Unveiling Magic

by Chloe Garner

It had once been that the Council brats took up most of a central table, within the lunch hall, very exclusive. Now, it was just Ethan and Shack and Ethan was feeling ostracized from the rest of the school.

  They had to get out of the building.

  “You need to work on your pitch,” Shack said, still eating happily enough.

  “I know,” Ethan answered. “But Milton is going to be the last person I convince to change his mind.”

  “You don’t even know what his mind is,” Shack said, and Ethan nodded.

  “Exactly.”

  Martha Cox brushed through the door and closed it behind her, leaning her back against the hollow wood like it was much more significant.

  “What do you have for defenses, here?” she asked.

  “What?” Valerie asked. Sasha was still looking out the window like a wound-up cat.

  “I told you, they’re coming,” Sasha said, and Martha looked over.

  “Exactly,” the woman said. “The Superiors are coming, and if we don’t defend ourselves, they’re going to kill us and take you, and the war will be over before it even really starts.”

  Valerie looked over at Sasha.

  “Sasha,” she said. “Sasha I need you to focus.”

  “What do you have?” Martha asked again, her voice much louder and angrier.

  “Almost nothing,” Sasha said. “We used it getting here and setting a defense around the house, but they just finished picking off my anti-detection spell, and they’re starting to target the house.”

  “Almost…” Martha said, then shook her head. “Almost none. What kind of… Never mind. I’m going to start making weapons. You three go back into the back and get under something.”

  “No,” Valerie said, and Martha stopped moving.

  “What did you say to me?” she asked, her voice even louder. “What did… Hanson, you need to tell your friend that I’m not just here on a social call. All of our lives are on the line here, and I don’t have time for her teenage rebellion…”

  “Ma, she’s one of the best there is,” Hanson said. “You need to let her help you if she thinks she can.”

  “Oh, she thinks she can help,” Martha said. “No. All three of you back in the back.”

  Valerie looked at Sasha, who looked like she was moments away from complying.

  “I need you to go through the house,” Valerie said. “Get creative. I cast a protection spell with seaweed and seashells. Anything that might help, bring it to me.”

  There was an odd sensation, of someone pulling her hair or tugging at her heel, as though those were the same thing, and she went to stand at the window.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “What is what?” Sasha asked, coming to stand next to her.

  “Are they hard of hearing?” Martha demanded of Hanson.

  “Something… pulling,” Valerie said. “I can feel it, but I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha said. “Does it have to do with your protection spell, do you think?”

  Valerie nodded slowly, feeling it out.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “They’ve got a hold of it,” Martha said. “It was an amateur cast and they’re going to funnel magic into you through it. You need to scuttle it before they knock you out.”

  “It’s what’s keeping them out,” Sasha said. “I’ve seen her hold a door closed against demons.”

  “They’ve got a link to it. Who are you? Why do you keep talking back to me?” Martha demanded

  “Ma, this is Sasha, my girlfriend.”

  Sasha ducked her head - Valerie suspected they hadn’t gotten all the way to agreeing to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend - and Valerie held her hand out just enough to get Sasha’s attention again.

  “Anything you can find. I think I can work with it. You know what you’re doing.”

  “Seaweed?” Sasha whispered, and Valerie nodded.

  “You need to let go of your cast,” Martha said, coming to stand next to Valerie. Her tone was different now, more conciliatory. “They’re going to get through it, and when they do, it may be too late to protect you. I… I can’t make you any promises. I don’t know how many of them there are, but I’m going to try. You are key to this war, and I’m not going to let you go without a fight.”

  “Neither am I,” Valerie answered. “Hanson, you should probably go sit in the tub, though. That’s where the protection warding will be the strongest.”

  “You’re saying I can’t fight this,” he said.

  “Not unless Sasha has taught you an awful lot of magic in the last two days,” Valerie answered.

  “Get under the bed in the back,” Martha said. “And don’t come out until I tell you.”

  Valerie looked over at Hanson, who mouthed sorry at her, and went back into the bedroom he’d slept in.

  “The warding is stronger at the tub,” Valerie said. “I tied a lot of the protection cast to water, so…”

  “Your cast is misshapen and it’s going to bring their attacks straight at you,” Martha said. “And if I’m outnumbered by more than two or three to one, we’re all dead, anyway, regardless what happens to you. I’m just hoping, if they do manage it, that they are happy just killing you.”

  “There, we agree,” Valerie said. Sasha came back into the room with a stack of blankets.

  Only Susan Blake would stock a linen closet in a tiny beach hut with blankets. She was always cold.

  Valerie picked one of them up and put it to her nose as Sasha looked out the window again.

  “There isn’t much else,” she said, and Valerie nodded. The blanket smelled like her mom.

  “I can work with this,” she said, going to sit on the floor.

  Martha went to get her own bag of spellcasting ingredients, taking up residence at the table.

  Whoever it was, they were out there. Right now. It was just a question of how long Valerie could hold them off and whether she and Martha Cox could be prepared for what came next.

  They were in big trouble.

  Lady Harrington entered the cafeteria.

