by B. C. Palmer
Amelia
My moving compass tattoo took me back to my room after I was able to focus clearly on my desire to be there. It wasn’t enough to just ask the thing, “Hey, show me how to get there, please.” Instead, I had to summon up the same kind of acute need that had led me to the restrooms before. Each time I let my mind think about Isaac and Lucas, about the promises their voices had held, the arrow would quiver, threatening me... tempting me back to them.
When I got to my assigned room at last, I knocked gently and, I thought, politely but was greeted with Hunter’s gruff voice from the other side.
“What?”
“It’s… Amelia? From before, your new—”
The door was flung wide, and Hunter was already stalking back to his desk. “You don’t have to knock. It’s your room, too, whether I like it or not.”
I got as far as the threshold before I paused, nervous about invading the man’s space. It wasn’t all that late, really, but between the Greyhound bus, the drive, the strange exam procedure, learning that all of physics was basically wrong, and about an hour and a half of sensory overload—well, turning in a little early was an attractive idea.
The room was lit, though, and Hunter had two books laid out on his desk, along with a legal pad where he was making loud, precise scratches with a fountain pen, complete with an inkwell at one corner of the desk.
Hunter was right, though, and after seeing a party split into seven dimensions, it was harder to doubt what Lucas had said about waking up in this room no matter where I slept. Hell, anything seemed possible at the moment. I forced my feet to carry me into the room further and tested the bed with one hand as I peered automatically at what Hunter was working on. It didn’t make any sense at a glance—old books, old writing, odd figures. Magic stuff, I guessed.
“What are you working on?” I asked. The silence was weird, at least to me.
Hunter grunted and didn’t look up. “You’ve been here five minutes; do you really think you’d understand even if I tried to explain it?”
“I might if you’re a decent teacher,” I countered his dickish quip. Maybe it was his rough demeanor, but I wanted to find out where his buttons were and see how much I could press them before he snapped. What would this man look like then? What would it feel like to be the sole focus of his attention, angry or not.
“I’m not.” He jabbed the pen at the page, cussed, and scratched something out before he laid it down and turned in his seat to, possibly, attempt to light me on fire with his brain. “Can you do me a favor and just… not do any of that? My work is complicated, and delicate, and requires calculations in dimensions you haven’t learned about yet and you might be surprised to know that Texas Instruments doesn’t make a fancy enough fucking calculator for it. I need to concentrate.”
My whole body had stiffened, winding tight as he bit off each word. Now that he was looking straight at me, I could see that whatever this was had taken a toll on him. Maybe he was always a little pale, kind of haggard, and maybe grooming his beard had never been a priority. But there was desperation of some kind in his bloodshot eyes, and dark circles under them.
He tugged at me in a way I wasn’t ready to examine. He was an asshole, but a part of me knew it was a familiar defense. Like the warded the rooms with strange symbols, he was warding himself by being so rude.
I exhaled the breath I’d been holding. I’d let it go for now. It wouldn’t matter anyways. The bus would take me away from him and the pain he carried. “Okay. I’m gonna… it’s hard to sleep with the light—”
Hunter rolled his eyes as he turned away, and made several complicated figures with his right hand before muttering, “Lux cadere.”
The room—or at least, my half of it—plunged into darkness. Only a faint, distant glow of Hunter’s desk lamp managed to glimmer just a bit, but the light was muted and didn’t reach far. I sighed, undressed under the blanket, and turned my back to him to get some sleep.
Almost the moment I rolled over, the mattress seemed to shift under me, gradually changing until it took on a combination of hard and soft I had never experienced before. Not all magic, it turned out, was flashy and mind-boggling. Bed magic? That I could get behind one hundred percent. I tried to mull over my life, stare at the dark wall and let my mind run wild, but next thing I knew it was morning and I had slept.
Hunter was already gone, and so were my clothes. I slipped out of bed, panicked about not having my luggage, but found that the short chest at the end of the bed had folded uniforms in it. All of them in my size.
