And anyway, she had a fiancé.
With the wand in his hand, Cassie taught him control charms. Spells and rituals for locking and channeling his magic. Some were nearly instantaneous—just thinking a word of power in his head pushed the wolf deeper and brought more control to him. Others were elaborate dances that lasted over an hour, with precise footwork and wand placement. One wrong motion and he’d need to begin again.
He made lots of wrong steps. Cassie explained to him every time exactly what he’d done wrong. To her credit, she never gave up. She never sounded exasperated. He wouldn’t have had nearly the same patience with himself. But her belief in him made him want to try harder. She saw a potential in him—more than just a project to get extra-credit with her mom—and he didn’t want to let her down.
He also didn’t want to miss the show.
“Again,” Cassie said. “This time, remember to hold the wand in the salute the moon position and to place your feet in coiled snake pose.” She clapped her hands. “From the top!”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Mal said after his sixth hour of trying. “I need a rest.”
“Very well.” Cassie glanced up at the massive campus clock tower. “Let’s take ten minutes. We can drink some water, stretch our legs, and try again on Mordenkainen’s Mastery of Self.”
Whoever Mordenkainen was, Malcolm was sure the man was a sadist. It was impossible to learn a ritual so complex in a day, or even two. According to Cassie, it was one of the greater techniques in the wizard’s arsenal. But the way she did it, it looked like a robot trying to swat a fly while avoiding stepping on hot coals. There was no rhythm, no art to her motions.
“Other witches, they move differently from you,” Mal said. The sun was beating down on him and he stripped off his jacket and shirt. There was no breeze at all, but it seemed to help.
Cassie was looking away from him, studying a book in her lap. “I am very precise in my motions. Precision is the witch’s best friend. But you aren’t the first to say that to me, in fact—” she glanced up at him and blinked. Her eyes roved over his bare torso, taking it all in. The scar from the bite was a deep red C-shape in his side, undoubtedly she was looking at that. But a deep blush exploded in her cheeks and that delicious earthy smell came to him again. What was it? He’d never smelled anything like it before in his life. It was like chocolate and caramel and coffee all had a baby together.
“What was I saying?” Cassie asked.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Mal said. “A change of scenery might do me good.”
Cassie nodded crisply, but she couldn’t take her eyes off his scar. “Where shall we go?”
“Let’s go back to my dorm room,” he said. “I have an idea.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She bit her perfect pink lower lip and gave him a worried look. “We really need to work on these skills and if this turns into some sort of blow off thing where we sit around your dorm room watching movies or that Netflix thing or whatever it is you do, then I’ll have to refuse.”
“We’ll practice more, I promise.”
“Because even though you’ve made some real progress, you still have quite a long ways to go in order to match up to even an incoming freshman.” She spoke the words like a disappointed grade school teacher and a searing flash of annoyance burned through him. Would she ever stop speaking to him like that? Would there come a point where she saw him as an equal, or would he always be a charity case? A poor little Afflicted, too dumb to know which end of the wand to hold.
“Cassie,” he growled. “I need you to trust me.”
She stared at him with an unreadable expression, then got to her feet.
“One hour,” she said. “Just one hour.”
“Then we should hurry.” Mal took her hand in his, surprised for just a moment at how easily their fingers threaded together and how cool she felt against his burning skin. And then he ran all the way to his dorm room with Cassie in tow. She grumbled at first that they were running too fast, that it wasn’t safe, that he wasn’t being careful of traffic. But when they came to Rothfuss street, which was choked with traffic for the big Labyrinth game that day, he scooped her up into his arms and leapt, flying, letting his shifter strength carry them up over the four lanes of cars.
Cassie cheered with unchecked glee as they soared through the air. Mal risked a look at her. It was first time he’d seen her with her guard down—the first time he’d gotten a glimpse of the real Cassie, and she was beautiful. When she laughed she was transformed, all of the primness and dour caution fell away, she was all bright smiles and big brown eyes and she smelled like moonlight.
