by Martha Carr
With a collective groan, the freshmen pushed away from the tables and rose to do as instructed.
“When do we get to the actual alchemy part?” Summer asked, still firmly planted in her seat.
“Not today, Miss Flannerty.” Zimmer nodded toward the textbooks on the shelf. “If you don’t get up to grab your textbook, I’ll have to transfer you to a different class for Block Two. As far as I know, the only opening at this time of day is Combat Training.”
Summer hissed and shoved herself out of her chair to get in line.
As Amanda filed down the row of tables to join the other students, Grace leaned forward to whisper, “What’s up with the new girl?”
Amanda shrugged. “She likes bombs.”
So does Johnny. He had somebody make a Crystal-magic bomb for him too, only in a crossbow bolt instead of a rock.
Chapter Seven
Two and a half hours of Alchemy class went by a lot faster than two and a half hours of running an obstacle course and getting barked at by Mr. Petrov. When the alarm blared at 12:45 p.m. to signal the lunch break, every kid in the class shoved their textbooks into their backpacks and stood abruptly.
“No homework for this first week,” Zimmer shouted over the chaos of scooting chairs and zippers and heavy footsteps heading toward the classroom door. “Don’t get too comfortable. That’ll change real quick!”
“Man.” Jackson shook his head as he joined Amanda and Grace in the hall. “They need to make these classes shorter. What kind of idiot picked two and a half hours?”
Grace shrugged. “Probably the Light Elf, right?”
“What Light Elf?”
“The woman. You know, one of the bounty hunters who started this school.”
“Leira. Jasper Elf,” Amanda muttered, hiking her backpack higher on her shoulders now that the Alchemy textbook weighed it down.
“Yeah, her.” Grace shot the shifter girl a sidelong glance and a quick smirk. “You say her name as if you know her.”
“I mean, she was standing up there with Johnny and…that big guy on our first day here. We all saw her.”
“Johnny.” Jackson let out a low whistle. “Listen to you, Coulier. First-name basis with all the top bounty hunters, huh?”
“Well, when I live with one of them…”
“Yeah, yeah. We get it. You’re a twelve-year-old freshman who’s super special and knows all these important magicals. You live here now, don’t you? Like the rest of us.”
Amanda snorted and shook her head. “Because I want to be here.”
“Same old story, Coulier. You know what? I still have no idea what you are.”
“A super special twelve-year-old freshman.”
Grace cracked up laughing.
Jackson scoffed and turned to look over his shoulder down the hall. “Where the hell is Alex?”
“Probably mooning over Mrs. Zimmer,” Grace quipped.
“He’s not that stupid—oh. Yeah, he is.”
Alex filtered out of the Alchemy classroom with a dreamy smile on his face, lugging his backpack in one hand by the strap so it dragged across the floor. Zimmer stepped out of the room behind him with a raised eyebrow and leaned back against the doorway, folding her arms.
“You think he tried to put the moves on her?” Jackson asked.
“That would be seriously stupid on the first day of class.” Grace stared at their teacher, then finally turned around. “She doesn’t look too happy, though.”
“Hey, Goo-Goo Eyes!” Jackson tossed a hand in the air. “If you don’t hurry up, all the food will be gone before I get to tell you to grab me seconds!”
Alex started, blinked, then finally saw his friends in the hall and hurried after them. “I’m not getting you anything.”
“Yeah, like you didn’t get anything from Mrs. Zimmer, huh?” Jackson slung his arm roughly around the half-Wood Elf’s shoulders.
“Get off me.” Alex shrugged away from him and tossed the rest of his long brown ponytail over his shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t.”
Amanda’s stomach growled so loud, all four of them could hear it over the other conversations and loud footsteps of so many students moving through the halls of the main building. Her friends stopped and stared at her, and she looked straight ahead.
“Damn, Coulier. Sounds like you haven’t eaten in a week.”
“You watched me stuff my face this morning.”
“I thought I was hungry. You got some kinda feral animal in there or something?”
She shot Jackson a glance and tried to laugh it off, but her smile felt tight. “No.”
“I’m screwing with you.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder and grinned. “Better hurry up and get to lunch before you end up eating one of us. Race ya!”
The wizard took off down the hall with a wild laugh and disappeared through the crowd of students all heading that way.
Alex rolled his eyes and picked up the pace, finally slinging his backpack over his shoulder.
“He was joking.” Grace playfully nudged Amanda with her elbow. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.” Amanda walked beside the witch and couldn’t bring herself to look at the other girl. “It wasn’t funny.”
“He never is. Should we tell him?”
“And have to deal with a grumpy Jackson all day?” Amanda shook her head. “That’d be even worse.”
“Ha! Very true.”
A small smile returned to Amanda’s lips, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what the wizard had said. A feral animal inside me. He has no idea how close he was.
For a brief moment, she started to beat herself up about being so afraid to tell the other kids she was a shifter. Then she remembered what happened to her and why. Kidnapped from her home and sold at auction to the highest bidder at that stupid Monsters Ball. Or almost sold. Good thing the highest bidder had been Johnny Walker the bounty hunter, and there was no way he’d “paid” for her after the way he and Lisa had crashed that scumbag party. What really got her was the memory of the thugs who’d hunted her down a few miles from Johnny’s cabin in the swamp and attacked her right out in the open, even when she’d shifted to tell them she was a girl and not a wolf.
