The Fairer Hex

by Lidiya Foxglove

“Yes…I have reviewed your file,” Professor McGuinness said. “The strange thing is, I remember when you came here to take your test. Or—a boy who looked just like you, anyway. You were recommended by Samuel…”

  “Are we so sure that Samuel Caruthers was a white necromancer?” Harris asked.

  “What?” Professor McGuinness looked offended. “You, of all people, should know his reputation!”

  “I know he’s a famous student of Merlin,” Harris said. “But he was considered at risk of turning dark. He was drawn to necromancy. And why is no one asking why Charlotte is a girl, recommended to this school by Samuel, who then immediately dies?”

  “We are looking into it,” Professor McGuinness said. “We’re not idiots. But in the meantime, Master Blair wants to keep Charlotte under our protection. We could send her to the witches, but then her power would be in their hands.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Harris said. “She’s a witch. She already proved that she can’t handle our magic. She burned down a building!”

  “It was just one room,” I said.

  “Enough,” Alec said, looking at me. “You’ve made your point, Harris.”

  Okay, so we had thoroughly established that I didn’t belong here. Finally, we started moving on.

  “In honor of Samuel, today’s lesson will be about a spell that he always found particularly fascinating,” Professor McGuinness said. “And, as it so happens, we might even have evidence of his fascination with us today in the form of Charlotte. It has to do with magical trades. When it comes to dealing with darker forces, especially demons or the undead, you will undoubtedly encounter a trade. This occurs when a demon asks you to give them something in exchange for a favor. The first rule of trades is like the first rule of drugs: Just. Say. No.” He wrote that on the board and underlined it.

  One boy raised his hand in a very measured sort of way.

  “Yes, Irving?”

  “I don’t think that’s the rule anymore. I just read an article in Four Elements magazine about how warlocks in Europe are using ecstasy—“

  “Thank you, Irving, but you know what I’m trying to get at. Please remember, your professors are old. We can’t keep up. Someday you’ll be old too and you won’t be able to keep up either. And I hope you’re not taking ecstasy. That is not allowed on campus, no matter what they’re doing in Europe. Anyway, my point: do not make a trade with a demon or a dead spirit. Not unless you are experienced enough to teach this class and even then, maybe not.”

  “What if an ethereal spirit wants to make a trade?” Irving asked. I guess he was the facts and questions kid.

  “They rarely do. Because trades are tricks. Remember that. Trades…are…tricks.” He waved a pencil like a baton.

  I raised my hand. “Why was Samuel so interested in trades, then?”

  “Well…Samuel was very skilled, of course. But he also just died, so…I would take his life course as a warning.”

  “What sort of trades?” Alec asked.

  “Demons and the dead aren’t just going to ask for some extra garden mulch or old children’s books,” Professor McGuinness said, indicating to me that warlocks totally had freecycle groups. “They will ask for things that are supremely precious to you, or they’ll ask for things that are crucially important to them.”

  “Are all dead people dangerous?” I asked.

  “All the ones that ask for things,” he said.

  “What if the thing they’re offering you is worth it?” Alec asked.

  “It’s not worth it,” the professor said, in a very honest voice that made Alec nod soberly.

  He had us run through some potential scenarios, like a demon asking for your first child. The boy he called on suggested he just wouldn’t have any children. Professor McGuinness suggested several ways this could turn out to be a trick, from a child you didn’t know you had to an accidental pregnancy later on to a beloved pet that you refer to as “your child”.

  “It sounds like something out of a fairy tale,” I said. “You have to be careful of how you use your words.”

  “That’s exactly right,” he said. “Even with ethereal spirits, you need to be careful. They will have good intentions, but they don’t always take things the way you intend them. They expect you to keep bargains. Speak clearly and mindfully with all magical beings.”

  I waited until after the class was over but lingered in my chair, pretending to look at my schedule and dig in my backpack until the guys all filed out—with a few more nasty or lusty looks.

  “Charlotte, did you want to talk to me about something?” Prof. McGuinness asked, shutting the door behind them.

  “Yes.” I shrugged. I didn’t really know who I could or should talk to in this place, but I felt like it definitely wasn’t Master Blair. “I was just curious. How does a warlock give their powers to someone else? Is that a type of trade?”

  “You mean, why did Samuel give his powers to you? That’s not a trade, Charlotte. It’s a gift.”

  “But why? And why would he have been killed right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a way to ask him, even after he’s dead?”

  “You’ll have to keep attending class,” he said. “But I’ll say this. Summoning the dead isn’t something you just do casually. Even white necromancy is very draining on the caster. It will cause you pain and weakness. It might hurt him, too.”

  Firian glanced at me nervously. “You’d better get to your next class.”

  “Ahem. I need to know this stuff.” Sometimes Firian was a little too bossy.

  Still, I was really glad he was there.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Charlotte

  So I ate lunch with Firian. Then Magical History, where I was completely lost, as they were talking about stuff that happened in the 1600s and I had never heard of any of these events, like the “Savannah Pirate Raid” (in 1925! I wrote down “Jazz Pirates”) or some alliance between French warlocks in Quebec and Native American warlocks and the Good Witches of the Colonies. I couldn’t even remember who was with or against who. I perked up whenever Salem was mentioned because my brain went, I know what that is!

