by Theresa Kay
“It wasn’t Mr. Davis,” I say. “There was an OSA agent there, Wright; he’s the one who ran the exercise.”
“Even worse,” says Burke.
“And it wasn’t a combat spell,” I say. “Not the spell I used anyway. It was supposed to be a light spell, but it . . . I don’t know. Suddenly I could see it, how I could change it, and I just did.”
His nostrils flare. “Are you telling me you were able to alter a light spell to the degree you did on pure instinct?”
“I guess so?”
“Impossible.” He shakes his head. “There is no precedent for—”
I scoff, some of my confusion retreating to be replaced with anger. “Is there a precedent for anything about me? A witch raised by shifters? Not to mention, I think you and I both know there’s something different about me and my magic that has nothing at all to do with my upbringing. Helen was worried enough to hide me, and no one even knows who my biological father is. Maybe it’s time to face that fact and find some real answers?” I fling my hands out by my shoulders. “You know, before I accidentally blow someone up because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and people keep forcing me to do it anyway.”
“I agree we need answers about your past and your magic. However, OSA does not,” he stops, sighs, and then motions for me to sit back down. “OSA does not take well to things—or people—they cannot explain, and with all the turmoil surrounding what happened on the St. James estate, I am concerned they might take too much of an interest in you. They are already suspicious of you because of your relationship with Ms. Martin; you do not want to draw their attention any further.”
“How am I supposed to—”
Burke holds up a hand as footsteps sound from outside. “It was an energy ball,” he hisses under his breath. “Not a spell.”
“But—”
“An energy ball, Ms. Andras.” He gracefully rises to his feet just as the door opens and Agent Callahan comes storming in.
“What the hell kind of school are you running, Desmond?” bellows Callahan. “If the Dumont kid is permanently damaged, his father will have your head”—his gaze falls on me—“and probably hers too. Wright said she was insubordinate and completely out of control.”
What? I jerk backward in my seat.
Burke gives me the slightest shake of his head. “Adrian Dumont will be perfectly fine,” he says. Whether he’s telling the truth or trying to placate the guy, I have no idea. “The incident was merely an accident, a dangerous one yes, but an accident all the same. I was just now determining what Ms. Andras’s punishment should be.”
Callahan glares at me before returning his gaze to Burke. “I’ll let you handle it this time, but if anything like this happens again, it will be out of your hands.”
Burke dips his chin in a curt nod of acknowledgment, and then Callahan spins on his heel and leaves. Burke walks over to shut the door before returning to sit behind his desk. “I need you to keep a much lower profile while OSA remains on campus and the investigation is ongoing. You absolutely cannot let anything like today’s events happen again,” he says.
“No kidding,” I say. “It wasn’t like I was trying to draw attention to myself.”
“I did not think you were.” He leans back in his chair. “Tell me more about what happened in class.”
I explain about Agent Wright’s instructions, how he locked my feet in place, and how I kept doing the light spell over and over again until . . . bam, Adrian was down and everyone was yelling.
“Control has always been an issue for you, something you have struggled with even from the beginning, correct?” he asks, raising a brow.
“Yeah. Pretty much,” I say.
“Basil tells me you have plenty of raw power, more than he has observed in any witch in years.”
I shrug. “I have no idea if that’s true or not. I don’t exactly have a point of reference.”
“It is my understanding that in your time with the shifters you engaged in regular physical activity. Have you kept that up here at Ravencrest?”
“Not really . . . I think I ran around the lake once and then whatever we’ve done in PE,” I say. “Why?”
“It seems as if you might have pulled too much magical energy and that, combined with your lack of control and your frustration with Agent Wright, ended up in you blasting your friend instead of simply releasing the magic.” He pauses to study me before continuing. “Your difficulties might simply be a side effect of your powers being bound or being without them for so long. Younger witches and those first coming into their powers sometimes have similar problems. Many of them use physical activity to . . . I suppose burn off excess energy would be the best way to phrase it. I would recommend you do so as well.”
“I guess I could do that,” I say. The concept sounds simple enough, and I’m not adverse to exercise.
“It will be a start, and perhaps it will help you gain some much-needed control over your powers.”
“I don’t know if it makes a difference or not, but my control problem seems worse since Bernadette hit me with that paralyzing spell.”
He pauses and taps a finger against his chin, before asking, “How so?”
My mind flashes to that weird magical shield I created and the way I broke the spell Bernadette put on Tristan without really trying. “My magic is stronger and behaves kind of strangely. I find myself acting on instinct and doing things I’ve never learned, but if I think too hard about it, everything goes sideways. Like with the light spell earlier. Once I saw Adrian’s expression at whatever I did, my control was gone and I ended up blasting him across the room because I couldn’t rein the spell back in.” I pause for a second before adding, “And what you mentioned earlier about ‘releasing’ magic? I have no idea how to do that.”
His brows rise. “Then I will certainly request Basil work on that with you.” He pauses and rubs his chin. “Has Basil said much about the binding spell placed on you?”
“Not really.”
