Familiar Magic (Druid Enforcer Academy Book 1)

by C. S. Churton

  Iain glanced at the door and I flicked a look over my shoulder, but there was no-one there. And then I caught a flash of orange and black – a bushy tail.

  “Where’s Jalen going?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  I whipped my head round and caught the confused look on Iain’s face. I opened my mouth, but he raised a hand, silencing me.

  “Stay still a moment.”

  I clamped my jaw shut and fought the urge to fidget. Iain’s face creased in concentration, and the familiar moved into the room, its eyes fixed on me as it made a wide circle around my seat to reach the instructor. It leapt easily onto the desk, but those wide black eyes didn’t leave me for a moment.

  “You make Jalen uncomfortable,” Iain said, his frown deepening.

  “Yeah. Um, that’s not normal, right?”

  At the sound of my anxious words, Jalen backed up a step, pinning his ears and baring his teeth at me. Iain pulsed energy from his palm and the familiar straightened, covering his teeth, but his body stayed tense.

  Jalen looked from me to the fox and back again.

  “It’s not just unbonded familiars and gryffs who are wary of you. I’ve never seen a bonded familiar act like that before.”

  “Now do you see why I need to go back to Daoradh?”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Iain said. When I opened my mouth to argue, he added, “Or mine.”

  He turned his head to the side and muttered something to his familiar, who spun on the spot and then disappeared from sight, like he’d vanished into thin air. On any other day, I’d have been wowed. Well, okay, I was still pretty wowed. But antsy, too. Because if our Familiamancy instructor had never seen a familiar act the way his just had, then what did that say about me?

  “We need to learn more about this before we act. Christmas break starts tomorrow. We’ll talk more after the holidays. For now, go back to your dorm, and don’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Uh…” I chewed my lip. Iain rolled his eyes.

  “Right, of course you’ve already told someone. You know, for a girl who doesn’t have a lot of friends, you sure are bad at keeping things to yourself.”

  “Gee, thanks. If you’re done with the character assassination?” I gestured to the door, and he nodded. I got to my feet.

  “And Lyssa? Try not to worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Try not to worry? Who was he kidding? I did nothing but worry for the next week, and the one after that, despite trying my best to bury my head in the sand over the Christmas break. I caught up with Kelsey, portalled out to see Sam (who was at a week-long party on an unnamed island), and then spent the rest of the time with my parents, my little sister Holly – and just because we weren’t blood, it didn’t make them any less my family – and with my half-sister, Ava. Having been raised in a succession of foster homes in America, Ava had no real family to speak of, but the moment they’d learned who she was, my parents had brought her into our family, and welcomed her into their home with open arms, and she was always there on family occasions. Holly idolised her, and my dad thoroughly approved of her studious nature, though of course we could never speak openly about what she was actually studying in front of them.

  In a way, it was a relief to have time away from magic, when I didn’t have to think about what Raphael’s curse meant. But in the quiet moments, it always nagged at the back of my mind.

  When January came, and brought with it the start of the new semester and my return to Krakenvale, I hoped I’d be returning to find some answers awaiting me. But no-one said a word about whatever was going on with my solar plexus chakra, or about going to see Raphael. Iain took me into a trance every few days to monitor the black mass’s progress – it grew every day, as Raphael had promised, but by so little that I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been monitoring it obsessively – but he wouldn’t answer my questions.

  Stormclaw still hated me, Killian tried to make my life a misery, Paisley alternated between giving me murderous looks and small smiles, and if I didn’t know better, I’d have said Elias was avoiding me. But it was hard to say. He didn’t seem to be around the academy much at the moment, and the other instructors stepped up to keep things running as smoothly as possible through his absences.

  On the plus side, Iain agreed there wasn’t much point in me showing up for his Familiamancy lectures, since I put all the familiars on edge and pretty much ruined the lesson for everyone else. Downside, he said I had to keep up with the theory side of things, so I still had a ton of studying to do. I wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t doing it to stop me having time to dwell. If he was, it wasn’t working.

  I was kicking around the gryff fields, being generally shunned by the entire herd and wondering how I was supposed to get close enough to check on Stormclaw’s injury, when Paisley found me. I hopped down from the fence and forced a smile.

  “Hi, Paisley.”

  “Hi, Lyssa. Can we talk?”

  I shrugged and drummed my heel against the fence post. It wasn’t like I had anything better going on. Paisley hesitated, letting her hair fall across her face. A stab of guilt ran through me. I wasn’t the only one round here with problems, and Paisley had bigger problems than most. I wanted to apologise for being so dismissive – but last time I’d tried the whole apology thing, she’d practically bitten my head off.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, anyway. “Rough day.”

  “I’m the one who should apologise,” she said. “I, uh, I haven’t treated you fairly.”

  “You gave me cake,” I said, which raised a smile from her.

  “You’ve done more for me than that.”

  “I have?” I ran my mind over the events of the last month, but I hadn’t even spoken a word to her. Unless giving her space countered, I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything.

  She glanced around – through habit, I was sure, since she could easily have heard or even smelled anyone sneaking up on us – but we were utterly alone. Even the gryffs had moved out of earshot.

