by Leigh Kelsey
But not today. Not now.
Although when she’d calmed down, Kati could think of worse prospects for a rebound…
“I would ask what’s pissed you off, but you were this angry last time we met. This is just your default setting, isn’t it?”
Kati scowled harder, shoving past him. “Leave me alone.”
She stalked around the circular plateau above the arena, heading for the gym.
“Hold up, Shortcake,” Salazar said, jogging after her. “It’s a bad idea to go near the gym when you’re angry. It’s charmed to push you to your limit—you don’t wanna be doing that when you’re worked up.”
Kati spun, her lip pulled back from her teeth. “Go fuck yourself, Joshua.”
“Be more fun if we did it together, Shortcake.”
Kati glared, breathing hard. But maybe he had a point about not going near magically enhanced gym equipment when she was worked up. “What, then?” she demanded. “If I can’t go near the gym shit, what can I do, O wise master?”
His mouth curled up in a smirk as he came closer, towering over her, all dark power and bristling muscle, his long hair tied up in a black ponytail. His eyes were a surprisingly bright shade of green, like crystal, she noticed. Kati gulped. At least he was fully clothed, unlike the last time she’d met him when he’d been sweaty and shirtless. “You bring your wand?”
Kati nodded, a single jerky motion.
“Alright then, follow me, O plucky apprentice.” He gave her a wry look and headed for the southeast corner of the room, to an archway Kati hadn’t noticed the last time she’d been there.
Curious, she followed Salazar through it and into a warren of small, contained rooms made of the same black stone as the rest of the academy. There were seven little rooms in total, the doors hanging open, none of them yet occupied. They looked like squash courts, with smooth floors and various guides on the walls.
Kati drew her wand, more for self defence than anything else, and followed Salazar into the closest room, giving him a warning glance as he shut the door.
“I’m not going to ravish you, don’t worry,” he said with a rakish grin. “I’m quite invested in all my limbs; I’d like to keep them.”
Kati laughed, pleased that he’d gotten the measure of her so soon. “Wise choice, Salazar.”
“So you do know my name,” he mused, heading for the rack in the corner and picking up what looked like a medieval chest plate made from leather. He buckled it on and handed a second one to her.
Kati shrugged, fastening the armour to her chest. “What are we doing?”
“Me? I’m training. You? You’re getting rid of all that anger I can sense stored up in you.”
Kati snorted. “Me? Angry?”
“I know,” he agreed in exaggerated surprise. “Who’d’ve thought a tiny thing like you could hold so much rage and savageness?”
Kati couldn’t stop her smirk turning into a real smile. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to flatter me.”
“Oh, but you do know better?” Salazar did a very suggestive thing with his eyebrow that made Kati blush.
“Prick,” she muttered.
“Cute,” he replied.
Kati held her wand loosely, stowed her bag in the corner where she wouldn’t trip over it, and walked to the middle of the little room. “There’s power in the walls, isn’t there? I can sense it.”
Salazar nodded, coming to stand a few feet across from her, his own vine wand in his hand and a lazy grin on his face as his eyes slid down her body. “Absorption spell. Catches any offensive magic so it doesn't rebound and knock us out. And unlike being out there in the arena, it prevents bystanders from being hurt too. Your stance is off. Brace your feet shoulder-width apart.”
Kati gave him a blank look.
With a sigh, Salazar marched over and brazenly adjusted her body. Kati scowled hard, although she didn’t mind his hands on her body. Not at all. She was quickly coming around to the idea of a rebound. Very quickly in fact.
“What difference does standing like this make?” Kati asked, frowning at him as he took up his place opposite her again, his wand raised.
“Balances your weight. Means you’re less likely to fall over if you get hit. And it makes your casting stronger; it’s a lot like throwing a punch.”
“Ooh, do you want to teach me that, too?” Kati asked, blinking owlishly. “I could give you a very pretty bruise. Or make your nose all crooked; you’d look very distinguished.”
Salazar feigned offense, recoiling a step. “You mean I don’t already look distinguished?”
