My affinity fluttered, red light dancing like flames in my core. My affinity grew and diminished, unable to make up its mind whether it wanted to burn hotter or die away.
Vega’s lips brushed my cheek. It was pleasant enough that my affinity radiated larger in my belly, filling my insides with light and joy. I could imagine it was Elric nuzzling the side of my neck, his hand on my waist.
The problem with Elric was that I could never quite suspend my distrust. Maybe that was all my fault, and he didn’t deserve to be treated that way, but I couldn’t completely let go.
It was no wonder I couldn’t sustain the magic to make it grow larger inside me. It faded away. Desperately I reached out for some pleasant memory. Derrick? My affinity grew smaller faster. Julian? The light inside me turned completely dark.
Felix Thatch? Was fantasizing about him invading his space? Would I accidentally project myself into his mind? I didn’t think so. I hoped not. I imagined the way his skin had melted into the cosmos in the dream the night before. His lips had tasted of starlight. The tattoos on the surface of his skin spoke of magic and mystery.
He’d made love to me in his dreams with tenderness. The memory made me tingle between my legs. I felt wet with desire for him.
Lips nibbled against my neck, and I moaned. I pretended they were his lips. My fingers swept over a long graceful neck, finding his hair and weaving my fingers through silky locks. His hair was shorter than what I remembered, but I was too deep in the intoxication of my affinity to give it much thought.
I burned with incandescence. Energy pulsed through my veins.
“Give yourself to me,” he said into my ear, his breath hot and tickling my hair. The accent wasn’t quite right, but I kept on pretending. “I need your magic.”
He bit my earlobe, distracting me. I brought my mouth to his, and in that instant, I didn’t hold back. Magic exploded inside me, rushing out in a thrill of electricity. It might have been lightning, but it didn’t feel like lightning. More like rainbows and piano music and chocolate chip cookies. My senses grew confused.
A heavy weight collapsed onto me, and I tipped over onto the soft clouds of the mattress. Arms remained circled around me.
“Holy fuck. That was better than Elric’s immaculate orgasms,” Vega muttered in my ear.
I tried to say something witty, but my words came out slurred.
Vega’s voice was deep with drowsiness. “Elric is still too damaged from trying to wear a Morty-made condom to give me a real orgasm. I can only hope sex with a Fae will be this hot.”
I wondered if she was always this chatty after sex. Maybe she was just trying to make me jealous of her relationship with Elric. It wasn’t going to work.
I forced myself to speak. “Elric and I did have sex, even though he was injured.”
“No. He glamoured his penis and disguised his injury so you would think you were having intercourse. He wanted you to prove you loved him before you changed your mind.” She shifted, snuggling more closely to me.
I was too tired to feel indignant. Not that I cared about one more lie added to the long list of ways Elric had deceived me. I yawned, sleep tugging at me. It felt safe with Vega’s arms wrapped around me.
Someone knocked on the door. It creaked open. I wanted to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. I was too tired. Vega didn’t move either.
The scuff of footsteps halted and then backed away. I opened my eyes, but my vision was blurry. I tried to lift my head, but Vega lay on my hair. The door slowly creaked closed.
Great. Someone had caught us.
Vega stirred and disentangled herself from me. She rolled away, but only slightly. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
“If you ever tell anyone you kissed me, I will kill you,” she said.
“Yeah? Well, if you ever tell anyone I made you a Red affinity, I’ll kill you.”
She laughed and closed her eyes. “I have to tell Elric. Or more accurately, you have to.”
I fell asleep, exhausted. When I woke, I found Vega with my cell phone, touching the screen.
She looked up, seeing I was awake. “How do you make this damned gadget work?”
“Is it draining you of energy or giving you wrinkles or whatever my electronics usually do?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
I sat up. “So you have a Red affinity?”
“No. I tried shooting lightning out my eyes. It didn’t work.”
“Oh.” Disappointment weighed heavy on my shoulders.
“Don’t even think about sulking. We have to do this multiple times to make it work. That was only the second dose. Next time, I’m going to set some ground rules.” She wagged a finger at me. “You need to figure out how to stir up your affinity without using me as your crutch.”
I wondered who it had been who had walked in finding Vega and me intertwined like lovers. Maybe it didn’t look like we were lovers. It might have looked like we’d fought and collapsed in a heap . . . cuddled up.
Whoever it had been had thought better of waking us—or letting us know he or she had seen.
I went looking for Josie, finding her in her classroom, prepping for classes. She didn’t act like she’d gone back to my room, but I didn’t outright ask her, Did you walk in on Vega embracing me in bed and then tiptoe out?
She smiled when she saw me. “Great news! I ran into Khaba. He said he had a chance to review personnel files.”
“Did he tell you if he found anything suspicious?”
“He didn’t say, but he seemed . . . excited. Let’s go over to his office.”
I think Josie just wanted an excuse to ogle him. The two of us went to the admin wing, encountering the custodian along the way. He swept up a mess of glass, glowering at us as we passed.
“Hi, Ludomil. How’s it going?” Josie asked with her usual good cheer.
“They’re all a bunch of juvenile delinquents,” he muttered under his breath. “And you teachers aren’t much better.”
