by B. C. Palmer
Suddenly, it was like my old life woke up and loomed over me. Hey there, Amelia. Remember when you had friends? When’s the last time you checked your text messages?
“It happens,” Hunter said softly. “There’s even a word for it. Occultation. It’s this thing that tends to happen to magicians. The rest of the world seems to get distant; it’s easy to forget about the people you used to know. Lucas, Isaac, and I all grew up in magical communities for the most part. But we had non-magical friends as kids. Last time I caught up with any of mine, they didn’t even remember me.”
I thought about my nerdy little clique. Gabby, Evan, Naomi, and Hector. We’d been friends since middle school, almost six years together. Of course, after Laura died, I had been a little… distant. But still—I hadn’t said a word to them since the summer. What must they have thought of me?
“I, ah… probably won’t be gone the whole break,” Hunter said. “A lot to do here, and everything. I mean, if you’re sticking around. We could work on Nathan’s research.”
I forced a smile. “Yeah. But don’t ditch your family on my account. Besides, I won’t be alone—there must be a few students who don’t go home for break, right?”
Eventually we went to lunch and caught up with Lucas and Isaac. I still hadn’t seen Serena anywhere and was beginning to think she’d left without saying goodbye. Lucas and Isaac, I learned, would be going home to the same town, where both of their families lived.
“We’ll have to deal with my grandmother’s insistence on seeing us married,” Isaac complained. “She’s very old-fashioned. Well… progressively old-fashioned.”
Lucas groaned. “I’m hoping it will be a brief visit this time.”
“Lucas hates his family,” Isaac explained.
“I don’t hate them,” Lucas corrected. “I just prefer to experience them in short, small doses, far apart.”
I was curious about a family of magicians, and a little sad that all three of them would be gone for the winter. “Has anyone seen Serena?”
There were only about twenty students in the dining hall, and she wasn’t among them. Lucas shot off a quick Whisper spell and waited. Eventually, he shook his head. “She must not be at the Academy, must have taken off early.”
“Oh,” I said, nudging today’s salmon dish with my fork. “That’s too bad. I hoped I’d get to see her before break.”
The boys grew silent as something passed between them. Hunter broke it gently. “Amelia’s planning to stay here over the break.”
Isaac looked shocked at first, and then pained. “Not even to see your friends?”
“Occultation,” I said, but waved off their concern. “No, look—I’m years behind everyone else, so a couple of weeks to focus on my studies and maybe even review my summoning material will be good. By the time you all get back, I might even be able to help unlock Nathan’s research, who knows? This will be good.”
I tried very hard to mean it.
As a means of demonstrating their solidarity, at least, the boys spent the day with me. I learned a lot about Lucas’s family, and the kind of drama that involved things like cursed objects for wedding gifts and hexed body parts for cheating spouses. Isaac’s family was lovely, as far as he and Lucas were concerned, and Hunter conceded that they did know how to throw a good party. I almost wanted to meet them, but asking to meet Isaac’s family seemed a little rushed. I suppose I could have gone as a friend, but I wouldn’t have felt like it. I wasn’t sure what we were, and no one seemed to be in a hurry to label it.
Hunter had a very different life than the two of them.
“Where I’m from,” he said, “we’re old-school magic types. There are eight ritual festivals a year, it’s totally self-sufficient, and we observe the wheel of the year. It’s a lunar calendar. Everything about our community is ritualized, from old, old pagan roots.”
“Hunter’s grandparents didn’t want him coming to Rosewilde,” Lucas revealed. “They think proper magicians are stuck-up.”
Hunter cut chiding eyes at Lucas. “My folks are proper magicians, thank you very much. They know old magic, the kind of stuff that ‘proper’ magicians don’t get.”
“Like what?” I asked.
He sighed and shrugged. “Hard to explain. For us, life is all magic, all the time. The Turning of the Wheel isn’t just some old superstition—we perform the rites and observe the Wheel as an ongoing ritual of life and abundance. It’s been going on continuously since before the revolution, when my ancestors settled up in the mountains. It was hard living then, lots of crops wouldn’t grow. They brought the magic of the Old World with them, though, and began the rituals, and in a generation that had all changed.”
