by Chloe Garner
Unveiling Magic
School of Magic Survival 2
Chloe Garner
Copyright © 2019 Chloe Garner
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Melody Simmons
Published by A Horse Called Alpha
The New Normal
Valerie sucked on a tooth as she looked around the room.
Dr. Finn had painted a lot of it, the furniture, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, with a savannah theme, and a lot of the desks and chairs were upside down with thickets of grass and plants tied to the legs.
She had to give it to him, he was creative about it.
He was also standing behind her with a stopwatch.
That beeped on the minutes.
Man, oh, man how she hated that stopwatch.
She didn’t know where the baton was hidden, or even what it would look like, precisely. It could have been painted brown and hidden in with some of the grass, or taped to the underside of a lab table.
Or he could have cast an invisibility spell on it and hung it from the ceiling, for all she knew.
Was invisibility possible?
The fact that Valerie didn’t know it was possible didn’t mean it wasn’t.
She took a step forward, feeling out the tension of the magic in the room around her. She had come to understand that some magic users had a gift for figuring out casts by touch - by physical sensation of some kind - but Valerie was not that kind.
She wasn’t going to know what the magic was that she was experiencing until she was well through a cast to dismantle it, or at least redirect it, and even then sometimes she didn’t ever really work it out. She just got to the point that her magic and the magic there in the room kind of meshed or melded or whatever, and she could move on.
The stopwatch beeped.
“Could you just turn it off for once?” Valerie asked, though something in the room jangled in a way that warned her she shouldn’t keep talking. There was magic in there tied up in sound. She looked over her shoulder at Dr. Finn, who smiled broadly without showing his teeth. His ears shifted up when he did that, and it made her want to grab him by them.
The man wasn’t that much older than she was. Most of the other teachers were from her mom’s generation, but he was only twenty-three or twenty-four, she forgot, and she had no idea what business he had calling himself ‘Doctor’.
Though.
That was how Lady Harrington had introduced him, and Valerie hadn’t ever found grounds to argue it, other than that he had a baby face and it needed to be pinched, and a person with a doctorate should be serious and wear glasses.
He did wear glasses.
Valerie turned her attention back to the room, taking a bag off of her back and kneeling gingerly, taking out a blue powder that seemed about right and sprinkling it on the floor.
There.
Yup.
There where it turned into bright blue fire? She shouldn’t go over there. She took out a piece of fish-smelling string and wrapped it around her hand once, then slapped the floor where the dust had enflamed, and there was a whistling like air coming out of a huge balloon. It only lasted a moment, but the jangling of the sound-triggered cast told her that she was still treading awfully close to the line, and she needed to get to that one quickly before she accidentally set it off.
The day she had spent without eyebrows had been the opposite of fun.
She moved forward, cast by cast, fighting off magic with magic, a bag of ingredients that Dr. Finn had seemed to have selected from out of Mr. Tannis’ room at random.
Some days, the practicum room was a puzzle. If she was clever about it, there was a right way and a wrong way to go, and if she went the right way, it was relatively straightforward to find the baton. Some days, it was a death march, disabling one cast after another, searching every inch of the room before she tracked down the baton.
It was grueling and demeaning, but…
But.
She was doing magic.
She wasn’t sitting in the library reading about it.
And as she continued to work at her progress, she had to secretly admit that she was having the time of her life.
Because she was actually good at this.
Yes.
The eyebrow thing.
And sometimes they’d put away dinner by the time she got down there, and she had to go eat the cold boxed dinner that Sasha had crated up for her.
And no one else had to do anything remotely like this. Valerie understood that the seniors had to go through a challenge course as a team, at the end of the year, but nothing so maniacal as what Dr. Finn would set up on a thrice-a-week basis for her to work through.
He was a natural.
Lady Harrington had hired him over the winter break, and he’d shown up at her last class of the day, the first day of second semester and informed her that she had a special elective.
None of the teachers trusted her with magic implements, yet, outside of Mrs. Reynolds and Mr. Tannis, so the fact that he put a bag into her hands and told her to go nuts? She’d loved it.
And she still did.
It was just so meticulous, and at the same time, it wasn’t like she was working off of knowledge that actually lived in her head. It was like she was using someone else’s knowledge that poured through a hole in her brain like sand through an hourglass. Just a trickle at a time, and barely enough to do the next thing.
Dr. Finn had told her frequently that as she practiced, it would get easier and she would be able to work faster, but it didn’t feel that way.
It felt like she was crawling on the floor through a dusting of blue powder, trying not to put her head up high enough to get her hair scorched off by the random shots of flame emanating from… over there, somewhere.
She’d get to it as soon as she could, but there was something up here ahead of her that was going to melt her shoes to the floor if she wasn’t careful, and it really didn’t matter that Lady Harrington had set her up with an account that was linked to her mother’s account, Valerie didn’t feel like buying new shoes.
