“It’s because you’re weak.” The professor pointed at Suresh. “And you’re weak. And you’re weak.” He indicated each student in the room, looking them each in the eye. “And I am also weak.”
He hung his head and silence filled the room.
A small voice from the edge of the row of students said, “It’s actually because witches and demons both draw their power from the same place.” Tamsin looked over to see who’d spoken. The girl had a pointy face, like a mouse, and dyed black and purple hair. She wore all black and had the body language of someone who never ever wanted people to look at her or talk to her.
The professor nodded. “Janet, right? Janet Wine? I knew your mother. Wonderful woman. It’s a real shame what happened to her.”
Janet flipped the hood of her shirt over her head and tried to sink into it.
“And you’re sort of right. It’s true that we draw magic energy from the same place that demons draw their power, but that’s not what demons believe. They believe we stole magic from them, back in the dark times, and that the more we humans use it, the weaker they become.”
“Is that true?” a boy next to her asked. He had deep brown skin with thick bands of bronze tattooed on his forearms and an intelligent look in his eyes. His voice was soft. “If we used enough magic, could we starve them?” His name was Benjamin.
The professor gave him an appraising look. “How many of you have seen a demon? Come on, I’m not going to snitch on you. I know consorting with a demon is grounds for incarceration, but I’m not asking if you consorted or cavorted or contorted with a demon. Just if you saw one. That’s no crime.”
Janet and Benjamin and another girl raised their hands.
“You three, meet me after class. I’d love to hear about your experiences for my research.”
Then he changed subjects to discussing the school and its organization, its hierarchy, the various houses and halls and traditions. Tamsin had covered most of it during her train ride and fought to keep paying attention. The class was two hours long and by the end of it Tamsin’s brain ached to contain everything she’d learned.
And she hadn’t even started a magic lesson yet.
Judging by the looks on her classmates faces, they were all in a similar situation. With the exception of Janet, they all had a slightly panicked look in their eyes as if they were just now realizing how fast and difficult university life would be.
Standing in the hall afterwards, Tamsin took slow deep breaths. She had an hour until she met with Professor Schoenherr for her first counseling session and she felt like she’d need all that time to calm down.
“That’s a heavy trip to lay on us,” Suresh said to no one in particular. “Hey kids, magic is real and by the way there are demons who hate you for stealing their natural resources and want to kill you.” There were knowing laughs from the rest of the students. They all milled about in the hall, like they were unsure about the next steps to take. That wouldn’t last long, of course. Soon they’d be rushing from class to class, or to study sessions or to see their lovers and tutors. But today, Tamsin knew, today was special.
Today was their only chance to make first impressions. It was the foundation for their future.
No pressure, right?
“I only just found out about magic,” Tamsin admitted, not looking at any one in particular.
“Oh my god, me too!” a girl with straight orange hair to her right announced. She had wide shoulders and a sweatshirt from her high school swim team. “About six months ago I was in a car crash and I walked away unhurt. It was a really bad one. Head on collision at highway speeds. The other guy was drunk and crossed the median line?” Her voice swung up at the end of her sentences, turning them into questions. “But I was fine. My Penrose contact said I instinctively teleported myself out of the car.”
“It was a year ago for me,” Suresh said. “I was playing hockey on this lake and fell through the ice. I was underwater for ten minutes, but this fish taught me how to breathe under there.” He shrugged. He had an enjoyably dopey smile. “It was a pretty cool fish.”
The other students peeled away. They had more experience, Tamsin guessed. Or somewhere better to be. But she and Suresh and Rachel, the swimmer with the long orange hair, talked and joked until the classroom door opened and Professor Schoenherr emerged.
Janet and Benjamin and the other kid who’d seen a demon followed him out. They looked shaken.
“Ms. Lee?” the professor asked. “You’re my next appointment. Are you free now?”
14
A Priest, an Opener, and a Know-It-All Walk into an Office
Professor Schoenherr lead Tamsin through the labyrinth that was Bentham Hall’s second floor. He muttered on the way like a tour guide who was about to quit his job. “That’s Albanessus Fronkle’s office. No one has seen him in ten years, but everyone is afraid to go in to check.” He nodded at another door. “That’s where we keep the staff’s coffee supply. It’s awful, but it’s free.” Another door was a lab for research into spells affecting the internet. And so on and so on.
Did he expect Tamsin to remember any of this? It was too much.
Or was he just a nervous talker? One of those people who never saw a silence they didn’t want to break? If Jiro was here, they’d get along well. Jiro never spoke unless he had to, or unless he had a sick burn to drop.
They arrived at a nondescript door. It was oak and had a large frosted glass window occupying the upper half. In gold letters, mostly faded, it said, Professor Schoenherr and then in smaller text Counselor to First Year Students, Exorcist, Demonologist, Resurrectionist.
“This is the only time I’ll walk you here,” Schoenherr said in his gruff accent. “You first years are like baby birds and you need to practice flying on your own.”
“But this place is a maze,” Tamsin protested.
