by S. W. Clarke
Callum glanced down at Loki, back up at me. He rolled his head, black hair gleaming blue in the light. I’d learned long ago that this was his cue.
He was ready.
He didn’t argue. Didn’t speak. Fire erupted from his hands, claimed his arms up to the elbow.
My fingers clenched. And in that moment, as I had done so many times without consciously acknowledging it, I looked at Callum Rathmore as my enemy. I did it with Torsten, with Mariella, with Jericho, with Eva—anyone I was supposed to fight.
Whoever they were to me in regular life, they were my enemy for as long as we had to grapple. That had always been my MO, as far back as I could remember. The Spitfire didn’t think in shades of gray, only absolutes.
And right now, my enemy stood before me.
This time, in a rare first aggression, Rathmore came at me. He swung around, flames arcing in a growing circle directed right at my face.
I ducked under the billowing heat, rushed forward with Loki. My familiar leapt, slashed at Rathmore’s leg with a growl. Meanwhile, I hit the ground, sliding with a boot outstretched to take the other leg.
“Good,” I heard him rasp, even as I missed.
Rathmore wasn’t just agile—he was downright acrobatic. He jumped, kicked off the wall to gain enough height to clear both of us. Down he came behind me with a thud on the floor.
I spun toward him, kicked backward to create distance. Something metallic clanked on the floor as I did, but I didn’t have time to pay it any attention. Rathmore was already sending a wall of flame at me.
“Clem, move,” Loki called. He jumped past me, intercepted the fire. He absorbed it as he leapt into it, and all that hit me was a wave of hot air.
I pressed up to my feet, new fire burning in both fists, when I found Rathmore standing perfectly still. He’d straightened, the flames still burning halfway up his arms, but he only stared at me, and then at the floor.
“What?” I breathed.
Then I saw it.
The flame guttered out from Loki’s body in the same moment my eyes lowered. My hands went cold, empty.
There on the floor between us, gleaming in Rathmore’s flames, lay the liar’s key.
“Tell me, Cole,” Rathmore said in a slow, measured voice, “why you carry a piece of orichalcum in your skirt pocket.”
He knew. How did he know what the key was made of?
My mind thrashed, searching for the right tack. I decided on ignorance even as I grabbed the key from the floor and replaced it in my pocket. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You hold a very powerful piece of metal.” His head tilted. “Don’t make me come pluck it from you, Clementine.”
So he knew that, too. Somehow he knew it.
My only tack now was bare honesty. “How could you possibly know?”
“I suspected the day you burned Jericho. I felt it on you when we danced. It’s bound to you, isn’t it?”
So he had felt the key that night.
“Yes,” I whispered.
He didn’t move. “What is it?”
I swallowed. I couldn’t tell him. “It’s something I…found, here on the grounds.”
“That’s a lie. Such an object wouldn’t be lying around.”
My lips folded. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Except that it does,” Rathmore said, one hand rising. A curl of flame shot out, tendriled its way over to me in a half-second. Before I could move, it had snuck its way into my skirt pocket and yanked the key right out. “It’s an object of immense—dangerous—power.”
And just like that, Rathmore’s flame deposited the liar’s key right into his hand. And then it disappeared into his own pocket.
A half hour later, I left the common room in a fury with Loki in my arms. No matter how much I’d asked, Rathmore had refused to return the key to me. He’d swiped it from me like I was a child.
“Hey”—Loki wriggled, claws pricking me—“quit squeezing.”
I ignored him. “It’s fine. The key will come back to me as soon as I get far enough away. That’s what it does.”
Loki managed to jump out of my hands. “And if it doesn’t?”
We were in a secluded spot, so I stopped. “Why wouldn’t it? It’s bound to me.”
“Rathmore is the greatest fire mage alive, Clem. Didn’t you read his profile in Witches & Wizards?”
I groaned. “Yes, goddamnit. I read it.”
“Then you know how powerful he is.”
“The key will come back to me,” I insisted. I watched as, twenty yards away, Rathmore stalked his way across the grounds toward home. Already a small gaggle of students trailed after him, peppering him with questions. All of which he waved off.
When he’d gotten far enough, I patted my pocket.
No key.
I patted my other pocket, then my blazer pockets. Then my socks, and everywhere else on me.
No key.
I stared at Loki. “It didn’t come back to me.”
Loki had found a particularly offensive spot on his back to lick, but he still managed to find the wherewithal to throw a heated stare up at me. “I told you.”
“That shouldn’t be possible. It’s bound to me.” I spun, stared after him. “I have to get it back. If it’s actually made of orichalcum, it’s all I’ve got to show me the way to the rod once I get into the labyrinth.”
“And to remake the weapon,” Loki added through licks. “Can’t fulfill a prophecy without fulfilling the prophecy.”
When Rathmore had disappeared, I stood like a statue, frozen with indecision. One thing was clear: I needed to get the key back. We had planned to visit Jericho’s friend tomorrow. Somehow, I would get it back before then.
But I hadn’t decided on how.
“Clem,” Loki said, “give me a little fire. That’ll burn off your finger oil.”
I ignored the slight, thrust one hand behind me, and conjured a flame in my palm. At least, I tried to conjure it.