“Farmer magic,” Lucas said. “Subtle and interesting from an anthropological standpoint, but it’s not exactly advanced.”
“I think it’s interesting,” I said, smiling at Hunter as I did. He didn’t seem to be perturbed, and I wondered if he was just used to it. “There’s so much more magic out there than I realized. Somehow I thought… well, I don’t know what I thought but all I’ve really seen is the Academy, you know?”
“The Academy is really all you need,” Isaac said. “That’s where the bulk of magical knowledge is concentrated. Here and the few others. All collecting and sharing over the centuries.”
“All except Blackthorne,” Lucas muttered.
I quirked an eyebrow. “Blackthorne?”
“Different kind of place,” Hunter said. “Different kind of magic.”
“They say it’s an assassin school,” Isaac said, his voice low. “Supposedly, they pit the students against one another in death matches every year, so only the strongest survive and graduate and go on to topple governments and whatnot.”
Lucas laughed. “Isaac is a romantic, and a fan of ninja movies.”
Isaac put his hands up. “You can’t prove I’m wrong.”
The rest of the day was spent exchanging what magicians considered to be urban legends, laughing, and enjoying a moment where there was no schoolwork, no real pressure. It was nice. And it couldn’t last. A car arrived for Isaac and Lucas, and the bus arrived for the rest of the students who didn’t travel via private car or portal. I smiled as much as I could, and wished the boys all a happy holiday. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was somehow hurt at being left behind. After all—they had families. Of course they would visit them during the only real break until summer.
Still, it left the Academy cold and quiet, and when I finally lay down to go to sleep, the room was hauntingly still without Hunter’s constant late-night scratching in his notebooks or even his occasional muttering to himself. I didn’t even realize how used to it I’d gotten until I couldn’t sleep.
The next morning was deathly quiet. I didn’t see another student in the dining hall for breakfast, and rather than plates laid out at the tables, it was a small, delicate buffet of biscuits, fruit, and yogurts, all prepared by the same mysterious forces that delivered the meals on a normal day. There was so little food, I did wonder if they knew how few students were here, and spent part of breakfast wondering at their exact nature. There was a dining hall, after all, but if there was an actual kitchen I hadn’t a clue where it was.
I was making peace with the ache of loneliness at the far end of one of the tables when I got a Whisper from Lucas. “Enjoying breakfast?”
I smiled and put my fork down to Whisper back to him. “Would be better if you all were here. But it’s pretty good. I think I prefer the buffet to the plated meals, if I’m honest.”
“I’ll talk to the headmaster about it,” he said.
Not in a Whisper spell—from the door leading to the hall. I turned, confused, to find Lucas, Isaac, and even Hunter standing in the doorway.
My jaw hung open as they approached. I stood, confused, as Lucas pulled me into a brief hug before passing me on to the others. I held them all for long moments before I pulled back. “What are you all… I thought you left.”
“We did,” Isaac said. “But we started discussing the matter and decided that our respective families may need some time to gain a bit of independence.”
“And,” Hunter added, “the Yule ritual isn’t nearly as fun as Beltane.”
Lucas smiled and scuffed his heel over the floor. “Plus, of course—none of us liked the idea of leaving you alone for the holidays. Yule or otherwise.”
“Well,” I said, hiding the full extent of my delight, “I guess… we can always take a crack at Nathan’s research. We’d have the library pretty much to ourselves, and I’ve got some ideas about—”
“We thought,” Lucas interrupted, holding up a keyring with key fob on it, “that we might venture out. Get some real winter weather. Maybe do some holiday shopping. Drink hot chocolate. You know. Normal… stuff.”