Like magic.
I don’t know that I expected any particular curriculum for magic. After all, I didn’t know the first thing about it. But from the way Hunter had summoned darkness—or, maybe, banished light?—and the way Serena had worked her flower illusion, I had hoped it would be something like, throw this gang sign and say these words in Latin. Maybe a wave of a wand and presto-chango, that shit-eater Clark from third grade who always pulled my hair is now bald. Not that I would be petty with magic. I remember what Uncle Ben told Peter.
Based on my first two days of classes, I wasn’t going to be doing anything with magic. Entrance exam or not, it became very clear about halfway through my first class that I had missed some huge chunk of critical education that everyone else had apparently gotten. On the first day of that first class, Beginning Principles of Classical Thaumaturgy, remedial was anything but remedial. Unless magician kids learned chaos math in middle school. If these were the ‘beginning principles’ then I was pretty sure advanced principles would break my brain.
After about the fifth time I raised my hand and asked Dr. Wardwell to repeat something so I could get it down in my notes, he finally surveyed the classroom. “Would anyone here like to assist our poor Miss Cresswin with a bit of extra study time?”
Crickets. The longer the silence went, the hotter I felt my face burning. I wished I knew the Latin gang sign to make myself invisible.
Wardwell, who was a plump man about five and a half feet tall with two oversized front teeth and a slight lisp, spread his hands. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to write faster, Miss Cresswin, or master Gamberly’s Living Ink Enchantment—we have a lot of material to cover and I can’t derail our entire curriculum for one student.”
“Of course,” I said quickly, shrinking down into my chair. “Um… can you maybe teach me that?”
His face withered to a sympathetic frown. “It’s in your Essentials Primer. Page eighty-five. May I continue now?”
I answered by attempting to hide in plain sight. Maybe I had magic after all—it apparently worked. Wardwell picked right up where he left off. “The essence of the seventh principle of thaumaturgical works hinges on the bifurcation of Plato’s ideal world into two operative realms, the electric and the magnetic, of which he said…”
Even if I could take notes fast enough—I couldn’t—it wouldn’t have even mattered. The whole class might as well have been in Greek. And parts of it were in Greek.
By the time I’d gotten through Sacred Geometry 101, Intro to Somatics—where the instructor suggested regularly dislocating finger joints as a means of obtaining the requisite flexibility needed for certain more complicated hand signs—and Elemental Essences, it was clear that I was no longer the star student of my school.
That was humbling, and frustrating. In high school, I had been valedictorian three out of four years. I had a better than four-point-oh GPA, aced every test, turned in every piece of homework, and went on to score a 1,580 on my SATs. I knew I wasn’t dumb.
“So what am I missing?” I asked Serena at the end of my second day of hell. I had my Essentials Primer laid out in front of me. The ‘primer’ was a manual of about 150 pages that covered about two dozen basic, utilitarian spells that was impossible to read without four lexicons. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Akkadian were freely spread throughout the pages, along with explanations for how the spells worked and why they were based on some kind of fantasy inter
pretation of m-theory and quantum physics. “Am I doing the hand-thingy wrong?”
“Somatic components are a bitch,” Serena admitted as she twisted my middle finger at an unnatural angle to loop around my ring finger and touch the first knuckle of my thumb. “Like that. Just do it like a thousand times and maybe dislocate that second joint once or twice for flexibility.”
I growled my frustration and pushed the book across the table. I’d asked her to meet me in the courtyard when I managed to track her down during lunch, and she hadn’t officially promised but she did show up. Now, she looked at me like a puppy someone had kicked. “Hey, don’t let this place beat you. It’s only been two days. You should have seen me my first month. It was like a nonstop period except instead of my cooch it was my ears bleeding, and instead of blood it was my brain, and I had cramps in my mind. Look. It takes time, and there’s more to it than the words and the gestures. You gotta find the magic itself inside. It’s there, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Fine,” I breathed, and pulled the book back to me. “Got any tips on that part, then? Should I meditate or something?”
