by Helen Harper
Looking down, I realised that there was a tear running from the bottom hem of the robes to halfway up my thigh. Shit. Perhaps I could get a safety pin from someone later on, I thought hopefully. I moved around a bit trying to see just how obvious the damage was, but it seemed that fortunately the robes were billowy enough for my modesty to be more than adequately covered. I shrugged and figured they’d just have to do. I quickly changed the dressing on my hand, noting with satisfaction that the lacerations caused by punching through the window yesterday were healing nicely, then ran my hands over my skull, feeling the beginnings of stubbly re-growth. I supposed part of me should thank Thomas for the fact that I didn’t have to worry about bad hair days any more. Then I snorted. The day I’d thank him for anything would be the day that dragons flew again through the sky.
Once back in the cafeteria, which I was oddly starting to feel rather at home in, I ignored the fruit plates and baskets of bread and croissants and instead made straight for the coffee urn. The cups on offer were rather on the small side, so I poured myself three and then balanced them precariously over to an empty table.
I was savouring the dregs of the second cup, when someone plonked themselves down beside me. Startled, I flicked my eyes up.
“Hey,” said Brock, placing down a tray covered with a mass of fried food that only a teenager could eat and not feel guilty about.
“Uh, hey,” I replied, somewhat nonplussed.
He lifted up his plate and gestured at me to try some kind of doughy sugary ball thing. I shook my head, and lifted up cup number three instead. Brock grunted and began to wolf down his food at an alarming rate, finishing before I’d even drunk down to the end of my coffee.
Then he pushed his chair back and grunted. “See you.”
I genuinely smiled. “Bye, Brock.” Wonders would never cease. It would appear that I may have made another, if perhaps rather taciturn, new friend.
“Initiate Smith?” called an unpleasantly familiar voice from the other side of the room.
Fucking Thomas. I’d been hoping that I’d have time to sneak another cup of coffee. I sighed and stood up whilst he crooked his little finger at me, beckoning me over. A flash of heat travelled down to my toes as I walked over to join him. Jeez, wasn’t I just becoming the well trained little sham Initiate?
Once I reached him, he smiled down at me, although it didn’t somehow quite reach his eyes.
“I hope you’re ready to begin your Protection lesson,” he said looking over my wrinkled attire with a disapproving frown.
“I can’t wait, Mage Thomas,” I replied, injecting as much fake enthusiasm as I could possibly muster.
A grimace crossed his flat features. “You’re going to have to, of course, get over your aversion to me touching you if you are going to have any chance of succeeding.”
I started guiltily at his words. I didn’t have a problem with him touching me: he just tried to do it at the most inopportune moments. With no appropriate answer, I just shrugged innocently and followed him out of the cafeteria.
When we were outside in the fresh air and heading towards what I presumed was the Protection building, Thomas chose to speak again. “So, I hear that you are starting to win over some new friends.”
I couldn’t help myself from grinning and nodding. “It’s all Mary really. That girl is like some kind of unstoppable force of nature. Once she puts her mind to something I don’t imagine much gets in her way.”
Thomas gave a short bark of laughter. “I can think of someone else not too far away who is much the same as that.”
I blinked. I rarely got my own way with anything. If I did I’d hardly be trailing after Thomas wearing a stupid powder blue nightgown in the middle of the Ministry of Mages’ national training academy. “That’s hardly true,” I protested.
“Really?” projected Thomas with a heavy hint of sarcasm. He began ticking off his fingers. “The Arch-Mage is prepared to free a potential hazard – your friend - from stasis simply because you asked him to. You are getting mage training at the best,” he put considerable emphasis on those last two words, “training academy in the world, even though you are not a mage. You attack me and, instead of being thrown out as you should be, you are offered counseling. You destroy a priceless painting and send a well respected teacher into therapy and nothing happens. And,” his voice rose half an octave higher, “you have now been given special dispensation to offer Protection lessons to a group of Level Four Initiates at the weekends that focus on attack instead of defense as the rest of us actual teachers are forced to give.”
Wow, bitter much? I had to admit that I was surprised that the Protection lessons I was going to give Mary and her friends were going to be allowed to go ahead, and I still felt guilty about Higgins, but I didn’t think that Thomas was seeing the whole picture.
“Do you think I want to be here?” I snapped. “There are a million places in the world that I would rather be than this sodding place. The Arch-Mage will free Mrs. Alcoon – that’s her name by the way, she’s actually a person, a human being – because she’s not done anything wrong and is no threat to you whatsoever. Of course your amazing Magnificence will only do so after he’s forced me to spend fucking years at this stupid school! Damaging that Escher lithograph was an accident and, anyway, I was just doing what I was told. I’m sorry about your friend Higgins and I hope he recovers soon, but those Level Four Initiates asked me to teach them, not the other way around, so get off your fucking high horse and chill out.”