Normal couple stuff, I thought, though… I wasn’t sure what to call our thing. A triangle? A square? A flock? Either way, I let myself smile a bit wider. “That sounds nice. I’ll just have to hunt down…”
Hunter reached into his thick winter jacket and produced a beautiful red scarf. “Thought it would match your hair. That’s a thing, right?”
I laughed as I took it from him and wrapped it around my neck. It was soft, and warm, and smelled like him. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s a thing, Hunter. Thank you.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lucas asked. “Let’s go paint the town… some color beyond the spectrum of the human eye that’ll protect them from St. Nick this season.”
Amelia
The change of weather was shocking. The moment Lucas drove us through the gates, leaving the Academy in his parents’ Jaguar, it was like driving into a different world. The windows fogged immediately. Hunter muttered a spell to heat the windshield and down the mountain we went. The red and yellow of autumn had given way to bare branches, as if the great giant I had first seen on my way to Rosewilde had died of its wounds and decayed into a million skeletons.
Thankfully I was in the back seat with Isaac. With him, I could ignore the buzz of anxiety churning in my stomach and push back the memories of Laura. It was like his body had a gravitational pull on me. I wanted to slide across the bench seat until I was pressed up against him. Isaac grounded me, where Lucas made me sore. I caught Hunter’s gaze in the side mirror, and I wondered if he’d make me burn.
Hunter hadn’t necessarily become sweeter toward me, or at least not in a Hallmark sense. I’d return to the dorm after studying with Serena and I’d find a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin from the kitchen on my desk. Or he’d grab my textbook from me when I was struggling with homework and explain it to me. Sure, he sounded annoyed and claimed he was helping so I’d leave him in peace, but I’d started to look forward to those sessions. He’d put his big hands over mine, correcting my finger movements, and I’d revel in the touch.
Other than that one night with the nightmare and after the incident with the students, he’d avoided my touch otherwise. I’d hoped I’d forget what it felt like to have him curled up around me, but it was like my mind had amplified it, and each time I fell asleep watching his silhouetted form working, I could feel the urge to ask him to sleep—just sleep—with me grow that much stronger.
I almost wondered if the headmaster’s rooming spell put magicians together who would be good romantically together. I’d asked Serena and she’d fully owned sleeping with her roommate by her first winter break, and I wasn’t quite sure if there was someone at Rosewilde that she hadn’t slept with yet, other than Isaac, Lucas, and Hunter, of course.
The nearest town, where I had been dropped off by the bus and picked up by Rosewilde’s driver, was Moretown, which we passed through when we got down the mountain and turned north. Moretown had maybe the most ironic name anyone had ever given a town. It was less town, in fact, than just about any town I had passed through. In the winter, it seemed even smaller.
I would have been happy ending up anywhere with the boys but was relieved when the road gave way to an actual town, Waterbury, with restaurants and bars and little shops. It was done up for Christmas, with old decorations hanging across the street between buildings—snowflakes, wreaths, and even a full Santa with eight reindeer that made all three of the boys shake their heads.
With our stipends, we weren’t short on money. I didn’t have my card yet—they weren’t issued until a student survived freshman year—so the day was on Lucas, Hunter, and Isaac.
We settled first into a little café, where they made honest-to-god espresso drinks. Lucas settled next to me with a quiet grin, his arm draping over the back of the chair.
“Fuck, I didn’t know how much I missed these,” I groaned blissfully as I sipped a white mocha. Rosewilde could conjure food from the ether—or possibly relied on house elves for that? I still wasn’t sure—but the only coffee they served was black, with milk and sugar on the side. There were a handful of spells around that problem, but after exploding two carafes of milk in an attempt to foam a proper latte, well… I decided black coffee was a worthwhile trade for the continued embarrassment
“What do you normally do for the holidays?” Isaac asked. He and Hunter were sitting across from me. Hunter had been looking around the cafe idly but his focus returned to me at Isaac’s inquiry.