  Otherwise it was a blur.

  Then we had Enchantment and Illusion, where everyone was learning the finer points of making enchanted clothes appear on their bodies, and Theurgy, which I needed to be good at so I could show up Harris and his stupid demon summoning.

  Since the year was just getting started, all the classes were mostly talk and overview, but I could tell it was going to take a lot of hard work and deep concentration. By the end of the day, I was utterly spent. There was so much to absorb in a magic class.

  Luckily, I was good at those things. I was awesome at yoga. I mean, not to brag, but you know how people are usually like, oh, I need to do more yoga? Well, I really do it. Every day. For an hour. All alone, no classes or anything, just me and a very old yoga VCR tape. It used to be my mom’s.

  I guess that might have something to do with my yoga discipline. Dad said that Mom used to do baby yoga with me and it was possible the yoga tape became some sort of surrogate for my mom. If I put it that way, it didn’t sound worth bragging about at all…

  But if yoga was sort of like magical training, maybe that was why she did it with me. She bound my powers, but I wonder if some part of her actually wanted me to be a witch someday.

  Thinking about Mom hurt. I always wondered why she left, and Dad’s explanations were vague. I probably should have been more upset at him for lying to me, but instead I just felt angry at her for abandoning him.

  And me.

  For dark magic? What a stupid reason. The more I thought about it, the more I felt insulted that they had even put me in the dorm for potential dark warlocks. I wasn’t interested.

  I actually had trouble concentrating on yoga that night, even though Alec was out. Probably because I didn’t have my VCR tape. I knew every move by heart, obviously, but it was part of my ritual to hear the v
oice of the instructor say, “Be where you are, because you’re already there…”

  The rest of the week passed without too much incident, as these things go. I went to class. I felt constantly confused and was assigned twenty tons of books to read to help me catch up. Alec was hot enough to leave me eternally flustered but he was a quiet sleeper. And also, quiet while he was awake, which is more than I could say for a lot of the other guys. They made sexual jokes about me in the dining hall, until Firian snapped, turned into a fox, and bit one of them on the arm.

  I called Dad and didn’t cry. Well, I didn’t cry much.

  Okay, I didn’t ugly cry. I just cried in a normal way.

  I just felt very out of place, almost like I was attending school with aliens. They weren’t just boys, they were culturally in another world. They had completely different concerns than the kids at my high school. They were rude to me, but also very formal. They knew very little about pop culture. Some were devoted to the ‘old ways’, which seemed Wiccan. They had their own little rituals and rules. Others went to the campus chapel on Sunday. Montague told me most warlocks in St. Augustine were Catholic.

  “Just think about the Vatican,” he said. “Doesn’t it seem kind of warlocky with all the mysteries and gold and rituals?”

  The school also had a handful of Jewish and Hindu students, plus two brothers who followed the Nordic gods. It was all kept very private. This was very different from my high school where we had a lot of devout Evangelical kids who were always battling with Kayleigh Patterson the loud atheist girl, plus a tight contingent of hippies who lived in the dome house community on one of the mountains. My high school was full of opinions, whereas Merlin College had this upper-crust boarding school feel where ‘opinions’ were not very polite, unless they were old-fashioned.

  The warlocks were surprisingly multicultural, as a whole. Firian said that power had always been divided up differently in the magical world, and interracial marriage had never been taboo. But they were as classist as the cast of Downton Abbey; any naive hope in my mind that a utopian world was possible if people from all around the world joined hands was dashed by one week at Merlin College.

  Over the weekend, where I was totally trapped there, the history teacher pulled me aside into his empty classroom and told me that he’d heard my familiar had bitten Guillame de Brigue, who I guess was somebody from the de Brigue witch family.

  “De Brigue blah blah,” I snapped. “He told me I should wear skirts more often.”

  The history teacher Professor Gruben, a white-haired man who always wore a hat outside but removed it when he entered a room, said, “Well, you are a young lady, so he’s probably right about that.”

  “This is the uniform!”

  “Oh.” He sniffed. “We can’t get you anything more feminine?”

  “How old are you, anyway!?”

  “One hundred and ten, my dear, not that it’s any of your business.”

  There was no use arguing with him, that seemed obvious. One hundred and ten? I hadn’t even been able to get my Grandma to acknowledge that my short haircut in seventh grade was pretty adorable because she thought girls should have long hair.

  Firian made a low growling sound. “I’m this close to taking you out of this school,” he said, in a voice that made the old man’s sagging eyes snap open.

  “Young lady, you need to be careful about this familiar you have staying so close to your side. I will not have a repeat of the scandals that have plagued other communities. If familiars should have sexual relations with the witches, we have trouble,” he said, waving a bony finger at me.

  My cheeks must have caught fire. Especially the way he said it, which conjured up an image of Firian…doing things to me. “We’re not.” I laughed nervously. “We play computer games together. We’re nerds. Friends. Friends without any benefits ever.”

  “Friends is almost as bad!”

