The awful, disjointed, sound I hear is the driver’s voice.
Abacus gets out of the car, a wily smile on his face. As soon as he’s clear of the door, a long leg emerges from the bottom of the vehicle and slams it shut behind him. I gag and take another shuddering step away so that my back presses against the iron gate.
“Come on now,” Abacus says, brushing me aside to unlock the gate at my back. “You’re made of stiffer stuff than that. At least, I hope you are. Or you won’t last long here.”
A massive metal key sends the gates to the academy swinging open, and without waiting for me, he strides inside. I wait only half a second, until another one of those spidery legs appears out from under the car, before dashing in after him.
I lose my breath running up the stairs leading to the entrance, trying to keep up before some other terrifying creature comes out from behind a corner. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more. Witches were not made for running. We have spells for that.
The door to the great hall doesn’t require a key. They fly open with a wave of Abacus’ wand, sending a couple servants skittering out of sight. Something doesn’t seem quite right about the way they move, but the same could be said about everything I’ve seen here.
Just, not quite right.
Aside from what appears to be messenger bats swooping overhead, the main hall is empty.
We pass under a massive unlit chandelier, between the two curved staircases leading up to the second floor, and through another set of doors leading into a sort of ballroom beyond. A wall of windows looks out into the grounds on the other side, in the center of which is a giant pool—almost more like a lake—of black water.
A middle-aged woman stands on a stage that’s been constructed in front of the windows. Her mouth still hangs open as she’s interrupted mid-speech by our sudden arrival. All in front of her, turning to face us, is a mass of students dressed in the all-black uniform of The Academy of the Dark Arts.
And all of them, save those turning their heads to whisper to each other, are staring at me.
I take it intrusions like this are not all that common.
“Headmistress Evanora,” Abacus announces, sweeping down into a deep bow. As he does, all the students in the room return the gesture.
“Abacus,” the headmistress says, her voice sounding just a tad strained, “you’re late.”
“But I come bearing gifts,” Abacus replies, making a flourish in my direction. “Let me introduce you to . . .” Here he adds a whispered, “Wren, step up,” before he continues. “This is Wren Davies, the newest Dark Witch assigned to our humble academy.”
I don’t know what I expected, but it isn’t the silence that follows.
The faces trained on me do not smile, don’t show any sign that they’re happy I’m here. If anything, they look almost . . . angry.
Then, from the back of the crowd, a voice calls out. “If she’s a Dark Witch, then what’s wrong with her aura?”
The crowd parts a bit, and a boy steps out from where he stands close to the stage. The headmistress behind him looks on as he points at me accusatorially.
Even Abacus is taken aback. He steps to the side, looking me over more carefully.
I shrink in my own skin.
As if it wasn’t bad enough being told I’m not the Highborne Witch I thought I was, now I’m not a Dark Witch either?
I glance at Abacus, trying to keep my voice low. “What is it? What’s wrong with me?”
He’s looking at me strangely now, but he doesn’t answer my question. He steps up and puts an arm on each of my shoulders, shoving me forward closer to the crowd.
“She’s as much a Dark Witch as any of us,” Abacus says, his voice growing louder as if it can drown out the distrust in the others’ eyes as they look at me. “The circumstances bringing her here are a bit unusual, I’ll admit . . . but she’s Dark at her core, you can be sure of that.”
He reaches over for my right arm, lifting it up so that the pitch-black wand in my hand is high enough for all to see. Even here, the sight of it causes a stir in the crowd.
“What is it?” I hiss, not so quietly this time. I want answers, but once again, I’m ignored.
At least this time the headmistress steps down from the platform and starts rushing over through the crowd. She waves an arm behind her, and another professor steps up onto the platform and starts reading out the announcements that we interrupted earlier. I catch snippets of it—something about staying out of the graveyards until after All Hallows’ Eve and making sure to double check all hardboiled eggs prior to eating—before I’m once again rushed out of an assembly and back into the front hall.
The doors swing shut behind us with a resounding echo, casting us in silence once more.
Chapter Six
The headmistress’s office is surprisingly small with dark paneled walls lined with shelves of books and magical artifacts. A glass case in the corner holds skulls of all kinds—both human and animal—but each with something decidedly wrong with it. A human with a second nasal cavity. An owl with no eyes. Two horse skulls fused together at the nape of the neck.
Behind her desk, glass doors open onto a small balcony that does not look down at the lake I saw before. The view beyond is that of a massive greenhouse. Panels of glass arch overhead. Down below, picking through the rows of wicked-looking plants, are Dark Witch students in thick leather overalls.
Headmistress Evanora sees my gaze and steps up to the window beside me. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?” she says, surprisingly gently. After a second, she reaches up to pull a long cord so that curtains drop down in front of the glass. When she pulls the cord again, the curtains sweep back—revealing the school grounds surrounding the dark pool.
“The first lesson to learn here at the academy,” she says, looking at me sharply, “Is to never trust your eyes. Nothing here is ever quite what it seems.”
“If you’re finished telling riddles, I really do have to be off,” Abacus says from across the room.