Thomas was silent. You’d think that spurting off my diatribe of woe and getting it finally all off my chest would make me feel better, but instead I just felt angry. Shooting sparks of heat shot along my veins and arteries. I scowled and went to thrust my hands in my pockets, then remembered that the robes I was wearing didn’t have any and cursed aloud, kicking a stone at me foot instead. It went clattering off across the cobbles, bouncing for several feet.
“And here we get to lesson number one,” Thomas finally said softly.
“Oh right,” I drawled sarcastically, “of course pissing me off is just so you can raise some kind of salient teaching point and show off with just how wise and knowing you are.”
“Look at your hands.”
I glanced down. Flickers of green flame ran along my fingertips. I clenched my fists, hiding them from sight. ‘So fucking what?”
“If you can’t begin to control yourself then you can’t begin to control an attack.”
“Oh yeah? Because if you look at one of the reasons why I’m here, you’ll see that I’m actually pretty damn good at controlling attacks. Better than your bloody mages, anyway.”
“And naturally you’ll only ever have to fight mages,” Thomas muttered. “Not earthquake inducing terrameti, or one-eyed monsters or demi-goddesses, that are stronger, faster and better than you.”
I spluttered. “How the hell do you know…?” Goddamnit, if that had been Alex blabbing then I’d bloody well kill him.
“The Lord Alpha was most forthcoming about your exploits. He thought that it might help your progress here if we knew more about you. There’s actually a rather thick file with sorts of information in the Dean’s office.”
Hot fiery blood pounded in my ears. Corrigan. I might have fucking known it.
Thomas drew a deep breath. “Baldilocks? Is that what you want to be called?”
I swore at him violently.
“Okay, okay,” he said, palms held upwards. “Initiate Smith, then.”
“It’s fucking Mack.”
“Alright, fucking Mack,” he said in a placatory tone.
I rolled my eyes at him and clenched my teeth.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Mack, you need to understand that the fury you get yourself worked up into is your downfall. If you can control yourself better, then you will be more successful at whatever it is you want to do.”
I muttered at him.
“Pardon?”
“I killed the terrametus.
I might not have managed to get rid of Iabartu on my own, but I killed the fucking terrametus.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. “Well done. But now let’s get to work so next time you can kill the god too.”
*
I still didn’t like him. And I was seething with rage at Corrigan and the way he’d given me up to the mages at the earliest opportunity. But I was starting to concede to myself that maybe there was more to Thomas than I’d initially been led to believe. If he thought that I was going to play the willing little student, then he was sadly mistaken, but perhaps I’d listen to what he had to say. Some of it at least. I’d not entirely forgotten his comment about me having feral instincts because of living with shifters.
He led me into a battered looking building, that was definitely considerably more worse for wear than any of the previous ones I’d been in. Thomas noted my reaction and mistook it for judgment.
“You’ve spent too much time with the pack,” he commented wryly.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Just because they have unlimited wealth, that doesn’t mean that we do also.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I scoffed. “You charge up and down the country getting payment for services rendered everywhere you go. You forget that I’ve been your headquarters in London. It’s hardly falling down due to lack of money or disrepair.” In fact from what I could remember it was positively gleaming with wealth. Marble floors, expensive portraits, that thick fluffy carpet that your feet sank into…
Thomas grimaced. “We have to keep up appearances. You have no idea how much money to takes to maintain the upkeep of all these buildings.”
I gaped at him. “And you think that the shifters don’t have lots of buildings to maintain as well? They are dotted all over the country! You guys get to stay in one place and then materialize by magic through whichever portal you decide to create. You don’t need to keep up a presence in every corner of the country.” I couldn’t believe that I was sticking up for the shifters now after Thomas’ revelation about Corrigan’s deceit, but this at least was the truth.
“And you don’t have to spend years training and buying materials to maintain your art. You just attack whichever Otherworld creature happens to nearest and then collect your payment. We actually pay attention to what’s going on and do what we can to keep the equilibrium between all facets of the Otherworld.”
I blew out air in exasperation. Keep the equilibrium? What a load of bollocks.
“I suppose you don’t eat your young either,” I said sarcastically.
Thomas laughed. “Oh, you’ve heard that little nugget, have you?”
“Yeah, I mean, seriously? Who believes that shit?”
“It doesn’t hurt to keep the ranks suitably wary of the Pack.”
I couldn’t keep the disgusted disbelief out of my voice. “So you make up stories about the monster in the closet?”
“No,” he answered, calmly, “we just don’t do much to dispel them that’s all.”
“The Pack is nothing like that as far as you’re concerned. We have always treated the Ministry with respect.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. When you need some magic, you call us in and then treat us like the hired help. Don’t think we’re not aware that you all think that what we do is mumbo-jumbo claptrap.”
“That’s not fair! We don’t think that!” I paused and then back-tracked slightly. “Okay, not everyone thinks that, anyway.”
“See?” Thomas pointed out. “You’re not any worse than we are.”
“You shouldn’t say that, really, you know.”
“Say what?”
“’You’. I’m not actually one of them, remember?”
“I’ll stop saying ‘you’ when you stop saying ‘we’. And anyway, if you’re not a shifter and you’re not a mage, what are you?”
