by Eva Chase
“I could see if I can talk him into going for a swim in the pool and take a look in the change room,” Malcolm said, but he sounded doubtful.
“He always complains about the chlorine,” I pointed out, remembering.
“Yeah, even in ideal circumstances, it might be a tough sell.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “And he’s definitely wary of me even without Rory there.”
Rory glanced up at me with a flicker of inspiration in her indigo-blue eyes. “Maybe we can find out indirectly. If one of us can pull off an insight spell on him—with someone else distracting him to make it easier to get past whatever mental barriers he’s got up, maybe?—asking specifically about what his parents did to him, we’d have a decent chance of sensing not just where they placed the spell but possibly more about what it involves too. That’d make picking it apart easier.”
As the pentacle’s original Insight expert, I should have been the one to think of that. Of course, Rory had been catching up in her skills in leaps and bounds. I shot her a small smile. “That’s a good idea. Connar’s mental defenses aren’t the strongest ever—his focus has always been more on the external arts.”
“The mood he’s in, he’ll have them up at the best of his ability, though.” Malcolm cocked his head. “I can figure out a good way to put him off-balance—and for long enough to give one of you time to really delve in there. Give me a little while to think on it and work out the best timing. We’ll only get one shot. Once he realizes we’re trying to get into his head…”
He didn’t need to finish that sentence. With the spell acting on Connar, we’d be lucky if he agreed to come within ten feet of any of us if he decided we were all the enemy.
Jude finally took a gulp of his drink. “It doesn’t sound as if I’ll be of much use in the current scheme, but keep me in the loop if you need any illusionary work. I do not want to see how much worse Connar’s temper can get.”
The comment about tempers reminded me of the irritable state Jude’s father had been in during the last meeting of the barons. The others had needled Baron Killbrook about his heir having moved away from the family properties, but Jude still hadn’t breathed a word about that development to any of us. Their relationship had always seemed chilly, but if things had gotten worse, if he needed someone to intervene on his behalf—
He might not appreciate me bringing up his familial dirty laundry in front of Rory, though. I’d never seen him care anywhere near as much about what anyone thought as he clearly did with her. It might be better to wait to broach the subject when it was just us guys, and if we needed her help, we could determine it then.
“If we can set it up so he won’t notice me there and be triggered by that, I think I should do the insight spell,” Rory had started saying when my phone buzzed in my pocket. “It was only a few months ago that I had to help Professor Banefield—I’d be able to recognize the signs faster.”
I didn’t know the number on the screen. I turned away from the others, raising the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hey. Declan?” said an uncertain and rather young male voice, fractured by shaky reception. “There’s been—I think Noah’s had an accident. He might be hurt.”
Might be? How could this guy not know what had happened one way or another if he’d been there for this “accident”? All my nerves jangled to high alert.
My younger brother had only just arrived at Blood U a few days ago, after spending the first two years of his education abroad—my attempt at keeping him out of the political fray. Now he’d been thrown straight into that fray, and apparently his peers were already challenging him every way I’d been worried about.
“Where are you?” I demanded. “What exactly happened?”
“It’s… hard to explain,” the guy said weakly. “We’re out about an hour’s hike east along the lake—I can make a magical signal so you can find the spot. I’ll show you what I mean when you get here.”
“Is he going to need more help than just me?”
“I… I don’t know.”
The back of my neck prickled with the instinctive awareness that this could just as easily be some kind of attempt to mess with me, although the other students wouldn’t generally have dared to pull a major prank on a near-baron.
“I’ll be there as fast as I can,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere, and keep that signal going.”
As soon as I’d hung up, I tried texting and then calling Noah, just in case he was actually fine. The call didn’t even ring, just went straight to voice mail as if his phone was off. Shit.
I debated going to the health center first to ask for backup, but the chances that anyone would have seriously injured my brother seemed slim. I’d only make him look weaker—and like a more appealing target—if I showed up with the full cavalry. If I couldn’t handle the situation, I’d call for extra help then.
When I turned back to the others, they were watching me. My distress must have been obvious.
“What’s going on?” Malcolm asked, tensed in his seat.
“I think my brother’s facing a little more than the standard newbie razing,” I said. “I can handle it—but it sounds like I’d better handle it quickly. When you come up with a definite plan for Connar, let me know.”
Unfortunately, once I’d set off, there was no way to speed up the journey along the lake. Even if I’d had access to a motorboat, the shoreline east of campus rose up twenty to thirty feet of nearly sheer cliff over the waterline, leaving nowhere to dock. Even the path that meandered through the forest not far from the shore petered out after about twenty minutes’ brisk walk.
After that, I had to pick my way as quickly as possible through the brush, twigs tugging at my clothes. Normally I’d have enjoyed the brightening autumn colors around me and the crisp fall scent in the air, but I was too distracted by thoughts of what Noah’s new “friends” might have wrapped him up in. Every few minutes, I sent out a thread of magic seeking the signal the caller had said he’d conjure.
