by Jayla Kane
“What the fuck…”
“That’s more like it,” she said, speaking to me in my own voice. My stomach dropped; my entire body flooded with ice. “You aren’t entirely fearless, are you, Mr. Black?”
I started to move towards her again and she raised her arms and held them out to me, warning painted on my face as clear as day. “What the-“
“I can take many shapes,” she said quietly, the sound an urgent hiss painted in my own deep tones. “If you attack me again, I will think of a vicious way to kill you. Cobra. Scorpion. I’m already going to be hiding the black eye you just gave me; don’t make me find a place for your body.” Her voice was mine, but a version of me that had never existed—cool, clever, enjoying the teasing words that poured out of its face. I studied myself; I would never have known I wasn’t looking at Hunter Black. My eyes weren’t quite right—they were a tad too round—and my chin was slightly longer. But I knew that given another thirty seconds, they could change that. Fix it. Fool anyone who saw them.
What would they make me do, I wondered? What would they frame me for, pin on me, ruin me with? They could do anything—open fire in the middle of class, gut a couple co-eds, rob the Witch’s Brew—and there was no way I could defend myself against the charges. Nothing I could do.
Even if she killed me, she could still pretend to be me afterward.
Fuck.
“What do you want?”
“Huh,” she said, watching me, and then she slid back into the more nebulous, vibrating form she’d taken before, disappearing into the depths of her cloak, all blurred edges. It gave me a headache to look at her directly. “That was quick.” I said nothing and waited. She sat down at the desk, kicking my bag with her foot as she did. “Usually I have to dress up our sales pitch a little bit, make things seem gloriously—”
“What do you want?”
“Fine,” she said, and sighed. “So. Magic is real.”
I was silent. I didn’t know why she kept talking like I needed to respond. She sighed again and continued after a long moment.
“You have potential, Mr. Black. I have a feeling you will be very useful to us. How much do you know about the Society?”
“Nothing.” That was a lie. I knew a little about it, because Jake had been doing research for about a year or two; that said, none of it seemed relevant now. He’d done research on a secret society in one of the country’s oldest private colleges, notorious for pranks with some real trouble sprinkled in every now and then, known as a magnet for rich punks. Now, magic was fucking real and I was going to be blackmailed into doing whatever this slick bitch wanted and what she wanted in the moment, apparently, was for me to tap-dance and act like this was great. Jim dandy. Fan-fucking-tastic. Now, I knew the Society wasn’t a club for Harvard drop-outs to drink and plot campus mischief. Now, I was terrified.
“Founded by certain families in Ashwood, it’s actually a very special group for people like you and me.” She paused, baiting me with that little comment, but I said nothing and waited. She sighed again, rapping her hand on the table. “People with a predilection for magic, Mr. Black. People who can handle the responsibility of true power.” Ten minutes ago, that sentence would’ve made me laugh out loud. Or at least want to. “There are twelve positions on the Council, which concentrates the most magic together in the same place—the Society has an endless roster of those who run our errands, fill our ranks, spread our propaganda; none of them are introduced to the concept of actual magic. But becoming a member of the Council bestows powers on each individual who agrees to swear fidelity to our mission, to each other. To the Society. Do you understand?”
“You want me to join the Council.”
“Good boy.”
“And that will make me… Shape-shift?” I knew there were twelve positions; Jake had read me all the crap about the Society he found online a few weeks ago, when he was getting nervous that his efforts to draw their eye hadn’t ended in success. Yet. I wished to god I’d found that envelope in his bag and shredded it before he even knew about it. He was on the Council too; did that mean—
“No. I have a natural ability that my position… And some small spells, too, in all honesty, have made extreme. I’m very lucky. It’s nice to be useful, don’t you think?” I knew, somewhere in that shifting mass of molecules I was staring at, that she was smiling at me. She sounded pleasant, but she wasn’t. She was a fucking monster. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the Society. It doesn’t make people magic who aren’t already, Mr. Black. And it can only guide the magic you have innately—the designations we’ve used, over generations, to group magic into clusters, the First Circle, Second Circle… The Society just shifts it. To be more useful.”