They didn’t care. None of them made it out alive after that.
She caught sight of Jackson slipping through the double front doors of the main building and wrinkled her nose.
Does he really think shifters eat people or was that another joke?
The outdoor cafeteria swarmed with students finally let out of their classes, all of them vying for a place in line in front of the buffet table and seats around the picnic tables.
Fortunately, the Academy of Necessary Magic had less than a hundred and twenty students enrolled for its first year. If they took on any more than that, they’d seriously have to rethink the way they did mealtimes.
Amanda piled her plate high with two massive sections of the giant sub sandwiches laid out across the length of the table—one with turkey and cheddar, the other with ham and provolone. Then she scooped up a heaping pile of potato salad, another of regular salad, and snuck an apple and a banana into her backpack just in case.
“Coulier!” Jackson shouted from a table under the pavilion. “You getting some of that pudding?”
She glanced at the giant glass bowl of chocolate pudding and shrugged before whacking down a large spoonful of it onto her plate.
“Hey, get me some too!”
“Dude. You already have some.” Alex pointed at the wizard’s plate.
“Can’t ever have enough pudding. Coulier!”
“Sorry.” She grabbed a spoon and lifted her plate. “It’s already touching the potato salad.”
Jackson slumped over onto the table. “Damnit.”
Grace shook her head and grabbed two napkins from the end of the table. “I bet we can find a few seats at a different table.”
“No, that’s okay. I�
�m gonna—”
“Oh, that’s right.” The witch shot Amanda a playful wink. “Lunchtime’s private.”
“It’s not private, exactly…”
“No, I get it. Trust me. It was hard enough to find alone time back in LA. Not like we had walls and bedroom doors underground or anything. If you need your space, you need your space.” Grace laughed as she headed toward the guys’ table. “See you after.”
“Okay.” Amanda watched her friend walk off, then glanced around the outdoor cafeteria and scanned the faces of the other students cracking down on lunch.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like having friends at the Academy. She did, although she would’ve been happy running around the swamps with Johnny, Rex, and Luther if coming here for school hadn’t been an option. Still, she could only take so much of being constantly surrounded by other kids who had no idea who she was or what she’d been through to get here. They only had an hour for lunch, and over the last six weeks while the other students got used to living in real buildings and sleeping in real beds again, Amanda had gotten used to spending lunch on her own.
She turned away from the buffet table and the kitchen building and headed almost directly north toward the edge of the campus.
The Academy of Necessary Magic had been built right in the middle of nowhere in Florida’s Everglades, which formed an easily recognizable boundary around the school’s campus—the natural border of the swamps themselves. Amanda had already picked her favorite spot by a group of mangroves, which offered enough privacy from anyone else who might bother to walk to the edge of the campus. She didn’t mind being seen—if anyone ever saw her. Mostly, it was to get away from the noise.
Funny. I spent my whole life in New York and only two months with Johnny, and I’m already trying to cut out the noise.
Not that she couldn’t hear most of the other students’ conversations from here anyway. Her shifter hearing made sure of that. At least here, at the edge of the swamp, she could also hear the birds and the wildlife moving through the reeds and the waterlogged flora. She could think about how nice it would be the next chance she got to shift and run around the swamp as she’d spent two months doing with Johnny’s coonhounds.
Johnny had tried to backtrack a little on the first day of the Academy’s opening—in his gruff and still weirdly shy way. He’d tried to tell her she didn’t have to be here if she didn’t want to, but Amanda had shot that thought right out of the air.
“I’m at an academy learning to be a bounty hunter,” she’d told him. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done!”
“It might not always be cool, kid,” he’d said. “You know that, right?”
Yeah. She knew that. The dwarf had probably meant it in a completely different capacity than she was feeling now—that being a bounty hunter wasn’t all explosions and fistfights and getting the bad guys on the first try. That was fine. Amanda didn’t expect the job she’d eventually get when she graduated to be easy, of course.
She hadn’t expected being around this many kids, all while keeping her shifter blood a secret—not to mention what she’d been through in the last three months—to be so hard.
That part wasn’t cool, either.
She set her plate down on the grass beside her and snatched up one of the sandwiches. It disappeared in three bites, and she quickly wolfed down the second before feeling even remotely full.
Ha. “Wolfed down.” The puns don’t get any better, either.
Halfway through the potato salad, something skittered across a soggy berm thirty feet in front of her. A brown-red streak darted across the mound of earth poking out of the swamp water, followed by a grunt and a squeal of terror before something snapped.
Amanda watched the berm until the red fox trotted through the reeds, a large rabbit dangling limply from its jaws. The animal turned toward her and met her gaze, its flanks heaving after the quick scuffle for its lunch.
Everybody does what they have to do. She nodded at the fox, and whether or not it understood the gesture, it darted through another stand of reeds and thick ferns and disappeared. Including me. Whatever it takes to get through school here so I can finally get the assholes who killed my family and stop anyone else from doing the same thing. After this, I won’t need a bounty hunter’s help anymore. I’ll be one.