  “You went to see Raphael – twice. That must have taken a lot of courage.” Her cheeks reddened, and she looked down at her feet. “Not that you did it for me, I know that. You did it for Kelsey, of course.”

  I reached out to touch her shoulder, then hesitated and drew my hand back.

  “I did it for all of you, Paisley. I might not have realised how much you were suffering, but I knew you were, and I should have done more to help you sooner. I’m–” Not even I was dumb enough to apologise again. “Well, I’m that.”

  She gave me a weak smile. “You don’t have to watch your words around me anymore. I–” She glanced around again and back to me, and her smiled widened. “They made a cure, from what you learned. The hexwork experts at the circle, and they gave it to me.”

  It took me a moment to process her words.

  “You’re cured?”

  She nodded. “They lifted the curse. It’s gone. I mean, I’m still a shifter – it didn’t fix that – but at least the rage is gone. And it’s thanks to you.”

  She hesitated, then stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me in an awkward hug. I returned it, wondering if even a single person had hugged her since she’d been bitten. It wasn’t an easy life, being a hybrid in a society that wasn’t big on anything different. Kelsey had been born that way, she’d had her whole life to learn how to cope, and she still struggled. Paisley didn’t speak much about her family – well, about anything, really – but not long after she’d been bitten, they’d distanced themselves from her. Her friends had done the same. Me, Kelsey, and Sam had done our best to make her life more bearable but given that Kelsey was the one who bit her, it had been a little awkward.

  “Well, that was all I wanted to say.” Paisley broke away and shuffled her feet. “So, thanks. If there’s ever anything I can do…”

  I glanced out at the gryff herd sunning in the distance, and a slow smile spread over my face
.

  “Well, there is one thing…”

  *

  At least Stormclaw would be taken care of. With that weight off my mind, and with Paisley’s words still ringing in my ears, I squared my shoulders and turned my feet to the academy. They carried me right to Elias’s office, where I rapped on the door and opened it without waiting to be invited in. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I was through hiding.

  Elias was seated behind his desk, and sitting on the other side of it, twisting round the glare at me, was the all-too-familiar form of Head Councilman Cauldwell.

  I flushed bright red, and made to back out of the office.

  “Uh, I’m sorry. I’ll come back later.”

  “Ah, Lyssa,” Elias said, beckoning to me. “We were just talking about you. Please, come in.”

  That didn’t sound good. I shuffled inside and clicked the door shut behind me, steadfastly avoiding Cauldwell’s eye. He wasn’t a fan of me at the best of times, and let’s be honest, this was hardly the best of times.

  There was another seat in front of Elias’s desk, next to Cauldwell’s, but I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to be seated to the man who’d once implied I might turn out to be every bit as bad as Raphael, just because we happened to be related by blood. Talk about sins of the father… I mean, sure, more recently he might have gotten me admitted to Krakenvale, but it was hard to forget that there was somewhere else he’d wanted me first – in adjacent cells with Raphael.

  “Take a seat.”

  So much for that. I sank into the seat, shuffling it sideways as much as I could without looking like I was trying to distance myself from my newfound benefactor.

  “I am told,” Cauldwell said, turning his cold grey eyes on me, “that you have requested to be allowed to visit with your father.”

  My hands curled into fists and I forced them to smooth out before I spoke, holding Cauldwell’s eye this time. I thought we’d laid all this ‘father’ nonsense to rest.

  “I have requested to interrogate Raphael, Head Councilman Cauldwell, because I believe he has cursed me.”

  “From within a warded cell, in the most secure prison in the druidic world? Nonsense.” He sounded faintly amused, but I knew him better than that.

  “So Raphael’s magic was bound, then?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain polite despite the urge to do the opposite. I might as well find out if Elias had been right about that while I was here.

  Cauldwell cleared his throat. “Well, uh, that’s rather complicated magic.”

  I frowned, cocking my head. I knew he wasn’t bound, because I was absolutely certain he’d put this black mass of energy inside me. But I wanted to hear it from Cauldwell’s mouth. Raphael should have been bound, and we all knew it. He was too powerful and too vindictive to have access to that much magic. He was dangerous, and hundreds of people had risked their lives to stop him being a threat. Some people had lost their lives. My stomach lurched. Kayden had lost his life.

  “I don’t understand.” I frowned, trying to make my voice confused instead of accusatory, and not quite sure that I’d pulled it off. “I thought the council regularly bound druids who were expelled from the academies, or who broke the more serious laws.”

  “All of our laws are serious, Ms Eldridge,” he said, regaining some of his composure. “But it’s not as simple as that. For a druid to be bound, the power binding them has to be greater than theirs.”

  I stared at him for several long, heavy seconds. It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard him, or even that I didn’t understand him, it was simply that this was such a ridiculous revelation that it was taking a while for me to process the full implications of it.

  “He’s more powerful than the entire grand council put together?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far.” He cleared his throat again. “But to attempt the spell and fail would be very dangerous, as you know.”