“How will I be useful?”
“You really cut through the shit, don’t you, Mr. Black?” I waited. This time she didn’t bother to sigh. “I want you to become our Wolf.”
“What will that do?”
“I’m not certain,” she said, and her words were like snowflakes, cold and delicate, indifferent to the suffering their chill could cause. “I want to find out.”
“Why should I say yes?” Besides the obvious; besides the threat of ruining my entire life, such as it was. She was quiet for a moment, and I knew she understood I was asking for something—anything—beneficial from this arrangement. A reason not to use whatever power this gave me to burn the fucking Institute to the ground.
“Having power doesn’t appeal to you?”
“I’m powerful now.”
“Physically, certainly,” she said, and I knew she was feeling the bruise I just gave her. “But… You can’t plow through the world with those fists, Mr. Black. Can you imagine what it might be like to have a pretty girl smile at you? To have money? To know the right people, the ones who can get you the hell out of that trailer back on the farm?” She leaned forward and I swallowed when I heard the grin buried on her terrifying mess of a face. “Can you imagine what having power might do for your family? For Molly?”
She’d done her research. I felt my fists clench.
But… She was right. She hadn’t asked me to do anything awful—yet. She would; I knew she would. The time would come, and it wouldn’t be long, if I was reading her right. And I was; I was book-stupid, but not with anything else. I learned life well. And some of the power she promised might be useful.
Might be. Could be.
It’s not like I had a choice, anyway.
“Fine,” I said, and I knew by the way she hid her flinch that she’d read me right too. Giving me power of any kind was a dangerous gamble in itself; she must think it was worth it, for some reason, but she understood what I might do with it. To her. To the Institute, the Society.
Good call.
“Usually,” she said, her voice a muddle of a million different noises, all arcing in a way that made me think of a song, “we have a big ceremony, robes, candles, all that fun stuff. Something about you tells me you don’t think much of ceremonies.” She glanced up at me, but didn’t wait for me to respond this time. She was pulling something out of a drawer in the desk, the slide of oiled wood as she moved all the way back, then the sigh in the back of her throat as she lifted something heavy. An enormous book thumped down on the desk. “Your friend Jake signed,” she said, taunting me; she didn’t wait to continue at all this time, spinning through the pages with one blurry finger. “You can’t tell him, I’m afraid,” she said, enjoying every word. I frowned, in spite of myself, and she caught it and looked up at me, her hand hovering over the page that must bear his name. “Can’t tell anyone. There’s very few real secrets in the Society—at least within the Council—but you can’t tell anyone at all. That’s part of the blood oath.”
“Blood oath?”
“See? Did it hurt to admit a little curiosity?” I hated her. Her fake banter, her fake friendliness. “Yes,” she said, turning the pages again. “You sign in blood. Don’t worry, not a pint or something ridiculous. Just
a little slice with the knife and you’re off to the races.” She flipped to the page she wanted and tapped it with her hand, the echo of her nail reaching my ears even through the muffled movement of her molecules. “You are the Wolf, Hunter Black. No one can know.”
“Why?”
“Because the Wolf is, let’s say, one of the three assassins we employ.” I froze, and I knew, beneath that spinning cloud of nothing, she was smiling at me. “Character assassins mostly, don’t worry,” she cooed. “Mostly.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” I growled, but she just laughed at me.
“I think you know what will happen if you start giving orders around here,” she said lightly, her hands landing on the desk across from me. “You know, it’s funny—I don’t use threats. I usually just say, hey, you’re magic! And people fall all over themselves to get a taste. Even the tiniest taste. Very few ever make it on to the Council, but you have to show the plebes what’s up every once in a while or they won’t fall in line. But you… You require threats.” She shook her head, a grotesque visual that made me feel nauseous as my eyes tried in vain to track a single feature on that whizzing mass. “You must be a hell of a lot smarter than we thought.”