Kati rolled her eyes and threw the first spell that came to mind, but a shield erupted from his wand faster than a blink, knocking it off course. Her magic was absorbed into the wall.
“Holy shit,” Kati breathed, reappraising him and standing up straight. “Forgot who I was fighting.”
His grin was crooked and smug. “Enjoyed the show last time, did you?”
Kati recalled his demonstration of strength and immense magic. Recalled the shirtlessness. “I didn’t hate it,” she said with a shrug, intuition making her cast her own shield spell. She raised her crackling purple disc to bat aside the spell Salazar threw. It was nowhere near what he was capable of. He was going easy on her, and Kati glared.
“Don’t hold back, asshole. I need a real fight to deal with this anger, remember?”
“If I didn’t hold back, you’d be dead,” he said. Simply, as if stating a fact.
Kati swallowed, nodding. She didn’t doubt him for a second. She was also a teensy bit aroused, and wondering what the souls was wrong with her. “Give me more, then.”
Salazar laughed, a deep rumble that made Kati shudder. Oh shit, she was in trouble. Especially as he purred, “Say please.”
Her eyes narrowed even as her pussy throbbed, just once but quite insistently. “Fine. Please.”
She inhaled through her nose to settle herself—soulsdamned hormones—and cast a stronger spell, pushing more blood and power into it, and taking advantage of how easily spells came to her. Salazar didn’t stumble, and he still blocked her spell in a heartbeat, but he was surprised, she could see it in the flare of his forest green eyes.
“Alright, Wilson,” he said, watching her, still souldamned smirking. “Let’s see what you can handle.”
Scares And Sausages
Kati was knackered by the time she limped up the stairs to the lobby, but she felt better for a few hours of training. And while the exertion had energised her body, the bickering and flirting had soothed the ragged wound in her soul.
I’m going to get food, Kati said to Dolly across the building. Do you want anything?
She felt Dolly startle awake, and in a sleep-dazed voice she replied, sausages, burgers, steak, and sausages.
Got it, Kati replied. Meat feast.
And sausages, Dolly added with a half asleep snort.
Kati smirked to herself. I’ll get extra sausages, she promised.
A low, dragging sound came from close behind her and Kati spun, still jumpy after the wraith attacks but more than ready to unleash one of Salazar’s techniques on whoever was following her. She scanned the corridor, but except for a few students, it was empty. No wraith. And the dragging sound had stopped.
Kati exhaled slowly. She was fine. She was safe.
No one was following her.
She shook it off and walked faster to the dining room, sure to stock up on extra sausages and burgers for Dolly, putting a plate of potatoes and salmon together for herself and grabbing a brownie for dessert. Carbs, protein, and chocolate, the holy trinity of post-workout sustenance.
This time, she made the whole trip without any dragging sounds or wraith attacks, and the only scary thing was how quickly a dog roughly the size of a loaf of bread managed to devour a mountain of sausages.
A Living (Er … Undead) Legend
“Is that…?” Kati asked the next Wednesday, her mouth hanging open as she, Naia, R
ahmi, and Harley hovered on the threshold to their supernatural history classroom.
“No way,” Harley breathed, her eyes alight with awe. She seemed a bit more like herself today, not quiet and hiding behind her long dirty-blonde hair, but wearing a backwards baseball cap, baggy jeans, and an SBA tie dangling over an Etnies T-shirt. It was what passed for a uniform for Harley. “It can’t be her.”
“It is,” Naia disagreed, pulling a book from her bag and flicking through it, stopping on a glossy picture of the same woman who stood in the classroom, talking to a handful of students. “She hasn’t aged a day, and this was taken in the sixties.”
“She’s an Eternal, Nai,” Rahmi said with a laugh. “Of course she hasn’t aged.”
“What’s going on?” Gull asked loudly, coming up behind them. He put one hand on Naia’s shoulder and the other on Kati’s and stretched onto his toes to see over their heads. “Holy shit!” he shouted, drawing the attention of everyone: the people in the classroom, those out in the corridor, and probably even students coming up the tower to their own classes. Gull was just gifted like that. “Sybil Esperanza!”