  “Sir, she understands,” Firian said. He gave me a hard look. He wanted me to just take the advice and go, I think. I nodded nervously and left the room. We stepped outside into the sun, a brisk mountain wind making me quickly button my sweater.

  “I’ve heard the story of your grandmother’s familiar,” he said. “When your grandmother was stricken from the record, her familiar married a human. She became a human, basically. Sometimes, when witches leave the community, their familiars join them, and then all the other familiars stop saying their name. But even that’s not as bad as when a familiar and a witch…”

  “I get the picture, Firian. One hundred percent. And it’s fine. We’re not like that anyway. We had a little thing going on in the game, but it was really tame.”

  “Definitely.” He cast me a furtive look. “I shouldn’t have even done that. Just needed to get to know you. That was my job.”

  “Right. My fox stalker.”

  He had a weird look on his face.

  I wondered if that was really all. If he really had no feelings for me. Because, on my end…

  I wasn’t sure. It was pretty strange to think he’d been watching me since I was a kid, and that he was born from my magic. I could see why the witch community frowned on that. That had to be either incestuous or maybe even narcissistic, like falling in love with a piece of your own self.

  Still, Firian was definitely his own person. I was comfortable around him as if I’d known him forever, but he was also extremely mysterious to me. My stomach squirmed.

  “Charlotte.” Montague came strolling by while I was standing on the path, feeling scolded and unsure what to do.

  “Oh…hey.”

  “You look distressed. I expect weekends can be difficult, being so far from your father…” He gave me a rather gallant expression, and I was charmed. Then I realized Alec was standing behind him on the path, keeping his distance.

  He took a deep breath and Montague turned toward him. “You can’t avoid her forever. She’s your roommate.”

  “I didn’t know you were actually avoiding me,” I said.

  “I can’t…harm you. But I definitely want to…” He said the last bit under his breath, but I heard it. I also got the feeling that by ‘harm’, he actually meant ‘send into a stratosphere of carnal delight that we might regret later’.

  I mean, every time I walked away from Alec, I forgot just how hot he was. Then when he re-entered my vision, my brain was practically locked down by the mere sight of his gorgeous mouth. He looked smart with his sophisticated glasses, but also…like some sort of beautiful demon prince with eyes like low flames and arms corded with muscle.

  “Alec,” Montague said, sweeping an arm around my shoulders. “You know you want to gaze upon her beauty. You know it will be the most delicious torture you can imagine. Let’s teach her to roller skate.”

  “Uggh, Monty, you’re killing me…” He rubbed his forehead just above his sexy glasses. “You’re not the one who has been cursed to need sex.”

  “You’re right. I have no idea what it’s like to be cursed to need anything that I will never really have,” Montague said dryly. “If I can handle day-old blood from a pouch, you can handle getting to know your roommate. It’s what Master Blair wanted. You’re half human. Just focus on the half of you that is a nineteen-year-old human boy and therefore, entirely capable of chastity and reserve.” He smirked.

  “This seems like a bad idea to me,” Firian said.

  “I am not surprised you’d say that, Firian,” I said. “But…I’m up for anything that gets my mind off my troubles right now. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alec

  Damn Monty. I knew he was into this girl. He was obvious about it, too. I was trying very hard not to be.

  Two years ago, Montague was just a normal guy, with an uneventful life. Harris and Montague and I all attended the same academy, one of the top schools for students to move on to the most exclusive universities. He was the fun-loving friend who knitted me and Harris together, the guy who owned an over-the-top car and
dragged us out to do something wild like going into town to go to the human mall and order fast food.

  I know, the definition of “wild” among warlock high school students was a little strange. Going to the mall was about on par with summoning a low level demon.

  Harris would pretend to hate it, and I would be exploding with my incubus instincts at the sight of all the human girls. I mean, I fucking loved it, deep down. I was never satisfied, but it was something, even though I had to jack off in the bathroom and take an extra “tonic”, the one that was supposed to calm all that down.

  Montague was different now. I’d realized that the day we all reunited in our new dorm. He’d become more serious. We all knew what happened to vampires, in the end. They started remembering things that had happened to their sire. Eventually their memories traced back to their sire’s sire, until they found an end: the oldest living vampire in the line. That vampire is their master, their lord.

  It was hard to tell, because he was acting more like a model warlock and the teachers all seemed to think he was just growing up, but Harris and I knew better. Monty was supposed to be our party friend.

  Something was going on in that head of his. His eyes grew so distant at times that he hardly seemed to hear what I was saying. I was afraid to know.

  I was hoping Charlotte would be good for him. He needed something else to focus on.

  That’s good, I thought. I’m definitely not dating her or anyone else. I don’t have time to get distracted by that shit. And Harris already has his parents lining up prospects for him. So Monty might as well go for it.

  Her familiar was giving me the side-eye and I realized that as I thought about all this, my eyes were taking in every delicious curve of Charlotte’s body, even through the men’s dress shirt that didn’t reveal too much. It was just enough. I didn’t need much. Just the sight of her ponytail flicking across her back as she turned to look at Monty was enough to get me thinking about what I could do to her.

  “So you’re planning on hanging around forever?” I asked Firian.