Schoenherr smiled. His eyes crinkled at the edges and for a moment he reminded Tamsin of Santa Claus, but a Santa Claus who had seen some bad shit. “You’re going to find, very quickly, that Penrose loves mazes. Both literal and figurative. Nothing here is simple. Nothing is done for you. Do you know why that is?”
He pushed open his door and flipped on the lights.
Tamsin blurted out, “Because magic makes things easy.”
Schoenherr whistled in appreciation. “Sandy said you were bright. She wasn’t wrong.” He took a seat behind his desk.
The office wouldn’t have looked out of place in any university in the world, except for the large sword hanging on the wall behind the professor. And the names of the books stacked in messy piles around the room.
“Magic makes things easy,” he agreed. “And when things are easy, you don’t learn. Dostoevsky once said that suffering is the origin of all consciousness and he wasn’t wrong. It’s through adversity and adversity alone that we grow. The school is designed to test you, to shape you. The buildings are mazes. Communication is a joke. Classes are held in different places from week to week. Other students will stand in your way and you’ll have to find ways to deal with them. Some of it will seem like incompetence, which is a wizard’s favorite disguise.”
Tamsin nodded. She wanted to open every book on his shelves and flip through them. They had the most fascinating names. The Demon of Malbec was shelved next to Enchantments for Small Dogs which was next to Pyromancy, Never A Good Idea.
How could this be real life?
“It says here that you only popped up on our radar last week. How is that possible? You’re nineteen years old.”
Tamsin shrugged. There was an accusation in his tone. “I didn’t do anything to keep myself hidden. I just didn’t know about magic.”
“Why are you nineteen?”
“Because I was born nineteen years ago?”
“Most graduates—they’re eighteen. Why are you nineteen?”
Tamsin blinked. This didn’t feel like guidance. It felt like interrogation. She had the sense that Schoenherr wasn’t just asking her
questions, but he was also examining her on some mystical level.
“I took a year off, when I was twelve. My dad was a historian and the whole family spent a year in Asia. He studies the historical interplay between Japanese and Chinese culture.”
Schoenherr waved her conversation away as if she was talking about what she had for lunch. “How did you stay hidden?”
“I don’t know.”
The professor chewed on his beard and peered at her file through his glasses.
“I must seem odd to you,” he said. “You probably expected a Dumbledore or an Obi-Wan. But instead you get an ex-Catholic lapsed priest from Brooklyn.”
“I didn’t expect anything,” Tamsin said. Which wasn’t true. She had been hoping for robes and wands and spells to turn marshmallows into mice. But that seemed ridiculous now.
“What do you think consorting means?” he asked. He put the papers down and stared at her.
The office felt warm.
“To hang out with?” Tamsin ventured.
“I’m trying to see if you understand our most basic rules, Ms. Lee.” He spoke carefully and with gravity. “As your counselor, it’s my job to meet with you every week to see how your studies are coming along and to ensure you have the tools you need to navigate life in this place. But I’m also watching you, to see if you’re going to be a problem.”
Tamsin’s eyes flicked up to that sword on the wall behind him. The blade was chipped at the end and the edge looked like one of her father’s kitchen knives that had been sharpened too many times.
“Do you think consorting means accepting a demon’s aid, even when it doesn’t benefit the demon at all?”
“Probably?”
“Do you think consorting means destroying a demon?” His eyes narrowed.
“No, I don’t.”
“What about pretending to use a demon, so that it gets close enough to kill? Luring it in with false promises—getting it to trust you?”
Tamsin shook her head. “I don’t understand what that has to do with me?”
“Why are you here, Ms. Lee?”
There was a pressure on her mind, like the beginnings of a migraine. It didn’t feel internal, like when the door in her mind opened. No, Schoenherr was doing this. He was poking at her thoughts.
“My father is sick. I want to cure him,” Tamsin said. “It’s a genetic disorder. Extremely rare. His body is attacking itself on a fundamental level, unraveling his nerves and unstitching his muscles. I don’t know how long he has.”
The pressure vanished.
Schoenherr leaned back in his chair. He pulled a hard candy out of his pocket and popped it into his mouth. “My father was a Catholic, did I tell you this already? And my mother was Jewish. I grew up in both traditions. They’re both lovely and have a lot to offer, especially a kid like I was. See, I found my magic early and I used it for healing. It seemed to be the best gift I could give the world. I healed everyone I could. Everywhere I could. I fixed broken bones and skinned knees and bad teeth. And when I was old enough, I went to the seminary. I thought the church would appreciate my gifts, and they did. Quietly, they had me heal hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. They worked me day and night until I couldn’t walk from the strain.”
He ran his hands across his beard. “Until one day, I healed a demon. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. He looked like anyone else. He wasn’t even a powerful demon, as far as these things go. Just a little guy. But as soon as I put my hands on him and let my magic put his body back into the shape God had decided it should be, I knew something was wrong.”
Tamsin sat very still.
