by Maria Amor
“I can get you access to the school displays,” she said finally. “It will have to be after school, and we’ll have to come up with an excuse for the dean—he obviously doesn’t want anyone anywhere near the displays.”
“And then what do we do?” Dylan gestured broadly. “We don’t know anything about proving they’re duplicates.” Halpern frowned.
“One other person should come with us,” she said. “I know the two of you want to do this alone, but you can’t—not something this big, and not if Cornelius Nolan is involved.”
“Who’s the other person?” Dylan heard the tension in Julia’s voice.
“His name is Juris Dagon,” Mrs. Halpern said. “He’s an elemental witch, and the school accountant.” Dylan looked at Julia; could they trust anyone else? Could they even trust Mrs. Halpern?
“When do you need us to come?” Julia’s voice was steady, and Dylan hoped that she knew what she was doing.
“Come about an hour after classes end,” Halpern said. “I’ll make the excuse that I’ve got you coming to speak with your parents on the phone about your misbehavior—that’ll get you both in here.”
“And you’re sure we can trust this guy?” Dylan wasn’t.
“He doesn’t know what the dean is doing,” Halpern said firmly. “I’m certain of it.” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that. “Yes—before you ask. I had someone who had the right talents read him, when I started to suspect something was going on. He’s a witch, he’s an honest man, and he would be able to see if the relics were real or duplicates.” Dylan looked at Julia, and held her gaze for a long moment.
“Do we really want to do this?” Julia took a deep breath.
“It’s the closest we’ve come to finding out what is going on, and how to prove it,” Julia pointed out. “If we get caught now…” she shrugged. “Either this is a setup, or it’s the real deal. If it’s a setup, then we’ll just have to risk it.”
“If it’s a setup, I’m going to get locked up,” Dylan reminded her.
“It’s not a setup,” Halpern said. “I’ll have Ruth call you to confirm it, if you want.”
“How could she know about this?” Dylan couldn’t fault Julia for a good question.
“Because I’m going to tell her what happened,” Halpern said. “You’ll get a call from her, and when she confirms that you can trust me, you come here an hour after classes, and we’ll meet with Juris, and get you whatever proof we can.”
The question no one in the closet asked—out loud—weighed heavily on Dylan’s mind, for the moment pushing aside even his surprised indignation at Julia’s impulsive kiss. And then what do we do? How do we prove it and who do we prove it to? Dylan swallowed against the dry feeling in his throat. Figure that out after. If you can get proof, you’re one step closer.
“Assuming we get the call, we’ll be here,” Dylan said.
“Good,” Mrs. Halpern said. “You’d better get back to class, both of you.”
They left the closet and Dylan walked with Julia through the hall, silent for a few minutes. “Now is a good time to talk about what the hell it was that just happened in the dean’s office, right?” He looked at Julia intently.
“What happened is that I needed a good cover, and I needed to sell it as hard as possible,” Julia said. “That’s all.”
“Why did you have to kiss me to sell it?” Dylan wasn’t exactly upset at being kissed—even by Julia, who he’d never thought of kissing before—but he was definitely a little irritated at not being consulted.
“Ashbel thought that I was going to see someone to make out,” Julia said. “It was either that or I was spying on her. I played to her idea of teenagers being walking hormones. Besides, that sold it way better than what we actually do when you help me through a power surge,” she pointed out.
“So there was nothing to it beyond wanting to show off in front of the dean?” Dylan stopped walking, forcing Julia to turn around and face him.
“Did you want there to be?” Julia raised a dark eyebrow, crossing her arms over her chest.
“No,” Dylan said firmly. “Definitely not. That would just make things weird.”
“Okay then,” Julia said. “Yes, it was just to really sell the idea that I was doing something naughty that wasn’t spying on Ashbel, to make the dean uncomfortable, and to get us out of trouble.”
“Next time find a better way to do that,” Dylan said.
“I’m sorry,” Julia told him, falling into step as he started back towards the classroom he’d been called out of. “Dylan!”
“What?” Dylan glanced at her.
“I mean it. I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I was just...I wanted to put one over on them both, knowing what I thought I did, and I wanted to make sure they wouldn’t snoop us, and I hoped that you’d figure out what was going on and be okay with it.”
“If we’d planned it in advance I probably would have been okay with it,” Dylan admitted. “It was just—not even the kiss, really. It was that I didn’t have any say in it. You just grabbed me and kissed me.” He glanced at her again, knowing how it sounded—knowing that it was the last thing a guy should complain about.
“You’re right,” Julia said. “I should have figured out some way to hint to you what I was going to do, and I should have figured something out that wouldn’t be so…” He caught the sight of a blush in her cheeks before she looked away. “Anyway, at least I can tell everyone you’re a good kisser. You don’t mind if I tell, right?”
“We shouldn’t,” Dylan said, though there was a tiny part of him that almost wished he didn’t have to say it. “They might use this as an excuse to move me out of the air-aligned dorms.”
“It’s not like I can get into your dorm room,” Julia pointed out.
“It’s exactly like that, you’ve done it before,” Dylan countered. “We’ve gone into each other’s rooms a dozen times.”