“I wonder . . .” He taps one finger against his lips absentmindedly. “Perhaps the binding spell was not broken completely, and the spell from Bernadette jarred it loose? Or maybe there was a second binding spell?” He’s not talking to me, more thinking out loud, so I don’t respond. Not that I have any more answers than he does. “I will talk it over with Basil and see what his thoughts are on the matter. Return to your dorm room for now. I imagine it has been an exhausting day for you.”
I am exhausted and would love nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide under the covers, but I’m sick of sitting on the sidelines of my own life.
“No,” I say, leaving Burke to blink as I continue, “I won’t go back to my room while you and Basil sit around and discuss me and my life. This involves me, and I deserve to be a part of it.”
“Another day, after I—”
“No,” I repeat. “Not when you’re telling me to lie to OSA. I understand being vague about the whole Penny thing, but wasn’t your whole spiel when I first came here that being under OSA jurisdiction was a good thing? That OSA would keep the Coven Council away from me and off my parent’s backs?”
“The situation is complicated.”
“Of course it is!” I throw up my hands. “But keeping me in the dark isn’t going to help anything.”
“You’re correct.” Burke pauses for a beat then sighs and takes his glasses off. Resting the hand with his glasses on the desk, he massages his nose with the fingers of the other hand then glances at me. “But the question is, how far can I trust you?”
Trust me? I gape at him, too stunned to find any words.
“You knew about Penelope, but you did not tell anyone. Why is that?”
I blink. “She asked for my help. I thought . . . I thought I was being a friend. And I couldn’t possibly have been the only person who knew. I mean, she was Nikiforov’s TA. How did he not know about her?”
Burke shakes his head. “Sergei has assured me he had no idea, and he w
ould have no reason to hide the knowledge.”
“And I would? How am I the untrustworthy one in this scenario? I didn’t ask to come here. Basil practically had to drag me, and you sat there and told me how things were going to be without giving me any other options.” I rise to my feet. “Is this all some sort of messed up game to you people? Nothing you do makes any sense. At least my family, those shifters everyone here looks down on, didn’t try to hide things from me.”
“Except for the truth about your magic and your parentage,” he says, his voice flat and his expression bland.
I narrow my eyes. “Yeah, except for that. But it seems like that whole mess was also created by a witch. Or, rather, two of them since I doubt mine was an immaculate conception. I didn’t ask for any of this, and the only reason I’m still here is to protect my parents from the Coven Council.”
He stares at me with an expression very reminiscent of my Uncle Connor’s ‘now think about that for a while’ look.
Realization washes over me, and I sit down. “And that’s why, isn’t it? Because I have no actual loyalty to Ravencrest? To you? To witches in general? So . . . I’m some sort of wild card none of you know how to deal with.” I lean across the desk. “I have no loyalty to OSA either.”
“Who do you have loyalty to, Ms. Andras? Perhaps the group Penelope was a part of?” he asks, his voice growing harder.
I lean away from him. “The group . . .? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You have heard, I am certain, of some witches being attacked over the past few months, correct?”
I nod.
“As far as OSA can tell, the violence has all been the responsibility of a single group, and Penelope was a part of this group.” He taps his finger against the desk. “OSA believes the group has recently escalated to murder. Five witches have been killed in the past two weeks, all of them mauled in such a way as to leave no doubt that shifters are responsible. A member of this violent group went unnoticed on campus for who knows how long, and she ended up biting and turning a prominent witch. It is all I can do to prevent OSA from locking down campus and using even harsher methods of locating any remaining traitors.”
When that gets him no response except for widened eyes, he continues, “I have not brought my suspicions to anyone’s attention, but it seems rather . . . convenient that Tristan was attacked when he left campus with you right after the two of you ran into Penelope.”
It takes a second for his words to fully register. “Are you accusing me of setting Tristan up? I rescued him. He told me to leave, and I still went after him. Not only that, do you know what that looked like to my family? Like I defended a St. James against shifters, put a shifter in the hospital for a person who would just as likely not bother to spit on them if they were on fire.”
And the memory of having to explain all that to Reid, my shifter cousin and best friend, makes me ill. I wouldn’t have changed anything I did that evening, and the shifters were the bad guys that evening, but I wish I’d never been placed in a situation where I had to take sides against shifters.
Burke’s watching my face closely, his eyes slightly narrowed, and his head tilted to the side. Finally, he nods as if coming to some sort of internal decision. “I believe you.”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes. “My parents said I could trust you, that you were on my side. But what side is that exactly?”
“The side attempting to keep the peace,” he says. “I am on your side, provided you are being honest with me. You cannot blame me for questioning your motives when you called Ms. Martin a friend and you brought her to the St. James estate.”
“I didn’t ask her to come with me that night,” I say. “And I had no idea she was involved with any sort of group. How could I have known?”
I think over every interaction I ever had with Penny. Sure, that night at the St. James estate she looked malicious and vindictive, but I never got that impression from her before that. Something changed the night Isobel was kidnapped though. What was it?