Mal was so distracted, he almost botched the landing. But he didn’t, instead he landed in a loping run, and he kept carrying Cassie all the way to Spenser Hall.
“That was incredible,” she said.
“Thanks, I’ve never done that with a passenger before.”
“Where did you learn Aira’s Rejection of Gravity?”
“Where did I what?”
“That spell you cast. The jumping spell. I learned it last year, but I could never manage to get more than ten feet, which was still an A of course, it’s a very difficult spell and ten feet is a perfectly acceptable distance.”
Mal set her down on his feet. His body felt too warm now, without her in his arms. His wolf scratched at him, newly agitated. “I didn’t cast a spell. I just used my shifter legs.”
Cassie cocked her head to one side and muttered a charm. Her eyes unfocused, like she was reading a book dangling in front of his face. “You didn’t even cast it on purpose,” she muttered. “How amazing. You’ve been performing high-level magic purely on instinct.”
“Stop looking at me like I’m an experiment and come inside,” Mal said. He fished around in his pockets for the key card.
“I’ve never been inside Spenser before,” Cassie said. “Are the rumors true?”
“Probably,” Mal responded. “The rooms rearrange themselves at night. Everyone invents new drugs and ways to get high all the time. If you’re aren’t sort of queer when you start living here already, then by the time you leave you’re totally bisexual. Oh, and we have weekly orgies in the common rooms.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Do you ever get tired of making fun of me?”
“One of those is absolutely true,” Mal said. He loved watching the blush explode on her cheeks.
Living in Spenser Hall—the Dispensery—was unlike anything else Mal had experienced. Amongst the students, there was both a sense of freedom and a crushing awareness that their time there was limited. Over the front desk the words Carpe Diem had been crossed off, and YOLO written next to them in burning letters. Mal’s part of the dorm didn’t look unusual, it was old and wooden, with rooms that seemed slightly too small as if when the dorm was built people weren’t quite as tall. His roommate Ash had to stoop to get through some of the doorways. The hallways had garish, busy rugs and tapestries depicting forgotten events of wizarding history.
The hanging outside Mal’s room showed four witches in pilgrim garb, words of power floating around them, standing between a village of children and an oncoming militia. He’d asked Nico what it was about, but Nico wasn’t up on his history either.
Cassie walked through Spenser like she was afraid she’d catch something, sticking to the exact middle of the hallway and staying so close to Mal that she kept bumping into him, which he really didn’t mind. He tried for a moment to see the dorm through her eyes. Her world was orderly and proper. Spells worked a certain way. There were words and gestures that when articulated caused events. She didn’t think about jumping and then leap over forty feet of cars. That trick would have taken her an hour and she would have landed on an oncoming SUV. There were paths of power, old families, polite ways of speaking and moving that served as a social armor. Spenser was the opposite of her world.
Smoke drifted out from under several doors they passed, some of it was from pot or vaping or old fash
ioned cigarettes, but not all of it. Some of the smoke resolved into flowers that bloomed, color exploding from the gray vapor, before fading away again.
Two first-year students ran past, their naked bodies painted in school colors for the Labyrinth game, whooping and screaming out what they thought was the school’s fight song.
As they walked down the hall toward his room, Mal took Cassie hand and pulled her to one side of the hallway. A first year student named Yob Tiggle was stopped in mid-step outside an open door. Blazing light spilled out from within. “Careful,” Mal said, “you need to get to the far side of the hall when you pass that room. Everyone here learns that the hard way.”
“What’s going on in there?” Cassie asked, squinting. She fished around in her bag and pulled out some large sunglasses with pink plastic frames and when she put them on she gasped and whipped them off. She was blushing again and giving off that delicious earthy scent.
“They say it happened last year. Two seniors working on a tantric ritual created a pocket of slow time.”