  Shit. They suspected that Raphael wasn’t just the most powerful druid to have ever been born, they suspected he was more powerful than all the druids who made up the grand council put together – and suspected it strongly enough that they feared the backlash from the failed spell would wipe them out. The same way the backlash from Raphael’s spell I rode Stormclaw into the middle of last year should have killed us.

  And he’d placed this spell on me. I was so screwed. Unless I could convince him to lift it.

  “Will you give me permission to go?” I asked. Cauldwell shook his head.

  “Absolutely not. Given how powerful he is, it’s far too dangerous.”

  “You knew how powerful he was last year, but that didn’t stop you sending me in to visit him – twice.”

  “Yes, but now we also know that he is capable of breaching the wards. Further security will have to be arranged, and until then, we cannot risk anyone being in close proximity to him.”

  “Well, how long will that be?”

  Cauldwell didn’t answer at once, so I turned to Elias, who seemed resigned to the direction this conversation had taken. I also suspected he was on my side, which was more than could be said about Cauldwell.

  “It could be decades,” he said. Cauldwell shot him an irritated look, but I was so horrified I nearly missed it.

  “Decades? You want me to live with this… this thing inside me for decades?”

  “Calm yourself, Ms Eldridge,” Cauldwell said, sounding irked that I wasn’t doing exactly that. But excuse me if I was having an emotional response to the news that I might have to spend–

  I shook my head. That absolutely was not going to happen. Cauldwell was right, I needed to regain my composure. I was sitting next to my best chance to fix this, and I couldn’t afford to blow it. I sucked in a breath, and another, and when I spoke, my voice was more even than it had any right to be.

  “I would be the only one at risk, Councilman Cauldwell. And I’m already at risk from this spell. I have nothing to lose, and I fully absolve the circle of any responsibility for what may happen to me in Raphael’s cell.”

  Cauldwell narrowed his eyes. “I won’t order any guards to accompany you into that cell.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.” I lifted my chin, then decided defiance probably wasn’t the best option when he was on the brink of caving. “I’m just asking for the chance to face this threat, rather than hide from it. I’m sure you understand, Councilman Cauldwell.”

  He nodded and stroked his chin. After a long moment, he nodded again.

  “Very well. I will make the arrangements.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The walls seemed more oppressive than they had before; the corridors darker, and I could feel the tonnes of earth above my head growing heavier with every step I took. Of course, nothing had changed since the last time I’d come here – but now I knew that I was trapped in an underground prison with a man who wasn’t as powerless as we’d all naïvely assumed.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Cody asked. I nodded. My throat was too dry to answer, and I didn’t want him to hear my voice shake. Pretty much everyone seemed to think I shouldn’t be here. I didn’t need to give them a reason to ask Cauldwell to pull me back. Not before I got what I came for. Fear had never stopped me before.

  I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders as we rounded the last corner, and my eyes fell on the final cell. Because what did I have to fear, really? The damage had already been done. Raphael’s spell was seeping through me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Except coming here. It was probably what he’d wanted all along.

  I nodded to Cody.

  “I’m ready.”

  “I have orders not to go inside with you. They come from Cauldwell himself, otherwise…” He trailed off, looking uncomfortable and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “It’s better this way,” I promised him. “And I wouldn’t want you getting in trouble for me. I’ll knock when I’m ready to come back out.”

  Assuming I come out of here alive. I buried the t
hought. That really wasn’t helping, and if Raphael saw even one glimmer of weakness, he’d pounce on it.

  Cody clapped a hand on my shoulder, then unlocked the cell door with an energy pulse password and stepped back. I took a breath and then stepped inside.

  The door slammed shut behind, magic sealing it in place. A shiver ran through me. That sound had visited me in my darkest nightmares more than once. Of course, in those nightmares, I wasn’t generally sharing a cell with Raphael – presumably only because my subconscious lacked that much imagination. This better not give it ideas.

  “Lyssa, such a pleasure to see you again.”

  Raphael closed his book – he was re-reading the one he’d had the first time I was here, by the looks of it – and set it aside.

  “The pleasure’s all yours,” I said dryly, and he chuckled.

  “And yet, it would seem you can’t quite stay away.”

  My jaw clenched, and I worked the tension from it – but not before he noticed it. I was going to have to do better than this.

  “Yes,” I said. “I wanted to see if there was a returns policy on your little gift.”

  “Ah, so you found it, then? Very good. I wondered how long it would take you.”

  I shrugged and leaned against the door.

  “What can I say? All the professors used to say I was slow on the uptake.” I frowned and cocked my head. “Must be murder on your ego, knowing that you were bested by someone like me.”

  “Murder?” He raised an eyebrow, and a shiver ran through me. “Interesting choice of word.”

  “Is that supposed to scare me? A word and a raised eyebrow?”

  “I have no doubt it takes more than that. But you are scared.”

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. Not of you. See, I realised something. You tried to kill me when you had all your powers at your disposal. And now?” I made a show of looking round the room. “Well, you’re not at your best, are you?”

  Raphael rose to his feet, and I forced myself not to react. He didn’t scare me.