God she wanted him to kiss her.
Professor Harrison blinked and the tension shattered. He closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.
He’s an empath, Tiana reminded herself. He can feel everything you’re feeing. Everything.
“I can’t pass you, Miss Sterling. Not in good conscience. You’re undoubtedly a talented witch who knows her stuff, but you didn’t do the work.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I really am. I can feel how much you hate it here and how smothered you feel. Maybe you can talk to your parents? Explain to them that you don’t feel like you need this school?”
The runes around him sparked wildly, as if a shooting star had suddenly materialized in the room. They both jumped in surprise.
“What if I solved your ghost problem?” Tiana said, her mouth moving before her mind knew what was going on. “If I can free you from whatever all of this is, will you sign those forms? Will you pass me? It could be like a final exam?”
Harrison picked his glasses up and put them on, looping one of the wires over each of his ears slowly. “I haven’t slept in four days and each night it gets worse. Honestly I don’t know if I can take this much longer.”
Tiana’s heart ached with the need to comfort him, to hug him. But she knew she couldn’t. Penrose may have been a madhouse when it came to magic, but they still had strict rules about teachers and students.
On hunts, her mother enjoyed being the one to comfort people. She brewed tea and made cookies and knit cozy scarves and did the hard work of repairing communities while her father was out plunging a yew wood stake into some Redcap’s heart or locking a banshee inside a stone.
When she was younger, the emotional work never seemed like real work to Tiana. It was all chatting and soothing and finding people new homes and jobs and it seemed so mundane, compared to sword fighting a bear shifter or sniffing out a dragon’s den. But maybe she’d been wrong? Maybe the emotional work was the hard part?
Professor Harrison nodded to himself. He’d arrived at a decision. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I’ve heard about the hunt your family did in Milwaukee. We can’t have anything like that here.”
“That was an accident,” she began.
“It can’t happen here.”
She nodded.
“Wait until the students leave for break. That’s in three days.”
“I’ll have the campus all to myself?”
“Some students don’t go home for winter break, but most do,” Professor Harrison said. “And I’ll stay here, in case the ghost is tied to me, and not to Penrose.”
“I need time to prepare, to research. I can’t go into a hunt without recon. That would be suicide.”
“I’ll give you until Christmas Day,” he said. “I have a flight that day to go see my sister in Ann Arbor. Solve my problem by then or I’ll not return to Penrose and you won’t pass.”
“But I get rid of your problem and I’m free?”
“Are you concerned? If you’re not up to this, I can consult other experts. Asking a student to do this is highly unusual.”
Tiana shrugged. “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.”
Professor Harrison laughed and it was marvelous, a roaring fire of a laugh, and Tiana wanted to hear that sound again and again and again. “So you’ve seen that movie at least?”
“What movie?” Tiana said.
Professor Harrison slowly banged his forehead into his desk. “I’m twenty-six. I’m not that old.”
“Is that from a movie?” Tiana asked, keeping her voice cool and innocent. What hunter hadn’t seen Ghostbusters?
“Just get out. And solve my ghost problem.”
3
If she was going to do this, she’d need help.
The first rule of hunting was Never Go Alone.
Her father used to joke that they had a name for hunters who worked alone—The Deceased.
There was only one person who could help her. It was her only friend on campus, the infamous Desdemona Cho.
Getting ahold of Des was not an easy thing. The girl was a sophomore at Penrose but had managed to piss off, offend, or torment every single person on campus at one time or another. It was impressive, really. Tiana couldn’t have become nearly half as infamous even if she’d set out to. The girl had a gift for mayhem and was the most naturally rebellious person Tiana had ever met. But because of her infamy there was a target on her back. Various school groups, fraternities, and teachers’ associations had put bounties on her. Not to kill her—Penrose had some rules after all—but to utterly humiliate her in the way she’d humiliated so many others.