Again.
Six weeks into the second semester, and the damage from Mr. Finn’s practicum was taking a toll on everything about her.
She was gonna get better.
Yeah, right.
They were just dragging her down the path to learn what she had to by encouraging her that someday it wouldn’t be this hard.
Everyone just practiced and learned.
Every time Valerie put her hands on magic, something blew up.
At least this way, it was Dr. Finn’s fault.
She took the lighter out of the bag and lit the cord of grass tied to a desk leg, feeling something unstable nearby that she needed to address soon, but she was hoping it would be so simple as to find the baton the first place she looked.
The room did not have adequate fire suppression, so a rather large wad of dry burning grass did nothing but make the top half of the room smoky.
There was no baton, but there was a new problem.
The smoke had interacted with several of the spells and had put one of them onto a timer that Valerie could feel ticking down. Whatever it was that it was designed to do, she had maybe a couple of minutes to find it and shut it down.
She checked the desk leg once more, just to be sure the baton wasn’t there.
It wasn’t.
There was a sound of something large and mechanical sort of… crunching… just out of sight behind a cabinet. She needed to go see what that was, too, but the floor had… invisible strings tying it to the ceiling that she had to make it through first.
No telling what it actually was, but that was how it felt to her.
She went digging through her
bag once more.
The stopwatch beeped.
Valerie was halfway through mauling her dinner when someone knocked on the door.
Valerie frowned at Sasha, and her roommate got up to answer it, stepping out of the way to reveal Ethan Trent.
Things had been cool between them ever since Valerie’s birthday party. He’d admitted he’d been spying on her for his dad, and she’d thought that she could forgive him for it, but then her lifelong best friend had also been spying on her, and a whole bunch of other people had turned up to try to kill her and her mom - who had also, also been lying to her about everything - and Valerie was just fed up with it.
She got the sense that Ethan got it, even though he still looked over every time she walked into a room.
She’d liked him.
A lot.
But she’d loved Hanson, and, well, her mom, so that didn’t help much.
“Mrs. Young asked me to come get you,” Ethan said, and Valerie looked down at her dinner.
“I’m busy,” she said.
Mrs. Young was the receptionist in the front office, and not someone that Valerie held in high esteem, though the woman did think the world of Sasha.
“Can Sasha go?” Valerie asked as the thought flashed through her head.
“You need to come,” Ethan said. “Really.”
Valerie grumped down at her dinner, then stood up and put her shoes on, walking out the dorm room door and into the hallway still carrying her food.
He glanced at it, but didn’t say anything.
“How was your session with Dr. Finn today?” Ethan asked.
“You keeping track of which days I’m up there?” Valerie pushed back.
“No. But we all heard the explosion and no teachers went running by, so it had to be you.”
That was valid, actually.
“It was fine,” Valerie said.
She’d found the baton, so yay for her, but she was going to need a new pair of jeans, since the ones she’d been wearing were now lime green.
The man had the worst sense of humor.
They walked toward the office, and Ethan glanced over at her several times like he had something he wanted to say, but Valerie didn’t want to hear it, and she never gave him the window to talk to her.
Finally, as they approached the door, he turned his back toward the office and put his hands out to her as though to physically stop her.
She didn’t quite walk into them, and she didn’t quite walk around him, but she considered both.
“Look,” he said. “I know I messed up. I’m a jerk and I’ve always been a jerk, and then I really liked not being a jerk because of how it made you look at me, and I should have told you a lot earlier…”
“You think everything is about you,” Valerie interrupted. He didn’t, actually. He’d mostly been nice to her when no one else would have. But it was an insult that would land, and she knew it. “I’m just done with trusting anyone. Everyone lies to me, and, you know?, in the middle of that you aren’t someone I can count on, either, so… I don’t want your apology. It isn’t about you. I’m just retrenching back with the people I can actually trust.”
“You mean Sasha,” Ethan said. She shrugged.
There was Mr. Jamison, too, but she wasn’t going to point it out, because it didn’t matter. The outside war between factions of magic users had taken another big turn with two mass civilian casualty events, and Mr. Jamison was basically working full-time for the war effort and then teaching classes. Valerie hadn’t seen him but once since the break.
“Not my fault that everyone lies to me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said quickly. “You just… You need other friends. Sasha is great, but you need other friends in the community. You’re out on your own, and I don’t think you see it.”
“So I need you,” Valerie said, pursing her lips hard. He sighed.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “Look. I… I wanted to warn you before you walk in there. I mean, I want to talk to you, and I never get to, but I really wanted to warn you…”
Valerie dipped her chin toward her chest.
“Yes?”
“It’s Hanson.”
She squinted at him.
