“I’m pretty sure Clarissa’s mother finished your legacy. You should feel some peace knowing your adoptive daughter carried on with your work, and now your soul will be able to rest. Lucky you.” Vega narrowed her eyes at me. “Come along, Clarissa.”
I wanted to punch Vega for being so shortsighted. She’d gotten what she wanted: information on the Fae Fertility Paradox and how to make Reds—how to make herself a Red. Now she wanted to leave.
Well, for once this wasn’t going to be the Vega show. I was going to get something out of this too.
Galswintha’s chest rattled as she spoke, something coming loose inside her. “Your mother would have helped me, bless her heart. She would have resurrected me from the dead, not temporarily like this, but given me a beating heart once again.”
“Been there. Done that. Not a good idea,” Vega said.
“We’ll help you. We can help each other, right? You can tell me how to bring you back to life, and then you can be my teacher.”
“Can we leave now? This is boring.” Vega shoved the book back into the shelf and selected a heftier tome. She eyed me with disapproval. I didn’t see why. She was the one who had wanted an undead boyfriend. Unless that had been an act. I couldn’t tell.
Galswintha smiled. Her teeth were black. I wondered if that was a side effect of the poison.
Her voice lowered to a hiss. “I will tell you the secret to eternal life, something I only shared with one other person, your mother.”
I leaned in closer to hear. “How?”
Her eyes were black holes in her shriveled eyelids, unreadable and mysterious. Her chin creeped an inch in Vega’s direction. I suspected she didn’t want Vega to hear.
“Um, Vega. . . . You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to. I can handle things from here.” I smiled hopefully.
“Sure you can.” Vega sauntered off, her book in hand. “Toodles, bitches.”
That had been surprisingly easy.
Vega’s heels clattered into the distance. She even left a sphere of light overhead. It was unlike her to perform magic out of the kindness of her heart for my benefit. Unless it wasn’t for my benefit, and that light provided a way for her to spy on us. Then again, Galswintha was supposed to be wise. She would have recognized a spell used for more than lighting a room, even in death, I suspected.
“How do I cure you?” I asked. “How can I bring you back to life for real?”
“It’s very simple.” She lifted her arm, the one still intact. “Take my hand and don’t let go.”
I hesitated. “Is this going to drain me?”
“I give you my word this will not steal your magic. You may cast a spell to bind me to my word, an unbreakable oath if you wish.”
I didn’t know how to do that kind of magic, but just the fact that she offered lent me some reassurance.
I took her hand, gently, afraid I might break her. It had taken quite a bit of tugging to wrench her other hand out of her wrist socket, but the skin felt so delicate, like old parchment that might crumble at any moment.
“Now, in order to live forever, I will say the magic words as I consume your beating heart.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Spell Work for the Idle Hands
I screamed.
I tried to pull away from Galswintha, but she circled her other arm around me, drawing me closer. She clamped onto my hand with the strength of a vise. Her gaping mouth neared my heart. I screamed and kicked at her. Instead of landing on mummified flesh, I got the chair. I tried to push her head away. My arm trembled with the effort.
Galswintha was far stronger than she looked. Curse Vega and her restorative spells!
Witchkin dealings with corpses trying to obtain immortality must have sparked the imagination of horror stories centuries ago, because every story I’d ever read about the dead eating the living fired in my brain. Images of vampires, zombies, ghouls, and mythological dead-person cannibalism flashed before my eyes.
As I struggled, my brain sifted through the paltry number of spells I excelled at: cleaning, sticking posters on the walls, a magic flashlight, and other things that wouldn’t help me at the moment. I had successfully called upon the hands from the Pit of Lost Souls once to save me from Vega, but I didn’t know if they would come to me anymore now that Jeb had renewed whatever wards that kept them contained.
“Hands!” I screamed. “Help me!” I tried to use magic to amplify my voice, to reach out to them, and draw them to me.
“Do you think the lost souls are going to help you?” Galswintha cackled. “I’m the one who put most of them there.”
I continued to scream anyway.
Galswintha muttered words in another language, probably her spell. Her raspy voice cut out when a black shape flew through the doorway and smashed into the side of the corpse’s head. Bones crackled and crunched within her neck. An explosion of apple-scented dust clouded around us and made me cough. Galswintha’s grip on me loosened, and I stumbled back.
I blinked the dust from my eyes and coughed up some corpse dust. Galswintha’s head hung from a sinewy stretch of skin. She fell back into her chair and slumped over the table.
Vega stood in the doorway, the heavy tome no longer in her hands. It lay on the floor next to my feet, the cover torn away from the binding and pages falling out.
I backed out of the cloud, waving dust from my face. “Good throw.”
“Not really. I was aiming for your head. Obviously I missed.” Vega picked up the book from the floor and used her wand to sew it back together. She shoved it into the empty place it had been in the shelf.
“You knew she was going to try to kill me, didn’t you?”
“Of course. A beating heart is the easiest way to bring the dead back to life. It’s why they want ours. Though, I wouldn’t call the life you give them worth living. The amount of magic that goes into skin rejuvenation alone makes it terribly impractical.” She lifted her nose up at the corpse.
