by Rebecca Hall
“Guinevere said that she cursed my family,” Mitch said, scrambling up to sit on the lip of the fountain.
“I doubt she’d have lied about that,” Nikola said, sitting at Mitch’s side. “Now what’s really bothering you?”
“Amelie,” he said and related the events of the evening.
“Our family is ancient, Mitchell,” Nikola said. “And as you may have noticed Amelie is a little competitive. Guinevere ruled over Camelot, Morrigan slaughtered entire armies and Gawain is the best healer in the world. What’s Amelie done that can compare to that?”
“She’s eighteen,” Mitch protested.
“We’re the youngest members of a family that has already done anything. They’re proud of her Mitch, and they love her, but I’m not sure that will ever be enough for her.”
“So this is all just sibling rivalry?”
“More or less,” Nikola shrugged, “and Guin does have a gift for bringing out the worst in her. But it was also Guin who taught her how to fence and it was Morrigan who gave her her first lessons in telekinesis.”
Mitch pulled a face. He wouldn’t try competing with any of his teachers and they didn’t have anywhere near as much experience as the two Fae.
“And you got Taliesin.”
“I know,” Nikola grinned. “I’m the closest to her by more than a century but I have my magic and the dubious honour of surviving my father. And, well quite frankly, most of her siblings openly favour me.”
“And none of this bothers you?”
Nikola shrugged, “Being me is better than beating them, one day Amelie will work that out.”
“I just hope it’s before I have to amputate my fingers.”
Nikola laughed and Mitch leaned over to hug him.
“I missed you,” Mitch said. “It’s nice to see you be yourself again.”
“I missed me too.”
“Will you…” Mitch swallowed. “Will you still be yourself when we go back. If not then… then…”
“It’s alright Mitch,” Nikola said, releasing him and rising to his feet. “Aunt Titania suppressed the impressions. I’ll have to meditate everyday but as long as I don’t enter another telepath’s mind I’ll be fine.” He offered Mitch a hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Good.”
“Now, how deep do you think this fountain is?”
“Uh, pretty deep I guess,” Mitch said. “For a–” There was a splash as Nikola fell back into it. “What the hell Nikola?” Mitch yelled.
“That was refreshing,” Nikola said, floating on his back.
“Try to pull me in and I’ll freeze it solid,” Mitch said, offering him a hand. Nikola laughed and let Mitch pull him out, embracing him in a slopping wet hug instead.
“Nikola,” Mitch groaned. Nikola just laughed. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“And then Gawain will scold me,” Nikola sighed and jumped down to the ground. “Good thing I was looking for an excuse to leave.”
Mitch laughed and jumped down as well, following him back to their rooms to change.
PART THREE
Questions and Confusion
“For someone who claims to be fine you sound dreadful,” Mitch said, rubbing Nikola on the back as he coughed.
“It’s just allergies,” Nikola wheezed.
“I know,” Mitch replied. “But if it gets any worse we’re leaving.” Nikola wasn’t breaking out in hives yet but he was also doing his best not to touch anything. With the hand sanitisers dotted around campus it was a good idea but Mitch knew that it was a half-measure at best. “We really need to find an anti-histamine that your system can tolerate.” There were some he could take but none that wouldn’t knock him out.
“I don’t think that those exist,” Nikola said, leaning against his shoulder. “And it’s only our first day back, this semester is going to be hell.”
“As opposed to last semester?” Mitch asked, carefully copying down the current equation.
Nikola shrugged, “They’re still fighting off the coast.”
“And it’s giving you a migraine,” Mitch said, checking the packet of tissues in his pocket in case Nikola got a nose bleed.
“Not yet.”
“Aha, you just have your eyes closed because it’s easier to write if you can’t actually see the page,” Mitch retorted. Even with his eyes closed Nikola’s writing was neater than his.
“Something like that,” Nikola agreed. He sighed, “Do you see the girl in the third row, second to the left?”
“Yeah?” Mitch said, “The one with dark curly hair?” She’d been sitting there when they came in, apparently she was a morning person, but he doubted that that was what had caught Nikola’s attention. She had looked vaguely familiar but there were more than a hundred people in some of his other lectures, he could have seen her in one of those without ever actually meeting her.
“She’s a magician.”
Mitch almost swallowed his tongue in an attempt to keep his voice down and not draw attention. They were supposed to be studying matrix algebra not discussing magic. At least no one was close enough to hear what they were talking about. Nikola was practically whispering in his ear.
“What?” he hissed. There was no need to ask how Nikola knew or if he was sure, Nikola was much more sensitive to magic than he was. “I didn’t think someone from one of the other schools would go to university here.” Well, Amelie was but her home was in another realm not a long haul flight away and he would have recognised someone from the Academy.
“I never said that she went to one of the schools.”
“You mean she was one of those second-rate hacks who was part of a coven at high school?” Mitch asked. He’d met some of them before and they’d been pretty useless. One of them had even trapped herself in her own magic.
“Those second-rate hacks cause more trouble than any other magical community,” Nikola said. “They don’t follow the same rules as the Teratos or someone trained in one of the schools and they have a nasty habit of trying to kill us.”
