“I knew you’d be calling,” Grace said. “Didn’t I say six weeks?” She wore black lipstick and had eyes that weren’t so much smoky as they were post-inferno.
“You said you knew a guy? Who could get me a phone?”
“Straight to business then? I like it, Cherry. I’m busy too.” Grace’s eyes were glazed and unfocused.
She was stoned to the gills.
“I can see that,” Tamsin said. “I’d hate to take up too much of your time.”
“So what is it?”
“Can you get me a phone?”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure. Anything. What is it?”
Grace laughed. “Holy shit, you are desperate. Just look at you. You’re practically dripping with flop sweat.”
She took another long drag on her pipe.
Tamsin could open her. She could pull the truth out of the girl like she had with Hannah and Gray and Rye. It would be so easy, especially with how high Grace was. But she had a feeling that might not go the way she wanted. The truth Grace wanted to say might not be the truth Tamsin wanted to hear.
“What do you need, Grace?”
“A favor. At some point in the future. I need you to swear to it.”
“What kind of favor?”
“The kind you do for me, no questions asked,” Grace snapped. They locked eyes. Tamsin looked away first.
“Promise me no one gets hurt?”
“I can promise that you won’t have to hurt anyone.”
“That’s not the same thing,” Tamsin said.
“Oh I know.” Grace took a long pull on her pipe and breathed out foul smelling green smoke that hung in the air unnaturally.
What choice did she have? Could she go to the administration and out herself as an Opener and beg leniency? It might work. Or it might just get her locked away. From what Janet said, it sounded like her talent was rare and powerful and dangerous. And maybe—just maybe—an untrained cherry like her was the worst person in the world to have that gift.
“Okay,” Tamsin said. “I’ll owe you a favor. Can I have the phone?”
Grace cackled. “Oh my god, you are such a newbie. You think it’s that easy? No, your little promise isn’t good enough.”
Grace closed her eyes and focused. A blue glow spilled out of her mouth. In a rasping voice she said, “Do you Tamsin, in exchange for a working phone, promise to perform a favor for Grace whenever she asks you, without question or hesitation?”
Tamsin chewed her lip. “I do.” She had the briefest sensation, like a rope tightening around her throat.
Grace took a long pull at the pipe again. “Smoke this, and the deal is done.”
“What is it?”
Grace didn’t answer.
“Is this the favor?”
Grace gave her a are you fucking stupid look and pressed the pipe into Tamsin’s hands.
Tamsin had never smoked anything before. Ever. But desperate times and all that.
She put her lips on the pipe. It reminded her ridiculously of her clarinet from band camp. She inhaled.
If the smoke smelled repellent, it felt even worse invading her lungs.
If she had to describe the taste of it, she would have said it was like taking a skunk and dipping it in molasses and then rolling it in lawn clips, then setting it on fire inside your mouth.
Distantly, Grace was laughing.
The world flipped upside down and inside out.
“What did you do to me?” Tamsin asked, but the words sounded like fish laughing.
Her eyesight went black and white and then became oversaturated.
She was outside her body, looking down.
She didn’t look so good. Her clothes were an absolute mess. Her skin had gone all chalky and she was pretty sure she drooling.
“You can’t hold your smoke, can you?” Grace asked.
Tamsin watched from above as the girl pulled an iPhone out of her back pocket and stuffed it into Tamsin’s bra.
Grace nodded, slipped the pipe into her jacket where it vanished without a trace. “The passcode is 666,” Grace laughed as she walked away.
Tamsin hovered over her body. What if the smoke wasn’t supposed to mix with alcohol? What if she had to take it on a full stomach? What if she was just going to die here?
She peered at herself closely.
There was no pulse.
She had no breath.
She was dying.
But the world was beautiful.
Was she a ghost? An out-of-body spirit? Something else? Whatever it was, she could see the magic in the air like eddies of golden wind. The runes on the walls and floor glowed like neon. Everywhere she looked, she could see traces of the spells that had been cast and the rituals that had been performed. It was glorious.
Her spirit body was a cloud of golden lights, like the world’s most organized fireflies having a parade. And inside of that cloud, was a key. And a door.
Tamsin tried to squish herself back into her dying body. She tried to fly her spirit body up her own nose or into her open mouth. But nothing happened.
So then she tried the key.
With every ounce of her will, she pushed the key out of her spirit form and pushed it into the body on the floor.
Something clicked.
The key turned.
Suddenly she was falling into herself and the golden world of magic was hidden from her eyes once again.
When she woke, it was nearly night.
And the moon was rising.
20
Preparations for the Future
She hurried to get the herbs from the shop before it closed for the day. Everything at Penrose seemed to close early, except for the bars that were off limits to First Year students—even the ones who were nineteen. It made the college town feel sleepier than it really was.
Everyone at the shop looked at her like she’d just been in a car crash. Calling her disheveled would have done a disservice to the word. Tamsin Lee looked like she hadn’t slept well in a month and had just come back from the dead, which was true. The old Tamsin would have felt embarrassed about this, would have hidden or taken the time to smooth out her hair at least.
