by Rain Oxford
“Eef!” I said, setting my glass down carefully on the table.
“Simple,” he said. “Reality is objective, but the way we perceive it is subjective.”
I made a sort of choking sound. After an entire day of seeing everyone around me do magic, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but this felt more real. I thought I understood and accepted the paranormal world. This was different. This wasn’t a game.
“No, not a trick. A certain flexibility in reality, if you will. A compromise between the objective and the subjective. Now, to business. The records of our students and faculty are entirely confidential. From the time we hear of their names to the time they leave our school, their association with the school is absolutely private. Not even the wizard council knows who our students are.”
“How big is the wizard council?” I asked.
He understood what I meant. “Unfortunately, they have the final say in every matter in this country when it comes to us. If a wizard comes into his power unknowingly and threatens our secrecy, the council hears about it and kills him. My schools are my attempt to get to them first. The child of a wizard is likely going to be one, so if I can keep tabs on my students after their graduation, I can watch for those children who end up in dire situations.”
“And you let other paranormals in to promote harmony between the different races? I get that. Why am I here?”
He picked up a yellow folder from the table and I did a double take. The bowl was gone and the folder was in its place. “These are police reports and school records of five people,” he said, handing it to me. “Four of them were wizards and one was fae.”
I opened the folder to find the death reports, along with pictures, of two women and three men. All of them had twin punctures in their throats. All of them were drained of blood. All of them were found in their own homes.
My instincts pushed at me. I had seen this before.
“All five people were on our list of expected top ten graduating students this semester. All had perfect scores, loving families, and incredibly promising futures.”
“Time of deaths?” I asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, I looked up at him. He looked so regretful, as if this was his own fault. I knew the type. He was headmaster and mysterious as any wizard could be, but he thought of his students as his children.
“All within a week from today.”
“The fang marks and lack of blood makes this look like a classic vampire attack.”
“I do not believe vampires have gotten in here. It is possible that vampires have somehow convinced, or enchanted, one of the teachers to steal records.”
“Why are you sure vampires weren’t in here?”
“I am not, but I have never met a vampire who knew his way around a cell phone, let alone any modern type of monitoring device.” He pulled something from his robe pocket and handed it to me. The three little black tags, each no larger than a shirt button, were audio bugs. Someone who could use electronics had tried to wire the headmaster’s office.
“Are you sure these are dead?”
“Yes. Even if there are others, I have destroyed them all with a simple burst of energy.”
“Okay, so vampires probably didn’t do this, but they’re definitely involved. I don’t do cases involving vampires.”
“Apparently, you do.” I said nothing, so he went on. “John Cross hired you to find his daughter, who was killed by vampires.”
“That’s why I’m in this whole mess in the first place. How did you even find out about him? People come to me for my discretion.”
“When it comes to humans, yes. However, the paranormal community, including the wizard council, is starting to come to know you better than you would like. John Cross is a highly respected member of the wizard council. He is also a major advocate of war between wizards and vampires.”
“Then I can see why his daughter was killed. I can’t see why I was involved.”
“Unfortunately, I do not know that myself. I want to avoid war between anyone, so I chose not to take this case to the wizard council. For the sake of my students, I cannot afford to go after this opponent myself without more information, either. Therefore, I went to one of my very old friends.
“V. K. Knight.”
“Yes. Vincent Kingston Knight. Have you heard his name before?”
I shook my head. “Why would I have?”
“I trust Mr. Knight to deal with this situation, and you are what he gave me. Thus, I will trust you to do your job and to keep any information you find away from the wizard council. I need to know if one of my teachers or students has betrayed me. Find the culprit, find the proof, and I will do the rest.”
“And I’m supposed to do this while pretending to be a wizard? How am I supposed to keep that up when I am expected to learn magic in class?” I didn’t like the look in his eyes, but I couldn’t figure out why.
“I have made sure you were placed into classes where you would not be required to do magic. If students believe you are a human, someone would get word out to the council and they will investigate my school. An investigation from the wizard council is the last thing I want.”
“Are you saying you have something to hide?”
“Apparently, you were not properly briefed on this assignment. The council sees human knowledge of us as a worst-case scenario. If anyone reports you as a human, the council will kill you.”
Yeah, five thousand a week is not enough.
Chapter 3
I was ten when my family moved from a high-rise Florida condo to an old brownstone in a small town of Rhode Island. I resented the house because I knew we moved so my father could work more. I resented him because I was moved away from my friends. That was the extent of my logic when I was ten.
While my parents were unpacking the car in the rain, all I could think was that the house was creepy. It was the middle unit of three, three stories tall, with five windows just on the front. The dark gray concrete steps that led to the door were tracked and covered in leaves. The building itself was dark red brick, similar to the color of blood. Although the door was the same dark red color, the frame around it was stark white. Three black metal numbers on our door identified our unit from its two neighbors, and the middle number was hanging down. As I studied the building, I felt like it was watching me right back.
