so much faith in my visions, or even because of the feather.

  But because Kirin, graduate mage and Keeper of the Grave, whatever the hell that means, just made a stupidly human mistake.

  Kirin told me he hadn’t heard anything about the party last night—that he’d been sequestered in the library.

  Yet now he’s telling me the guys were pretty wrecked after.

  How many lies and half-truths is that now? I’m quickly losing count. The spying at Kettle Black. The dodginess when I asked about the Book of Shadow and Mists. The party.

  I hate lies. Hate liars. And this Academy is filled with both.

  It’s all I can do not to lay it out right here, to demand he tell me about the Keepers of the Grave and the dark book and those dreamcasting visions.

  Demand he explain what Dr. Devane meant when he said that I’m not just the witch who can translate her mother’s prophecies.

  But I can’t figure out how to do it without telling him about my crazy owl trip across the sky, and I definitely don’t want to share that right now.

  For now, my best course of action is to stick with the plan. Work on Mom’s research, make the most of my classes, try to get a handle on my magick, avoid the hell out of Carly and her merry band of psychotics, and most importantly?

  Stick to these conniving, secret-society scoundrels like a wart on a witch’s tit, hoping they fuck up and spill their secrets before they figure out all of mine.

  Inside the archives, Kirin retrieves the notebooks we started with yesterday, and also hands me a thick manila folder full of computer printouts. News articles, I see when I peek inside.

  “I wanted you to take a look at all this, see what you make of it. It’s part of what we’ve been tracking—what we believe are the wrongful arrests of witches and mages since magick first became public knowledge. It doesn’t account for all of them, of course—some locales don’t even bother reporting when a magickal citizen is taken into custody. But it gives you some perspective on why our work here is so important.”

  I take a deep breath and page through the printouts, skimming the headlines. Explosions, fires, murders. Dastardly plots to steal, maim, torture. Sensationalist commentary on the dangers of unregulated witchcraft. Calls for more restrictions. More executions.

  The articles date back decades, starting right around the time magick was publicly revealed. There seems to be a slowdown in the early 1990s, but then it spikes again—right around the time my parents left the Academy.

  The last batch of articles are all about me—the same articles Devane showed me in prison.

  I snap the folder shut, not wanting to see one more gruesome headline.

  “So in all these so-called crimes and attacks,” I say, the pieces sliding into place in my mind, “the victims themselves are witches and mages—just like the accused parties. Witch-owned businesses are being destroyed. Mage family members killed. The homes of witches torched, supposedly by their own hands. You’d think that if whoever was behind the attacks wanted to freak out the public, get more restrictions put on us, they’d go after non-magickal humans.”

  “That’s the crazy part,” Kirin says. “It’s almost ridiculous. Why would witches destroy their own businesses? And hurt their own friends and families? It just seems so… so random.”

  “That’s just it,” I tell him, making the connection. “The attacks are being staged to look random.”

  “But why? What’s the endgame here? If they wanted to thin out the magickal population, there are probably more effective ways.”

  “Throughout history—even before people knew about real magick—the number one tactic used to isolate witches was dehumanization. It happened during the Salem witch trials, and in Europe, and long before that, too. And the fastest way to dehumanize us is to make sure everyone else fears us.”

  “Exactly. So why not attack human-owned businesses and keep fanning those flames?”

  “Because it’s more effective this way,” I say. “The message our enemies want to send is that magick is so powerful, so corruptible, that even witches and mages themselves can’t be trusted to control it. That we can just erupt at any time, causing chaos and death without warning. They want everyone to believe that we’re so unbalanced, we can turn on our own kind in a heartbeat. Turn on our own families.”

  Kirin nods, his brow furrowed as he follows this to its logical conclusion. “And if we can do this to our own kind, imagine what we might do to them?”

  “Brilliant strategy, really.” I rub my thumb over the skin on my inside wrist, the slightly raised edges of the pentacle tattoo. “And they know exactly where to find us. How to target us.”

  The registration is part of a national database. It’s supposed to be confidential, accessible only at the highest levels of law enforcement, but everyone knows how that goes.