“It stole my magic. Sucked it right out of my hands and when my magic was gone, it started taking my life. I would have died that day, devoured by a demon. Except there was a parishioner who sensed what was going on. He wasn’t gifted like us, but he was sensitive. Some people are. Usually they have a relative who exposed them to magic at an early age. Anyway, this guy, he burst into the back room and found me writhing on the ground, with my hands holding the demon’s. The demon couldn’t move, see? He was as stuck to me as I was to him. As long as he was feeding, he was trapped. And this parishioner, he was a vet. An ex-Marine, I think. He put a knife right through that demon’s chest.”
“Did that kill it?”
“No.” Schoenherr shook his head sadly. “They don’t kill easily. But it drove it off. They still feel pain, even if it doesn’t bother them in exactly the way it does us.”
“Professor, why are you telling me this story?”
“Because First Year students are vulnerable,” Schoenherr said. “You need to know how dangerous the world can be for you.”
“I have the internet, I know how dangerous the world is.”
“It took ten years for my magic to come back. Ten years. And every day, I thought it wasn’t going to happen. I had a gift and I lost it. I couldn’t heal anymore. Do you know how useless that made me feel?”
Tamsin remembered the sign on the door. “And that’s when you became an exorcist.”
The professor flinched. Tamsin smiled inwardly. Why did everyone underestimate her?
“How did you know that?”
“When you healed the demon, did you get accused of consorting?”
Schoenherr nodded. “There was a trial. The punishment would have meant death. But they realized I did it out of ignorance, not malice. I was forgiven. And then I spent the rest of my youth hunting demons, first for the Church and then for Penrose.”
“But can you heal now?” Tamsin asked. There was sharpened iron in her voice.
Schoenherr nodded. “But not your father’s condition. That sort of illness—a genetic abnormality—I would just hurry it along. The very blueprint of his body has an error in it, and to pour magic in would only magnify that error. His body is just doing what his genes say to do. To fix him, you’d need to rewrite his genes.”
“Okay. How do I do that?”
Schoenherr stood up and selected five books from his shelf. “Read these. Don’t do any of the rituals inside. Seriously. Just read them. Designing a cure isn’t impossible, but it’ll take time to make it. Years, at least. It’ll have to be personalized to a degree that will startle you.”
“He might not have years.”
“This can’t be rushed. Rushing would just kill him faster.”
The words took Tamsin’s breath away. It couldn’t be true. How could these people rearrange stone, float luggage, fight demons and not be able to help her dad? Maybe they just didn’t want to. Or maybe she couldn’t afford the real cure.
Schoenherr glanced at his watch. “We’re almost out of time. Tell me, how’s your roommate situation?”
Tamsin’s blood was boiling. The door inside her mind rattled. “It’s not good. I think we all hate each other.”
The professor laughed. “That’s how it always starts, but soon you’ll find commonalities and you’ll be best friends.”
Tamsin loved to have her feelings and opinions completely ignored.
No, wait.
She hated that.
“Who’re your roommates anyway?”
“MacKenzie something or other and Hannah Hearthhome.”
The color drained from Schoenherr’s face. He stabbed a finger in the air at her. “You be careful with that one.”
“Hannah?”
“We’ll see if we can get you a room somewhere else.” He made a note on his desk.
“What’s going on?”
“I can’t say anything,” Schoenherr warned. “She’s connected too high. Half the board of regents are her family. Just be careful. Watch out.”
They stared at each other over the desk.
“Do you have any questions for me? We’re going to do this every week. You should think of questions. Especially if you run into problems or topics you want to explore further, you can bring those to me.”
“A girl on my hall, she was talking about a door opening inside her and then she s
ort of burst into flames. I heard someone say she opened a portal to the elemental planes? Or something?” It was a lie, but Tamsin sold it.
Schoenherr sat upright. “What girl is this? Do you get her name?”
“No, no. I don’t think she even lived in our dorm. I think she was visiting one of the second years.”
“If you see her again, tell her to talk to her counselor. She might be an opener and if she is, she’s extraordinarily dangerous.”
“What’s an opener?”
“Magic tends to specialize in different people. I heal people. It’s what I do. My wife has a talent for metallurgy. Another mage might have a gift for talking to animals. But an opener, they open things.”
“Open things? That’s pretty vague.”
“They open doors between places. They open portals to other worlds. They open locked things. They open minds and hearts. They uncover secrets and disrupt everything. Nothing is safe from an opener.” Schoenherr ran a hand over his forehead. He was sweating now. “An opener. Christ almighty. That’s just what we need.”
Schoenherr excused himself and sent Tamsin packing. He seemed genuinely flustered.
In the hall outside, Janet was waiting. She seemed like a storm cloud squished into a human body.
“Is he ready for me?” she asked, as if seeing Schoenherr was the very last thing she wanted to do.
“Maybe give him a minute? He’s busy with a thing.”
Janet smiled. “What did you guys talk about? Let me guess, how scary demons are?”
Tamsin nodded. “It sounds like you have a different opinion.”
“The prof here is like a guy who went swimming and saw a shark once and now runs around telling everyone to never go in the water. He’s paranoid.” Janet fished headphones out of her pocket. “You can’t believe what he tells you. Trust me.”
15
Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Page 7