For the first week, I had trouble sleeping due to a strange sound coming from next door. It seemed odd to me because when I played outside during the day, I never saw a person in that unit. Their lights were never on and their car never left the curb.
One night, when I was woken by a slopping sound that reminded me of a mop hitting the kitchen tiles, I sat up and listened. I never heard words spoken, even at night, so it came as a shock to me when I heard a young girl’s voice. Because her words were foreign and softened by the thin walls, it took me a few minutes to realize that she was singing. I knocked on the wall. The singing stopped and it was silent for a moment.
Then, finally, there was a soft, hesitant knocking on the wall.
Excited, I knocked back and was rewarded with a bolder rapping. I got up from my bed, shivering from the cold and wide awake with enthusiasm. I knocked again at the foot of the bed. The knocking followed, so I moved further down the wall until we reached the window. I didn’t have a balcony, merely a metal shelf that extended from my window that would hold plants… and the weight of a ten-year-old boy.
I opened my window, braced myself with the old wooden frame, and pulled myself out until only my legs were inside. It was cold, the wind was harsh, and I was on the third floor. Had the metal flowerbed snapped, I would have died that night.
Instead, it held, and the window beside mine opened. The girl, about my age, was not very pretty. She wore a plain white nightgown and had long, dark brown hair and deep brown eyes. She was too thin, too pale, and had an aura about her that I understood even then. There was no joy or hope in her eyes. This girl knew only loneliness and abuse. She was afra
id of me, even as curiosity drove her to lean out of the window.
I smiled because Mom had said my smile made people happy. Even though my instincts demanded that I went back inside, I knew she needed a friend as much as I did. “I’m Devon,” I said.
She gave me a hesitant smile back. “I’m Astrid.”
* * *
I was out of breath, startled from my sleep as my past tried to claw its way into the present. The sensation of being watched prickled hairs on the back of my neck. Moonlight spilled into the room through the window, revealing that both my roommates were asleep and we were alone. Too afraid of the nightmares that sleep promised to unfold, I climbed down from my bed, picked up my lighter from the desk, and lit the lantern.
There was a manila envelope on my desk with no address or name. I opened it to find a small clump of pictures and my second check for five thousand. Getting the hint, I carefully examined the pictures. There were no people, dead or alive, in the photos. Instead, they consisted of letters. Someone had spread out some letters in a dim room and took pictures.
Not with a cellphone, I could tell that much.
Many of the words in the letters would have been hard enough to make out had I actually held the letters in my hand. What I could decipher was basically a list of crimes that were committed by vampires. As I read through them, page after page, I started to feel anxious. This was calling for an all-out war on vampires. The reasons for it were stupid; they were things that humans, wizards, and anyone else could be accused of.
The last letter was just a list of names. It was a hit list of vampires.
Let the wizards kill them all.
* * *
Laws of Magic: Circle One was considered boring by my classmates. As a private investigator, I assumed it was all about wizard laws, but I was wrong. The classroom was small and dark with a low ceiling and no windows. Alpha Flagstone was the shifter who was on the school board. After a slight glare at me when I entered, which he graced everyone else with as well, he otherwise ignored me. He didn’t have an assistant, a whiteboard, a desk, or a book. He just talked.
“The first law of magic is the Law of Knowledge. Understanding brings control; the more that is known about a subject, the easier it is to exercise control over it. It sounds obvious to some of you, but too many people overlook this. We have too many accidents in this school because students do magic without knowing enough about what they’re doing to control it.” He looked right at me. “Knowledge is power.” We spent the remainder of class discussing this as a group.
After class, I was following my map, glancing up only enough to prevent myself from bumping into anyone or taking a wrong turn, when my instincts demanded that I move. I stepped to my left just in time to avoid getting struck by a fireball.
“Devon, help!” Darwin begged, diving behind me. The man who chased after him was seething.
“What did you do?” I asked my roommate.
“Nothing! I just grabbed the wrong pencil!”
The man approaching was not a shifter. He was young, eighteen if his looks could be trusted. His, short, spiky white hair made me think he was fae, though I knew nothing about the different types of the paranormal beings.
“He shot me!” the man yelled, halting in front of me.
“It wasn’t me! I couldn’t even if I wanted to!”
I believed Darwin when he told me that he was not dominant like the stereotypical wolf shifter. If anything, it seemed to me like he was too friendly. He was clumsy, perhaps, but not spiteful. “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. Let it go and Darwin will make it up to you.”
The man studied me for a moment, sizing me up. “He’d better,” he said before turning and walking away. From the rumors I had heard about the fae kind, they were peaceful unless their territory or tribes were threatened.
“Thanks, mate. He just flipped out over nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” There were several students watching the commotion, but it wasn’t until I walked past the black-haired woman that I sensed her. Without a thought, I turned and shoved her into the wall. People shouted, tried to get out of the way, or tried to pull me off the woman.
“What did she do?” Darwin asked.
“Vampire,” was the only word I had to say.