  Looked around the room in anticipation of the voices there dropping off, which they did little by little and then all at once. She lifted her chin with the faintest of nods, then took one more step forward.

  “I know that many of you have been highly dissatisfied with the events of the last few weeks,” she said, her voice stern. “You say that you came here to learn and be around other magic students, and I understand that. At the same time, we cannot take shortcuts with your safety, and we will not. I expect the student body to accept this gracefully and cooperatively, regardless of how much disappointment you may feel over it.”

  Ethan glanced at Shack, but Shack was paying attention to the room in the casual way that he did, his elbows back on the table and his feet way out in front of him, not looking at anything in specific.

  Ethan didn’t know if Shack had learned that from his mom or if he’d come by it naturally, but it was one of the greatest intel-gathering tactics Ethan had ever witnessed.

  “You will all return to your rooms for not more than fifteen minutes and find the things that you must have for the evening, and then we are going to ask that all of the dormitory students exit the building. The visitor cottages will be open for sheltering in during the next three hours, while the faculty are taking actions that would not be possible with students in the building. It is our hope that these exercises will be enough to return us to our normal activities, but no one should rely on that. At the end of three hours’ time, you will all be counted back into your dorm rooms. I expect promptness and compliance. Is that clear?”

  Ethan looked over at Shack.

  “Lady Harrington isn’t a bad wingman to have,” Shack murmured as voices around them picked up in comparable conversation.

  “Your fifteen minutes begin now,” Lady Harrington said. “Please clean up after yourselves as you normally would, then proceed to your rooms.”

&nbs
p; Ethan frowned.

  “Well,” he said, equally quietly. “That solves that.”

  Ethan and Shack were among the first out on the front lawn, milling around and talking to people. Sure, they ate their meals together every day, but this was the first time they’d been able to just hang out and talk in weeks. Everyone was eager, despite the cold, and after a while, they started down toward the visitor cottages, just the weight of the crowd drawing them forward.

  “Hey,” Ethan said as people were starting to move. “Why go down to the visitor cottages? The upperclassmen have been living it up while we’ve been on lockdown, and they’ve got food and movies and all of that. You know? I’m going to go knock on Elvis’ door and tell him that we’re going to go stay there while the teachers are exorcising the school.”

  Shack laughed.

  “I want to be there to see his face.”

  “I mean,” Ethan said, putting out his arms and walking backwards, “they owe us that much, don’t they? School spirit and camaraderie and we’re all in this together, right?”

  “Party,” Shack said quietly, and the word spread like wildfire. Ethan grinned with a nod.

  “Party at the upperclass cottages,” he yelled, putting a fist in the air and charging the other direction.

  People followed him, as they generally did when he set off to do something visibly, and he jogged back up the hill and along the ridge to where the upperclass cottages were tucked in against the tree line.

  Ethan looked over at Shack.

  “Divide and conquer?” he asked, and Shack nodded.

  “I’ll start at that end, you start at the other end. Meet you in the middle.”

  Ethan shook his head.

  “I’ll start at the other end after I put in an appearance with Elvis.”

  Shack nodded, looking behind them.

  “I probably should, too.”

  Three hours really wasn’t going to be much, to go through all forty-odd cottages that the upperclassmen resided in, and they would have to move quickly, but he thought they could do it.

  He strode up to Elvis’ door and knocked, looking over his shoulder at the wedge of underclassmen coming along the ridge behind him, trailing and taking and laughing, the word ‘party’ rolling along and through the crowd with a predictable potency.

  Elvis came to answer the door looking like he’d just gotten out of bed.

  “Ethan,” he said, frowning hard and scratching his head. “What are you doing here?”

  “Lady Harrington kicked us out of the school so that they could work,” Ethan told him with a grin. “So we came here for some place to be and for something to do.”

  “Is that… is that the whole school?” Elvis asked, straightening and walking around past Ethan.

  “Every last one of us,” Ethan said. “Open up the cottages; we’re here to hang out until the teachers are done at school, and it’s the first time we’ve been out in weeks.”

  Elvis held up his hands, but the next words out of his mouth were lost as Ethan slipped past him and Shack after that, and a dozen more kids besides. The others split up; Ethan could hear the conversations as they talked about which upperclassmen they wanted to crash with. Some of them it was a sense of friendship, while others had revenge on the mind, but it sounded like if they waited the right amount of time, most of the cottages would be open for them.

  This just might actually work.

  Ethan threw himself onto a couch next to one of his brother’s friends, crossing his legs on the coffee table and draping his arms across the couch to either side.

  “What’s on?” he asked.

  “We don’t get a TV signal out here,” the young man told him, and Ethan shrugged.

  “But you’ve got a DVD player,” he said.

  “Why are you here?” Elvis’ roommate asked, and Ethan gave him the short answer that avoided mentioning the visitor cottages.

  Ethan heard the refrigerator open and close several times, and the roommate stood to go defend his food. Ethan snagged the remote and slid across to lean on the arm of the couch as he went to go see what DVDs were loaded.

  “Ethan,” Shack said, sitting down next to him.