But nothing happened.
I turned, lifting my hand. I snapped my fingers, and no fire. Not even a spark.
“No rush, just a shamefully dirty cat over here,” Loki called up to me.
Was my power only thanks to the key? All these months, had I only been able to access it because it amplified my abilities?
“I…can’t,” I whispered.
Loki came to my foot, pressed against it. His tail curled around my ankle. “Remember what Umbra said. It’s not about the key.”
I eyed him in an unfocused haze.
“She said it’s about belief,” he went on. “You’re just demoralized, is all. You think your power depends on the key. It doesn’t.”
I picked him up, started toward my dorm. “I’m getting it back. Tonight.”
He huffed. “You’re going to do something illegal, aren’t you?”
“Just breaking into Rathmore’s place. That’s not illegal if he has something of mine, right?”
“That’s absolutely not how it works.”
I rubbed a hand over Loki’s head. “And yet that’s how it has to happen. You know he won’t return it to me.”
He sighed. “When are we doing this?”
I glanced down at him. “We?”
“I’m your familiar, which means if you’re breaking laws, I’m breaking laws. And I have a good nose.”
“Are you saying you can sniff out the key?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a magical item.”
“What’s that got to do with having a good nose?”
“We familiars can sense magic, Clementine. And that key is chock full of it.” Loki nestled farther into my arms. “I thought you realized that.”
Well, now I did.
The plan was this: break in while Rathmore was at the dining hall. He ate there most nights at the faculty table, which I imagined he hated. But all the professors had to be social, and so did he.
For once, enforced socializing worked in my favo
r.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
That night, Loki kept a lookout as I waited behind a tree near Rathmore’s place. When he finally came out, black cloak trailing behind him in the almost-night, Loki trotted over to me, green eyes glowing in the darkness. “All right, he’s gone.”
When I’d climbed the circling steps up and stood in front of his door, I’d thought I would have to finagle the lock. Surely Callum Rathmore kept his door locked.
But he hadn’t. The knob turned and it swung right open.
Inside, the entry hall lay austere and neat. A robe hanger, a spot for shoes, the scent of him—woodsmoke and pine—everywhere. A small lantern flickered to life on a side table, startling me.
Loki walked in. “Don’t worry—it’s set to activate on motion.”
I approached the lantern, stared at the flame inside. “You can do that?”
“It’s easy enough with fire magic.” Loki disappeared down the hallway. “Don’t get distracted. The key’s this way.”
We came into the main living space, where his small table and chairs and an armchair were set out thoughtfully. In the chimney-less fireplace, wood embers still glowed. A thick blanket was splayed across the chair, a book laid open atop it.
Dare I say, his place was cozy.
I approached the armchair, picked up the book. “Jane Eyre?” I whispered, finding myself on a page with a scrawled note in the margin. Here, someone—Rathmore?—had written, Always her own master.
Rathmore liked to read?
Charlotte Bronte?
I flipped to another note earlier in the book, this one in the same cursive: Jane the indomitable.
He’d also written, on the same page, something about entrapment and abuse. It was in the section about Jane’s childhood at the orphanage.
I leaned against the armchair, turning the pages. I had never written in books this way; it always felt too permanent, too revealing. I didn’t like to leave my thoughts in the world, which was why I hadn’t kept any diaries during the time after my mother left.
This was hypocritical of me. I knew it. This was the very same intrusion I would have objected to, the very reason why I hadn’t ever documented myself in this way, and yet I couldn’t stop my hand.
Because if I was being honest, a small part of me was desperate to know the real Callum Rathmore. To admire him. To like him. If I was really going to show him who I was, to allow myself to be vulnerable in that way, I had to trust him just a little.
But of course, that had happened the first moment I’d lifted the book. When I’d read, Always her own master.
He was a romantic.
“Clem?”
My eyes lifted from the book, found Loki sitting in front of me. At some point I’d sat down on the armchair.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
I stood, set the book down at the exact page Rathmore had left it on. “Did you find it?”
“It’s in a drawer in the bedroom.”
If Callum Rathmore’s entry hall smelled of him, the bedroom was like standing next to him. A soft light flicked on atop the bedside table when I came through the doorway, revealing an unmade bed, sheets strewn.
He writhed in his sleep.
Loki crossed to the table. “It’s in here. I can’t open it—you know, lack of opposable thumbs and all.”
When I got to the table, I stared down at the photograph left on its surface, now illuminated by the light.
A black-haired young woman smiled back at me. She sat in front of a large outdoor fountain, her arms wrapped around an equally black-haired boy. He smiled, too.
I’d seen that smile before, just today.
My fingers hovered over the picture. “That’s his mother.”
Loki landed on the bed with catlike grace. “Whose mother?”
“Rathmore’s. She was beautiful.”
I wondered why the photo wasn’t framed. What he would look like now if he ever allowed himself to smile like that. If he had smiled like that since his mother’s death.
“I read about her in the profile,” Loki said. “Shame.”
I only stared at the image. It was more than a shame.
“He was about ten,” Loki said. “Very tragic.”
Yes, it was tragic.
