The Circle

by Val St. Crowe

  “No,” he said. “And you’re ignoring my question.”

  “There was a question in there? Because I didn’t hear one.”

  He took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. “You’re not like your sister.”

  “How well did you know my sister?” Inside, I was a tightly coiled spring. How dare he keep bringing her up?

  “I knew her well enough,” he said. “You’re a lot mouthier than she was.”

  “What’d you do to her?” I raised my eyebrows. “Just admit it to me, huh? That’ll make things a lot easier.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “You can play dumb all you want, but I’m not an idiot. Why else would you want me to leave so badly, huh? Because you’re afraid that I’ll find out what you did to her and you don’t want—”

  “You think I killed your sister.” His voice was flat.

  “You going to deny it?”

  He sucked on his cigarette, as if considering it. “That’s why you’re here.” He tossed the cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. “Shit.”

  “That container there is for butts.” I pointed. “You allergic to putting a cigarette out in a normal place? You like littering? You’re such a—”

  He put his finger against my lips, stopping my voice. “Stop.”

  I was so startled at his touch that my words died in my throat.

  He took a step back, bent over, picked up the cigarette butt and deposited it in the receptacle. It was one of those deals with the long skinny neck and the tiny hole at the top. I guessed they put out the fire and stopped the smoke or something. He gave me a look, one that said, There? Happy?

  I gritted my teeth.

  He scuffed a toe of his boot against the ground. “So, you’re here to find out what happened to Enid, and you’re not going to leave until you do.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Shit,” he said again. He glowered at me.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “I already know what happened. You did it. All I need to know is why. You do it for your girlfriend? Tess? Maybe she was jealous because Enid didn’t have to wear makeup an inch thick to look good?”

  “Tess isn’t my girlfriend,” he said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “And—”

  “Not your girlfriend? So, what? She’s just a girl you summon to be a prop when you’re trying to terrorize first years out of their dorm rooms?”

  “Basically,” he said. “Look, the pair bonding thing, it’s so… human.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You want to try to fit in here, you should figure that out,” he said.

  “People pair bond,” I said. “Most occultists get married, don’t they? Anyway, whatever, we’re getting off topic. You were about to explain why you murdered my sister.”

  “I didn’t murder your sister,” he said, but he didn’t meet my gaze when he said it. “Enid… she got into some stuff that she shouldn’t have gotten into. It ended up being over her head. She knew the risks, but she didn’t care. But she never wanted you to come here.” He gestured around. “All I’m doing is delivering her message. Hell, I don’t even know why I’m bothering.” He looked up at the trees criss-crossing the sky. “I tried. I tried, okay?”

  “Who are you talking to?” I said.

  He swung his gaze back down to me and pinned me with his dark eyes. His coal-black eyelashes were as astonishing as they’d been the first time I’d seen him. “You want to hang around here, play Veronica Mars, go for it. What the hell do I care? You’re officially not my problem anymore. Got it?”

  “I was never your problem,” I said.

  He snorted. He turned and started down the sidewalk, walking away from me.

  “Hey,” I called after him. “This project we’re supposed to do? I don’t want anything to do with you, all right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  One of the other members of the Black Circle came around the corner. He had chin-length wavy blond hair and he looked too muscular for his age too. He nodded in greeting. “Phist, where the hell you been? Tess and Gina are waiting in the front of the building, both having coronaries. I think they’re planning what they’re going to wear to your funeral already.”

  “I been nowhere,” said Phist. He tossed a glance over his shoulder. “With nobody.”

  I flipped him off.

  He laughed. Then he winked at me.

  Seriously?

  Phist turned back to his friend. “Well, you know what they say. Die young, leave a pretty corpse, right?” They fell into step together and walked past me.

  I watched them go, seething.

  “Whoa,” said a voice.

  I whirled.

  Lev stepped out from behind a tree. “You’re Enid Astaroth’s sister?”

  “You were spying on me.” I glared at him.

  “Um, no,” said Lev.

  “You were hiding behind a tree—”

  “I wasn’t hiding, I was sitting. You came out and didn’t see me. What was I supposed to do? Stand up, wave my arms and be like, ‘I’m here, I’m here’?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I stalked down the sidewalk.

  Lev hurried to catch up with me. “Wait up, come on.”

  “Give me one good reason why I should.”

  “Because you’re trying to solve your sister’s murder, and I can help,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “One condition, though,” he said. “You let me film it.”

  I stopped in my tracks and turned to face him, completely floored. “What?”

  “Film it,” he said. “I’ll make a documentary about it. It will be awesome. I’ve always wanted to make a documentary, but I never had the right sort of topic. This is great, though. True crime. It’ll be like Serial.”

  “No,” I said. “No, that’s insane.” I started walking again.