The Alpha Rho frat brothers didn’t appreciate the way she’d bewitched their sound systems to only play the sounds of barnyard animals mating. They offered twenty grand to anyone who showed her up publicly.
The Union of Concerned Educators were upset with her, after Cho had devised an enchantment to turn any simple coin into an orgasm trap. And then scattered he hexed spare change all over campus. Des claimed it was an accident—that the coins had been for personal use only and there’d been a hole in her knapsack. The Union offered free passing grades for Cho’s defeat.
And the entire senior class was pissed at Cho for ruining picture day by spiking the drinking fountains on campus with an anti-glamour potion. So many carefully crafted illusions had tumbled down that day while Cho snickered.
With all of the bounties on her, she had to be careful. Any locating spell would misdirect inquisitive witches to the waste treatment plant just off campus. Any attempt to call her would result in a witch’s phone playing Carly Rae Jepsen at maximum volume for exactly seven hours. Scrying her would get you an eyeful of a proctologist’s office. Looking for Desdemona Cho was a bad idea.
The administration could have suspended her or expelled her any one of a hundred times, but they didn’t. Cho claimed it was because they were too impressed with her to see her go to another school. But probably it was something simpler—having Cho to focus their ire on improved morale on campus. She was the villain. The boogeyman. If your potion failed, blame Des. If your milk went sour and your shoes shrank overnight, blame Des. If your dorm’s fire alarms mysteriously blared in the middle of the night, well it must be Desdemona Cho up to her old tricks.
Two years in, and she was already the most infamous witch in generations.
And Tiana found her eating pizza in the park.
“Hey Sterling, want a slice?” Desdemona Cho held up a wide pizza box from a pizzeria in Oakland, California. “You wouldn’t believe what I went through to get it here hot.”
“Yeah, I’d love that,” Tiana said. The pizza was covered in pesto and olives and hot peppers and the smell of it was divine. The bench next to Cho was inviting and unoccupied, so she decided to occupy it.
Today her friend was dressed in a leather jacket over a pink Cinderella dress with her big stompy boots on to really complete the ensemble. Her black hair defied gravity and stabbed stiffly at the sky. She had dark paint around her eyes giving her a sort of raccoon-y vibe. She looked like a raccoon punk princess. There were worse ways to describe Desdemona Cho.
“What’s the occasion?” Tiana asked. “This pizza? The dress? The whole appearing in broad daylight in public thing?”
Cho stuffed an entire slice into her mouth and chewed, sighing with pleasure. She held up one finger, pausing the conversation while she masticated right there in the open.
“The semester is done, Sterling, and I am victorious once again. Despite the stuck-ups and the fuckheads and the administration doing their best to get in my way I again end the semester with perfect grades.” She chortled and fished out another slice. A dollop of tomato sauce dripped onto her pink dress and evaporated as it touched the fabric. There was a protection spell on the chiffon that was so good and clean that the runes were all but invisible.
“How many more then? Four to go?”
“Four to go. And then I graduate.”
“My mom says that Penrose graduati
on was the saddest day of her life.”
“Mine was when my parents died,” Des said offhandedly.
The pizza was delicious, but Tiana couldn’t eat more than a few bites before she lost interest. “What will you do after graduation?”
“That’s two years away.”
“You always have a plan, Des.”
“True but I really don’t. I keep expecting they’ll kick me out before then and take my choice away.”
“If they don’t kick you out though?”
“Then maybe I’ll do some grad school and see if they kick me out of that?”
“And if they don’t kick you out of that?”
Cho grinned widely. “Then I’ll teach here. Until they fire me.” She turned her head and regarded Tiana. “What’s wrong? You’re not usually this chatty.”
“I’m not?”
“Usually I’m the one talking your ear off and you, like, grunt politely every seven minutes to let me know you’re listening.”
Talking was hard. No, talking was easy when it came to clients or marks or people she was playing. Talking was easy when it had a clear goal and no emotional investment. Talking to friends—that was hard.