Even at the pace I was keeping, it took three quarters of an hour before I picked up the tingle of magic in the distance. I pushed myself even faster, wincing as a thin branch whipped against my cheek. As I followed my sense of the signal, the ground slanted up even higher.
I emerged into a rocky clearing between a stretch of pines. A junior fearmancer I recognized from Noah’s dorm was standing in the middle of it, his expression turning vaguely terrified at my arrival. He still had his phone clutched in his hand.
“All right,” I said in the firmest tone I had in me. “What’s going on? Be quick about it.”
The guy shifted on his feet and jerked his head toward the ground several feet away from him. “A bunch of us came out here exploring. One of the guys dared Noah to go down into the caves. I don’t know what happened down there, or whether it was on purpose—it sounded like some rocks fell. He wasn’t answering us.”
My skin turned cold. And of course the other perpetrators of this ploy had fled when they’d realized it’d gotten out of hand. I stalked closer to the spot he’d indicated, where I could now see the mossy rocks opened with a crevice large enough for a person to squeeze through. All I could make out below was darkness.
“Noah?” I hollered.
No answer. When I looked back around, all I caught was the last guy’s back as he hightailed it into the woods. He didn’t want to stick around to take the blame either. I guessed I should thank him for bothering to call me in the first place, even if I suspected he’d been more involved in this setup than he’d wanted to admit.
I conjured a small ball of light and sent it down into the crevice. It highlighted craggy walls and a rough floor several feet down. Well, there was nothing for it. I dragged in a breath and concentrated on forming a thin rope with my magic.
As I clambered down into the caves, a quiver of energy passed over my skin. The second I’d dropped below it, the cave’s silence fell away. Water was dripping somewhere nearby, and a pebble rattled. Then a
voice carried, hoarse but determined, from deeper in the darkness.
“Hello? Guys?”
Noah. Someone had cast a silencing spell beneath the cave entrance so no one could communicate with him from above. What the hell had these assholes been thinking?
My jaw clenched, I scrambled the last few feet down and waved my conjured light in the direction the voice had come from. I had to hunch to squeeze deeper into the caves. “I’m coming!” I called.
“Thank fucking God,” Noah muttered, with enough spirit that my lips twitched with relief even as anger continued churning in my gut.
I had to take a couple of turns before I found him. My brother was sprawled on his ass in a particularly narrow section of cave, where several rocks ranging from skull size to whole person size had tumbled down to fill the gap—and pin his legs in place from the thighs down.
Noah’s expression tensed when he saw me, as if he expected me to be angry with him. I knelt down next to him, setting a careful hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you out. You tried moving the rocks?” His arms wouldn’t have been much help in his current position, so he’d have needed to turn to magic.
He nodded, his mouth twisting. “It—it really hurts. I managed to shift a few of them, but my control wasn’t great because the pain messed with my concentration, and I accidentally knocked more down, so then it didn’t seem like such a great idea to keep trying. The guys…” He gave me a questioning look.
“They took off on you,” I said. “But one of them stuck around long enough to give me a heads up.”
“I think they did it on purpose,” he said grimly. “Some of them, anyway. I wasn’t planning on going this far, but this force that must have been conjured started shoving me, and before I could get around that, all this crap crumbled down.” He ducked his head. “You tried to warn me people would pull shit like this. I just didn’t think—I didn’t want them to think I was scared of them.”
“It’s okay.” I squeezed his shoulder. “I wouldn’t have thought anyone would go this far either. Just imagine their faces when you show up back on campus acting like nothing was ever wrong. That’ll throw them off. Now let me get you free.”
This once, I wished Physicality had been one of my strengths. I wasn’t outright weak in it, but the magic to lift the stones out of the way came with noticeably more effort than my regular spells did. Even in the chilly air underground, sweat started to seep down my back and across my forehead. I had to be careful, or I could bring down more rubble on my brother instead.
When I’d finally cleared the rockslide, I winced at the sight of Noah’s legs. One of them was twisted at an unnatural angle from the knee. Something was broken there. No wonder he’d been in too much pain to effectively cast his spells.
We weren’t making that hour-long walk back with him like this. I could numb the pain and fix a splint on him to make sure the break didn’t get any worse, but that was about it. I pulled out my phone to call back to campus and grimaced at the No Reception message. Of course there wouldn’t be down here.
“Not that I wanted you to have to learn this lesson,” I said, “but I don’t think you’re going to forget to be cautious around your classmates anytime soon. I’m going to steady your leg as well as I can and get you out of here, and then we’re going to have a nice long talk about how to deal with assholes while we wait for the medical team to get here.”
Chapter Four
Rory
It was pretty normal for me to emerge from my dorm bedroom and find Shelby, my friend and only Nary dormmate, making her breakfast in the kitchen area. What was a little strange was the fact that she didn’t look up or say anything in greeting when I came over to make some toast for myself.
“Hey,” I said, not particularly loudly, but she startled so badly that the spatula she’d been holding ready to scoop up her frying eggs flew from her hand. It clattered onto the floor.