Everyone backed away from us and several students ran for help. Three students shifted into large gray wolves, but they only growled at the vampire without doing anything to help. Anger welled inside me until I felt heat and pressure build in my chest. The image of blood splattering the floors and walls filled my head until the pressure released and the girl vanished.
I fell against the wall and my head throbbed with a sudden migraine. “What happened to her?” I asked.
Students were looking at me with wide eyes and no one said anything until Alpha Flagstone and Professor Roswell showed up. “What happened? Someone said there was a vampire,” Professor Roswell said.
“Devon kicked the vampire’s butt!” one of the students shouted.
“Did the vampire attack anyone?” Alpha Flagstone growled as he glanced around, probably looking for blood or injured students.
“No… She was just there.” Now that the adrenaline was fading, my actions seemed a little irrational.
The three male wolf shifters changed back into their human forms… naked, of course. Not one of them even tried to shield themselves from the eyes of the dozen women gathered around.
“How did you know she was a vampire? And where is she?” Alpha Flagstone asked doubtfully.
“I know a vampire when I see one. I can… sense them.”
“Devon can also control the minds of animals!” Darwin added helpfully.
This was getting way out of control fast. “I didn’t do anything to the vampire, I’m…” I’m not a wizard. “She just disappeared.”
The professor looked even more suspicious at my words. I could see the wolf in him trying to communicate, trying to tell him something wasn’t right about me, but the man was too strong to lose control of his wolf like that.
“She had on a strong perfume, but I could tell she was a bloodsucker when I shifted,” one of the wolf shifters said.
Standing at six-four, about two hundred forty pounds, with short, medium brown hair and steel-gray eyes, he was a cowboy if I ever saw one. My instincts screamed that he was a hunter, but it wasn’t me he was threatening.
He glared at Alpha Flagstone. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping that kind of scum out of here?” he asked with a southern accent.
The older wolf narrowed his eyes. “You will watch your tone, pup. Keep challenging me and I will send you back to your mother in a shoe box.”
“Why do you get to be the alpha if you need your students to fight vampires for you?”
“I have been playing this game of life a lot longer than you have.” The other two wolves, not nearly as large as their friend, glanced nervously between Alpha Flagstone and his challenger for a moment. Deciding they were safer betting on the older wolf, they both went to Flagstone’s side.
Although the professor was actually a fair amount smaller in muscle mass than his challenger, he struck me as much more dangerous. He was the same height as the younger man, and since I hadn’t seen the professor shift, I couldn’t be sure how they compared in wolf form. There was absolutely no fear in him and his posture was familiar in a primal way; he was ready at any instant to attack.
Still snarling, the younger wolf finally lowered his eyes in submission.
“I will talk to you later about the vampire, Sanders. Get to class,” Flagstone said.
I nodded and turned. Everyone reluctantly moved on, but they were whispering to each other. Even though I was confused as to what actually happened, I knew rumors could make my job a nightmare. I sighed and headed to class.
Magic in Everyday Life took place in a medium sized room with seats that were set up in rows like in a lecture hall. The walls were deep, dark blue, sponge-painted stone. The ceil
ing was vaulted with a skylight. Unfortunately, the person who built the classroom above us was an idiot.
When I took the closest seat to the door, which was becoming my M.O., Darwin sat next to me. I took the time to notice that he was wearing another hoodie. “Am I in the wrong class?” I asked him, about to pull out my map.
“No, mate, this class is for wizards and fae. I don’t know why I’m here, though. I can’t do any decent magic.”
“What does it take to be considered decent magic? What can you do?”
He blushed and turned to face the front. “I’ll show you later.”
Okay, that’s not weird or anything.
After a moment, he turned back and pointed at me with a pencil. “But, I will tell you…” He trailed off as he noticed the pencil in his hand. “Oh, crap. This ain’t my pencil.”
I reached for the pencil, but he dropped it and flinched as far away as his seat would let him. I froze, shocked, because I knew the look of fear on his face. His eyes were clinched closed and his hands were tucked against his chest.
I studied his hands, but I couldn’t see his wrists beneath his cuffs. “Who hurt you?” I asked. I was surprised by the anger in my voice. I had seen abused children act this way when they thought they did something wrong and were about to get hit for it. Darwin wasn’t a child, but he had obviously not been properly socialized. There was something very innocent about him, like with a child, and the idea that he was so afraid didn’t sit well with me. Of course, knowing what his reaction indicated, anger was the absolute worst response I could have showed him.
“Nobody,” he said quickly. He opened his eyes when he realized I wouldn’t hurt him. “I just don’t like to be touched.”
Professor Hans was everything I thought a wizard would look like. Appearing to be around seventy, he had long white hair, a long white beard, and light blue eyes. His black wizard robe had a burn mark on the left cuff. The suspicious stain on his dark gray cardigan was a display of carelessness. This class, like the title suggested, was all about using magic effectively and secretly in our chosen professions. I almost wished it did me any good.