I swirled my white mocha in its little holiday mug—the handle was stylized mistletoe—and tried to separate myself from the bit of sadness the question evoked. “Ah… this will be the first one without Laura. Usually, we would go on a little shopping spree. Nothing crazy or anything. She was careful with money even around Christmas. But you know… a new sweater, or scarf. Or shoes. Laura had so many shoes and was always trying to get me interested but I’m just not a heels kind of girl. We never really did the Santa Claus thing. But we had a tree, and a wreath that we’d make together. Or at least we did. The… the last couple of years I thought it was silly. And I had SATs to study for.”
“Tell us about her,” Lucas urged. His hand rubbed my arm encouragingly. “What was she like?”
I smiled thinking of it but had to wipe my eyes. “She was great,” I said softly, trying to keep my throat from tightening. “She always had an answer for any problem, always something to say. We talked all the time. I told her everything—school, boys, dreams, nightmares. Laura would always tell me that everyone needs at least one person they don’t have to hide from, who never judges and is always willing to listen. She was that person for me. I guess I don’t know if I was that person for her. Sometimes I think she had more secrets than I realized.”
Hunter sighed and brushed my hand with his on the table. “Sometimes, people keep secrets to protect the people closest to them,” he said. “If she did keep things from you, I’m sure it was because she worried, not because she wanted to.”
I nodded quickly, and wiped my eyes again. “I know. She loved me, and that’s the important part. I just wish I knew more about her life before me. She was my parents’ best friend. I’ve been thinking about what you said before—about occultation?—and it’s made me wonder… did she really not know? She’d known my parents for years, since they were all kids. She knew how they met. In middle school, all the way back in sixth grade, my dad was kind of a nerd. Well… not kind of. He was full-blown. The other guys gave him crap. One day it went too far, and Mom had to run off some of his bullies. Laura was with her when it happened, said that after that they were inseparable. She told me they went to the same college, but I don’t know if she actually knew about Rosewilde or not.”
Lucas peered over the edge of my cup, noted that it was empty, and glanced at the door. “Well… how about we keep some of those traditions alive? There are a few holiday shops along the street. We can have our own shopping spree.”
I forced a smile, hoping it would become real if I faked it long enough. “That sounds like fun. Anything that isn’t grueling study. A break from magic doesn’t sound so bad.” But then I realized my smile was real, though my grief was still there. If there was anyon
e I would want to continue Laura’s and my holiday traditions, it would definitely be with these guys. Besides, if it weren’t for them rearranging their own holiday plans, I’d have been left alone in my dorm room trying to decide if Hunter would know if I slept in his bed or not.
The other two finished their drinks, and we crowded through the door and back into the cold air. Waterbury didn’t have a lot, but what it did have was almost painfully adorable for the season. It was honestly perfect. I led the sightseeing when I spotted the nearest little shop, which sported sweaters, mittens, and other Christmas-themed winter wear. The Academy only allowed uniforms, and I still hadn’t seen my suitcase, so I didn’t particularly want to buy anything.
“Oh, but we have to,” Isaac said, holding up the ugliest Christmas sweater I had ever seen. He clicked a switch on the sleeve, and it got much worse—the lights on a Christmas tree lit up.
“I second that,” Lucas said, holding up a second sweater sporting Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—complete with lit nose. “Hunter?”
Hunter glowered at both of them. “That’s awful, both of them.”
“That’s the point, old man,” Isaac said. He fished through the rack and then barked a delighted laugh when he pulled a third sweater and held it up.
It didn’t light up, but it was a complex scene featuring a polar bear sharing cookies with Santa.
“Trying to paint a target on my chest?” Hunter asked. He recoiled from the image of Santa Claus, but accepted the sweater when Isaac thrust it on him. “Fine. But I’m throwing it away before Christmas Day.”
“I somehow doubt Santa will make it through the Academy’s protections,” Lucas chuckled. “So that just leaves our Amelia… let’s see now…”
The three of them picked through ugly Christmas sweaters as I shot one after the other down until it seemed like it would just be the three of them walking around in their ridiculous Christmas attire. That was, until Hunter laughed out loud and presented us with the final option.