  “Is it because you think that I wouldn’t be good at making a documentary, because I do a lot of video editing,” he said, falling into step with me. “I have a YouTube channel. I do a lot of reviews and theory vids, that kind of thing. Mostly about Star Wars. Mostly about the sequel trilogy.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “Big fan of Adam Driver,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Something about the guy. He’s like vulnerable and yet powerful. He’s not conventionally handsome, but he’s breathtaking, you know? His voice? His voice just gets inside me and—”

  “Adam Driver’s great,” I said. “But, um, I don’t see how cutting together a bunch of footage of him shirtless means you can make a documentary.”

  “I can, though.”

  “And even if you could, you can’t make a documentary about Hellespointe or about the occultist community or about magic. We keep all this hidden from the human world. If anyone knew—”

  “People will think it’s fiction,” he said. “Like a fake documentary. Like The Last Exorcism.”

  “That’s the found footage movie you use as an example?”

  “What would you use?”

  “I don’t know? Blair Witch? Tropemaker?”

  He shrugged. “Never seen it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What? We weren’t even, like, born when it came out.”

  “Is this your criteria for judging all movies?”

  “I heard it was stupid. There was a lot of snot.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Listen, all this aside, you can’t make a documentary of me, and I don’t need your help figuring out what happened to my sister.”

  “You so do,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.” He caught me by the arm. “Look, I remember your sister. I’m not saying she and I were, like, friends, considering she was in the Black Circle and all, and they’re a little, you know, cliquey, but I was here last year when it all went down, and if you want to figure out what happened, I’m a resource you should take advantage of.”
>
  I sighed. He kind of had a point here.

  “I see what you’re saying about the documentary, though. Maybe it’s not a great idea to film about the magical community. The Acclasia might not like that.”

  “You think?”

  “So, that’s off the table. But, come on, let me help. I’ll be the Sharona to your Monk or whatever, yeah?”

  I shook my head. “You have a very strange pool of pop-culture references, I gotta say.”

  “You don’t like Monk? Who doesn’t like Monk?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Look, you should know that I’m not going to simply turn over what I find to the school administration or something. Once I have proof, I’m going to go after the people who did this to her.”

  “You’re not laced,” he said. “You could never—”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “Then I get myself killed.” My nostrils flared. “I’m all in, okay? If you don’t want to be part of that, maybe you should stay clear.”

  He chewed on his bottom lip. “Whoa, this just got really intense.”

  I rolled my eyes again. I started to walk.

  He came after me. “Suther, look, I’m in, but I’m going to talk you out of suicide missions, okay?”

  “You can try,” I muttered.

  “Okay,” he said.

  We walked.

  “So, why do you think it’s Phist?” he said.

  “He’s been following me around since I got here, trying to convince me to leave the school,” I said. “Also, he’s a dick.”

  “Yeah,” said Lev. “He’s pretty much an asshole. But nice to look at, am I right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But being attractive doesn’t make someone not a killer.” I paused. “Enid was really in the Black Circle?”

  “Totally,” said Lev.

  “Did you ever see her with Phist?”

  “All the girls are always draped all over the guys in the Circle,” said Lev. “I don’t get why they’d volunteer for it. It’s like they sign up to be scarves or something. Living accessories. Takes the women’s movement back centuries, you know?”

  “Enid was like that?” I made a face.

  “Well, to be fair, I can’t remember specifics,” said Lev. “I tended to think of them all as interchangeable. There’s the Black Circle in the corner. They’re all over each other, as usual. What’s new?”

  “Eew.” I grimaced. “That’s not like Enid. She would never do that.”

  “Maybe you didn’t know your sister as well as you think you did,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No, I knew her. I knew her better than anyone else.” Enid and I had grown up together. We’d only been a year apart in age, and we’d been inseparable. When we’d discovered our magical abilities, we’d gotten even closer. “Listen, maybe there is something you can help me with.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “The last time I heard from Enid, she called me. It was late at night, and I didn’t pick up. She left a message on my voicemail. She told me that she loved me, and that, no matter what, I should never come to Hellespointe.”

  “Well, it’s good to know you honored her wishes.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I had to come. Anyway, in the background, I heard someone shouting something. It was like a countdown? There was a lot of yelling and clapping and stuff like that?”

  “The fights,” said Lev.

  “The what?”

  “Every Friday,” said Lev. “Which, coincidentally enough, is tonight. I’ll take you.”

  * * *

  Around 9:00, Lev knocked on my door. He looked me over. “Change,” he ordered.

  “What?” I said, looking down at my clothes. I was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of black pants.

  “You look like you’re trying to pull off a jewel heist,” he said.

  “I’m trying to look inconspicuous.”

  “You’re going to stand out like a sore thumb,” he said. “At least put something on over it.” He went through my closet and pulled out an oversized button-up shirt which was blue. He tossed it at me.