I stared at Galswintha, unable to tear my eyes from her silvery hair sweeping against the floor. “How did you know she wasn’t going to ask me for your heart? How did you know she would kill me? I’m a Red affinity like her. I’m the daughter of her student and friend.”
Vega shrugged. “Had I been in her position and wanted to be brought back to life, it’s what I would have done.” Carefully she placed Galswintha’s head back onto her shoulders. She used her sparkly scarf to bind the head back in place, careful not to wrap up the corpse’s long hair into the layers. She ended the bandage by tying the end with a big bow.
I wasn’t sure why Vega didn’t use magic. Maybe she felt like it would be a waste. She strode around the table across from Galswintha. Like a true master directing her servant, she snapped her fingers at me. “Go behind her again. Touch Galswintha the Wise’s shoulders. I will have the last word on this matter.”
That sounded so Vega.
I did as she directed. Galswintha stuttered on the words of her spell before choking. She shifted to the right and left, as if trying to figure out what had happened and where she’d gone wrong.
Vega cackled. “For the record, I performed your spell without the dragon egg. I’ll let you know if it actually works.”
I was reeling for days over my night of necromancy with Vega. Galswintha the Wise had known my biological mother. She understood the secrets of the Fae Fertility Paradox. It was unfortunate she’d turned out to be evil.
Every time I tried to talk to Vega about what Galswintha had revealed to us, she shushed me.
“It isn’t safe to talk about this on school grounds,” she said.
But what had happened needed to be talked about.
Without me even knowing, Vega had turned herself into a Red affinity. She hadn’t needed to drain me to do it; she’d used Alouette Loraline’s spell—or a modified version of it.
I didn’t know if that meant I had the secret of creation that the Fae wanted.
Or it meant Vega did. If only I hadn’t been cooped up in a room with her where she could observe my every movement.
I felt like I was in a cage with a wolf. It was only a matter of time before she ate me.
I considered telling Josie about my fears, but I wondered what she would think of necromancy. Being a Red was already a hard-enough secret to keep. Josie was my best friend, but she was a blabbermouth.
I wondered what it would be like to be roommates with her and have to walk on eggshells around these secrets. Vega was wicked, but she already knew what I was.
If I told Elric I could make anyone into a Red affinity and that person could bear his heirs, that meant he wouldn’t need me or Imani. Having something the Fae wanted meant I could get him to help the school stay open. I could get Elric to drop his allegations against Thatch.
Finally I said to Vega in the privacy of our room, “I’m going to meet with Elric and make a deal with him.”
“No, you aren’t. Not yet.” She flipped through one of the books she’d “borrowed” from the vault under the library.
I crossed my arms. “You’re right. I can’t meet with him yet. Not until you come clean.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I want to know when you performed this spell. Was it that night on the roof? Elric helped you create the lightning?”
“Elric had nothing to do with it. I was the one who called the lightning. Not directly. I used your magic. I paired you with two Celestors who had minor lightning Elementia affinities. What was that freshman’s name? Melissa? Missy? I don’t recall. She isn’t advanced enough for my classes.”
Vega had paired me with Melissa and Imani. Did Vega think Imani was a Celestor with an ability for lightning? I hoped so for Imani’s sake.
Vega sighed despondently. “Then Josephine Kimura came along. She distracted you from chaperoning those students and distracted me from directing lightning at me. Something unusual happened with that Imani girl, and a vortex opened.”
But if the lightning had struck Vega, she would have died. I understood that now. Perhaps she did as well.
“I might still have recovered from Josephine’s interruption, but then there were the spiders. I still can’t figure out if she had done it intentionally, or someone used her to do their bidding for them. It was like someone knew what I was going to do—to steal that lightning that you and Imani gathered—and they wanted to use it to out you.”
To out me or Imani, but I couldn’t tell her that.
“Why do you think Josie had anything to do with the spiders?”
Vega eyed me. “You’ve seen how she is with arachnids. It’s disgusting. She has an entire loft of them above her room.”
Josie may have loathed Vega, but I couldn’t imagine her siccing them on Vega. Then again, I didn’t think Vega was wrong about Josie’s eccentricities. She did attract spiders wherever she went.
“Let’s say Josie did bring those spiders,” I said. “What if she didn’t mean to? What if someone wanted to use them as a distraction to out me, like you suggested? It would have had to be someone who knew what you were up to, that you wanted to test that spell.”
She nodded. “Yes, but no one knew what I was doing. I was too careful. I covered my tracks.”
“What about the ingredients you collected? Did anyone know?”
She tapped her red lacquered nails against the book. “No one knew, per se. But Thatch did catch me in his supply closet stealing unicorn semen.” Her lips twisted into a sinister smile. “That was hilarious. Especially seeing his reaction when I told him it was a spell for menstrual cramps!” She cackled. “He is such a prude, and he can be as gullible as you sometimes.”
I felt mildly bad for using that one on him in the past.
“So Thatch is the only one who knows?”
“Probably. But he already knows what you are, doesn’t he? If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to invade your mind and use your touch magic against you, would he?”