Shelby blushed pink and ducked to grab the utensil with a swing of her mouse-brown ponytail. “Oh my God,” she said, swiping the back of her hand across her forehead. “I’m sorry. Somehow I didn’t even notice you there.”
She was usually more alert than that. She’d needed to be, considering the fearmancer students made her as much a target of their pranks and bullying as they did all the other Nary students. And Shelby had become even more of a target since my friendship with her had become obvious. Victory Blighthaven, who’d been queen bee over the dorm before I’d arrived, had taken every chance she could get to undermine me and my friends until Malcolm had warned her off a month ago, and that had included tearing up Shelby’s property.
Sometimes I had to worry about Shelby’s own sense of self-preservation. During my first term here, she’d kept going to classes despite running a high fever for a week, scared of losing her spot in the music program if she didn’t appear committed enough. The staff didn’t cut the nonmagical students any breaks.
I studied her expression, noting with some relief that she was wearing the violin pendant I’d gifted her. The deflective spell on the silver charm should prevent most direct spells from affecting her, although if someone hit her with anything really powerful, I wasn’t sure how well it would hold. I’d have to bolster the magic in the pendant as soon as I got the chance.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Maybe she was coming down with something again.
“Oh, yeah, same as usual.” She flashed me a little smile, rinsed the spatula under the faucet, and turned off the water. A second later, she turned the water back on and rinsed the spatula again. Then she repeated the process a third time without any sign she’d realized she was redoing her efforts. My stomach sank as she finally wiped off the utensil with one of the dish towels.
“Are you sure everything’s fine?” I pressed. “You slept okay? No one’s been hassling you? No problems in class?”
“Everything’s good. You don’t need to worry about me.” Her tone was bright, but her gaze jerked to me at the same instant, and I caught a sensation I didn’t think I’d ever felt from her before. A small but clear shiver of fear shot from her to me, prickling through my chest to join the rest of my magical energy where it thrummed behind my collarbone.
She was scared of me? Of something I’d said? I didn’t think I’d come on so strong with my concern that she’d take it as a threat. I eased back a step anyway, swallowing hard.
It might not really have anything to do with me. The other fearmancer students could have shaken her up so badly that she couldn’t help remembering them when she looked at me, just because I was another regular student rather than a scholarship kid. She’d often downplayed the treatment she’d faced in the past.
I wouldn’t have thought she’d completely brush off an incident that had rattled her this much, though.
The last thing I wanted was to make her more uncomfortable by harping on the subject. “Well, if you need any help or just want to talk to someone, you know where to find me.”
“Thanks,” she said, sounding genuinely appreciative, so maybe nothing was wrong after all. She dropped the eggs onto her plate and headed for her bedroom. “Gotta study the piece we’re going to start performing today. I’ll see you later!”
I forced down my worries and opened up the fridge to grab my raspberry jam. At the sight of my stash of cheese and grapes in the corner, my throat tightened for a totally different reason.
Those had been mainly for my familiar’s benefit. Deborah might have kept most of her human mind after her fellow joymancers had transferred her consciousness into the mouse’s body so she could watch over me as a supposed pet, but her tastes had definitely been influenced by her new state of being. Just a week ago, I’d have been adding a chunk of cheese, a few grapes, and some crackers to a plate so she could have her own breakfast.
I’d never be bringing her those little offerings again. I’d never have to lower my voice while we talked, me out loud and her inside my head through the familiar bon
d, to make sure my fearmancer dormmates didn’t realize I’d brought an intruder into their midst. I’d never hear her dry but affectionate voice calling me “Lorelei” the way no one had since I’d lost the parents who’d raised me.
Other than the glass dragon charm hanging from its chain around my neck, Deborah had been the only connection I’d still had to my life with the joymancers I’d thought of as Mom and Dad. She’d been a contrasting voice when the fearmancers tried to convince me of their ideals. And in the end, it’d turned out she’d had too much faith in her own community.
The joymancers in California had refused to listen to her or me when we’d tried to convince them I wanted a peaceful negotiation to get my birth mother back without the bloodshed. When I’d escaped, they’d tried to kill me. Deborah had thrown herself into a spell I hadn’t been fast enough to deflect and taken that blow in my place.
Her loss had left not just an emotional ache but a physical discomfort from the severed familiar bond. Over the days since, it had dulled but not vanished. The pain still throbbed faintly in my chest. I didn’t know how long it would take for it to fade completely, and maybe I didn’t want it to. I should remember the sacrifice she’d made for me.
With those solemn thoughts hanging over me, I nibbled my way through my toast. I was just finishing my breakfast when Victory and her two besties, Sinclair and Cressida, sauntered out of their respective bedrooms to converge on the dining table. Sinclair appeared to have been assigned to grab their chef-made pre-prepared breakfasts out of the fridge.
Victory didn’t look directly at me, but I felt her attention on me all the same. She flipped her light auburn waves over her shoulder with a huff. “Almost twice as many feebs wandering around campus now. It really is ridiculous. I guess we should just be glad they didn’t stick one of the newbies in our dorm.”