“That’s, I mean, that is, I’ve heard but never seen … ” She trailed off then shook her head. “That’s sex magic.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not exactly illegal, but it’s quite frowned upon in the wizarding world.” She crossed her arms defiantly. “That is not proper magic. Someone should do something.”
“Oh, I’m sure someone’s coming,” Mal said, but she didn’t get the joke.
Once they were past the bubble of tantric time, he motioned for Cassie to wait. Then Mal slid his belt out of his jeans. Cassie looked away, then looked back, then looked away again. “We need to rescue this kid. He’s probably having the time of his life in there, but the guy might have a plane to catch or people to see.” Mal fashioned his belt into a loop and tossed it over the student’s outstretched arm. He could feel the edge of the bubble, it was like warm soapy bath water. It wouldn’t stop him unless he was foolish enough to get his head into it.
“When I first moved in, we’d take turns sticking our heads into the tantric field and then getting yanked out. It was a fun way to spend a Friday night, y’know? Only some people who don’t live on this particular hall don’t know about it and get stuck, or sometimes the assholes who live across from me shove people into it.” Mal pulled the belt and it seized the student’s arm. He tugged and the guy moved slowly, it was like trying to move a parked car. But as soon as his head exited the field he popped free.
Yob was breathing hard and his face was flushed. His eyes were half-lidded from the concentrated dose of sex magic he’d been marinating in. Yob looked at Mal and Cassie, blinked owlishly behind his glasses, and ran off.
“You’re welcome!” Mal shouted at his back.
“Well that was rude,” Cassie said. “Also he stole your belt.”
Mal shrugged. “After being that close to sex magic, I’m sure he has something important to take care of.” He winked at Cassie but again she didn’t get the joke. Mal was beginning to suspect that she really was a virgin, and it wasn’t just some purity act she put on. “Anyways, this is my room.”
Mal pushed open the door. He could already hear the arguing voices from within. Nico and Ash had been working on their game for days, refining and arguing and tweaking the rules.
Cassie did a half bow to Mal, something formal and ancient that sent chills down his spine. What was he doing bringing her here to his room? She was a princess, highborn magic royalty, or as close to it as there was in the twenty-first century. How could he bring her to his grubby dorm room? Surely she’d take one look at the mess, cover her mouth with a scented handkerchief, and run away.
“Enter freely and of your own will,” Mal said, sweeping his arm before him. His wolf was being calm, weirdly calm. For the first time in months he felt almost normal. The beast seemed to calm down around Cassie, except when it didn’t.
Nico and Ash stopped bickering the moment Cassie walked in. If it’d been Mal alone they would have pulled him into their dispute and tried to get him to act as arbiter. But when a beautiful highborn strides in like a walking moonbeam, it’s a bit disruptive.
“Hi? Can we help you?” Nico offered.
“Oh shit, are you from the administration? How did you find out?” Ash jumped to his feet.
Cassie smiled at them politely and turned to take in the room. “Your triples are bigger than ours,” she said. “In The Keep, we have less space. But higher ceilings.”
Mal slipped in behind her. “Hi guys, this is my—” he fought for the right word for what to call Cassie.
“Tutor,” she offered.
“Friend,” Mal said at the same time. They both glanced at each other and Mal saw something new in Cassie’s eyes, a flicker of something dark and hungry and scared inside her.
Ash stepped forward, beaming. “Well, any tutor friend of Mal’s is welcome here.” He shook Cassie’s hand with his great bear-like mitts. The man was enormous. It was easy to forget because he spent so much time curled up around his guitar in a beanbag chair, but standing next to her—Ash was three times her size. Ash glanced up at Mal, his eyes asking the question Are you sure she’s cool? Mal nodded reassurance and Ash smiled more broadly.
Nico waved from his seat. Before him was the game table he and Ash had been working on. They had it flipped over, so the bottom was exposed and Mal could see thousands of tiny runes etched in gold, wrapped in interlocking circles. It looked like circuitry, but it was just words. When Nico saw Cassie’s interest in the board, he threw a blanket over it and glared at her.