“But not officially,” Julia insisted. “Officially there’s no way I could get into your dorm room without people knowing about it.”
“But the whole point of these theft allegations is that they’re pushing the idea that people can,” Dylan said. “They might actually use this against us.”
“We’ll have to move quickly then, before they can do anything about it,” Julia said. Dylan looked at Julia sharply.
“We’re going to have to move quickly either way,” he said. “But yeah, I take your point.” They’d reached his classroom; Dylan knew that he had to go in, but he didn’t want to—he felt too unsettled still. About the kiss, about Julia and guarding her, about the scheme and how close they were to having to take some kind of step to reveal what was happening.
He knew that if he didn’t go back in, someone would come looking for him, and for Julia too, but he couldn’t make himself go through the door without settling himself, at least a little bit. “I forgive you, for the whole—thing,” he said.
“I appreciate it,” Julia told him. “I’ll meet you at the usual place?”
“Sure,” Dylan said. He turned away from her and made himself open the door.
Professor Braden didn’t have anything to say to him when he went back to his seat; and in spite of doing the right thing, Dylan knew by the time the school day was over, less than two hours later, that he almost might as well have just gone to the infirmary, or back to his dorm room. He didn’t get anything out of the class, nor the one that came after it, because he was too consumed with the prospect of what would happen after the end of the day, with what might be revealed, and what that would mean for the overall plan—loose as it was.
By the time he met with Julia, he at least had managed to settle his sense of nervous irritation at her high-handed prank. Dylan thought that he might even manage to more or less forget it had happened within a day or two, as long as no one knew about it outside of him, Julia, the dean, and Professor Ashbel. If it got out that he and Julia had kissed, though—Dylan didn’t let himself dwell on it. The meeting with Mrs. Halpe
rn was more important.
He and Julia made small talk as they waited for the hour to pass between the end of the school day and when they were supposed to go to the administration office. Half an hour after the end of the day, Julia’s iPhone rang. It was Ruth. “Well, at least we can be pretty sure that Mrs. Halpern is on the up and up,” Dylan said. Julia nodded, and accepted the call, setting it to speaker.
“We’re alone, and I have you on speaker so Dylan can hear you,” Julia said without preamble.
“I heard you found out something significant,” Ruth said.
“We think so,” Julia told her grandmother.
“Do you know Cornelius Nolan?” Dylan wanted at least to know where the rest of their unlikely set of conspirators was on the subject, on the situation.
“I do,” Ruth said. “And if he’s involved in this, you’re both in danger unless you can prove it, and prove it in front of the council.” Dylan looked at Julia; that was a tall order.
“We’d need an audience with the council for that,” Julia pointed out.
“I can get Karine to oblige me; she likes you,” Ruth said, in a tone of voice that Dylan interpreted to mean that—at the moment, at least—Ruth was less than certain she shared that judgment.
“So, if we can get proof, you can get Karine to get us an audience?” Dylan felt nervous just at the thought of it.
“Proof that you can bring to the audience, yes,” Ruth confirmed.
“And then?” Dylan was glad that Julia had asked the important question; he wasn’t sure he had the nerve for the answer.
“And then you appear before the council, and you persuade them of what is happening,” Ruth replied. “And that is going to be a dangerous appearance.”
“It is?” Dylan’s stomach felt like it was full of ice water.
“It will be,” Ruth confirmed. “You’re going to be accusing one of the most important fire-aligned Guardians in the country; of course, it’s going to be dangerous.”
“What can he do?”
“Since you’re both minors, not much,” Ruth said. “But enough.”
“Let me guess,” Julia said, sounding exasperated. “You’re not going to tell us until it comes up.”
“There’s no point in worrying about what he may be too much of a coward to do,” Ruth told them. “Get the proof, confirm it for me, and worry about the audience when it happens.”
“Okay, Grandmother,” Julia said. “I will talk to you later.”
“You will,” Ruth agreed. The call ended, and Dylan snorted, shaking his head.
“I guess we’re going to go see a guy about some relics then,” he told her. Julia nodded.
“You know that proverb that’s actually a curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?” Dylan nodded to indicate that he did. “I sort of get it now.”
“Let’s put our stuff in the dorms, we’ll have just enough time to get to the admin building,” Dylan suggested. He didn’t want to go; he didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they did get proof of what they were fairly certain Dimitrios and his friends were doing. But Dylan knew that they were both in far too deep to back out.
*
Julia could feel every nerve in her body tingling, or at least it seemed that way as she followed Mrs. Halpern and Juris Dagon into the small, well-warded chamber that contained the school’s relics. Dagon was a short, well-groomed man, with sandy-brown hair and medium brown eyes. The only thing that made Julia think he had any kind of interesting life outside of his jaw was the fact that she could just barely—barely—discern a fragment of a tattoo through the white dress shirt he wore. He was somewhere around Mrs. Halpern’s age; old enough to look like a real adult, but not so old that he seemed out of touch with the world.
“We’ll have to be quick,” Mrs. Halpern said. “The systems will only be down for about twenty minutes.”
