Smoke and Mist (The Academy Book 1)

by Kate Hall

  Phillip’s anger subsides, and he takes a seat next to Alex. He runs a hand over his face and across his bald head.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, his voice now gentle.

  Alex nods, not trusting himself with words right now.

  Phillip puts an arm around his shoulder and squeezes gently, then drops it. “Take a nap here. I will get a test kit to see if there are any drugs or spells in your system.” Alex buries his head in his hands to keep Phillip from seeing the tears now falling from his eyes, but his shoulders are trembling. “We don’t have to tell the dean. For now.” Phillip pats his shoulder before retreating, and Alex hears the apartment door close. When he looks up, he’s alone. He leans back on the couch and falls into a fitful sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Sarah

  SARAH WAITS ALL WEEK FOR ALEX TO TALK TO her, possibly to confront her about running off at the party, but he says nothing. They don’t even talk in class, other than the bare necessities for making potions. Other than that, silence. Her heart drops lower the days go on, tangling itself up in her intestines.

  She dreads going to class, fearing that he won’t tell her why he refuses to have a conversation with her, or worse, that he will. How does she explain the anxiety attack that had encapsulated her just by seeing a woman with red hair?

  It shouldn’t matter to her that he doesn’t want to speak to her. She turns cold, removing all hope from her tone. She stops trying to start small talk, and she stops making jokes under her breath for his benefit. At home, she pushes him out of her mind and focuses on the egg. She read an article over the weekend that explained how to tell if an egg is still alive, so she’d cast the basic spell and delighted over the momentary pulsing light emanating from it to show that she is, in fact, going to have a dragon.

  Friday afternoon, Gabby and Sarah are eating lunch in an abandoned classroom that’s hidden up a circular flight of stairs at the end of the main building. Sarah is reading an informational eBook she’d spent some of her meager savings on, How to Raise Your Dragon, when Gabby asks, “Are you going to the fall formal?” Gabby is sitting cross-legged on the dusty old teacher’s desk, her mouth full of pasta.

  Sarah shrugs. “I don’t really like dances. Too many people.” She puts her phone away and tries to force one of the antique windows open—when they discovered the room and started eating up here, this became her project. Today, she has a can of WD-40 she found in Mark and Elizabeth’s garage so she can try to loosen the hinges. So far, she hasn’t had much success.

  Gabby nods while she chews. After swallowing, she says, “I feel that. I just enjoy having a chance to dress up.”

  Sarah oils the hinges again, waiting a moment for it to soak in before yanking it, and it budges about a quarter of an inch. “Ha!” she cries victoriously, bouncing and pointing at it. Gabby raises her eyebrows and nods at the accomplishment, although she suggested yesterday that Sarah just use magic to open them. “Told you that you don’t need magic for everything,” Sarah says smugly.

  “Kelly is coming,” Gabby says, holding up her phone to show off the text from her girlfriend in Chicago. “I know you said the other day you wanted to meet her.”

  It takes Sarah a moment to remember that they’re talking about the dance. Gabby pulls up a photo of the red floor-length gown she designed over the summer just for the formal.

  “I’ll think about it,” Sarah relents. “But I’d rather not be a third wheel.” She hits her palm bluntly against the wooden window frame, and it goes just a smidge more.

  Gabby considers for a moment. “What about Tyler from first hour? I’m pretty sure he has a crush on you.”

  Sarah makes a face. “Tyler is obnoxious,” she objects. “All he talks about is his dad’s solar energy company.”

  “Right,” Gabby says, nodding. “And we all know you’re more of a wind-farm girl.”

  Sarah laughs. “Precisely. If you’re gonna do clean energy, do it right.”

  Gabby finishes her salad quickly and pulls out a notebook. “Okay, give me a list, then.”

  “A list?” Sarah asks, raising an eyebrow at her, the window project forgotten.

  “A list of all the attributes you want in a beau—“ Gabby waggles her eyebrows at that old-fashioned word “—and we’ll figure out who you should ask.”