“He didn’t.” I didn’t want to think he was a pervert.
“And if he did? What better way to ruin your life than by publicly outing you in front of a crowd of people? What would his motivation be, I wonder? Jealousy? Revenge for leaving him to be tortured in Elric’s dungeon? Or perhaps it was simply time to escalate things to the next level—orders of the Raven Queen.”
I shook my head. “Why would you think Thatch works for the Raven Queen?”
“Do you truly believe she would willingly permit anyone to leave her employment, knowing all her secrets?”
“He bargained with her. He tricked her.” Unless all that had been another one of his lies.
“Use your brain, moron. Where would you be forced to go once the Witchkin world knows what you are? You’d be pressured to resign from your position, if you weren’t fired on the spot. It wouldn’t be safe in the Morty Realm. Your only choice would be to go to the Fae for protection. And who wants you more than anyone else?”
“Elric.”
Her brow furrowed. “No. I was about to say the Raven Queen, you idiot.”
She thought Thatch was behind this, but everything he’d done so far had been to save me. If she was right, that meant he had never meant to help me—except for show. Or if this was him, he somehow thought striking me with lightning would help me in some way. In a way, it had. My affinity had returned, but he claimed I was better off without my magic.
It didn’t add up. Perhaps I didn’t want it to.
Vega turned back to her book. “There was one more person who saw me collecting ingredients, but I wouldn’t put much stock in it as a lead.”
“Who?”
“The custodian caught me in the forest gathering a few ingredients under the light of a full moon. Apparently he was collecting some ingredients of his own.”
I stared at her in shock. How could she not see the connection? “You mean Ludomil caught you? That’s the name of Galswintha’s former apprentice!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Sorceress’s Apprentice
Vega was just as quick to dismiss my suspicions of Ludomil as she had been before.
“He might be working for the Fae,” I said. “Or he might have his own agenda.”
“It isn’t him. He’s not a librarian, has zero interests in his books, and his magic is subpar at best.”
“That’s not true! I’ve seen him use powerful magic. And I’ve seen him with books!”
The night I’d been with Imani—the same night Imani’s magic had gone haywire—he’d walked out of a secret passage in the wall. He’d moved stone with magic. He’d even had books with him that night.
Vega ignored me. “He isn’t Galswintha’s killer, and he certainly didn’t try to kill you or out you. The only reason I mentioned him was because he might have inadvertently mentioned it to someone else.” Vega closed her book with finality. “Don’t go accusing innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit. Not unless you intend to ruin their reputation.” Her lips curled up into a smile.
She had to be referring to Thatch.
Vega might not have wanted to look into Ludomil as a possible murderer and saboteur. It didn’t mean I couldn’t.
I was limited in my magic skills, and I was in this mess way deeper than I could swim. I would sink without a magical copilot to assist me. I left my dorm room, making an excuse about taking a shower and getting ready for bed.
Instead I went to Josie’s room. I could trust her to help me. Probably I could give her a basic rundown without going into the necromancy part. I was surprised to hear voices coming from inside Josie’s room. At first I thought it was two women’s voices, one Josie’s. After a minute of definitely not eavesdropping, I realized one was Pinky.
I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I heard Vega’s name. A few seconds later I heard my name. I wondered if they knew I was standing outside her door. It wasn’t after curfew. Anyone could have gone up ther
e to the tower.
Reluctantly, I knocked, afraid I was interrupting something clandestine. I thought back to Josie’s previous conversation with Pinky that I hadn’t been meant to hear.
Josie whispered something hurriedly. Something tipped over and thudded. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Don’t worry. It’s just me. Clarissa.”
A few seconds later Josie opened the door, her face flushed.
“Sorry. Um, I don’t want to interrupt if you have someone else in here.” I glanced around, not seeing Pinky.
“No, not at all. No one is here. You can come in.” She peeked out into the hall. No one was there. She pulled me inside.
“I heard Pinky’s voice,” I whispered.
“No, you didn’t,” she said quickly.
“Yes, I did.”
She waved a hand at the mirror. “I was using my magic-mirror spell to talk to him. Maybe that’s what you heard.” Her smile was strained.
As I entered her room, I caught a whiff of his musk. He didn’t smell bad like he used to, the stench of garbage and rotting food mixed with ten years of not washing. It was more of a faint goat-cheese smell, but oddly sexy. I sat on Josie’s bed, scanning the room. Pinky was eight feet tall. He couldn’t hide under a bed or a table. But he didn’t need to. He could camouflage himself with magic. It was his best skill.
“I’m not going to tell anyone he was here.” I crossed my arms. “Unlike some people, I can keep a secret.”
Pinky giggled. Her wardrobe wavered, the wooden surface shifting unnaturally. Dark brown eyes stared down at me. Slowly Pinky revealed himself, the brown of his fur becoming separate from the grain of the wardrobe.
“Wow! Cool!” I said.
Josie groaned. “It would have worked if you had gone upstairs.”
“Not a chance. There are tarantulas up there,” he said.
He patted her on the shoulder before making his way to the door. He peeked out, ducked under the frame, and left.
“What was Pinky doing up here anyway?” I asked.
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