She inhaled the rest of her potato salad, the regular salad tossed with a sweet vinaigrette, and all the pudding before she set the scraped-clean plate aside and let herself daydream. A run tonight would be perfect.
Chapter Eight
Their only class after lunch was the last class of the day—Illusions. Amanda slumped into her seat in Ms. Calsgrave’s classroom in the main building, already dreading whatever the course would entail.
The rest of the freshmen slowly filtered in, looking wiped out after a giant meal and the ridiculously long class periods. Grace claimed the desk next to Amanda and shrugged her backpack to the floor before sliding into the seat. “Finally. Something that makes sense.”
“How’s that?” Amanda rested her elbow on the desk and propped her chin up in one hand.
“Illusions. Spells. Actual magic this time.” The witch unzipped her backpack to pull out a notebook and pen. “I don’t care what they’re trying to call this place or what we’re supposed to be training to be at the end of it. It’s a magic school. Gotta be some kind of magic taught here. You know, beyond jungle-gym-climbing and bomb-making.”
Amanda snorted, but she still didn’t feel any better about this class. Practicing actual magic wasn’t something she had experience with, even before, when she’d thought she was merely another relatively normal kid with a relatively normal family.
Besides, it’s common knowledge that shifters can’t do spells.
Ms. Calsgrave sat quietly at her desk, her face hidden behind a black hardcover book with an engraved pentagram on the front that had been filled in with gold paint. The other students quieted on their own as the minutes ticked by and their Illusions teacher kept flipping through the pages.
Grace leaned toward Amanda and whispered, “What is she doing?”
“Reading?”
“Yeah, but… I mean, that’s not a school book. That’s for, like, humans who want to pretend they’re witches.”
Amanda shrugged.
Someone in the back of the room coughed loudly.
“Because my face is hidden behind a book doesn’t mean I can’t see you, Miss Porter.” Ms. Calsgrave’s voice didn’t come from the front of the room at her desk, but from the back by the open classroom door that none of the students had bothered to shut behind them. “Because you see me up there doesn’t mean that’s where I am, either.”
All the students turned in their chairs when the door swung swiftly closed with a loud thunk. The air in front of the door shimmered, and Ms. Calsgrave appeared from thin air with her hand still on the doorknob.
“What the—” Jackson jumped in his desk chair at the back of the room, glanced at the same teacher sitting behind the desk, then pointed at Calsgrave standing four feet away from him. “You…”
“This is Illusions class, Mr. Pris.” Calsgrave eyed him with bright blue eyes and a soft smile. “So the first lesson, of course, would be not to believe everything you see.”
She pointed at the second version of her sitting behind the desk, and the illusion shimmered away into nothing.
“Wait, we get to learn how to be invisible?” Jasmine’s mouth hung open.
“That’s awesome!” Evan shouted.
Ms. Calsgrave shook her head as she headed down the side of the room toward her desk. “Awesome? Definitely. Not this year, though. Eventually, you’ll get to this point, but everyone has to start at the beginning. A cloaking illusion is not beginner-level magic.”
“Man, that’s creepy.” Jackson shuddered. “How long were you standing there?”
The teacher either didn’t hear his question or didn’t think it was worth answering. She merely sat behind her de
sk and looked up to gaze across the faces of her students. “Illusions are often overlooked in discussions of useful magic, especially within the disciplines all of you are here at this school to master. What is most important for you to learn here is the power of your resourcefulness. When all else fails, illusions are a resource you can always call upon to use. Combat and weapons technology and alchemical arms are all very well and good. However, what happens if you’re stripped of your ability to use any of those skills? It’s hardly plausible to carry around a stripping agent in your back pocket for the rest of your life. Illusions can’t be taken from you, stolen, broken, or manipulated, as long as you learn how to master their various forms for whatever purposes you want.”
“Yeesh.” Tommy sniggered and jerked his chin at Evan sitting beside him. “Sounds like somebody’s trying to one-up Zimmer.”
“What it sounds like, Mr. Brunsen, is you’re not paying attention.”
Tommy sat up straight in his chair and immediately faced her.
“The Academy’s curriculum wasn’t chosen by some arbitrary want to pit various disciplines against each other. Every one of the classes you’ll take during your four years at this school is essential for a well-rounded education in…alternative life choices. Which we all know is already ingrained in you. That’s why you’re here. So yes. You’ll learn how to defend yourself physically and with magic. You’ll also move up through your classes to discover how to use what you’ve learned for offensive tactics as well. This class is about how to make sure you don’t get caught with your pants down.
“Obviously, now that magic has been out in the open for the last few decades—and I am talking about humans’ awareness of our existence—most magicals think the art of casting illusions has lost both its luster and its necessity. They’re wrong. There’s a delicate balance between using illusions for fun and casting them so precisely and accurately that no one can tell the difference between what’s real and what you’ve created. My demonstration, for example. Both cloaking and reproduction illusions will be second-nature to you by the time you graduate.”