  I shrugged into the shirt, sighing. “You know, we really have to talk about you and your ideas about wardrobe.”

  “Talk all you want, I’m probably not going to change,” he said cheerfully. “And you are. Your clothes, that is. I’m going to make you change clothes every time you’re wearing the wrong thing.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We going to the fights now or what?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We left the dorm and went around back, heading straight into the woods that flanked the building. There was a small path, and we had to walk single file.

  “The fights aren’t technically, like, allowed,” said Lev. “But unless they get too loud, the administration usually pretends they don’t know they’re going on.”

  “But they do know,” I said.

  “Everyone knows. It’s a weekly tradition,” he said. “They happen, and the Black Circle runs bets. They run bets on everything, though. Like, I’m sure you heard in class the other day when people were happy to find out the semester project was transmogrify.”

  “People bet on that?”

  “Yeah, there were a bunch of different predictions,” said Lev. “People put down money on it.”

  After winding through the woods for some time, we finally emerged in a clearing in the woods. A valley spread out in front of us, and it had been turned into an outdoor amphitheater. Levels of seating had been built into the hill, circling around the stage, which sat down in the bottom of the valley. The sun was going down and the sky was streaked with reds and purples. Stars were coming out in the sky.

  The amphitheater was full of people, students from school. They had cans of beer and bottles of liquor. They were smoking cigarettes. They were laughing and talking and looking down onto the stage, where two shirtless guys were circling each other, magic crackling in orange sparks from their clenched fists.

  Lev and I came to a stop at the top of the amphitheater, peering down.

  “It’s not always students,” said Lev. “Sometimes, they fight other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like animals,” he said. “One time, demons.”

  “Demons? How does that work?”

  “It doesn’t work,” he said. “They can’t really harm each other, since they’re pure spirit. It was kind of a boring fight, and it took a lot of power to keep them from escaping.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “They keep talking about fighting demonborn, but that hasn’t happened.”

  “That sounds insanely dangerous,” I said, shocked. Demonborn were abominations. No one knew exactly how or why they even existed. They were half-demon, half-human. They were always born to human women, because men couldn’t impregnate demons, considering demons were pure spirit. I wasn’t even really clear on how a demon could impregnate a woman. But it happened, and the demonborn were the result. They were fiercely powerful, winged humanoid creatures, and they hated occultists. My parents had been killed by demonborn.

  There had been a series of attacks years ago, basically a war. But eventually, the demonborn had been driven back. They still killed here and there, but they weren’t as powerful. Their numbers had been thinned.

  “Totally,” said Lev. “Maybe female demonborn, I guess. It’s not like they don’t have—” He broke off. “I mean, um, no demonborn fights.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What were you going to say? They don’t have what?”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said. “Words were just coming out of my mouth. Meaningless words. Look, they do a countdown whenever someone goes down.”

  He pointed.

  On the stage, one of the men had his knee in the other guy’s back.

  Someone was counting down. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six—”

  The other guy threw off the first
man, getting back to his feet.

  “That what you heard on the phone with your sister?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  On stage, one of the men drove a sparking fist into the other man’s nose.

  “It must be a fist fight tonight,” said Lev. “They like doing those.”

  “They’re using magic, though,” I said. “Why use their fists?”

  “They can punch harder with magic,” said Lev. “Who understands boys?”

  I chuckled. “You’re a boy.”

  “Barely,” he said, sighing. “I mean, not that I find women understandable either. I’m like a third gender.”

  I turned to study him, not sure how to respond to that. It must be a very strange way to feel. Lonely. Maybe I was being too hard on Lev.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Stop feeling sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for me. Who wants to understand the allure in punching other people for fun?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Sometimes, they do other stuff,” he said. “Full on magical battles. Sometimes, it’s all spells that you gather in your hand and throw. There are all kinds of different permutations.”

  I watched the bodies of the two guys, and I had to admit that I was mesmerized by their sweat-sheened muscular forms moving and gleaming under the newly risen moon. My lips parted.

  Lev chuckled, low in his throat. “Yeah, the fights aren’t all bad.”

  I turned away, embarrassed.

  “You want to get something to drink?” He pointed. “I think they’re selling hard ciders down there.”

  “Oh, I’m not legal to drink,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not like they’re legal to sell alcohol,” he said, laughing.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Right. Sure. Fine.”

  “Suther, you’ve had a hard cider before, right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  * * *

  Okay, so that was a lie. It wasn’t as if I’d never had anything alcoholic to drink, but I had to admit I wasn’t exactly well-versed in drinking. I’d never been drunk. I couldn’t really figure out how anyone managed to choke down enough of that disgusting-tasting liquid to get drunk in the first place.

  But then I tried the hard cider.

  Oh.

  That tasted really good. Hell.