“Why?” Mitch asked. Most of the myths about the Teratos were just that but a stake through the heart, or an iron poker, was fatal no matter what you were.
“Because they don’t know that, no formal education remember? Just word of mouth and second hand accounts.
“Their organisation seems to be rather haphazard. There are a few disjointed networks but it’s mostly just independent covens in the major cities. It’s not like you can just Google for them, anything legitimate would be drowned out by the white noise.”
Mitch nodded. The Teratos had a private forum but access was by invitation only and had come with dire warnings of death and dismemberment should he attempt to hack the server or allow a human access.
“So long story short, there are a lot of magicians out there who regard us as the spawn of Satan and act accordingly.”
“Well if you investigate the origin of magic…” Mitch muttered. Nikola laughed softly.
“She could be completely harmless but I don’t want to go that deep into her mind.”
“Then don’t,” Mitch said, squeezing Nikola’s shoulder. “We’ll just avoid her.” Insomuch as they could when they shared a paper, but it wasn’t like she could stake him in the middle of campus.
“Are hedge-witches really that much of a problem?” he asked.
“Conservative estimates say that only twenty percent of magicians receive formal training,” Nikola replied. “And that figure is steadily declining.
Mitch cursed under his breath, he knew that most magicians weren’t formally trained but he hadn’t thought that they were outnumbered four to one. The schools tried to take the best but if eighty percent of the magical population went untrained and then met each other and started hunting ghouls and vampires…
It would probably be a short-lived hunt; most Teratos had had more than a century to master magic, but it wasn’t something that he ever wanted to deal with.
“Can’t the schools
try to organise them?” Mitch said. “And, I don’t know, run an after school program or something?”
“They’re elitist snobs Mitchell, and they won’t listen to us because we’re not human.” He practically spat the last words, he might not care for his human ancestry but he resented the notion that he was somehow less than human.
“We’ll just have to look out for each other then,” Mitch said, hastily scrawling the final set of equations as the lecture came to a close.
#
“This seat taken?”
“What? No,” Mitch replied, moving his books aside and looking around the crowded tutorial room. He barely kept from jumping out of his skin when he realised that it was the girl Nikola had pointed out to him the other day. Up close and seen from the front she looked a couple of years older than him with dark skin and darker eyes and that same sense of familiarity.
“Thanks,” she said, sliding into the empty seat and placing her books on the now empty table. It’s just co-incidence, Mitch told himself. There aren’t any other empty spots, she doesn’t know that you’re a vampire. He’d checked the aether on Monday and if anything Nikola had downplayed how much of a problem the self-trained magicians were. Or the internet was blowing everything out of proportion again.
“Where’s your friend?”
“Sick,” Mitch said. Nikola had made it through three days of classes but he’d been sniffling and sneezing that morning and Mitch had convinced him to stay home. If he got too sick it would interfere with his ability to contain the impressions.
“I’m Miriama,” she held out a hand.
“Mitch,” he replied, shaking it on pure reflex before he realised that it might not be a good idea. This close he could feel her magic and while she hadn’t seemed aware of his she definitely noticed when their hands touched. He ran his tongue over his fangs and barely kept from thumbing his ring. He wished he could just wear contact lenses like Nikola instead of having to rely on glamour. Glamour could be seen through.
Miriama’s eyes widened. “You’re a wizard,” she hissed.
“I’m a maths student,” he hissed back, eyes darting around the room to make sure that no one was close enough to overhear. Not that it mattered much, everyone would probably just assume that they were a pair of giant nerds.
“But…”
Mitch stared at the page in front of him and the equations waiting to be solved, wishing that Nikola was in his usual spot at his side.
Miriama sighed, “Sorry, I was just surprised, that’s all.”
Mitch shrugged, he supposed wizard was better than vampire.
“Have you done question seven yet?”
“I’ve tried it,” Mitch said, relaxing slightly. It didn’t seem like she was going to stake him and no one ever got lynched for discussing a maths problem. “I don’t know if I got it right though.” Nikola would have known but Nikola always worked in Faerie and then translated the answer to English and it was impossible to get things wrong in Faerie without rewriting reality.
“Same here,” she smiled at him. “Wanna compare notes?”
“Sure.” He leafed through his notes until he found and pushed them towards the middle of the table.
“That’s not supposed to be legible is it?”
“I can read it,” Mitch said. It was a little messy but Nikola never complained about his writing.
“I really am sorry,” Miriama said once the tutorial finished and they were making their way across campus to the food hall. “If you don’t want to be part of the community then I won’t tell anyone.”
“Err… thanks,” Mitch replied, opening the door for her.
“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” Miriama said, gliding through. Mitch shrugged, he was so used to doing it for Nikola that it was practically a reflex.
“I mean it,” Miriama continued, lowering her voice slightly now that they were out of the wind. “I came here to get away from… you know. I won’t out someone else.”
“Uh, sure,” Mitch said. He had no idea what she might be trying to get away from but if she wasn’t going to pry into his life then he could hardly ask about hers.
“Don’t tell me you finally made a friend Mitch,” Amelie said, coming in from the opposite direction.