He was probably right on that account. I watched him watch me, wondering if he knew my secret.
We found Khaba filling out detention forms in his office. He waved us into the bubblegum-pink room.
I closed the door behind us and lowered my voice to a whisper in case Ludomil came into the admin wing. “Did you find anything interesting in his employment history? Like you saw he worked in one of the houses of a Fae court? Or he just happened to be the custodian in the Raven Queen’s estate?”
Khaba snorted and shook my head. “Wow. I can see why we hired you, with your imagination.”
Josie took one seat across from his desk. I took the other.
Khaba finished scrawling a note on the comments section of a detention form for Balthasar Llewelyn. Upside down it looked like he had written: Needs to refrain from freezing the water in the toilet cistern with magic.
Oh, boy. It had been one of those kinds of days for him.
Khaba set the form aside. “As it happens, I did find something interesting about Ludomil. He’s deaf in one ear. I never knew that.”
“What?” Josie and I asked together.
That was the big news?
“Apparently he got beat up by a couple of Fae who drained him after he graduated. A group of his teammates chased the Fae off before they completely sucked him dry. He’s lucky he survived with any magic at all.”
“He’s lucky he survived. Period,” Josie said.
Khaba inclined his head, acknowledging the sentiment. “That was only a few years before he started here as head custodian. Alouette Loraline hired him on because he had been an exemplary student with promising skills in magic. He’d been on the school’s air pelota team and had been accepted onto a professional team. It was while they were touring that the incident happened. It was quite the scandal at the time, according to Jeb. And that’s saying something considering he remembers an incident that happened forty years ago.”
&
nbsp; “Did they catch the Fae who did that to him?” I asked.
Khaba grimaced. “I wasn’t around at that time—not around here. I don’t know. I could guess the answer, though. It’s unlikely.”
That was the Unseen Realm. It made me think back to what Thatch had said about Fae walking all over Witchkin. We had no rights here. I wondered if Vega’s plan to take over the world would give Witchkin leverage.
Khaba went on, “I suspect Alouette Loraline felt bad for Ludomil because he wasn’t left with much magic to do more than practical work like cleaning.”
“So she did something . . . nice?” I asked.
“Her actions were charitable. I told you before, she wasn’t completely evil. She meant well. She was always trying to find a way to make everyone happy. Back in the day when she was headmistress, there were several janitors. Since that time, we’ve had to cut down on positions. Ludomil does a decent job keeping up with the maintenance and cleaning duties considering it’s just him and unpaid brownies these days.”
“I saw him use magic,” I said. “He was carrying books, and he made the stone walls move. He might not have been drained.”
“He was. It was only about ten years ago that his magic started to come back. He was so excited when he showed me he could heat up a bucket of sudsy water to clean the floor.” Khaba smiled patiently. “Sometimes people’s magic does come back. It just takes decades.” His lips turned down. “That is, if he isn’t a Merlin-class Celestor.” An obvious dig at Thatch.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “I thought there something more exciting you were going to tell us.”
“There’s more.” Khaba grinned. “While poking around files, I asked around to corroborate what I was reading. Nothing that would draw attention. I just asked Grandmother Bluehorse if she’d had any of the staff as students. She ticked off a list of their names. Ludomil was one of them. She remembers him, as does Jeb. They’ve worked here the longest—aside from the brownies.”
“So basically you’re saying, he’s really not six hundred years old.” Josie elbowed me. “Okay, so that was pointless. At least no one had his turban torn off this time.”
“One might say Ludomil Sokoloff has a clean record,” Khaba laughed. “As clean as the floor he just scrubbed outside my office.”
I didn’t know if that was the best analogy, but I got the point.
Josie laughed a little too loudly. “See. Told you so. No one is trying to kill you.”
It was time to cross Ludomil off the list of suspects who wanted to kill me. Maybe Galswintha’s murderer had died of old age by now. The person who had tried to attack me could have been . . . just about anyone else.
Though, Vega had a reason to keep me alive if she wanted to use my magic. I didn’t actually believe Elric or Thatch wanted to hurt me. I knew Josie had been mad at Vega, and she had a thing about spiders. Josie and Pinky had been acting suspicious, but maybe it was because she was ashamed to admit she was attracted to big, hairy men.
I turned to Josie. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What? Nothing? Why would you think I’m hiding something?”
Khaba looked from Josie to me. “That’s right. You’re besties. Neither of you have secrets from each other.”
I wasn’t sure if he was teasing or he knew we had secrets from each other.
Josie shook her head, eyes wide. She seriously had something she wasn’t sharing, though I didn’t think it was related to a Fae queen kidnaping Josie, brainwashing her, and trying to make her drain my magic to become a Red affinity like the Raven Queen had done with Derrick.
I was fairly certain that if Vega had known she could have done that rather than inoculating herself with Red magic by using a spell, she would have done so.
Khaba stepped past Josie and me and peeked out the window of the closed door. “What I’m going to tell you needs to remain confidential.” He pointed to Josie. “That means you need to keep your mouth shut and not start any rumors.”
I nodded. She sighed in exasperation. “That only happened once.”