Serena laughed, a high-pitched bells-tinkling sort of sound that made me that much more envious of her. Her hair even tossed in the breeze when she did it, like it was just waiting to jump in to make her look fabulous. “Honey, no. Meditation is for the mental arts kids and mostly to keep them from going psycho. No, magic is… it’s like an extra emotion, a muscle you haven’t flexed before, or an eighth color. You passed your exam, right?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“And when you did, you did some magic,” she pressed. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Remember that feeling?”
Even though it was only three days ago, I had a hard time pinning the experience down. It was like a dream I’d started to forget. I did remember the vibration, though. “I think… it was like I was shaking all over, but not really moving.”
Serena gave me a blank look. “Okay. It’s not like that for me. But start with that.”
“What’s it like for you?” I asked. “Maybe I was focused on the wrong thing.”
She shook her head. “Nah. It’s different for everyone. The basics are the same but the specifics are individual. Just try and focus on that. Or, you know, you could go see Lucas about it. He’s good at this kinda shit.”
“Did he teach you?”
“Nope,” she said as she slipped off the table and onto the grass. “I taught myself. And it took a month of menstruating in my brain, so. Do as I say, not as I do, okay?”
I closed the primer and pounded my head on it.
Serena’s hand rested on my back, between my shoulder blades. “Hey. You’ll do fine. It’s just gonna be hard at first. Talk to Lucas. I bet he can help.”
I hadn’t told her about Lucas and Isaac’s invitation. I’d been avoiding both of them intentionally, not that I needed to try that hard. But if Serena wasn’t going to teach me, and Hunter was… Hunter… then Lucas seemed like my best bet. After my last class was over, I looked for the two of them at dinner but they didn’t show up—or I couldn’t find them in the crowd. So I looked at my magical hand-compass and thought of Lucas.
The arrow wiggled, made a half-circle and wavered before driving back to center.
“Come on,” I breathed. “I need to find Lucas. It’s important. Just show me?”
Magic compasses clearly didn’t operate on pity. What was worse, though was that every time I focused and it did start to point somewhere, it almost immediately jumped in the opposite direction. What had Wardwell said in his… something-something principle of thaumaturgy? Something about clarity and singular intention. “There can be no conflict between the magician’s internal and external desire; for these two components, in their alignment, are as the lens which directs the etheric current in a precise direction.”
No conflict between internal and external desires? It was the first time anything made at least a little sense. I wanted to find Lucas to help me with a problem—my external desire—but I wanted to avoid the awkwardness of having turned him and Isaac down, and the many reasons why I had done that, which started with being intimidated at how open they were about it and ended with never having been with two men at the same time before. Or two anyones at the same time, for that matter. I hadn’t even used two sex toys at the same time.
I took a moment to set that aside. I had said ‘no, thank you’ and they had dropped it. There was nothing awkward about it and we could all just move on. It did take some doing. I had to talk myself around the bend from a few different angles, make justifications, and rehearse seeing Lucas again after that in my head until, finally, the compass gave me a direction and held steady.
I made a small hoot of excitement in the courtyard that drew a few curious looks and quickly gathered the primer under one arm to hurry after the compass arrow while I still had the proper alignment of inner and outer desire. Or whatever.
It led me back through the dining room, up to my own hall and to the end, past the stairs, and to the junior hallway. It took me almost all the way to the end, toward a door that was cracked open a few inches. When I reached the door, I paused as I heard a pretty specific and distinct sound, and Lucas’ voice.
“Yeah, fuck… almost there…”
I froze. The compass arrow spun circles. I shouldn’t have looked, because decency, but it was like the blue room, except I admit—being out of sight did make it way harder to stop. Lucas leaned back on the edge of his bed, naked except for the black slacks piled around his ankles, his head lolled back, mouth parted. The muscles of his chest and stomach twitched rhythmically as he panted, the corner of his mouth tugged up in a frozen kind of smile that would have said it all if I couldn’t see the rest.