“I just met with Professor Harrison.”
Cho inched forward. “Sexy Professor Harrison or the Professor Harrison who wears the beard jewelry?”
Tiana bit her lip. “The sexy one.”
“Girl! You’ve been holding back! I didn’t know you had a class with Professor Sexypants. You never talk about this stuff! But wait,” Desdemona tilted her head in that way that suggested she was thumbing through a giant stack of index cards in her head. “You’re not a senior and he focuses exclusively on finding and destroying dark artifacts.”
“It’s an independent study thing,” Tiana shrugged. “And I didn’t know he was a relic hunter.”
“Darkifacts? Artidarks? There’s got to be a better name for them,” Cho mumbled.
Tiana picked a stack of olives off the pizza and put them all in her mouth at once. “I thought he was an empath and that made him good at the counselor thing?”
Cho shook her head. Her hair didn’t move an iota. “Dude has an empathy gift, but he uses to it track curses and hexes and bad feels and all that.”
“He’s in trouble, Des. Bad trouble. And if I don’t help him, then I fail the semester.”
“And you’re stuck here?” Cho’s eyes were large and bright with concern.
Tiana nodded. Something shiny in the grass near her foot caught her eye. Was it a quarter?
“And then I’m stuck here for at least another semester. But what if I can’t hack that?”
Desdemona laughed. “You’re here for help, yeah? But maybe I shouldn’t help you? I’d love to see you here next semester, girl. You bring a menacing sort of know-it-all glower to every occasion.”
“But,” Tiana said, “it would also probably mean that Professor Sexy ends up dead. Or insane. Or both.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we? Sexiness must always be defended.” Cho snapped a sarcastic salute. “Count me in on whatever scheme you concoct. It’s not like I have anything better to do until school starts in January.”
“Thanks, Des. It means a lot to me.” The quarter in the grass beckoned to her. It was so shiny. So close.
“You probably don’t want to touch that,” Des said.
“Is this one of your orgasm coins? I thought you stopped that?”
Des shrugged. “I prefer the term climax currency and I may have celebrated the end of the semester by revisiting some of my greatest hits.” She paused. “I’d avoid the water fountains, too.”
They agreed to meet the next night, after classes were officially over and the Penrose campus sank into its winter slumber.
On the walk back to her dorm, Tiana passed a dozen shiny quarters just lying on the ground. Each of them beckoned to her but she knew better. Des explained once that the quarters had been an art project, for her “Political Statements 202” class. The students learned the history of magic as a political messaging tool, and were encouraged to create their own objects. Most of the students made animated posters or dioramas that grew and evolved and died. But Desdemona Cho wanted to make a statement about the ridiculous nature of capitalism and the weird joy we experience when we find a bit of money on the ground. The spell was supposed to give a tiny thrill—a burst of excitement—but sex magic is notoriously difficult and has a way of getting out of control. And so instead of a little thrill the cursed currency gave whoever picked it up a continuous rolling minutes-long orgasm.
She’d never picked one up. But why not? What could it hurt to sneak one back to the dorm and to grip it in her hands, hard, once her roommates had gone home for the winter? It certainly would help kill the time. And maybe take her mind off of Professor Harrison’s dreamy eyes.
Tiana slid her wand out of its sheath and whispered a levitation charm. And one by one she collected all the quarters she could see and deposited them into one of the empty pouches on her belt. She could have taken just one, but what if she liked it? No. Better to take them all. She could spare some kid on their way to their finals the distraction.
4
One of her roommates, Connie, had left the day before without so much as a goodbye. The other had packed her things while inside her magical cone of silence, tears wetly streaming down her cheeks. And now she sat on her bed, staring into a hand mirror, fully dressed for winter with all of her belongings stuffed into a jewel-toned duffel bag larger than her.