This new Tamsin didn’t care.
This new Tamsin just wanted to take care of business.
She was still high from whatever the hell she smoked with Grace. She hadn’t eaten in at least a day and yet she had no appetite
The cashier who rang her up looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, right down to the chin beard. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Tamsin nodded. She didn’t trust her voice.
“Okay, because you look seriously messed up. Do you want me to, like, clean you up?” The cashier held up his wand.
Tamsin nodded without thinking. What could it hurt?
Shaggy’s twin brother drew a complex circle in the air that made her dizzy. Behind her in line an older woman muttered a complaint under her breath.
He finished drawing the circle and tapped Tamsin on the forehead and a sensation like standing under an enormous blow dryer washed over her. She looked the same, but now her hair was flying out in all directions.
“Okay, yeah, that didn’t work as well as I was hoping,” he apologized. “Sorry.”
Tamsin paid for the herbs and ran all the way to the dorm.
Her dorm room was off limits for a ritual, of course. MacKenzie would be there and even if by some miracle she wasn’t—the girl did go to classes at some point, didn’t she?—Hannah might show up and Tamsin was in no mood for a rematch.
Though it had felt very satisfying to break her nose.
She checked the common room, but Chester the RA had it commandeered for some elaborate board game that involved castles and miniature soldiers that moved on their own. So that was another possible room off her list. But she noticed amongst the players of the game was Rye.
She caught his eye and waved him over.
He seemed to have decided the best way to
beat the heat was to wear as few clothes as possible. The enormous man was clad in only a skimpy pair of running shorts. Tamsin didn’t mind at all. Especially when he stood up from his folding chair and walked over to her.
Watching a mostly naked Rye move was like eating dessert.
His tattoos seemed especially vivid that night. They shone with a silver light. Did he repaint them? Or was it the full moon’s effect?
“Ahh, Tamsin, my little koshka. How are you?” He stood close to her. Closer than usual.
Did he see how messed up she was? Could he tell that she was high?
There were fresh red scratches on Rye’s arms and legs, like he’d been wrestling a small bear. They were deep.
“What happened to you?” she asked. She reached out and touched his wounds without asking.
Rye blushed at the contact. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “I was playing with a dog.”
“I thought pets weren’t allowed on campus?”
“They aren’t,” Rye said. He looked back at Chester nervously, but the Resident Advisor was arguing with one of the other players over some arcane rule of the game. They were waving books at each other and shouting.
Tamsin traced the scratches with her fingertips. She wanted to kiss them, to smooth ointment on them. It was wrong to see Rye hurt. The man was so calm and so kind.
She wanted to wrap Rye up in bandages and be his brave healer. But there was no time for that now.
Whenever she touched him, her heart raced. She couldn’t catch her breath.
Rye was absolutely still, watching her with his big soulful eyes.
“Something is wrong? You seem different.”
Tamsin put on a brave smile for him. “Just too much homework. Listen, Rye, I have a ritual I need to do. Its supposed to enhance clarity and focus. It’s a concentration thing? It shouldn’t take more than an hour. Could I use your room?”
It felt awful lying to him—like punching a puppy.
He nodded. “Yes, of course. My room is your room.”
“Will it be a problem with the other boys?”
“No, no. Gray is off wherever he goes at night and won’t be back until twelve. And it’s a full moon, so Cash is busy, of course.”
“Of course,” she said. Why of course? What did Cash do on full moons?
Chester’s thin voice cut the air. “Rye! Are you playing? If you don’t get back here for your next turn, you forfeit six victory points and I don’t have to tell you that you really can’t afford that.”
Rye smiled at her and shrugged. “I am going to lose badly. But it is fun.”
“Good luck storming the castle,” Tamsin said.
“Come find me after your business is complete. Perhaps we can go for a walk under the moonlight?”
Tamsin’s heart did a triple backflip. “Yes. I think I would love that.”
Rye always seemed so pure of heart, so innocent and kind. But the way he looked at her then was anything but. Maybe it was the heat or the full moon, but the look in his eyes told her that if she went for a walk with him that night, at some point he would have her pressed against a wall with her legs struggling to wrap around his muscular waist as he kissed her and did every other thing he wanted to her.
He wanted her.
She looked like a swamp witch who had woken up in a roadside ditch.
And he wanted her.
She’d do the ritual. She’d meet this King of Shadow and secure her future.
And then she was going to kiss a handsome boy under the moonlight.
21
Summoning the King in Shadow for Dummies
The instructions in the book were easy to follow. Easier than most of her textbooks.
It was like Summoning the King in Shadow for Dummies.
Tamsin placed the unlocked phone on the middle of the floor and drew the binding circle around it. According to the book, the King would grant one request in exchange for a favor and for the promise of being returned to the spirit world.