I said nothing. What good would it do?
“Sign,” she said, her voice a sigh of contentment as she registered my utter powerlessness, my horror and fear. It made her happy. She slid an ornate knife across the desk, along with a slim piece of wood that looked like a chopstick—something to dip in my blood and write my name on the page. I couldn’t read the word on the top; on my best days, my dyslexia makes a hash of regular English. This was something else, bold colors and shapes sprawled on paper that must’ve been a thousand years old. “Sign, Mr. Black,” she said again, and now she didn’t sound happy.
I signed.
Chapter Three
Hunter
Nothing happened.
I was awake the whole night, waiting, sick to my stomach. I kept cursing her for treating me like a goddamn experiment—for treating all the idiots that came through that office like something from a fucking lab. The ones that didn’t have any ‘predilections’ were scared out of their minds, probably needed treatment for PTSD or just thought they’d lost it and could never believe in anything they saw ever again, and the rest of us… I mean, how many of us were there? That was a big goddamn book, but there were only twelve positions on the Council. The Rose was one; Jake was something called the Games Master, and Raven, god help her, was probably going to end up his Sineater. No idea what any of it meant. None. I rocked back and forth on the skinny mattress where I slept, raised on milk crates in the corner of my trailer, feeling like I was eight years old all over again. I’d never been this scared since then. Never.
Would I be sitting here when my whole body just… Dissolved? Turned into nothing, fuzzy shapes I couldn’t control? She hadn’t explained anything. Not a single goddamn thing. She had a smile in her horrible, distorted voice when she slammed the book shut on my bloody name and told me to get out, that she’d be in touch, and that was it. I was suddenly back in the same room I’d been in before, the one that looked empty and normal. The mirage I would never shake now, whenever I walked into a new place and could never again believe my own eyes.
She said I wasn’t a shape-shifter. I didn’t trust what she told me, though; she was a liar. A liar who enjoyed lying—the worst kind. Jake had flashes of that, mostly when it came to manipulating someone in some way that gave him a hand over Raven, but he wasn’t naturally inclined towards deception at all; it was one of the things I liked about him. Jake preferred to use the truth like a hammer. Call him a bully and you’d be right, but you could trust most of what he said; he weaponized the truth. But that bitch… Nothing was real. Nothing.
Maybe it was all just some warped trip. Maybe she really had slipped me some acid somehow—I mean, if they got a letter in my bag, then they could get some drugs in my system. Hadn’t that been on the news, recently? Drugs that could be transmitted as airborne, absorbed through the skin? Inhaled almost by accident?
I shivered and wrapped my hands around my knees.
I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone, avoiding Jake and Molly most of all in case I turned into something that might hurt them. I couldn’t live with that.
I didn’t sleep.
Nothing happened.
I got up and went back to that place the next day, determined to confront her; no one was in the office when I got there. I waited for a while, then realized it was probably monitored—and if what I’d seen the day before was real, there was no point anyway. She could’ve been one of a dozen students that walked by and I would never know.
I bought the books for my classes, followed some of the other people Jake and I were tracking—all members of the Society, ate, sat in the library and wondered when the hell the blade would drop. When my life would change forever. And not, I was sure, for better.
Nothing happened.
I went home, ate dinner with Molly after I made sure her door was unlocked and I could get outside fast. I was beginning to think more and more that it was all some kind of horrible prank, and I was so exhausted that I worried I really was starting to see things. I told my little sister goodnight, listened to her lock up the trailer, and went out and did some work on the cars, trying to catch up before the semester actually started. The whole thing made my head spin; I was in college, but everything was just like before. Like high school, but worse.