Tiana waved to her and offered her a half smile, but the girl was fixated on her hand mirror and didn’t look up and certainly couldn’t hear anything. And while the semester for her had a certain soundtrack of loneliness, punctuated only by calls with her parents, visits with Professor Harrison, and the occasional weekend hangout with Des, it must have been harder for her roommate, Ruby, who lived every day in her self-made zone of silence.
It didn’t matter though. Harrison needed help and Tiana could only focus on him for now. What was haunting him? How did it begin? What were the symptoms?
She couldn’t make time for Ruby. And anyway, the girl was packed and ready to go. She’d be with family soon and family was always better.
But still, the girl was in pain. Tiana snatched a post-it note from her desk and wrote, “I hope it gets better” and stuck it to the door where Ruby would have to see it.
The day after classes ended, Penrose was a ghost town.
It was Tiana Sterling’s first experience with the concept of a school break. Every cafeteria was shuttered. The library was locked and barred and two armed guards stood outside with rifles and staves to prevent any students from getting hurt by trying to sneak in to the snacks without the help of the martial librarians. Nearly every student was gone or going.
It was as if overnight all the color and noise and movement had bled out of campus. The vast throbbing heart that was Penrose was now stilled and Tiana longed for the stillness to end almost instantly.
She met up with Desdemona halfway to Professor Harrison’s house and they walked in silence for the trip as if the campus had become a graveyard. Every witch knew that you didn’t speak in a graveyard unless you wanted to wake things and you never, ever whistled.
Harrison lived just off campus, in the small sleepy part of town that the locals called Lemontown and that the students creatively referred to as Lametown. The houses here dated back to Victorian times and had a strange sameness to them owing to all being exactly the same color yellow.
“What is up with this neighborhood?” Des asked, kicking her way through piles of leaves. “It looks all normal and Norman Rockwell and whatever, but it’s making my spidey sense tingle like whoa.”
“Before I came to Penrose, I researched the campus, did I tell you that?” Tiana asked. “I treated the semester like one big hunt and the second rule of being a hunter is never go anywhere without doing your homework. If you think an old barn is just housing a lon
e ghoul but actually it was the site of a murder cult fifty years ago, you’re going to run in unprepared and get literally eaten alive.”
Des peered around at the houses. “Are you saying this whole picturesque neighborhood is a murder cult?”
Tiana shook her head. “This area was built by a team of Penrose scientists as an experiment. They believed certain colors and wavelengths of light could protect us from dark magic. They took six blocks of streets and painted each a very specific hue to test their theories. Hence, Lemontown.”
“So where are the others? I’ve never heard of a Limetown or an Orangetown or a Grapetown.”
Professor Harrison’s voice rang out from a porch nearby. “The others collapsed. Only Lemontown remains.”
“It worked?” Cho asked.
“Sort of,” Tiana said. “The yellow does keep bad magic away but it also keeps good magic away. And it gives witches and wizards nasty headaches if they stare at it too long.”
“Dude, why do you live here?” Cho asked.
Harrison grinned boyishly and shrugged. “This is where they house the junior-level teaching staff.”
“Can we go inside?” Tiana asked. “This yellow is bothering me.”
“Welcome to Lemontown,” Harrison said in a cheerful voice. He opened his front door and waved them in with a half bow.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, the odd pressure vanished. Tiana blinked and Des blew her nose while Harrison grinned at them. There was something different in his eyes. They were a little bright, a little too wide.
“You haven’t been sleeping, have you?” Tiana asked.
“If I don’t sleep, the ghost can’t get me,” he said in a singsong voice.
“Yeah, that’s not creepy at all,” Des drawled.
Harrison lead them into his home. It was a classic Victorian with gorgeous wood floors that shone like maple syrup in sunshine. The magic that had been worked into its bones made it look like not a day had passed since it was constructed. There were no chips in the paint or scratches on the floor. The windows didn’t have the wobbly glass that actual old Victorians had. It looked like the showroom version of Tiana’s grandparents’ house.
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