“She was in the woods,” I say, still running over the memories. “That night. She found me outside after I made my way to the quad, still suffering the effect of Bernadette’s spell. She said she’d seen a light in your office, so she had to have been behind the building. I was too out of it then—and am just now realizing I clearly didn’t have all the pieces at the time—to notice the change in her, to question what the hell she was doing out there that night.”
Burke leans back in his chair. “Could she have been meeting someone? Another accomplice on campus perhaps?”
“Maybe? Probably? I don’t know.”
The two of us sit here, puzzling over that.
And there was something else weird that night . . .
“She said my eyes changed colors.”
Burke jerks backward. “Changed colors?”
“When I was fighting off the spell, she said my eyes flashed gold.” I pause. “She also seemed to know a hell of a lot more than she should’ve the night I manifested.”
“The night you manifested?”
“She was there. She was the shifter I stepped in to rescue or whatever.”
He gives me a blank look. “All Basil ever told me was that you were Helen’s child and she had left instructions for Basil to be contacted should the binding spell ever fail and your powers manifest.”
I explain about the party and the confrontation between Penny and the three witches that I stepped into.
“Interesting.” He rubs his chin. “There is definitely something unique about your powers, about you, and I think we need to figure out what it is. I will ask Basil to look further into the binding spell and your magic.”
“Which is exactly what Isobel was doing,” I say. “And I think that’s why she’s currently missing two weeks’ worth of memories, because she found something out that somebody didn’t want her to.”
Burke purses his lips. “I will tell Basil to be very discreet in his inquiries as to not draw any attention to what he is doing. I cannot guarantee he will find anything, or that what he does find will be helpful, but he has access to sources of information that you and I do not. You must promise me that you will have Ms. Cardosa stay out of it from here on. Any sort of magic that affects the mind is dangerous and unpredictable, and I do not want her to suffer any further injury.” Burke leans his elbows on the desk and rests his chin in his hands. “And until we know more, you need to keep your head down. I do not want any attention drawn to you if at all possible, especially since we have no idea what is truly going on.”
“Yeah . . . sure. That shouldn’t be too hard.”
Not.
When I get to my dorm, I find Isobel sitting at her desk and working on what looks to be some sort of sigil-related assignment. She glances up at me as I enter.
“You don’t look so great,” she says as she closes her textbook and gives me her full attention.
“I don’t feel so great,” I say as I plop down on my bed. “Today’s been . . . weird.”
“I heard bits and pieces around campus. Something about you throwing Adrian across the room with a light spell? What the hell happened?”
I lie back with my hands behind my head as I give her a brief rundown of what happened in PE with Adrian. “You know what it was like when I first started learning spells. My powers were never very cooperative to begin with, but now they’re all over the place. I think it might have something to do with the spell Bernadette hit me with. Everything’s been a little wonky since then. Burke suggested that it could also be related to the binding spell, that it wasn’t completely broken the first time or maybe there was a second one layered underneath, and Bernadette’s spell interacted with it in a weird way.”
Isobel stares into the distance and nods absentmindedly. “There aren’t many studies on interactions between spells because you can never be sure what might happen, but I can check the library and see if I can find any information on how a binding spell m
ight—”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “I know you want to brush it off as something else, but I think it was your research into my past and my magic that led to you being dosed. We have no idea what information might have triggered someone to erase your memories. I don’t want you stumbling over it again if I can help it. Whatever information you found could put you in even worse danger, and I don’t want to be responsible for that.” I pause. “I don’t want you to get hurt, and I kind of promised Burke I’d get you to stay out of it. Let Basil do the research into the binding spell. I don’t think anyone’s going to be dosing him.”
She opens her mouth like she wants to argue but then closes it and shakes her head. “If that’s what you think is best.”
“I do.” I smile, hoping to soften some of the sting of telling her to back off. “Besides, there are plenty of other things you can help me with that won’t get you hurt.”
“Like?”
“Um, studying? Figuring out how to control my spells? Just because I’m more powerful or whatever now doesn’t mean I’m any better at most of this stuff,” I say.
She comes to sit down next to me on my bed. “And maybe deciding what to do about contacting your grandparents?”
“That, too, I guess.” I sit up so I’m resting with my back against the headboard. “I’ve always known I was adopted, but Mom and Dad are my parents; Uncle Connor and Reid are my family . . . What if Nikolas and Thea Andras try to take me from that? What if they expect me to be something or someone I’m not? Sure, I’ve embraced the Andras name here because I had to, but that’s not who I am. No matter how powerful I might get, I can’t imagine I’ll ever be some high-society witch when all I really am is Selene Monroe, a Blank.”
Isobel grabs my hand. “That’s not all you are, and getting to know your grandparents can’t change who your family is. Blood doesn’t make a family, people do. Remember when I told you about me and my little brother being raised by my grandmother after our parents died in a car accident? She’s not really my grandmother. Mateo, my little brother, is my half-brother. We only share a mother. My step-father came into my life when I was two, and he was the only father I ever knew. His mother is the one who took me and my brother in. My grandmother could’ve taken my brother and left me to the foster system, but she didn’t. Even though she isn’t related to me by blood, that doesn’t make us any less of a family. She chose me, just like your shifter family chose you.”