Tamsin knew very little about spirits. The magic needed to interact with them was weird and complex and was reserved almost exclusively for grad students. Unless you had a gift for it, spirit work was just too dangerous to bother with. What she did know was that they disliked being in the material world.
She drew the protection circle in the space where she would stand. Each circle took a long time to draw correctly. They were filled with odd whorls and mystic runes that had to be copied from the book precisely. She chanted as she drew, following the instructions to a tee.
Around her circle and the King’s, she drew the third circle. Some of the runes in this one seemed familiar, as if she’d seen them recently. Did Janet’s privacy spell incorporate some of them?
Tamsin didn’t let herself think about if she should be summoning a powerful spirit for aid. The answer was clearly no. But as long as she focused on the process and ignored the nagging voice inside, she could make it work.
She’d already stolen from a professor and gotten high with Grace. What was one more step into the shadows?
Her fingers gripped the ritual chalk tightly. She broke piece after piece while drawing the runes. She was tightly wound.
If only the boys could be there to help her. She would have felt so much better.
But would they let her summon a powerful spirit? Of course not.
It was odd to be in the boys’ room without them. There was a slightly funky smell, like laundry that had been sitting around too long, coming from Cash’s part of the room. Gray’s area was hidden behind an opulent silk curtain that glimmered with hints of gold. And Rye’s was a mess of spilled paint, stacked canvases, and sketchbooks. On his bed were what looked to be paw prints from a very large dog, preserved forever in red paint.
What was Rye up to?
Tamsin finished the ritual and sat in her circle. The words for it were in some ancient tongue that the book didn’t bother to identify. All of it was written phonetically and when she pronounced the final syllable, nothing happened.
The King’s circle was empty.
Nothing had changed.
She’d gone through all the effort for nothing.
But then there was a whisper in the air.
It reminded Tamsin of when she was a little girl and her house made little creaks as it settled at night.
Jiro told her it was faeries coming to take her away.
Her parents said it was just an old house going to sleep.
The summoning circle was empty.
Was something tapping on the window?
Could she hear footsteps in the hall?
A bit of shadow in the corner of the room seemed darker than the darkness around it.
What did a spirit look like, anyway? It wasn’t as if the book had sketches in it.
Tamsin was about to give up.
But something had changed.
There was a trick Rachel had taught her, during one of their study sessions. It was basic magic. Kiddie stuff. But really useful.
Tamsin sat still with her legs crossed and her arms loose. She took a long slow breath in and let her eyes unfocus. Jiro used to tell her that if you unfocused your eyes while reading you could see secret messages written in the space between words. It sounded silly at the time, but he wasn’t wrong.
There were secrets hidden in the world.
They were just looking in the wrong places.
With unfocused eyes a mage could see the magic in the in-between. When a witch wrote in the air with a wand, she wasn’t writing on the actual air as if it were paper, no, she was writing on the space under the air. Between our world and the next. It was the place that magic came from and flowed to. And if you looked just right, you could see it a glimpse of it.
Tamsin saw now a being of shadow, out of the corner of her unfocused eyes. He had long sharp limbs, almost like a praying mantis, and a head that stretched up to the ceiling. He wore a six-pointed crown of deeper darkness sprinkled with stars. He had no featu
res that Tamsin could see, apart from a dazzling white smile.
“I see you,” Tamsin whispered.
The King in Shadow laughed in a musical voice. “Of course you do, Tamsin Lee. And not for the first time.”
“Can you help me? Do you know what I need?” Could this be the answer she’d been searching for? Could he give her power? Could he heal her father?
“The King in Shadow knows everything that is hidden. All secrets belong to the King.” His voice made Tamsin think of that house settling.“You need power, little twin. The King in Shadow can give this to you.”
Everything about this felt wrong.
But how could she stop now?
“And what do you ask in return?” Tamsin’s voice shook. Tears welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She couldn’t see the King in Shadow, unless she looked away from him and even then it was just the briefest flicker.
“I want your gift, Opener. Oh the things I could do with that key you carry in your soul. Such wonderful, delectable things.”
Tamsin saw teeth, razor sharp and flecked with meat.
She saw three tongues in one mouth.
Fingers like butcher’s knives reached for her.
This was wrong. Too wrong. She needed help and she needed a cure for her father. But to do this—it felt like she was trading her soul.
“No,” Tamsin said. “I won’t do this. I can’t trust you. I don’t care what anyone says. I’d rather fail out of school than give you my gift.”
The King of Shadow stepped out of his magic circle. “You really think you have a choice, girl?”
His laugh was too loud, too knowing.
Tamsin tried to stand and move out of her circle, but she was trapped. It was as if an invisible wall had been erected around her.
The ritual had been a trap. She was caged and the King in Shadow was free.
“What’s going on? Stop!” Tamsin screamed.
The King in Shadow laughed louder and flicked out with his knife fingers. “No one can hear you. This outer circle you drew? You really should have paid more attention to it. No one will be able to even see you in this room if they open the door. We are invisible and that sweet gift of yours is mine to devour.”
Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Page 11