I swallowed, then replied as evenly as I could. “I’m human, of course you numbskull.”
Thomas laughed again, humourlessly this time. “I’ll believe that when fish start climbing trees.”
Slightly offended, I backed away from him. Straying into dangerous territory as we were, I wasn’t stupid enough to let this conversation carry on further, however, so I stayed silent as we moved into a large gymnasium type space and hoped that the mage wouldn’t pursue it. Green paint was peeling off the walls in a depressing manner, and an old gymnastics horse stood forlornly in one corner. Thomas motioned me towards a mark on the scuffed floor, thankfully getting down to the actual business of teaching rather than poking around to glean what he could about my background. He then stood in front, facing me.
“Do what I do,” he instructed, and inhaled deeply, cupping his hands in front of him as if he were holding a ball.
I copied his movements, feeling like an idiot. He tutted and shifted over to me, gently tipping up my head but pressing down slightly on my shoulders until I relaxed. Then he nudged my feet further apart until they were pointing slightly outwards. He moved back to where he had been before and returned his hands to the cupped position, remaining there for several moments, before lifting up his arms and pushing them slowly out in front of him. I mirrored his movements. When Thomas picked up one leg and placed it diagonally in front of him, shifting his weight onto it, then I did the same. When he took his left wrist and curved it downwards, joining each of his fingers to his thumb, and then scooping it out into the empty air, so did I. After thirty minutes of this, I was panting as if I’d been sprinting down a race-track, despite the fact that every movement was slow and deliberate. Every single thing that Thomas had done had impressed me with its sheer fluidity and grace. Next to him I felt like an awkward heffalump.
When he eventually stopped, drawing his feet together and bowing towards me, and I did the same, I stared at him suspiciously.
“That was just tai chi, wasn’t it?”
Thomas arched an eyebrow. “It’s called t’ai chi chu’an,” he corrected.
“Whatever,” I dismissed airily. “It’s got nothing to do with protecting myself against otherworld nasties. That demi-goddess you spoke of before would have laughed in my face if I’d tried that.”
He sighed heavily. “Mack, you have a very long way to go.”
I rolled my eyes, looking away for a moment, then flicked a glance back at the mage. I guessed it was time for the unthinkable after all.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
He seemed surprised. “For what?”
“Calling me Mack. Not many people do.”
Thomas grinned, suddenly appearing terribly boyish. Then he glanced down at his watch and abruptly changed demeanour. “Come on, it’s time to go.”
“Go where?”
“Anger management, of course. Not that I see it doing much good though.”
My contented mood evaporated in an instant. He just couldn’t help himself. I nodded, trying to hang onto my former feelings of tranquility, but the irritation was starting to take over again. Stupid mage. I ignored his look of bedeviled amusement and stalked out of the gym.
Chapter Eight
The portal was already set up and waiting by the time I arrived back at the main building. It shimmered green and purple in the morning sun. If I didn’t know better, I thought ruefully, I’d think it was pretty. Instead my stomach was already churning at the idea of having to travel through one yet again. God knew how the mages managed to do this all the time and not end up with some permanently dodgy stomach condition. I tried to steel myself, imagining a wall of iron surrounding my intestines. It’ll be fine, I whispered to myself.
A black robe who I’d not yet met stood towards the edge of it, but I barely registered him, instead focusing on the swirling shapes and flickers of light. I took a step towards it, suddenly wishing that I’d not agreed to the counselling. Why in the hell couldn’t it just be held at the academy? I was pretty sure I could conjure up a few other names of mages who would benefit from spending an hour or two with a shrink.
&
nbsp; I sneaked a peek at the mage who continued to stand stoically at the side, pointedly not looking at me. It didn’t appear as if I’d get any quarter from that area, so I took a deep breath and walked forward, pushing through to the other side.
Inevitably, as soon as I came through, the bile was rising in my throat. I did my best to fight it, swallowing it down and trying to focus on breathing deeply. It didn’t work. I managed to run a few steps away from the portal itself and then immediately began regurgitating up the remnants of the coffee. It occurred to me that if anyone ever wanted to take me down, then it would be pretty damn easy for them to just to wait for me to materialise through a portal. My temporary nausea induced incapacitation would then quickly become permanent and there’d be fuck all I could do about it.
I rubbed my hands over the top of my head. At least I didn’t have to worry about ending up with bits of vomited carrot in my hair, I figured. I shrugged thoughtfully. Maybe I wouldn’t bother re-growing my hair out. Then I reminded myself of the charming nickname Mary had designated for me, and thought otherwise.
Looking around, it was clear that I was on the roof of a building somewhere. I walked over to the edge and peered down, but didn’t see anything I recognised. Not that it was such a huge surprise that I didn’t know where I was. After all, I was hardly an expert on London. I had kind of thought that maybe it would be near the Ministry, but it didn’t seem to be. Shrugging, I turned back, making for a small door that could only lead down to the counsellor’s offices.