The woman in question turned, grinning at his exuberance. She was exactly as Kati had pictured her when she’d idolised her as a kid. Around forty years old in appearance, she was tall and broad, with a naturally pretty face, a broken nose, and a fierce smile. Kati’s nan called her a battle-axe. She was spot on.
The five of them flooded into the room and were absorbed into the huddle around Sybil. Kati watched her in complete awe. Sybil had been the headteacher of SBA for twenty-four years from 1921 to 1945, but Kati knew her because she’d captained England’s first levby team to a world cup victory. She was the first person to apply the levitation spell to sport and invent levby.
She was badass.
And she was their replacement history teacher? Damn.
But Kati’s mind shot to their first teacher, Lavellian, who’d been attacked by the poltergeists in the tower last term. Kati had seen that someone was going to be killed in a dream and she, Rahmi, and Naia had saved his life. Sort of. More like Mrs Balham, Madam Hawkness, and Iain—no, Mr Worth—had saved his life by bursting into the tower in a dramatic rescue.
But Kati didn’t want to think about that rescue, or passing out and having Iain catch her, cradling her against his chest—
No. It was done. Over.
She had to get past this.
“Alright, fan club,” Sybil said, clapping her hands together. Not like Miz Jardin did, in a preppy sort of way. No, this was a deafening crash that startled them apart. “Sit down and prepare to learn a gamut of interesting historical facts. Or failing that, just pay attention to the boring stuff. Make sure you write it down, you’ll probably be tested on it. It’s never the fun things that come up in exams, have you noticed?”
Kati laughed, finding her seat and settling in for what promised to be the most interesting history lesson of her life.
The lesson was fun, especially with Sybil’s brisk, wry delivery, but the classroom was too close to the tower for Kati’s liking. Their history lessons had been suspended after Lavellian’s attack last term, so this was the first time she’d been so close to it since that day Ingrid the Terrible had almost killed Kati and Lavellian both. She still had a scar from where she’d been stabbed by her own athame.
Kati thought she could almost feel the chill of the dead emanating from the tower opposite, but she couldn’t see anything through the windows, no hint of silver-blue turrets or a conical roof. Still, she could have sworn she could sense the residue of the ghosts there, and she was more than happy to get out of the classroom, silent when everyone else gushed about Sybil—who point blank refused to be called Mrs Esperanza, as that made her sound like a dowdy old teacher—but Rahmi noticed.
She locked her elbow with Kati’s, giving her a worried look. “What’s wrong? You look spooked.”
“I’m fine,” Kati replied quietly, fighting a shudder as they headed for the staircase down to the ground floor, bringing them even closer to the Stolen Tower, invisible though it was. “Just … being so close to the tower. It’s unsettled me a bit. I’ll be alright.”
Rahmi squeezed Kati’s arm and gave her a soft, encouraging smile. “It freaks us all out, you know? Especially Harley.”
“I know,” Kati murmured. “Speaking of … did you hear that her dormmates have been giving her shit? Charming her showers to be ice cold, slipping mild poisons into her food so she’ll get sick, putting locking spells on her door so she’ll miss classes?”
Rahmi’s expression darkened with righteous anger. “No,” she replied sharply. “I didn’t know that. Isn’t Marigold Archer one of her roommates?”
Kati shrugged. “I doubt it’s Marigold making her life hell; she couldn’t hurt a fly. But I was thinking … we have four bedrooms in our dorm, and we’re only using three…”
“Yes,” Rahmi said fiercely, nodding firm and decisively, her jaw set. “Let’s adopt her.”
Kati laughed. “Exactly my thinking.”
“Nai,” Rahmi called, and she was on one now, brimming with righteous anger and purpose. “Wait a sec, we’ve got a favour to ask.”
Kati braced for some pushback from Naia, but she was all for it. “Four’s a very lucky number, you know,” she said when Kati looked at her a beat too long. “If I have to live in dorm number thirteen, at least there can be four of us.”