“That should be enough time,” Juris said. He cracked his knuckles, and looked around the room; Julia had only been in it one other time, when she’d toured the school as a ten-year-old child. The room was deep inside of the administration building, guarded by every means that the Guardians and the supernatural creatures that built the school could come up with.
Julia could feel the magic in the room—the wards, the crystals and charged substances, intended to prevent supernatural attacks; the school had updated the room to include more modern and even hypermodern protection systems as well, as different methods became available. The relics themselves were in pressure-glass containers, some of the more potent ones ringed with crystals meant to buffer the magic that naturally infused them.
Sandrine had a variety of different relics, donated by the creatures and people that had held them before, representing all of the different elements. There were the rings of Melusine, which had helped to build castles, alongside elf-arrows and fae amulets, a fire sword forged in the breath of a dragon before they had made the shift into being able to assume human forms, an infinity blade—capable of killing whatever the point touched—and charms made by different groups. There was a Philosopher’s Stone, an ancient vial with the tears of the first changeling, and more things than Julia could name, altogether.
Each of the schools that existed to teach Guardians and supernatural creatures held a relics chamber, but Sandrine’s was one of the finest. Julia looked at Juris, tearing her gaze away from faded fabrics, gleaming metals, and glittering jewels. “How are you going to find out what’s going on?”
“My magic is earth-aligned,” Juris explained. “I have dabbled in the other elements, but nothing really appeals as much, or feels as right.” He rubbed his hands together and looked around the room. “Even if the relics represent all of the elements that exist, at its most basic, creation is an earth-aligned magic.”
“What does that mean?” Julia was glad that she wasn’t alone in her confusion; Dylan sounded just as lost—and more suspicious.
“There is a spell that will allow me to show whether the relics are originals—created items—or duplicates. The energy to create a thing is different from the energy to duplicate it.”
“Let’s get this done,” Mrs. Halpern suggested. “We can talk about the theory behind it later.” Juris nodded and took a deep breath, and Julia and Dylan both stepped back from the middle-aged man. He began to murmur lowly, in a language like the rumbling of the earth, and Julia recognized it as the earth-aligned language that few witches ever managed to really learn.
It was known by all earth-aligned Guardians, at least by the time they were adults, but witches generally weren’t even allowed to learn it. She wondered what Juris had done to earn the privilege, and decided that there were more important things—just at that moment—to think about. The chanting continued, and Julia tried not to interfere, although she didn’t know how she possibly could.
After a few moments, she began to notice a change in the relics. Some of them began to glow, with a dark green-black energy that Julia thought had to be earth-energy; even the air and water-aligned objects, and the fire-aligned objects, took on the color. Some of the other relics seemed almost to grow dim.
As the chant continued, Julia watched the differences between the two groups of relics increase, until the ones that had been dim almost looked as though they would disappear entirely. Mrs. Halpern was scribbling something down; Julia thought it had to be the results of the spell, though she couldn’t be sure.
Juris stopped chanting, and the spell held for a few moments longer. “The ones that are dim were duplicated,” he said. “No actual ‘creative’ energy was used to make them. The ones glowing are the real ones.”
“Do you think you can do that again?” Julia gestured to the various relics. “Like—if the council calls on me, and has me speak?”
“I may be able to, but there’s a bigger chance that someone on the council could,” Juris said. “The spell I just used would be one that most highly-trained earth Guardians would know.” That was good; Julia nodded. It woul
d mean that she would have to persuade someone—and she would have to explain knowing about that kind of magic, as far out of her purview as almost anything could be. She looked at Dylan.
“Do you think they’ll accept it?”
“We need something that would make them actually decide to come here and investigate it, something that would persuade them that we’re not just making something up,” Dylan pointed out. Julia considered.
“Would it be possible to remove the relics that are duplicates?” She looked at Mrs. Halpern and Juris.
“There’s a possibility,” Juris said. He pressed his lips together. “I’ll need your help, Dylan; it requires both earth and water magic.”
“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Halpern’s voice was tight.
“Between the two of us, we can ‘wash away’ the ones that aren’t originals,” Juris explained. “With my energy to identify them, and Dylan’s water-aligned properties, the ones that are duplicates would disappear completely.”
“No,” Mrs. Halpern said. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Julia frowned at the older woman. “It would get attention.”
“But then we’d have no proof when they come to investigate,” Mrs. Halpern said. “The dean would accuse us of the thefts, and they’d put new duplicates in some place they say is proof that it was us.”
“But the duplicates would do the same thing there as they do here,” Dylan pointed out. “They could be identified.”
“And then they’d say that we got Juris—or someone like him—to make the duplicates,” Mrs. Halpern said.
“This isn’t necessary,” Juris said. “We can modify the spell so that the relics only appear to be gone.”
“You can do that?” Mrs. Halpern looked relieved. “And then they could be revealed again under magic?”
“Julia could do it,” Juris suggested. “Or any air-aligned Guardian. Recovering lost items is within their magical purview.”
“I don’t know how to do something like that,” Julia said.
“It wouldn’t be difficult,” Juris told her. “I will have a friend write out the spell in the air-aligned language.”