But I could. Isaac was between his legs, one hand moving slowly up and down the length of Lucas’s cock. It was mesmerizing, the way he did it, his fingers moving each time he twisted his fist around, fanning out and back in as he tugged up and closing again as he pumped down. He had a look of amused concentration on his face, watching as Lucas’ body responded. “There you go,” he breathed.
And, sure enough, there Lucas went. Isaac’s hand almost stopped moving, twisting slow around the thick crown of Lucas’s cock at the last moment. And at about that time I decided maybe I should look away and come back later—except, Lucas was looking at me as his face twisted with ecstasy and he gave up a small, short-lived fountain into Isaac’s fist. “Fuck, yes.”
Amelia
It was like he’d turned me to stone and fire at the same time. I couldn’t move, and every part of me flushed with heat. Different kinds. There was the kind in my face, which I hoped would ignite and ensure that I never had to explain myself—and then there was the kind between my legs, which made my knees go a little weak.
“You can come in, if you want,” he said as his stomach tensed and released under Isaac’s apparently ongoing treatment. He gasped and glanced at the other man. “Shit, that’s sensitive.”
“Obviously,” Isaac said. He leaned toward Lucas and turned to get a good look at me. “Oh, hey. Change your mind?”
Before I could stammer out some weak answer that would probably have to be a very bad lie, he turned his face back to Lucas’s cock and his hand and licked up some of the mess. Lucas shivered and grinned at me.
I spun around so hard that I almost turned back around. As if I were twirling for them. God, you are the most awkward person on the planet, I chided myself. Stop moving, idiot, you’re making it worse.
Faced away from them, I hugged the primer to my chest. “Ah, no, I’m just… I mean I did change… not about… um, I need some help. With my thing. A thing, I mean, not my thing, not anything like—fuck.”
“Deep breaths, Amelia,” Lucas said, his voice a little closer.
I jumped and spun again but made a concerted effort to keep my eyes on his eyes. And then his chin. No, better make it… I picked his shoulder, and I don’t know why. I was still
hot, and flushed, and was both horrified and eternally grateful that the school uniform included a tasteful knee-length skirt that made me feel exposed on the one hand but also certainly hid just how wet I was on the other. “Um,” I said.
Lucas dipped his head as if trying to catch my eyes with his. How could he be so casual like this? At least his pants were on now, though he was pretty clearly still hard. Which I shouldn’t have known but I couldn’t help that my eyes just kind of did their own thing and said, “Fuck you, Amelia, we do what we want; we are the free republic of your face.”
I swallowed too loudly and had to lick my lips, in a way I hoped wasn’t suggestive, to speak. “I need help with a spell. And with magic in general. Serena said you were good at that. At magic, I mean. Teaching it. Or something. Why was your door open, if you were… you know? Doesn’t that seem like a sort of private thing that you do… in private?”
Lucas didn’t answer right away, which made me want to squirm a little. Which was probably the whole point and if so, well, then I guess he won that round. He finally did speak, clearly amused and with a voice that I wished didn’t do the sorts of things it did to me just then. “We like an audience,” he said. “Sometimes. Plus, everyone pretty much has astral eyes flying all around this place. Privacy isn’t exactly high on anyone’s priority since it always turns into a sort of arms race.”
“For the record,” I muttered, “privacy is a priority to me.”
“Hunter’s room is warded pretty well,” Isaac said as he came into view with a hand towel, drying his hands. “Shouldn’t be a problem in there. We’re, ah… all done here. Come on in.”
I did not go in. “Is it something you can just, like, tell me about. I have a notebook; I can write it down.”
Lucas chuckled. “Not exactly. And it’ll take a minute. Just come in. I promise you’ll be okay. Isaac and I were just blowing off some steam. Classes are stressful here; it’s good to have a friend, you know? I can put my shirt on if it makes you more comfortable.”