“Right,” Kati said, and that was that. A deadpan, tomboy skater girl was added to their little friend unit, and a sense of rightness settled in Kati, like the cogs of the universe had aligned.
Weird, but not completely unexpected. She was a necromancer and death magician, after all. Weird was sort of a prerequisite.
The Truth Will Not Set You Free
Kati was still thinking about the Stolen Tower and Lavellian—and by extension, the dreams that had led her to what Theo, Bo, and Colen did that day in the forest—hours later. So after a botched attempt at a temporary strength draught—that should give a few hours of super strength, but would, in Kati’s case, give whoever drank it cute panda ears, a furry face, and a fluffy pom pom tail—she hung back after potions and poisons, told her friends to go on ahead, and stalked Alexandra Chen to the library.
Her heart pounding in preparation of the confrontation, Kati pushed the library doors open after Alexandra, mentally going over what exactly she would say—and she came face to face with the business end of a dark wand.
“What do you want, Wilson?” a familiar voice asked, flat with exasperation.
Kati swallowed, resisting the urge to go for her own wand. Alexandra’s brown eyes were narrowed but glossy, as if she’d been recently crying, and her oval face was pale. She didn’t look well at all.
But despite the wand pointed at Kati’s face, she didn’t look murderous, so that was a nice bonus.
“To talk,” Kati replied, and when Chen’s expression darkened, she quickly added, “About the wraith attack.”
She pushed the dark wand aside and marched purposefully down the central aisle of the library, smiling as Veesa, the head librarian, as she passed the big woman, confident that Alexandra would follow. She did, stalking like a shadow attached to Kati’s boots. She didn’t smile at Veesa, and Kati doubted she got special privileges from the librarian like Kati did—she could sneak food and drink in as long as she promised to be careful, and she could access some of the books that were meant to be locked behind iron grilles for third-year students only.
Kati led Alexandra to a chair in a little nook at the back, and only after she did so did she realise that she’d subconsciously brought her to a table where Kati and Iain had once shared a secret kiss. But she squared her shoulders and pushed through the memory, hardening herself against it.
Alexandra sat only when Kati gave her a stubborn glare and motioned at the chair opposite her.
“I lied,” she said when Alexandra gave her an impatient gesture. “I don’t want to talk about the wra
iths. But you almost killed me, so you owe me. I want to know what your brother told you about that day in the woods—I want to know exactly what happened. Even the parts you said don’t make sense. Who did they bring back?”
Alexandra made a sound in the back of her throat, shaking her head, poker straight black hair swinging like an axe. She stood abruptly, but Kati caught her wrist in a strong grip.
“Please,” Kati forced through gritted teeth. “I need to know. Whoever it is, whoever came through that portal, my brother’s probably with them right now. You know what it’s like to lose a brother; don’t let that happen to me.”
Alexandra glared at Kati for a long moment, but then she ripped her wrist from Kati’s fingers and sat again, leaning across the table.
“Touch me again and I’ll gut you.”
“Noted,” Kati replied, relieved beyond words that she’d sat back down. “Tell me.”
Alexandra expelled a hard breath, scowling at the table. “I told you he wasn’t making sense at the end. What he told me … it’s wrong. There’s no way it’s right.”
Kati’s stomach was a hard knot of fear. “Who did they bring through the portal, Alexandra?”
But Chen wouldn’t meet her eyes; she chipped at a biro slash through the table, her jaw set.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because I don’t want it to be true!” Alexandra snapped, lifting her head and glaring at Kati with fierce brown eyes, so much emotion—rage, grief, and fear—in them that Kati was taken aback. “If he was telling the truth then he … my brother … he’s let a monster free.”
Kati’s next breath shook as she inhaled. “Who, Alexandra? Just give me a name.”
“It’s unforgivable,” Alexandra replied quietly, her eyes pleading with Kati to drop it. “Don’t make me say it. Don’t make me admit what my brother did.”