Headmistress Evanora calmly walks to her desk and sits behind it with the grace of a gazelle. Meanwhile, I nearly crash headfirst through the window when I accidentally get scared by my own reflection in the glass.
“If it were anyone else, Abacus, I’d be severely cross.”
“I count myself lucky then,” Abacus says, nodding his head. He sticks one hand into the pocket of his coat and sends a letter flying across the room to rest neatly on the desk in front of the headmistress. “Everything you need to know is in that letter,” he says. “But now, really, I must be off. Renault, you know.”
“Don’t you dare,” Evanora says, holding up one hand to stop him before he can try to storm off without so much as another word. “Renault can wait. You might be accustomed to going about as you please without consequence or explanation, but I, unfortunately, don’t have the same luxury.”
I stand awkwardly in the corner while Abacus looks on impatiently. The headmistress tears the letter open with one impossibly long, shiny black nail, and unfolds it to read its contents. While her eyes flit back and forth across the page with near dizzying speed, she lifts her other hand—the one with her wand—and makes a flicking motion.
The chair across from her desk flies back, and I fly into it.
It’s more like I’m suddenly compelled to lunge across the room and into the chair, my arms and legs getting somewhat tangled along the way, but the end result is the same. By the time her eyes lift to meet mine, I’ve mostly managed to pull the neckline of my dress back up and flatten the tangles of my hair back down.
“As you can see from the letter—” Abacus starts, clearly itching to be free of us, but Headmistress Evanora cuts him off again.
“Even you, Abacus, must know I can’t just take your word for it. I have a school to protect and laws to uphold.” Here, her eyes flicker to me, and she adds, “Yes, Wren Davies, even we Dark Witches have a code that we adhere to.”
&nbs
p; She glances back down at the paper in her hands.
“So you’re supposed to be a Dark Witch, and you didn’t even know it.”
It’s not a question.
Suddenly, her hand snakes out across the desk and she lunges forward with it. It grasps my chin, pulling me forward in my seat so she can turn it back and forth in the light. Her face, much too close to mine for comfort, flickers with a series of conflicting emotions.
The headmistress’ lips part a bit, and she lets out a short, breathy sound. “It’s really something. It’s almost as if . . .” For one brief second, a sort of wonder appears on her face as she trails off, blocking out all the other emotion.
As quickly as it appears however, it’s again replaced by a calm, scientific exterior. She does not finish her sentiment.
Instead, she drops my head and waves an arm towards a corner of the room, calling out, “Apparebit!”
My stomach seizes up at the spell I’ve heard too many times to count. My body responds just as violently. My posture straightens, my feet flatten on the ground, and the muscles in my legs prepare for sudden flight—should it be necessary.
The headmistress notices, but says nothing as a small black trunk appears on the desk in front of her with a dull thud.
I flinch in my seat, my heart leaping up to sit at the back of my throat for a moment before deciding to settle back down where it belongs.
“A little jumpy, are we?” The headmistress says, eying me sideways.
I roll my shoulders back and try to settle into my seat. Even though I know it was just a basic summoning spell, I’ve never seen a Dark Witch cast a spell before. Actually, that isn’t true. I saw Abacus cast the witch-burning spell, but I didn’t think about it at the time.
I guess I always assumed their magic was a whole thing of their own, that every word uttered from their mouth was some kind of curse meant to make the world just a little . . . darker.
As much as I’m trying to grasp this new idea, it doesn’t stop my heart from thumping at the sound of the two latches on the trunk popping loudly open. Headmistress Evanora’s long, black nails dig into grooves and pry it open just a crack, peering inside for one moment before throwing the lid back to reveal the full contents within.
“Really, Evanora,” Abacus says, his voice almost pleading this time. “She got the wand, you know.”
The headmistress arches an eyebrow at him, but still reaches inside to remove a tiny jar of liquid. I recognize it at once. It’s silvery and thick, that same swirling, ever-shifting substance that fills the pool back at home.
The memory of the last time I saw that liquid floods back in, and with it, a violent fit of nausea overwhelms me. It hits me so hard, I have to steady myself on the desk in front of me. My fingernails dig into the wood until the tops of my knuckles turn white.
How did I end up here, in the Academy of Dark arts of all places?
I still haven’t been able to process it. Everything that happened from those moments is a blur. A nightmarish, grimy, shadowy blur.
I just want one minute alone, one second to try and make sense of everything that’s just happened—everything that’s still happening—but it isn’t possible. At least, not as long as I’m sitting between two very powerful Dark Witches who seem determined to convince me, and each other, that I’m one of them. I might not know much of anything about the dark arts, but I know when a witch is not to be messed with.
So, I reach out my palm across the desk, ready for my blood to be tested for the second time in the same day.
Headmistress Evanora pricks my finger so fast, I don’t even see her do it. All I see is a flash of a silver needle and the single bead of red blood that pools on the tip of my finger. She turns my hand over to let the drop fall into the jar, then watches with great interest as once again, the liquid blackens and boils until it turns as thick as tar.
But that’s not enough proof for her.
My eyes are still glued to the jar when she promptly caps it, shoves it back into the box, and reaches inside for another tool. This time, she removes a deck of cards. They’re larger than playing cards, and from the demonic symbols hand-etched into the backs of them, I think I know what they are. She eyes me closely as she begins to carefully, slowly, shuffle them into neat piles before me.