  Her freshman year, back in Sedalia, Penny had asked Sarah who she liked, but Sarah didn’t really have feelings for any of the boys at school. In fact, her true love at that time was Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings movies, which her neighbor introduced her to. Penny did not know that Sarah was in love with a fictional character—Penny was the type of person that believed in a strong divide between fiction and reality, and having a crush on a fictional character just didn’t make sense.

  Sarah had sighed and relented, picking the first person that popped into her mind. “It’s Will. From science class.”

  There’d been nothing wrong with Will. He was a tall, skinny boy with more limbs than he knew what to do with, although it was an average number of limbs for a human being. He’d been short at the end of eighth grade, but when they came back to school, he’d grown at least six inches, and he was due to grow more before he graduated. He also liked to play his guitar in the cafeteria before school, although he only knew two songs—Master of Puppets by Metallica and The Thunder Rolls by Garth Brooks.

  “You’re bi, right?” Gabby asks. After Gabby had shyly mentioned her girlfriend earlier in the week, Sarah had given her this information about herself. When Sarah nods, Gabby quizzes her, although the questions about her zodiac sign don’t give her a lot of confidence.

  Sarah sighs and hopes that she won’t have to fake-like somebody for this friendship to work like she had with Penny. Gabby has insisted on a slumber party at her house this weekend, and Sarah will have to mention her kiss with Alex. She’s already dreading that part.

  At the end of the day, Gabby slaps a piece of paper across Sarah’s chest.

  “I’ve narrowed down your specifications to five people,” Gabby whispers, her voice conspiratorial.

  “Why are we whispering?” Sarah asks, her voice hushed as they walk out to the student lot.

  “Because it’s more fun,” Gabby replies.

  Raul Venados

  Wendy Whatshername (from first hour? You know?)

  Sam Foster

  Catherine Harvey

  Daniel Williamson

  Alex isn’t on the list. She can’t help but slump her shoulders in disappointment, so she’s glad that Gabby is walking ahead of her. Sarah’s overnight duffel bag is already in the backseat of Gabby’s black Cadillac Escalade, so they leave as quickly as possible to avoid St. Louis’s rush hour traffic. The leather is hot, but Sarah is too charmed by the crystals and stuffed dog and National Parks lanyard hanging off the rearview mirror to care.

  Gabby and her family live on the southeast side of town, in a suburb called Kirkwood. Their house is a tall, brick faced building with white Grecian columns guarding the front door, and the neighborhood is filled with matching tall, brick faced buildings with Grecian columns. Of course Sarah knew ahead of time that Gabby is rich, but she’s still thrown off-kilter by the mansion. The car gets parked under an overhang between the house and the separate three-car garage, and they take their shoes off just inside and hang them on a rack next to the washer and dryer.

  “This just in,” Sarah says, “the rich are just like you and me. They, too, do laundry!”

  Gabby laughs. “No, those are just for show. We have to burn everything as soon as it’s been worn once.”

  They banter like this as Gabby weaves them through the house, all dark wood floors and ivory walls. When they’ve gone up three flights of stairs, she leads Sarah to something completely out of place—an wrought-iron spiral staircase that climbs up to the attic.

  Sarah wants to mention how awful it is that Gabby has been relegated to living in the attic, but she gasps when they go up the stairs.

  She immed
iately falls in love with Gabby’s room.

  One side of the attic, which has a magical window that allows stargazing on the ceiling, is filled with star charts and astrology information, all surrounding a huge bronze telescope. There are notes scribbled obsessively on most of the charts, and Sarah hopes that she gets a chance to look them over.

  Another corner holds Gabby’s bed, where a king-sized mattress rests on a rustic pallet frame. There are wall tapestries that have mandelas and stars and woven trees draped across the ceiling and the walls, overlapping each other. Fairy lights surround the nest of comforters and fleece blankets and faux fur throws, and pillows are strewn everywhere. Dozens of pillows. Sarah would love nothing more than to bury herself in that bed and never come out.