“What are you working on?” she asked, her voice full of wonder. “That runework was exceptional.”
Nico watched his feet. “Thank you,” he said in a quiet voice. The dude did not do super well around normal people, let alone normal girls.
“It’s our independent project,” Ash said in his booming voice. He sat down opposite Nico, and even sitting he was larger than Cassie.
“Nico is an artificer,” Mal said. “Our resident mad scientist. And Ash is studying bardic magic. They’re pooling their efforts on a group project.”
“It’s going to revolutionize the world,” Nico muttered.
“We haven’t slept in six days,” Ash said with a laugh. “Forgive us our appearance and that of our room. We tend to keep a tidier house, but the deadline for our prototype grows closer every day and we are far from done.”
Cassie stood very still, as if she was afraid to step deeper into Mal’s world. Or maybe it was just the pizza boxes, piles of dirty underwear, bubbling beakers and stringed instruments all over the floor that made her reluctant to step anywhere.
“Six days? How can you focus for six days?” Cassie asked. “After two I get burnt out and can’t focus enough to cast at all.”
Nico’s eyes lit up. “The secret is to take turns. We have four methods for staying awake that we rotate between.”
“One of them,” Mal added, “is caffeine.”
“And my potions,” Nico said, warming to Cassie now that he could talk about technical matters. “The recipe is actually quite ingenious.”
“And I have an inspirational song that I wrote, based on a classic marching tune but repurposed for the modern era,” Ash said. His eyes were wider than usual and a hint of mania played in his smile. “There are side effects though. Irritability. Emotionality. Some slight hallucinations. Verbal echoes. Some slight hallucinations.”
“Fascinating,” Cassie said. “I wonder if adding in other methods could let you last even longer without sleep.”
“That’s sort of why we’re here. Cassie is helping me cram twelve years of magical education into like a week. I could really use some of your magical Adderall.”
“Really?” Nico jumped out of his chair. “You’re usually so skittish about substances. I mean, this is great! A breakthrough! Nico whirled around the room in a hurry, throwing aside piles of clothes and toppling carefully balanced stacks of books until he found what he was looking fo
r. He held up a vial of sparkling sand. “Powdered moonlight. It should enhance your memory, fight fatigue, clear up your acne.”
“I don’t have any acne.”
“Ease digestion.”
“Not a problem.”
“And appease your wolf. It’s a little bit like catnip for shifters, but cut with enough other stuff to let you concentrate. The goal is to get your wolf high, so the man can focus.”
Cassie took the vial from him and muttered a charm while flicking with her wand. It was the same spell she’d cast outside and her eyes had the same faraway look. “I can’t identify these ingredients. What’s in here?” But Nico refused to answer.
Ash squinted at Cassie. “Your wand technique,” he said.
“Classically trained,” Cassie replied with a curt smile.
“It’s awful,” Ash said, shaking his head. “Your form is very stiff. You look like a robot trying to give directions to a hive of bees.”
“Ash,” Mal growled. His wolf leapt into his throat. It wanted to attack Ash, to make him pay for the insult. It was oddly protective of Cassie.
“Goddess, I’m sorry. It’s these side-effects. One of them unfortunately is that I can be an asshole sometimes.” He apologized with a sheepish shrug and sat back on the floor.
A mask of professional distance had snapped back into place on Cassie’s face. She regarded Mal and his friends with a haughty expression. “Very well. This has been educational, but we should get back to work.”
“At least let me inspire you, before you go,” Ash said. “It should help with your studying.”
Mal glanced at Cassie, but she was unreadable. She’d retreated into herself and was almost unrecognizable. It’d been a mistake to bring her to his room with his friends here, but they never left and these days they never stopped arguing either. And if he was going to master the self control charms, he’d need a little extra help.
“Okay, inspire me, Ash.” Mal said.
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