“It’s what?” she asked, bolting around him and into the office.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
There sitting on one of the couches, all six-foot-two and two hundred pounds of him, was her ex-best-friend-in-the-world, Hanson Cox.
“Hi, Val,” he said meekly, and she shook her head.
“What on earth are you doing here?” she asked.
“Mr. Cox is here seeking asylum,” Lady Harrington said, coming out of her office. “And I’ve just received my confirmation from the Council that we’re going to give it to him.”
“Why?” Valerie demanded. “He doesn’t know any magic. He’s got a mom out there and a dad. Isn’t it their job to take care of him?”
“I went home and no one was there,” Hanson said. “I’ve been staying with friends at school for months, and the police are looking for them, now, but… Something happened to them, and it was because I came here that weekend. I’m worried.”
“I’m afraid that I have to tell you, young man,” Lady Harrington said. “The Council knows exactly where your parents are. Your mother was called up into work while you were here, and she was forced to leave without notice. They thought that your father would come home to care for you, but his situation got more complicated, too, and there was no one to reach out to you without endangering you further. It was safest for everyone if you remained a civilian, by perception, if an orphaned one.”
Hanson licked his lips.
“They’re alive, though?” he asked. Lady Harrington nodded.
“Yes, and your mother sends her regrets.”
Valerie wondered what, exactly Martha Cox had said, because certainly ‘regrets’ didn’t cover it.
For a moment, Valerie wanted to sit down next to Hanson and hug him; the wretched few months he had to have gone through, thinking that his parents were likely dead… Dealing with police and the school…
“What have you told your informal guardians about where you are now?” Lady Harrington asked.
“That I had some family up north that I could find, if I just went,” Hanson said. “They didn’t like it, but they let me go.”
“You should contact them and let them know that you arrived safely,” Lady Harrington said. “You can use the phone in my office.”
Hanson glanced over at Valerie and swallowed hard, again words that he wanted to say, but she shook her head.
She didn’t want to hear them.
She looked at Ethan as Hanson followed Lady Harrington to her office. Ethan was standing against the door, whether because it had simply been convenient or because he was intentionally blocking her exit, she wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Valerie said.
“I thought you two were friends,” Mrs. Young said from her desk. “He was your only visitor.”
Not technically true, but whatever.
“I don’t want to see him,” Valerie said.
“Would have thought you’d be more sympathetic,” Mrs. Young said. “Seeing as you’re his only friend in the world, and it’s just the way it was when you first got here.”
Hanson was massively popular. Girls didn’t generally want to date him, because he wasn’t sexy, the way the guys the girls were chasing after were, but he was friends with everyone.
The idea of him being along in the world was laughable.
And then tragic.
Ethan jerked his head toward the hallway and opened the door. Valerie went out, considering for just a moment the option of just going straight back to her room, but she waited for Ethan while he closed the door.
He opened his mouth and closed it once. Frowned.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked.
“Hanson’s mom had him spying on me fo
r my entire life,” Valerie said. “And I found out the weekend he came here.”
Ethan paused, nodding slowly.
“I get that you’re mad at him,” he said.
“No,” she answered. “You don’t.”
“I do,” he said. “Every single one of the kids that I sit with every single day at lunch is telling their parents everything that we talk about, everything that we do, who sits with who, who talks to who and about what… Shack might be my best friend. I think he is. And our parents work together. They’re on the same side, not just of the war, but of the politics, too, but I know that he goes home and tells his mom everything that I say, and I know that he sends her a letter twice a month with the potential political alliances within the Council brats. Maybe it won’t be this way forever, I don’t know. But the first year, as everyone is figuring it out, especially us, when there are so many of us who are going to be headed for power after graduation? Everyone spies on everyone, and nothing is secret. That’s my whole life. So maybe I don’t get why you’re angry, but I get where you are.”
“How can you stand it?” Valerie asked. “Not having any friends?”
“I’ve never had any friends,” Ethan said. “Just friendly political acquaintances. You’re spoiled, having had real friends out there in the real world. Sasha’s brothers, too. They aren’t interested in power; they’re just going to school for the education and then they’re going to head off and do something lucrative and interesting. They’ve got great friends, I hear. But I don’t get friends. I had one for like a minute, but between me and my life, it died pretty fast.”
She looked away.
“I said I would keep your secrets,” Ethan said. “So where everyone on the Council knows that your mom was here, my dad didn’t hear it from me. I’ll tell him that Hanson is here, but I’m not going to tell him why you two aren’t friends. I’m going to keep my promise to you. He can’t even tell his mom stuff, now, because they aren’t going to tell him where she is…”
“Do you know?” Valerie asked abruptly, and he shook his head.
“I just know the kinds of jobs that people get called up for on that kind of warning,” he told her.