I’m instructed to pick one card from each pile, so I do. I expected there to be some sort of draw to the cards selected, a kind of intuition to the selection, but I feel nothing.
She begins to carefully lay them out in front of me, one by one. The first thing I see is these are not the same as the phony Tarot sets that I’ve seen local so-called “mediums” hocking. The symbols on the face of the cards are as foreign as those etched into the back.
Even Abacus leans forward, curiosity getting the better of his indifference.
Mistress Evanora looks over the cards with a ferocious hunger. “You have a darkness in your heart, that’s for sure,” she says, but her eyes keep scanning the cards. While I can’t even begin to attempt to read them, one laid out in the middle catches my eye. Where all the rest of the cards are scrawled with dozens of inscriptions, this one features a single, strange symbol.
I reach forward, pressing one finger to the middle of the card. “What does this one mean?”
Evanora’s eyes shine as she looks up at me. “That is interesting,” she says, quietly. Her eyes flicker up to Abacus, and then back to mine as she leans back a bit. “I’ve never seen that card drawn for these tests before. It’s the divinity card.”
“Divinity? Like . . . gods?”
We don’t have gods in our world. Some of the old witches believed in them, but if they ever did exist . . . they’ve long since died out.
“In a way,” Evanora says, carefully prying the card out from under my finger and returning it to the deck. “It represents the powers at be, those forces greater than us. Not gods per-say, but something like it.”
In turn, she places the cards away. “I have one last test I’d like to perform, just for the sake of it,” she says.
She digs into the box again, picking through various instruments until she procures a set of old-fashioned silver scales.
“Just for your reference,” she says, reaching up to pluck a strand of hair from her own head. She places it onto one of the scales. It tips dramatically to one side. “Perfect.”
She holds out her hand to me, and after one second’s hesitation, I follow her lead and pull out one of my own long black hairs. We wait for one second for the scale to settle, and then she carefully lays the strand across one side.
Nothing happens. The scale sits neutral.
“Interesting,” she says, quietly.
Abacus’ feet shuffle by the door. “It doesn’t mean anything, Evanora,” he says.
“Of course. Not yet, anyway,” she says.
“So then, are you satisfied?” Abacus asks.
She’s staring at me again, sizing me up. “Yes,” she says, finally. “The girl can stay.”
That’s all Abacus needs to hear. With that, he turns on his heel and storms into the hall—only to stop and immediately march back. He picks my strand of hair off the scale and looks at me decidedly.
“Never give a gift of hair to a Dark Witch,” he says. “Let that be your first lesson.”
He snaps his fingers, and the hair disintegrates in a burst of fire.
This time, when he storms out for a second time, he lets the doors slam shut behind him. He leaves a void of power in the room behind him. It makes me shudder.
With Abacus gone, the headmistress leans forward, her chin resting on the palm of her hand. The other, reaching to grip the letter from Abacus between her thumb and forefinger, taps an uneven rhythm across the top of her desk.
She glances down at the paper once more, and then sits up, sighs, and rubs the inner corner of her eyes. “I’m not going to lie, if you were anyone else . . . anything else . . .” here her eyes trail my body in a way that makes me feel utterly expo
sed, “I might try to fight it. But who am I kidding? We need all the females we can get.”
“So it’s true, then?” I blurt. My hands immediately fly up to cover my mouth. I blame the truth serum I was given earlier. I know it’s effects have long since worn off, but I still like to have something to blame rather than admit, even to myself, that I’m a complete idiot.
“That we Dark Witches are dying out?”
She waits for me to reply, and since she doesn’t look angry, I let my hands lower back down to my lap. “Yes,” I say, quietly. “Because you aren’t having girls.”
She waits for a second longer and then leans in closer across the desk. “To some, it might seem that way. Like I said, Wren, not everything here is as it seems. After all,” she adds, giving me that odd look that makes my stomach want to curl up into a little ball, “You’re here now, and that has to mean something.”
Even if that something is a terrible, horrible mistake?
I have about a thousand more questions to ask her, but before I can even open my mouth to start, there’s an unsettling rumbling sound from outside in the great hall. She and I both stop and cock our heads in that direction, unsure of what to do until, seconds later, there’s a frantic flurry of knocks at the door.
Headmistress Evanora is on her feet, waving for it to open.
An older woman, probably a professor here at the academy, bursts inside. Behind her, people have started pouring into the great hall from every direction. They head for the front door, where another teacher is barring the exit and waving his hands excitedly.
“Headmistress,” the woman in the doorway says, her breath catching. “There’s a problem at the gate.”
“Of course the hordes couldn’t let the pavement cool beneath Abacus’ feet before they came rushing in,” the headmistress snaps before barreling out after her.
I’m instructed to stay where I am, but that doesn’t stop me from following so far as the door.
I look on as Headmistress Evanora rushes down the stairs and starts making her way through the crowd. From up here, it’s impossible to tell what’s making all the commotion outside.
Dark Witch: A Paranormal Academy Romance (Academy of the Dark Arts Book 1) Page 5