  The corner adjacent to the bed contains a study area—an office computer desk with a brand-new computer, and bookshelves piled high with books that spill out onto the floor to the sides. The slatted wood floors are covered with what must be fifteen antique rugs, some soft, some itchy, all intricately woven. A golden chaise lounge sits along one wall, so Sarah sets her duffel and school bags there.

  Sarah’s room is bland and boring, the guest room of a house she’s merely visiting, but Gabby’s room feels lived in, like it truly belongs to the girl who occupies it. Maybe Sarah should attempt to decorate her own. While she gapes, Gabby changes into an ivory bohemian dress with lace shoulders and linen that scrunches at the torso and flows gently to her knees. She even puts a flower crown on her head and sighs gently with satisfaction as she sinks into her fluffy bedding. This is the first time Sarah has seen her out of uniform, and the change is dramatic yet fitting.

  Sarah changes into the ratty sweatpants she sleeps in and a plain black tank top, wishing she could look as ethereal as Gabby.

  “What’s wrong?” Gabby asks, concern flooding her face when Sarah collapses next to her on the bed. “I have more flower crowns if you want to match.”

  She starts to get up and go to her armoire, but she stops when Sarah mumbles, “I kissed Alex.”

  Gabby gasps and sits back down immediately. “What? Alex Locklear? The pyromancer? Don’t you have a class with him? When did this happen?” Her eyes are wide and inquisitive, but not judgemental like Penny’s would’ve been. Penny would have taken one look at Alex and called him a weird emo.

  Sarah’s lips tug into the tiniest of smiles despite being ignored by him all week. “Last weekend.” She can’t exactly tell Mark and Elizabeth that she snuck out; she’s already keeping the dragon egg from them. It feels good to let it out, to have someone to confide in. She starts with the feeling that she needed to be at the party, then mentions Alex pulling her out of the spell, and ends with the kiss. She doesn’t bring up the red-haired woman that had freaked her out.

  “How was it?” Gabby asks, a grin spread across her face. She’s like a mermaid, her attention caught by this big shiny thing, and she has to know everything.

  “It was...nice.” Sarah reaches up and brushes her fingers against her lips, remembering the softness of Alex’s. “Magical.”

  Gabby sighs and lies down. “So I guess you aren’t going with Catherine or Raul to the fall formal, then.”

  Sarah shrugs. “I don’t know. Alex hasn’t said a word to me since we kissed. I think he probably regrets it.”

  She wants to talk about the vision she’d accidentally shared with him, the connection she feels when they joke around, but she doesn’t know how to put it into words without seeming like a naive child. “Let’s talk about something else. Anything else.”

  They should be doing their Spiritual Magic homework, but instead they end up watching the Lord of the Rings series since Gabby has the extended editions. “Eowyn is so much hotter than Arwen,” Gabby argues at one point. “I knew I was gay because of her. That whole ‘I am no man’ thing.”

  “I knew I was bi because of Arwen and Aragorn, though,” Sarah says.

  Gabby purses her lips, then concedes. “Fine. Maybe Eowyn and Arwen are equally hot.”

  Towards the end of Return of the King, Sarah drifts into sleep. Before losing consciousness, she realizes, for the first time, that Penny was wrong to abandon her.

  Maybe she can be happy at St. Merlin’s.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alex

  MONDAY MORNING, A CHANGE IN THE AIR wakes Alex in his dorm. At some point in the night, he kicked his blankets to the floor, and he wakes up shivering before the sun has even considered rising. He gets down and searches in the dark for his comforter, but it doesn’t help to dispel the chill when he wraps it around himself. Magic doesn’t work in the dorms, probably because they’d be burned to the ground if it did. The communal microwaves already cause enough grief.

  It had taken all of last week, but Phillip pulled him aside after class on Friday to inform him that he’d been dosed with some sort of love potion. He’d taken him to the nurse to get it reversed, and Alex spent all weekend sick in bed from the side effects. Now, though, he feels quite a bit better. Instead of trying to fall back to sleep, he changes into his uniform and decides, despite the early hour, that he’s awake for the day. He sneaks out of his room, careful to not wake David, and waves at the desk attendant, Ms. Quaker, who laughs. “Go back to bed, Locklear. It’s too early to be up.”