“I’m only sharing this with you because you need to understand the full picture.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “While reviewing files, I noticed Ali’kai Keahi never graduated from Womby’s. Her school records indicate she failed mathematics in grammar school, and when she came here, she was abysmal in alchemy and wards because she could never get the equations right.”
Okay, so I’d always thought she was mean, but I had no idea she was also incompetent.
“Um, isn’t she the school’s bookkeeper?” Josie asked.
“Alouette Loraline hired her on to do receptionist and light secretarial work: filing, scheduling appointments, writing letters, and taking notes. She was adept at these duties. We had three other secretaries twenty-five years ago. One worked in the counseling office and two over here in the administration wing. Jeanette Selby retired as bookkeeper and secretary two years after Alouette Loraline died. Jeb didn’t replace Jeanette. He gave all her duties to Mrs. Keahi. But she’s been bumbling her way through them. She doesn’t know accounting or how to budget. Jeb does all that, and his memory is horrible. Twice this year he realized we didn’t have the money to pay for food to feed students and asked me to go into Lachlan Falls and promise favors to Clarence Greenpine at Ye Green Grocery.”
“I can see this is a problem, but I’m not sure where you’re going with it,” I said.
“Scrutinizing records and pay stubs—something that neither Jeb nor Mrs. Keahi has ever done—I have discovered that Ludomil Hummeln Ba’Izabul is still on our payroll.”
“What? He’s still alive?” Josie asked.
“I knew it!” I said. “I told you he was still alive! He’s glamoured himself, hasn’t he? What position does he have?” I was more than a little pleased to know Thatch was completely off the hook in this case.
“When did he leave? When did he come back?” Josie asked, talking over me.
Khaba wet his lips. “According to the ledger, there is no break in employment. He started here six hundred years ago, before this was ever Womby’s. He’s never left.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Seeing Red
Khaba was just as confused as Josie and I were about this revelation.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Khaba said. “It doesn’t mean he’s still physically here, but someone is receiving his paycheck. It’s mailed to an outside address, which I need to investigate.”
“You need to stop paying him!” Josie said. “He doesn’t even work here anymore. The school doesn’t have enough money to feed students, and this freeloader is getting money.”
“If I stopped paying him, it would raise his suspicions. I’m going to investigate this quietly, without drawing more attention to the matter. I’ll see if anyone lives at the address, and if no one does, I will covertly watch to see who picks up the check.”
“Can we come? We can watch the mailbox after paychecks are sent out and see if he comes to pick it up,” I said.
“Yeah! It can be a stakeout like in the movies,” Josie said.
“Aren’t you two precious?” Khaba shook his head. “No, you aren’t going to help with this. You are going to be safe and careful during the All Hallows’ Eve Open House. It’s already going to be busy and dangerous enough keeping track of a bunch of sneaky, unpredictable teenagers at an event, but one with sneaky, unpredictable Fae is going to be even worse. Now that we know there is an individual who is a murderer, potential embezzler, and someone you believe may have tried to attack you with lightning at a school event recently, you need to be extra vigilant.”
“Vigilant. Yep, that’s my middle name,” I said.
An obvious lie. If it had been, I might not have gotten myself in deeper trouble at every turn.
The days of October sped by, making me feel as if I didn’t have enough time to prepare for the All Hallows’ Eve Open House. I had agreed to help Elr
ic scheme to bring the school event off campus, but I feared what that would mean. I would be facing a leering court of Fae who would dissect me for weaknesses. These supposed Fae benefactors might hurt my students more than help them.
Elric wrote me twice, asking to see me to talk about negotiations. Both times, I made excuses. Vega and I weren’t ready.
Meanwhile, Vega pressured me into two more inoculations of Red magic. Each time she grew stronger, though to her disappointment, she wasn’t able to shoot lightning out of her eyes. Even so, I saw evidence that her affinity was changing or at least being supplemented. She could handle electronics and felt energized by them, and with each dose of electricity that I gave her, she recovered with increasing speed. To her delight, she was able to jolt me with static electricity after she rubbed her hands across the blankets of her bed.
Unlike the times my sister and I had done this to each other as children in the Morty Realm, the arcs of pink light were larger. She could shock me from a foot away. It smarted while simultaneously feeling satisfying as the magic soaked into me.
We were making progress, but it didn’t feel like it was coming fast enough.
The week before the celebration, as I was walking up the stairwell to Josie’s dorm with her when she whispered, “I say we just move your stuff into my room when Vega is gone on one of her weekend holidays.”
I wanted to have Josie as a roommate, but I needed to help Vega come into her powers to prove to Elric I could give him a child by making anyone into a Red affinity. Who would ever have thought I would be mentoring Vega?
I patted Josie’s shoulder. “After the big auction and celebration.” I considered going to Jeb to ask him permission to switch rooms, to make it official, but he was still miffed at me about the Thatch accusation.
I was still miffed with myself. Too much to feel like I deserved any favors.
Josie’s response sounded muffled and faint. As I gazed at her, the distance between us stretched like taffy. Her brow crinkled in confusion. Her mouth formed the shape of my name, but I couldn’t hear her. She faded away.
Hex Crimes Page 20