“We were working together in maths,” Mitch said. “And we were both heading in the same direction,” along with half the class. The food court adjoined the central library. Miriama cleared her throat loudly.
“Oh right, Amelie this is Miriama, Miriama this is my girlfriend Amelie.”
Miriama blinked, looking even more shocked than she had when she realised that he was a magician, and mechanically held out a hand.
“Nice to meet you,” Amelie said, shaking the offered hand. If anything Miriama contrived to look even more shocked.
“You’re from the schools aren’t you?” Miriama asked. Mitch nodded and jerked his head towards an empty table and they drifted towards it. The schools might not be able to train everyone but they did make a point of training the best. Amelie was probably one of the strongest magicians Miriama had ever met.
“Your friend too?”
Mitch nodded again. She’d probably have a heart attack if she ever realised how strong Nikola was.
“The one up north?”
“Yeah,” Mitch replied, pulling out a chair. “Nikola too.”
“I went to school in Munich,” Amelie said.
“Wait…” Miriama said, staring at him intently. “You didn’t attend an interschool maths contest a couple of years ago did you?”
“How–” Mitch began, suddenly realising why she looked so familiar. “Aroha.”
“Mitch,” Amelie said, kicking him under the table when he didn’t respond.
“My sister and her friends picked a fight with them,” Miriama shook her head. “Our parents were not pleased when they got a call from the Academy, Aroha was grounded for a week.”
“Tell me that you kicked their asses,” Amelie giggled.
“Amelie,” Mitch groaned. “We never would have done that without the curse’s influence.” Well, probably not. The only one it had been affecting was Gwen but he’d thought that dating her was a good idea, so clearly there’d been something wrong with his judgement.
“Aha,” Amelie sounded thoroughly unconvinced.
“Aroha still insists that you cheated,” Miriama said.
“There’s no such thing,” Amelie said.
“Just because you don’t believe in fair play,” Mitch muttered.
“Try telling her that,” Miriama said at the same time. Amelie just grinned at them both.
#
“Your friend still sick?” Miriama asked, sliding into the seat next to Mitch’s.
“His name’s Nikola and yes he is,” Mitch replied. Nikola was feeling better after a weekend spent in bed but Mitch hadn’t wanted him going out in the sleet and Nikola hadn’t voiced any objections to staying in his nice warm bed. He’d even complimented Mitch’s bread slicing skills when he brought him breakfast in bed but he’d barely touched the toast and he’d flinched at the light from the open door. It hadn’t taken a genius to realise that the Eternity War was back in town.
“Anyway,” Miriama said, rummaging in her back for a pen. “It’s school holidays at the moment.”
“I know,” Mitch said. Cullum had wanted to come visit again but his parents had put their foot down and Mum had actually flown to New Zealand to spend the holidays with him. The knowledge that Cullum was probably hating every second of it did little to console him. His parents had never thought it necessary to come spend the holidays with him.
“And since Aroha will be starting university next year our parents decided to send her down here.”
“They what?” Mitch asked. “Can’t she just look at Auckland uni or something?”
“I said the same thing,” Miriama said. “I’ll try to keep her busy but I thought I’d better warn you, she’s only here for a week.”
“Tha
nks,” Mitch said, slumping back into his chair. Dunedin was a big city, avoiding one person shouldn’t be that hard. He’d just have to stay home with Nikola when he wasn’t in class.
Miriama flashed him a quick smile and frowned at the rest of the room. “Where is everyone?”
“Good question,” Mitch replied, glancing at the clock over the door. Their lecture should have started five minutes ago but half the class and the lecturer were missing. “Did you check cancellations this morning?” He should have; if it was sleeting in town then it was probably snowing on the hills.
“No,” she sighed, “I guess we just wait for one of them to do it.” Half a dozen of their classmates had laptops out and others were playing with phones and tablets but Mitch wasn’t sure how well the wireless would cope with concrete walls and magicians.
“Hey, why were you so surprised when you met Amelie the other day?” He supposed she could have sensed Amelie’s magic before shaking her hand but he didn’t really believe that.
“I ah…” she stared at the desk, fiddling with her pen. “I thought you were with Nikola.”
“You what?” Mitch asked, almost swallowing his tongue.
She met his incredulous stare and laughed softly. “You do realise that most of the class thinks the same thing right?”
“What?” He seemed to be saying that a lot but part of his brain seemed to be frozen. He looked around the lecture theatre. When they were actually here about half of them had been in his maths lecture last semester and a third were in physics with him but he still wasn’t sure how he and Nikola had managed to become the subject of gossip so quickly. The second semester had barely started.
“You can’t really be that surprised,” Miriama said. “You’re always holding hands or playing with his hair or something. Your body language practically screams relationship.”
“He’s my best friend,” Mitch protested, “and I’m dating Amelie.”
“What kind of an idiot thinks that dating his best friend’s twin is a good idea?”
“Does everyone really think that?” Mitch asked. Amelie might not mind being mistaken for Nikola’s sister but she’d hit the roof if she ever heard that Mitch was being mistaken for Nikola’s boyfriend.