Of all the intrusive things I’d done tonight, discussing his mother’s death while I’d broken into his home seemed unconscionable. Too intrusive. So I didn’t say anything. Instead, I did the next least conscionable thing: I pulled the drawer open.
Inside was a wooden box. The cover had been etched in whorls and flowers, with such a gorgeous intricacy I sensed this wasn’t just something you picked up at your local shop. It was special—hand-carved. Diligently, with microscopic care.
I touched the edge, pressed the lid up a crack. Inside, the key gleamed back at me.
“Bingo,” I whispered.
“Found what you’re looking for?” a voice said behind me.
Rathmore.
Loki and I spun in the same moment. I dropped the lid with a clap, backed into the end table, the lantern atop it wobbling.
Before either Rathmore or I could speak or move, Loki scrambled off the bed in a mess of covers and disappeared between Rathmore’s legs. His claws scrabbled across the floor as he ran through the living room toward the entrance.
And just like that, he had booked it.
Rathmore, still in the doorway to the bedroom, half-turned to watch him go, his arms folded over his chest. When it was clear Loki was gone and silence had fallen again, he turned back to me with the barest, barest hint of a smirk. “Loyalty’s a hard trait to come by.”
Rathmore and I stared at one another. He filled the doorway almost to the ceiling, his face cloudy and unreadable.
I was still pressed to the end table like I’d seen a spirit, my hands clasping its edges. “How did you get in here?” I breathed.
One of his dark eyebrows rose. “Think about what you’ve just asked me.”
I screwed my eyes shut. “I mean, without me hearing.”
“Oh, that’s what you’re worried about. Not that you’ve broken into my home and I’ve caught you.”
I knew in that moment it was all over. Any chance I’d had of him teaching me fire riding was done. I was a burglar, a thief, a liar.
The only way forward was honesty.
“I need that key.”
“Do you know what that key is, Clementine?”
I avoided snorting. “Yeah, I do.”
“Do you know it once belonged to the Shade?”
Shock gripped me with a vise clamp. “How do you know that?” I whispered.
“I was a good student back in school,” he said in a voice that could almost be mockery, though of whom I couldn’t say. “I had a great ambition to someday defeat the Shade, and so I learned all about her.”
“So you know what the key is?”
His chin lowered. “Of course I do. It’s part of the weapon that was sundered after she was banished to the underworld. It magnifies a mage’s power.” He paused. “If you know what it is, then do you know how you came to possess it?”
“It was given to me,” I said.
“By the wisps in Umbra’s antechamber,” Rathmore finished.
I gripped the bedside table harder, feeling almost overwhelmed in a way I never quite had in his presence. It was the absoluteness of him—the place where he slept, the smell, his body encompassing the doorway. I’d never felt more vulnerable, more compelled.
I shook my head in disbelief. I couldn’t understand how he knew.
Rathmore observed my tight hold on the table, eyes lifting back to mine. “You don’t even know what the wisps are, do you?”
I pressed my lips together, unwilling to answer. This whole situation felt as fraught as those early interviews with foster families. Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t look the wrong way. Don’t laugh too loudly or too little.
“The will-o-wisps served the Shade,” Rathmore said. �
�Long, long ago.”
The floor seemed to drop out, though I remained standing. Barely.
They served the Shade.
The wisps served the Shade.
“They responded to Umbra,” I whispered, thinking of the time she corralled them back into her antechamber after they attacked Liara Youngblood. “They obeyed her.”
“Maeve Umbra is their caretaker now,” Rathmore explained. “Lest they fall into the wrong hands.”
“But what are they? They talked to me. They defended me from another student.”
He leaned against the doorway. “Each one of them contains the soul of a mage. Lobotomized, but a soul is a soul.”
I stared at him, unblinking, a part of me back in the library in my first year as I read about the nature of will-o-wisps. I had learned back then that some cultures viewed them as containers, vessels.
Now I knew they were vessels for souls.
“You’re wondering how, and why,” Rathmore’s voice broke in.
I refocused, nodded.
“One of the Shade’s many unreproducible experiments, before she was defeated,” Rathmore said. “She was supposed to have pioneered the darker arts.”
“If they belonged to the Shade, then why…”
“She was a fire witch,” Rathmore said simply.
And I’m a fire witch. The rarest kind.
“They responded to a fire witch,” I said, finally understanding. “That’s why they spoke to me, why they defended me, and why they gave me the key. Because they sensed my magic.”
Rathmore nodded slowly.
I had a new pressing question; it overtook everything. “You took it from me. I don’t know how you did that—it’s been bound to me for close to a year now.”
“A year? The plot thickens. Tell me what’s happened since the wisps gave you the key, Clementine.”
He hadn’t answered my question. But he had already answered a dozen.
I forced myself upright, to stand without leaning on any aids. I made myself stare him down. If he wanted to know everything, I had nothing anymore to lose. “When I took it from the wisps, the key transported me straight to the gates of Hell. The Shade and her army were there that night.”
Now I had a suspicion as to why they had taken me to that place. Maybe the Shade had given them a last command, or maybe that was her home. Whatever the case, they’d believed the fire witch who’d touched the key was her, and they had carried out her wishes.