I guess I was still big enough to put up a fight against whatever or whoever was dumb enough to pick one with me, but that was the only advantage I’d had before all this. If it was a prank… Maybe the Society itself pranked me. Maybe this was some kind of hazing process, and I just needed to hang on until Jake called me and told me the truth. I felt better about that—that seemed like a real possibility… Until I tried to imagine Jake keeping something like this from me.
He wouldn’t. Not normally. I had to keep a couple things from him—not much, and not because I wanted to. But he wasn’t the one that kept secrets.
I crawled back on my bed and tried to stay awake, still terrified it was all real, and then told myself it had to be some kind of fucked up thing the Society did, some rich brat Hell Week they made up for freshmen. And I was fine. Everything was fine.
It would all be fine.
I woke up huffing feathers.
It was the strangest feeling—I couldn’t breathe well, not as if I had a cold but almost like I’d been working on the exhaust end of a car for a while with the motor running. The little tiny ones, they must’ve gotten down into my lungs. I sat up on the bed and looked all around me; the air was full of them. Feathers just floating everywhere, from the ceiling, drifting on the breeze from the screened in windows. I rubbed my eyes and blinked. My eyes had feather residue in them, too, it felt like. As if someone had just dumped a truck load right on top of me.
I stood up and that’s when I realized why. My feather duvet and pillows, full of goose-down, were in shreds. Just absolutely ruined, twisted and torn as if something with teeth or claws had attacked them in the night. My mattress was ruined too; foam guts spilled out of it and dripped onto the floor, tiny pink nuggets of fluff that bled out of the broken mattress. My whole bed was in tatters—worse. It looked like it’d been through a shredder. Twice.
Which made no sense.
I was fine, mostly; my clothes were ruined, but that wasn’t any loss. Molly bought me all that fancy bedding because she’s a sweetheart, and I didn’t have another mattress. I hated sleeping here and avoided it as much as I could—this was the original trailer, the one where my father lived with my step-mother until she died. But I stayed here because it was close to Molly’s; I liked to keep Dad on his toes. He knew if he moved around at night I’d hear him. And what the consequences would be.
He hadn’t fucked with anybody that way in years and years, but I liked him knowing I was here. He could never tell. I kept it quiet and dark, so he’d n
ever be able to work around me. No patterns. I liked it that way; I could leave and have a good time once in a while, and he’d still be here, sitting on eggshells, watching my windows and wondering if I was in my bedroom, afraid to go start some shit with Molly. Damn right.
But something had happened last night, and after all this time the culprit wasn’t my father. It was me.
Fortunately, it looked like the only real victim was my bed.
I looked at the mess and sighed, then found some trash bags and scooped everything in to them to haul to the dump. I had no idea what had happened, but the damage was all centered in the bedroom. My doors were still locked from the inside, so whatever it was, I hadn’t moved very much. I wondered again if they’d just drugged me and ripped my bed to shreds while I lay snoring on the floor, if this was some kind of really in-depth, supremely fucked up rich kid trick. But I had a pit in my stomach that told me I was just trying to comfort myself with thoughts like that. There was no way somebody like me would be worth the effort, first of all, and I still couldn’t completely explain the hallucination of that horrible woman with the dissolved body, talking to me with her discordant, cobbled together voice. It would be different if I’d never done a drug that could make you see things—I had, of course, because what the hell else is there to do in a town the size of Ashville. But… The room around her—that ancient, grotesque furniture, the shine of the wood, the elegant, gilded wallpaper… All of that was clear as day. Perfectly etched on my memory for all time. But her body, the way she’d morphed into me… That was too real.
I tried to convince myself it was almost over, that the kids from the Society would call on me any day and laugh and we’d all have a beer and I’d be able to put this behind me and wait for the day to crush their fucking faces like I was popping a fistful of eggs—
But it didn’t happen like that, and I knew it wouldn’t. I waited, going to class, sleeping only when I passed out cold, and I gave up using anything to cover me because I’d just wake up covered in shredded fabric… And blood. After the first time, I had scratches, some of them really deep. Cuts like an animal had been after me in the night.