  “No such thing,” Alex replies, his voice quiet as he notices her six-year-old twins sleeping on the floor like a pair of puppies in a pile of blankets and couch cushions. They usually occupy her first-floor apartment, but they must have followed her the twenty feet to the desk when she got up for her shift.

  The air is brisk, a slap in the face as soon as he opens the door, so he half walks, half jogs to the library, the only other building on campus that’s always open. He allows his hands to heat themselves, just not enough to be set ablaze. He’s sure the librarian wouldn’t be so willing to let someone in the library after seeing their hands on fire. Magic can do a lot, but books are quite flammable.

  His eyes catch a woman on the other side of the courtyard. He only notices her because it’s abnormal for someone else to be out right now, and he doesn’t recognize her from the staff. She’s dressed in all black, the only color on her a mane of red hair. He wants to point out to her that the other buildings aren’t open yet, and they won’t be until seven. When he considers calling to her across the courtyard, though, another sharp wind cuts at his eyes and cheeks, so he rushes inside.

  The library is the biggest building on campus, stretching five stories into the night. One side of it has an entirely glass wall, only interrupted by steel framework. The lights are lower at night than in the daytime, but, with the lack of stars, the library is the brightest thing in the world. When he was younger, he would sometimes hide in the depths of the reference section well into the night, which is hidden away in the basement. There, he would pretend that he wasn’t a pyromancer. He could act like nobody was interested in him, like he didn’t have everyone’s expectations on his shoulders.

  When he enters, warm air envelopes him, and he’s embraced by the scent of books. The main entrance is grand and modern, all sleek dark wood desks and white shelves. A cart of books rolls by on its own, the books shelving themselves. Dazzling silver lights float through the air, tiny stars and moons enchanted to follow the time of day. Crickets chirp and a stream bubbles somewhere in the distance, although it’s impossible for either of those things to be anywhere in here.

  The librarian is lounging at the dark wood front desk, a Stephen King true-crime novel in hand. Clown demons and black shucks—omens of death that take the form of a dog—don’t usually attack people, but the novels are a sensation because they make people wonder if it could happen to them. She nods at Alex before getting back to her book.

  He wanders through the stacks, tracing his fingers along the spines of books that interest him, and they whisper to him, begging him to pick one—or all—of them. He eventually ends up in the basement, a warm, cozy hovel with rich browns and golds and endless hot coc
oa and espresso for anyone that knows where to look. Plush armchairs surround a fake roaring fire. He caresses a biography about Norman Claire, a famous pyromancer from the nineteen-thirties.

  Alex has read most of the books on pyromancy that this library has to offer, but they’ve brought him no closer to understanding why he is one. It’s supposed to be genetic, but neither of his parents are pyromancers. They’re both only mildly interested in magic at all, and, although they support him living a state away at St. Merlin’s, he sometimes feels as though they’d prefer it if he were normal. If he were to settle down with a nice girl, making an honest living, they’d be just as content, but without the barrage of questioning from friends and relatives about what he’s going to do with his gift.

  When he gets past the introduction of the biography, he feels a sudden charge in the air, the electricity of a storm. The spark of a spell. The hairs on his arms raise in anticipation, like lightning is going to strike him down at any second.

  Someone else is in his mind.

  What’s going on? He thinks, pushing his thoughts toward the presence. It doesn’t seem hostile, but he keeps his guard up.

  I’m so sorry, Alex. I just don’t want to be alone. It takes him a moment to place the voice. He’s only had one class with Cynthia, but now that he recognizes her, the connection gets stronger. If he closes his eyes, the basic colors blur around her, dark, desaturated greens of the trees and grass at night.

  Before he can ask what she means, a sharp pain digs into his right arm, burrowing deep into his bones. He grits his teeth as a gasp is dragged out of him.

  What the hell is going on? He demands, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, he can only take her pain, her fear. He has to find her, to stop whatever is going on.