  “Seriously?” Ethan called after the roommate. “Who here watches rom-coms?”

  “Ethan,” Shack said again, his voice serious. Ethan picked a movie and gave Shack his attention.

  Shack pulled his phone out of his pocket and showed it to Ethan.

  Mercifully, they both had charged phones, just now, so all they’d had to do was get them out of their room before they went outside.

  It had signal.

  Ethan froze.

  Shack shook his head.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s one of the people in this cottage,” Shack said softly, putting the phone away again. “Just means we need to keep looking. Could be it’s a huge hole.”

  Ethan nodded, numb, then nodded again.

  Of course.

  Of course Shack was right.

  He stood.

  “Nothing here to watch,” he announced to no one in particular. “I’m going to go see what everyone else has got going on.”

  “Don’t make a scene,” Shack muttered as he walked past, and Ethan gave his friend’s back a dark look.

  He wasn’t making a scene. He was just letting everyone know…

  Right.

  He wouldn’t have done that, normally.

  The cell signal here had thrown him off.

  He nodded and headed out.

  More cottages to run down.

  Not enough time.

  Two more.

  Ethan found two more cottages with cell service.

  But they weren’t right next to Elvis’. They were at random up and down the woodline; Elvis’ cell service was something he had carved out for himself. Or, at least, one of his roommates had.

  Ethan met up with Shack as everyone was starting back toward the building at the end of the three hours, and Shack shoved his hands into his pockets, shrugging his shoulders against the cold.

  “One more,” Shack said. “Down by the end.”

  “Two,” Ethan said.

  “Four total,” Shack said. “How sure are we?”

  Ethan shook his head, but one of the girls went running past him, grabbing his elbow and tugging at it with laughter.

  She hopped and talked for several minutes about absolutely nothing, and then they were back at the school. Lady Harrington was watching everyone as they went by with a cool expression, and she crooked her finger at Ethan as she saw him.

  “I need a word with you and Mr. MacMillan, please,” she said, uncrossing her arms and going into the office. Ethan ducked his head and whispers went up around him - probably about the cottage swap as much as anything; it was a good scapegoat - and he and Shack followed Lady Harrington into her office.

  “Well?” the woman asked as she seated herself behind her desk.

  Ethan had never been in Lady Harrington’s office before. All of his conversations with her had happened in the conference room.

  “Four,” he said, looking over at Shack. “We found four cottages with cell phone signal.”

  “Which?” Lady Harrington asked.

  “My brother’s,” Ethan said, and she gave him a tight frown.

  “And the rest?” she asked.

  Ethan gave her his two, and Shack told her which one he had found, and Lady Harrington gave them a brief nod.

  “I will follow up with this, thank you,” she said.

  “No,” Ethan said. “No, we want to still be involved. My brother is on the list of suspects, now.”

  She gave him another tight frown, then nodded, getting out a list.

  “This is the list of people who were in the building the night of the silverthorn cast,” she said.

  She took out another piece of paper and started making a list.

  “And this is the list of upperclassmen who live in those four cottages.”

  “What about the night
of the demon attack?” Shack asked. “If I knew it was coming, I’d want to be out of the building.”

  “Mr. MacMillan, your insight is useful and I appreciate it, but I intend to scan the magic of every person on this list, regardless of when they were in the building. I’ve reduced it by enough that I will not hesitate to do so, even if I do invade the privacy of students who have done nothing wrong. I am beyond my tolerance of patience with this situation.”

  “I thought most of the upperclassmen knew how to ward their magic to keep you from scanning it,” Ethan said, watching as she went down the list and circled names.

  “Yes, but not the magic in their actual casts,” she said. “And upperclassmen are well known for using copious magic around their cottages. I will know which cottage contains the saboteur, if it is one of them, and then I will know whose magic it was that cast the original seed.”

  Lady Harrington was scary.

  Ethan had known that his entire life, but he hadn’t actually been afraid of her until just now.

  “I simply do this to put Mr. Trent’s mind at ease,” she said. “Because… Oh.”

  “You’ve been waiting out of decorum?” Shack asked.

  “Politics, Mr. MacMillan,” she answered.

  “What is it?” Ethan asked.

  “The elder Mr. Trent was in the building for dinner that day,” she said. “It doesn’t prove anything, one way or another, but I had hoped that he had missed his entire day that day, as he often does, and would rule himself out.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “My brother wouldn’t have any reason to cooperate with the Superiors. He lives for taking on my dad’s role someday. He basically believes he is on the Council, now.”

  “You aren’t wrong,” Lady Harrington said, rolling up the two lists and putting them away. “I’d just hoped to rule him out preemptively. You appeared worried.”

  “I’m not,” Ethan said.

  “No, you look worried,” Shack said. “Have since I told you that I got signal at your brother’s cottage.”

  Lady Harrington frowned.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Ethan said. It was. It was nothing.

  “Speak,” Lady Harrington said, and Ethan shook his head.

  “It’s just that Elvis really hated Valerie. From the very first. He was… Anyway, I know he was supposed to get on her good side, and he wouldn’t do it, because he… He just hated her too much.”