  “Something tells me it’s not just a bunch of human fanatics working with a few crooked magick-users to stoke the flames,” Kirin says. “There are witches and mages working on this from the inside. Possibly at the highest levels of the magickal community.”

  “You said you wanted to give me perspective?” I ask. “Consider it gotten.”

  Shoving aside the folder, I grab one of Mom’s notebooks from the stack, opening it to a random page. Just like yesterday, new passages appear at my touch.

  “It’s still happening,” I confirm. “Same as yesterday.”

  Kirin’s eyes light up behind his glasses, and I read the latest verse to appear:

  Hexed and cursed, bruised and broken

  What comes first, the dark words spoken

  The veil is torn, the spells diminished

  Mage firstborn, the final finish.

  “Wow,” he says, his eyes filling with the same excitement I saw yesterday. He taps on the table, glancing around the archive lab. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You transcribe the new phrases you’re seeing, I’ll compare them with the original texts detailing all the Tarot card placements, and we’ll see what kind of sense we can make of it.”

  “Sounds good,” I say, and just like that, we snap into work mode, both of us diving headfirst into our tasks.

  It’s painstaking work. My mother’s passages don’t always appear clearly, and sometimes the words rearrange themselves, scrambling into nonsense before I can even finish transcribing them. I end up having to do a lot of re-work, and even after two hours, I only manage to transcribe a few pages.

  Kirin’s got the original texts on a laptop, doing his best to match up my notes and make sense of it all, but I’m not sure he’s making much progress either.

  “You holding up okay?” he asks when he catches me watching him.

  I close Mom’s notebook and set down my pen. “I think I’ve hit my wall.”

  “You did great, Stevie. I know it’s slow going, but we’ll get there. I can feel it.” He smiles that go-team smile again. It makes my heart hurt.

  We lock eyes, neither of us speaking for several long, uncomfortable seconds.

  “Kirin,” I begin, finally breaking the silence, “what do you know about my mother? About her time at the Academy?”

  Kirin removes his glasses and rubs his eyes, letting out a long, slow breath.

  This time, when I feel the pulse of his energy, I know he’s going to tell me the truth.

  “According to Headmistress Trello,” he says, “your parents were among the most powerful magickal students the Academy has ever seen. First as undergrads, and then as graduate students. Your father was studying potions—he was earth-blessed. Your mo
ther had three affinities—all but fire. Her gift, as you know, was prophecy.

  “But as the years went on, they became more and more isolated, your mother spending almost all of her time in the library, poring over old tomes, drawing cards, writing everything in these notebooks. I don’t know when things went bad, or how everything unraveled after that. All I know is that she and Anna had a major falling out that essentially divided the staff and graduate body into two camps—those that supported your parents and wanted to know more about the things your mother’s prophecies foretold, and those that… Well, to be blunt—those that thought she’d gone mad.

  “She was pregnant with you by that time, and your father finally convinced her to leave—that the stress of staying would do irreparable damage to her and to you.”

  A long, heavy sigh escapes my lips. It’s more than anyone else has ever told me, but still not anywhere close to enough. Not anywhere close to the full truth.

  “I understand why Trello wants me here,” I say. “Witches being targeted like this, the attacks still happening—it affects us all, and my mother knew it would. But I can’t help but sense there’s a lot more to the story about my parents than anyone is telling me. Professor Phaines seems kind of above the gossip, but Trello's definitely keeping secrets—you should’ve seen her clam up when I met her the other day. She tried to act sympathetic, but it’s so obvious she’s just protecting herself. Dr. Devane is… Well, I’m still trying to figure him out. And you’re…”

  I trail off, not sure where to go with that.

  “I’m what, Stevie?”

  “I don’t know,” I say softly, lowering my eyes. “That’s kind of my point. For all the time we saw each other at Kettle Black, I really know nothing about you, Kirin Weber.”

  “Not true. I was there every day for nearly three months. That has to count for something.”

  “But it was just a couple of hours a day. And of that, I spent maybe fifteen minutes at your table. Add all that up, and we’ve probably spent less than a day or two together.”